The system is of course hard to change, since there are lots of vested interests that don’t want it to change.
Not if you do something that requires no-ones permission. My suggestion is a public database that lists courses, degree programs or other products of formal education, and lists how many of the participants fail vs. how many get the degree/certificate/whatever.
With somebody who wants to radically reform education (like Peter Thiel) throwing a moderate amount of money at it, this should be very doable. And it has two groups of customers: Students will want to look up the stats before they start something, and employers will want to see how much of a selection is actually proven by a given degree/certificate/whatever. While you’re at it, maybe also list average time to completion, price, prerequisites to participation and whatever else helps either or both of these customers.
With enough political influence, I believe the best reform would be to mandate that each programme of higher education has to fail at least a defined fraction (say a third) of the applicants. That’s what they do for driver license tests in Germany, and it makes the faculty/students non-aggression pact quite impossible. (Of course it only works if trying a second or third time incurs nontrivial extra cost.)
With enough political influence, I believe the best reform would be to mandate that each programme of higher education has to fail at least a defined fraction (say a third) of the applicants.
That discourages students from cooperating. Students will help struggling class mates less when it’s in their interests that those classmates fail the class.
That’s correct. But I would argue that in many cases, we don’t need students to cooperate as much as we need them to compete.
Or when groups of students work on a project together, the intensified competition could happen at the group level, like competition between companies.
Not if you do something that requires no-ones permission. My suggestion is a public database that lists courses, degree programs or other products of formal education, and lists how many of the participants fail vs. how many get the degree/certificate/whatever.
With somebody who wants to radically reform education (like Peter Thiel) throwing a moderate amount of money at it, this should be very doable. And it has two groups of customers: Students will want to look up the stats before they start something, and employers will want to see how much of a selection is actually proven by a given degree/certificate/whatever. While you’re at it, maybe also list average time to completion, price, prerequisites to participation and whatever else helps either or both of these customers.
With enough political influence, I believe the best reform would be to mandate that each programme of higher education has to fail at least a defined fraction (say a third) of the applicants. That’s what they do for driver license tests in Germany, and it makes the faculty/students non-aggression pact quite impossible. (Of course it only works if trying a second or third time incurs nontrivial extra cost.)
That discourages students from cooperating. Students will help struggling class mates less when it’s in their interests that those classmates fail the class.
That’s correct. But I would argue that in many cases, we don’t need students to cooperate as much as we need them to compete.
Or when groups of students work on a project together, the intensified competition could happen at the group level, like competition between companies.
In the UK there are plenty of such databases, but I don’t know how much of an impact they’ve had.