201–210 of 276 posts
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> but for the love of God let's give the 20 year Olds dorms still cuz that's an experience we all need to have. Coed. If this is true could you explain what I missed out on?
Depends on the type of person you are. I didn't like them much, but lots of people had fun and formed great memories and friendships.
Higher education is insanely our of touch with reality. Literally, on any given campus you'll hear "we don't produce jobs, we produce degrees" all while they boast $$$ on their website over what you'll earn. It's disgusting. I was a yuge Bernie fan in 2016 because he addressed one of the biggest issues our society faces - why do we allow the universities to endenture our youth? There's simply no reason. The material…
> but for the love of God let's give the 20 year Olds dorms still cuz that's an experience we all need to have. Coed. If this is true could you explain what I missed out on?
* being collocated with other students provides an academic safety net for the underprepared (it's easier to get your neighbor to explain physics at 10p than a person on the internet who's in your online class/ at your training center)
* it provides peer pressure for the undermotivated... its harder to say "this workload is unreasonable, I'm not going to do it" when you see your roommate and all your neighbors slogging through it
* proximity forces social interaction, which builds social skills in those who wouldn't have sought them out
* it's great fun. Easy to achieve critical mass for parties or other recreational activities. These events in turn build friendships an a valuable network after college.
But:
> ...students who excel on exams frequently fail to apply their knowledge to the real world... the same goes for students of biology, mathematics, statistics, ...
I think this holds better for high school. That's were we (myself, at least) got into the "test-zone".
Looking back it feels like it was deceitful to emphasise tests.
However, the main point from my side is this: I happened to have a good math lecturer at university (i.e., in higher education) that launched my research orientated subsequent years. I don't know if the problem is "higher education" or maybe just mentorship. I think it's a mixed bag for different people.
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What I mean by the value, is what employers are willing to pay. Even Kaplan admits that college graduates get paid more. The subsidy should drive more people into college, but depress the wages of college graduates. In fact, Kaplan admits that college increases pay more than it increases productivity -- that it benefits graduates more than it benefits countries as a whole, suggesting that something about college educ…
> What I mean by the value, is what employers are willing to pay. Even Kaplan admits that college graduates get paid more. The subsidy should drive more people into college, but depress the wages of college graduates. The fact that college graduates get paid more seems adequately explained by the signalling model he presents. How else do you explain the big pay differences for college graduates vs people who dropped…
Kaplan can't figure out why anybody in their right mind would pay me to work for them. (I can't figure it out either). So it must be "signaling."
A better description would just be to admit that we don't understand the market value of higher education, and there are effects that contradict a simplistic market model, either because the model is false or we aren't feeding good information into it.
What a load of crap... "why do schools focus on unmarketable skills?" Gee, I don't know? Maybe because we shouldn't be teaching kids that they only exist to learn about a trade so they can be another cog in the machine? Because there are things worth learning beyond just what's valuable to the job market and every person should be given the opportunity to branch out and be diverse in their studies? Colleges give you…
The arts and history teach us empathy and give us context of the human condition. There is so much more to being a cog in the machine, as you said correctly. The more I see the way people behave in today's "current events" realm, the more I believe these things are more important than ever.
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…
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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…
I have an office job and I feel the need for physical activity. I take every opportunity: help out a friend to move to a new flat, help on construction site, whatever it is. I never saw physical activity as something that damages my body (besides normal muscle aches or blister on skin - which heal after some days). Is it so different to do this regularly/daily?
Worked as a cattle vet for 8 months. I couldn't watch a movie anymore, always fell asleep. Being outside, lifting calves, the cuts and crushed toes, it was all too tiring. Maybe I didn't do it long enough.
I still work duty shifts from time to time. Eventually you hurt yourself (needles, bites, scratches, lifting animals, ...), it's just part of the job. But it's annoying, and exhausting to always (try to) be cautious and focused.
I can't think of any job that uses body functions and/or tools and is completely safe long term.
Now I feel physically fresh after my office job, and then bike everyday straight through the fields to go ride my horse. Impossible with my previous job, as I was already burned by it. I've reached a sane equilibrium : office job and 2-3 hours physical activity per day. And I definitely felt that a "field" job was draining me enough to affect my personal life.
> Why do advanced-math classes bother with proofs almost no student can follow? Because they're for math majors. And less-advanced ones are filters for potential math majors. Me, I hated that stuff. Engineering math actually taught useful skills. > I’m cynical about students. The vast majority are philistines. I was a horrible TA. I was mainly an RA, but had to TA one semester. I had no patience for the "what do I ne…
Anecdotally, as an engineer in industry, I use very little of the engineering math. Number sense and sort of general quantitative reasoning are used.
Let's suppose for sake of argument that I actually used engineering math though. Analytic solutions to derivatives and integrals (2 semesters of calculus) are largely useless because of applications like Wolfram Alpha that will solve these problems for you. The small class of ODE/PDE problems that are handled by analytic undergrad math classes will most often be solved using numerical methods such as Runge Kutta. Linear algebra is actually super useful in practice because you can use matrix solvers to solve systems of linear equations -- but a first course in undergraduate linear algebra is often just basic by-hand computations on matrix systems, and don't discuss higher order concepts at more than a shallow level (spans, invertibility, spectral decomposition, canonical forms, etc.)
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I'll admit I don't know the first thing about escalator repair but I'm confident that a 4 year apprenticeship is absurd. Perhaps that's the real problem. The rules should be amended such that you can get an escalator repair license in 60 days. Problem solved.
"The rules should be amended such that you can get an escalator repair license in 60 days." There are real risks fucking up an elevator. https://www.cnn.com/2015/07/27/china/chinese-mother-killed-e...