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College Was the Biggest Mistake of My Life

americandreaming.substack.com

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Re: College Was the Biggest Mistake of My Life

#131

Post by michaelt »

sircastor wrote: post #43

> What matters are connections, professional experience, and the ability to raise large sums of money. I have yet to find a job where these things are not true. In fact, I very much doubt there’s a job where it is your diploma that gets you that job. It’s almost always your connections. Your diploma from Stanford is more l likely to get you a job because of the name than your success in studying there. I finished my…

In fields with a lot of demand, like programming, loads of companies will go to recruitment fairs at universities and routinely hire people without any personal connections or professional experience.

Fields like fashion and journalism, on the other hand? Unless Mom or Dad has someone who owes them a favour you'll find there are far more graduates than jobs. Compounded with a nigh-endless supply of people willing to work unpaid internships in the hopes of one day getting paid.

Re: College Was the Biggest Mistake of My Life

#132

Post by throwawaygh »

ldiracdelta wrote: post #94

Depending on the program, college is a filter for higher IQ and attention to detail. There's a cheaper filter called an IQ test, but they are illegal in the US. There is no compelling reason why s/w engineering couldn't be taught on an apprenticeship model after passing some cheap psychology tests. Can you hold 11 variables in your head vs the standard 3 of normal humans? You may be good at s/w. Do you have a high G…

> There's a cheaper filter called an IQ test, but they are illegal in the US.

Tech people have been repeating this bullshit since the days when Slashdot was the HN. Maybe earlier. It's always been 99% false and 0% true, with 1% "it depends" (please spare us that bullshit).

IQ and IQ-like employment proficiency testing is literally an entire cottage industry.

> There is no compelling reason why s/w engineering couldn't be taught on an apprenticeship model

Two reasons, without thinking particularly hard:

1. Why internalize a cost that can be externalized?

2. Who's doing the mentoring? Senior Engineers make $300K-$600K. Professors make $60K-$200K. Most CS educators make less than their students' first year offers. So, even if you internalized the cost, you'd run it as a stand-alone training program as opposed to embedded apprenticeships. Which, btw, is what companies with "learn to code career pathways"tend to do.

> Do you have a high G score? You may be good at software.

I know lots of geniuses -- in the sense of high Putnam scores even -- who are clever programmers but couldn't SWE their way out of a wet paper bag. I also know a lot of folks who are not particularly bright but who are really fantastic SWEs.

It's not clear to me that IQ is a good predictor of SWE performance for most SWE roles, any more than it's a good predictor for literally any job (including checkout clerk or fry cook, btw).

IME certain types of Software folks massively over-estimate their own intelligence and also the importance of IQ-like intelligence required to be excellent in 99% of software development roles.

Re: College Was the Biggest Mistake of My Life

#133

Post by the_only_law »

bingohbangoh wrote: post #33

Chiming in as a recent American college grad... One of the most disappointing aspects of American College life is how incurious everybody seemed to be. I had grown up with Reddit & Twitter and easily, many times over, had more interesting conversations, read more nuanced takes, and learned more about the world than I did in any of my college classes. Granted, I was a STEM major with very few humanities classes. But g…

> One of the most disappointing aspects of American College life is how incurious everybody seemed to be.

I would love the opportunity to engage my curiosities, sadly school is expensive as shit and the only way it seems possible is to be wealth now or take a vow of poverty.

Re: College Was the Biggest Mistake of My Life

#134

Post by lotsofpulp »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #106
coldpie wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So did I. No, we don't, but it will still benefit you. When your peers are less beholden to their jobs because of their debt shackles, they can ask more of their employers, which will also raise your working conditions. Sometimes life isn't 100% fair, and that sucks and I'm sorry. But looking at it objectively, it's still an improvement for you. (And, "I suffered, so others must suffer, too" isn't a great way to set…

Thank you for being a knowledgeable, decent human participating in a democracy. More of this is needed all around.

The politically palatable way would be to give everyone $100k indiscriminately, not just people who took out college loans. It is never going to be politically popular to bail out people who studied literature by borrowing tens of thousands of dollars while other 18 year olds are going into the army or working as a trades’ apprentice.

Re: College Was the Biggest Mistake of My Life

#135

Post by WkndTriathlete »

ldiracdelta wrote: post #94

Depending on the program, college is a filter for higher IQ and attention to detail. There's a cheaper filter called an IQ test, but they are illegal in the US. There is no compelling reason why s/w engineering couldn't be taught on an apprenticeship model after passing some cheap psychology tests. Can you hold 11 variables in your head vs the standard 3 of normal humans? You may be good at s/w. Do you have a high G…

20% of good software engineering is knowing the computer science aspect of software. 80% of good software engineering is being able to translate the problem domain into software and back, as well as communication. IQ tests do not test for the latter, which is arguably the most important part.

