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Students don't seem to be getting much out of higher education (2018)

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Re: Students don't seem to be getting much out of higher education (2018)

#131

Post by tzs »

justinzollars wrote: post #4

I feel like everyone is doing social media marketing - or something equally useless while the world around us is breaking down. In the Bay Area, in San Francisco specifically, voters allocated funds to fix or replace every single Bart escalator. The best hope we have for completing this job is 7 years. Yes you read this correctly 7 years. The problem is we do not have enough licensed escalator mechanics to do the wor…

> In the Bay Area, in San Francisco specifically, voters allocated funds to fix or replace every single Bart escalator. The best hope we have for completing this job is 7 years. Yes you read this correctly 7 years. The problem is we do not have enough licensed escalator mechanics to do the work. Money isn't the problem.

There are 35000 escalators in the US. If a typical escalator needs to be replaced every 35 years, that works out to about 1000 escalator replacements a year.

I can't find offhand any data on this, but I'd expect that most escalator installations are only a few escalators, and so that the demand for about 1000 replacements per year is pretty steady.

Thus, I'd expect that there would be about enough mechanics to handle 1000 per year, without much excess capacity.

BART has 175 escalators. That job is big enough that to do it in one year would take over 17% of the nation's escalator installation capacity. That seems like a job sufficiently out of the ordinary that it is not surprising that it has to be spread over a few years.

I used 35 years lifetime, which I got from the escalators in a manufacturer's brochure I found--it had one that was rated 30 years and one 35-40, so I took 35. But these were heavy duty escalators. Other sources suggested 25 years, or 15-20 years. If you use a lower average life, you get more mechanics needed per year.

Regardless of the lifetime used, I expect that the year to year demand will be pretty steady, and BART's 175 will still represent a very big spike.

Re: Students don't seem to be getting much out of higher education (2018)

#132

Post by taftster »

justinzollars wrote: post #4

I feel like everyone is doing social media marketing - or something equally useless while the world around us is breaking down. In the Bay Area, in San Francisco specifically, voters allocated funds to fix or replace every single Bart escalator. The best hope we have for completing this job is 7 years. Yes you read this correctly 7 years. The problem is we do not have enough licensed escalator mechanics to do the wor…

> Not everyone is cut out for college.

Actually I quite think it's the opposite.

We should be saying, "Not everyone is cut out for escalator mechanic."

Those who aren't cut out for "real" work and traditional vocational education end up going to college to get useless marketing or business degrees. Plumbers, electricians, heavy machinery operators, drafters, are all making really good money historically due to the demands you're describing.

The "easy" path these days is to go to college.

Re: Students don't seem to be getting much out of higher education (2018)

#133

Post by cbhl »

Frost1x wrote: post #99
cbhl wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a CS degree, the slackers can read the slides at home, do the assignments from home, and only come in to do the exams. You're not going to see them until the graduation ceremony. (At least, I didn't.)

How does doing work remotely make one a slacker (other than the aspect of not physically transporting yourself)? And if you're capable of completing a course without being present, what does that say about the course and or your capabilities?

It doesn't; what I meant to say is that "just because you don't see slackers doesn't mean they're not there".

As for the courses and the professors' capabilities, there are a bunch of systemic issues there. One is that "number of students who fail out" is a metric that is used to measure program performance, so first year is usually full of courses that are review for like half a given cohort. Another is that one often gets tenure for research, not teaching ability, so some professors optimize accordingly.

For what it's worth, there are plenty of folks who will tell you that you should "slack off" on a degree and just start a startup instead.

Re: Students don't seem to be getting much out of higher education (2018)

#134

Post by bdamm »

FranzFerdiNaN wrote: post #120
rumcajz wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Switzerland, most people go into trades. Higher education is not seen ad having higher status in any way. Also, if you call a plumber to fix your broken sink, it's going to be really expensive.

So most people go into trades and yet it’s still incredibly expensive to hire a tradesperson? Sounds like the market is failing.

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. It's a legit question.

Re: Students don't seem to be getting much out of higher education (2018)

#135

Post by modernyogihippy »

twblalock wrote: post #16
justinzollars wrote: post #4

I feel like everyone is doing social media marketing - or something equally useless while the world around us is breaking down. In the Bay Area, in San Francisco specifically, voters allocated funds to fix or replace every single Bart escalator. The best hope we have for completing this job is 7 years. Yes you read this correctly 7 years. The problem is we do not have enough licensed escalator mechanics to do the wor…

> Maybe more people should go into the trades - and not be funneled into higher education. We desperately need better infrastructure, more housing, tangible things. Not everyone is cut out for college. This is a common line of argument, but you will find that many tradesmen hope their children will go to college and get office jobs. The trades are hard on the body. Some trades are hazardous. An injury or medical prob…

> The trades are hard on the body. Some trades are hazardous. An injury or medical problem that would be a hassle for someone with an office job can be career-ending for people in the trades.

