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The college-for-all model isn't working

latimes.com

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Re: The college-for-all model isn't working

#91

Post by arebop »

WalterBright wrote: post #69
mortenjorck wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A major benefit of college is a baseline of domain knowledge that will serve you in your professional career, but indeed, that’s also a major benefit of a technical program. The real disconnect is that college is also (or at least is supposed to be, or has traditionally been) a schooling in the liberal arts. Four years spent learning to think critically about society and culture as well as one's area of specializatio…

I've always wondered about the reputed benefit of learning to think critically from a liberal arts education. For example, with engineering, an airplane built from your design flies or does not. There's no pretending it flies when it doesn't. Reality cannot be fooled, so one is forced to learn to think critically. But with liberal arts, the same person can argue both points of view with equal facility - how does one…

The liberal arts mechanism for ordering arguments is democracy!

The idea of liberal arts is that their study enables one to participate as a full-fledged member of society. Thinking critically about arguments that concern society requires not just checking the validity but also the soundness of an argument. I suppose you really need some understanding of culture and history to make up your mind about many issues of importance to the society in which you live.

Re: The college-for-all model isn't working

#92

Post by scoofy »

pc86 wrote: post #62
nickthemagicman wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other option is college for the rich. So it's working better than the alternative.

What about college for those who want a career that demands a degree (realistically, not according to HR)? The discussion here should be about under what circumstances college is meaningful and appropriate, not whether author's world view. If the article is wrong, dispute it with sources.

Almost all careers are either certification-based or they create an arms race of education. When you have an arms race everyone has an incentive to get a degree but perhaps not everyone with said degree will get a job. Resources are wasted, but there isn't any incentive to stop the system from perpetuating itself. When you have a surplus of unemployed-educated people, why not hire over-educated workers? This reenforces the need for a degree.

Every time I see people saying "not everyone should go to college" during a non-economic-boom I wish they would start teaching game theory to high schoolers.

Re: The college-for-all model isn't working

#93

Post by streptomycin »

WalterBright wrote: post #69
mortenjorck wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A major benefit of college is a baseline of domain knowledge that will serve you in your professional career, but indeed, that’s also a major benefit of a technical program. The real disconnect is that college is also (or at least is supposed to be, or has traditionally been) a schooling in the liberal arts. Four years spent learning to think critically about society and culture as well as one's area of specializatio…

I've always wondered about the reputed benefit of learning to think critically from a liberal arts education. For example, with engineering, an airplane built from your design flies or does not. There's no pretending it flies when it doesn't. Reality cannot be fooled, so one is forced to learn to think critically. But with liberal arts, the same person can argue both points of view with equal facility - how does one…

Most engineers don't work on projects with as straightforward outcomes as "flies" or "doesn't fly", even in college. Even if they did, not everything that falls in the "flies" category is equally good. Deciding which is the most good for a given application can often be as qualitative as you perceive liberal arts. Furthermore, there are many engineers who have made careers out of doing little more than "criticizing without a mechanism for determining the correct way".

To argue from the other side, the point of liberal arts isn't to make you argue both sides of an issue equally. And telling a good essay from a bad essay can often be easier than telling a good airplane design from a bad one.

(Full disclosure: I'm an engineer and I only took 2 semesters of humanities classes in college.)

Re: The college-for-all model isn't working

#94

Post by ahomescu1 »

nickthemagicman wrote: post #54
nsxwolf wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great that you noticed it's an op-ed by the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, but, is the college for all model working?

The other option is college for the rich. So it's working better than the alternative.

Another option could be "college for the intelligent, regardless of wealth".

Re: The college-for-all model isn't working

#95

Post by ahomescu1 »

sounds wrote: post #63
mortenjorck wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A major benefit of college is a baseline of domain knowledge that will serve you in your professional career, but indeed, that’s also a major benefit of a technical program. The real disconnect is that college is also (or at least is supposed to be, or has traditionally been) a schooling in the liberal arts. Four years spent learning to think critically about society and culture as well as one's area of specializatio…

Yup. Where the grandparent said "employers think college degrees are more valuable than they probably are," you've highlighted the disconnect between what employers think they're getting from a college grad (certain skills) and what colleges actually do (teach students to think, to learn, to read). That's not High School 2.0. In fact, High School seems to be the right place for vocational training. It's the pinnacle…

> Where the grandparent said "employers think college degrees are more valuable than they probably are," you've highlighted the disconnect between what employers think they're getting from a college grad (certain skills) and what colleges actually do (teach students to think, to learn, to read). That's not High School 2.0. In fact, High School seems to be the right place for vocational training. It's the pinnacle of state-mandated schooling, and in fact includes vocational requirements. Some schools implement that as wood shop. Others focus so completely on teaching computer skills they become a "magnet school" for that one thing only.

