121–130 of 187 posts
If you want to get a Visa at some point in your live: things get much easier to if you have a university degree. All these "don't need a degree" posts always seem a bit US-centric.
If I assume correctly that you're talking about US working visa.. What you said sounds much much more US-centric than anybody who ever said "don't need a degree".
A college degree is not some terminal credential to make you into a coding cubicle robot the rest of your life. It goes more towards helping you be a more well-rounded person, for the short time in your life while you are more than just profit to the machine. US execs aren't helping anybody out when they push this anti-college garbage.
No amount of "roundedness" is worth the current asking price of college. They're going to have to offer more.
A college degree is not some terminal credential to make you into a coding cubicle robot the rest of your life. It goes more towards helping you be a more well-rounded person, for the short time in your life while you are more than just profit to the machine. US execs aren't helping anybody out when they push this anti-college garbage.
The Economist had an article about 6 weeks ago that reached the opposite conclusion. It essentially found a comfortable middle class lifestyle was going to be hard to achieve without higher education now, compared with previous generations. Now, it wasn’t specifically looking at coders and Tim was, but the title doesn’t mention that.
Well, then the Economist is almost laughably wrong. This completely ignores the building and construction trades. In America, the average Millionaire drives a F150 pickup truck, not a Mercedes-Benz or BWW. (well documented in the book The Millionaire Next Door.) Don't discount the trades. Take the HVAC guy who just spent a morning putting in a heat pump at my neighbor's place for $6000. It was Move up to doing two su…
The average Joe Tradesman never makes no more than $50K per year and has to retire in his 50s because the hard physical work (and inadequate health care) has worn down his body and he can no longer keep pace with 25 year olds. That's not a winning career strategy, especially in a future in which the rise of product disposability and building with modular components will simplify and reduce demand for much of today's trade work.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You should have the ability to write 20-30 pages well structured text to show that you can think, organize your thinking and communicate your thinking to others in your field. Many people graduate without this ability, but at least they have had some practice and can write 5 pages better than when they started the college. Almost all engineering programs I've seen, practically don't have any English requirements. I…
at my university, You're required to take 2 semesters of english and for senior design 1 you're basically writing a 100 page book on your proposal.
This is distinct from trades and arts, where there is a simple scale of competence.
The reason most jobs demand a university degree today is because of the professionalization of management and HR means that the people making hiring decisions have a direct interest in preserving and increasing the value of their own positions and credentials.
For example, have fun getting P&L responsibility or significant direct reports without a degree, let alone getting a work visa. The reason for this is not because of competence, it is because of a tribal identity that the schools inculcate.
The thing about "uneducated," people is that because they have to trade on their skills and performance, and not credentials, over a certain intelligence you can't trust them to sustain cognitive dissonance (or to lie) on behalf of the team, because they will defect if they perceive risk to their competence-based identity.
When you hear someone say an uneducated person "doesn't get it," they are not referring to competence, they are referring to recognition of a power dynamic that means success and group survival is about relationships and the perceptions that drive them, and not about the material quality of the work.
This may sound nihilistic and cynical, but recognizing non-technical education credentials as more of a tribal membership or a kind of managerial officer training than a signifier of skill clarifies the dynamics of companies and organizations, and could save a lot of stress wondering if people are evil or insane.
They aren't necessarily evil or insane, they are indexed on perceptions and relationships that are not decided only by skill and competence.
Few will articulate it this way, but there is no incentive for people with an education to criticize it, and without one the perspectives and tools to do so are rare.
If you want to get a Visa at some point in your live: things get much easier to if you have a university degree. All these "don't need a degree" posts always seem a bit US-centric.
What visa? If I assume correctly that you're talking about US working visa.. What you said sounds much much more US-centric than anybody who ever said "don't need a degree".
A college degree is not some terminal credential to make you into a coding cubicle robot the rest of your life. It goes more towards helping you be a more well-rounded person, for the short time in your life while you are more than just profit to the machine. US execs aren't helping anybody out when they push this anti-college garbage.
No amount of "roundedness" is worth the current asking price of college. They're going to have to offer more.
I'm not sure what else they could offer; most of the information they provide isn't "forbidden"; you are welcome to go buy the textbooks and read them yourself if you wanted.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would like to see a study that indicates that dropouts working in a professional environment are less "well-rounded" overall. I don't dispute that something exists, but I haven't seen one. I'm obviously biased, but I have a lot of interest in linguistics, history, political theory, moral philosophy, and a lot of other non-coding fields, for which I have purchased and read many of the college textbooks. I also do no…
Conversely, a significant portion of the students in my class when I was attending university were only there to get a degree & didn't care about anything but the easiest way to get a passing grade.
2001: https://slate.com/human-interest/2001/12/how-to-buy-a-good-c...
2019: https://toronto.citynews.ca/2019/02/19/cheating-at-u-of-t/
Not to say it's universal, but it's rampant—the view that they're just there to pick up their ticket to an easier life. (if it's accurate, or not!)