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Going to university does not broaden the mind

economist.com

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Re: Going to university does not broaden the mind

#141

Post by Aloha »

macspoofing wrote: post #122
jedberg wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No not at all. I just mean that I had never been exposed to anyone who wasn't white before college. And while I didn't dislike them, I never even gave a second thought to making fun of people of other races. I suspect that had I not been exposed to other races, I would have turned those jokes into actual beliefs.

>I never even gave a second thought to making fun of people of other races. You shouldn't make racist jokes because you shouldn't needlessly hurt or offend the people around you. That isn't quite the same as being racist (although depending on the intention it could be). Racist means hating someone based on their ethnicity or skin color. It isn't quite the same. >I suspect that had I not been exposed to other races,…

I know people like him, their perceived racism is as much fear from a lack of familiarity as it is anything - a broadly diverse society is important - it's specifically important for Americanism to flourish.

Re: Going to university does not broaden the mind

#142

Post by jedberg »

sethammons wrote: post #119
jedberg wrote: post #92

University definitely broadened my mind. I grew up in an area that was 99+% white and 50+% Jewish. We literally had “the black family” with twins who were our top track stars. And a few Asian families who hid their Asianness. It was at University that I learned about Asian culture. It was the first time I used chopsticks. It was the first time I drank tea without sugar. It was the first time I ate Chinese food that w…

True story. At work, folks going out for lunch. Ask if I want dim sum. I had never heard of it. All I could think of, in redneck fashion, was "that boy ain't bright, he's dim some." I declined going. Still not sure what it is. I think it is a soup.

I'll be honest, I'm not the biggest fan. But no it isn't a soup. It's a bunch of small little bites and they generally bring them around on carts and you tell them what you want and then pay for what you eat. Usually the items are steamed and the carts have hot water at the bottom to keep the steam going as they cart it around.

Re: Going to university does not broaden the mind

#143

Post by zapzupnz »

justinclift wrote: post #121
scarface74 wrote: post #120

Only the privileged can afford to go to college to “broaden their mind”. Most people go to college to compete in the market and get a job. It’s amazing how much push back I get about computer science degrees should teach marketable skills and people say they weren’t meant to be ”vocational degrees” and you shouldn’t go to college for “job training”. Just the idea that people are suggesting in some of the comments tha…

Don't many of the "go and live abroad" types mostly self fund by getting work in their target countries? eg waiters, fruit picking, or whatever they can get

I used to live in shared apartment where plenty of people were coming and going. Imagine a backpackers, but people lived there for long stretches of time.

All the uni students who came for their OEs definitely worked jobs, some out of their comfort zones. Most were in hospo, some doing construction, and the rest fruit picking as you said.

If they weren't doing that, they had joined those programmes where you work on a farm in exchange for free board and food. Some were on couch-surfing programmes which weren't too dissimilar.

Re: Going to university does not broaden the mind

#144

Post by speedplane »

sethammons wrote: post #119
jedberg wrote: post #92

University definitely broadened my mind. I grew up in an area that was 99+% white and 50+% Jewish. We literally had “the black family” with twins who were our top track stars. And a few Asian families who hid their Asianness. It was at University that I learned about Asian culture. It was the first time I used chopsticks. It was the first time I drank tea without sugar. It was the first time I ate Chinese food that w…

True story. At work, folks going out for lunch. Ask if I want dim sum. I had never heard of it. All I could think of, in redneck fashion, was "that boy ain't bright, he's dim some." I declined going. Still not sure what it is. I think it is a soup.

Try something new, you may like it.

Re: Going to university does not broaden the mind

#146

Post by fergie »

all2 wrote: post #10
beaner wrote: post #3

Outside of specific academic focus, nearly everyone I know who has graduated a US university thinks basically the same way.

Most people I know (I'm in university) can recite facts rather easily, they understand the theory and practice relatively well. What they seem to lack (what most people I meet seem to lack) is questions and a questioning mind.

Just out of interest- what questions are your peers are not asking?

Re: Going to university does not broaden the mind

#148

Post by lambdasquirrel »

jedberg wrote: post #92

University definitely broadened my mind. I grew up in an area that was 99+% white and 50+% Jewish. We literally had “the black family” with twins who were our top track stars. And a few Asian families who hid their Asianness. It was at University that I learned about Asian culture. It was the first time I used chopsticks. It was the first time I drank tea without sugar. It was the first time I ate Chinese food that w…

I would agree, going the other way.

Before university, all I knew of rich folks was that they poached the good teachers from my high school (we were a magnet school in the poorer inner city, back when cities were poor). Lets just say that I found that there was more nuance to all those kids from suburbia.

