51–60 of 111 posts
The trouble with linear methods is that they often fit to the bulk of the population and have poor fit at the extremes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I heard this from my peers in undergrad all the time and it befuddled me. I thought "so ... you have no curiosity about the world? about how stuff works?." I'm not claiming that I had hifalutin ideals; I knew that money was important, but I had this (perhaps naive) idea that if I became an excellent practitioner in whatever I did the money would follow. I just wasn't prepared to hear "I'm just here to get a good job"…
A thoughtful graduate student schooled me on this, when I was a Junior working in her lab. She was interviewing widely, looking for a job that suited her goals. She said "If you take the highest offer, then they're deciding for you. Its just prostitution then." I've remembered that for 35 years.
There are certainly other factors to consider than just salary, but to dismiss that consideration as "prostitution" is absurd. Money may not buy happiness, but it buys everything else. I'm a big fan of food, clothing, and shelter, all of which money can buy in abundance.
But I was lucky to pick a field with high pay and lots of good employers, so I have the luxury of choosing both.
Woah, what? So a degree that cost $1 but raised your career earnings by $100 would be at 100%? 1000%? Not sure how they're doing the math, but it completely dwarfs the rest. And shows how obviously flawed the measure itself is.
One of the key things left out is the baseline cost of time. A few years of your life is not free and probably makes for a pretty high baseline cost.
https://medium.com/@spencer_th0mas/why-america-cares-about-e...
All this data suggests is that STEM majors are more likely to get high-paying jobs with only their undergrad degrees. It completely omits the many humanities/arts majors who go on to graduate study and thence to perfectly lucrative careers.
There is another HN article that shows salary for STEM majors at mid career was equivalent, irrespective if school. According to that article, at 44, I'm making more than the average MIT grad of the same age, and I went to KU.
interesting; happen to have a link or a term that'll help me find it? thx
The big thing for me with top schools is the "baseline quality of the degree". I didn't go to a top school, but spent my time studying everything math and CS related I could, and managed to get an awesome education. At the same time, I am fully cognizant of the fact that peers who were less driven likely were more easily able to skate by, for the most part. So when a resume comes across my desk from a guy from my alm…
I've heard that Harvard is similar: the grade distribution at Harvard is roughly 10% As, 80% Bs, and 10% Cs. Getting an A at Harvard implies that you really did a lot of work, but getting a B could imply everything from "You really did a lot of work but just missed the cutoff" to "You learned basically nothing from your undergraduate education."
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I went to University of Illinois for math (grad school), and I haven't really seen that effect, although it probably didn't hurt. I've mostly gotten interviews because of my open source credentials & impressive accomplishments for early in my career. I'm of the opinion that while school calibur might be able to get you interviews and jobs a lot of times, it's selecting for mediocrity since it doesn't go for professio…
I have friends at UIUC and the difference in recruiting is night and day. I didn't get any response when I applied to Dropbox and Citadel over the last 2 years, but on the UIUC Computer Science Facebook page both companies post internship opportunities with direct recruiter emails, sometimes saying "anybody can interview" (for Dropbox). As someone who goes to a school of decent, but lower caliber this is a significan…
The big thing for me with top schools is the "baseline quality of the degree". I didn't go to a top school, but spent my time studying everything math and CS related I could, and managed to get an awesome education. At the same time, I am fully cognizant of the fact that peers who were less driven likely were more easily able to skate by, for the most part. So when a resume comes across my desk from a guy from my alm…
In technical fields this is usually reliable (someone who went to CMU or MIT and graduated probably put in a pretty high baseline level of work), but in more liberal arts fields school quality correlates much less to a baseline quality level. At my alma mater (Amherst), for example, the easiest course of study would be to take 4 humanities classes / semester, spend 12 hours/week in classes, write 3 papers/semester fo…
Or maybe they learned exactly what they needed to do to game the system. Does doing a lot of work correlate to learning more? Seems both sides of the huge distribution got the same perceived outcome, just one did it easier.