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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

#171

Post by hackinthebochs »

Kinrany wrote: post #146
hackinthebochs wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

At any given moment there are a fixed number of jobs, and so a fixed number of "good jobs". I can grant that the number of good jobs isn't fixed on the scale of years. But people that want/need good jobs usually can't wait years for them to materialize. On the timescales that matter to individuals, the number of good jobs is fixed and so the competition for them is effectively zero-sum.

There also seems to be a scale issue when it comes to the availability of good jobs. That is, not all jobs can be good (i.e. high paying) and there is an essential order-of-magnitude difference between the number of high paying jobs and the number of low paying jobs required to make the economics work. So the proportion of good jobs is effectively fixed even on longer timescales.

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

#172

Post by edjrage »

balladeer wrote: post #162
joelbluminator wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Currently working as an applied AI researcher and about to go back to get my phd in AI as well" : You're probably in the top 2% of intelligence, that's a huge advantage over most everyone else. People who are closer to the average may need to take more conventional paths to succeed.

What is that intelligence you’ve mentioned?

Maybe the most obvious one - IQ? Even if you don't think it measures intelligence, it's highly predictive of success in areas such as this.

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

#173

Post by muffinman26 »

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

At the University of Washington (which consistently ranks at the level of MIT and Stanford for Computer Science), someone with a bachelor's in Computer Science would generally be expected to complete at least two of: * Operating Systems: Either implement lock/fork, assorted system calls, and virtual memory for OS/161; or implement a device driver. * Networks: Implement the Tor protocol or a project of similar complexity. * Compilers: Implement a compiler for simplified Java including at least constant propagation or a similar optimization. * Animation: A year-long course series that culminates with animating a few-minute long movie. * A small video game. * A Maps-style program for finding the shortest walk between any two locations on campus, including displaying that information. This one was required for Computer Science.

All but the last of these were done in groups of 2-3 people. It might have been theoretically possible to graduate with only one big project, if you took machine learning, security (the final project for this one was finding an exploit in Firefox, but no actual code was required), and some heavy theory classes. Most people would have done at least 3-4 big projects like this.

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

#174

Post by School-Cotton »

bradly wrote: post #135
hackinthebochs wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Many developed countries in e.g. Europe don't actually have universal academic high school like the US does - they have perhaps 1/3 of people go to academic high school, where it is more difficult than in the US (perhaps comparable to the difficulty of AP classes). The rest go to vocational or semi-vocational school.

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

#176

Post by throwawaygh »

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…

> Good jobs are zero-sum.

Without universal high school, the USA would still be a largely illiterate subsistence farming nation with high rates of poverty as defined at the global scale.

Even well-paying jobs in the trades require literacy and basic mathematics skills.

So, no, good jobs aren't zero-sum.

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

#177

Post by mrits »

enkid wrote: post #145
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…

I think we are witnessing first hand why more education is not always overall better. There isn't much point in having everyone learn British Literature on a 30 year payment plan.

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

#178

Post by refurb »

francisofascii wrote: post #58
imgabe wrote: post #38

Nothing is a guarantee of a good life. It seems like people think you should be able to just check a few boxes, then slot into a 9-5 and have everything taken care of for you for the rest of your life. Well, it doesn't work like that. Even after college you're still going to have to plan and think and take action to make things happen for you. It's not just all going to fall into your lap because you took a few class…

To be fair, it used to work like that in America. Graduate high school, get a decent paying union job in your hometown with an okay house to raise a family. Drink beer and watch sports on the weekends with neighborhood buddies. Work 30-40 years and retire.

That’s a cherry picked example. Good union jobs were more plentiful back then, but by no means readily available to everyone.

Just like today, plenty of people struggled to make ends meet.

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

#179

Post by smnrchrds »

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.

If you think the crisis does not affect STEM degree holders, you are mistaken. There was a study commissioned by OPSE (Ontario Society of Professional Engineers). The findings directly contradict this oft-repeated wisdom that STEM degrees (or at least T and E in STEM) are a guarantee of a good life. If you have the time, I recommend that you read the full report. Here are some excerpts:

> only 29.7 per cent of employed individuals in Ontario with bachelor’s degrees or higher in engineering were working as engineers or engineering managers.

> A further 37 per cent worked in professional positions that normally require a university degree.

> Those who were not working as engineers and were working in positions that don’t necessarily require a degree made up fully 33.3 per cent of the total.

In other words, there are more people with engineering degrees who work in jobs not requiring any degree at all, than there are people working in engineering.

Source: https://www.ospe.on.ca/public/documents/advocacy/2015-crisis...

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

#180

Post by frockington1 »

langitbiru wrote: post #125
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.

What about majoring in business?

20 years ago was pretty viable but seems to be dwindling. I'm knowledgeable about finance majors so Ill use that as an example. The top 10% will do fine and make decisions while managing others money. The next 20ish percent will be salesman selling funds to others. The remainder will be writing business requirements so technology can automate their job
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