“Jack [Welch, ex-CEO of General Electric] was essentially saying a graduate business degree was a waste of time.â€
That’s a misunderstanding of the comment. What Welch was saying was that the most valuable thing the students were paying for was the contacts they made, not the content of the coursework. The contacts are hard to make any other way, and many people consider the investment worthwhile. Even if you manage to meet the same people without having the shared background, it won’t do you as much good, since you won’t get the same reaction from them.
Chris Hibbert is one of the world’s best prediction market designers (Yahoo! research scientist David Pennock outsources to him the most complex problems) and the software architect of Zocalo.
Chris Hibbert has published a bunch of very good technical explainers of the many prediction market designs:
- PM Intro: Basic Formats – [simple double auctions] – by Chris Hibbert – 2005-12-30
- PMs with Open-Ended Prices – [markets with open-ended prices] – by Chris Hibbert – 2006-01-05
- Looking at Both Sides – [the symmetry of complementary purchases] – by Chris Hibbert – 2006-04-17
- Market Design: Book and Market Maker – [how to integrate an order book with an automated market maker] – by Chris Hibbert – 2006-04-28
- Increasing Liquidity in Multi-Outcome Claims – [the mechanics of multi-outcome markets] – by Chris Hibbert – 2006-07-19
- Continuous Outcomes: Bands, Ladders, and Scaled Claims – [predicting the value of a continuous variable] – by Chris Hibbert – 2006-09-20
- Integrating Book Orders and Market Makers – (mirror on MO) – by Chris Hibbert – 2006-09-20
- Conditional and Combinatorial Betting – (mirror on MO) – by Chris Hibbert – 2007-03-06
- Market Makers for Multi-Outcome Markets – (mirror on MO) – by Chris Hibbert – 2007-09-10
Well, I agree with him that the study/academic side of college is 95% a waste of time (outside of high-level quantitative, and foreign language fields). I have learned infinitely more about politics by keeping up with it on my own than regurgitating 20-y/o memes from public policy textbooks.
And it also illustrates why I have no interest in a non-language graduate program. I can’t imagine how, from a learning standpoint, a graduate degree would be a better use of time than two years spent in the white-collar workforce, even before accounting for the insane tuition.
Some graduate schools are interesting: finance, MBAs, etc.
To Learn or Credential?
by Robin Hanson
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/04/to_learn_or_cre.html
At school, students both learn and get credentials of learning. But what if they had to choose between the two? My students act as if they care mainly about grades, not learning. But students who “love school” often tell themselves they are different, that credentials are just icing on their learning cake. I learned years ago, however, that our choices tell a different story.
As a researcher at NASA Ames Lab in the late 1980s, I found it easy to sit in on classes at nearby Stanford. I sat in on many classes in many departments, participating often in class discussions. I never applied for admission, or paid tuition, but no one ever complained. One professor even wrote me a letter of recommendation based on my work for his class.
So anyone can learn at the very best schools for free, if they are willing to forego the credential. This free ride would probably stop if more than a few people took advantage of it. But in fact almost no one is actually interested in just learning, without the credential.
Even official students face similar choices. I tell grad students to focus on writing good papers, since no one will care what grades they get, as long as they pass. I tell my teen sons to spend less homework time meeting anal formatting rules, and more on content. But my students and sons rarely take my advice.
In my third year as a physics undergraduate at UC Irvine (in 1979), I found that my classes went over the same concepts we had learned in the first two years, just with more elaborate math. So I decided to play with the physics concepts instead of doing the assigned homework. I learned enough that way to ace the exams, but my grades often suffered from rigid grading formulas. However, I had no trouble getting strong letters of recommendation.
So am I just weird, or do too many students neglect learning, relative to credentials?