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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

#341

Post by KMag »

908B64B197 wrote: post #326
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…

> it is also quite common for students to over-estimate the value of a no-name institution. I've found this to be moreso the case in the two European countries I've lived in for an extended period of time (France & England). Tuition in France is basically free from what I understood. Even if students over-evaluate the value of the school, the fact that it's free still makes it attractive. And I think that some univer…

It's only free if you forget opportunity cost. Lots of people working behind cash registers with 4 year degrees would have been much happier going to trade schools and being well on their way to being small business owners/co-owners.

There's no doubt that not having crippling debt is much better than having crippling debt. However, we have this cultural idea that being on the road to taking partial owneship of a small skilled labor business is inferior to being in a dead-end job with a 4-year degree. I fear that an over-emphasis on opening access to 4-year degrees implicitly reinforces this idea of 4-year degrees being universally better and that tradespeople have somehow settled for second-best, even if they have more income, a better work-life balance, and are providing absolutely essential services.

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

#342

Post by robotresearcher »

mindvirus wrote: post #328
robotresearcher wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine we collected the best material in written, bound volumes. And nearly every city had a large collection you could borrow from for free. We did. The professors of history, psychology, art, biology, math, - everything - at the world's greatest universities very often write down what they know in books. We achieved this already. You can read Feynman's course on physics tonight. Your city library probably has it.

Absolutely, and that's something I'm very grateful for! One of the things I love the most about where I live is the excellent library system, and I have taken a ton of advantage of it. That said, it's not always the best for serious self study, since often books lack answer keys or worked solutions. I'm not proposing distance ed. I'm proposing that we shape education around automating the rote things, in particular d…

Why do you think universities still give lectures, as the (contemporary) material has been available in written form for a few hundred years? Thousands of professionals, most of them smart and well-intentioned, have had these choices since the advent of cheap printing. Yet lectures today would be recognizable to the ancient Greeks. Why?

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

#343

Post by tracker1 »

mcguire wrote: post #330
iguy wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My suggestion to achieve this is to cap repayments (of non-dischargable loans), perhaps at 15% of taxable income, and written off 20 years after signing. That would make lenders very interested in the outcomes of various courses. And their offers to prospective students would convey useful career advice, too.

Note that the average (mean, I assume) student loan payment is $393, according to the article. The median student loan payment is $222 ( https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackfriedman/2020/02/03/student... ). $393 is 15% of $2620 which annualizes to $31,512, which is about the median personal income for full-time workers (whoops, before taxes). ($222 is 15% of $17,760 annual, about the poverty line for two.) That's not a…

20% pretax deduction would probably be sufficient for repayment. Of course loan reform in general would probably be a good idea. If there are 10k graduating with a degree in a field with only 100 jobs/year needing that degree, or likewise paying less than $40k/year, should probably not be granting loans for those degrees in the first place.

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

#344

Post by DoreenMichele »

dqv wrote: post #318
DoreenMichele wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went to school part-time and intermittently while very ill and homeschooling my special-needs sons. I also completed a couple of different certificate programs with a compressed scheduled, one in a Summer Camp format where you completed a year-long certificate program in two months, and the other was a month of going to school eight hours a day on my employer's dime when I got a corporate job. I wrapped up an Assoc…

Thanks for the advice. This is pretty much what I was planning to do - part-time and mostly online - but I wasn't confident it was possible to get a degree this way.

I was in California at the time. California Virtual College was a useful resource for finding classes I needed and verifying before I signed up that my program would accept them:

https://cvc.edu/

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

#345

Post by icedchai »

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.

One of the most talented developers I ever met was an English major. This was about ~20 years ago. The C code this guy produced was unbelievable.

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

#346

Post by AnimalMuppet »

vaidhy wrote: post #339

I have been reading through the comments and I am very curious about a few things - 1. What "bullshit" degrees people are talking about? Are they the liberal arts studies? If so, as a society do we not see value in the fine arts? Expertise in music, language, anthropology, history, etc do not necessarily lead to a well-paying job.. but they give intellectually satisfaction in and of itself. 2. IMHO, the pay you are l…

"This knowledge is valuable in itself. It will make you a better, more well-rounded person, who has a richer life." That's a completely reasonable statement.

