A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
1. What "bullshit" degrees people are talking about? Are they the liberal arts studies? If so, as a society do we not see value in the fine arts? Expertise in music, language, anthropology, history, etc do not necessarily lead to a well-paying job.. but they give intellectually satisfaction in and of itself.
2. IMHO, the pay you are likely to earn should never be a judge of value of a degree. A degree gives you an opportunity to learn something in depth. As long as you are able to reach that, the degree is valuable. The sad part of being in US (and other places) is that the depth is not valued. Trying college fees to ability to earn is an incorrect optimization.
3. If I were a poet, an author or a painter, do you think I should expect that I will be able to pursue my passion on a nominal pay (maybe as a teacher/tutor, basic income from government etc)? Most of the "golden age of civilizations" had this property. When everyone needs to fight for survival, that reflects poorly on the state of things and it is more of a dog eat dog world.
"This degree is valuable economically. It will lead to you having a well-paying job that will lead to you being economically successful". For many degrees, that statement is false.
The problem is that, when we talk about the value of a college education, much of the time we're talking about the second statement. But that statement is true only of some degrees, not of all of them.
Is the first statement still true? Sure. But is it true enough to be worth going deeply into debt for, without an economic payback for the degree? That's much harder to claim. And many people think that they're getting the second benefit from a degree when they're getting a degree that only provides the first, and they feel like they didn't get what was promised.
Degrees as having economic "worth" comes from the shift away from career training and apprenticeship and towards an expectation of readily available career skills (and unpaid internships, a related issue).
I don't see value in graduating with 6 figure debt for those degrees. In the words of Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting:
“You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library.”
We should talk about free college education or heavily subsidized one, but this same group here has been heavily against these ideas because they are socialist. However, happiest countries in the world seems to be mostly social democratic[1] and for one, if possible, I will happily trade my US pay for a lower pay, less worried life.
On a side note, I have a feeling that US prefers a "dog eat dog world" because everyone here thinks they will be the ones doing the eating and caring for the underdog is a sign of weakness/waste of resources.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurabegleybloom/2020/03/20/ran...
It already exists. It's called the internet. You can learn almost everything you need, and in much greater detail, than a traditional 'higher education' offered by a brick and mortar institution.
The problem is only convincing the gate keepers.
What I remember most, and consider most valuable about my college years, is not the teaching/coursework. The net cannot begin to compare. Facebook is free.
School isn't just a funnel of knowledge being poured into your brain. It's about the people that teach you and verify that you are actually learning the right things. Sure, you can pick up books on cryptography, but who would you rather hire? A self-taught cryptographer, or a university-vetted cryptographer?
[0]https://www.amazon.com/Applied-Cryptography-Protocols-Algori...
Additionally, Applied Cryptography is an outdated (“classic”?) book. It’s most recent introduction clearly states this, and refers the reader to a different book (“Cryptographic Engineering”) for more current information.
Can you give me a bibliography of books readable by a person without an advanced degree, that would teach them how to create brand new, secure fully homomorphic encryption algorithm?
Edit: my spell checker changed “homomorphic” to “homophobic!”
This is a caricature. It's not much different than saying people are for free college because they're lazy and don't want to work for a living.
> I have a feeling that US prefers a "dog eat dog world" because everyone here thinks they will be the ones doing the eating and caring for the underdog is a sign of weakness/waste of resources.
I have a feeling the reason you think this way is because you haven't made a serious effort to empathize with the people who disagree with you.
If I was the leader of this country, I'd see placing market pressure on the citizens would coerce them to yield to market efficiency. That is to say, if people have to pay for college, it would push more people towards degrees that run the economic/productive component of this engine (due to the higher salaries from the demand). The wealth generated from this omni-cultural push will benefit the country, both it's leaders and it's citizens. Deep down in the depths of the human mind is a little chunk of the brain that is terrified of death and inferiority. This goop collectively bubbles up to the surface sometimes, taking the form of war.
If this is one of the prices to pay to live in a country that no other country in the world could conquer, i'd say it's worth it. Human history is full of evidence that reality.
[0]This comment is just a one dimensional thought experiment
The default or dominant culture in America is upper class cis het white male. Historically, yes, those people could pretty count on being the ones doing the eating.
Women and people of color were the ones taking up many other roles and it was possible to sometimes care about them -- or just treat them like absolute crap while benefiting from a relationship to them because they had little to no recourse -- without that impinging on the professional part of your life where, by default, killer instinct could rule the day.
I think part of what is messing things up is the rise in human rights for women and people of color. This is disrupting these historical patterns which have something of a tendency to carry forward.
We are largely failing to ask "So, just what kinds of patterns actually work for a world in which we assume all adults have similar rights and opportunities?" Many people are quite oblivious to the many layers of baked in assumptions about, for example, how work gets organized and how we provide benefits to the people.
It is largely invisible the degree to which we assume a man is doing certain kinds of work and there is probably a woman at home doing the cooking and cleaning and other "women's work." And I tend to get a lot of flak anytime I try to comment on it because I'm a woman and HN is overwhelmingly male, so people (seem to) think I'm some man-hating, feminazi who is intentionally shit-stirring or something and tend to not think I'm someone who has actively studied the space because of the ways it has negatively impacted my life, so I'm somewhat knowledgeable about such topics.
EDIT: I'll flesh this out with an example of why I don't value liberal arts degrees. Approaching one Christmas I was struggling. My work didn't go on break until 5pm on the 23rd, I was juggling that plus parenting plus all the other tasks that go into preparing for a family Christmas. I stumbled across a news article that I would summarise as "We need to thank all the women that are working hard right now to make Christmas special for us". I emailed this journalist, a graduate of the liberal arts, and mentioned that there are a number of men out there in situations like men working towards the same goal and the gendered language can be harmful. The journalist reponded that it's mostly women so there isn't an issue with this language. The same journalist who writes about how we need to make STEM more hosptitable to women, etc.
Her formal liberal arts education only taught her to see gender issues in one direction and didn't give her to critical ability to think about gender issues in a broader sense. So yes, I don't value when people have some parts of a liberal arts education.
Which is par for the course.
I do not self identify as a feminist. The things I'm talking about having studied aren't the things you are thinking of.
I have a pretty good track record of being even-handed about gender issues in my comments in this forum. I still get a lot of flak. This discussion is a good example of that. My comment was downvoted and it currently has one reply -- yours -- which is openly hostile.
Given that I have been here eleven years and yadda, that gets frustrating. After eleven years of being reasonable, you would think that other people here would do a better job of meeting me halfway on certain topics.
Our current mode of working tends to create jobs that only work well for cis het white males with a wife at home whose primary responsibilities are taking care of the "women's work." This fact equally screws over not just people of color and women, but men like you who did the single father thing.
You have valid criticisms of how far too many women are openly hostile to men as their default position for trying to self advocate. I'm just as critical of that shit. I don't self identify as a "feminist" because my feeling is that "feminism" boils down "women are entitled to real careers, just like men have, and fuck all y'all men and to hell with the welfare of the children."
It actively disregards the very real sacrifices involved in having a career with the traditional pattern of male success, which includes often barely knowing their own children, and I was a full-time wife and mom for two decades. My adult sons still live with me. There is no way in hell anyone is going to get me to agree with a position of "Women are entitled to careers, even if that means shitting all over the children to get there from here."
I'm human. I certainly don't get everything right. But when I talk about the need to change how we work because the world has changed and our patterns of work are still largely based on this idea that "workers" are cis het white males with a wife at home doing the cooking, I'm not talking about "Fuck all y'all men." I'm talking about "This is why we default to certain patterns and those patterns aren't working for the world currently and there is no objective reason we need to continue to cleave to those patterns."
Some crappy things that happen at work are rooted in real world metrics. For example, harvest time on a farm is always crunch time because food is only ripe and fresh for a short period of time. If you don't harvest it in a timely fashion, it rots. It isn't going to keep and wait until later.
But many of the things we do today are more or less unexamined habits from the past and it's enormously difficult to have any kind of reasonable and productive discussion of that fact because you cannot talk about patterns of work without talking, to some degree, about historic patterns of gender roles and even slavery in the history of the US and people get very touchy about that and it actively interferes with trying to figure out "What piece of what we do is actually something the work, per se, imposes on us? And what piece is bad habits from a different era that are failing to die?"
We are all victims to some degree or another of the ghosts of the past in the form of cultural norms, existing built environment and so forth that keeps alive patterns from the past even well past the time that humans began actively and intentionally changing the things those were rooted in. As just one example: We outlawed slavery in the US, yet Black Americans are still quite far from having genuine equality with Whites. They see high rates of incarceration, high rates of unemployment, high rates of poverty, etc.
Trying to find patterns that are good for people in the here and now is hard and it's made harder by the inability to have a good discussion about the topic to begin with. Far too often, by the time the world agrees that X is bad and Y would be better, Y is also out of date and we should really be doing Z but we can't do Z because Z is the new thing no one trusts or understands and will not accept.
Thank you for replying to me instead of just downvoting my comment into oblivion.
Have a good day.
> tend to not think I'm someone who has actively studied the space because of the ways it has negatively impacted my life, so I'm somewhat knowledgeable about such topics
Those who have actively studied in this area have had large negative impacts on my life. I felt the impacts of gender policy, derived from the liberal arts academia, during the hardest years of my life. I'm sick of having the fact I'm a cis het white man thrown in my face by people "educated" in this area. Here's something I wrote here 8 days ago:
>That video reflects purely on skin colour and I feel that can be harmful. My skin is white but I'm descendant from the Australian Stolen Generation (google it if you want to see more). I was raised in a poor country town and I literally joined the military to escape that life......I make decent money now since I used the military for a CS education but when I go shopping I choose to go to the low socioeconomic area. I don't fit in culturally at the upper middle class shopping centers. I don't dress the same, talk the same, hold the same values, etc. Not feeling like you don't fit in isn't just linked to race.
I don't fit in culturally in upper class white areas. I was born and raised in an area that is in the top 5 for every single crime in my state. My family still has baggage from literally being stolen and given away, not to mention being half casts (part aboriginal). I became a single parent. And yet, I've worked my arse off and managed to carve myself a good career and a lovely life.
