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I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears

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Re: I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears

#251

Post by manuelabeledo »

flatiron wrote: post #232
manuelabeledo wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They say the German education isn’t anything to tout and having an American education on your CV is a big +. Having lived in Europe for 30+ years, I have never heard of this outside higher education at very famous institutions, e.g. Stanford, Harvard, MIT. In fact, primary and secondary schools in the US are usually seen as quite insufficient.

Where in Europe? I’ve hired in both Portugal and Germany and have seen a ton of US education. This is for developer positions I would expect it different if you are hiring line cooks.

I don’t quite understand where you are going with this. Have you hired US nationals, or US educated people? Either way, I haven’t seen many US educated people in Europe, and especially in Portugal.

> This is for developer positions I would expect it different if you are hiring line cooks.

I’m a lead engineer myself.

Again, I yet have to find anyone in Europe who would have primary and secondary education in the US in high consideration. In fact, after traveling in Asia, I had somewhat the same experience: top US universities were highly valued, but anything below that was mostly dismissed.

Re: I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears

#252

Post by AngryData »

wenmoon wrote: post #147
gruez wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

during the peak of the COVID labor shortage, many producers did increase wages but found that they still couldn't get workers. also in North America at least, many/most laborers are undocumented immigrants. white collar workers aren't quitting the desk to go out in the field..it is backbreaking work. if the labor pipeline dries up (which is a very real thing as immigration has decreased in North America/the US) then…

Probably because farm labor is skilled labor and seasonal. It sucks to live out of a vehicle traveling with the crop harvest. If you want them to work just within the area you need to make the month or two of work worth more than just a month or two of wages, because they will soon have zero work and will fuck over holding other non-seasonal jobs while every other seasonal industry also competes for that labor. Agriculture is also exempt from overtime pay. On top of all that, you can't just throw some rando in a field and expect them to get anywhere near the output of an experienced picker, especially with 12 hour days and a physical workload far higher than most people have ever experienced.

Their meager wage increase is not worth uprooting your entire life just for 2 months or less of work unless you are sending that money back to a country where a dollar goes much farther. They need far more than just add 2 bucks to an already way underpaid job to not only attract workers now but keep them around and available for following years.

Re: I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears

#253

Post by stonogo »

ryan93 wrote: post #193
wolverine876 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

SAT math scores combined with GPA are 5 times more predictive than gpa alone at Berkeley. They also found the test was more predictive for low income students

The same task force you're quoting also recommended the SAT be revamped to reduce the inherent bias among the questions.

Re: I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears

#254

Post by nsonha »

sammalloy wrote: post #219
charrondev wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> College prepares people to be adults in every way, not to be a resource for corporations. As If you have to go to college to become an adult. A lot of college programs seem like their purpose is for some very wealthy and sheltered children to become “cultured”, but that is completely unrelated to the skills needed to be a functioning adult or to take significant responsibilities in your life.

Without a well-informed populace, democracy cannot function. Contrary to what you have argued, becoming cultured (in other words, understanding the philosophy, ethics, history, and fundamental assumptions about how and why society functions) are essential skills for taking responsibility, and the lack of these skills is behind virtually every major deficiency in society. College and university were never supposed to…

"College and university were never supposed to be about job training. They were supposed to teach one how to learn so you could become a lifelong learner"

I see little benefit in discussing how things should be instead of what they are. There are clearly forces that pivoted universities towards what they are today, telling people what university should be isn't gonna fix anything.

More importantly, who decided university is the only place you could learn this, or that you could not become a life long learner long before going to university?

It seems that institutional education is precisely what gives people the impression that there is such a thing as "stop learning" aka graduation.

Re: I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears

#255

Post by honkycat »

mgh2 wrote: post #85
raincom wrote: post #69

HYP (Harvard, Yale and Princeton), and top tier law schools (Harvard, Yale, Stanford), top tier b schools (Harvard and Stanford) still control the whole thing. Sure, if you can ace leetcode like an olympiad, you can become a L7 at FAANG. However, if you are a MBA from San Jose state, you would be working as a financial analyst. However, if you are a Stanford MBA, you would be a SVP. Top tier firms in PE, VC, IC, and…

Is it pedigrees that matter or what these signal? Ethics aside, I rather have a smart person in charge rather than the opposite

It signals wealth and an upbringing that meshs with the current c-level staff. this is not controversial to assert. I'm not saying these people are not smart, but they are also definitely rich.

