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More students are turning away from college and toward apprenticeships

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Re: More students are turning away from college and toward apprenticeships

#521

Post by pdntspa »

bumby wrote: post #499
pdntspa wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's all shit that I am sure I would be able to answer if I had paid attention in class. Which is what they are trying to test.

Obviously the entire test is about what’s taught in class, but distilling it down to the single dimension of “basic math” in your dismissal was what I found interesting.

Because it was the one area I was familiar with. The others... not so much. But if I was in classes contemporary to the test and had paid attention, I probably would have.

Re: More students are turning away from college and toward apprenticeships

#522

Post by lanza »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #26

College seems to have ~3 uses from students' perspectives: 1. A trade school for technical professionals who actually need specialist education (scientists, engineers, lawyers, doctors, etc.) 2. A finishing school for the elite 3. A blood sports arena for the brilliant to complete for professorships (almost all of whom will lose and be saddled with 6 figures of debt and 7 figures of opportunity cost) A lot of people…

I'd definitely explicitly add business to the first entry. Sure you can work in business without a degree, but the experience with the mathematics and ideas that you learn is definitely a huge benefit.

Re: More students are turning away from college and toward apprenticeships

#523

Post by [deleted] »

ericd wrote: post #510
hamburglar wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The self-taught path can also lead to another kind of deficiency, which is someone who knows all the concepts but doesn’t know how to talk about them efficiently. This ends up being the type of person who spends 5 minutes describing a component of their design where items are stored based on a key and can be looked up by that key so another process can stash and retrieve those things rather than recompute them but th…

I think reimplementing that stuff is probably a big part of why you felt they were so brilliant, though - once you've built your own way up the tech tree, you can see the whole tree, and move around it at will, drawing disparate parts into solving whatever problem you have right then.

[deleted]

Re: More students are turning away from college and toward apprenticeships

#524

Post by bumby »

pdntspa wrote: post #521
bumby wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously the entire test is about what’s taught in class, but distilling it down to the single dimension of “basic math” in your dismissal was what I found interesting.

Because it was the one area I was familiar with. The others... not so much. But if I was in classes contemporary to the test and had paid attention, I probably would have.

I think that was part of the OPs point: in general, we aren’t familiar with all that they were testing for, so cherry-picking the domain you feel comfortable answering kinda proves their point rather than negating it.

Not that it really proves anything in the larger scope they seemed to imply. At least, not anymore than losing on the old show “are you smarter than a fifth grader?”

Re: More students are turning away from college and toward apprenticeships

#525

Post by travisgriggs »

rootusrootus wrote: post #449
xyzelement wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are referring to something on one hand very valuable, on the other hand it's very easy to graduate college without learning that, and I think colleges themselves in recent decades are pivoting away from. A hundred+ years ago when "almost nobody" went to college, college was a place for those hungry and willing to sacrifice for intellectual growth. Nowadays college is a baseline consumer good that "almost…

> I had a class that really critically analyzed native American cultures. Today the class would be considered racist, it would have to a priori be an admiration of those cultures, rather than a critical analysis. It's amazing that now we're getting hit from both directions in this regard. The left would like minorities treated with kid gloves, and now the right wants to muzzle schools that would say anything critical…

Almost like Sneetches (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sneetches_and_Other_Storie...)

Contention creates a magnet for nonelastic investment in things monetary as well as social will. A surveillance economony that creates opportunity like today's commercialized internet would have been a wet dream for Sylvester McMonkey McBean.

Re: More students are turning away from college and toward apprenticeships

#526

Post by hamburglar »

ericd wrote: post #510
hamburglar wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The self-taught path can also lead to another kind of deficiency, which is someone who knows all the concepts but doesn’t know how to talk about them efficiently. This ends up being the type of person who spends 5 minutes describing a component of their design where items are stored based on a key and can be looked up by that key so another process can stash and retrieve those things rather than recompute them but th…

I think reimplementing that stuff is probably a big part of why you felt they were so brilliant, though - once you've built your own way up the tech tree, you can see the whole tree, and move around it at will, drawing disparate parts into solving whatever problem you have right then.

No, the brilliance was evidenced elsewhere. The fact that this person was unaware of (or didn’t appreciate) prior art and had to invent everything from scratch when it could have been pulled off the shelf wasted a lot of time debugging and running into mistakes that other people had already run into and solved. His brilliance meant we succeeded in spite of this stupid habit.