I see plenty of black people, women and gay people do very well in life. The trick is to be born in money or into a culture of success (i.e. did you know 2nd generation Nigerians and Ethiopians have better educational success than the general population?). The issue is that a large majority of slave descendant black people are born into a cycle of poverty. In my home town I've seen programs attempting to break this cycle and it's brutally hard.
I'm much more interested in breaking these cycles of poverty than I am in restructing the way society manages productive work. Free, educationally-programmed daycare from 6 months of age? Daycare that has the ability to accomodate people working non-business hours? Some form of universal income to keep people afloat? I'm all ears here, and this will benefit marginal communities immensely.
Blaming it on cis white men? My ears will close. It's a single-digit percentage of white people born into the privilege that those at top have. People of all races can be born here but due to historical reason it's pretty heavily white. The majority of us aren't born into that and are sick of being blamed.
That isn't remotely what I'm saying at all.
And you are making erroneous assumptions about what I've studied.
This is a pointless discussion.
Have a good evening -- or whatever time it is where you happen to be.
I also have deep and engaging conversations with mathematicians and physicists. I’ve tutored them in odd math they’ve simply never encountered.
Unless collective resources are needed for something like a nuclear reactor design study, a whole lot of application doesn’t require the college debt.
It’s almost as if we just need to agree on what some things are for social stability reasons, and we can debate the rest.
Instead we seem keen to be filtered for willingness to go into debt on education and housing, so we can justify demanding $200k/year for something open source programmers do for fun.
I’m pretty sure a whole lot of why we do things is satisfy social memes, and little to do with economic utility.
I think you should be clear that when you say "some new grads going into FAANG", the word "some" actually means "very very few". Because, very very few grads going into FAANG actually make $200k/yr starting.
There's lots of value there - art for art's sake and all that - but these degrees (and many others) don't directly translate to employment. The problem is that many people are expecting college degrees to give them lucrative employment when this isn't what college was necessarily designed for in the first place.
Take for example, Metallica. To my knowledge, none of them have formal training, yet each member has a net worth of hundreds of millions of dollars.
I really doubt the majority of musicians trained at a conservatory or similar institution exist is what the person you’re responding to said. Having gotten some amount of lessons at some point is not the same as spending even three months at a conservatory.
> A net worth is not an indication of musical talent and should not be used as one.
But it is an indication of how much the public values your work, a very noisy one, to be sure, but by far the most democratic measure if that’s something you care about.
Global popularity and net worth is not everything, but you could say that is "a good life", in the context of this discussion.
If we restrict this only to artists, a degree doesn't guarantee a base level of popularity or base income.
It'd be more interesting to look at the number of people who make a living from music, and whether or not the majority have formal training. I suspect they do so off you want a career doing what you live maybe training is a good idea. And if my assumption is wrong it'd be an interesting thing to research.
The mass arts that the masses can afford to consume (TV, streaming music, and movies) are by definition based on popularity, so we can only have so many artists.
I don't know why we fund so many people's arts degrees. We need less funding for arts degrees, and more funding for the arts instead. Someone being able to live a basic (but self-sufficient) life has nothing to do with funding arts degrees.
You've chosen the arts which require massive organisation and expense. What about painters, singer-songwriters, writers, poets, etc.?
Actually organizing events requires an entirely different skill set- while having an appreciation for the arts absolutely can help pull off a successful event, it is by no means a requirement.
If you want to make something artistically creative for people to watch, listen to, or read, you are competing with Mozart, the Beatles, Edgar Allen Poe, Tolkien, and countless other prodigies. Artistic creations made by individuals are a winner-takes-all market where a small fraction of the creators enjoy the majority of the revenue. Artistic creations made by large groups are somewhat fairer (but still often on the low end) in their compensation, if you manage to out compete other job applicants and get the job.
Regardless of whether you as an individual treat art as a commodity, you have to square your viewpoint as a artist with the fact that you have to put bread on the table. Society will very likely reward you very poorly for your artistic contributions.
I admit I am someone who appreciates art for its own sake, but after years spent eroding the post-WW2 edge in science and manufacturing, creative endeavors are part of what sustains us materially as well as the intangible ways.
You need a bunch of artists for one Breaking Bad, the same way you need many startups for one Facebook or many scientists for one Einstein.
But my point still stands: How many of these artists got art degrees? Rihanna didn't, Kanye dropped out early, Billie Eilish and Taylor Swift didn't go to college. Michael Jackson didn't go to college. They do have support staff and some of them may have gone to art school, but there are plenty more folks with art degrees who are struggling.
There are better ways to support the arts than to fund arts degrees. UBI is one example.
I'm unreasonably picky and I can never find find enough books / games / tv shows / etc that I actually like. They exist for sure, but I burn through them too quickly, and then I'm left without anything to read/play/watch for a while.
So if we could have ten times as many TV shows to pick from, that would be great as far as I'm concerned. Whether the economics exist to support that is another question of course, and likely the more relevant one.
Most have a theatre nearby too.
maybe it's a bit los in translation for me, but I wouldn't consider those things really art. For profit gigantic corporations don't produce art. I would say that most art is inherently not able to be a mass-product and therefore every city etc. needs its own art-scene.
I don't know what civilizations you're talking about, but the vast, vast majority of humans in the past were busy working in the fields to avoid starvation. The classical fine artists were wealthy or had wealthy patrons.
Here are a few examples: https://sites.google.com/site/dobsonandphillipsinc/home/anci... - During this era, the economy, arts, architecture and even commerce, flourished.
Golden age of Gupta empire: [https://resources.saylor.org/wwwresources/archived/site/wp-c...] Under his rule, the Gupta Empire reached its zenith, and this is considered the golden age of India. His reign, like his father’s, was marked by religious tolerance and great cultural achievements
There are very similar notes about Persians, middle ages in Europe etc.
But there is no reason why we are not living in one now.
I'd like to add: "[...], and show people that you've done so."
I can learn a lot of things in-depth in my leisure time, yet I'll never obtain a certificate which states that I've got in-depth knowledge on a certain topic.
It's worth asking what a "professor of the practice of public leadership" is, because - with my combined liberal arts and STEM academic background - I honestly have no idea.
Which piques my curiosity, because this piece reads like a parable. Second son not interested in college? Never mind. He can always work dawn to dusk - note that work ethic - among "hard-working honest folk." And then join the marines. Where happiness ensues.
As career outcomes go, what could possibly be more wholesome and indeed American?
Which is why should we teach the liberal arts in colleges and schools. Because if we taught the liberal arts - including media literacy and critical thinking - this piece would be seen for what it is: a transparently manipulative piece of propaganda written by someone who works for a right-wing think tank.
Now - you can agree, or not agree, with the political positioning. But unless you are liberal arts-literate, you will not be agreeing freely. You will not know how a piece like this is crafted with stock techniques of manipulative rhetoric to persuade you of a point of view, and a course of action, and in fact a complete moral package, while appearing to be an entirely anodyne but reassuringly plain speaking personal story.
Because - apparently - that is what "the practice of public leadership" really is.
Public leaders do the same thing every day to get you to agree with laws or decisions they make.
Corporate leaders do it to get people to buy their shit or work for their company.
Leadership, is literally persuading people to follow you. Because in the end, you're going to be a lot more successful as a leader doing it that way than through orders and fear or something.
As to the rest of your post about the article itself though, I don't disagree with you, having written many persuasive things designed to sway people using facts, and perfectly placed numbers, that's pretty much what this is.
1. Society does see value in arts and rewards them commensurately. But democratic access to the arts means that those who are regarded good by the many are rewarded by many and those who are regarded good by the few are rewarded by few. Nothing seems wrong about this to me. Free people give Kanye more money than Killswitch Engage. And as for the liberal arts, if you're Karl Popper you'll live a productive life. If you're Joe Schmoe the Philosopher-Barista then maybe you're not going to reach his heady heights but that's because you're not as useful to me.
2. Each person has a concept of what you value. If you would go into lifelong debt to know about Kierkegaard, then so be it. Good for you! You have that option.
3. You shouldn't expect anything but the same fair shot anyone should be given at life. If we have surplus money and we wish to spend money on people who want to paint, then we will. If we don't, we won't. And we will be fickle. Adapt or die. Your business model is not my problem.
Is there value in having _someone_ have expertise in classical music? Sure. Is there value in everyone in the world pursuing expertise in arts at the expense of society's ability to produce food? Obviously no.
The idea that everyone should have equal opportunities to pursue the arts doesn't work on a fundamental level because the distribution of what needs to be done vs what are "desirable" occupations do not match in reality - even when we account for automation. Put another way, everyone wants to be the rich instagrammer posting cocktail pics, not the person serving said drinks at minimum wage.
So, is it really a surprise that even though more people have access to arts degrees nowadays, that they are unable to realistically sustain themselves on the back of these degrees?
We could simultaneously see value in fine arts but also not see value in a four-year full-time program with a heavy accreditation component in the fine arts—and certainly not as a gatekeeping requirement for jobs that have nothing to do with the specific subject being studied!
If anything, if we wanted to promote these subjects to more people, we ought to make learning about those subjects more flexible, less stressful and less expensive. (It's not just about the direct costs, either—even a free full-time program comes with a massive opportunity cost that most people can't afford.) It seems like the only way to make that realistic would be to decouple signaling and career accreditation from the education itself.
This is much easier said than done, of course, but I think just mentally separating the different aspects of a college program—education from signalling—is crucial for understanding what's going on and how it could change.
Yes but most people are complaining that they have this degree and not making enough, so what's the solution? Make government/tax payers pay for these degrees who the salaries match that of guys in STEM?
>. The sad part of being in US (and other places) is that the depth is not valued. Trying college fees to ability to earn is an incorrect optimization.
Lots of people who studied with me didn't like STEM but they did it just because it will give them better salary and life. These people made scarifices, it's rediculous to assume that all people study STEM are studying because of some passion or enjoyment which they don't get from studying music or acting.
>When everyone needs to fight for survival, that reflects poorly on the state of things and it is more of a dog eat dog world.
