341–350 of 449 posts
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If you have a pool of applicants for a job, all with no relevant experience, it's an easy filter. You filter out all the people who haven't proven they can do something they agreed to do for 3/4 years.
If that's all it is, there's got to be a way to come up with something that lets someone prove they are willing to do something for 4 years, but only costs maybe $250 a year.
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Actually Texas has cheap, well-funded state schools. It is financially a well-managed state. Maybe you should switch to saying "That's Illinois" or "That's Chicago", they're the dysfunctional state now.
you can’t argue logically with leftist insult attempts. norwegians very much believe themselves to be better than you and will sneer at you after affronting you with silly outdated stereotypes. it’s adorable
If someone had written an article about struggling actors turning to sex work and sleeping in cars, nobody would blink an eye. Acting pays little for the same reason being an academic pays little. Lots of people want to do it, but there is limited demand, hence only the really exceptional folks make any money doing it. Obviously, people shouldn't need to sleep in cars. But the answer to that is a basic income. It's n…
I want to comment that academics provide such an incredible amount to the world we live in. In a time of bullshit thought leaders and companies like Equifax who will tell you obvious lies, the academic discipline with its rigor, criticalness, and policing against self-promotion is a kind of last-bastion for intellect in the West. And even that is sort of cracking. BTW one country has already tried the “you can only g…
This is true, but it's not terribly efficient about doing so. Much of it provides little to no useful return, and some of it actively harms the world we live in. If we wish to talk about the value of academics, we must honestly look at the whole balance sheet. Value isn't just about revenue, but costs, as well. And with rising tuitions and falling class quality, the ROI of a college education isn't as high as it used to be. For students and for society in general.
> the academic discipline with its rigor, criticalness, and policing against self-promotion is a kind of last-bastion for intellect in the West.
I'm really struggling to word this in a polite way without discarding facts (sorry if I'm rude), but, what kind of fantasy led you to believe this is or has been the standard for academia?
- Academic discipline is more about knowing how to file papers and abuse TAs and post-grad students for free work, rather than about following scientific processes. There's been truckloads of articles lately about insufficient scientific rigor on published papers - especially in the social sciences. The glut of students, professors and information has lead to more noise than signal. Self-referential theories get presented as fact, where papers reference other papers still in peer review. Student thesis subjects are encouraged to focus on the professors' work in order to increase citations and prestige. Controversial papers are encouraged instead of scientific papers, which has caused all sorts of problems in academic journals and the parasitic journalists who write clickbait from them. And then there's the ever-present massaging of data and discarding of any contradictory samples.
- Self-promotion is absolutely huge in academia and has been that way for decades. That's how "publish or perish" came to be a staple of the industry. Not to mention the prestige factor in selecting mentors and advisors, politics in academia between people at the professor level can get extremely vicious. Elite oligarchies are as fixed in academia as anywhere else. And if they can't teach, they just move into administration and promote themselves there. Administration is probably the worst part of a modern educational institution - full of waste and corruption. Like how Katehi got rehired at her chancellor-level salary after a year's vacation after that pepper spray incident at UC Davis. Academia is literally infested with bad actors. Not to say there aren't good ones, but the bad ones are especially well connected and hard to evict. There's no policing against it except against the people who get caught before they're successful at entrenching themselves.
- Critical thinking isn't even remotely a curriculum requirement anymore. Many classes actively discourage critical thinking, and instead encourage rote memorization or directed analysis instead. In some classes, if you dare to challenge the narrative presented, you might receive Title IX sanctions for your oppressive actions from students and professor. After which you'll then be brought before a panel, denied representation and judged by a biased group more focused on maintaining image and federal funding than on the truth. And this might be from something as small as questioning the statistics or the sample set from a study. Students are encouraged with safe spaces and other policies that prevent them from processing or even seeing opposing viewpoints. That is not "criticalness". It's pandering.
- Deceiving students in academia is also a thing. Once again, there's the whole problem with scientifically bad papers being encouraged, published and referenced without peer review. These things make it in to curriculum and don't get pulled out after a retraction. Some classes will teach you that you shouldn't critique at all. Class books are often written by the professor to supplement their income, and contain their own pet theories. They put out a new edition every year with minor changes just so you can't buy a used book. And you've obviously never sat through a lecture rant on the professor's pet grievances. Lecture after lecture on the evils of western civilization from a person who literally couldn't survive outside of it can really tire you out. And honesty about career applicability for degrees is at an all-time low. Partly because some of the people teaching you have limited career aspects themselves and don't like to stare the facts in the face. Dishonesty about the value of the information presented and its critical reception is kind of the worst kind of dishonesty when you're charging someone a year's salary to listen to it.
There are good things about a university education. And not every situation is this bad. But it is not the ivory tower you're perceiving, and likely hasn't been that way for the majority of your lifetime, if not all of it. The honest, naked pursuit of science and truth always been the ideal, but rarely the reality. We don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water. But we've got to be more honest and objective about problems in academia if we have any hope of fixing them.
