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A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

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

#141

Post by rootusrootus »

blaser-waffle wrote: post #56
zajio1am wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To prove intelligence and conscientiousness? Probably PhD degree.

Bollocks. Ph.Ds don't mean much unless you want to do research and provide cheap labor for 5 years. I'd say a Master's is the new BA/BS. With everyone getting an undergrad degree via online schools, or via 6+ years of undergrad college, it's ability to filter is weak. A brick-and-mortar Master's serves as a way to differentiate from that pack; I'm not sure what an online Master's equates to.

Maybe an online master's will actually be a better filter than brick-and-mortar? I'd say it takes more fortitude to stick with an online program and finish it, so at some point maybe 'online' won't be a pejorative, it'll be a bragging point.

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

#142

Post by hajile »

rayiner wrote: post #101
ghostpepper wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s because it gives guilds the power to control the pipeline of skilled labor and exclude new entrants to limit supply. Guilds are generally run by their members, and the existing members are much more likely to be white and native born than potential new entrants. Their management structure also makes it more likely that prejudices will be acted upon. When public unions became a thing in the 1960s and 1970s, they…

A federal government can dictate what it thinks morality should be, but in practice cannot enforce morality in a free country.

Even in the US South, the vast majority of millennials and gen Z are not racist. They aren't in political power yet, but in the next 20 years or so, they will be and the zeitgeist of the area will finish its shift (even the people currently in power are abolitionists compared to the previous generations). Travel the world and you'll see that (perhaps outside some European countries) the US of today is just about the least racist country in existence.

Guilds/Unions formed today won't have the same issues as ones from 50-60 years ago because the general view of people today isn't what it was back then.

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

#143

Post by psychometry »

stillbourne wrote: post #87
psychometry wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who's going to pay for someone to be unproductive at their job? Corporations surely don't want to anymore.

You mean you can't have lower level people working on bug fixes and small tasks while you save bigger more difficult work for more advanced people? Who says they won't be productive? What is your measure of productivity?

I'm talking about the fact that hiring managers expect applicants to have 100% of the listed skills for any position because their corporations would rather spend money on stock buybacks than employee training.

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

#144

Post by throwawaygh »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #134
throwawaygh wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> particularly when humanities topics are far more amenable to self-study than STEM topics.

Really? I feel exactly the opposite, especially for CS. How do you become a good writer without feedback from a good writer (or, at least, critical reader)?

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

#145

Post by enkid »

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.

There are some things that does make everyone more successful. More education is overall better for society, even if it's no longer a guarantee of "success." Some things don't really get diluted but can enrich the lives of anyone they are involved in (if we disassociate the word "success" from a comparative cycle). For example, healthcare, books, digital entertainment, internet connectivity. The comparative advantage goes down, but the impact to the individual does not.

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

#146

Post by Kinrany »

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…

You're explicitly saying that good jobs are zero-sum. Why do you think that?

It seems like a non-prediction that having more people with good education will enable new businesses.

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

#147

Post by bradly »

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.

> We used too. A high school education meant something to my grandparents.

Do you have a high school education? The education I got in H.S. had a big impact on my life. I couldn't imagine being done with school at 14 and thinking that was equivalent to 4 years of High School.

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

#148

Post by biophysboy »

organicfigs wrote: post #99
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.

I've always wondered - is there a way that we can decouple liberal education from technical skill building in the US university system? Because I absolutely agree that people crave and need the joy and balance that you describe, but currently its being held hostage to the price of at least 10k a year! Its so sad, I would kill for affordable, offline liberal education. The instructor doesn't even need to be elite (in fact I would prefer that she/he were not!), they just need to have a cool format.

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

#149

Post by augustt »

hazz99 wrote: post #95
throwawaygh wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Some random classes that come to mind:

Electronics: https://www.google.com/search?q=6.115+final+projects

Interactive music: https://vimeo.com/user42907764

Product design: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqKSAz3yxMM

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

#150

Post by shpongled »

non-entity wrote: post #107
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.

Even only a subset of STEM is "useful" from what I've seen. Particularly in the science part there's just so few jobs and such high education requirements.

Yeah I think we can safely shorten it to "TE"
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