College May Not Be Worth It Anymore • Hacker News Board

Re: College May Not Be Worth It Anymore

#241

Post by cookiecaper » Thu, May 17, 2018, 5:48 PM UTC

mkirklions wrote: post #215

cookiecaper wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I agree that most education should be learned on the job, but college is a filter to keep the lazy out of jobs that require the dedicated. This is the heart of the issue, and I'm not sure you realized you stumbled upon it. First, you acknowledge the only way to "fail out" is to "not care". This itself shows that college doesn't prove capability or learning or anything objective. It only shows that you have to do th…

>You're filtering for someone who is mainstream and complacent; you're filtering for someone who won't question, let alone challenge, the groupthink. Weird sentence in this big post, I felt it was out of place. I never thought this was a thing in both college and industry. Everywhere Ive been encouraged you to challenge everything. The goal is to be correct by any means necessary. (Engineering school, I cant speak fo…

> I never thought this was a thing in both college and industry. Everywhere Ive been encouraged you to challenge everything. The goal is to be correct by any means necessary. (Engineering school, I cant speak for other degrees)

"Of course we challenge groupthink. That's just what they told us to do."

Are you missing the irony here?

Re: College May Not Be Worth It Anymore

#242

Post by cheeseomlit » Thu, May 17, 2018, 5:49 PM UTC

VikingCoder wrote: post #103

cheeseomlit wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tax increases you would need to sustain a system like that would be absolutely devastating. Also, college degrees would mean a lot less if they're free- devaluing them for people who actually paid for them

Our current Student Loan Debts ARE absolutely devastating. If you knew that an applicant had a Full Ride Merit Scholarship to a good degree program, it would "mean less" to you? Can you explain that a little bit better?

They are devastating to the people who take them out, not to everyone around them. You are not required to take out a student loan, you are required to pay taxes no matter how high they are

One applicant getting a full ride merit scholarship (or a small group of them) based on their own achievements is not going to devalue a degree. Giving everyone in your society a full ride scholarship based on nothing but their existence absolutely will. Abundance is inversely related to value

Re: College May Not Be Worth It Anymore

#243

Post by BlackDeath3 » Thu, May 17, 2018, 5:49 PM UTC

RoyTyrell wrote: post #129

VikingCoder wrote: post #7

I assert the expense of college is an awful burden to put on someone who must finance most of it through debt. It's a gamble. You can improve your odds of a happy outcome in that gamble by looking at the Student Loan Default Rate for any given major at any given college, and picking the best program for you (with the lowest default rate possible.) But if you are a child of parents who can finance your college? Absolu…

> Veterinarian programs specific limit how many students they accept, because if they didn't, their graduates wouldn't be able to afford a living wage. Are you sure that's the only reason? Are the reasons the same for medical school too? I think people should be allowed to pursue any major they desire. The only way you can really enforce quotas on everything is probably through laws or policies set by the Dept of Edu…

>> Veterinarian programs specific limit how many students they accept, because if they didn't, their graduates wouldn't be able to afford a living wage.

> Are you sure that's the only reason?

I'd be surprised. I'm sure that, as always, budgets and class sizes are concerns as well. There are also other ethical concerns to be considered (e.g. lots of students implies lots of animal cadavers implies...?).

Limiting class sizes to keep wages inflated sounds a little conspiratorial to me, but I won't deny that it could be a factor.

Re: College May Not Be Worth It Anymore

#244

Post by s73v3r_ » Thu, May 17, 2018, 5:50 PM UTC

aarongough wrote: post #123

awalton wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is probably a good thing, since it will slowly beat into the minds of upper-levels at corps and recruiters that a College Degree shouldn't be the minimum bar applicants need to reach, and maybe some of these companies will start removing the "has degree" band reject filter.

I don't have a degree and honestly have never had any issues with recruiters or interviews for intermediate/senior 'software engineering' positions. I never represent myself as having a degree, but I don't go out of my way to point out my lack of degree either. Never once in an interview have I been asked about my education. One nice thing about software development positions is the interview process tends to be meri…

Yeah, but software engineering isn't the only profession out there.

Re: College May Not Be Worth It Anymore

#245

Post by whataretensors » Thu, May 17, 2018, 5:52 PM UTC

mkirklions wrote: post #212

whataretensors wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Failed out of engineering= they didnt care I don't even know how to respond to this... my friends didn't fail out from a lack of effort. You also don't know this but all of my old friends are Mexican - so you are implicitly saying the reason they didn't succeed is because they are lazy Mexicans. I don't think you intended to take this stance. You likely got tricked with everyone else into believing in social constr…

Nah, it had nothing to do with your personal racism toward your friends for being Mexican. If you didnt pass math and engineering, you didnt care enough. Your friends treated college like high school or worse. If you did 100% of the homework, read the chapter before class, studied for tests, you wouldnt be failing out of college. At worst case, the classes are hard enough you get a C or D in a class. But that isnt en…

> Nah, it had nothing to do with your personal racism toward your friends for being Mexican.

Dude I'm Mexican. I showed you stats on high dropout rates of other hispanics and you call me racist, meanwhile claiming all of those dropouts are lazy.

>If you didnt pass math and engineering, you didnt care enough[...] Lets be honest here, if you put those kinda hours into engineering school, you can expect to get As and Bs

More social constructionist falsities that university is based on. It's easy to disprove, assuming you ever met any of the 99.9% of people who aren't good at math.