I went into university steadfastly believing the roster sheet of progressive policies. Then there was economics class, and the in-depth conversations around that, and I came to realize that a lot of policies are double-edged swords, either difficult to implement correctly, or just outright too good to be true. For example, you can't really elide the fact that prices provide important signaling to the markets, that in turn influence supply and demand.

That having been said, I don't think the libertarian wing nuts I'd met came to the same sort reckoning,... they still seemed to think the free markets are magic pills... so I figure that I learned more from the experience than they did.

University was a confusing time. There were a lot of folks who were a lot more privileged than me, who were smarter than me, but not very motivated. It would take many years after college before it became clear how things even out. (They are still on good footing thanks to their privilege, and they're not bad people. I have sometimes enjoyed seeing them again – when I do – like it was old days. I don't envy them anymore. And I wouldn't switch places either.)

Life is complicated. University forces a kind of mixing – and a certain kind of critical thinking – that forces you to look at how complicated it is. Sometimes, things just are.

I've been to the other end of the spectrum, been around lots of people who never went to school or who dropped out. Or who had it easy in university. I interact with folks who never had to pick up that kind of critical thinking. It eventually becomes plain and clear the kind of subtle difference it makes in people's lives over time, and across generations.

It is in life as it is in board games. Randomness and complexity obscure the "winning" strategies.

Re: Going to university does not broaden the mind

#149

Post by scarface74 »

nixpulvis wrote: post #135
scarface74 wrote: post #120

Only the privileged can afford to go to college to “broaden their mind”. Most people go to college to compete in the market and get a job. It’s amazing how much push back I get about computer science degrees should teach marketable skills and people say they weren’t meant to be ”vocational degrees” and you shouldn’t go to college for “job training”. Just the idea that people are suggesting in some of the comments tha…

I feel there's a bit of a strange tension in this argument. Why can't you have both? While I was in classes it wasn't job focused, or at least not directly. I often hear people complain, for example about how they never use anything they learned in college for their programming jobs. I find this impossible to believe. The process of building a binary search tree or proving the pumping lemma are all exercises. Just li…

The process of building a binary search tree or proving the pumping lemma are all exercises. Just like anything else being good at things takes practice, college is (or should be) as good of an environment for this as we can create.

Your examples are at least related to software. What good is Art History? The 6 courses of calculus, differential equations, and three or four other classes math classes I took over 20 years ago.

Another retort people say is that any specific language you learn in school will be obsolete soon as you graduate. That’s only true if you are teaching the latest $cool_kids_front_end_framework. Even that could be alleviated if you had courses your senior year focused on what’s in demand right now.

But, from my vantage point, the five go to industry languages haven’t changed in the past 10-15 years. By 2004, the web was already a big deal as was Jsvascript. Java and C# were big in the enterprise and while scripting languages that start with P (Python, Perl, Php) go in and out of style knowing one of them would help you move to another one and of course C/C++ will never die.

While I was in classes it wasn't job focused, or at least not directly....People telling you directly that college shouldn't be about job training are feeling a bit nostalgic and idealistic

Again, you had the privilege of not “being job focused.” So did I to an extent, I already knew how to program before going to college - I was hobbyist Basic and assembly language programmer for six years prior. The only thing four years of college did for me was expose me to two useful classes - C and data structures. But by then, I already had a C compiler for my Mac and was playing around with it.

But my parents growing up in the segregated south didn’t have that privilege. They knew their only way out was college. There only reason for going to college was to get a job. Middle class families aren’t sending thier 2.5 kids to college to be “better citizens of the world”.

So I say again, what's stopping the underprivileged student, paying for college with debt and loans, from broadening their mind, while getting the skills to pay the bills?

How much less debt could they have if society didn’t look down on “vocational training”? Schools/degrees that just focus on learning just what you need to get a job.

Re: Going to university does not broaden the mind

#150

Post by dingaling »

sammosummo wrote: post #45

Grew up in a medium sized mostly working-class town in Northern England. My whole childhood I felt like an outsider, nobody cared about the things I cared about, whenever I spoke it was met with complete silence or indifference. I thought there was something wrong with me at a fundamental level, perhaps autism. First day at uni (19 yo) I stayed in my room most of the night, terrified. Finally summoned up the courage…

> and university is the reason.

But not the sole mechanism by which you could have gained that experience.

Prior to uni I spent time drifting around youth hostels in western Europe. That was affordable even for someone from a Belfast council estate. I bunked with people from literally all around the World and learned more about humanity than I had done in 18/years prior.

Within weeks of starting a job I was sent to Illinois for three months and again had an eye-opening in blue-collar American culture. The Simpsons suddenly made sense.

In contrast for me uni was boring, partisan and segregated. It even had an International Students' Centre where they could congregate away from the locals, because their parents were paying huge fees whilst we were there on meagre Giro grant cheques. I suppose I learned about capitalism there.

I'm keener for my kids to do six years in the military before even thinking of uni.

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