To be fair, nothing ever is a guarantee of anything.
A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life
431–440 of 497 posts
Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life
#432I 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…
> do we not see value in the fine arts?
We could simultaneously see value in fine arts but also not see value in a four-year full-time program with a heavy accreditation component in the fine arts—and certainly not as a gatekeeping requirement for jobs that have nothing to do with the specific subject being studied!
If anything, if we wanted to promote these subjects to more people, we ought to make learning about those subjects more flexible, less stressful and less expensive. (It's not just about the direct costs, either—even a free full-time program comes with a massive opportunity cost that most people can't afford.) It seems like the only way to make that realistic would be to decouple signaling and career accreditation from the education itself.
This is much easier said than done, of course, but I think just mentally separating the different aspects of a college program—education from signalling—is crucial for understanding what's going on and how it could change.
Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life
#433There's so much potential in a better university/college. Imagine that in society we pooled our resources to make the best video/online courses for a variety of subjects. The best CS courses. The best history courses. The best biology courses. We could focus on making the courses accessible and translated. We could make the best assignments and projects, iterated and experimented on with a population of millions. Hec…
This is a recipe for a very poor education in my opinion. This sort of mass produced educational content, taught by professional educators rather than researchers, produces students who merely know facts and can perform basic algorithms. Real understanding of a field comes from long hours engaging with the subject and playing with ideas, and from interacting with others in the field. Working through educational mater…
You can very easily become better than 99% of humanity at a topic by diligently working through an advanced textbook. That’s not genuine expertise but it’s not nothing. A community of practice is necessary for true expertise in mature fields but you can get a long, long way with a series of textbooks.
Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life
#434Earlier quoted context omitted.
You do not need to go to a music conservatory to be a musician. And among the musicians with the highest net worth, few have formal training. Take for example, Metallica. To my knowledge, none of them have formal training, yet each member has a net worth of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Yes, but the vast majority of musicians do have formal coaching and training. A net worth is not an indication of musical talent and should not be used as one.
This could be explained by selection bias more than teaching success.
Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life
#435Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do not believe in this over-simplification. However, the point about going to debt for those degrees is a question specific to US at this point in time. We should talk about free college education or heavily subsidized one, but this same group here has been heavily against these ideas because they are socialist. However, happiest countries in the world seems to be mostly social democratic[1] and for one, if possibl…
> We should talk about free college education or heavily subsidized one It already exists. It's called the internet. You can learn almost everything you need, and in much greater detail, than a traditional 'higher education' offered by a brick and mortar institution. The problem is only convincing the gate keepers.
There is no comparison. College is not a vocational school. Internet is not a library, more like acres of dusty piles of tattered and strewn books. More importantly, it's also a shitty source of: collegiality, constructive criticism, respect for scholarship, access to intelligently-vetted new experiences, and well-reasoned communication.
What I remember most, and consider most valuable about my college years, is not the teaching/coursework. The net cannot begin to compare. Facebook is free.
Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life
#436Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 w…
You’re assuming a baseline at or above those intro courses. I’ve had engineers who don’t know how paragraphs work, or whose vocabulary and reading comprehension seems to have stunted at middle school.
Those people are usually stuck as juniors without formal education because they’re not at the point where self-teaching is possible.
Ymmv
Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life
#437Earlier quoted context omitted.
Top universities already put all of their courses for free online. e.g. here's all of MIT's CS lectures: https://www.youtube.com/c/mitocw/playlists . There's no downside to them doing so, because they derive most of their profit from their reputations. And then if you want a more formalized course structure, you have online courses like KhanAcademy. And then if you want to personalize your learning, you can find indi…
> The only difference is that you won't get a reputable slip of paper. I would add the costs behind providing that slip of paper are not insignificant. It requires having people with expert level knowledge of the field assess your work and your knowledge over a broad range of courses. So universities in the US are ridiculously over priced, but the value they provide is still > 0.
Oh, for sure, slips of paper can be super-valuable. I don't think their main value, however, come from the implied expert-level assessment. Rather, I think their value comes from the implied gating requirement to even get in in the first place. Harvard is more famous for how hard it is to get into, rather than how hard it is to graduate, and then the resulting exclusive club you get to become part of once you're in.
Being part of an exclusive club and having a built-in reputation opens many more doors and makes getting some jobs a lot easier. So then you have to calculate the value of that potential. Department of Education estimated the earning potential for Ivy Leagues to be on average 40k more a year, up to 130k more a year.
If we're comparing a college then with no reputation vs taking only online classes, I wonder if there is much if any appreciable difference per year. Maybe at that point the value of the college education is mostly in the knowledge and skills you gain and the paper itself has negligible worth. So then make sure you're only paying a negligible amount to get that paper.
Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life
#438There's so much potential in a better university/college. Imagine that in society we pooled our resources to make the best video/online courses for a variety of subjects. The best CS courses. The best history courses. The best biology courses. We could focus on making the courses accessible and translated. We could make the best assignments and projects, iterated and experimented on with a population of millions. Hec…
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.
There's a lot of value to paying someone who has spent decades reading all the things people wrote down and distilling the most important information, themes, and principles.
I'm reading The Illiad right now (Pope's version). It's quite nice, but I don't understand it. I mean, I get what's going on, but I don't understand why they are telling me this. Why is it composed the way it is? Why start the last few months into a 10 year war? How does one even successfully camp out in front of an enemy city for ten years? Why didn't someone win already? Why are two enemy combatants duking it out while everyone else watches? Why are they willing to stop when the priests put out their poles saying it's nighttime, battle's over? Why are the priests even willing to go near two people fighting? And that's not even getting into all the literary stuff I'm completely missing.
I have the source material. If I spent enough time reading up on ancient Greek culture, and reading analyses of The Illiad, etc. I'll probably get that. Or I could pay a guy who's already done it to explain all the important parts and point me to the things people have written down that are actually helpful (as opposed to not very insightful, based on obsolete information, pushing an ideology, or just flat-out wrong).
Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life
#439Earlier quoted context omitted.
I strongly agree. When I was an undergraduate, the "lower division", more introductory, required courses were taught by specialists in "Computer Science Education", whatever the heck that is. I hated them. They were ... useful, as a basis for everything later, but they weren't taught well and if that is all there were, I would be very unhappy about the time and money wasted. Then I reached the "upper division", mostl…
So what I'm hearing is that introductory classes could be replicated in a primarily online environment? I'd be a huge fan of moving the first year or so of college online (or at least having the option to do so) for a reduced rate.
Possibly, yes. My preferred alternative would be to make introductory classes more like later classes.
Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life
#440I'm not sure where this goes in the threads and discussion, but this historian has a really nice article on the importance of the humanities. Unlike science and technology, the humanities don't have an obvious ROI, especially when you have to pay large sums of money, and I think he does a good job of illustrating the value the humanities bring and possible consequences we are seeing in our own society of not valuing them.
https://acoup.blog/2020/07/03/collections-the-practical-case...
(And thank-you to whoever first posted a link to this guy's blog to HN, it's really good, and I'm not even all that into history of warfare.)