Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A generation of American men give up on college

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 824 posts

Re: A generation of American men give up on college

#271

Post by ClumsyPilot »

throwtheworld wrote: post #99
baron816 wrote: post #63

A lot of this is driven by narratives—A narrative that college isn’t worth it anymore. A narrative that (white) men are uniformly privileged and life is just easy for them. And a narrative that those men aren’t wanted by society any more. I’m not convinced that all those men need to go to college, but they clearly need something. They need to feel like they’re part of society. Nothing good can come of an entire gener…

> A narrative that (white) men are uniformly privileged and life is just easy for them. This is very perspective dependent. I’m a black college student now and every conversation with friends back home includes some mention of dropping out because it’s not for us as well. When you see people with equivalent resumes already coasting by in the job market because they could get their last names and LinkedIn photos past…

"I’m a black college student now and every conversation with friends back home includes some mention of dropping out because it’s not for us as well."

I can only recommend that you have to base life decisions on your own experience, because it can differ dramatically.

I have an experience from which I have drawn some conclusions - I am an immigrant and many of my co-immigrants are convinced that the locals dislike them, they feel they are being treated unfairly, etc.

I was unable to square my experience with their's: surely they can't be imagining things, but at the same time I cannot be just magically lucky. Some of them are older generation, maybe things were different back then. Maybe, when they face difficulties they are more likely to attribute it to discrimination. Maybe some behavioural stereotyoes play a role - I don't know.

For a while I wanted to try a 'secret shopper' experiment, create two fake Linkedin profiles, identical except background- try applying for jobs with them. Never got round to it.

Re: A generation of American men give up on college

#272

Post by znpy »

smitty1e wrote: post #74
baron816 wrote: post #63

A lot of this is driven by narratives—A narrative that college isn’t worth it anymore. A narrative that (white) men are uniformly privileged and life is just easy for them. And a narrative that those men aren’t wanted by society any more. I’m not convinced that all those men need to go to college, but they clearly need something. They need to feel like they’re part of society. Nothing good can come of an entire gener…

My brother in law is an electrician. I had enough EE in college to change a light switch without burning the house down. However, that book-learnin' fell apart when confronted with troubleshooting a strangely wired room, and I got very polite while asking him over to bail me out. These fellows eschewing the ivory tower, where being of European extraction and bearing a Y-chromosome on the college campus is an indictme…

> These fellows eschewing the ivory tower [...] are going to trade schools and will make fat piles of cash repairing plumbing.

I read somewhere that (ironocally) plumbing it the less likely thing to be "automated" via an AI or something.

Re: A generation of American men give up on college

#273

Post by usename_Here »

I agree on some of the points about support structures for women that don't exist for men. I've seen it occur even at the professional level, female co-workers are reached out to, invited to groups, given networking opportunities that I would have to put loads of effort to keep up with. It's biased treatment in the now, even if it's trying to offset the errors of the past.

Re: A generation of American men give up on college

#274

Post by laurent92 »

tnzm wrote: post #193
dkarp wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this with everything. You have to become an expert at everything if you want it done right. Maybe it's because the truly expert help is generally too expensive. Examples: - Taxes/Pensions - if you just rely on your accountant then they'll do the bare minimum and you'll miss out - Energy company - we're rolling out smart gas/elec meters in the UK. There is an old type (smets1) and a new type (smets2). You don't…

Well put. Personal story: moved into a EU country and tried to import my car tax-free as personal property. Went to a customs agency because apparently you don't talk to customs directly, you go through one of those. They had me collect all sorts of documents, which took me months before it became evident that this type of car cannot be imported tax-free in the first place. The stress from expecting people to take th…

Well put. When you become medium-level at all areas where you like tinkering, it’s hard not to get bitter about people who aren’t doing it correctly for you…

Re: A generation of American men give up on college

#275

Post by pclmulqdq »

circlefavshape wrote: post #212
icare_1er wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on the number of "affirmative-action" initiatives that I see all over the US, in many tech-companies (I don't know about other fields), I'd say that being a women, or black, is definitely a huge plus to get your foot through the door, with many recruitment programs blatantly saying they are only for minorities, which sounds to me like pretty much segregation in reverse, but that indeed seems to be the agenda of…

> with many recruitment programs blatantly saying they are only for minorities Really? I understood that it was illegal to discriminate based on gender, race, etc in the US

It is illegal, but that doesn't stop people from doing it. In the US, things like this have to go to court to actually be struck down, and there haven't been any sympathetic plaintiffs suing over these laws yet.

