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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

#261

Post by paulpauper »

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…

Have you been to a shopping mall or McDonalds, even in expensive areas like the Bay Area? Poor , low-income families with the latest gadgets, nice clothes. The money is coming from somewhere. Also, tons of subsidized programs like education, housing, and healthcare. Sure, they are not wealthy in the sense of making a lot of money, but enjoy a good standard of living nevertheless.

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

#262

Post by raincom »

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

Two intelligent people--one due to his circumstances end up going to UC Merced, another ends up graduating from Harvard. Both excel in excel sheets, financial modeling, the UCMerced graduate would be working as a financial analyst at Cisco, whereas the Harvard one will be doing a similar thing at Goldman Sachs.

So, the issue is not one of smartness, as Harvard itself says in its reports, since majority of their applicants are smart anyway. That's how the filtering works for the super elite, and the 'servants' of this super elite--and this 'servant' class also also elite as well. Here, I am not using 'servant' in pejorative sense, but in the sense that one who works for super elite end up making millions a year.

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

#263

Post by gruez »

ajb wrote: post #210
beaned wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He justified it with his next sentence: > If farm workers' job gets sufficiently bad from a value proposition perspective, then people will leave the occupation and employers would be forced to pay higher wages to attract workers.

Not everything is like the laws of physics, which continue to work over many orders of magnitude. Supply and demand for employment works backwards at both the top and the bottom of the salary range. At the top, beyond a certain point supply decreases because people save enough to give up working. At the other end, reducing post can increase supply because people's need for income of inelastic below a certain point, s…

>Supply and demand for employment works backwards at both the top and the bottom of the salary range. At the top, beyond a certain point supply decreases because people save enough to give up working.

Is this really applicable to this context? In other words, are farming jobs really going to get to a point where the pay is $10M a year, and people only take the job for a year and then never work another day? Considering that being a farmer has basically no barrier to entry, I doubt it will get to that point. Not to mention, if farm labor was really that expensive, so would the cost of living, so those would be FIRE farm workers would have to come back to pay the increased food bill.

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

#264

Post by xadhominemx »

edflsafoiewq wrote: post #159
crackercrews wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You get 200 points per section automatically. [1] And to get into MIT you'd need at least 1,000 points, no matter your race. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT

Why does it have such a weird score range?

You get negative points for answering incorrectly, to disincentivize blind guessing.

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

#265

Post by nimithryn »

dmurray wrote: post #160
nimithryn wrote: post #152

Some of these points are correct. College does seem to be providing less value in the US, etc. Maybe some third-tier universities could be in trouble if there's a decline in college attendance. But, "collapsing"? Universities are one of the most long-lived types of institutions known to humankind. Oxford was founded in 1096. I suspect they will be around quite a lot longer.

I don't think he's suggesting universities will go away completely. A 10% or 30% or 90% in US university attendance/revenue/headcount over a period of a few years would objectively be a collapse no matter how well Oxford or MIT continues to thrive.

I mean, his ideas for replacing universities seem oriented at the elite institutions: https://twitter.com/sama/status/1505599701864701954

TBH I don't think it's clear what he's suggesting.

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

#266

Post by andrewjl »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #149
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…

> 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…

> But AFAIK the main market distortion in the farming industry is the opposite: subsidies that make farming more attractive than it would be, which would tend to increase farm workers' equilibrium wages.

That might be true for markets in the abstract but the market for farm labor is distorted in several ways. One is due to historical reasons farm labor is treated differently from other labor categories and the end result is many of those workers have fewer protections. The second is, as others mentioned, many cannot seek other work due to lack of documentation. In effect becoming a captive labor force with limited ability to advocate for itself.

As an aside, whenever markets display aberrant behavior in the real world, it pays to look for the distortions. They're usually not hard to spot.

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

#267

Post by brigandish »

lordnacho wrote: post #250
gruez wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Serious question - have you ever been poor? Are you aware that sometimes people have to work at shitty jobs because they have no other options? OP was talking about the problem from a practical perspective (ie. "We really need farm workers", presumably worried about a future where there aren't enough farm workers and we starve or something), and I was addressing that in the same way. Your objection seems to be from…

The whole price stickiness thing is the free market not working. How can you say the market will sort it out and in the next post give the mechanism for why it doesn't do so? What you're really arguing isn't that the market will sort things out to someone's satisfaction, you're just saying the market is a jungle and whatever survives survives.

> The whole price stickiness thing is the free market not working

Wouldn't the standard response to that be that it's not really a free market, and if it were made more free then such inefficiencies would be less likely to occur?

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

#268

Post by jdauriemma »

There was something on the HN front page recently that asserted that the goals of education and capitalism are (paraphrasing from memory) fundamentally at odds with one another. I thought that statement captured the state of things perfectly. All the hand-wringing over “alternatives” to universities will accomplish little if this underlying conflict is not resolved.

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

#269

Post by chaps »

sometimeshuman wrote: post #94
crackercrews wrote: post #52

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…

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 grew up in lower socioeconomic status and can confirm that the university admissions process was never really taught to us in any meaningful way. Teachers never talked about it, my parents never talked about it, counselors didn't talk about it, etc. Our education was built around testing because if our school got bad testing, then the school would lose funding. Our education was damaged as a result, every teacher talked about it as an awful system, and the kids who did well in testing had enough money to pay for tutors, ie they were already advantaged

Getting rid of SATs from my perspective sounds like a fantastic idea.

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

#270

Post by a1pulley »

com2kid wrote: post #151
tester756 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's real problem Only one person (the oldest one) from my like 20-30ppl circle within age range of 20-30 gets close to IT salaries, that's ridiculous in most cases it is around 40% (around 2 minimal wages) of my *nothing special* salary by IT standards (4.5 minimal wages), people with better cards get 7-10 minimal wages here, top people like 15-20+ and they see no reasonably easy way to jump higher (e.g within one…

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…

> 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.

Someone on Nextdoor was confused about how to "add those jack things" to the ethernet cables in her prewired house. I spent a few minutes linking her to YT videos and an article so she could do it herself. No response, but a few weeks later someone else PM'd me: "Wanna make a couple bucks?"

Ignoring the tone-deafness of that question: yes, low voltage wiring quotes are ridiculous, but it's also one of the easiest DIY projects you can do if have an attic or crawlspace. I installed four access points through my attic and a UAP-AC-M-PRO-US for backyard coverage.

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