31–40 of 315 posts
When are we going to learn that encouraging everyone to get more education is a waste of resources? All it leads to is lowered standards and devalued degrees. Your credential is only worth something because someone else doesn't have it.
There's an ongoing weakening of the signal for people with degrees who can actually do design engineering.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_high_school In Denmark and some neighboring countries there's this concept of a school you can go to just to learn stuff later in life, as an ongoing thing. There's a whole bunch of themes (sports, history, etc), and often you can book yourself in for whatever amount of time makes sense for you.
Do you get an academic degree?
When are we going to learn that encouraging everyone to get more education is a waste of resources? All it leads to is lowered standards and devalued degrees. Your credential is only worth something because someone else doesn't have it.
One way to think of this is that the "ruling class", for lack of a better term, in the US is college educated professionals. To them, "college is good" is an unquestionable truth, and the systems they build will always give more resources to colleges.
I have no problem with people getting degrees in the arts. My spouse has a Master's in fine arts, from a university in Europe. But she didn't acquire any debt from that degree, while I did in the US with my CS Master's.
But living with enormous debt--debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy (in the US)--is such a burden, and the degree itself may really not offer that much in terms of job prospects (though we shouldn't discount the value of humanities degrees--turns out they often do pretty well in life).
It is hard to see why a poetry program should cost so much.
> For colleges and universities, master’s degrees have essentially become an enormous moneymaking scheme, wherein the line between for-profit and nonprofit education has been utterly blurred. There are, of course, good programs as well as bad ones, but when you scope out, there is clearly a systemic problem.
Cool. Now do the higher education system as a whole.
One of the key issues I see is that we don’t place a high enough value on adult education. A philosophy professor of mine told me the word “andragogy”, which is the theory of adult education. It’s different from “pedagogy” which means the education of children. I always thought that learning is learning. It never occurred to me that there’s a difference between how and why children learn and that it could be differen…
Slight anecdote, I gave a few geometry lessons to a teen. And witnessing his brain operate was quite staggering. Teen operate at high frequency low depth it seems. He didn't want to grasp the rule or symmetry but ran in many intuitions very rapidly (honestly my brain froze at his pace of change, so vibrant) only to feel defeated or confused. Made me think adult and kids really need different approaches. Our emotions facing a new topic are so different.
In Europe a Master's degree is a necessity for the (better) starter jobs in industry, but usually in the more common (traditional) fields like economics, law, engineering, or science.
But in these cases aren't undergraduate degrees normally three years, and a master's degree one? So that's four years total, which is what Americans do anyway. An American undergraduate plus masters is six years, which is absolutely insane. Let alone their PhDs, which mean you could easily end up 29 before you graduate. I had a friend in Europe who finished their PhD with top-tier publications in two years - much les…
It filled in a lot of gaps that my undergraduate education left, and significantly raised my profile amongst recruiters.
CS might be the exception to the rule about Masters degrees though.