There is no solution, we can't have our cake and eat it too. If you offer same salaries in both music and engineering, lot more people will go to music and other art subjects. Then who will survive market demand for STEM.
- "University degree" is a heterogeneous thing. While there is such thing as non-economic value, the strictly economic value of a college education tends to cluster around a small subset of degrees.
- Many countries have enacted policies to increase proportion of people who get degrees. Far from fixing inequality, this has instead diluted the value of university degrees.
- All universities are not created equal. While it is possible (and even common) for employers to pay too much attention to the reputation of the school, it is also quite common for students to over-estimate the value of a no-name institution. I've found this to be moreso the case in the two European countries I've lived in for an extended period of time (France & England).
- The exorbitant debt incurred by university tuition in some countries (which need not be named, I think) means the ROI on the university degree has to also be exorbitant.
Have I missed anything?
Was this the purpose? I thought it was to raise living standards by improving productivity. By and large, broader education has been successful at that. (It went off the deep end, in recent years, with the proliferation of bullshit degrees.)
In the US, part of the problem is that by making education debts non-dischargable in bankruptcy, and by the aforementioned proliferation of degrees that may qualify as 'nice to have' rather than 'increase earning potential'.
The end result is a lot of people who got a college degree that doesn't really pay for itself, and instead leads to 20+ years of debt, or 10 years of indentured servitude to a non-profit.
I think a big part of the problem is that debt is so readily issued for degrees that overwhelmingly leave the recipient incapable of providing for society in gainful ways.
I assume lenders would take the degree being pursued, institution at which it’s being pursued and applicant’s academic history (and this likelihood of completing it) into account.
Currently, there is zero incentive to do that work.
https://www.savingforcollege.com/article/history-of-student-...
Nothing, and that's exactly why education debts need to be dischargeable like anything else.
Dischargeable loans makes loan companies have actual responsibility and consequences in deciding who to give loans to. Otherwise, they blindly give out loans (why not, there's no risk!), putting all that much money in the system, which college institutions are happy to absorb in higher tuition.
I’m not sure what the answer is, though I think an economic approach is key.
If you're still going to be paying your loan off in 7 years, bankruptcy would be an easy choice.
The debt doesn't just magically go away. Chapter 7 requires liquidating assets, and chapter 13 requires paying some loans back anyway. And besides, I don't see why loan companies couldn't require cosigners to reduce risk on these college loans.
Then you rent an apartment or buy a car. Are you implying you can't do this after bankruptcy? It's much easier to do these with a bankruptcy on your "record" than with a $1000 monthly payment.
If you've got an 800 score and no money, no one will give you a loan. If you've got a trash credit score, but an extra $1000 that isn't going to loans, then you can 'afford' to get fleeced on 36% 72 month auto loans for 7 years until your credit is rebuilt.
That $1000 is likely getting spent no matter what, either in repaying loans, or paying a premium over the market rate to get a landlord to agree to lease you an apartment instead of someone with an 800 score.
It would be interesting to see insurance companies have more skin in the game - we would probably start getting much more accurate breakdowns of ROI by major, degree, and school.
What America has now is a good system, where anyone can use these loans to pull themselves up.
What government or maybe banks need to invest is in more career counseling.
$393 is 15% of $2620 which annualizes to $31,512, which is about the median personal income for full-time workers (whoops, before taxes). ($222 is 15% of $17,760 annual, about the poverty line for two.) That's not a wildly big change over the current state.
How about 10% of taxable income?
> 10k graduating with a degree in a field with only 100 jobs/year needing that degree
What I'd live very much to avoid is having a centralized body which makes such decisions. Under my scheme, lenders who identify such fields will be reluctant to grant loans, but how they decide what's in the field, and what exceptions to make, the can do however they like.
The university takes on the risk, but they have much more information about their students and their degree programs than students, governments, or private lenders, so they're probably best placed to be making informed risk decisions. Under the current systems, the government and the student take on the risk, while the university and the private lenders get the rewards.
A large portion of those creating the tech are self educated.
Seems like that can’t be ‘hard to get into’.
Germany's interesting here, since they had/have Fachhochschulen (apparently translated to University of Applied Sciences). Some of which were very highly regarded, and offered a different focus that suited some people. Although after the Bologna Process, this difference is less clear, too.
There are pretty decent apprenticeships, but only so many people want to work trades regardless. It's not exactly a ticket to wealth or status like a degree might still be perceived.
Yes you're missing something.
My friends in the US all apply to a very large number of elite universities. In the UK I don't believe you're even allowed to apply to more than one elite university in the same year, and only a very small number of universities overall. One person I know in the US applied to 23 universities.
And then on top of that, in the UK all admissions for elite universities and most below that require an in-person interview, which the US (bafflingly) doesn't do.
I think I applied to one elite and two just below elite.
All of this means total applications in the UK are far fewer than in the US but each is more focused and more realistic which makes successful admissions seem higher. But really people who wouldn't have gotten in didn't apply in the first place.
> it seems extremely easy to get into a 'top' UK university
Also, what's with these scare-quotes? Are you skeptical that they're really top universities? They consistently top international rankings, alongside your best.
Not all, but at least premium ones do alumni-driven interviews.
When I applied to university a while ago the rule was that you can apply to 5 universities only, ie make 5 applications in total. Only exception was "clearing" but thats a different story
From what I've seen over the last decade, this is incredibly true in the United States, particularly with the rise of for-profit schools offering online degrees.
("Oh, and X has a Ph.D."
"Oh? Where from?"
"I think it's the University of Phoenix."
"Ok.")
Tuition in France is basically free from what I understood. Even if students over-evaluate the value of the school, the fact that it's free still makes it attractive. And I think that some universities are teaching only (no research) no?
There's no doubt that not having crippling debt is much better than having crippling debt. However, we have this cultural idea that being on the road to taking partial owneship of a small skilled labor business is inferior to being in a dead-end job with a 4-year degree. I fear that an over-emphasis on opening access to 4-year degrees implicitly reinforces this idea of 4-year degrees being universally better and that tradespeople have somehow settled for second-best, even if they have more income, a better work-life balance, and are providing absolutely essential services.
I know enacting social change is much much harder than throwing money at problems, but I wish America figured out a way to really strengthen the cultural admiration for the hard-working craftsperson archetype.
Pete Buttigieg took a lot of flak for pointing out that many jobs in America don't require a college degree, and there should be nothing shameful about learning a skilled trade instead of going to college. We have a vast over-supply of many college majors, and (I'm told) big shortages in many skilled trades. There are way too many people with 4-year degrees from top-100 schools working cash registers in retail, when they'd have far less debt and higher income (and a good chance of later becoming successful small business owners) if they'd gone to trade school instead of college.
It's honestly classist to push 4-year degrees so hard. There's something noble about optimizing your own happiness while providing valuable services, despite much of America considering skilled laborers to be a class below cashier workers with useless 4-year degrees. I wish we as a society could better appreciate skilled laborers.
We don't have much positive to show from decades of flooding the college tuition markets with cheap credit / crippling debt and implicitly pushing hard the notion that going to trade school is settling for second-best.
There's something to be said about removing the crippling personal debt from the act of flooding the education markets with money, but without cultural changes, I think a big effect would be further ballooning of college costs. I fear the crippling debt will just get hidden as accelerating the ballooning of government debt without moving the needle much on inequality.
no, what it's done is uncover the hypocrisy of the meritocracy underlying western narrative--when university degrees were exclusive to the upper class white guys, degrees exhibited a "meritocratic distinction". naturally, only smart and capable people got degrees, not just people in a fiercely-defended and exclusive club.
but when educational attainment became more wide-spread and democratic, the club moved on and abandoned the university degree as a useful in-group signal. economic value was with in-group membership, not in the degree itself, a decidedly unmeritocratic, and unequal, system.
it's made this relationship more apparent, elucidating why inequality has persisted despite wider degree attainment.
Nothing, nothing will guarantee happiness. Or a good life.
Make the best decisions you can, by which I mean try to make decisions that you will not regret later. (Have I made a crap-ton of mistakes in my life? Sure 'nuff. Would I make different decisions if I could, even knowing what I know now? Probably not.)
And for the love of Pete, stop denigrating those who have made different choices. Sure, it may make you feel better about your situation temporarily, but it is very, very unappealing.
I can't agree with this enough, and it's a very powerful mindset. As a personal example, there was some point in my mid/late 20s where how I made decisions changed. Less of "will I regret doing this" and more "will I regret NOT doing this".
It's amazing how much happier and content with my life I was when I removed speculative regret (what if..?) in favor of actual regret. Turned out I regretted a lot less and enjoyed much more when I actually got out and did.
This can be hard as a young adult, when everyone in a position of authority is telling you your entire childhood that not getting a degree means you're a failure.
It's kind of a lot to ask of 18 year olds to truly be able to weight the significance of a student loan for example.
Sure. There's an equal amount of young people who regret going.
Not that they regret the education received per se, but do not feel that its value is anywhere close to the amount of student debt they are in.
Undergraduate courses should either be publicly funded or employers should adjust their expectations. Part of the problem is that nowdays college degrees are required even for fairly low-paying jobs, which wasn't always the case.
Then one day, the subject came up, and the other guys were like "Thank god I'm graduating and won't have to waste any more time reading and studying and sitting in a classroom. I can work outside and make money instead."
And I realized not everyone's path to happiness is the same.
On the flip side:
I spent another summer working with a couple older gentlemen driving a tractor. I said something like "This isn't so bad, working outside, breathing fresh air."
They told me in no uncertain terms "Get a job doing something in an office with air conditioning, you don't want to still be out here doing this when you're our age."
Then I realized that if they were happy with their current standard of living their life probably had no work related stress whatsoever and they kinda had it figured out. Now I make over 10x more and am constantly stressed out and anxious taking my work home with me everywhere, and I envy those people quite a bit.
Imagine that in society we pooled our resources to make the best video/online courses for a variety of subjects. The best CS courses. The best history courses. The best biology courses. We could focus on making the courses accessible and translated. We could make the best assignments and projects, iterated and experimented on with a population of millions. Heck, we could even hire professional actors that would both help with engagement and with representation problems in various fields.
