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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

#131

Post by langitbiru »

qsymmachus wrote: post #112
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.

I see that STEM chauvinism is still alive and well on Hacker News. Believe it or not, there are some skills you can pick up studying the humanities that will set you apart from your CS major peers. Being able to write and communicate clearly, for example, is pretty much a super power in most tech jobs.

Sometimes I wonder why we have to choose. Why can't we take STEM degree and learn humanities from Coursera/Khan Academy. Or we take humanities degree and learn programming from Coursera/EdX/Youtube.

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

#132

Post by [deleted] »

ryanmarsh wrote: post #118
bradly wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We give everyone in the U.S. high school education and we don't make the claims you make above. Why would higher education be different? The purpose of free higher ed for all is not to guarantee everyone a good life–it is to try and give everyone an equal chance at a good life. If higher ed is highly correlated to escaping poverty and upward economic mobility, then college costs raising at a rate 11 times faster than…

We give everyone in the U.S. high school education and we don't make the claims you make above. We used too. A high school education meant something to my grandparents.

[deleted]

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

#133

Post by compsciphd »

throwawaygh wrote: post #114
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.

> Majoring in "Eastern Gender Studies" will likely waste 4 years of your life. I took a bunch of art history courses that focused mostly on Asia while double majoring in STEM fields. I'm a scientist, not a designer, but I do manage a team that includes designers. I often have to weigh in on certain design choices, and getting those choices right is often make/break for the project. The tools and skills I developed in…

that's the argument for going to a liberal arts college and majoring a BA in CS instead of a BS.

It be an interesting study to look at universities that offer both tracks.

Take Columbia University that where one can earn a BSE in CS from the school of engineering, or one can earn a BA from columbia college. where the students are taking many of the same "core" CS classes, but the engineering students have a larger CS course load, while the BA students have a larger humanities course load.

I'm sure there are other universities that have similar setups where one can get similar degrees with different course load emphasis.

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

#134

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

throwawaygh wrote: post #114
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.

> Majoring in "Eastern Gender Studies" will likely waste 4 years of your life. I took a bunch of art history courses that focused mostly on Asia while double majoring in STEM fields. I'm a scientist, not a designer, but I do manage a team that includes designers. I often have to weigh in on certain design choices, and getting those choices right is often make/break for the project. The tools and skills I developed in…

While I agree regarding about the awfulness of SWEs who can't write or communicate (which is most of them), college credit hours are too valuable to be wasted on humanities courses, particularly when humanities topics are far more amenable to self-study than STEM topics.

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

#135

Post by bradly »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #130
bradly wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We give everyone in the U.S. high school education and we don't make the claims you make above. Why would higher education be different? The purpose of free higher ed for all is not to guarantee everyone a good life–it is to try and give everyone an equal chance at a good life. If higher ed is highly correlated to escaping poverty and upward economic mobility, then college costs raising at a rate 11 times faster than…

>We give everyone in the U.S. high school education and we don't make the claims you make above. Probably because a high school diploma has been so normalized that it is seen as the baseline. But that underscores the problem. Of course everyone having a high school diploma devalues it. That's part of why its seen as the default. If we make undergraduate education a similar default, it will just devalue that too. Not…

I don't understand this. The U.S. would be much worse without free, universal High School, regardless of whether you think it has devalued over time. I believe that if I didn't have a H.S. education, my life would be more difficult, but I get the feeling from these replies that people view a u.s. high school education as throw-away.

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

#136

Post by leetcrew »

bradly wrote: post #106
hectorr1 wrote: post #4

Most successful people have X. Government: “Let’s give everyone X!” Over time the value of X is diluted, loses its status signaling, and overall quality degrades. Successful people move to Y.

We give everyone in the U.S. high school education and we don't make the claims you make above. Why would higher education be different? The purpose of free higher ed for all is not to guarantee everyone a good life–it is to try and give everyone an equal chance at a good life. If higher ed is highly correlated to escaping poverty and upward economic mobility, then college costs raising at a rate 11 times faster than…

> If higher ed is highly correlated to escaping poverty and upward economic mobility, then college costs raising at a rate 11 times faster than average income is a form of classism.

this is true if you look at the sticker price, but does the actual cost for a low-income family grow at that rate? I'm having a hard time finding a source that shows by year what a bottom quartile family would have paid for tuition at an in-state public university or an elite institution.

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

#137

Post by cptnapalm »

ryanmarsh wrote: post #118
bradly wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We give everyone in the U.S. high school education and we don't make the claims you make above. Why would higher education be different? The purpose of free higher ed for all is not to guarantee everyone a good life–it is to try and give everyone an equal chance at a good life. If higher ed is highly correlated to escaping poverty and upward economic mobility, then college costs raising at a rate 11 times faster than…

We give everyone in the U.S. high school education and we don't make the claims you make above. We used too. A high school education meant something to my grandparents.

I once picked up a hundred year old Latin schoolbook meant for grade schoolers (fifth grade, I think). It was significantly more information dense than the college course Latin textbook I had.

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

#138

Post by MuffinFlavored »

foxyv wrote: post #63
mac01021 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Usually 2+ years of experience in a certain field.

How do you get enough experience for employers in said field to take a chance on you? It's all about getting over that initial hurdle of 100% unexperienced.

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

#139

Post by projektfu »

mac01021 wrote: post #44
astura wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. This article is very light on content and I'm kinda surprised something this banal and content-less even made it to an actual publication. Also, the guy's son graduated high school two years ago, he's 20-21 years old, practically everyone is happy at that age, let's hear about his life satisfaction at 40. That's ignoring the fact that two years is hardly enough time to evaluate the long term outcome of a maj…

But then "It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is only because they only know their own side of the question." -- J S Mill

I think as time goes on, I am learning that humans are dissatisfied because they no longer know how to live the life of a human, where (wild) pigs are fully capable of living the life of a pig. The big eye-opener for me was "The Story of B", by Daniel Quinn. Say what you want about the completeness or quality of its anthropology, it has touched on an ineffable fact that we are constantly trying to use more of what is bad for us to try to make it good.

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

#140

Post by biophysboy »

qsymmachus wrote: post #112
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.

I see that STEM chauvinism is still alive and well on Hacker News. Believe it or not, there are some skills you can pick up studying the humanities that will set you apart from your CS major peers. Being able to write and communicate clearly, for example, is pretty much a super power in most tech jobs.

Even in pure STEM jobs, like physics academia (where I work), writing/skill is probably the most important skill you need to develop to be a working, publishing scientist.
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