I'd like to argue for the opposite. Since everyone goes to high school, it should be a place to teach people to think, learn and read (that's how it used to be in some European countries). This is where students could explore and find out what they like, as well as read as many books as they can.

After that, college should be for white-collar training. You really do need several years of focused learning on certain topics before jumping in (I don't think you can ever jump straight into medicine, building bridges or designing microprocessors without a few years of reading in advance).

Re: The college-for-all model isn't working

#96

Post by tbrownaw »

randomdata wrote: post #79
tbrownaw wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I've seen is supposedly-experienced programmers who can't write FizzBuzz, or claim database experience but don't know why a cross-join is bad or what it is, or who claim to be experts at $TOOL but can only recite a handful of memorized answers and just pick whichever sounds closest to the question. Software developers (supposedly) aren't stupid. Applicants for software development positions on the other hand...

I'll admit, I had to look up what a cross join was, despite being quite familiar with the subject once I understood the terminology. I'm sure you apply much more rigour to your hiring process, but at the same time, it is difficult to know who is throwing out great candidates (I'm not suggesting I am one) over silly little things like this. How do we know if people are hard to find because people are actually hard to…

How do we know if people are hard to find because people are actually hard to find, or people doing the hiring are terrible at their job?

Partly both, but also missing a qualified applicant often costs far less than making a bad hire.

The ratio of decent hires to bad hires needs to be as high as possible. In comparison, the percentage of qualified applicants thrown out almost doesn't matter (unless it gets to something truly absurd like 90%). (Really it does matter, just not compared to making bad hires. Interviews and delays are still expensive, just less so than failing to get new employees up to speed.)

Interviewers that make bad hires are terrible. Interviewers that turn away good hires are merely bad.

Re: The college-for-all model isn't working

#97

Post by tbrownaw »

randomdata wrote: post #88
WalterBright wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then Google/Facebook/Microsoft/whoever is without that talent. How does this prove there's no shortage?

I'm not sure I was trying to prove that there isn't a shortage, rather if you're only offering a "generous" rate and not the rate that actually attracts people, then you are not really playing in the market. With that said, what is a shortage? Is there a shortage of Ferraris because I cannot afford one, or am I just too poor to consider owning one? Is there a shortage of developers until every developer is working fo…

A shortage is what happens when there is a significant delay between prices rising and supply rising.

If demand gradually increases, both quantity and price will rise steadily.

If there is a shortage, price first rises sharply with little or no increase in quantity and then falls with a significant increase in quantity.

Re: The college-for-all model isn't working

#98

Post by cheesylard »

voidlogic wrote: post #75
cheesylard wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a 19 year old programmer who just dropped out, this eases my anxiety. A lot.

Beware, if you are outside of the Bay Area getting a degree is comparatively more important to employers... At least until you have oodles of XP.

I grew up in Sunnyvale.

A lot of my friends from high school have part-time jobs / intern over the summer at the startups/companies from where around I used to live...

But I don't live there anymore. And I'm kind of hesitant to move back to Sunnyvale (It is the most boring, soul-sucking place on earth) so I guess that doesn't really count for anything.

Meh.

Re: The college-for-all model isn't working

#99

Post by jheriko »

Slightly disappointed to not see the obvious arguments.

As a university drop out I may be biased but I do believe that 'education for all' is a horribly misguided premise which persists because of the practicality of cheap childcare it provides (!)

I believe that vocational education is pretty flawed too...

I fail to see the value in qualification X if everyone can get it. All qualifications seem to be an exercise in desire and discipline... and this is why it doesn't work. IMO.

It works fine for serious and competitive fields like medicine and dentistry, but for the vast majority of fields out there a degree isn't worth much at all.

I can, and maybe have, written your dissertation from your textbook with no lectures... and I will do just fine.

Smart guys will drop out and succeed because of the same reasons they drop out, not in spite of it... just a shame so many drop outs are probably dropping out because education is not for them - or possibly university or vocational education is not right for their entire field.

Re: The college-for-all model isn't working

#100

Post by clarkm »

jellicle wrote: post #33

For those who aren't aware, this is an op-ed (meaning the newspaper doesn't stand behind any of the facts claimed) from a right-wing Koch brothers organization. Several commenters have already noted that the fundamental "fact" here, that certain vocations are experiencing major shortages (the "skills mismatch" claim) is completely false, which it is. The Great Recession stretches across all job fields and locations i…

You bring up the Koch brothers simply because the author wrote a report for the Manhattan Institute?

That's like bringing up George Soros whenever you read an op-ed by someone who once worked for the Brookings Institute.

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