Then in addition to being places of research, universities become the places we go to facilitate taking those courses and applying the knowledge. Watch the interactive videos, and expert tutors help you understand challenging topics, guide you where to look next, and facilitate labs. At least for undergraduate, this seems much better than what we have now.
And then, why not open it up to everyone? We could all take various courses throughout our lives. I'd love to be continuously taking classes in new fields, but the world isn't set up that way.
We did. The professors of history, psychology, art, biology, math, - everything - at the world's greatest universities very often write down what they know in books. We achieved this already.
You can read Feynman's course on physics tonight. Your city library probably has it.
I'm not proposing distance ed. I'm proposing that we shape education around automating the rote things, in particular delivering lectures. I don't think the main benefit of being on campus is the lectures or coming up with assignments, instead (as another comment noted) it's the peers and the people you interact with and how they help you learn. And so by automating away the rote part of it and focusing on the creative (research, TAing, peer interaction), it seems like we should be able to create better outcomes.
1. High quality video recording and transmission is still relatively new technology, and it seems most lectures are audio visual performances.
2. There hasn't been a push for a paradigm shift. Lectures work well enough, and have lots of benefits like creating a gathering of people. But does COVID change that?
I'm reading The Illiad right now (Pope's version). It's quite nice, but I don't understand it. I mean, I get what's going on, but I don't understand why they are telling me this. Why is it composed the way it is? Why start the last few months into a 10 year war? How does one even successfully camp out in front of an enemy city for ten years? Why didn't someone win already? Why are two enemy combatants duking it out while everyone else watches? Why are they willing to stop when the priests put out their poles saying it's nighttime, battle's over? Why are the priests even willing to go near two people fighting? And that's not even getting into all the literary stuff I'm completely missing.
I have the source material. If I spent enough time reading up on ancient Greek culture, and reading analyses of The Illiad, etc. I'll probably get that. Or I could pay a guy who's already done it to explain all the important parts and point me to the things people have written down that are actually helpful (as opposed to not very insightful, based on obsolete information, pushing an ideology, or just flat-out wrong).
When I was an undergraduate, the "lower division", more introductory, required courses were taught by specialists in "Computer Science Education", whatever the heck that is. I hated them. They were ... useful, as a basis for everything later, but they weren't taught well and if that is all there were, I would be very unhappy about the time and money wasted. Then I reached the "upper division", mostly elective courses taught by active researchers in the given field. Sure, their lectures and such were not well polished and rather uneven, but their enthusiasm for the subject generally shone through and you could get more insight from a chat with a professor on a ten-minute walk from class than from any textbook you've ever seen.
TAs that could understand the material and see where you went wrong. Classmates who were challenging and who asked questions you never thought about.
The whole package is what makes it good.
Yep. I'm reminded of the MOOCs. The idea was to remove all elements from the class that had a cost (i.e., no office hours, no questions during the lectures). MOOCs turned out to be a better textbook, not a better class.
With that said though, imagine if the baseline for every class in every university was "great classes with awesome course material". Now the differentiating factor becomes what you talked about - the quality of the TAs, the professors and their research, your classmates. Wouldn't that be an improvement?
I'm thinking of it as us automating away the non-creative part of school - i.e. as you noted, the valuable stuff is the interactions and the peers, so why not maximize the focus on creating opportunities for that?
I also think that this is a larger societal problem that should be but has not been addressed by social networking apps. There are no social networks that are designed to foster communication about highly specific ideas. Sure I can go to r/history to find people who are generally interested in history, but where can I go to find people who would be interested in book-clubbing G.J. Meyer's 'A World Undone'? If I want to talk about physics in general, I could go to /r/physics. But how do I find physicists who want to discuss matter-antimatter asymmetry? You can glom on to conversations in current social networks, but there is no way to start/find/subscribe to discussions about very specific subject matter.
Point being, rather than saying that the IRL personal interactions at college are a reason why the current model is ideal, we could do a lot of good by figuring out how to port that experience A) onto online courses, and B) onto the world at large.
As to TFA, I think that for a lot of people trade schools are a better option, and should often be encouraged. I'd like to see more general education regarding retirement planning etc as well earlier on, as this is a place a lot of people get stuck, esp. in the US.
Another issue is that people should be guided towards educational paths that have demand in the workplace. Does it make sense to go 200k into debt for a job that pays 38k/year, or graduate 10k students for a career path with only 100 openings. Some of this onus is on the students and parents, but the schools themselves could do much better with this. Some reform on funding might help, but it's a touchy subject.
For all the flack that Facebook gets, you may also be surprised to find some very specific interest groups, I wish they had not removed the live messenger chat for groups specifically though..
We are rapidly testing this hypothesis during the current pandemic.
Let's be realistic, there's only so many compilers books, algorithm or OS books around. And most classes are based around these.
I can go coast to coast and everyone I'll meet who is doing an algorithm class will be doing more of less the same thing, only with variation on how hard the problem sets and labs are.
And then if you want a more formalized course structure, you have online courses like KhanAcademy.
And then if you want to personalize your learning, you can find individuals who are great at teaching that constantly are producing online content. e.g. Grant Sanderson's channel 3blue1brown, popular even amongst professionals, because it re-teaches concepts in a much more powerful and intuitive manner.
I think the internet is already set up exactly the way that you are imagining. The only difference is that you won't get a reputable slip of paper.
I would add the costs behind providing that slip of paper are not insignificant.
It requires having people with expert level knowledge of the field assess your work and your knowledge over a broad range of courses.
So universities in the US are ridiculously over priced, but the value they provide is still > 0.
Being part of an exclusive club and having a built-in reputation opens many more doors and makes getting some jobs a lot easier. So then you have to calculate the value of that potential. Department of Education estimated the earning potential for Ivy Leagues to be on average 40k more a year, up to 130k more a year.
If we're comparing a college then with no reputation vs taking only online classes, I wonder if there is much if any appreciable difference per year. Maybe at that point the value of the college education is mostly in the knowledge and skills you gain and the paper itself has negligible worth. So then make sure you're only paying a negligible amount to get that paper.
But it kind of is that way?
There is already probably more course content online than you could learn in a lifetime.
Real understanding of a field comes from long hours engaging with the subject and playing with ideas, and from interacting with others in the field. Working through educational material (where it exist) is obviously helpful, but it's not enough.
tl;dr: Nobody becomes in expert in anything by working through a textbook.
The goal of undergrad shouldn't be to make anyone an expert, that's what graduate school can be for.
Not just any higher education, though, but specific professional degrees that grant access to supply managed markets. That part seems to be often missed when this topic comes up.
I recall a Gallup study into the top 1% finding that something like 70% of the top 1% have a professional degrees (doctors, lawyers, etc.). The remaining portion was comprised of more people with high school or less than those with only a bachelor degree, suggesting that a bachelor degree alone does nothing to improve your prospects. Which goes against the common thinking.
But is also echoed in the general economy. With the rise of post-secondary attainment, incomes have held stagnant. If there was a financial advantage gained though higher education itself, not through supply management, incomes would be rising.
But spends more time on an anecdote about the author's son to demonstrate that "Happiness is possible without College", which is a different matter entirely. And one would hope the latter is true, since 2/3 of the US population does not attend college.
This article is very light on content and I'm kinda surprised something this banal and content-less even made it to an actual publication.
Also, the guy's son graduated high school two years ago, he's 20-21 years old, practically everyone is happy at that age, let's hear about his life satisfaction at 40. That's ignoring the fact that two years is hardly enough time to evaluate the long term outcome of a major life decision.
To be clear, I don't think the author's son will grow up to be miserable, like the parent pointed out, most people don't have a college degree and most people aren't miserable. But this should be obvious.
"It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is only because they only know their own side of the question."
-- J S Milllol
Not to mention the vast majority of humanity! One can get a lot out of a "college education," but there is a lot more to life than that.
"After his second harvest, with money in the bank, our son joined the Marine Corps, a dream he had had for several years. He finished boot camp and is now at infantry school in North Carolina. He wakes up at 4 a.m., is tired all the time—and is happy. He is, as a translation of the second-century Saint Irenaeus puts it, “a man fully alive.”"
Happiness is possible without college, but geeze, I think I'll pass on that road.
(On the other hand, I know people who have taken roughly that road; he discovered he didn't like ranching (and it didn't pay squat) and joined the Navy, spent 8 years and two deployments in. Seems to have worked out pretty well. On the other hand, he recently completed a bachelors at a for-profit school (that mostly exists to absorb GI-bill benefits, AFAICT) and wants to go back for a masters for some reason.)
I had this debate with myself when I was younger because I really like physical work but am probably better at knowledge work. The biggest reasons I work an office job is that they tend to pay much better than other work and it's easy to end up in a physical job that can take a bad toll on your body over time.
Expensive is an understatement. At the same time, being unsure of what you want to do before college is what makes it a great place to sow the seeds for what you do in life. Funnily enough that happens mostly outside of class through people you meet and projects you work on.
Since the physical aspect of college is in question this upcoming year, I feel that it isn't worth it. You can probably do a lot of school without actually paying tuition, and find new ways to meet people and work on projects.
(I'm 55. Tuition has changed in the decades since and this approach might no longer work. It did at the time.)
I then dropped out without a degree and did the military wife thing for a lot of years. I returned to school when I knew what I wanted to do, career-wise.
I made that decision in part because I was personally acquainted with two people who each had a bachelor's degree (and more schooling beyond that -- one was two quarters short of a master's and the other was working on his second bachelor's) and were financially dependent on someone else while they delivered newspapers (one also spent some time selling shoes and he eventually killed himself).
One was in his thirties and living with his mother. The other was mooching off a wife at the time who eventually left him.
So I was never fooled into believing that a college degree guarantees you a successful professional career. I felt I could deliver newspapers for a living without a college degree and I would be better off if I had such a job without being saddled with college debts like at least one of these two men was.
I don't regret my decision. Given the details of my life, I think I made the right choice.
We need to do a better job of educating young people about when it makes sense to go to school. Far too many people seem to think a degree is a magic wand and don't understand what else needs to happen to establish a career, especially one that pays well enough to justify taking on student debt.
