121–130 of 235 posts
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What part of the world is that? In the US it's typical to have 2 16-18 week semesters per year, usually with a job or internship for 10-12 weeks in the summer.
Oxford and Cambridge. Probably a few other old unis in the UK.
Mid 50's here. As my kids are hitting college age I'm starting to get the itch to go back and complete my degree. My company has a facility near Cal Poly, where I went, and I drive by on my way in and out of town when I go onsite. Really don't know what to expect, figure I'll just wander on campus and stop by the admin building and see what they have to say. I'll bring my old student ID with me, just in case.
In my experience you can just show up the first day and ask the prof if they mind you auditing the course. There might be password-locked online materials these days, however. I've thought about going back to finish the degree, but it's hard to see it as worth $60k/year.
I'm a returning student about to complete my degree at the end of this year. I went to an art school for a few years out of high school and ended up in customer service positions with some great companies. I didn't want to continue in customer service, so I decided to go back to school. Started with two years at community college, and now finishing up my last two at university. Some insights I picked up along the way…
I also went back as an adult. I felt like the semesters were too short if anything. The types in-depth projects we did in upper division classes needed 15 week semesters. Even without the long projects, the vast majority of students in my CS and math classes couldn't have handled 2x the information. The shorter summer versions of hard classes always had a much higher fail rate. At my university you could also take up…
It depends on the subject in my experience.
At my school (major state university) undergraduate business school classes were run like high school. Attendance taken, assigned seats, pop quizes, etc.
Science and Math courses were most "adult" in their treatment of students.
Elective social sciences (100-level psych, sociology, history, political science, etc.) varied somewhere in between.
I completed all my English lit and writing requirements in high school so not sure how those classes worked things.
I'm a returning student about to complete my degree at the end of this year. I went to an art school for a few years out of high school and ended up in customer service positions with some great companies. I didn't want to continue in customer service, so I decided to go back to school. Started with two years at community college, and now finishing up my last two at university. Some insights I picked up along the way…
- there should be 4 semesters a year, not 2, people should graduate in 2 years, not 4+ At the onset of this journey, I was enthusiastic to learn, but along the way I've been beat down to just wanting to get "the piece of paper" and be done. It's been a long three years and each day forward is increasingly difficult to stomach since I realized I can learn all of what is being taught to me faster on my own. The fact th…
If you're just trying to get trained for a vocation, then yeah, you don't need 4 years. However, I do think a 4-year degree is a unique opportunity, and it shouldn't be seen as a screen for people who can slog so much as a fit question of "do you need the other things that come with a 4-year degree?"
I'd guess that a bit less than half of my 4 years was spent on academics, of which it was 2/3 CS degree and 1/3 liberal arts. The rest was summer internships, hobbies, personal projects, engineering teams, research, and just playing around as an 18-22 year old.
I agree with the parent poster's advice though. Outside of my academics, I learned skills like writing, speaking, organizing, diplomacy, etc. which you often learn anyway through work experience. People returning to school need that much less than people who never worked do, so there's no need for them to pay the time tax on extracurriculars.
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- there should be 4 semesters a year, not 2, people should graduate in 2 years, not 4+ At the onset of this journey, I was enthusiastic to learn, but along the way I've been beat down to just wanting to get "the piece of paper" and be done. It's been a long three years and each day forward is increasingly difficult to stomach since I realized I can learn all of what is being taught to me faster on my own. The fact th…
>The fact that it’s a 4-year slog is one of the factors that make university degree holders earn premium in the labor marketplace — conscientiousness, conformity and consistency required to slog through 4 years needed for school to certify it send employers a strong signal that you’re the kind of person who will do their job well. In my career, everyone I've worked with had at least a Bachelor's. Most had a Master's…
What matters is not whether they are very conscientious or consistent, but rather how conscientious or consistent relative to candidates who didn't earn the degree. Employers use this signal to perform statistical discrimination on their pool of applicants. The situation here is similar to the statistical discrimination that happens when you are shopping for car insurance: women pay lower premiums not because they are particularly safe drivers, but rather because they are safer (or less costly) than men, on average.