When "positive discrimination" makes it before a judge, it usually gets stuck down.

Re: A generation of American men give up on college

#276

Post by Miner49er »

icare_1er wrote: post #176
happythen wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No way. Being white is definitely a leg up. Well, at least for me, a white guy, no college degree. Life is much easier. I don't think there is any support missing for us, that actually sounds hilarious. We need to work on lifting others up.

Based on the number of "affirmative-action" initiatives that I see all over the US, in many tech-companies (I don't know about other fields), I'd say that being a women, or black, is definitely a huge plus to get your foot through the door, with many recruitment programs blatantly saying they are only for minorities, which sounds to me like pretty much segregation in reverse, but that indeed seems to be the agenda of…

Maybe a few tech companies are like this, but the rest of the country isn't.

Re: A generation of American men give up on college

#277

Post by raxxorrax »

This seems to happen in a parallel universe. From my first semester at university with 120 students, 5 were women. Out of those 1 made it till the end, which is more or less exactly the average of those that actually got their degree in the standard period of study.

That said, I think university doesn't count as much as it did before. At least in softwareworld you can make it without a degree just fine. You have disadvantages for some higher positions in large companies. But who wants to do that job anyway? It seems rather unattractive today.

Re: A generation of American men give up on college

#278

Post by geomark »

twic wrote: post #140
Simon321 wrote: post #131

To people recommending trades, there's nothing wrong with trades, but you can get more out of college than only a job. You can actually learn things that you wouldn't have learned otherwise. The environment also naturally stimulates and values learning, gathering knowledge and understanding. You can learn how to become a better person and think more critically. Seeing how many misinformation is going around and the p…

Plenty of that misinformation is being swallowed and spread by people who went to college, so it's not clear that helped.

Plenty of that misinformation is being indoctrinated in people at college.

Re: A generation of American men give up on college

#279

Post by [deleted] »

davidhunter wrote: post #191
dkarp wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this with everything. You have to become an expert at everything if you want it done right. Maybe it's because the truly expert help is generally too expensive. Examples: - Taxes/Pensions - if you just rely on your accountant then they'll do the bare minimum and you'll miss out - Energy company - we're rolling out smart gas/elec meters in the UK. There is an old type (smets1) and a new type (smets2). You don't…

This is an interesting observation and matches with my experience. I'd add: 1) There's a race to the bottom with services in terms of pricing. For example, NHS GPs have strict time limits within which to provide a particular service. These time limits have reduced over the years and so individual doctors are capable of providing a better service but are can't given the constraints. People rarely are willing to pay mo…

[deleted]

Re: A generation of American men give up on college

#280

Post by pitched »

WalterBright wrote: post #160
blueblisters wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the thing with vocationals skills - they make you really good at understanding how something works or how to fix something without breaking something else, but beyond that range of problems and solutions, you need to talk to an engineer. Not that vocational jobs are not important - clearly they add value and create employment.

I'm not so sure they understand how it works, though. BTW, if you ever see an EE with a card that has printed on it: V = I*R I = V/R R = V/I it's a sure sign he's a formula-plugger, and has no idea how it works. He doesn't even understand algebra. https://testguy.net/content/266-Ohm-s-Law-Watt-s-Law-Cheat-S... A definite no-hire :-/

I’m not saying that most people aren’t formula pluggers (and that’s a big problem) but, my first impression of that kind of card would be that’s it’s meant to be branding, not a tool. Someone is carrying around a piece of what they love.
Post reply on HN