Did you do full-time college and full-time job when you returned? How was balancing that with all the other life responsibilities?
I wrapped up an Associate's with two online classes and testing out of some other things. I then enrolled in an online bachelor's, which was never completed because divorce and a serious, lengthy medical crisis got in the way. I then did GIS school one summer and got a corporate job and they put me through a certificate program and additional training for my entry-level job.
You can look into testing out of some things. This is cheaper and less of a time commitment. You can do self study to help prepare for such tests.
You may be able to get some credits for other things. There are books on how to try to do this. If you have military experience, most American colleges will automatically credit you for some of your military training and schools (like you will generally be exempt from taking any phys ed classes).
Online classes can also help make things work. I did sometimes take classes in person and the commute to class was a huge and burdensome time commitment. When I took classes online, there was no commute and that time went into studying instead.
If you do take classes in person, you can reduce the time burden by choosing a compressed schedule. Sometimes the same class is offered on either a schedule of three one hour classes a week or two 90 minute meetings a week. The class with two 90 minute meetings will save you commute time to the college, which can be substantial. (For me, the college in question was like 30 or 45 minutes away, even though it was in the same city I was in. This added up to an hour to 90 minutes saved per week to go with the compressed scheduled.)
The situation, is way, way worse now. Orders of magnitude worse.
I'm not interested in being thusly misconstrued.
I just felt bad for the people who even back then were having trouble with student debt. And to think they were in a relatively lucky age -- everyone is in that boat now, with far less hope of getting out of the hole.
The two individuals I knew had serious personal issues. I also had serious personal issues. That's why I decided they were good examples of where my life might end up if I bulled on ahead with going to college as if a degree would fix everything.
In any era, some people will slip through the cracks. But a healthy system makes that the exception, not the rule. Far too many people are overburdened and falling down these days to the point where there is fairly widespread talk of systemic failure.
Government: “Let’s give everyone X!”
Over time the value of X is diluted, loses its status signaling, and overall quality degrades.
Successful people move to Y.
(Although, here in the UK at least, the quality of degrees genuinely does vary by university in a way that roughly corresponds to their rankings. I know that's an unfashionable observable but I have seen enough degree programs at different universities to know it's likely true unless I happen to have seen an atonishingly unrepresentative sample. Partly this is self fulfilling because lower ranked universities are forced to take less good students and the level of the programme has to be adjusted accordingly, but part of it really is to do with quality of teaching.)
On our team we had a guy from ENA and he was the son of a French diplomat and a British mother - we quickly learnt he did not need any hand holding.
I'd say a Master's is the new BA/BS. With everyone getting an undergrad degree via online schools, or via 6+ years of undergrad college, it's ability to filter is weak. A brick-and-mortar Master's serves as a way to differentiate from that pack; I'm not sure what an online Master's equates to.
Georgia Techs OMSA, OMSCS, UT Austin Masters in DS, CS online.
I've interviewed and worked with so many PhD from top tier schools and it's astounding to me that someone can spend 6+ years studying a quantitative science, at a school like MIT or Harvard and still not have a basic understanding of statistics, and worse be incapable of genuinely understanding any of the quantitative tools they used for years.
The current generation of PhDs don't know how to do any kind of real research, they simply know how to mechanically replicate the processes you need to survive in academia today.
I find sometimes a PhD can come with very ingrained attitude issues. I recall working for a company with a new-recruit development program where really the only way to fail out was through attitude issues. One of the people who oversaw the program mentioned that she's only ever seen people with PhDs and higher fail out over this issue.
I also think it's unrealistic to expect PhDs to have a "basic understanding of statistics" unless they specifically studied it. I would be shocked and dismayed to see a PhD statistician misunderstand basic statistics; I wouldn't blink if a PhD mathematician or physicist made basic statistical errors. It's hard enough to achieve research-level mastery of one domain in five years, and many mathematicians and physicists (most?) do not need stats.
If you're talking about fields like psychology or sociology, I personally disagree with the expectations they're held to. I believe we would have less of a reproducibility crisis if research projects had statistician coauthors and peer reviewers, rather than just PhDs for whom statistics is not a core competency. That would be fairer and more realistic.
Finally, to be blunt it's hard for me to take this comment seriously when you say something like this:
> The current generation of PhDs don't know how to do any kind of real research
Heh.
A PhD degree does generally prove expertise in whatever the subject of your dissertation was and provides access to a couple of networks. Not always guaranteed, but if someone has a PhD I generally expect that they are at least competent at whatever their dissertation was about. And I've only been burned once.
The value of the expertise & set of networks, though, can range from "extraordinarily valuable" to "worse than useless".
In STEM fields the expertise & network is usually at least good enough to keep you busy with decent-paying work for a career or so.
In CS it's usually good enough to get you either a 100K job with lots of freedom or a regular old 300K job at a big tech. So, not really worth doing if your goal is just maxing out lifetime earnings, but certainly there are worse outcomes. From there you're on your own, though.
In many of the humanities... not so much.
Luckily, I knew this when I started my PhD program, because of an oversupply of mentors and role models within my own family. Also, I was planning on carving out my own niche anyway because I'm a punk. But it's not for the faint of heart.
Still, I'm skeptical about modifying PhD education to turn it into a "credential" that comes with an employment guarantee. Part of academic freedom is the freedom to study something that nobody cares squat about. Also, many of the people who are attracted to doing that, are unlikely to prosper in a mainstream career anyway.
For myself, I realize that becoming a programmer after high school might actually have been better from a lifetime earnings standpoint, but it assumes that I would actually have survived an entry level job in a code factory or IT department.
(Source: I work at Google, yet still see life as often confusing and sometimes terrifying)
More discussion on "the root of this" might lead to the above changing.
If you don't have that foot in the door you are usually spending a few years working for "Exposure" or "Networking opportunities." Sometimes for minimum wage or less. Unless the job is so hard that it's constantly churning workers. I'm sure a lot of jobs will take you off the street with no experience, but they will be dangerous and/or unpleasant.
Naturally when generalizing there will be exceptions. But that was essentially the rule when I got out of college. 2+ years experience prerequisite for most "Entry-Level" positions.
https://8thlight.com/blog/ryan-verner/2019/01/15/evolution-o...
But it is confusing are 8th Light acting as a source of training for other companies or just internal use.
How many years is it 4 / 5 what certification do you get at the end?
Why are you using "trade" terminology normally those doing "advanced apprenticeship" where associate professions and calling us "apprentices" would have got you a hard look.
when I did mine in the UK I was a Junior member of the IMECHE on the path way to full chartered (PE) membership
It does seem a bit light how long is the apprenticeship
If FANG companies where serious about training / diversity this is what they should be doing take bright high school kids at 18/19 and sign them up for a proper 4/5 year apprenticeship.
Personally, when I look for a job, I'm not willing to commit to 30-40 years. I think that part would have to change as well.
Apprenticeships for things like plumbers and electricians pay a decent wage interspersed with education.
On the long term a Ph.D may do better than a Master Electrician, but in the short term it's a way better deal. My friend out of HS who started working for Nissan and then Infinity was making 60k+ before he was 21. He's capped at around that much -- like 60-70k -- but most of our high-school friend circle wasn't making that kind of money until our late 20s (and at least one became a teacher, and still doesn't get that much in terms of pure cash comp).
Perhaps that is by design - companies are wary of investing time and money training junior employees because they can just leave before the investment pays for itself?
Not sure what the answer is here; just playing devil’s advocate.
When public unions became a thing in the 1960s and 1970s, they systematically excluded Black people, for example.
Even in the US South, the vast majority of millennials and gen Z are not racist. They aren't in political power yet, but in the next 20 years or so, they will be and the zeitgeist of the area will finish its shift (even the people currently in power are abolitionists compared to the previous generations). Travel the world and you'll see that (perhaps outside some European countries) the US of today is just about the least racist country in existence.
Guilds/Unions formed today won't have the same issues as ones from 50-60 years ago because the general view of people today isn't what it was back then.
No matter what the "zeitgeist" is 20 years from now, guilds will still have the effect of artificially limiting the supply of labor to the fields they control, which has been a disaster for fields ranging from medicine to cosmetics.
But in an industrial union, as an example get hired by an automaker with a UAW contract (and not in a so called right to work state), you are a UAW member.
Also, it's weird that you call out guilds for being discriminatory but then give an example of discrimination in employment. We have fair employment laws to prevent this type of behavior and arguably could have "fair guild membership" laws if it became a problem.
It's fair to argue against guilds for driving up prices by limiting membership.
And employment discrimination laws won’t solve the problem because the discriminatory effect arises from the legal practice of protecting existing members at the expense of potential new entrants.
There was a very clear example of this recently in Chicago. Lori Lightfoot explained that she wouldn’t pursue police funding cuts because under the union contracts, cuts would have to be made from newer employees first. (Last in First out.) That would mean that 2/3 of the cuts would be Black and Hispanic officers, even though less than half of the overall force is Black and Hispanic.
I'm lucky enough to come from a country with free decent universities, so maybe it's easy for me to say, but I can't even put a price on how my education changed every single part of how I think and understand the world. That it prepared me for a well-paying job is just a nice side-effect.
How well do you think the misinformation that laid the foundation for the political shitstorm the US is in now could have taken hold if most people had a college education?
Yes, especially if all or at least most colleges considered it a high priority to educate people in what used to be called citizenship.
Next government: “Let’s charge everyone for X!”
Next government: “Let’s overcharge everyone for X to the point where the price equals or exceeds the value!”
The purpose of free higher ed for all is not to guarantee everyone a good life–it is to try and give everyone an equal chance at a good life. If higher ed is highly correlated to escaping poverty and upward economic mobility, then college costs raising at a rate 11 times faster than average income is a form of classism.
We used too. A high school education meant something to my grandparents.
OTOH, I can imagine the HS-level Physics books were very different from the ones we studied with, with different subjects given different depths.
Do you have a high school education? The education I got in H.S. had a big impact on my life. I couldn't imagine being done with school at 14 and thinking that was equivalent to 4 years of High School.
