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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

#191

Post by jeena »

thegeomaster wrote: post #158
Aloha wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because everyone isn't as smart as you are, and with the elimination of many jobs at the bottom of the economy we no longer have a good way to ensure the pie of wealth us equitably divided.

But looking at it as a pie that needs to be divided is wrong. One of the core tenets of capitalism (well, in theory) is that wealth is created literally from nothing. It's not a zero-sum game. In practice, unfortunately, one needs certain prerequisites to be able to do this. So in my view, the problem is not that something is unequally divided, but that a class of people systematically aren't able to create enough we…

Shouldn't it be quite clear to us right now that this theoretical assumption never worked because we have limited resources on this planet?

Re: Going to university does not broaden the mind

#192

Post by s_kilk »

thegeomaster wrote: post #158
Aloha wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because everyone isn't as smart as you are, and with the elimination of many jobs at the bottom of the economy we no longer have a good way to ensure the pie of wealth us equitably divided.

But looking at it as a pie that needs to be divided is wrong. One of the core tenets of capitalism (well, in theory) is that wealth is created literally from nothing. It's not a zero-sum game. In practice, unfortunately, one needs certain prerequisites to be able to do this. So in my view, the problem is not that something is unequally divided, but that a class of people systematically aren't able to create enough we…

> One of the core tenets of capitalism (well, in theory) is that wealth is created literally from nothing.

Yeah, and that theory is nonsense

Re: Going to university does not broaden the mind

#193

Post by jeena »

badpun wrote: post #178
pj_mukh wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, I remember in first year our engineering professor teaching us all these abstract concepts about robot controllers and the philosophy behind them and then finishing the lecture by telling us, "Also, when you get to your first job, just read the manual to figure out how your specific controller works so you can do your job" :/. P.S: Also Waterloo grad here. Co-op FTW.

Hah. Our numerical methods professor once remarked during a lecture that programming is a technician’s job and if we want to just learn it, we should be be in a vocational school, not in univeristy learning CS. He was not wrong IMO.

The supervisor of our bachelor thesis said something similar, interestingly he was Pakistani and said "Sure you can try to program this thing as your thesis, or you could do something more stimulating like research of this topic. The implementation you should give to some Indian programmers, they are far better, faster and cheaper in it than you guys anyway."

And as racist ad bad it sounds, now a couple of years later, in the real world, that is exactly what happens. We, the ones in Sweden, we do the research and design of the system, and then our customers more often than not find teams in India who with our mentoring implement it.

Re: Going to university does not broaden the mind

#196

Post by jeena »

scarface74 wrote: post #149
nixpulvis wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ye…

It seems to me that you equal Computer Science to Computer Programming. The later is just a really small subset of the former, and like you write most people already know how to do it before they attend University.

In my CS studies we never learned any programming, it was kind of assumed that you already know how to do it. Instead we focused on all the other things like computational complexity theory, computer graphics, programming language theory, design of computational systems, theory of computation, human–computer interaction, artificial intelligence and all the other much more interesting stuff.

After I left university I in practice haven't written any code yet (in 5 years), I've been only working with designing big systems which are later populated with components which are programmed by programmers.

But even though, the mantra at university was always, we don't teach you any specific language, we teach you the building blocks behind those languages with the goal so that you can take a new language and learn it within two weeks because you already know most of the paradigms behind it and you only need to learn the syntax, the libs you can look up in the documentation.

Re: Going to university does not broaden the mind

#197

Post by jeena »

nixpulvis wrote: post #155
scarface74 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ye…

Ah something we can agree on. There should be nothing seen wrong with getting in depth job training at various kinds of vocational schools. As someone who works with a number of people out of bootcamps who are now great programmers I can only hope this is a good sign, at least in my field, some other fields are surly less progressive.

I agree that programming is something which totally sufficient can be taught in vocational schools, no need to do that in university. My brother never went to university and he is a much better programmer than me when it comes to specific languages, etc. The idea behind my Computer Science degree is to learn the theory behind it. I would consider it a failure if it was just programming which I would have learned at the university.

Re: Going to university does not broaden the mind

#198

Post by kbenson »

Armisael16 wrote: post #195
erichocean wrote: post #194

> I grew up in an area that was 99+% white and 50+% Jewish. That's logically impossible. You group in an area that was majority Jewish, and minority white.

'Jew' is not a race.

Yes it is. It's also probably got an easier claim to that word than 'white' does.

Re: Going to university does not broaden the mind

#199

Post by dgellow »

kuerbel wrote: post #180
mushufasa wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nice catch. if the article focuses on european higher education, it may not apply to north american systems, which aim for breadth. my understanding is that even in university, european students pick a track before matriculation and keep to it.

I'm German. We have a three tiered school system: the lowest one where you go to school for, iirc, 9 years is usually bound for people who are ... more hands on and later do an apprenticeship as a e.g. hairdresser. Middle tier is where you go to school for 10 years and do an apprenticeship as e.g. accounting clerk or IT system specialist. The higher tier is where you get the Abitur. It's mandatory that you have this…

Just a detail to add to what you said, the school system is defined by the Bundesland, meaning there can be differences through the country.

Re: Going to university does not broaden the mind

#200

Post by WilliamEdward »

thegeomaster wrote: post #158
Aloha wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because everyone isn't as smart as you are, and with the elimination of many jobs at the bottom of the economy we no longer have a good way to ensure the pie of wealth us equitably divided.

But looking at it as a pie that needs to be divided is wrong. One of the core tenets of capitalism (well, in theory) is that wealth is created literally from nothing. It's not a zero-sum game. In practice, unfortunately, one needs certain prerequisites to be able to do this. So in my view, the problem is not that something is unequally divided, but that a class of people systematically aren't able to create enough we…

Actually, the theory is the opposite: Wealth can be created from anything.

But, it has to come from somewhere.

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