[xondono]

>The point of this is that none of this has anything to do with signaling, but it also has very little to do with the quality of education received. The value of an e.g. Princeton degree is that you're the sort of person that could get accepted into Princeton. [..] The degree just works as 'proof of filtering'.

That is precisely what signalling means. Top colleges pick only does who have signalled being over 99.99% of the population in things like intelligence, conformity and work ethics, then they filter out a bunch of them that never end up their degrees, and now their having their degree signals that you are a top 99.999% worker.

[mcguire]

How long do you think their signalling value would last if they selected the same group of students, sent them to Aruba for four years, and then handed them diplomas?

[rjf72]

That'd be a really interesting experiment.

I think the sort that get accepted to these programs also tend to be the sort that would consider just sitting on the beach sipping martinis to be something that'd rapidly become hell. It's just boring. So you'd have a group of ultra highly driven people with 4 years of undirected self study, but also access to pretty much all the knowledge they could ever want in the era of the internet.

It's really impossible to predict, but I do think the results would be interesting and not necessarily what you're implying. In today's era of assumption of education = skill, we often forget things like the Wright Brothers were a highschool grad and a highschool dropout -- yet they effectively invented aeronautical engineering with some skills they picked up operating a bicycle repair shop. There's some major dissonance between what we, collectively, ought be doing today - and what we actually are doing. I think it's a mixture of exponential leaps in entertainment and a general worsening in the condition of entrepreneurship (imagine how laws you'd be breaking by trying to fly your own homemade airplane now a days!) Your idea would at least certainly help combat the latter simply because that's all there'd be to do!