Probably because a high school diploma has been so normalized that it is seen as the baseline. But that underscores the problem. Of course everyone having a high school diploma devalues it. That's part of why its seen as the default. If we make undergraduate education a similar default, it will just devalue that too. Not to mention what happens to the people who can't complete an undergraduate degree. They become even further marginalized in society.
It is faulty reasoning to notice that a bachelors degree correlates with good outcomes and then conclude that more bachelors degrees means more good outcomes. Good jobs are zero-sum. If there are more people who satisfy the requirements for good jobs, the requirements just increase. It's not like most office jobs require a bachelors degree, the fact that so many people have them makes them an effective zero-effort filter.
I remember a native German poster on hn commenting on the subject "funny how the its the brown skinned Germans, who end up in the lower tier schools"
You know that meritocracy was seen as a bad thing when it was coined.
The problem in the U.S. is that not all public schools are equal, so the "merit" to get into a certain school/scholarship is at least partly tied to your social-economic status.
For instance in my area, all public schools have removed arts/music/foreign language, but in the nicer neighborhoods PTA, boosters, and fundraisers have added those removed subjects back with parent donations. So you have a situation where when it comes to vote for a small tax increase to help our schools, many people are confused as their kids go to a public school with everything they need. These are schools in the same school district. New, upscale homes can also pay directly for their public school in the form of Mello-Roos taxes.
It seems like a non-prediction that having more people with good education will enable new businesses.
You can read more about it in his essay here: http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html
Why not? Is there some economic axiom that states this? Can wealth not continue to increase? And can't wealth be used to create "good" jobs?
There also seems to be a scale issue when it comes to the availability of good jobs. That is, not all jobs can be good (i.e. high paying) and there is an essential order-of-magnitude difference between the number of high paying jobs and the number of low paying jobs required to make the economics work. So the proportion of good jobs is effectively fixed even on longer timescales.
I think most economists would say that is called the lump of labour fallacy.
Without universal high school, the USA would still be a largely illiterate subsistence farming nation with high rates of poverty as defined at the global scale.
Even well-paying jobs in the trades require literacy and basic mathematics skills.
So, no, good jobs aren't zero-sum.
But the point is that we can't do away with K-12 schooling. Subsistence farming was, is, and will be a bad job.
College Algebra is required to enter a lot of trades. And not just because it's a requirement for the AS, but also because you actually do need to be able to understand the material in order to work in many trades. The students I tutor often fail college algebra, move on to their subject courses thinking they can tick off that useless stuff later, then realize they need a college algebra tutor after failing those courses because it turns out they need to understand how to interpret a table or graph of a function in order to do the job.
College Algebra is really hard for a lot of people. I can say with almost certain confidence that, even with extensive tutoring, they would never make it through that course without years of practice reasoning about mathematical objects in Algebra I and Algebra II and Geometry.
I think people who are naturally talented in STEM massively underestimate the amount of practice some people need to pick up the quantitative skills needed to enter many trades.
- Which aspects of algebra do the students have the most trouble understanding?
- What are some good examples of tables, graphs, and functions the students need to interpret?
The basic concepts of variables and functions. I can't stress enough that most of your high school facebook friends posting these memes are doing so non-ironically: https://www.google.com/search?q=math+was+great+until+they+ad...
Which, I guess, means "everything". But really getting over that first conceptual hurdle is the hardest part. After that, it's a lot more hand-holding through exercises/practice than trying to surmount a fundamental conceptual barrier.
> What are some good examples of tables, graphs, and functions the students need to interpret?
Tables and ratios and rates of change abound in the trades. Especially anything related to electricity or water. You really need at least a conceptual understanding of variables and functions to understand a lot of the material.
Also, most tradesmen will want to run their own business at some point (that's where the money is), and tables/graphs/functions abound.
If you're struggling with college algebra, odds are good that you're uncomfortable:
1. interpolating values from a table (1/16 : x, 2/16 : y, ..., 1: z; oh no, I need to know the value for 3/32 and it's not on the table!),
2. evaluating a function at a point ("the equation tells me xs from ys and zs, but I need zs from xs and ys!").
Pick a trade and (1) and (2) are fundamentally necessary skills. Smart phone calculators obviate this some-what, but it's still important to have at least a conceptual understanding even if the mechanical skill of doing the math atrophies. Otherwise you won't even know how to use the calculator properly. See this all the time.
The money thing in particular is super important, though. I do a lot of example problems that basically boil down to "if your fixed cost is $X and the equipment needs to be replaced every 2 years, and if you charge $Y, will you make a profit? What is the smallest value of Y that will make a profit? Etc." Students really struggle with this sort of thing, especially if you throw in seasonal variable with fixed debt payments ("how much do I need to make in the summer months to cover the loan payments in the winter months?"). Questions like this are at the heart of college algebra.
Like, would not be surprising if lots of small businesses fail because the owner doesn't do the work of making sure the unit economics can cover amortized costs, and then end up defaulting on their loan.
TBH even gig economy participants need to be able to do the more basic stuff from college algebra...
this is true if you look at the sticker price, but does the actual cost for a low-income family grow at that rate? I'm having a hard time finding a source that shows by year what a bottom quartile family would have paid for tuition at an in-state public university or an elite institution.
Would it better if stores listed loaf of bread at $300 and then people can negotiate the price from there?
they don't put a clear price because they take a lot of different factors into account. take a look at this tuition estimator for vassar: https://studentfinancialservices.vassar.edu/calculator/quick...
the grant is calculated based on your family's income, home value, savings, investments, number of children, and a couple other data points. they can't give an exact number until they see your FAFSA. it sucks that this is so complicated, but I argue most of this is necessary to fairly calculate grants. two different households making $60k might have wildly different abilities to pay for tuition.
Kids are passed along without meeting the standards of the grade or degree so that the institution does not look bad.
You may be too young to remember when this was the crises du jour and the No Child Left Behind program, etc.
Not everyone can get earn a PhD. Not everyone can pass the rigors of high school. Not everyone can run a 4 minute mile either.
What I am not saying is that education hasn't been devalued, or standards haven't changed, or anything else around the quality of education–simply that an education better than not in the u.s..
I don't think I believe more education can ever be a bad thing. But the business of education in the US is an absolute nightmare that corrupts the spirit of learning it ought to protect, and I agree more of that business will not make things better for students.
distinguish between education and schooling
And absolutely vital for a healthy democracy.
Perhaps, but you shouldn't make the mistake of equating schooling and education.
Just because people born to the right family, who are free of crippling disability and disease, and possess the innate traits that enable one to be successful in the workplace also happen to go to school does not mean that going to school will change the traits you were born with, reverse the disabilities you have, and see you adopted by another family.
Funny that was missed when it is the first thing you learn when you head down the road to attaining a degree.
It is the people that are seen as going beyond that education baseline that are the elite, and get the best careers and the most success generally (ignoring other factors for the purpose of this conversation). As you increase the baseline, what it takes to be elite also increases accordingly. I think we can all agree that it is inherently true that not everyone can be elite, in the same way that it's impossible for everyone to be above average, which is what I think you're getting at.
I think what this view may fail to consider is that the benefits of the baseline come to resemble what was previously considered elite as overall wealth increases. Middle class people now have larger homes, more vehicles, more luxury etc. than the lower-tier elites (ignoring the billionaire class here) did 100 years ago. That increase of the baseline living standard is tied to, though very much lags, the baseline of education.
Put another way, we can not eliminate the relative gap between the baseline and the elite, but, in absolute terms, as the baseline comes to meet what was previously elite in education the baseline well-being and standards of living also come to meet what was previously elite.
Hiring in general is done poorly and I understand why. It's hard to differentiate between so many candidates especially for entry level positions where a lack of job history makes it difficult to evaluate talent. So it makes sense that employers optimize for lazy signals like completion of a degree.
In general universal education is far better for a country.
It doesn't make sense.
Apprentices start working one day a week and going to school four. They end up working four days a week and going to school one. Apprentices can switch to a more academic track, at a technical school or university, if they get the desire.
When they finish with their apprenticeship, not only do they already have horizontal ties with their classmates, but they also have vertical ties with their business, its clients, and the master tradesmen who conducted the classroom component and oversaw the theoretical and practical exams.
It's brilliant. And is there any profession that can't be done this way?
"Can't" because those are the rules we've established. But both of those professions seem like they be perfect for apprenticeships (they were at one point in history). It's not like studying the literature isn't or can't be a part of apprenticeship curriculum.
Unlike in the US where you first do 4 year of pre-med/pre-law, in continental Europe med and law students start learning on the job early.
I've dealt with a lot of trades people, and the ones who are my age (mid 50s) tend to be hobbling and broken. On the other hand I could see it work for things like the "lesser" health care trades such as dental hygienist.
It seems like people think you should be able to just check a few boxes, then slot into a 9-5 and have everything taken care of for you for the rest of your life.
Well, it doesn't work like that. Even after college you're still going to have to plan and think and take action to make things happen for you. It's not just all going to fall into your lap because you took a few classes in your early 20s.
I hope to not experience a repeat of those initial conditions.
i would die on the inside
Just like today, plenty of people struggled to make ends meet.
If you're not particularly ambitious, yes. The whole system runs on ordinary people's labor, and it's an authoritarian system: when you go to work, you're following orders. It shouldn't be on you to take constant initiative and exercise your intelligence in finding new orders to follow, new ways to subordinate yourself to someone else's goals.
If you want to treat people as subordinates, you have to take care of them, and yes, that means taking off the anxiety and cognitive load of potential unemployment.
If you want people to do all this thinking for themselves, why shouldn't they recognize they're being exploited and get rid of you and your system?
And yes, you are always free to get rid of any one company's system and start your own system (i.e. company). What people find when they do this is that with freedom comes a lot of responsibility.
A good life requires so many different elements, but mostly comes down to one thing: what you put into it, esp. in regards to improving the lives and welfare of others around you. Do this, and you will find that your own life gets better and better. Be kind, do work to help others, care about people and their lives (and not just your own) and you'll find that life will turn out pretty darn fine.
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/233578
"The only major personality trait that consistently leads to success is conscientiousness."
I was offering an easy answer to the confused wondering of the Atlantic article. The path to success is known. Apparently not as well known as I would have thought. No need to point to the fact that the heterogeneous mess of a "College Degree" as being not a factor.