Very true. I know a Uber driver who used to install and repair ACs. Unfortunately, one day, he had a mishap leading to a serious back injury. He was told he couldn't carry on in this line of work. He had no other skills or means to acquire a college-degree with a family to support. The only option he saw best fit was to drive a taxi.

Re: Students don't seem to be getting much out of higher education (2018)

#136

Post by TomMarius »

bdamm wrote: post #134
FranzFerdiNaN wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So most people go into trades and yet it’s still incredibly expensive to hire a tradesperson? Sounds like the market is failing.

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. It's a legit question.

Switzerland is known for high fixed cost of living. It has been said that the Swiss people don't place higher value on "lesser" tasks, so it makes complete sense that it is expensive without any relation to how much the market is saturated - it wouldn't become cheap even if the market was oversaturated, rather some people would go away from that market - because of fixed costs of living.

Re: Students don't seem to be getting much out of higher education (2018)

#137

Post by fzeroracer »

twblalock wrote: post #16
justinzollars wrote: post #4

I feel like everyone is doing social media marketing - or something equally useless while the world around us is breaking down. In the Bay Area, in San Francisco specifically, voters allocated funds to fix or replace every single Bart escalator. The best hope we have for completing this job is 7 years. Yes you read this correctly 7 years. The problem is we do not have enough licensed escalator mechanics to do the wor…

> Maybe more people should go into the trades - and not be funneled into higher education. We desperately need better infrastructure, more housing, tangible things. Not everyone is cut out for college. This is a common line of argument, but you will find that many tradesmen hope their children will go to college and get office jobs. The trades are hard on the body. Some trades are hazardous. An injury or medical prob…

It's not exactly trade-related but as I've mentioned in the past my parents were fishermen. Similar to the trades, it's a very physically intense job that burns out your body, requires long hours and can be pretty dangerous.

After seeing how my parents ended up, it's no wonder to me why people would avoid the trades. We simply don't have the safety nets in place to protect people who burn out from those jobs, and no one wants to spend their later years in crippling pain as a result of destroying their back.

My parents were happy that I managed to get an office job.

Re: Students don't seem to be getting much out of higher education (2018)

#139

Post by tfehring »

taftster wrote: post #128
tfehring wrote: post #124

It seems like the countercultural anti-college rhetoric that’s sprung up recently is focused on the individual level, which makes sense. But I’m concerned that it misses a broader and incredibly important point as a result. Roughly a third of American adults have at least a Bachelor’s degree. I (unsurprisingly) haven’t been able to find any hard data on this question, but does anyone want to take a guess at what perc…

I don't know. You're making the leap to suggest that 33% of Americans are responsible for 90% of the innovation. I don't think that's the case at all. It's probably more like 0.1% of Americans are responsible for 90% of innovation. Or in other words, 32.9% of the population of Bachelor degree holders don't add any more innovative value than the 67% of non-Bachelor holders. Or to put it another way, there isn't a dire…

I think you’re either thinking of innovation more narrowly than I am or underestimating the number of people who contribute to it. I don’t think you can attribute, say, the development of a new drug to a single person in most cases. Or the implementation of a machine learning model. Or the changes that have led to massive improvements in the efficiency of clean energy in recent years. Or, if you want to really stretch the definition of “innovation,” the development of financial instruments to help investors better allocate capital and manage risk.

The list goes on, of course. But what I want to illustrate is that entrepreneurs with “a-ha” moments don’t have a monopoly on innovation. Far from it.

Now, going through that list of innovations again, what proportion of the people involved do you think have a Bachelor’s degree or more? I promise I didn’t intentionally cherry-pick at all - I suspect the pattern will hold if you come up with your own list, provided that you limit it to the last, say, 50 years. And at least in the examples I gave, the fact that the people responsible overwhelmingly have college degrees isn’t incidental, it’s a result of the fact that deep subject matter expertise is needed to push the envelope.

Re: Students don't seem to be getting much out of higher education (2018)

#140

Post by ryanmcbride »

Anecdotally the other day I was talking with two friends and former coworkers we realized that one of us had completed grad school, one of us had a undergraduate degree, and one of us was a college dropout(that one's me) and we all have the exact same job at the exact same level.
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