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A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

theatlantic.com

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Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#91

Post by stillbourne »

mjollnir wrote: post #86
stillbourne wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we should bring back the guild system. Start a job as an apprentice, mentor with a journeyman, progress your way up, mentor apprentices while learning from others higher up, gain sufficient knowledge to build your masterpiece, graduate as a master in your field, mentor journeymen. Move on.

I'm not sure it went anywhere, because this is a pretty accurate description of the PhD system.

I wouldn't know, I'm just a high school dropout, but if they barrier of entry to getting into a PhD "guild-system" is to also go through Associates, Bachelor, and Master degree, then I don't think its worthwhile for 90% of jobs that only require technical mastery.

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#92

Post by flyingfences »

throwawaygh wrote: post #73
game_the0ry wrote: post #69

No one really goes to college and grad school to learn. Higher ed is commoditized as a: * insurance policy, where students use it to avoid limiting themselves to low-status and low-paying careers * lottery ticket, the gateway to a "prestige" career track [1] * status signaling mechanism, where young people flex their educational elitism [2] And higher ed is arguably bad at what its supposed be good at - a delivery me…

> If you have ever interviewed a fresh grad who didn't study "Cracking the Coding Interview" Goodhart's Law. > or did not have a few "side projects" under their belt IME: end-of-course projects at places like MIT and Carneige Mellon are often much more impressive than the CRUD web app or copy-pasta Jupyter notebooks I tend to see from e.g. coding bootcamps or especially self-taught applicants. And students usually ha…

> end-of-course projects at places like MIT and Carneige Mellon

Very few students study at places like MIT and Carnegie Mellon. They typical CS program, even the typical "good but not exemplary" CS program, does not direct students to produce "projects" on nearly the same level. I even went to a college that has a well-regarded senior capstone project for its traditional engineering majors, but the CS equivalent felt far more low-effort and unconsequential. Among my classmates, the ones who had significant side projects and internship/co-op results were the ones with preferential outcomes and the ones who only had end-of-course projects to show were the ones with "typical" outcomes.

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#93

Post by quietbritishjim »

nix23 wrote: post #29
quietbritishjim wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps a degree from one of the "best" colleges/universities in the country.

More like having the best connection's from the university/family/friends ;)

I never said the degree was a benefit itself! Just that it might satisfy "Most successful people have X"

(Although, here in the UK at least, the quality of degrees genuinely does vary by university in a way that roughly corresponds to their rankings. I know that's an unfashionable observable but I have seen enough degree programs at different universities to know it's likely true unless I happen to have seen an atonishingly unrepresentative sample. Partly this is self fulfilling because lower ranked universities are forced to take less good students and the level of the programme has to be adjusted accordingly, but part of it really is to do with quality of teaching.)

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#94

Post by JumpCrisscross »

omginternets wrote: post #30

I barely skimmed the article, but I don't find this surprising for a few reasons (some of which have been mentioned elsewhere in the comments): - "University degree" is a heterogeneous thing. While there is such thing as non-economic value, the strictly economic value of a college education tends to cluster around a small subset of degrees. - Many countries have enacted policies to increase proportion of people who g…

> Far from fixing inequality

Was this the purpose? I thought it was to raise living standards by improving productivity. By and large, broader education has been successful at that. (It went off the deep end, in recent years, with the proliferation of bullshit degrees.)

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#95

Post by hazz99 »

throwawaygh wrote: post #73
game_the0ry wrote: post #69

No one really goes to college and grad school to learn. Higher ed is commoditized as a: * insurance policy, where students use it to avoid limiting themselves to low-status and low-paying careers * lottery ticket, the gateway to a "prestige" career track [1] * status signaling mechanism, where young people flex their educational elitism [2] And higher ed is arguably bad at what its supposed be good at - a delivery me…

> If you have ever interviewed a fresh grad who didn't study "Cracking the Coding Interview" Goodhart's Law. > or did not have a few "side projects" under their belt IME: end-of-course projects at places like MIT and Carneige Mellon are often much more impressive than the CRUD web app or copy-pasta Jupyter notebooks I tend to see from e.g. coding bootcamps or especially self-taught applicants. And students usually ha…

What sort of things do you see in these end-of-course projects? Genuinely curious

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#97

Post by ghostpepper »

rayiner wrote: post #88
stillbourne wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we should bring back the guild system. Start a job as an apprentice, mentor with a journeyman, progress your way up, mentor apprentices while learning from others higher up, gain sufficient knowledge to build your masterpiece, graduate as a master in your field, mentor journeymen. Move on.

Guilds are awful for immigrants and racial minorities, who are often the new entrants excluded by the guilds. Many “Jewish law firms” exist to this day because Jews were excluded from existing WASP law firms.

I’m trying to think of why it would be worse. Is it because skills become less transferable, thus making it harder for an apprentice to move from one master to another?

Perhaps that is by design - companies are wary of investing time and money training junior employees because they can just leave before the investment pays for itself?

Not sure what the answer is here; just playing devil’s advocate.

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#98

Post by throwawaygh »

zajio1am wrote: post #34
mac01021 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big question is "what is Y in this case"?

To prove intelligence and conscientiousness? Probably PhD degree.

> intelligence and conscientiousness

Heh.

A PhD degree does generally prove expertise in whatever the subject of your dissertation was and provides access to a couple of networks. Not always guaranteed, but if someone has a PhD I generally expect that they are at least competent at whatever their dissertation was about. And I've only been burned once.

The value of the expertise & set of networks, though, can range from "extraordinarily valuable" to "worse than useless".

In STEM fields the expertise & network is usually at least good enough to keep you busy with decent-paying work for a career or so.

In CS it's usually good enough to get you either a 100K job with lots of freedom or a regular old 300K job at a big tech. So, not really worth doing if your goal is just maxing out lifetime earnings, but certainly there are worse outcomes. From there you're on your own, though.

In many of the humanities... not so much.

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#99

Post by organicfigs »

qzx_pierri wrote: post #96

It is if you major in STEM (and you apply yourself and get internships, etc) - Majoring in "Eastern Gender Studies" will likely waste 4 years of your life.

As someone with a STEM degree who enjoyed taking online classes at a CC during their 20s in Art History, I wouldn't call it a waste of time; it's brought me more joy, balance, and a feeling of well-roundedness than I had contributing to os projects.
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