Yes, there's lots of ways to not succeed. Why not do a very little bit of shallow research and shout out to the roof tops what actually does work?!
https://talkpoverty.org/2015/12/17/american-dream-zip-codes-...
We had a computer lab with 8 Apple II's in my public elementary school in 1983. We also had a few TRS-80s.
But lack of things and capital will never get you a good life. If you are starving, no matter what you put in or how kind you are to others, you cannot have a good life. If you are home insecure, you cannot have a good life. Period.
I'm going to define "good life" to mean food, housing, and health security.
While you're right that nothing is guaranteed, the wealthier you are, the more you can guarantee these basic needs.
Even me, being in tech making around 6 figures, I haven't achieved my definition of a good life. This is because if I lose my job, the basic needs I listed cannot be maintained.
However, if you do not need to work (i.e. CEOs, billionaires, etc.), you are more likely to have your basic needs for a good life met for the rest of your life even if you lose your "job". What I'm trying to say is that having things and lots of capital can very much get you to my aforementioned definition of a "good life".
I think we're getting ahead of ourselves with these philosophical questions of what a "good life" is. First, let's meet everyone's basic needs: food, housing, and health. Because those needs are clearly not met.
Starvation is a problem for Africa, not the USA.
The US is huge, some people would have to hitchhike quite far to get to a high-traffic area. There's also no guarantee of receiving any handouts at all, so I'm not sure I'd use the word "easily" (or even "possible"). And after hitchhiking and begging all day, praying for a few bucks to buy rice, you're not actually going to want to buy rice. You're going to want alcohol, or something fatty and sugary, or just plain drugs.
Your framing of this problem trivializes a terrible, dehumanizing experience, and is out of touch with the reality of the impoverished middle-American.
- the rice cooker
- electricity to cook the rice
- potable water for the rice
- storage containers for the leftover rice
- refrigeration or other means of preserving the prepared food
- a secure place to store your month's food supply from other hungry people and/or cleaners
- mental health while you eat the same plain rice with bare your hands for a month and society judges you for "not pulling yourself up by your bootstraps."
You can make all the excuses you want, but nobody is dying of starvation in the USA. The number of annual starvation deaths in the US is so small we don't even track it, and the people that do die of starvation aren't starving because they are poor, but sick (i.e. cancer makes them stop eating).
I'm not advocating a plain rice diet 24/7. I'm just saying calories are so cheap in America that obesity is a bigger problem for the poor than starvation.
Furthermore, even the poorest in the US have access to the things in your list if they want them.
That really is all there is to it. People recognize value and, guess what, they'll gladly _pay_ you for your skill.
Happiness is up to you. The only thing I'd send your way to think about: "In order to get love, you have to give love."
perhaps if he truly feels that way he could leave academia and cease perpetuating the myth?
imo calling it an "investment" is part of the problem. its a pure sunk cost and not an asset.
They don't see it as finance terminology and the concept of the word investment in the context of others like 'sunk cost' and 'asset' holds very little specific meaning in that case.
Ironically that is a 'problem' you can 'fix' by putting people in college and teaching them basic accounting.
there are far more variables to consider in higher ed (student loan debt, opportunity cost of time, unemployment, alternative education experiences, etc) so looking at it as an outflow of cash with a predictable return is misleading at best.
no college has a monopoly on information and there is no proprietary info gained (other than network from elite schools). in a sense the knowledge component of a degree can only approach a value of zero as time goes on. the experience aspect is of course subjective and very important to some.
It's incredibly predatory to lure people who by definition don't know that much about the world yet (let alone finance) to take on six figures of debt for something that the investors know in a lot of cases won't pay for itself. It's usury. As an outsider, the fact the US allows it reeks of political corruption.
As far as webdev goes, you could do a bootcamp and be earning money within 6 months to a year. That's money that's hopefully going into your pension fund and earning interest while your peers are still in class.
Or you could learn to code using cheap and/or free resources. College isn't the only place to learn things nowadays and I think a lot of people haven't caught up with that yet.
I used to think nothing could beat the college experience for bonding but I think the formula of lots of people doing the same thing every day in a niche environment they want to be in is easily repeatable. I'm still in contact with digital nomads I hung out with in Bansko two years ago and I was only there for a month. But it was an intense month of seeing each other every day, just like college.
Oh and don't worry about not finding a dev job if you don't go to college. Employers are coming around slowly and there are lots of success stories out there: www.nocsdegree.com
Is a College Degree Worth It?
College Degrees are no longer worth it!
College Degrees - not worth the paper they're printed on.
A College Degree - what does it really get you?
And so on and so forth.
If bootcamps were a valid pathway into the profession at the time after I left high school I definitely would have foregone my Computer Science degree and gone down that route.
I'm glad attitudes towards them have shifted in the last few years - most of my friends in the profession work in companies that actively seek out applicants from bootcamps.
I would love more different avenues for people to come to software engineering, and I'm rooting for boot camps, but I'm also skeptical about how universal the benefits are. I think coding is much more of a learnable skill than many already in industry give it credit, but I also think it takes years, not weeks, to learn to do it well.
I tend to feel that under-emphasizing these things are why the software industry has so much of a problem with poor designs, low code quality, and missed deadlines.
Maybe it would be possible to create a two year degree that would fill in those gaps.
I think there is too much weight put on CS theory but it is valuable if you already have it through a degree.
Outside of FAANG and similar unicorn growth kind of companies nearly nobody else needs a new X or a different design of Y. I'd even go as far to say most of the time we don't even need to understand the internal of the tool itself.
Gut feel says upwards of 99% of companies just need existing solutions combined. I'd say 20% of the industry itself thinks they're actually apart of the 1% that are truly facing a problem nobody else has.
I've seen companies suffer from too much CS theory. They get caught up in the technical problems and the most ideal solutions instead of focusing on providing customer value.
We hear this through the many talks about premature optimization and reinventing the wheel but in the real world I hear a lot of individuals calling the work a hack when it isn't the most optimized solution.
It would help people to realize any thing one does has an expiry date to it. This is why you need to have a system to remain consistent at some broad goals. Things like good eating, exercise, personal finance, relationships, reading and learning have to be done consistently, and have to be done throughout your life. You won't be good at life, if you don't do some of things regardless of the age, and place you are in.
The loss is in assuming College Degree as an aristocratic right. If you think this way you will soon realize there is nothing special about reading a few books between ages 18 - 22 and doing no learning after that for decades.
To me primary purpose of education is initiation. College degree should be treated as a good head start as an initiation. Nothing more, Nothing less.
I'm talking more on the lines of normal people, from normal families. For people like us, education means some thing very different. Its like initial exposure to an experience we must maintain all life.
I would disagree. College education is absolutely not required to get through life. And it should be required even less than it is. There are some professions for which degrees are super useful. But most people doing degrees are going into professions that just require any degree and could easily be done without one.
To me College screwed my long haul instead.
When I graduated, I couldn't find any legal jobs (I could find some jobs masquerading as contracts, that employers offered to avoid paying taxes properly), because whenever I did, the person that got hired was someone else that DIDN'T go to college, but had 4 years of experience more than me.
After some time working (like I said, as "contractor"), and I finally had some experience, my issue was that people hired were either younger with same experience, or my age but more experienced.
And then of course there was the issue that my job selection was extremely limited, I could only take jobs that would let me pay my massive student debt, it felt to me my life wasn't much different than the one of a literal slave, being forced to work into very specific jobs because I couldn't take a job that paid less, or take my time to find a better job, etc...
Now I am 33, I have a wife, don't live with my parents anymore, have a reasonable income.
Still can't get unemployment benefits, because never been employed.
Still I am not even called to many job interviews, because "no experience".
Or one time, I was called to a job interview in a big asian multinational that had a Brazillian gamedev office, they been complaining on media for months they were not finding people qualified for the job, the job title was exactly what I had a degree for, the HR loved me and all.
Then when the last step left was for them to get authorization from higher ups... the authorization didn't came.
Know why?
Well, because although I had a degree, they didn't cared about the degree, what they cared about, was experience.
So no, college is NOT "obviously" part of anything unless you mean being "obviously" part of crushing student debt that force thousands into conditions that in my country are literally legally slavery if the owner of the debt was also the employer (we have a law named "employment analogous to slavery", one of its points is that employing people to have them repay their debt to you is considered slavery).
So while a college degree is not a guarantee, the question is whether or not it increases your chances. Because if it does, you can combine it with other things that also increase your chances to give yourself the best shot.
I mean, it is possible to sit infinite monkeys at infinite typewriters and get Shakespeare. Doesn't mean it's a good strategy.
Now, if college is unavailable to someone for whatever reason, it is good to know that a good life isn't dependent on getting a college degree. You can focus harder on other positive indicators.
But if we're going to dismiss everything that isn't a sure thing, we're going to be just dismissing everything.
https://acoup.blog/2020/07/03/collections-the-practical-case...
(And thank-you to whoever first posted a link to this guy's blog to HN, it's really good, and I'm not even all that into history of warfare.)
It's all about show and very little about substance.
Building a flashy web app and studying for interviews will get you further than anything you learn in school.
Why would you subsidize a path in life making people in some cases worse.
That's all.
- Don't do pre-university in high school but prepare for "higher job education" in high school. Graduate at 17.
- Do a "higher job education", speed it up (instead of 4 years do 3 years) and graduate at 20. Do some web dev/UX-based degree (they exist and speedups are possible, provided you're pro-active).
- Get a job grind away for 3 to 5 years, learn about investing and invest most of the money.
- If you want to go deeper in computer science, because the craft is beautiful then follow a master degree in security.
I'd have missed out on a lot of spiritual/some social development that I wouldn't have gotten at "higher job education" but did get at uni (as I did that for 6 months, a different degree though). However, compared to that, I now have a career setback of 7 years.
That's fair, but while some kids would thrive going to work after college many more would be hampered by a lack of a college education for the rest of their lives.
Probably US specific but, in most schools, education sucks and all good colleges (not just super expensive; state schools, too) offer a solid STEM background to fix the damage after lousy schools. College should not be necessary, but in the US it kind of is.
