631–640 of 1001 posts
I mean, look at coding bootcamps and all of these online learning platforms, the market found a niche. I think the same would happen with colleges without the gravy train of student loans.
Have a 3 tiered system of free public, cheap private, and expensive private would serve everyone I think.
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My point is that you claim that college prepares people to be adults “in every way”, so I wonder in what way today’s college graduates are more prepared to be adults than, say, overwhelming majority of adults were in 1930s, who didn’t have any college experience.
In the 1930s, you weren't expected to have 5 years of experience for an entry level job, and they had actual on-the-job training, which no company wants to invest in anymore.
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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 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 t…
> Getting rid of SATs from my perspective sounds like a fantastic idea.
There are two types of standardized tests. The first kind you reference measures the school. They are not used for college admissions. They can affect school funding.
The second type of test measures the student. Sometimes a school will report those numbers. But they do not affect the funding a school gets.
Getting rid of the SAT would have zero effect on contingent funding for schools.
Sam Altman makes a lot of grandiose predictions and statements. For example, in 2019 he said “Human radiologists are already much worse than computer radiologists. If I had to pick a human or an AI to read my scan, I’d pick the AI.” [0] However, most people with domain knowledge in this space still would not want their scan not to be read by a human. The AI radiology apps are generally narrowly focused and useful for…
It’s just simply the case of - I’ve got the money, and hence I’ve got an audience, and (hence or not) I’ve got an urgent need to make random proclamations. Founder of this site does that a lot too and just like this post almost always gets a lot of attention.
Some people can just afford to do and have people listen to their useless brain flatulations and on the side are often called visionaries and shit. That happens on every socioeconomic levels and sub-levels, of course on different scales. So that’s there.
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> Teaching? Never heard of it. This view is starting to become outdated. Plenty of schools now have a role known as "Teaching Professor" that focuses on teaching, with no research expectation. They have all the same qualifications as any faculty hired for the role, like a Ph.D. in the field. At UPenn at least they can even get tenure.
How does that work now at UPenn?
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> Vomit. LOL. C'mon, Musk builds rockets, electric cars, robot trucks, and tunnel boring machines. How much more Tom Swift can one get? Ok, Ok, I admit he hasn't yet built a Jetmarine or an Atomic Earth Blaster. > You surely know people smarter than him who didn't acquire the mass amounts of money I've never met Musk, so cannot attest personally to his smarts. But I've met plenty of very smart people. But smarts alon…
8. Lots of money.
Besides, although Musk was born into wealth, there's no evidence on his wikipedia page that he had access to it:
"working odd jobs at a farm and lumber-mill" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk
"Musk says that before the company became successful, he could not afford an apartment and instead rented an office and slept on the couch and showered at the YMCA, and shared one computer with his brother."
He made his initial money on an internet startup. Nothing wrong with that.
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How does that work now at UPenn?
So this is based on what a colleague told me who left my institution for UPenn. The position is "Teaching Professor" or equivalent where the idea is you spend most of your time teaching, with zero expectation of research, although you might want to engage in research about teaching. That kind of introspection comes naturally. Usually this role is without tenure, but universities are trying to make this position more…
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I went to work when I was 18. I don't think I've spent my career doing menial work.
Look how many people have taken this same approach - purposely miscontrue the discussion into a personal attack and respond. Perhaps people who did go to college can also take discussion personally and get mad about others saying they wasted their time and money. Then we'll have an even better discussion! Yes, I'm saying that you personally - and your dog too - are an ignorant, uneducated, menial worker, who can't co…
Did I use that word right?
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FWIW, I think that this factor: > If the upper class want someplace to send their kids to read poetry and binge drink for 4 years Is the heart of the problem. For a long time, this was basically the core function of universities - to make people part of the elite. We told ourselves that it was actually about the things being taught rather than social connections. Maybe to a certain extent it even was. But then, opera…
Do you think access to education is a human right? I find your last paragraph a bit troubling, I agree that becoming a part of the elite does not really have a significance with regards to your own worth. But the USA is not a country that revolves around the middle class, its a country that revolves around the elites. In America not being part of the elite is a failure because the political and economical system is m…
Education is good, but it should be as cheap and simple as possible. Putting it in universities that cost more than the per-capita GDP to attend is about as far from that as it gets. If we take that system and call it a "human right" and get the Government directly involved in paying for it, we're only making it worse by institutionalizing all of the bad practices that make it so insanely expensive, making it even more difficult to ever change and effectively extracting even more money from the people who don't use it.
Education is also not for everyone, and not at every time. People should pursue it because they actually want it, not because they perceive or are told they need it to succeed in life. We shouldn't tell kids they're destined for failure if they don't go to college, shouldn't shame people for being interested in jobs that don't need college, and shouldn't require college degrees for jobs that don't actually need it.