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Degrees are not reliable signals of productivity. I would much rather hire someone who didn't finish college but has had five years of progressive responsibility in the right area, than someone who had just finished a four or five year degree course but had never worked.
I didn't say they were. They aren't, that's the issue. A college degree overshoots the level of qualification necessary for a general skills job and comes short of the qualification necessary for a specialized position. Also, your crosswise comparison between an experienced candidate without a degree and an inexperienced candidate with a degree only tells me that you put more weight into experience than having a degr…
You've got a space of time in a person's life between, presumably, graduating high school and sending you a resume. What did they do with that time?
Merely having a degree doesn't say much.
Merely not having a degree doesn't say much.
Having an honors BS in CS from CMU, MIT, Stanford, or a bunch of other schools implies academic competence and exposure to a certain range of ideas. But I don't know that they can be productive outside of that environment.
Having an ordinary BS in a STEM subject from a random college that I've never heard of means even less to me. But is it zero? No.
Holding down a job for those four years is a signal, too, and it needs evaluation. What kind of job? While living at home? Did anything progress during that time? Is it relevant to what we're trying to hire for?
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> For the most part, the only jobs that hire for English and other liberal-arts degrees are universities and schools This is such nonsense. Most jobs don't care what degree you have as long as you have a degree, and with an English degree you can apply for 90% of jobs. You could graduate and go on to be anything from an advertising executive, to a soldier. Most jobs don't care - it's technology that's unusual.
Why do employers keep putting so much value on something so worthless? There must be cheaper ways to demonstrate to employers you have something equivalent to whatever it is they think they're getting from any old 4 year degree.
'College professor' is currently a middle-class job and it has been for a long time (since before I was born at least). What we have in this article are stories from people who are in the middle class and hit a bump in the road, and never recovered economically. This can happen to anyone, including you, the silicon-valley start-up STEM uber-programmer.
It is just bad luck and highlights the lack of a societal safety net. In short, this is a shock piece describing something that is very common in the USA. It is shocking simply because our mental image of a 'College professor,' is a well-to-do clean-cut person in a tweed jacket scribbling on a chalk-board. You don't think to yourself 'homeless prostitute,' (the examples were clearly very specifically picked). The contrast is intentional.
This isn't to detract from these people's plight. It is certainly a real one (maybe an example of one of the most real things that can happen to a person). The majority of us are a couple of unfortunate life events away from making the decisions that these people had to make. Lose your job and have an expensive illness at the same time, you'll pretty much be there. These people started behind because of massive college debt, for the most part, but it doesn't change that we're all close to this.
I'm disheartened that this is being reduced to in economic terms 'a supply-side problem,' under the assumption that the economics of supply and demand actually apply to a person who is (for all purposes) not making a living wage and in debt to their eyeballs. It's bullshit if a person is employed 60+ hours a week and they aren't able to properly feed clothe and house themselves (and their family, for that matter). It doesn't matter what the job is.
Honestly, it's bullshit that we have homelessness and hunger at all. At what point do we have a serious conversation in the west about attempting to become a post-scarcity society? I don't think we even know what is involved to make a society like that tractable.
Say it with me friends and colleagues, Union. This is the future for all of us, when programming becomes commoditized just as teaching has. When our salaries are pushed to the bottom. We are not owners, we are not capitalists, we are not bosses, we are people with a skill you can learn on the internet and a corresponding talent for it. Either a) this will happen to us as programmers, b) we have credentialing and gate…
e) You will no longer be able to call yourself a "full stack" developer that can work in any field. Employers will only look for developers that are good at programming, and a expert in a niche field. For example, bioinformatics.
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> For the most part, the only jobs that hire for English and other liberal-arts degrees are universities and schools This is such nonsense. Most jobs don't care what degree you have as long as you have a degree, and with an English degree you can apply for 90% of jobs. You could graduate and go on to be anything from an advertising executive, to a soldier. Most jobs don't care - it's technology that's unusual.
Why do employers keep putting so much value on something so worthless? There must be cheaper ways to demonstrate to employers you have something equivalent to whatever it is they think they're getting from any old 4 year degree.
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What a programmer centric view. 99+% of people are not programmers. You want to be in any other STEM job you need a university degree(s). Almost any reasonable paying job other than programmer require actual training and education.
> Almost any reasonable paying job other than programmer require actual training and education. Interesting; this contrasts with the claim of liberal arts graduates who maintain that simply being competent critical thinkers is all that's required for almost any job.
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"The market for a piece of paper is way too strong." Penguin, PwC and EY have already dropped university degrees as a requirement. "The move comes just months after accountancy firm Ernst & Young, one of Britain’s biggest graduate recruiters , made a similar announcement, saying in August that it would no longer consider degree or A-level results when assessing potential employees" https://www.theguardian.com/books/2…
High school drop out here, I'm in a management/special projects position at a software company. My ability to self educate allows them to use any language, tool or framework relatively quickly without swapping out staff that have been approved for that purpose by academia. Given my short tenure in the development market in comparison to the price I command at least in my case not having formal education is actually m…
I adhered to Aaron Swartz not degrees when hiring