"This degree is valuable economically. It will lead to you having a well-paying job that will lead to you being economically successful". For many degrees, that statement is false.

The problem is that, when we talk about the value of a college education, much of the time we're talking about the second statement. But that statement is true only of some degrees, not of all of them.

Is the first statement still true? Sure. But is it true enough to be worth going deeply into debt for, without an economic payback for the degree? That's much harder to claim. And many people think that they're getting the second benefit from a degree when they're getting a degree that only provides the first, and they feel like they didn't get what was promised.

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

#347

Post by andreilys »

vaidhy wrote: post #339

I have been reading through the comments and I am very curious about a few things - 1. What "bullshit" degrees people are talking about? Are they the liberal arts studies? If so, as a society do we not see value in the fine arts? Expertise in music, language, anthropology, history, etc do not necessarily lead to a well-paying job.. but they give intellectually satisfaction in and of itself. 2. IMHO, the pay you are l…

"1. What "bullshit" degrees people are talking about? Are they the liberal arts studies? If so, as a society do we not see value in the fine arts?"

I don't see value in graduating with 6 figure debt for those degrees. In the words of Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting:

“You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library.”

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

#348

Post by rurp »

mcguire wrote: post #331
mac01021 wrote: post #11

The article spends a little time, in the middle on the headline assertion "College does not guarantee Happiness" But spends more time on an anecdote about the author's son to demonstrate that "Happiness is possible without College", which is a different matter entirely. And one would hope the latter is true, since 2/3 of the US population does not attend college.

" But he did have plans: He found a job across the country on a wheat farm in central Idaho. This wasn’t a hobby or a whim. He became part of a community of honest, hardworking people. He worked from dawn until well past dark through his first harvest, driving a combine, fixing fences, and picking rocks out of the soil. In the winter he found a job apprenticing to an expert cabinetmaker, and started his own small bus…

That's interesting because that lifestyle doesn't sound all that bad to me. It's not for everyone, but a lot of people really enjoy working outside with their hands and find sitting in an office going to meetings to be incredibly stifling.

I had this debate with myself when I was younger because I really like physical work but am probably better at knowledge work. The biggest reasons I work an office job is that they tend to pay much better than other work and it's easy to end up in a physical job that can take a bad toll on your body over time.

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

#349

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

throwawaygh wrote: post #144
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)?

> "How do you become a good writer without feedback from a good writer (or, at least, critical reader)?"

Software developers have to communicate with our co-workers and write documents continually anyway so it's not much additional effort to observe the clarity, effectiveness and persuasiveness of what one is writing or even solicit feedback. You also get to observe colleagues and leaders who are good (or not) at writing and learn from their output. Being a competent communicator becomes more or less a requirement as one rises through the ranks, for both managers and senior technical individual contributors, so it's best to make a virtue out of necessity and hone your writing skills in the workplace.

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

#350

Post by mindvirus »

robotresearcher wrote: post #342
mindvirus wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely, and that's something I'm very grateful for! One of the things I love the most about where I live is the excellent library system, and I have taken a ton of advantage of it. That said, it's not always the best for serious self study, since often books lack answer keys or worked solutions. I'm not proposing distance ed. I'm proposing that we shape education around automating the rote things, in particular d…

Why do you think universities still give lectures, as the (contemporary) material has been available in written form for a few hundred years? Thousands of professionals, most of them smart and well-intentioned, have had these choices since the advent of cheap printing. Yet lectures today would be recognizable to the ancient Greeks. Why?

That's a good question. I think two things:

1. High quality video recording and transmission is still relatively new technology, and it seems most lectures are audio visual performances.

2. There hasn't been a push for a paradigm shift. Lectures work well enough, and have lots of benefits like creating a gathering of people. But does COVID change that?

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