Middle-Class Families Increasingly Look to Community Colleges • Hacker News Board

Re: Middle-Class Families Increasingly Look to Community Colleges

#131

Post by throwawayjava » Sun, Apr 08, 2018, 8:55 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #94

I don’t understand all this talk about “connections” made in 4 year colleges, as if that’s a good thing. Isn’t it intensely anti-meritocratic and something to be discouraged, not encouraged?

> as if that’s a good thing.

Developing a network of peers IS a good thing!

> Isn’t it intensely anti-meritocratic

I guess that depends on how yo define "merit".

The ability to build professional networks is actually a valuable skill, not just for the individual but also for the business. And the network itself is valuable.

I can think of three of reasons why a business would, on merit alone, prefer someone with demonstrated ability to build their professional network, or who is plugged into a particular professional network:

1. When it comes to hiring, "merit" does not mean "the best person"! "Merit" means "someone who can do the job and who we can convince to take the job given recruiting budget X and max comp package Y." If locating a candidate among the chafe costs more than "X", then that candidate ISN'T a meritorious candidate. No matter who good they would be at the job!

2. Businesses often recruit to access to an entire network/pipeline, not just a single engineer. This is a common pattern at lower-paying shops especially. Recruiting your Nth engineer from State U is easy because you already have recruit N-1 to give you the names of five people who would probably do well. Now, in any given year, the business could recruit zero people from State U. But then they have to rebuild their State U pipeline in subsequent years.

In other words, your network is part of the value you provide to the company! Someone with no professional network is strictly less valuable than someone with a professional network. And in some regional job markets, "Alumni of State U" is a valuable recruiting network.

3. Someone with a strong professional network has signaled that they have a modicum of skill at "winning hearts and minds". Depending on the shop, engineers who are good at building and maintaining reputation over the long term bring way more value than just the LoCs they commit during their period of employment.

4. It's also worth pointing out that someone you recruit via one of these networks might have a niche combination of skills that would be otherwise hard to discover. E.g., "oh, we're hiring a new dev to work with a new client in industry XYZ. I have an old friend who double majored in CS and ABC, which gives him the background needed to talk with folks in industry XYZ. Should I give him a call?". Again, the definition of "merit" is "we can find you with budget X and you're willing to do the work for comp package Y". NOT "you're the ideal candidate if we had X+Z recruiting budget to cast a wide net and find you"

All that said, hiring college buddies can be anti-meritocratic, for sure. Life isn't fair. Just one of the reasons colleges require freshman read Shakespeare :)

Re: Middle-Class Families Increasingly Look to Community Colleges

#132

Post by bergerjac » Sun, Apr 08, 2018, 9:02 PM UTC

quake wrote: post #83

I only really decided to go into engineering late in my final year of high school, and I used the local community college (conveniently located across the street from my HS) to take all the calculus and computer science classes that I didn't have covered. In a year, I covered my high school requirements, and my first year of university calculus, computer science, chemistry and physics. The class sizes were tiny, whic…

> "5% of what you learn here will be applicable in your job."

That's what the dean of my university department told all the students.

Not for economics.

Not for political science.

This was for Electrical Engineering.

I wouldn't suggest to anyone to go to college.

It'd be more like a last-ditch "Ok, just don't start off at a university."

With the accessibility of information on the internet and the future collapse of student debt, college degrees will be an afterthought.. (besides doctors, dentists, most engineers)

Re: Middle-Class Families Increasingly Look to Community Colleges

#133

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Apr 08, 2018, 9:31 PM UTC

skookumchuck wrote: post #113

maxerickson wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say that. I said it should be available to every student, which is not the case. It's directly a failure of the primary education system, but it is more a failure of leadership and resources than anything else. As far as NCLB, the response to it is a bigger problem than the law. There's nothing in it stopping states from investing in both helping underachieving students and in helping other students get ahea…

> a failure of leadership and resources Why is it more expensive to teach, say, calculus than algebra? Offering more advanced classes should not cost more.

