I found that college fails to live up to being “The Great Equalizer”
visaalambalam.com
I found that college fails to live up to being “The Great Equalizer”
1–10 of 125 posts
Re: I found that college fails to live up to being “The Great Equalizer”
#2After the experience of meeting the Uber driver with an degree in actuarial science unable to apply his education it shattered my rose colored glasses about how education today is "The Great Equalizer" and the solution to all of our problems.
I wanted to share these thoughts to discuss any cool ideas to bridge the gap between an education and effectively increasing opportunity for people as automation take away more and more low-skill jobs
Re: I found that college fails to live up to being “The Great Equalizer”
#3After the experience of meeting the Uber driver with an degree in actuarial science unable to apply his education it shattered my rose colored glasses about how education today is "The Great Equalizer" and the solution to all of our problems. I wanted to share these thoughts to discuss any cool ideas to bridge the gap between an education and effectively increasing opportunity for people as automation take away more…
Don't be down just because you met one guy - who knows, maybe he cant work a week without insulting a client.
Dont forget that when colleges didnt exist for everyone, say 200 years ago, most people were farmers.
People are selective when it comes to timeframe, but it's just a mean regression - some periods reach peak, some get back lower, but all in all, we're trending up.
Re: I found that college fails to live up to being “The Great Equalizer”
#4After the experience of meeting the Uber driver with an degree in actuarial science unable to apply his education it shattered my rose colored glasses about how education today is "The Great Equalizer" and the solution to all of our problems. I wanted to share these thoughts to discuss any cool ideas to bridge the gap between an education and effectively increasing opportunity for people as automation take away more…
Don't be down just because you met one guy - who knows, maybe he cant work a week without insulting a client. Dont forget that when colleges didnt exist for everyone, say 200 years ago, most people were farmers. People are selective when it comes to timeframe, but it's just a mean regression - some periods reach peak, some get back lower, but all in all, we're trending up.
> The story that hit me the hardest was when I was chatting with an Uber driver
This sentence implies that he didn’t meet “one guy”
Re: I found that college fails to live up to being “The Great Equalizer”
#5I have worked in IT for a long time, but have taken night and weekend college classes over the years. I took a CS 3xx class with mostly college seniors a few years ago. Most were CS majors. Once a bunch of us were outside talking, and I said something about software version control. The person I was talking to said "what's that?" I asked the others if they knew what software version control was. None knew. I said, "you know, like git". None of them knew what git was. Some of them were months from graduating and looking for a job as a programmer.
Re: I found that college fails to live up to being “The Great Equalizer”
#6The economy that mobilized on a dime to defeat Nazi Germany and sent men to the moon had only 5% of adults with a college degree. Is it so much more complex now that kids need four more expensive years of education? And if it is more complex, is college as currently structured the cheapest way to develop those additional skills?
Re: I found that college fails to live up to being “The Great Equalizer”
#7After the experience of meeting the Uber driver with an degree in actuarial science unable to apply his education it shattered my rose colored glasses about how education today is "The Great Equalizer" and the solution to all of our problems. I wanted to share these thoughts to discuss any cool ideas to bridge the gap between an education and effectively increasing opportunity for people as automation take away more…
Don't be down just because you met one guy - who knows, maybe he cant work a week without insulting a client. Dont forget that when colleges didnt exist for everyone, say 200 years ago, most people were farmers. People are selective when it comes to timeframe, but it's just a mean regression - some periods reach peak, some get back lower, but all in all, we're trending up.
Farming is arguably more complicated and requires more domain knowledge than most service jobs today.
Re: I found that college fails to live up to being “The Great Equalizer”
#8After the experience of meeting the Uber driver with an degree in actuarial science unable to apply his education it shattered my rose colored glasses about how education today is "The Great Equalizer" and the solution to all of our problems. I wanted to share these thoughts to discuss any cool ideas to bridge the gap between an education and effectively increasing opportunity for people as automation take away more…
Founder of https://www.whiteowleducation.com here. Undergrad dual major in Actuarial Science and Computer Science (with a MBA a long time after undergrad).
Without additional context, my guess would be that the Uber driver maybe focused on applications of math and statistics to the insurance industry, but maybe focused more on passing actuarial exams and less on using programming in order to implement the models. Some of the actuarial exams cover finance, statistics, and math; it feels like the driver would be suited to do data science work. It would be interesting to hear more about where the driver is located and whether he/she was only targeting the insurance industry or if that person was looking at other jobs in analytics.
EDIT: I started my business on the premise that universities teach a lot of "fundamentals", but that I don't believe higher education does not do as much as they should to teach the practical "day to day" skills (like data visualization or software version control / git) that are needed to get development work done. My thought is that a couple of online courses can quickly help to bridge the gap between theory and practice.
Re: I found that college fails to live up to being “The Great Equalizer”
#9> It’s already happening with companies like Lambda School focused on cultivating the next generation of software engineers by educating
Bad example. Lambda School had some pretty bad press on HN about having lower completion rates than advertised, etc.
Re: I found that college fails to live up to being “The Great Equalizer”
#10The economy that mobilized on a dime to defeat Nazi Germany and sent men to the moon had only 5% of adults with a college degree. Is it so much more complex now that kids need four more expensive years of education? And if it is more complex, is college as currently structured the cheapest way to develop those additional skills?
I think you are approaching this from the wrong angle. You are assuming because the cream of the crop could achieve something (I.e. most certainly had college degrees) 70 years ago that we can still form society like that today.
But society is not the same as it was then. I don't think you can argue that the median job today requires the same amount of knowledge or skill then it did 70 years ago. And that is what college is for currently.
Of course you can still argue we don't need that many college graduates but your argument by itself is not convincing.