141–150 of 195 posts
There are universities - and I mean well-renowned universities - all across the globe where people can get a degree without necessarily having to go into an obscene amount of debt.
A degree may not be for everyone indeed, but we don't have to assume these issues have to necessarily be part of the process.
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…
> I will say that in the STEM degrees people were far more curious than in the humanities.
In my experience, this was not really the case. A lot of STEM people I met were very interested in some topics, but were either a) only superficially interested in things like ethics; b) only interested in a very specific view of ethics (some form of ultra techno-utilitarianism/utopianism for instance); or, c) immediately dismissive of whole conversations or areas of research without actually bothering to engage in any of the discussions. The more galling thing is they often thought that they could simply comment on those topics without any of the research. So just as there are journalists calling for people to learn ethics without learning to code, there are people who work on code who comment on art, or history, or philosophy, with little to no understanding of the long debates and research in those fields. It really goes both ways.
TBH, I don't think it's really about the whole STEM v. Humanities thing that people make it all about. It's really about the cost of higher education across the board.
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).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You seem to be complaining that your CS program is outdated because it teaches CS instead of Software Engineering or the programming trade. Kind of like complaining that a Material Science curriculum is dated because it teaches Material Science instead of Civil Engineering or the construction trade.
Your point seems kind of circular. CS can't be dated because you have a list of what is considered CS and your list is a single source of truth. But I wasn't arguing about terminology. I was just pointing out that many of the big, required courses in CS aren't that useful. Or maybe not as useful as the professors might imagine them to be. So call it whatever you like. I'm just agreeing that the curriculum is dated.
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 re…
They do, proper IQ tests have a language component. Properly reading, understanding and writing text is very much related to IQ.
I'll offer one anecdote of counter-college hate. I went to a local state school, graduated in three years with winter and summer classes, commuted for the second and third, worked the whole time, and came out with a very small amount of debt (maybe 5-10k, been a while now and I don't remember). I made friends in college, I was able to get into a great job via an internship that I got from the school job fair, and got…
(maybe 5-10k, been a while now and I don't remember) How long ago was it? I only ask because my eldest child is currently at university, and I believe the experience I had in the 1980s and she has now are fundamentally different. The academic, financial and employment landscape has changed a lot in the past 20-30 years, and that creates different pressures for both students and institutions. I now firmly believe doin…
I'll offer one anecdote of counter-college hate. I went to a local state school, graduated in three years with winter and summer classes, commuted for the second and third, worked the whole time, and came out with a very small amount of debt (maybe 5-10k, been a while now and I don't remember). I made friends in college, I was able to get into a great job via an internship that I got from the school job fair, and got…
What year did you graduate?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You seem to be complaining that your CS program is outdated because it teaches CS instead of Software Engineering or the programming trade. Kind of like complaining that a Material Science curriculum is dated because it teaches Material Science instead of Civil Engineering or the construction trade.
Your point seems kind of circular. CS can't be dated because you have a list of what is considered CS and your list is a single source of truth. But I wasn't arguing about terminology. I was just pointing out that many of the big, required courses in CS aren't that useful. Or maybe not as useful as the professors might imagine them to be. So call it whatever you like. I'm just agreeing that the curriculum is dated.
It's not.
> CS can't be dated because you have a list of what is considered CS and your list is a single source of truth.
CS curriculum can be dated, if it doesn't keep up with progress in the domain. It doesn't become dated just because you want to do something other than CS.
(It may be the case that the percentage of working programmers in jobs where a CS degree is a particularly relevant on-ramp has declined; that's certainly true for both EE and Mathematics, but those degrees aren't outdated, either.)
> I was just pointing out that many of the big, required courses in CS aren't that useful. Or maybe not as useful as the professors might imagine them to be.
They are useful, they just aren't useful for the task you want to do, which isn't computer science, or something which requires particular depth in computer science.
Compilers remain useful, as does the skill to construct them, even if it's not the job you expect to be competing for. More broadly, theory is useful, it's just you don't expect to be seeking jobs that are either doing research moving the field forward or building systems that require more than rudimentary theory.
“Not what I want” isn't the same thing as “outdated”.