[deleted]

Re: Middle-Class Families Increasingly Look to Community Colleges

#134

Post by jobowoo » Sun, Apr 08, 2018, 9:33 PM UTC

KKKKkkkk1 wrote: post #107

gmays wrote: post #41

Community college worked well for me. 2 weeks after graduating high school I started taking a heavy workload at the local community college. I was able to complete the prerequisites by the following year and transfer to a local state university. I was lucky that both were within a 45min drive from my house. The result was graduating college with a bachelor's degree 2.5 years after graduating high school. I lived at h…

I'm wondering what's the opportunity cost that you paid by having Cal State on your CV instead of a top-ranked university. I sometimes see people who went to MIT or Stanford that I feel would not have gotten nearly as far as they have if it were Cal State. How many of your colleagues are from top universities?

I was able to find this site that compares average income by where students went to college.

CSU Stanislaus: $47,000 (early career), $90,300 (mid career) MIT: $81,500 (early career), $147,000 (mid career)

Early career is 0-5 years experience. Mid career is 10+ years experience.

https://www.payscale.com/college-salary-report/bachelors?pag...

Obviously, we can't say that prestige of college and income are causal but the correlation is definitely there.

Re: Middle-Class Families Increasingly Look to Community Colleges

#135

Post by chrisseaton » Sun, Apr 08, 2018, 9:34 PM UTC

skookumchuck wrote: post #113

maxerickson wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say that. I said it should be available to every student, which is not the case. It's directly a failure of the primary education system, but it is more a failure of leadership and resources than anything else. As far as NCLB, the response to it is a bigger problem than the law. There's nothing in it stopping states from investing in both helping underachieving students and in helping other students get ahea…

> a failure of leadership and resources Why is it more expensive to teach, say, calculus than algebra? Offering more advanced classes should not cost more.

> Why is it more expensive to teach, say, calculus than algebra?

Because educating someone to teach more advanced subjects takes more times and resources.

Re: Middle-Class Families Increasingly Look to Community Colleges

#136

Post by iopuy » Sun, Apr 08, 2018, 9:51 PM UTC

oculusthrift wrote: post #82

maxerickson wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having a year (or more) of college credits upon high school graduation should be one of the education tracks available to every student. It's a massive failure of imagination that this isn't already the case.

This is essentially what AP classes are, is it not. If you go to a decent high school and take a good amount of AP’s it will keep you busy and challenged.

Of AP, IB and dual enrollment AP is by far the worst option. There is a cumulative test at the end of the year where if you do not score high enough you won't receive college credit where as IB and dual enrollment focus on the content of the course throughout the semester to.award credit (and sometimes a cumulative project). Aced your AP class but perform poorly on the test, no credit for you!!! Also the tests cost hundreds of dollars extra. You might ask what does "not scoring high enough entail"? The answer is it is arbitrary. The test is scored 1-5 with 5 being highest and schools pick a range of 3-5 to award credit.

Re: Middle-Class Families Increasingly Look to Community Colleges

#137

Post by nvarsj » Sun, Apr 08, 2018, 10:02 PM UTC

epage wrote: post #121

nvarsj wrote: post #92

I went to community college because my family was "middle class poor". Income just too high to qualify for grants or scholarships, but too low to afford to send me to university (for various reasons). Community colleges are great in many ways. They provide a low cost option to get a four year degree. They give a second chance if you messed around in HS. It's less competitive to transfer into a top tier public univers…

CC is a mixed bag. CCs can shine in that the teachers are hired to teach rather than research and that they can be more practical / approachable than a specialized researcher. I had a really lucky CC. I lived in a R&D military town hours from any other town. Some of my teachers were literally rocket scientists from the military base who happened to love to teach. The other teachers tended to be the spouses of the roc…

That's awesome! I had one good math teacher for my differential equations class. He had worked on rocket propulsion systems in the Navy, had a Ph.D from MIT I believe. I wasn't quite sure why he was a full time teacher at CC - maybe he just loved teaching differential equations to the masses. But he was an exception, for sure.

Re: Middle-Class Families Increasingly Look to Community Colleges

#138

Post by lsc » Sun, Apr 08, 2018, 10:03 PM UTC

KKKKkkkk1 wrote: post #107

gmays wrote: post #41

Community college worked well for me. 2 weeks after graduating high school I started taking a heavy workload at the local community college. I was able to complete the prerequisites by the following year and transfer to a local state university. I was lucky that both were within a 45min drive from my house. The result was graduating college with a bachelor's degree 2.5 years after graduating high school. I lived at h…

I'm wondering what's the opportunity cost that you paid by having Cal State on your CV instead of a top-ranked university. I sometimes see people who went to MIT or Stanford that I feel would not have gotten nearly as far as they have if it were Cal State. How many of your colleagues are from top universities?