This kind of statistical discrimination, that is, using educational attainment to make hiring decision, is often somewhat illegal (based on straight reading of Griggs v. Duke Power Co., e.g. for most BA in History graduates it is hard to argue that their diploma is "reasonably related" to the jobs they are doing, but the employers will happily choose the graduate over someone with only high-school diploma). To my knowledge, however, nobody ever made an actual legal challenge, so employers happily keep using it.
I'll admit they probably do well in the "slog through mind numbingly boring work", but that's often a negative. Whenever I've been in a team full of people who have no problem doing the most tedious work you can imagine, the result have been the very same people tend to oppose ways to improve efficiency (usually "automate the boring work").
This may be true for people in highly-skilled jobs requiring high intelligence, which probably describes most of HN readers, but many other employers will value consistently slogging through mundane tasks over creativity and innovation.
I don't want to work with people who don't mind really really boring work. I want to work with people who hate it enough to eliminate the need to do it. Engineers tend to be of the former category, and software people of the latter.
So do I, but, as you noted, the management doesn't value these very much.
Also, depending on which school you go to, getting a degree from it is just its own skill. Knowing how to work the system (e.g. get previous years' homeworks and exams, etc) can play a big role.
Precisely. This is more important, considering that less than half of college students are proficient in reading (NAAL 2003), and the rest only has intermediate level or worse. The point here is that people tend to forget most everything they learn in school, so what they learn exactly doesn't matter all that much in the grand scheme of things.
There are down sides to a low ranked school (lack of smart peers and perhaps a slightly watered down curriculum), but I think quality of instruction is not one of them.
Right. My understanding is that while teaching quality in low ranked schools is lower than in high ranked ones on average, there are still plenty of low ranked schools with high teaching quality, better than most high ranked ones. One might ask themselves then, why then are they lower ranked? The truth is that the education quality doesn't matter that much, what matters is student selection.
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There are plenty of mechanisms to counter this. One is direct funding of colleges as we did before via state and Federal funding. Another is to establish a feedback loop where loan guarantees and funding for the institution are a function of their students default rate: that way if the education doesn't lead to jobs then the school gets less money.
That will lead to universities only accepting students that would get jobs after graduation, which would probably kill many majors that don’t have high employment rates.
We don't need millions of people learning unproductive things for excessive prices.
Obvious people who can afford to learn something for fun can do so, and knowledge that is socially valuable but not economically valuable can be supported by government or private patrons who see the social merit. Both are better than duping kids into huge loans.
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Oxford and Cambridge. Probably a few other old unis in the UK.
That squares with what I have heard before about UK university degrees being shorter than US degrees. What do you do with the rest of the year?
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> It will happen if you vote blue. Unfortunately it is a matter of voting blue enough, not just blue. In some areas politicians, even Democrats, regularly relate to their constituents by bashing "East cost liberal elites" despite having degrees from Ivy League schools. If Doug Jones had said that a liberal arts education is valuable for developing into a well-rounded citizen his race would have ended then and there.
I have a college degree. I hope for my kids to take the path of earning college degrees. I think that college is great in the abstract. I also think that until we sort out our health care system in this country (USA), a career in the trades is a very frightening prospect. Even so, this comment is very interesting to me. I frequently see on Hacker News the sentiment that modern higher education is a bubble. That if we…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are plenty of mechanisms to counter this. One is direct funding of colleges as we did before via state and Federal funding. Another is to establish a feedback loop where loan guarantees and funding for the institution are a function of their students default rate: that way if the education doesn't lead to jobs then the school gets less money.
That will lead to universities only accepting students that would get jobs after graduation, which would probably kill many majors that don’t have high employment rates.
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I don’t mean to be contentious here, but the reason for which student debt cannot be discharged by bankruptcy is pretty sound: it’s because education (theoretically) adds warning power to an individual and cannot be liquidated. (I’m not a lawyer and am not an American either.)
more to the point: it's an unsecured (ie, there's no collateral to take in the event of default) loan with a very low interest rate issued to a group of people who have little to no credit history.