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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

#201

Post by analog31 »

95_JL_OK wrote: post #170
baron_harkonnen wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A PhD only signals that you have an unhealthy relationship with academia. I've interviewed and worked with so many PhD from top tier schools and it's astounding to me that someone can spend 6+ years studying a quantitative science, at a school like MIT or Harvard and still not have a basic understanding of statistics, and worse be incapable of genuinely understanding any of the quantitative tools they used for years.…

Another thing with a PhD is that it is no guarantee that you'll even be hireable. I know of a number of PhD candidates who have trouble interacting in a professional setting outside of the of 'I deserve deference because I have a PhD, you don't necessarily even deserve respect' mentality. I find sometimes a PhD can come with very ingrained attitude issues. I recall working for a company with a new-recruit development…

I wonder if the same people would have failed out of any job requiring human interaction. One thing graduate education does is attract people who know that they would struggle in a mainstream work environment for whatever reason. Some are outright crazy.

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

#202

Post by vezycash »

reb wrote: post #199
mrits wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's important to distinguish between education and the business of education. I don't think I believe more education can ever be a bad thing. But the business of education in the US is an absolute nightmare that corrupts the spirit of learning it ought to protect, and I agree more of that business will not make things better for students.

> It's important to distinguish between education and the business of education.

distinguish between education and schooling

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

#203

Post by leetcrew »

ideals wrote: post #164
qsymmachus wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The way I look at it now after working for large and small tech companies, the Stem degree will help you land your first job because you can be extremely green as long as you have that stem BS. However a self taught programmer with a humanities degree can also get to the same position with some sweat equity. Once at the position of software developer the person with the humanities degree takes off. They've learned to…

does getting a humanities degree improve one's soft skills, or do people that already have good soft skills choose and succeed in humanities degrees?

I took several upper-level humanities courses in college (almost enough to get a classics minor), but I don't really feel like they improved my ability to communicate/network in the office. in my experience, these courses teach the material and the skill of writing a very specific kind of formal research paper that doesn't have much to do with business or technical writing. while you don't directly use a lot of the concepts you learn in a CS degree, I find the technical background much more useful in my day-to-day work.

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

#204

Post by astura »

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…

>The questioning only really has a loud voice in places like the USA with horrendously expensive higher ed systems. I don't really hear a lot of griping about the cost of education or opining on internet alternatives when I'm in Munich or Vienna.

There's also a growing anti intellectual movement in the US, you even see it here on hacker news. If you start with the premise that education is at best useless and at worse actively harmful of course the cost would be questioned.

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

#205

Post by C1sc0cat »

School-Cotton wrote: post #174
bradly wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not sure that is actually a good idea as kids with well of backgrounds tend to get the higher tracks.

I remember a native German poster on hn commenting on the subject "funny how the its the brown skinned Germans, who end up in the lower tier schools"

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

#206

Post by 082349872349872 »

jimhefferon wrote: post #50
gspr wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean there's a lot more to university than "success preparation". While university is indeed no guarantee for success, it does seem to help a lot with your understanding of the world and your ability to think critically. I'm lucky enough to come from a country with free decent universities, so maybe it's easy for me to say, but I can't even put a price on how my education changed every single part of how I think an…

> could have taken hold Yes, especially if all or at least most colleges considered it a high priority to educate people in what used to be called citizenship.

Isn't citizenship a high school subject?

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

#207

Post by oneplane »

nu_throwaway wrote: post #200
oneplane wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People call it an investment because they think: I put something in it with the goal of getting more out of it in total. They don't see it as finance terminology and the concept of the word investment in the context of others like 'sunk cost' and 'asset' holds very little specific meaning in that case. Ironically that is a 'problem' you can 'fix' by putting people in college and teaching them basic accounting.

id argue that with an investment you can compare like to like alternatives and can use a greater degree of objectivity. there are far more variables to consider in higher ed (student loan debt, opportunity cost of time, unemployment, alternative education experiences, etc) so looking at it as an outflow of cash with a predictable return is misleading at best. no college has a monopoly on information and there is no p…

And that's why people use the word 'investment' without knowing the meaning of the word.

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

#208

Post by DiffEq »

rbanffy wrote: post #189
Upvoter33 wrote: post #157

Nothing is a guarantee of a good life. A good life requires so many different elements, but mostly comes down to one thing: what you put into it, esp. in regards to improving the lives and welfare of others around you. Do this, and you will find that your own life gets better and better. Be kind, do work to help others, care about people and their lives (and not just your own) and you'll find that life will turn out…

A good ZIP code is a great start. https://talkpoverty.org/2015/12/17/american-dream-zip-codes-...

What made those zip codes good?

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

#209

Post by Apocryphon »

psychometry wrote: post #143
stillbourne wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe this is one area where legislation can help enforce a social norm. Corporate training used to be practiced at prior generations of generations- IBM, GE, HP, etc. With corporate profits at the levels at they are today, Big Tech can afford to spend a little more on expanding internship and training opportunities.
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