School is all about signaling, not skill-building • Hacker News Board

Re: School is all about signaling, not skill-building

#131

Post by hopler » Sat, Mar 16, 2019, 1:39 PM UTC

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #117

jdietrich wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The essential question is "why do we think that every skilled job requires a four-year college degree?". It would be a peculiar coincidence if the vast majority of jobs required exactly the same amount of academic education. Why do so many people go on to do work that has little or nothing to do with their major? Here in the UK, a large proportion of healthcare is delivered by healthcare professionals other than doct…

Because most high school graduates don't have the soft skills (or the hard skills) to work in a corporate environment. I've worked with people with previous job experience that have gone through 10-week coding programs. And it shows. They might've been taught a framework or a language, but their computer science skills aren't nearly as developed. Some things take years to click, and growth occurs from years of writin…

College doesn't teach those soft skills. Jobs and skill training teach those skills

You don't need college to write years of bad code. Internships or hobby projects do fine.

Re: School is all about signaling, not skill-building

#132

Post by barry-cotter » Sat, Mar 16, 2019, 1:40 PM UTC

closeparen wrote: post #12

NoblePublius wrote: post #8

Admissions based on standardized test scores ONLY. Make colleges co-sign loans. Fixed it.

The usual complaint about wealthy families buying college access is explicitly standardized test prep courses and tutors.

Why Elites Dislike Standardised Testing

> It is absolutely true that the SAT is the reason this scandal occurred. But for standardized testing requirements, the millionaires and celebrities charged in this scheme would not have needed to search for “side doors” to get their children into elite colleges; they could have walked right in through the front.

...

> SAT scores correlate strongly enough with IQ that the SAT is interchangeable with IQ as a test of general cognitive ability. Cognitive ability is highly heritable; the single strongest predictor of a child’s IQ is the IQ of the child’s parents. There is also a correlation between income and IQ. That means smarter than average parents are likely to have smarter than average kids and higher than average incomes.

> The educational attainment of an SAT taker’s parents is about as strongly correlated with higher scores as high income is; the median student whose parents hold graduate degrees scores a 560 on critical reading and a 576 on math, only slightly lower than the richest students in the dataset by income, and a full standard deviation higher than students whose parents hold only high school diplomas.

https://quillette.com/2019/03/13/standardized-testing-and-me...

Re: School is all about signaling, not skill-building

#133

Post by slfnflctd » Sat, Mar 16, 2019, 1:40 PM UTC

throwaway287391 wrote: post #94

ozim wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at what you wrote "I developed marketable skills, secured multiple internships". That does not read like school did that for you and probably you could do the same without school. How much of that CS101 was studying on your own time? Finishing school is signaling that you are person that shows up in the morning for classes and puts up years of his life to do that. By any means I am hiring developer who is signal…

> Finishing school is signaling that you are person that shows up in the morning for classes Not sure about others but I tried my damnedest not to take morning classes unless I absolutely had to -- most semesters I had nothing before 11am or noon. The flexible scheduling was one of my favorite things about college. I did take one 8AM class and thinking back I have no idea how I didn't completely bomb it -- I showed u…

Honestly I think this line is total bunk. I'm quite sure hiring managers believe it to be true - many jobs that don't actually need you to have completed any degree to do the work still require one to get hired - but in my experience, people who haven't completed college are more likely to be willing to put in long hours, while those who have tend to expect/demand more time off. [Not that wanting time off is a bad thing, I just don't think it should be doled out based on whether your parents could afford to put you through school.]

Re: School is all about signaling, not skill-building

#134

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Mar 16, 2019, 1:42 PM UTC

yorwba wrote: post #76

avcdsuia wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a US citizen, but AFAIK, a course includes lectures, office hours, assignments etc. How did he manage to fully understand the materials without all the resources that are provided only for registered students?

Also not a US citizen and I don't know how it works at Princeton, but in my experience, getting actionable feedback on assignments is rare. You may get told where your mistakes are, but not how you should have done it instead. Most of the value of assignments is in simply doing them; that forces you to review the necessary material. As for office hours, I never went to any, but I assume that they're not going to chec…

[deleted]

Re: School is all about signaling, not skill-building

#135

Post by ni3hao3 » Sat, Mar 16, 2019, 1:42 PM UTC

The upper class view education as necessary for signaling, the middle class view it as necessary to build skills, and the lower class view it as useless.

