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A twenty-year professor on starting college this fall: Don’t

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Re: A twenty-year professor on starting college this fall: Don’t

#131

Post by RandomBacon »

RandomBacon wrote: post #65
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a scholarship, this advice may not be good. I think most scholarships expect you to start that fall; if you don't, you may lose the scholarship. (Some or all of them will accept a "gap year", but most won't accept you going to community college for two years and then trying to take the scholarship. Or at least, that's how I think it is. Your mileage may vary, so if you have a scholarship offer, check the…

Many scholarships are available to students while in college. Many people don't even apply to them because they don't know about them or care at that point. Where I went, the Student Affairs office knew more about scholarships than the financial aid office.

I wonder why the downvote? If you, or if you have kids going to college, make sure they're on every internal mailing list possible that college has. That's how I found out about a lot of scholarships. I didn't have any debt because I found out about the scholarships and asked staff and professors to nominate me.

A professor who hears about a scholarship, or a department head who emails their staff, generally doesn't think to include the financial aid office, or any other office in the university.

Re: A twenty-year professor on starting college this fall: Don’t

#132

Post by perl4ever »

electriclove wrote: post #83
ForHackernews wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people I went to high school with chose to stay home and go to community college to figure things out. Most of them puttered around for a year or two, studying part time while working, eventually getting distracted and abandoning their degree plans. I think I can count on one hand the kids who actually transferred to a 4-year university and finished their bachelors degree. I guess dropping out of a community…

Not sure why you are getting downvoted. What you said is actually true for many that go to community colleges. Do people disagree about this? I think there are many positives to attend a community college first but there are also several drawbacks that need to be acknowledged.

Assuming it's true for many that go to community colleges, why are people so committed to the idea that it's cause and effect? What does this claimed pattern have to do with anything inherent about a community college?

Overspending to make a big commitment to something in the hopes that leads to success is generally, on average, terrible advice, in my opinion, even if you think there's some example of it working for somebody at some time.

Re: A twenty-year professor on starting college this fall: Don’t

#133

Post by RandomBacon »

devNoise wrote: post #90
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a scholarship, this advice may not be good. I think most scholarships expect you to start that fall; if you don't, you may lose the scholarship. (Some or all of them will accept a "gap year", but most won't accept you going to community college for two years and then trying to take the scholarship. Or at least, that's how I think it is. Your mileage may vary, so if you have a scholarship offer, check the…

I'm on the fence about how scholarships should factor into the total cost of college. I feel like there is a decent amount of scholarship money freshmen year that disappears after that. So that the student ends up with a lot of student loans debt to finish school. It's all well and good that freshmen at an expensive college will be cheaper than some alternate school. Though is it really going to be cheaper overall? I…

I studied engineering. There were a ton of scholaships available to any student. The financial aid office generally never finds out about except that the receive a check from some organization or company and are told to deposit in my account.

There are plenty of scholarships, just the communication about them is extremely poor. You have to get on every mailing list your university has, and constantly ask professors if they've heard about any scholarships.

Many of the scholarships I got were from companies or organizations that reached out directly to professors.

Re: A twenty-year professor on starting college this fall: Don’t

#134

Post by perl4ever »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #46
perl4ever wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly is the negative consequence you are envisioning from 2 years at community college and 2 years at your in-state 4-year school, vs. all four years at the latter? The typical alternative that people need to be guided away from is one of the for-profit "career" schools that doesn't have transferable credits and is way more expensive than community college.

I think they envision a lack of support and encouragement, and therefore the student dropping out or not finishing a degree.

Personally, I didn't succeed until I could ask for support, and that was completely independent of being at a private, public, community college, you name it.

I never even realized there was this negativity towards community college until recently, but I suspect it at some level amounts to astroturfing by their competitors, the miserable for-profit career schools that are everywhere. People will make bad decisions; I did after high school, but it's unconscionable to play on their vanity or low self esteem, telling them they're not good enough for a real college or that a real college isn't good enough for them, either way.

Re: A twenty-year professor on starting college this fall: Don’t

#135

Post by rlanday »

Chyzwar wrote: post #127
rlanday wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t see how the college bubble continues as-is after this. What we had before was basically a common knowledge problem. Everyone knows college is a ripoff and, aside from a small number of degrees, the students are mostly just getting subsidized by taxpayers to drink and smoke pot for four years while the rest of us work and pay taxes. But, we didn’t all know that everyone knows that. There was also a coordinatio…

These kids that drink and smoke pot are paying in personal debt, the taxpayer is not really subsidizing this (at least based on what I was reading). For most career paths outside a small portion of the technology, college is the only way. Part of the problem is that the US is not spending enough taxpayer money into education. If the US spends a portion of it military budget 570B$ to enhance education spending 70B$ pr…

The US spends plenty of money on education. If the data on this site is accurate, local, state, and federal spending makes up about 6.35% of US GDP: https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/education_spending

vs. it looks like about 4.8% from Germany. Maybe there’s some discrepancy in how those numbers are calculated, but they’re at least not wildly different.

