While it makes sense for government to sponsor the humanities and arts, much as it does museums, many educational institutions, or more precisely specific departments, mislead students into applying for graduate programs with dim career prospects by exaggerating job opportunities. This is to further their turf in internecine battles, but saddles those students with crushing debt and little prospects of discharging it.
Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid
421–430 of 565 posts
Re: Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid
#422Earlier quoted context omitted.
Medical licenses are not revoked based on lack of certification. There are plenty of working and employed physicians who lack board certification. Hospitals and health systems in areas with a shortage of doctors can't afford to be too picky, at least not for primary care.
There aren't any practicing cardiology or nephrology which is the GP's point and my point.
Board certification is completely voluntary, even for specialists like cardiologists and nephrologists. They can also still be issued malpractice insurance (although the premiums may be higher).
Re: Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid
#423Earlier quoted context omitted.
Putting a broad label of “woke garbage” on simple liberal arts requirements of taking a few classes from “history, philosophy, arts, international studies, or social sciences,” almost does not even justify a response. I will give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you’ve never taken such a class, but I can assure that unless you live in a reality so warped by politics, that basic logic and reason is out the…
Thing is, I have takrn a class like that. Was a political science class. Extreme hard right (chinese dissident, hard anti-left). I wrote the requisite papers. All of them were F, with no commentary. I brought this to the department chair, and the grades changed to b's and a-'s. He was absolutely grading on political position for the paper, and not a proper discussion of content per the rubric. And, aside from going t…
I don't understand how this happened. Surely you picked up enough of the lecturer's views during the lectures and you knew what you had to say to get a good grade. So why didn't you do it?
The way I see it, the humanities classes are there to make sure you learn the non-technical aspects of life well enough to be a functioning member of the adult world. To succeed in life, one of the things you need to be able to do is read the room and decide what to say and what to skip. As a hiring manager, I want to hire people who get it and aren't always bumping heads or causing unnecessary friction.
So in that sense, success in these courses is a good signal for hiring managers.
P.S. You ultimately did succeed in getting that signal, because you got them to change your grade using resourcefulness and persistence. Which are also important soft skills I want as a hiring manager. So overall I would say the system is working just fine.
Re: Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid
#424Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It simply isn't true. I got my student loans a quarter century ago. Back then the loans were dischargeable and low. The Bankruptcy Reform Act which introduced restrictions on discharging student loans was introduced in 1978, a full quarter century before your experience. Loan dischargeability was further restricted in subsequent years. If you got your loans a quarter century ago, you were deep into the time when it…
Two centuries?
Generations, presumably.
Re: Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid
#425Holy shit this is a great idea. I get the complaints about the arts, but colleges have enjoyed essentially unlimited patience for larding up their programs with extra fees, bullshit credit requirements, and more, for decades. I don't personally think that efficiency should be the primary concern of colleges, but it should be a concern, and it just plain hasn't been for ages. And that indulgence has been cloaked in sp…
Engineers are part of the petite bourgeoisie so they need to speak appropriately to the monied class.
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Re: Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid
#426Earlier quoted context omitted.
They might be part of the curriculum, but apparently ~half the country doesn't know what we just celebrated[0], so I somehow doubt they actually did their reading. It's pretty easy to pass or even do well in classes without really engaging with the material at all, even at the university level. Like I got an A in a philosophy course by just reading the professor's notes on exam morning and spitting them back out on a…
By definition, half of the population is of below average intelligence. As my daughter said to her boyfriend in college, "Welcome to the upper half of the bell curve."
Right but that's just it: it's barely the upper half (over 40% of young people now get a degree apparently[0]), and the age breakdown indicates that 40% is also apparently the proportion of 18-29s that know we declared independence 250 years ago. So assuming continuity and rough correspondence of the two distributions, that's approximately the level of knowledge at the threshold of degree holders now.
Actually the census data says ~43% get a degree and the article says 39% of 18-29s know what we celebrated, so presumably at least 4% (~9% of degree holders) are able to get a degree and don't know.
If this is our bottom end, I get the sense that even above-average students (even of liberal arts) aren't reading Montesquieu or whatever image people try to evoke about highly educated societies.
[0] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2025/educatio...
Re: Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid
#427Earlier quoted context omitted.