> I'm wondering what's the opportunity cost that you paid by having Cal State on your CV instead of a top-ranked university. I sometimes see people who went to MIT or Stanford that I feel would not have gotten nearly as far as they have if it were Cal State. How many of your colleagues are from top universities?

Community college is different from a state college. Community colleges only do your first two years,and you transfer to another school for the rest of your Bachelors.

This is what I'm looking at now... I really want to get into a top-10 school, but I'm a washout; I had terrible high school grades and I've only been published once in the meanwhile. A top-10 university won't let me in. Hell, I talked to the people at SJSU and they told me to take two years of community college and get back to them.

It's interesting, though; I looked into it, and it's dramatically easier to get into Berkely from a community college; Berkeley has like a 15% admissions rate out of high school... and a 25% admissions rate from a California community college.

(that said, I personally agree that a top-10 college is worlds better than a middle of the pack college. My only point here is that from my research? Even without any money constraints, the most realistic path for me to a top-10 college is through a community college.

Of course, if you have a chance to go to a top-10 college, my advice to you is to borrow like hell and do it, because top-10 colleges, as far as I can tell, give you dramatically better returns if you graduate, and they don't seem to cost dramatically more than the mid-range schools.

I personally think that the utility drops off pretty fast after you get out of the really top universities. I mean,I'm not saying it's not worth going to a middle of the road school... I'm just saying that I would be a lot more careful of taking out giant loans to go to a middle of the road school than I would when going to a top-10 school.)

Re: Middle-Class Families Increasingly Look to Community Colleges

#139

Post by x0ner » Sun, Apr 08, 2018, 10:11 PM UTC

During the early part of high school, a few friends and I began attending community college night classes for subjects we got exposed to in our day classes. By the time I graduated, I was half-way through a AAS degree and considered continuing locally a no-brainer.

Ended up transferring 70 credits or so over to a four-year institution 1 year after graduating high school and managed to walk away with a BS degree earlier than my peers and with no debt. Without community college, there's no way I would have achieved this; I owe a lot to that part of the system.

For many years, I felt like an imposter because of my community college background. The irony in it all though was that for a much cheaper, often more flexible schedule, and sometimes better teachers, I walked away with a lot of the same opportunity as my peers. Naturally, my "network" wasn't filled with ivy-leaguers, but I'd later rub shoulders with them in my employment and be considered equal.

More details around hacking through education: https://medium.com/@9bplus/hacking-the-education-process-1be...

Re: Middle-Class Families Increasingly Look to Community Colleges

#140

Post by nvarsj » Sun, Apr 08, 2018, 10:13 PM UTC

SubiculumCode wrote: post #99

nvarsj wrote: post #92

I went to community college because my family was "middle class poor". Income just too high to qualify for grants or scholarships, but too low to afford to send me to university (for various reasons). Community colleges are great in many ways. They provide a low cost option to get a four year degree. They give a second chance if you messed around in HS. It's less competitive to transfer into a top tier public univers…

My experience at a community college was quite different. The physics professors were known to kick people's asses but you learned a lot, and the math courses ->calculus were really good. However, not all classes had the same level of rigor. I took grammar course at the community college, and all we did was watch videos of flying saucers with the instructor going on and on about the conspiracy cover-up. WTF, it was a…

My physics professor at CC was an ex surfer whose son was a famous world class surfer. He would spend most classes telling us about surfing, mixed with warnings to never go into Physics unless you loved it because there was no funding. We did lots of fun labs, but nothing too rigorous. He was an amusing guy.

My worse teacher was for CS. He was supposed to teach us about assembly language, but he had absolutely no idea what he was doing, and it was obvious to everyone. He would just babble nonsense for hours every lecture, trying to pretend he understood. The class revolted and petitioned to get him expelled from the college! I think he was one of the most senior lecturers there, he might have even been chair of the CS dept. Can't say I'm surprised, I think CS teaching quality is poor outside of 4 year schools.