Re: A twenty-year professor on starting college this fall: Don’t

#136

Post by milquetoastaf »

StandardFuture wrote: post #118
bosie wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't working on FOSS projects be closer to an internship rather than apprenticeship? Are they really being mentored and taught while working on the FOSS projects?

Yes it would be more akin to an internship rather than an apprenticeship. Also, contributing to open-source is not a learning experience like an apprenticeship can be. You cannot contribute to FOSS without a minimal skill level. Whereas, you can enter an apprenticeship from scratch. Whether or not you agree with apprenticeship systems being good or bad, it is clear that the GP comment on FOSS being a replacement for…

>You cannot contribute to FOSS without a minimal skill level

That is patently false. Many large and well-known FOSS projects absolutely have entry level tickets and issues, such as documentation (both in code and externally) and known bugs.

Re: A twenty-year professor on starting college this fall: Don’t

#137

Post by dubya »

closeparen wrote: post #119
sramsay wrote: post #92

Another twenty-year professor here. I would just like to point out that this article is articulating -- with absolutely accuracy and lucidity -- every college administrator's worst nightmare. They've all been discussing the possibility (that parents and students will make this very decision) for weeks. It might be the right decision to make, but it would be absolutely catastrophic for most schools.

Universities would seem uniquely capable of just going into hibernation for a while. They do it every summer, after all. That tradition is even because of infectious disease risk! What does it really cost to park a campus in "summer mode" a while longer?

Schools, particularly those without large endowments, often have large debts they have to service and rely on tuition for much of that. Building facilities is not cheap, and state governments have been providing less funding.

Re: A twenty-year professor on starting college this fall: Don’t

#138

Post by PeterisP »

chadlavi wrote: post #50

This seems pretty out of touch. Encouraging people to go right into the jobs market as 18yos without degrees is encouraging them to trap themselves at the (already rapidly expanding) bottom of the economic ladder, unless they're from an already upper/upper-middle-class family. And the same goes double for encouraging degreeless 18yos to skip getting paid entirely and volunteer. That's rich kid stuff.

The article is not suggesting these people to avoid college as such, it's suggesting them to skip a year. Your college prospects won't be worse with a year of working experience, if anything, it really helps learning if you have a bit of context working in the direction of your studies.

Re: A twenty-year professor on starting college this fall: Don’t

#139

Post by SpelingBeeChamp »

danaris wrote: post #120
kurthr wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The downside is that you basically won't get into Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Yale... or most any other "top" college after going to community college. I know of one counter example, and I know of many very smart capable people who would have been capable and profited from such a degree, but missed their chance... which in turn made it VERY difficult to get any advanced degree. Maybe that doesn't matter in CS/programming…

> get into Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Yale Based on everything I've seen over my roughly 20-year career in academia, plus the 18 years before that living in that world (my parents are both professors), what you get from going to Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Yale, and all the other "Big Name" schools is just that: the name. The education you get there is not better than the education you can get at a small liberal arts colleg…

You say that as if the name has no value. It's an enormously valuable social signal.

Re: A twenty-year professor on starting college this fall: Don’t

#140

Post by sfifs »

danaris wrote: post #120
kurthr wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The downside is that you basically won't get into Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Yale... or most any other "top" college after going to community college. I know of one counter example, and I know of many very smart capable people who would have been capable and profited from such a degree, but missed their chance... which in turn made it VERY difficult to get any advanced degree. Maybe that doesn't matter in CS/programming…

> get into Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Yale Based on everything I've seen over my roughly 20-year career in academia, plus the 18 years before that living in that world (my parents are both professors), what you get from going to Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Yale, and all the other "Big Name" schools is just that: the name. The education you get there is not better than the education you can get at a small liberal arts colleg…

I didn't study in the US, but having studied in college faculties staffed by professors who are at the cutting edge of their fields in my country, I can confidently say that the experience was unparalleled vs. my friends who didn't. In my undergrad one of my profs was a "may have been" Nobel prize winner. In my B-school, some of the profs essentially created the government's public policy in some fields. Their perspectives and insights during classes was quite enriching.

So I find your comments quite curious. Nowadays I tell my younger cousins and nephews/neices to research the faculties in colleges they are applying to and look at the quality and impact of their publications.

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