131–140 of 168 posts
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Another thing we can add is sealing grades. If you can’t use your grades as a credential, the incentive to cheat is reduced. This won’t solve the relation between getting a job and living - that’s a job for UBI and a comprehensive social security system.
Or, maybe we get rid of them. Like maybe the idea of having grades is kind of silly in the first place?
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Free education and no grades with no business purpose already exists; it's called learning about things that interest you on your own time. I don't see why the taxpayer needs to pay for someone to do this.
Then you're missing the point of higher education.
And it's not just that it would cost a lot, it's that it would cost a lot and a motivated person can already do a 90% job of it for free on their own.
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The thing you're angry at, the thing that you're upset about? It's capitalism, it's the coupling of education with jobs, it's credentialism being overturned by new technology, etc. I think education is incredibly important, but I understand that I'm going to have to retrain myself a little bit. A college degree can no-longer be assumed to be a proxy for having put in the effort to deeply study something. Now what's t…
replying to my own thread here, but this got me thinking, so thanks OP, but... can anyone here think of some better ways where we could decouple the education process from the work process? To me this seems like the main problem. It seems that we've decided that "get good grades == good employee" collectively. I know I'm a bad employee (which is why I work for myself now but that's another story), but I got great gra…
Instead of getting student loans and going to college for 4 years where you don't accomplish much, companies should directly offer high school students 4 year full paid internships. At the end the student needs to go through a test from an expert in that field, possibly a professor lead examination, and to the degree that they pass the company and student share in a large prize. If they pass that test, they officially get the degree.
This is already a clusterfuck, but it's going to be so much worse in 10 years. We're going to have an entire generation trapped in the gig economy because their education is going to be considered worthless, and even if it wasn't worthless, there won't be enough entry level jobs for anyone to get into. Senior people will age out and our entire society is just going to be hollowed out. And people wonder why I'm an AI…
Yup. You can either A) ban AI (good luck) and teach students to understand CS fundamentals deeply - which will of course make them totally unsuitable for an industry that is demanding tokenmaxxing from every engineer; or B) embrace AI at the university and produce students that are nothing more than prompt "engineers".
I honestly pity watching my fellow software engineers rush to adapt to this new dystopia, just to stay afloat a little while longer before they are truly obsolete. It is quite tragic.
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replying to my own thread here, but this got me thinking, so thanks OP, but... can anyone here think of some better ways where we could decouple the education process from the work process? To me this seems like the main problem. It seems that we've decided that "get good grades == good employee" collectively. I know I'm a bad employee (which is why I work for myself now but that's another story), but I got great gra…
It's probably cleaner to directly couple those that want it, so that those that want to decouple can be left to the academic path. It's pretty normal to hear from people that when they entered the workforce they learned way more than what they learned at college. Let's incentivize this. Governments should directly subsidize education. Instead of getting student loans and going to college for 4 years where you don't a…
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Or, maybe we get rid of them. Like maybe the idea of having grades is kind of silly in the first place?
Your grades tell you and your teachers how well you are doing. It's a useful feedback tool.
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Then you're missing the point of higher education.
No, I understand the point of it, I just don't think it is worth the tens of thousands per person that it would cost to do it. I could accept a value argument for free university education in some form, but that form would not be for gradeless/credentialless unproductive studies. And it's not just that it would cost a lot, it's that it would cost a lot and a motivated person can already do a 90% job of it for free on…
That's the thing, like, there's not a whole hell of a lot I learned in Phil 201 that is directly applicable to my job, but, you know the class is valuable. I took art history in college. Turned into being one of the most important classes I ever took and I'm one of those stem major types.
Productivity shouldn't be the point of education - you get productivity indirectly out of the education and search for knowledge, but if we want more data plumbers (which is largely what most of the programming I do for money on a regular basis is), I don't think we necessarily need to make certain that college is paying for them.
I mean, think bigger - this new technology is going to be utterly transformative to our society and economic system. If we could actually approach some sort of reasonable post-scarcity world, what would we want it to be like? So, maybe there's grades, but it's "pass/fail" or something, but all of these metrics that we use to evaluate have become targets.
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> Nowadays pretty much everyone has a degree and then couldn't find a job The unemployment rate in the US is 3.7%. 38% of adults in the US have a college degree. 38% is hardly everyone, and if nobody can find a job, then the unemployment rate should be far higher than 3.7%, which is basically full employment.
How about the relevant age group? Like 25-35 y.o. For sure 20-y.o. adults have no degree and students are not count as unemployed.
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The thing you're angry at, the thing that you're upset about? It's capitalism, it's the coupling of education with jobs, it's credentialism being overturned by new technology, etc. I think education is incredibly important, but I understand that I'm going to have to retrain myself a little bit. A college degree can no-longer be assumed to be a proxy for having put in the effort to deeply study something. Now what's t…
replying to my own thread here, but this got me thinking, so thanks OP, but... can anyone here think of some better ways where we could decouple the education process from the work process? To me this seems like the main problem. It seems that we've decided that "get good grades == good employee" collectively. I know I'm a bad employee (which is why I work for myself now but that's another story), but I got great gra…
The excessive education requirements for jobs came about mainly to provide easy legal ways to cull a large pool of applicants. This credentialism trend has grown far beyond anything that is healthy.
One possible and feasible solution is to encourage (via funding and guidance) more coop and internship programs and partnerships. This is especially true for local junior colleges, but is also useful for 4-year schools.
That doesn’t really decouple education and work, but it would be something that could move the needle from the local level to the national level.
If you want to decouple education and work, I will humbly suggest that the system already exists. It’s people using their personal networks. Many people seem to find this to be incredibly unfair (however one defines unfair), but it’s an absolute cheat code / life hack for decoupling education and work.
Simple example:
I graduated from a prestigious school (one that is known for feeding Wall Street) a year and change after a stock market collapse. Only half of the graduates from the previous year had jobs in their chosen career fields. My year was worse.
When we saw who got Wall Street jobs, it was folks in the top 10% of the class, and about the same number randomly scattered amongst the rest. Some of these folks were very low ranked, and they were known for aggressively taking advantage of the “gentleman’s C” system. What was the common thread of all of the non-top 10%? It was almost always a personal connection, often a close one like a parent, being in a position of power at the employer.
None of this was or is obvious in boom times, but in times of distress we were able to see who was swimming naked in terms of connections/nepotism.
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It's probably cleaner to directly couple those that want it, so that those that want to decouple can be left to the academic path. It's pretty normal to hear from people that when they entered the workforce they learned way more than what they learned at college. Let's incentivize this. Governments should directly subsidize education. Instead of getting student loans and going to college for 4 years where you don't a…
Doesn't this just kind of become kind of allow companies to direct the research towards their ends and the education be damned though? I wouldn't be opposed to this sort of thing intrinsically, but I worry about the incentives here.
> allow companies to direct the research towards their ends
So long as they hit the requirements to reward the prize, I don't much care what else the students are driven to do. One might ask how does this differ from when a company hires a fresh graduate? In fact, I wouldn't mind also applying this system to those that have degrees, and are trying to advance in their careers.
My only concern is that the students would then be able to be hire-able by other companies in their field. If that answer is mostly yes, the system is working as intended. If it's not, the requirements would be raised until they are.