My life is great, I am not trying to complain.

Elsewhere you asked for proof. There is plenty of proof that income is the best predictor for attending an ivy league school.

Here is an article from harvard: https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2020/06/at-home-with-harvard...

Harvard has almost as many students from the nation’s top 0.1 percent highest-income families as from the bottom 20 percent.

Re: I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears

#256

Post by BadCookie »

foobarian wrote: post #241
mind-blight wrote: post #58

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…

I don't like how the word STEM gets thrown around because I feel it whitewashes the fact that most of the opportunity is in ad-supported web apps. Anyone trying to work in chemistry or physics finds this out the hard way.

Yeah. My friends with PhDs in physics are working in software engineering departments at startups and FAANG, their educations almost completely irrelevant to the work they do. At our college reunion, a beloved physics professor was disappointed that not one of his former students at the reunion was still in physics. But I am not sure why he was surprised given how hard and unpleasant it is to stay in academia/research. I didn’t even work at a FAANG, but leaving grad school and getting a programming job immediately cut my workload in half and increased my income by almost 4x … roughly an order-of-magnitude better deal. There’s no real opportunity in physics or math without essentially switching to software eventually.

Re: I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears

#257

Post by brigandish »

dudeman13 wrote: post #173
titzer wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If farm workers' job gets sufficiently bad from a value proposition perspective, then people will leave the occupation They are. Farmer suicides over the past 10 years have skyrocketed. Farmers are committing suicide at twice the rate of combat veterans. [1] I'm afraid I can't take your comment seriously as a dispassionate economic analysis since it lacks even basic empathy for people caught in this ongoing trainwr…

I don't think you can win this one. The free market might as well be a religion for some people. Nothing (not even historical facts) is enough evidence for it to not be the answers to all economic issues. Also, there are lots of US tech people here - with overly inflated salaries compared to approximately everyone else. And everyone knows those winning the game have a tendency to lose empathy and think the game is fa…

> The free market might as well be a religion for some people. Nothing (not even historical facts) is enough evidence for it to not be the answers to all economic issues.

Aside from their lack of empathy and the ignoring of the distortion of the supply of labour happening that makes the "non-problem" an actual problem, what is incorrect about pointing out that supply and demand are, if not the most fundamental factor then close to it, in a market?

Re: I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears

#258

Post by shagie »

rayiner wrote: post #225
wolverine876 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> College prepares people to be adults in every way, not to be a resource for corporations. Only 2% of Bangladeshis go to college. Are the rest not adults? Indeed, I’d say the opposite is true. Apart from job training, the main function of college in America seems to be extending adolescence and deferring dealing with the real world. 18 year olds in Bangladesh are a lot more “adult” than many college-educated 30-some…

The quote I believe corresponds to "the expected civic responsibilities that an individual has in that society."

There are many ways to prepare an individual for that responsibility. In western nations, that is often done more through a formal educational program than through the community and family.

This also isn't a "you must have X amount of civic responsibility" as different societies are looking for adults to have different amounts of responsibility within that society.

While American college is to an extent the deferment of responsibility, in many cases it is also the exposure to a wider range of cultures than one experienced up through high school. It is that exposure to other people and culture - learning to get along with a roommate or doing your own laundry in a gradual process that college presents.

In that respect, it is not a deferment of dealing with the real world, but rather a gradual introduction to the broader world. While the 18 year old American may be able to do unskilled labor and get along (tolerably) with siblings, being able to work in an office or understand that the upbringing of the driver of the carpool isn't the same as yours - that comes from that exposure to other people and cultures.

Re: I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears

#260

Post by nostrademons »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #221
com2kid wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People doing low voltage cat6 wiring make bank. Friend of mine got quoted 10k to run wires in his single family house, and that was w/o any walls up. Plumbers doing fancy installs, not plunging toilets, over $100/hr. Huge demand, not nearly enough workers. Some of the trades pay very, very, well. Heck live in nannies working 8 hour shifts don't have to pay for housing and they pull in 60k-80k. I know a woman running…

Home improvement is a crazy market. A lot of people seem to quote based upon what they think you can afford, which is easy to figure out since they usually do it while standing in your house.

One of our contractors actually said, "Yeah, I looked your house up on Redfin."
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