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The Coming Meltdown In College Education & Why The Economy Won’t Get Better Soon

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Re: The Coming Meltdown In College Education & Why The Economy Won’t Get Better Soon

#101

Post by andrewflnr »

kamaal wrote: post #88
ender7 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, "went to MIT" is both easily recognizable and easily verified. "Built a fusion reactor in my basement" is neither of those things. Similarly, "check out my GitHub" has many of the same problems. I'm sorry, but most employers don't have time to look you up on GitHub to crawl through all your commits. That will happen if you get past the first cut, but it won't do anything beforehand. Sure, you can put "…

>> They simply don't have the time to do research on each one. As with anything, you have to find some way to stand out, but in a way that doesn't require them to visit your basement. In that case they shouldn't look too surprised if they end up hiring wrong people. Or they end up hiring a person with a lot of paper degrees but can't move a coin on the table. Because you ultimately get what your truly ask for. You as…

In that case they shouldn't look too surprised if they end up hiring wrong people.

They shouldn't, but they probably will anyway. I think you have to assume that lots of companies will be stupid and work with them or work around them.

Re: The Coming Meltdown In College Education & Why The Economy Won’t Get Better Soon

#102

Post by vannevar »

Can someone please explain to me how what is happening in higher education is any different ?

Sure. The big difference (enormous, really) is that unlike homes, there is no secondary market for diplomas. We talk about an education as an investment, but in truth the 'asset' is us. One reason the housing bubble was so devastating was that if one person defaulted, it marginally depressed the value of everyone else's home. If someone defaults on their student loan, it doesn't make everyone else's education less valuable. The student loan debt problem is much more like the credit card debt problem, which exacerbated the housing bubble but on its own had nowhere near the cascading impact. Student loans are a problem, but they are not a crisis. We should be much more concerned that there has been no meaningful banking reform since the 2008 crisis, and that banks are still gambling on dangerous derivatives whose real risks are unknown and quite possibly incomputable.

Re: The Coming Meltdown In College Education & Why The Economy Won’t Get Better Soon

#103

Post by ender7 »

kamaal wrote: post #88
ender7 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, "went to MIT" is both easily recognizable and easily verified. "Built a fusion reactor in my basement" is neither of those things. Similarly, "check out my GitHub" has many of the same problems. I'm sorry, but most employers don't have time to look you up on GitHub to crawl through all your commits. That will happen if you get past the first cut, but it won't do anything beforehand. Sure, you can put "…

>> They simply don't have the time to do research on each one. As with anything, you have to find some way to stand out, but in a way that doesn't require them to visit your basement. In that case they shouldn't look too surprised if they end up hiring wrong people. Or they end up hiring a person with a lot of paper degrees but can't move a coin on the table. Because you ultimately get what your truly ask for. You as…

Yeah, I'm not arguing that a degree is a good indicator of performance.

You have to put yourself in the shoes of the person in charge of hiring. If you advertise a well-paid tech position, you will probably get thousands of applications. You can't read them all in elaborate detail. You can't visit everyone's Github. You just don't have time. So how do you cull? Just randomly select 10% and go with that? What if you happen to pick all the bad ones? That's not going to work. Industry experience? That's easy to fake and also doesn't really mean anything. Contact their previous employers? Those interviews are notoriously inaccurate and also way too time-consuming.

If they graduate from a good college, that's possibly a good sign (but possibly not! easy to get a CS degree and have no work ethic). If their resume lists a bunch of personal projects and GitHub links, that's possibly a good sign (but possibly not! easy to push random crap to GitHub that no one will use).

I'm afraid it all comes down to time. Either you hire an army of extremely well-trained HR people who are all capable of evaluating code quality and project performance (in which case, why aren't they off programming themselves?) or you come up with some heuristic for culling applications that doesn't take an inordinate amount of time. It's harder than it sounds, and that's why employers fall back on do-you-have-a-degree - because it sits at the sweet spot of sort-of-predictive and easy-to-cull. Or they end up asking their current employees who to hire, which means they hire their friends (which is not necessarily a bad thing).

Re: The Coming Meltdown In College Education & Why The Economy Won’t Get Better Soon

#104

Post by mkramlich »

jellicle wrote: post #43

Mark Cuban writes: "As an employer I want the best prepared and qualified employees. I could care less if the source of their education was accredited by a bunch of old men and women who think they know what is best for the world. I want people who can do the job. I want the best and brightest. Not a piece of paper." So, I suppose I could be wrong, but I would be willing to bet a great deal of money that Mark Cuban d…

Fuck college. It's not the only way to learn, to meet people, or to show your expertise, capabilities and accomplishments anymore. We have this thing called the Internet now. Write a book. Put a PDF online. Record a video of yourself giving an intelligent speech or showing some useful talent. Put it on YouTube. Write software. Put on GitHub. Answer technical questions well on StackExchange (or whatever for your particular industry/field.) Apply your supposed skills and talents on something tangible then put it on the web and be findable. Fuck 4-6 years of your life and $100k in debt. Fuck all that.

Re: The Coming Meltdown In College Education & Why The Economy Won’t Get Better Soon

#105

Post by hedgie »

mathattack wrote: post #97

He nails the key issue - cheap easy money that can be flipped later for a high paying job. Of course the job may or may not be there. It's worth it for Harvard, but perhaps not for Bradley.

not sure that's the case.

