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School is all about signaling, not skill-building

latimes.com

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

#161

Post by moorhosj »

mythrwy wrote: post #152
moorhosj wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I certainly wouldn’t want a doctor in their first 5 years of on-the-job training.

If they were overseen by another doctor with more experience it might be OK. Besides I'd assume with this setup the future doctor wouldn't start with brain surgery. Maybe stitch up cuts and set broken bones, working up into more complicated scenarios. I mean, I've always done my own minor doctoring anyway. And people did for a long time, it's only recently a long stint in college was required. Granted this approach h…

What was the infection rate in this “pre-schooling” period? We used to use leeches, blood-letting and cocaine medicinally, that doesn’t make them good ideas for today’s society.

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

#162

Post by sdaslo »

milesvp wrote: post #99
iguy wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And a forced pace, to keep moving instead of disappearing down every passing rabbit-hole.

This is a big one. I sat in on a number of 400 level CS courses after I graduated, and a big factor was just having a scheduled place to be, and homework assignment due dates that forced the correct pace for learning. The pace also made it easy to start the work early, but not obsess if I hit a roadblock, since there was a lot of opportunity to ask questions leading up to the due date. I don’t think I’d have gotten t…

How did you stay motivated to finish the homework or projects to the same degree as if you were being graded? I feel like the one factor that changes the equation is that grading inherently motivates even those who want to learn for learnings sake - it forces you to move faster and study harder with time and grade challenges.

Do you feel like you learned the material to a level that you would have had it been graded for you??

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

#163

Post by josephjrobison »

milesvp wrote: post #99
iguy wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And a forced pace, to keep moving instead of disappearing down every passing rabbit-hole.

This is a big one. I sat in on a number of 400 level CS courses after I graduated, and a big factor was just having a scheduled place to be, and homework assignment due dates that forced the correct pace for learning. The pace also made it easy to start the work early, but not obsess if I hit a roadblock, since there was a lot of opportunity to ask questions leading up to the due date. I don’t think I’d have gotten t…

How do you sit in on classes?

Do you actually just show up? Or do you have to audit the class and register, but for free?

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

#164

Post by ergocoder »

In an ideal world, school is great. But, in a real world, it monopolizes knowledge and makes a huge propaganda that it is the only way to learn. We have been doing this propaganda for decades.

Then, parents, who don't know any better, think that they need to send their kids to colleges at all cost. They don't even care much about which college or which subject it is. Then, some business capitalizes on that by making a low-quality college. Then, we have this strange issue with student's debt where the student is not really hireable.

I talked to my colleagues at Google anonymously through Blind. And a few, even at Google, said (and many agreed) that either they took the student loan or they became a drug dealer (or something equally bad). I was quite surprised that even googlers would hold this kind of views.

I agree though that being $xx,xxx in debt is better than being a drug dealer. But, in my opinion, those cannot possibly be the only two choices. I didn't grow up in US, so maybe I don't understand the situation here.

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

#165

Post by analog31 »

chongli wrote: post #136
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, t…

I would also ask: "What about the musicians?" After all, music degrees are heavily vocational. But the music vocation itself is overcrowded unlike engineering or medicine.

The article cites as evidence the large disparity in value between three and four years of college. This is much more prevalent in engineering than in music. Taking three years of college music study, or learning it informally, will in fact prepare you for a music career. I know people who have done it.

In my view, the need to make special exceptions for certain college majors weakens the signaling hypothesis.

Disclaimer: One of my kids is a music major, and I earn part of my income as a musician.

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

#166

Post by u801e »

Mbioguy wrote: post #156
dogma1138 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Boy are you in for a surprise. Medical school lectures are mostly optional these days and are entirely skipped by a significant proportion of med students in favor of resources like Strong Medicine (literally a YouTube channel), gigantic Anki digital flashcard decks (see reddit.com/r/medicalschoolanki), UWorld, First Aid, Sketchy, Pathoma, etc. 'High Yield' is the buzzword for resources that are a better use of time.…

As someone who went to medical school more than 20 years ago, it wasn't that much different other than people using "question banks" in order to help them pass the tests. There were plenty of prep books for preparing for the USMLE and board specific exams (for rotations in the third year).

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

#167

Post by JMTQp8lwXL »

_v7gu wrote: post #93
JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #23

Maybe for the elite. But for middle class people like myself, I developed marketable skills, secured multiple internships, and found it easy to get a full-time job straight out of school. I had about a years worth of industry experience via internships (one for 6 months, two others 3 months each). Signaling doesn't buy you much. At least in engineering, because a technical interview will sort out whether or not you a…

> Signaling doesn't buy you much. At least in engineering, because a technical interview will sort out whether or not you actually demonstrate basic programming skills very quick. Doesn't everyone complain about how technical interviews only measure how well the candidate is prepared for technical interviews? With that in mind, I'd argue that the willingness to prepare for a technical interview has become just anothe…

In my mind, I probably took this too literally. Suppose only half the keys you pressed actual put a letter into the document, etc. It'd be far less useful.

The 80-20 rule applies to software: 20% of the feature set is used 80% of the time. Mid-way through development, it's likely the 20% may not be complete. It was a poor analogy.

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

#168

Post by randcraw »

nafey wrote: post #41
kevintb wrote: post #33

I strongly disagree. Elite colleges are all about signaling. But I don't doubt for a second that my CS degree taught me an enormous amount - some skill-building, lots of abstract thinking - that I wouldn't have been able to achieve as quickly as anywhere else.

Okay but how about this: Say you actually dropped out of your degree one day before completing it. Skillwise you are almost the same but your compensation will take a drastic hit on average.

Not if the employer is rational, and instead simply asks to see your transcripts. A list of courses completed (with grades) from a respected school is much more informative about someone's skills than a degree.

Credentialism is a poor surrogate for showing your work.

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

#169

Post by JMTQp8lwXL »

ilaksh wrote: post #121
TAForObvReasons wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Software Engineering is a notable exception, most other fields don't quiz as part of the job interview process: soft skills and credentials or state licenses or bar exams are relied upon more heavily. Maybe signaling matters more in these fields? License and bar exams are more serious than people in technology are willing and ready to admit. They serve the role of quizzes because the "passing score" requires a base…

The first issue is that JS has evolved every few years. For example, we went from callbacks to promises and now to async/await. Or look at how modules have evolved. Or the use of const and let vs. var. The other issue is that there are layers of other skills that also evolve every few years. So to create a "bar exam" for a front-end web engineer, for example, you would need a completely different version every two ye…

Async/await is just syntactic sugar for Promises.

A CS bar exam should just assess fundamentals -- if you have a good CS base, and problem-solving skills, you will adapt with the times as technology changes. Then, it wouldn't need to be updated to include new ES6 functionality. Besides, someone who does back-end Java doesn't need to concern themselves with language change to JavaScript. That's another reason why such an exam should be generic.

I'm honestly surprised nobody has tried to make that a thing. It'd save companies so much in time and effort if they could just say "yup, this person has the credential".

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

#170

Post by u801e »

barry-cotter wrote: post #112
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…

> The essential question is "why do we think that every skilled job requires a four-year college degree?". That’s not accurate. Law school requires any degree followed by three years of a law degree. Now that’s pure signalling. Every other Anglophone country bar Canada has undergraduate law degrees instead of requiring what amount to two undergraduate degrees.

Isn't a law degree in the US considered a doctorate rather than a bachelors?

Medical degrees in the US are similar in that you complete an undergraduate degree before you can get into medical school and get a MD or DO. Some countries have the MBBS degree which is a bachelor level degree that can be started right after the equivalent of high school.

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