191–200 of 1001 posts
Seems like a pretty unremarkable collection of surface level observations if you ask me
Try hiring someone without a degree in healthcare: someone's life is on the line, not some rich man's toy.
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>the SAT's a way of laundering discrepancies in generational wealth, which is indeed due to racist public policy as well as racist private actions. it may be intended not that way, but that's how it functions. But what are SATs being replaced with? "holistic admissions"? A poor kid can prepare for the SAT by studying his ass off, with mostly free/cheap materials from the internet. How can you do the same with "extrac…
From my viewpoint in Europe I never understood the whole extracurricular, hobby or even the essay or recommendation letter part of admission process. All of those felt like nothing to do with actual capability to study. If SAT is a bad idea, replace it with field specific national entrance exam. Other fun alternatives, just outright auction off certain number of admission slots. Or just award slots randomly to all ap…
First, a meta-point about questions like “why doesn’t the US have policy X Y or Z”: The US is essentially set up to be ungovernable by design (any meaningful reform requires the cooperation of both major political parties, a situation that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the developed world), you can’t really find rational reasons for most policies.
I notice this a lot, actually: the fundamental thing Europeans miss about the US is they think “a rule exists, thus it must be there on purpose”, because in your countries, unlike in the US, you have functioning parliaments and governments that can change laws as necessary.
Anyway, the US arrived at its education system, as with most things, through a long and largely random process. The catalyst for the weird non-academic admissions standards in particular is well-documented to have been pure anti-Semitism: college administrators felt that with purely academic admissions standards, too many Jews were being admitted.
Definitely agree that removing the SAT appears to be related to the upcoming supreme court case about affirmative action. COVID was a good reason to delay it for a couple years. But schools are pushing it out further. That makes no sense. It seems the SAT is increasingly considered "racist" because it reveals racial disparities in learning. What's next? Get rid of the driver's license test because it turns that white…
> the SAT is increasingly considered "racist" because it reveals racial disparities in learning Could you provide an example of that claim? Usually the SAT is considered discriminatory because the way the testing is done favors wealthy, well-educated people, and gives negative results for equally talented people who lack those advantages. Colleges have found that the SAT is excluding a large part of the talent pool.…
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> We really need farm workers, and most of them live in poverty. How are both of these true? If a job pays poorly, doesn't that suggest there are many people willing and able to do those jobs, relative to the need for the job to be done? Maybe this results from some market distortion? But AFAIK the main market distortion in the farming industry is the opposite: subsidies that make farming more attractive than it woul…
>> If a job pays poorly, doesn't that suggest there are many people willing and able to do those jobs, relative to the need for the job to be done? No. This notion of relentless competition is insane. One school district was paying a janitor barely a living wage. The standard response was "he could improve himself / get a degree, and find a better job. That shifts all blame on him an ignored the fact that the distric…
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>STEM jobs are the main viable path for economic stability and freedom. >We really need farm workers, and most of them live in poverty. I love having more engineers, scientists, and doctors, but we desperately need non-STEM work to be a viable option This is basically a non-problem because of the supply/demand mechanics of the labor market. If farm workers' job gets sufficiently bad from a value proposition perspecti…
It is not a non-problem for people without your privilege. Gig workers, immigrants and others with no viable options are forced to do these jobs or starve. All the while people complain about immigrants crossing the border and "taking their jobs". Graduating high school seniors aren't lining up to mow grass or pick fruit or work as a meat packer for $15/hour. They want to come out of college to a 6 figure job with no…
That’s exactly what’s happening. With a steady flow of cheap labor to take these jobs, the wages for them will remain stagnant. It makes perfect sense for low income workers to be complaining about immigrants taking their jobs because that’s exactly what happens.
Cut off illegal immigration for a few years and watch as the price of all unskilled labor increases. It’s basic supply and demand.
The ones at the top generally don’t care because the people coming in are not competing for their jobs. And they arguably benefit from the cheap low end labor through lower prices for staples and even luxuries like landscapers and nannies.
Even that is changing with remote work and offshoring. I don’t know if it will take five years or a decade, but the so called knowledge workers who don’t sock away their savings now are in for a rude awakening when their own paper pushing jobs get replaced.
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As an ancedote, I was told by my low income peer group that you get 600 points just for filling out your name on the SAT and that 800 points could get you into a great school like MIT. So I assumed it was a pass/fail exam in a sense and left early during the verbal part because I found it condescending and boring. Before the exam, I couldn't understand why the higher income kids were paying for SAT training classes.…
I think this is a real fundamental problem and something that seems to easy to fix. People just don't know how the other half live. There's a persistent belief that rich people and poor people are like two different species. I got a CS degree from a pretty good school but it was almost pure luck. My high school had programming classes and I enjoyed them. I didn't realize what I was setting myself up for.
When Covid hit, schools in poor communities tried to implement distance learning and discovered that only half (for example, in one city which I don't remember) of families had a desktop or laptop for the student to use - probably those kids aren't going to become programmers. Programming classes are non-existent, at least based on limited knowledge - seriously, look up the programming classes in a nearby poor school district.
> Cancelling student debt is good if it's tied to fixing the problem going forward, which means not offering it, or having the colleges be the guarantor, or ISAs, or something. What do you tell the upper middle class families that didn't buy a bigger house or pad their investment accounts so that they could help put 3 of their kids through schools? My parents spent at least $200k on undergrad education between me and…
Yes. The average US college graduate has under $40K in debt. If you're able to get into a networking school for the upper class like Cornell you're able to get a full ride at a state university. UVA and UW-Madison means at most one of three children went to college in state, on in state tuition.
It's perfectly fine to choose the university to go to based on prestige but paying for a network is not morally superior to going to a less good university on a full scholarship, or doing two years at a community college and transferring to a state flagship for the last two years. Making expensive choices to chase status, a zero sum game, isn't eveil. Neitehr should it be encouraged.
I'm concerned that the majority of "should we fix college or should we circumvent college" conversations don't bring up one of the scariest parts of our current economy: STEM jobs are the main viable path for economic stability and freedom. All of the conversations I've seen implicitly assume that this is good, and that the solution to farmer workers (or other low paid workers) escaping poverty is to train them as so…
America is a country that loves the free market country, yet no one seems to be talking about supply and demand to fix college prices. Double the number of large quality state universities. Re-index public university tuition to what they were in 2000 + inflation. Mandate that funding comes with X number increase in tenured professors. Re-instate public funding for state universities to what it was in 2000 + inflation…
> "I was asked to give a 'privilege disclaimer', essentially stating that if I didn't look like I did I wouldn't have been able to succeed..." What??
I'm concerned that the majority of "should we fix college or should we circumvent college" conversations don't bring up one of the scariest parts of our current economy: STEM jobs are the main viable path for economic stability and freedom. All of the conversations I've seen implicitly assume that this is good, and that the solution to farmer workers (or other low paid workers) escaping poverty is to train them as so…
> STEM jobs are the main viable path for economic stability and freedom. People repeat that but what is it based on? Most of the population, including most people who have economic stability and freedom, have not had STEM jobs and very likely will not have STEM jobs. More importantly, college is about much more than job training. College prepares people to be adults in every way, not to be a resource for corporations…
People repeat that but what is it based on?
Most of the adult population have not gone to college but somehow manage to become functioning adults.