It's cute how software engineers are attributed as the likely inventors of HVAC robots. Whatever happened to mechanical & electrical engineers?
How many jobs really require college?
171–180 of 314 posts
Re: How many jobs really require college?
#172I think the author of this post is making the same mistake that a lot of other people (particularly smart folks) make whenever they are thinking about the ills of modern education system and what can be done to improve it. Like Peter Thiel and others, I don't think they understand how and why students are failing in classrooms today. Take for example the author's suggestions on how school systems can be improved: Cre…
Can you really expect high school students to perform well in online classes? Does it matter? At what point do we put the failure of the student on the student? Education being unaffordable is a broadly sympathetic position. Not getting an education because you couldn't be troubled to take advantage of a free education is an unsympathetic position. You're giving too much credit to students, they don't know what is be…
The point of education (or public policy in general) is usually not to assign moral blame. You can personally assign blame to anyone you want, but society has a harder problem : maximizing good outcomes. That means policy has to account for people that are lazy, people who have bad intentions, people who are stupid, and so forth. Society can't pretend those people don't exist even if you can, because if they end up uneducated, jobless and ignored they will just cause huge problems later. While you might feel good about blaming them for those problems, wouldn't it be better to prevent them in the first place? It is better to provide the best possible educational track that we can and try to make sure they have a viable career or work path open to them.
Re: How many jobs really require college?
#173With the quality of education as it is today, and no improvements in sight in the near or long-term future, I'd say a college education--or self-guided personal learning for the few who have the motivation and ability to do it--is required in the US if one is to not be considered stupid. There are exceptions at certain private--and usually incredibly expensive schools--but overall, even the best public schools are atrocious and don't teach children the skills and knowledge they need to be decent citizens, let alone how to prosper. This is why attending college is not primarily about job preparation. Even when job preparation is not necessary, the rest of the education is. Yes, much of it should have been taught in grades K-12, but since that isn't happening, college is the last defense against stupidity that's likely to last a lifetime. Thus, the question the article asks is not very important, and the article's dismissal of any use for college other than job preparation is short-sighted and ill-defended.
Re: How many jobs really require college?
#174I think the author of this post is making the same mistake that a lot of other people (particularly smart folks) make whenever they are thinking about the ills of modern education system and what can be done to improve it. Like Peter Thiel and others, I don't think they understand how and why students are failing in classrooms today. Take for example the author's suggestions on how school systems can be improved: Cre…
I don't doubt online learning wouldn't work well for some or maybe most high schoolers, but to use your own one-off experience of making a mistake of doing online school (which apparently doesn't work well for you), and if I'm not mistaken, generalizing it to mean that everyone has to do it your way is not helpful at all.
I had a usual on campus undergraduate degree experience, except I also took some fully and partially online courses, and I did great in them and enjoyed them even more as I didn't need to spend time physically putting myself into a classroom. I also got a master's degree which was mostly online in a math-heavy discipline, and I did fine because I do the work necessary.
I've just been working remote for weeks, and have done remote days many times for my job, and honestly I can usually get more done because I'm not distracted by everyone interrupting me and making smalltalk around the office.
So remote works well for me, and probably for many others. It doesn't work well for you, and possibly many others. Please, let's not impose our 'best way of doing things' on everyone else (I'm including myself here).
Re: How many jobs really require college?
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The most elite companies in the valley have correctly found out that remote doesn't work There are enough companies out there with remote employees and even remotely distributed teams to disprove the assertion that "remote doesn't work".
I have the feeling remote works only for people who have an intrinsic motivation to be good at what they do. I met a whole bunch of people who want to be a dev because it pays well. Most of them need constant supervision.
It's not "intrinsic motivation to be good at what they do" that enables one to successfully work remotely, it's enough discipline to do one's job outside of an office setting.
I myself try to hire for devs that don't need supervision because we're all adults here and being a nanny isn't something I'm interested in. I prefer trusting others to do their work in a timely manner, and if that trust is broken, we move on.
Re: How many jobs really require college?
#176I recently helped transform a customer service department from being an embarrassing shambles to something we could be proud of. The queue of tickets is now empty whereas before, when we didn't have things automated, our many customer service agents were struggling to keep up with the back of a 4000 long queue. Things are now pro-active, we fix problems before customers know rather than wait for them to complain. Ess…
I'm pretty sure your colleagues were able to 'listen and learn, write good English and show up in the morning' before they went to college.
Re: How many jobs really require college?
#177The premise of this post is that the author has performed an analysis of the educational requirements for jobs and can extrapolate from it. But this author thinks that only a grade school education and not more than 6 months of training is required to be a cook --- a profession people go to post-secondary school for --- and that some college study is required to be a programmer. How seriously should I take their conc…
The arrogance of the opening of this piece is amazing. Essentially: "I know nothing about analyzing occupations, I do not work in or hire for any of these occupations, now I will classify these occupations based on my subjective analysis of how much education one really needs to do these jobs."
Re: How many jobs really require college?
#178I think the author of this post is making the same mistake that a lot of other people (particularly smart folks) make whenever they are thinking about the ills of modern education system and what can be done to improve it. Like Peter Thiel and others, I don't think they understand how and why students are failing in classrooms today. Take for example the author's suggestions on how school systems can be improved: Cre…
> Can you really expect high school students to perform well in online classes? The most elite companies in the valley have correctly found out that remote doesn't work... and yet we're going to do remote with our students? I took online classes when I went back to complete college at an older age... it was the worst mistake of my life I think this really depends on the person. I learned coding on my own as a teenage…
This x1000, I've seen 15 year olds learn about semiconductor lithography because their interested about it.
Re: How many jobs really require college?
#179The article's classifications aren't even observed in other OECD countries: for example law and medicine are undergraduate degrees is most of Europe and Australia and people do fine (obviously doctors still need residency etc in order to become skilled). And those countries are doing fine -- better than the US in many ways.
Re: How many jobs really require college?
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
So I don't know about all fields, but I know about programming. Do you know how much value a high school type person has in writing computer programs for an actual software company? Something fairly negative. Say -$10 an hour or -$50 an hour, based on how much experienced person time they take up and how much damage they do. If you run a small profitable business, even if you could get high schoolers to work for free…
It sucks for the big corps to not be able to contractually force labor out of workers who they have trained. But it sucks far far more if you are stuck in an abusive contract.
Maybe. But the end result is where we are now. People go to college to try and learn a skill. Don't really learn the skill as well as an apprenticeship. Get a lot of debt.