161–170 of 187 posts
perhaps a little bit premature advice college students are not at risk to begin with - I'd recommend waiting closer to mid summer it might be the best time to attend college, fewer people enrolled, getting more attention from educators etc
Professors, faculty, and parents are at risk, though. If corona infects a dorm it will rip through like wildfire. You'll have 100's of asymptomatic carriers overnight. Then they go home for break...
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> 2) If you are studying a technical field, even if you are average, a degree has greater ROI than just about anything else. You can pay off your debt in the first few years out of school and continue earning dividends for the rest of your life. What's the downside to going to a community college? Where I grew up the credits were transferable. They did say, "Most people spend the first two years figuring stuff out".…
Transfer spots can be more competitive than Freshmen spots. This would especially be true if more people were doing it.
Agreed, that was my experience. Added on top of the limited slots for upper division transfer to a highly desirable school I was in the most impacted major of all and its unbelievably hard to transfer even if you meet all the criteria and you're already in the system.
The amount of BS posturing that takes place to have to 'justify' your acceptance to just want to get in and out and graduate is unfathomable when dealing with administration/acceptance committees, especially if they know they can use your spot to bring in International students that pay upwards of 5x more than you.
Personally, I still regret when I think of the business opportunities I turned down, ultimately motorsports was a better monetary investment then a career in the Life Sciences after the financial crises as cruel luck would have it.
I learned then that doing the seemingly safe, prudent and pragmatic thing isn't always the route you want to take in Life and that following the herd is seldom as rewarding as promised. At least if you fail following your own instinct it will be on your terms and hopefully provide you with a solid foundation and skill set to rebuild if/when needed. In addition to a richer Life experience.
Personally I'm a proponent of apprenticeships and online learning/certifications, which I think is where Universalizes are going to have to migrate towards for a majority of their programs if they have any chance of surviving this post-corona World in the long run.
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Transfer spots can be more competitive than Freshmen spots. This would especially be true if more people were doing it.
I have no idea how admissions work. I've heard stories about soliciting applications from unqualified candidates so they can tout accepting 1% of applications and the number of applicants so they can sound more exclusive. One would imagine in a fair world if you applied as a Freshman and as a Junior you'd have a higher chance of being accepted, if Junior applicants had a higher graduation rate they would bias accordi…
Its pretty corrupt, I already spoke on my first hand experience in other threads, but just look at what the recent admissions scandal yielded:
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/investigations-college-admis...
The one at USC was the most blatant of all in my opinion:
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-04-01/usc-admi...
There must be a lot of people thinking they won't be getting the full experience if they start this year. I wonder if this will be the pin which pops the credit fueled runaway costs bubble? Anyone who ends up not bothering with it at all will at least have great reason for not having a degree - well I was all set to go to such and such, but then coronavirus, so I started work for a while instead, and just really got…
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…
Arguing in the other direction, if you mainly just need the sheepskin, this might be an unusually easy time to get one. Personally, my college experience was mainly useful for discovering that my college experience wasn't going to be very useful for me. (Mildly interesting: The author seems to be this woman. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/02/17/la-verne-seek... )
> , if you mainly just need the sheepskin, this might be an unusually easy time to get one. It’s a good point: this year and next will have an unusually high percentage of pass/fail options, but networking will be quite restricted.
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> , if you mainly just need the sheepskin, this might be an unusually easy time to get one. It’s a good point: this year and next will have an unusually high percentage of pass/fail options, but networking will be quite restricted.
I've met 0 people to code with in college :(
And we were all non-gregarious nerds. I wonder if that is why?
My university was quite large, with about 4,000 undergrads and about the same number of grad students. My high school was about 40 students a year (240 total) and I am barely in contact with any of them.
Arguing in the other direction, if you mainly just need the sheepskin, this might be an unusually easy time to get one. Personally, my college experience was mainly useful for discovering that my college experience wasn't going to be very useful for me. (Mildly interesting: The author seems to be this woman. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/02/17/la-verne-seek... )
She’s been run out of her job for political reasons using the excuse she used the term “assassinate” instead of “fire” to describe getting rid of somebody. It’s childish and the school should be liable for slander at this point
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I went to MIT, and I can confidently say it's no better than many schools a tier or two down. What you describe is a difference in personality, more than in tier. There are party ivies, and there are some really awesome 2nd or 3rd tier tech schools. Some of the lower-tier tech schools are just like MIT in virtually all respect, except brand. That said, brand matters. MIT now invests incredibly heavily in brand develo…
What do you make of Eric Weinstein's recent interview on Lex Fridman's AI podcast (both MIT alumni) specifically the taking back MIT portion: https://youtu.be/rIAZJNe7YtE?t=6418 I've been conflicted with MIT as an institution ever since the death of Aaron Swartz, it stood by and then participated in what ultimately took the life of a great member of the hacker/tech community, but I understand and accept that so many…
The leadership is overrun by brand-focused, power-seeking, money-grubbing sleaze-balls. That's drifted down, taking over some parts of the Institute, and leaving others okay-ish. But if left unchecked, it will take over the whole thing and ruin it.
We definitely still need a place in the world where nerds can do their thing.
It's hard for me to express how much less visible MIT was when I went there, and how much higher the quality of the research was as well. When I applied, scientists respected it, but popular audiences confused MIT with ITT. A highly-branded high-dollar MIT of the type we have today brings in the wrong sorts of people. Nerds have no chance of competing with them for power, and they have no chance of competing with nerds for intellectual curiosity.
But I think the time for taking back MIT may have passed.
Aaron Swartz is far from the worst thing that happened at MIT; things like that now happen regularly. MIT "wised up" to the use of NDAs and non-disparage agreements in protecting its branding.
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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…
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> 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 perspe…
A university having a prestigious name is not synonymous with having Nobel Prize winners and influential professors. Hell, one of the professors at the small liberal arts college I work at is a Pulitzer Prize winning poet.