"Here, however, is what was explosive: Dale and Krueger concluded that students, who were accepted into elite schools, but went to less selective institutions, earned salaries just as high as Ivy League grads. For instance, if a teenager gained entry to Harvard, but ended up attending Penn State, his or her salary prospects would be the same.

In the pair's newest study, the findings are even more amazing. Applicants, who shared similar high SAT scores with Ivy League applicants could have been rejected from the elite schools that they applied to and yet they still enjoyed similar average salaries as the graduates from elite schools. In the study, the better predictor of earnings was the average SAT scores of the most selective school a teenager applied to and not the typical scores of the institution the student attended."

there's a guy at work with a phd in math from princeton. there are plenty of people with his job title that didn't spend all that money to get there. most of them went to the great in state engineering school and spent far less money for the same result.

http://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/the-college-solution/2...

Re: The Coming Meltdown In College Education & Why The Economy Won’t Get Better Soon

#106

Post by tzs »

learc83 wrote: post #30
MaxGabriel wrote: post #7

This was the first comment on Cuban's blog. Can anyone comment on it? I listened to the NPR Podcast, it is specific to private colleges; I am not sure how public colleges fit in. "The most recent Planet Money on NPR was about the cost of college. [1] They point out that the price that has been rising is the “sticker price.” However, the average price a student pays for college hasn’t risen (except to adjust for infla…

>The reason student loan debt has ballooned isn’t because students are paying more. That's not true, I've seen numerous articles on the cost of public colleges increasing much faster than inflation. Anecdote: I dropped out of Georgia State in 2007, I'm going back now to finish my last few semesters of a math degree. The cost has more than doubled in the last 5 years.

The situation seems to be quite different at private schools. Here's a graph of Stanford tuition from 1920 to 2011, plotted on a log scale:

http://imgur.com/dGiSi

I've put a linear regression line on top. It's a pretty good fit.

I can't find the data now to do a plot for it, but I saw similar numbers for Harvard from around 1970 to present, and they similarly showed a pretty steady growth.

Public schools are much more variable, I believe, because they are one of the few state institutions that is allowed and/or required to get a large part of its budget from fees to its users. Thus, when a state has budget trouble there is a tendency to make state colleges and universities raise tuition.

PS: the tuition data I have for Stanford gives the tuition at the start of each decade from 1920 through 1990, then gives yearly data. I probably should have plotted points, not lines.

Re: The Coming Meltdown In College Education & Why The Economy Won’t Get Better Soon

#107

Post by [deleted] »

learc83 wrote: post #30
MaxGabriel wrote: post #7

This was the first comment on Cuban's blog. Can anyone comment on it? I listened to the NPR Podcast, it is specific to private colleges; I am not sure how public colleges fit in. "The most recent Planet Money on NPR was about the cost of college. [1] They point out that the price that has been rising is the “sticker price.” However, the average price a student pays for college hasn’t risen (except to adjust for infla…

>The reason student loan debt has ballooned isn’t because students are paying more. That's not true, I've seen numerous articles on the cost of public colleges increasing much faster than inflation. Anecdote: I dropped out of Georgia State in 2007, I'm going back now to finish my last few semesters of a math degree. The cost has more than doubled in the last 5 years.

[deleted]

Re: The Coming Meltdown In College Education & Why The Economy Won’t Get Better Soon

#108

Post by randomdata »

jey wrote: post #92
davyjones wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. I have found blog posts where there are snippets about how they are "looking for bright and interesting minds and college degree does not matter" but when you look at their Jobs page, you have a BS Computer Science or equivalent requirement listed there.

It does say "BS Computer Science or equivalent " -- so they're asking for a certain level of education, which doesn't necessarily have to be in the form of a college degree.

It is interesting that they still choose to use college-level credentials as the baseline metric though. Why not "Four years of demonstrable self-directed learning in the study, or equivalent"?

Re: The Coming Meltdown In College Education & Why The Economy Won’t Get Better Soon

#109

Post by eli_gottlieb »

glesica wrote: post #40

This is just absurd. Non-accredited, branded schools will provide better education for less money? Really? I assume he's referring to the growing for-profit college industry. Yet for-profit colleges are actually the biggest culprits driving up the student debt. Students at for-profit colleges run up more debt, are more likely to drop out, and are more likely to end up under-employed than those at traditional universi…

What I find disturbing here is the complete, total, hegemonic shift to thinking of education as job-training.

Re: The Coming Meltdown In College Education & Why The Economy Won’t Get Better Soon

#110

Post by eli_gottlieb »

talmand wrote: post #98
DTrejo wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He might mean things like http://www.khanacademy.org/ and http://devbootcamp.com/experience .

Not trying to complain since it looks like a good program, but why does Dev Bootcamp lump Jquery, Coffeescript, SASS, HAML, AJAX, and others under Advanced Rails Technologies? Shouldn't that be Advanced Web Technologies or are they just simplifying things for their Rails program?

They have a course in Advanced Rails Technologies? What kind of damned idiot takes "Advanced Rails Technologies"?
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