Here are my (Dave) answers to questions you asked for the What question do you have for us? question on the Beginning of Semester Survey. If you missed your chance to ask a question on the survey, or want to follow-up on any of these, feel free to ask additional questions in slack.
The way we ran the final project last year, students had about a week to form a project team and come up with a project idea. We had some time in class discussing project ideas and giving teams feedback on their direction.
Some of the teams came up with good ideas quickly. Others had a hard time coming up with ideas, and we encouraged them to look for potential projects based on their interests and things that bugged them about their everyday lives. Some of these turned into interesting projects, but others maybe not. (You can judge for yourself by reading their final project reports.)
I think we’ll try a few more concrete things to find good project ideas this semester, including having a list of suggested papers with data sets as starting points. You’ll also have more time for the final projects than last year’s course, so we hope everyone will find someting exciting and interesting to do, and be able to execute a fulfilling project.
This is a good question, and in many ways, is course related (in some ways, it is related to every one of your courses, of course, since individual courses may have both signaling and intrinsic value). I can’t give you a specific percentage, and I think it varies from -50% (the value is learning, and the signal is actually harmful) to 100% (the only value is signaling) depending on the degree and individual.
Bryan Caplan’s book The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money makes a very compelling case that nearly all of our current education system is signaling (he does, thankfully, make at least a carve-out exception for certain fields: “You obviously learn some valuable skills in school (engineering, computer science, signaling models).” (quoting David Autor).
As a teacher, of course, I hope that things students learn and experience in college can have a big positive impact on their lives, and have seen at least some clear cases of evidence that this can be true. That said, a large fraction of the value of a UVA degree is from signaling, and the high success rate (however one might define success) of UVA students after graduation has a lot more to do with the filtering process done by admissions and the signaling value of the degree, than what students learn here being so much better than what students learn at a less prestigious school with lower success rates.
My favorite Bryan Caplan book is Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think, which I encourage everyone to read. Probably better not to read The Case Against Eduction until you are close to graduating with a valuable (for signaling) degree, since part of the case he makes is that while public investment in education is bad for society and exaccerbates inequality, for a talented individual, investment (of time and money) in education is unquestionably a great investment.
At a course level, one (depressing to teachers) sign that UVA students value courses more for than for learning is that my experience is similar to Caplan’s — although students will complain bitterly about not being able to enroll in a class they want, I can count on one hand the number of students (and on the other hand the non-students) who have regularly attended and participated in classes I’ve taught at UVA without getting being enrolled in them (despite there being no barriers for any student to participate in any class they want, regardless of whether or not they are enrolled and paying tuition for it).
Everyone who can figure out the bureaucracy of getting added to the class without the professors needing to use SIS will be able to join the class. The is the only offering of the class this year. (As noted above, anyone who doesn’t disrupt other students is welcome to participate fully in the class regardless of whether or not you are enrolled. Being enrolled only impacts whether or not you’ll get the credits for the class that may be useful for signaling.)
There’s no expectation for the students in the CS section to have any Economics background. We’ll try to remember this, but please do interrupt in class with questions if we use any terms or concepts you aren’t familiar with. For the projects, our goal is that they will require teams of students with Economics background and CS background to work together, so you should make sure to ask the Econ students on your team to explain things that you don’t understand (and conversely, help explain CS things they may be unfamiliar with).
We plan to have a few classes in the second half of the class to talk about more technical aspects of privacy, and questions like how information can be valued and incentives set up to encourage privacy.