Re: College May Not Be Worth It Anymore

#246

Post by VikingCoder » Thu, May 17, 2018, 5:52 PM UTC

professor_plum wrote: post #173

VikingCoder wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, right now engineering should accept a ton of students. And be encouraging more. Say, for instance by being free, and then using Progressive taxation on the graduates to pay for it all. Note that I'm essentially advocating a Loan, but without a Principal. And it's means adjusted what the interest is. And you never finish paying it off.

Disagree. There are too many STEM students already. It's just that plenty of web development shops are okay with hiring a physicist. It's a waste of money and time to encourage more STEM education unless the student is actually passionate about the subject in itself. The downsides of the current trend are: - pretentious web development job posts requiring master's degrees in CS "or related field" (as if physics prepa…

I have a STEM degree and I make more than twice as much as anyone in my family who does not have a STEM degree.

If there were "too many STEM students," wouldn't my salary drop?

> It's a waste of money and time to encourage more STEM education unless the student is actually passionate about the subject in itself.

I want people to not have to struggle financially so much. STEM is a pretty well documented way to get a stable job with a very competitive salary.

If you have other ideas, I'm open to them.

> debt-ridden, unfulfilled scientists relegated to the above

As though other careers are not debt-ridden, and are more fulfilling?

If you're getting "a job," you're already kind of screwed. If you're an entrepreneur, or happen to get extremely lucky to love what you're doing, or unless you've gone Amish, we all live with tons of debt and aren't very fulfilled by modern life. Am I wrong?

Re: College May Not Be Worth It Anymore

#247

Post by sanxiyn » Thu, May 17, 2018, 5:52 PM UTC

sologoub wrote: post #220

sigstoat wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Instead of saying that college is not worth it, why don’t we do MORE to make it free? you don't make things more cost effective by changing who pays for them. you just get more people taking advantage of the cost ineffective good.

The article states nothing of the cost inefficiency, that is cost of producing the good or service. Instead, the article tries to claim that the price of education makes it a questionable investment, given the monetary returns. Higher education can and is being delivered at reasonable costs across much of the developed world, with many countries choosing to have taxpayers carry the burden of funding education. This c…

> we will reduce the negative effects lack of education currently has on society.

Such as...?

While I lament innumeracy of people for example, I observe even educated people are mostly innumerate. I am pessimistic problems attributed to lack of education will be solved by education because education is so ineffective.

Re: College May Not Be Worth It Anymore

#248

Post by throwawayjava » Thu, May 17, 2018, 5:52 PM UTC

IkmoIkmo wrote: post #205

Rotdhizon wrote: post #33

This is a nothing article, the fact that it completely leaves out what degrees are being obtained invalidates it to me. It says that a college graduate makes only ~$3,000 more a year on average than a high school graduate? With how hard they are dissing degrees, I assume they are talking about some worthless degree like liberal arts. "Why do employers demand a degree for jobs that don’t require them?" > This is a com…

> It's not actually a requirement, it's there for formality. This simply isn't true a lot of the time. It is sometimes, but there are plenty of jobs that require highschool level skills but will filter out those who don't have a degree just because they can. It's not that big a deal if you select one candidate over the other because the former has done a 2 week internship that made no difference in the qualifications…

> It is sometimes, but there are plenty of jobs that require highschool level skills but will filter out those who don't have a degree just because they can.

There's also "the minimum viable candidate" vs. "cheap value-add".

E.g., an admin asst that does the job as described vs. the admin asst that occasionally helps with spreadsheets, does some basic graphic design work, and proof-reads both user-facing and technical documentation.

Does an admin asst need a college degree? No. But I'll take the admin asst with some art, accounting, and writing skills ANY day. Those skills completely re-define the role and add tons of value at very low cost.

I've seen the same in tech roles. Given two candidates who are both obviously capable of doing the primary duties of the job, the one with a deeper background (either from college or self-taught) is obviously preferable because versatility outside of the designated role is always a nice value-add.

Re: College May Not Be Worth It Anymore

#249

Post by sanxiyn » Thu, May 17, 2018, 5:55 PM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #192

The New York Times may not be worth it anymore :-) It annoys me how they conflate focused learning and investment returns. If they said "Cars may not be worth is anymore" because the best cars are beyond the reach of most people to afford and those people would be better off riding the bus. College is like this in other ways as well, when you don't have a car you are constrained to the jobs you can get that you can r…

College is an option generator if you complete. All people trying college should take completion probability into account. One very good point of the article is that college not completed is not an option generator. This should be more widely known and should be repeated often.

Re: College May Not Be Worth It Anymore

#250

Post by Consultant32452 » Thu, May 17, 2018, 5:55 PM UTC

derefr wrote: post #186

Consultant32452 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Employers are generally looking for a proxy for iq, since testing iq directly has potential legal problems. SAT, ASVAB, grades, degree attainment are often just proxies for iq. I think if Congress passes a law explicitly allowing iq tests for all job applications we'll see many of these seemingly irrational job requirements fade away.

Sure, the employer (maybe) can’t test for IQ it themselves—but why not have a public policy of “appreciating” if people bring you a credential from an external IQ testing firm? (I.e. the sort of formal testing MENSA does, but without the social club.)

It's illegal to require an IQ test/score for a job unless you can reasonably prove that a particular iq score is required. If you say that 130 is required, you have to explain why 129 is not capable of doing the work. As you might imagine, this is a high risk endeavor which is why most places don't ask for it. The SAT, however, is largely an IQ test in disguise and allows employers/universities to skirt the legal problem.