Re: More students are turning away from college and toward apprenticeships

#527

Post by spacephysics »

nonethewiser wrote: post #432
spacephysics wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fully agree. And to continue this, I think one step that would be accepted across the aisle (in lieu of total debt forgiveness) is to either severely cut or get rid of interest rates on school loans. The compound interest working against students is a major part of the predation in these loans. But banks need to make money? Have a one-time interest tacked onto the total loan amount that doesn’t change over time. This…

> Fully agree. And to continue this, I think one step that would be accepted across the aisle (in lieu of total debt forgiveness) is to either severely cut or get rid of interest rates on school loans. I dont understand how you agree with the post yet come to this conclusion. If debt is the source of the problem why encourage more of it? The point is colleges can always raise prices because students can just take out…

You also put a cap that the median income worker can pay off reasonably. So anything above would need private loans

Re: More students are turning away from college and toward apprenticeships

#528

Post by eyelidlessness »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #26

College seems to have ~3 uses from students' perspectives: 1. A trade school for technical professionals who actually need specialist education (scientists, engineers, lawyers, doctors, etc.) 2. A finishing school for the elite 3. A blood sports arena for the brilliant to complete for professorships (almost all of whom will lose and be saddled with 6 figures of debt and 7 figures of opportunity cost) A lot of people…

I’m just a HS graduate who should’ve failed my senior year, and I may well have dropped out of HS if I could go back and do it again. So, an enormous grain of salt should accompany what I’m about to say.

I think the benefits of a liberal arts education are probably worth everything its proponents say. Having a well rounded education, which exposes one to not just new ideas but an openness to new ways of thinking, is invaluable. I’ve hobbled together what I can from earnest interest (and some free courses from universities which opened up their lectures), and I’ve grown a lot from that. I hesitate to imagine how much more I’d have benefited from college being described not as a vehicle for future success but as a part of becoming a person in a world that only gets more complex—with age, responsibility, and time in a society.

I lucked out on the career front, but a more formal and broad education is something I really regret not pursuing at the time it most fit my life trajectory. And I think everyone benefits from that spirit of education continuing to exist.

Re: More students are turning away from college and toward apprenticeships

#529

Post by jackmott »

mfer wrote: post #53
azinman2 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also grows the intellectual souls, exposing people to far more depth of thought. It also builds professional networks. If a person is smart enough to receive it, more education is almost always good. Of course money is a factor, and schools have gotten insanely expensive. I’m glad to hear that more people are finding alternative routes - it shouldn’t be that everyone needs college because quite frankly many career…

> But I wouldn’t dismiss its value in being taught how to think. Few universities teach how to think. Most teach what to think. Critical thinking, reasoning through ideas and concepts, and research are often lacking. > I wish there was a bigger focus in physics, math, and philosophy for those who didn’t know what to do I don't buy that. You can't by a psychiatrist. You can't be a medical doctor or nutritionist. There…

[dead]

Re: More students are turning away from college and toward apprenticeships

#530

Post by bastawhiz »

azinman2 wrote: post #40
pclmulqdq wrote: post #26

College seems to have ~3 uses from students' perspectives: 1. A trade school for technical professionals who actually need specialist education (scientists, engineers, lawyers, doctors, etc.) 2. A finishing school for the elite 3. A blood sports arena for the brilliant to complete for professorships (almost all of whom will lose and be saddled with 6 figures of debt and 7 figures of opportunity cost) A lot of people…

It also grows the intellectual souls, exposing people to far more depth of thought. It also builds professional networks. If a person is smart enough to receive it, more education is almost always good. Of course money is a factor, and schools have gotten insanely expensive. I’m glad to hear that more people are finding alternative routes - it shouldn’t be that everyone needs college because quite frankly many career…

> If a person is smart enough to receive it, more education is almost always good.

This presupposes that college provides a good enough education. Arguably, the more you pay for school, the better the quality of education. A community college CS education is probably not as good as getting your CS degree at MIT.

I made the mistake of going to a college for my first two years with only two CS professors. I'd taken all of the first professor's classes, and the second professor grilled us on binary => decimal, no calculator allowed, on each of her finals (even for Cyber Security and Java!). Not every education is worth the ink the diploma is printed with.

> Of course money is a factor,

Money is THE factor. The cheapest educations that aren't useless are still too expensive for most Americans to afford. Almost nobody can pay for college up front, and the financing is extremely predatory. That's literally the crisis.

No matter how good "learning to think" is, college simply isn't the right place to do it for millions of people. It ruins futures, and knowing how to think doesn't dig you out of crippling debt that only gets discharged if you die.

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