My ability as a software engineer to effortlessly shift between industries is directly due to the broad college education I received. Software apprenticeships would only lead to a largely immobile workforce stuck in one or two particular technologies.

There seems to be this perception in some circles that software engineering is a handful of senior or principal software engineers tediously writing very detailed stories with specifications for hundreds of junior software engineers to crunch out without thinking. This is, without a doubt, one of the most expensive and least efficient means of software development. It's also what an apprenticeship system without college gets you.

Re: College Was the Biggest Mistake of My Life

#136

Post by 0x500x79 »

The college system should not be destroyed but be re-thought. I think that the following conditions should be put-in-place: 1. We should stop focusing on universities for any jobs that don't require it. Open up community college degrees to be 4 year for professions that don't need university-level depth. 2. Any profession that is "civic service" should have the debts paid for by the state/federal government after X-years of service. 3. Limit the number of loans available for certain degrees.

The article talks about film degrees being not very useful long-term. This should not be something that requires taking 100k of debt out of and we should not push teenagers to take on these loans.

For civic professions like teachers, librarians, medicine (nursing): These are jobs that are required for a functioning society. We should not push 100k of debt for a 40k/yr job. Wipe out the debt after a number of years of service.

I am not at all disappointed with my decision to attend university, I make plenty of money to pay loans due to being in an affluent career (software engineering). The article calls out that STEM, Doctors, etc should have university-level education and I agree. Let's get away from having students rack up 100's of thousands of dollars on debt for degrees that don't provide that value over 10-20 years to the receiver.

Re: College Was the Biggest Mistake of My Life

#137

Post by the_only_law »

christophilus wrote: post #20

My advice: go somewhere cheap, and get a practical degree. I went to CCU for most of my college career (back when it had just become a standalone university). Wasn't (still isn't) prestigious, but with scholarships, was entirely free for me, and it had the added benefit of attracting some decent professors who had retired to the beach and still wanted to teach part time. Today, for in-state tuition, it's around $47K…

> Today, for in-state tuition, it's around $47K for a 4-year degree.

Fucking Christ this is cheap?

> marine-biology

I don’t think this is a very useful degree. Don’t most biologists have to go through the PhD/PostDoc trying before they can find a job in the field paying more than $30k.

Re: College Was the Biggest Mistake of My Life

#138

Post by the_only_law »

awillen wrote: post #113
christophilus wrote: post #20

My advice: go somewhere cheap, and get a practical degree. I went to CCU for most of my college career (back when it had just become a standalone university). Wasn't (still isn't) prestigious, but with scholarships, was entirely free for me, and it had the added benefit of attracting some decent professors who had retired to the beach and still wanted to teach part time. Today, for in-state tuition, it's around $47K…

I wish people would push vocational schools like they did college. We are going to need thousands and thousands of nurses in the next several decades. They're well-paying jobs that aren't going to be automated away in our lifetimes (a lot of doctors, on the other hand, can probably be replaced by AI). We need nurses, not people with sociology degrees (I say this as someone with a sociology degree).

> We are going to need thousands and thousands of nurses in the next several decades. They're well-paying jobs that aren't going to be automated away in our lifetimes (a lot of doctors, on the other hand, can probably be replaced by AI). We need nurses, not people with sociology degrees (I say this as someone with a sociology degree).

FWIW a lot of the nurses I know are desperate to get out. One person in particular I know makes ok money but the schedule absolutely destroys them.

Re: College Was the Biggest Mistake of My Life

#139

Post by the_only_law »

TheKnack wrote: post #70
omarhaneef wrote: post #9

One point of view arguing for a non-stem degree is that it teaches you to read, write and think. And there is some logic to that thought. Even if you spend 4 years just learning about, say, Sociology, you have to read up on a debate, summarize the background, have an opinion, be challenged and so forth. And you are on your way to 10k hours. Now film school might have a component of that, or maybe it is teaching you h…

I have a STEM degree from a liberal arts university. Half of my courses were not part of my major requirements and many if not most were humanities type courses. I've always felt that combination has given me a big advantage over others who went got the same degree from traditional universities. STEM curriculum does not have to exclude "reading, writing, and thinking".

I’m absolutely fine with including the general humanities courses in theory, but in practice that’s tens of thousands of dollars more I have to pull out of my ass somewhere.

Re: College Was the Biggest Mistake of My Life

#140

Post by michaelt »

platz wrote: post #103
ylhert wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree for the most part, but I don’t think many of these creative endeavors are helped by college (and the costs/debt it brings). In fact, there is a counter argument that perhaps there would be more successful creatives if we did not push everyone to go to college and take on lots of debt; they would have more time, energy, and money that they could more directly apply towards the pursuit of those creative dreams

by what mechanism can they directly apply towards the pursuit

In some creative fields you can just jump straight into doing it.

For example, if your creative aspirations lie in youtube, or twitch, or instagram, or tiktok - mostly they just start doing it, self-educating about things like lighting and lenses.

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