So to make college optional, fix schools: reduce hours and drudgery, focus on consistent STEM background, give extra support to kids that excel in a subjext. My 2c.
Charging accordingly.
Don't work for middle men, get direct clients.
Make friends
Help people
Oh and study
Id love to go C2C but finding clients seems really hard.
nothing hurts us more than the lack of (higher) education.
kids, stay in school.
Why do you hold that view?
Just to be sure: if you are young/new please don't take this as discouragement. The less it applies to you the better. And if you face discrimination then take pride in your accomplishments in spite of adversity.
But I find OP's assessment overly specific...
It is one way of getting training - and if you say went into the right MOS cyber etc get to Master Sargent E8 you could then get a good job outside.
It's a shame, because I loved (and continue to love) higher education.
If anything, I'd say the rate of people attending college despite not wanting to can only have increased since then. The assumption that college is an absolute necessity for a comfortable middle-class life has only in the last few years come into serious question, and still has yet to face anything like the inquisition it deserves.
Yes, we tend to pay a lot to go to college, and yes, a lot of us feel like we must do it. A lot of choices factor into how much you pay - community college can reduce this, going to a lesser known school, etc. However, it’s an investment in yourself. For some of us, that investment works out really well. Others may struggle to get that awesome job after college.
Judging by the number of people who don't show up to class or otherwise just "get by", it's absolutely true. People "go to college" because they're told it's their meal ticket into the middle class. This is the point of the article.
Ask the average person if they'd rather pay to have the paper degree and not have to attend any classes, or get the education for free but not receive any paper credentials. You'll have your answer.
I mean, I've heard of this happening a lot in community college, but in my private university I didn't regularly see this behavior, and certainly not in the upper level classes.
This is an interesting thought, however I don't think it is a good test for whether someone wants to be in college/uni or not. It is reasonable to enjoy the education and be realistic about the value of the paper certificate at the same time.
The overall point about social pressures etc. is well taken though.
A lot of people enjoy the social aspect of college (from parties to having a cohort that is interested in the same things they are).
The money issue roughly fell into three buckets: 1) students not worrying about money because they have rich parents, 2) students not worrying about money because they have student loans, and 3) students worrying a lot about money because they have student loans.
From my experience going to undergrad at a state university in the midwest, a lot of students would prefer to have a well paying job immediately after high school and not go to college. However, a lot of those same students would rather go to college than stay in their small hometown where job prospects are bleak.
Assuming you went to college for a marketable and "valuable" degree - by this, I mean a degree with a clear path to a somewhat stable career. Usually, if you don't have internships you've already shot yourself in the foot.
Plenty of people with family money and college still find ways to go bankrupt from addiction, real-estate woes or bad investments.
Some just don't care enough or have enough drive to be "successful".
Some who find success get involved with the wrong people, or think their source of money is an endless fountain and go broke or worse end up on the street.
Goodness do journalists write for simpletons these days...
* insurance policy, where students use it to avoid limiting themselves to low-status and low-paying careers
* lottery ticket, the gateway to a "prestige" career track [1]
* status signaling mechanism, where young people flex their educational elitism [2]
And higher ed is arguably bad at what its supposed be good at - a delivery mechanism of relevant knowledge. If you have ever interviewed a fresh grad who didn't study "Cracking the Coding Interview" or did not have a few "side projects" under their belt, then you know what I am talking about.[3] The internet is the most effective information distribution delivery and it's much cheaper, no wonder the value of college is in question.
[1] Consulting, finance, corporate middle management, grad school
[2] How many times have you been on a date and you tell or ask the other person where they wen to college, what they majored in, etc
[3] Arguably, the standard that hiring managers set for new grads is too high. Perhaps it's the employer that should be training fresh grads, but that is not how the current job market works. I think about this a lot because it causes problems for both young people and employers.
Goodhart's Law.
> or did not have a few "side projects" under their belt
IME: end-of-course projects at places like MIT and Carneige Mellon are often much more impressive than the CRUD web app or copy-pasta Jupyter notebooks I tend to see from e.g. coding bootcamps or especially self-taught applicants. And students usually have a half dozen or more of those, in addition to internship projects.
Sometimes a self-taught person comes along with a genuinely impressive project, and I push hard to hire those folks. But for the most part it's silly little single-person-project web apps and such.
> The internet is the most effective information distribution delivery and it's much cheaper, no wonder the value of college is in question.
The questioning only really has a loud voice in places like the USA with horrendously expensive higher ed systems. I don't really hear a lot of griping about the cost of education or opining on internet alternatives when I'm in Munich or Vienna.
Very few students study at places like MIT and Carnegie Mellon. They typical CS program, even the typical "good but not exemplary" CS program, does not direct students to produce "projects" on nearly the same level. I even went to a college that has a well-regarded senior capstone project for its traditional engineering majors, but the CS equivalent felt far more low-effort and unconsequential. Among my classmates, the ones who had significant side projects and internship/co-op results were the ones with preferential outcomes and the ones who only had end-of-course projects to show were the ones with "typical" outcomes.
The non-flagship state uni a lot of my friends went to had fantastic project-based coursework in CS. Acceptance rate is like 70% and tuition is very affordable.
Agreed that ENG departments tend to do better at this, especially at mid-tier state schools. CS departments need to take project-based work and especially capstones much more seriously.
Electronics: https://www.google.com/search?q=6.115+final+projects
Interactive music: https://vimeo.com/user42907764
Product design: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqKSAz3yxMM
All but the last of these were done in groups of 2-3 people. It might have been theoretically possible to graduate with only one big project, if you took machine learning, security (the final project for this one was finding an exploit in Firefox, but no actual code was required), and some heavy theory classes. Most people would have done at least 3-4 big projects like this.
There's also a growing anti intellectual movement in the US, you even see it here on hacker news. If you start with the premise that education is at best useless and at worse actively harmful of course the cost would be questioned.
In your view, what distinguishes the former from the latter? CS is not my primarily skillset, but I do know "how to program". And, because I'm a grad student, I want to do something with a very high impressive:time ratio, if that makes sense.
Hard to give a generic answer.
Basically, anything that makes me say "yeah there's no youtube tutorial for that, no public github repo you could copy ideas from, and you had to have solved a lot of difficult gritty problems in creative ways to get it to work".
For that reason, A lot of the most impressive projects I've seen demonstrates the potential of a new tech stack. Demonstrations of promise can be either really cool demos or else pieces of infrastructure that lower the barrier to entry/iteration time/etc.
Back when 3D printing and laser sintering where new technologies, here are examples of cool projects around that emerging stack:
* digging into the firmware and/or hacking around the firmware to fix some limitation of the machine. This is probably not relevant anymore, but was when 3D printers were still new and had annoying bugs.
* A domain-specific CAD-like tool that did a bunch of "physically possible" checks for certain types of objects by using numerical analysis to do a bunch of ad hoc checks. Fantastic project because you can look at it and say "if you took two years and did this in a more systematic way it'd be a great product"
* auto-generated statues/art
* etc.
NB: that would be a bit less impressive these days, because 3D printing is now mainstream and a lot of these projects can be done via copy-pasta development from github repos, or even by following a youtube tutorial.
What is your primary skillset, and what's an emerging capability in that space? How can you use software to either demonstrate the promise of that capability or else build useful infrastructure that could make that capability easier to access?
NB: this is mostly for undergrad and maybe non-thesis masters projects. If you're in a thesis masters program or phd program, focus on doing science. Pick a good advisor and listen.
What is great with MIT/CMU style projects is that they demonstrate a good knowledge of the fundamentals of engineering and often required a significant amount of learning on a very scoped subject to complete the project. That is something I want to hire for, because I know that even if these guys know nothing about my specific tech stack and problem space, they will be able to figure it out quick.
I repeated it a couple of times, bootcamp projects are often worthless, and more often than not the goal of the bootcamp is to manage to complete the project, which is identical to the one that the other 40 students completed. They are often made to be flashy and show (non-technical) hiring managers that they have the right applied skills to churn out code immediately, but I'm pretty sure a lot of bootcamp grads could not figure out how to translate their toy app to a different framework or ecosystem in any reasonable amount of time.
I think the deluge of undergrad degrees is the cause of this? a degree isn't a meaningful differentiate? rather just a expected baseline all prospective employees must have
Funnily enough that is effectively what happens in many cases anyway. You still need to shell out the 40k for the undergrad degree to even get the opportunity to learn on the job.
I went to college and grad school to learn.
The fact that most software developer jobs of the present day don't really make use of a college education says more about the profession of software development than the value of getting a degree. Software development is becoming a commoditized, blue collar job that anybody off the street can do and that will have long term impact on the market value of ordinary developers.
I don't think it's true. Colleges and education in general are teaching people. But it's more like drinking from a firehose.
But nobody cares about effort to retain what you drank from said firehose, so 90% to maybe 99% of it basically disappears into ether, unless you're in a profession that actually makes use of what you're taught.
I did. As did many of my classmates. I've found engineering fascinating since I was a child so I enjoyed the opportunity.
> How many times have you been on a date and you tell or ask the other person where they wen to college, what they majored in, etc
How is this "[flexing] educational elitism"? That is standard small talk to gauge another person's life experience and interests.
I was told from a young age college was about learning and not grades. I believed that lie, aggressively optimized for learning over grades and that was a huge mistake.
Several times I skipped doing boring unnecessary homework or going to a useless class to work on projects that would teach me more. I would routinely do things like skip class to go above and beyond on interesting projects.
Despite getting above a 90 on all of my projects and exams, I graduated with a 2.4. I would routinely have calls with potential employers where they would say "wow after talking to you we're really impressed with your knowledge of c.s. and the projects you've completed. Oh btw I didn't see your gpa on your resume, what was it? Oh, I'm sorry. We only take people who have a gpa about 2.5/3.0/3.5. but don't worry you seem super personable and smart I know you're going to find something".
Now I tell all of my younger siblings. Optimize for grades and that's the only thing that matters. You can always pick up a book but you'll never be able to fix your gpa. My 2.4 and my wife's 4.0 continue to influence our lives (albeit now much more mildly) 10 years later.