If one thinks doing simple derivatives is a chore, I'd suggest a career other than engineering. I've known many engineers who practiced math avoidance. None of them were worth much as engineers. I know a recruiter who would ask engineering candidates what is 20% of 20,000, without using a calculator or phoning a friend. He was surprised at how many could not, and it was an easy way to filter out the no hires.
> I've known many engineers who practiced math avoidance. None of them were worth much as engineers. I have an engineering degree and did "real" engineering (electronics/semiconductors) before switching to SW. Almost all my engineering courses required calculus knowledge. None of my real engineering jobs benefited from it. And I say that as someone who tried to find any and every excuse to use calculus at work. I lov…
> None of my real engineering jobs benefited from it.
At Boeing, there were two parallel engineering groups. The design group, and the stress group. The design group did things by eye, the stress group did the math.
I was in the design group. I did the math for my work (and so did a couple others), and we got the good assignments as a result. the stress group normally required a master's degree, but they invited me to join their group. (I declined, because I wanted to do design work, not check other peoples' work.) But it was a very nice compliment from the stress guys.
I've also seen the EEs at work who avoided the math. They'd just try random things until the circuit worked.
When my house was built, an architect designed it. But a structural engineer did the math on it - and I have copy of his work. It involved the usual beam formulae. But sometimes a beam is not in the book of formulae, and you gotta use calculus to do the stress calculations.
I've also watched engineers use book formulae with zero understanding of the basis of them. I was not impressed.
Re: Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid
#428Earlier quoted context omitted.
Software engineering is a pretty unique field as far as self study goes. There are others since the dawn of the internet, but many domains dont have great online learning resources. And then there's labs and research.
I don't think that's really true. Big ones like medicine and law have very well developed programs. To the point where something like half of med school students attend class rarely or never. More esoteric and less explicitly goal oriented fields aren't going to have as developed options but I doubt there's any undergraduate degree that you couldn't fairly easily mimic with self study. The difference is that software…
Most undergraduate, and certainly almost all first few years of undergrad, could no doubt be replaced with self-study. I agree with that. I was mostly thinking science/engineering fields that need either an extensive set or expensive set of lab tools and machinery. Or as you bring up medicine, things such as autopsy and hands-on experience. And then there's just having people around (teachers and classmates) that push you toward thoughts you wouldn't even be aware of to think about.
Software engineering's main difference isn't even the lack of credentialism, though that certainly helps. The big thing is the core feedback loop of coding. It's short, has immediate feedback, and practically everything you need to become a good developer is freely available due to FOSS culture.
Re: Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid
#429Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with the value of studying arts, social sciences, etc. But why should taxpayers cover that? There are lots of online courses which could provide the same education for free. Community colleges also show that it's possible to provide a decent in-person education at a fraction of the cost of major universities. If we could get tuition under control, then federal tuition assistance would be fine, but also hardly…
Could also reverse it: Why should tax payers cover things that pay off anyway.
Individuals may rationally avoid the downside risk of a college degree, even if the expected value is positive. As a toy example, suppose college costs $200k and increases lifetime earnings by $2m 90% of the time, or by $0 10% of the time. As a high school grad, I'm not sure I would take those odds; $200k of debt could ruin my life. But the government may prefer that everyone take this gamble, because most individuals will benefit and also it will pay for itself in increased tax revenue, etc.
I'm not sure how well this maps to reality, and maybe you're right-- maybe the government should only offer loans, and only to students who have a high probability of paying them off. But I still feel that this is a step in the right direction.
Re: Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid
#430Earlier quoted context omitted.
If one thinks doing simple derivatives is a chore, I'd suggest a career other than engineering. I've known many engineers who practiced math avoidance. None of them were worth much as engineers. I know a recruiter who would ask engineering candidates what is 20% of 20,000, without using a calculator or phoning a friend. He was surprised at how many could not, and it was an easy way to filter out the no hires.
It's a trivial task and certainly does not require attending an early morning class. In fact, most engineering does not require the degree. Almost everything in the field is self-learnable in a short period. The reason the students are in the class at 0750 is not to learn how to do this, since it is trivial and almost everyone I know could do it by the 10th standard two years prior to college. It's because no matter…
An engineer who does not understand the math is not an engineer, but a technician. Technicians can do very good work as the result of experience. But knowing the math behind it is what makes an engineer.
Credentialism is why the recruiter asked the simple math question.