Re: School is all about signaling, not skill-building

#136

Post by chongli » Sat, Mar 16, 2019, 1:44 PM UTC

Zarath wrote: post #62

Come on, have we really swung so far on the "game is rigged" and "college isn't what it used to be" pendulum that we're acting like college doesn't build useful skills. Before college I had never written a program in my life outside of my TI-83. Coming out of college I was able to secure a full time job at a highly respected software company. They didn't hire me because my program was great (it wasn't that great), bu…

This article is just a companion piece for the author's book, The Case Against Education [1]. I'm reading this book for philosophy class and one of my top questions going in was "what about the engineers?" Well, Caplan heads that off at the pass: his father was an engineer and he says repeatedly that vocational degrees like engineering and medicine are about more than signalling. His earnings data prove that point, too, because it shows that the arts degrees people people poke fun at the most, earn the least.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36319077-the-case-agains...

Re: School is all about signaling, not skill-building

#137

Post by wolco » Sat, Mar 16, 2019, 1:48 PM UTC

dogma1138 wrote: post #96

ozim wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at what you wrote "I developed marketable skills, secured multiple internships". That does not read like school did that for you and probably you could do the same without school. How much of that CS101 was studying on your own time? Finishing school is signaling that you are person that shows up in the morning for classes and puts up years of his life to do that. By any means I am hiring developer who is signal…

Would you go to a doctor that learned medicine form YouTube? I think the problem here is a bias due to the fact that the employment after earning their computer science degree is for many people not about the science part of it but rather about fairly mundane programming and general office work. Good luck arguing that chemistry, biology, mechanical engineering, medicine and many other fields that require specific too…

Yes. Why would learning through video scare you?

Re: School is all about signaling, not skill-building

#138

Post by jjoonathan » Sat, Mar 16, 2019, 1:53 PM UTC

chongli wrote: post #123

bko wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Would you go to a doctor that learned medicine form YouTube? Depends on my ailment. Most of the time people go to the doctor they are told to get some rest and maybe prescribed something. I don't think that needs 8 years of medical school. And doctor's don't even necessarily do a good job at prescriptions either, since they tend to over-prescribe in the US

they are told to get some rest and maybe prescribed something. I don't think that needs 8 years of medical school. What takes 8 years of medical school is knowing when not to tell the patient that. When telling the patient to go home and rest could result in severe illness or death.

Except that it doesn't, because other countries see similar performance metrics with less overall training.

Nobody in charge is doing the "extra training increases costs by X which decreases availability by X which causes X damage vs lack of training causes X' damage" calculation -- everybody just argues for more training every time there's a problem, with the inevitable result of our stupendously expensive outlier of a medical system with middling measured performance and poor, ever-worsening accessibility.

Re: School is all about signaling, not skill-building

#139

Post by treis » Sat, Mar 16, 2019, 2:01 PM UTC

dogma1138 wrote: post #96

ozim wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at what you wrote "I developed marketable skills, secured multiple internships". That does not read like school did that for you and probably you could do the same without school. How much of that CS101 was studying on your own time? Finishing school is signaling that you are person that shows up in the morning for classes and puts up years of his life to do that. By any means I am hiring developer who is signal…

Would you go to a doctor that learned medicine form YouTube? I think the problem here is a bias due to the fact that the employment after earning their computer science degree is for many people not about the science part of it but rather about fairly mundane programming and general office work. Good luck arguing that chemistry, biology, mechanical engineering, medicine and many other fields that require specific too…

>Would you go to a doctor that learned medicine form YouTube?

That's not a fair comparison. A better question would be: "Would you go to a Doctor that spent 9 years learning on the job or 9 years in school?"

Re: School is all about signaling, not skill-building

#140

Post by adamnemecek » Sat, Mar 16, 2019, 2:06 PM UTC

y4mi wrote: post #57

adamnemecek wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not about them not making errors or not it’s about them making decisions suitable for women students.

you probably meant it as "because most administrative staff are female, male interests are underrepresented at the highest level" I cant really argue with it because i've honestly no idea which male interests could possibly fall short in the context of a school, but anyway. your phrasing of the initial statements comes across as sexism, because it sounds more like: "only males can represent all students interests" yo…

Ok, I felt that e.g. drawing was mostly figure drawing rather than say car designs.