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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

#171

Post by abecedarius »

tokyodude wrote: post #104
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…

Note: I am not agreeing nor disagreeing with the article. I'm only clarifying what it's trying to say The article is about the fact that school does not show that "developer ... is signaling that he is reliable and comes to work every day" The whole point of the article is there is zero correlation between people who've graduated from college and people who haven't in term of how well they do on the job. It sounds co…

> The whole point of the article is there is zero correlation between people who've graduated from college and people who haven't in term of how well they do on the job.

This is not what the article says. It's saying employers hire graduates because they're better employees, but college mostly didn't make them better. This is closer to your option 2. (We are talking about the OP, the Caplan editorial, right?)

Caplan is saying college is mostly an expensive arms race. It has to be expensive (in students' time and attrition through boringness/difficulty, if nothing else) to be an effective signal. Subsidies in recent decades have made it even more expensive.

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

#172

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

>> Bryan Caplan is professor of economics at George Mason University and author of “The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money.”

Here I was thinking this was an article that genuinely sought to engage my opinion, when in truth it was only an advert for someone's book.

I think I'll make it a habit from now on to scroll all the way to the bottom of opinion articles to save myself some time.

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

#173

Post by Mirioron »

moorhosj wrote: post #161
mythrwy wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We still use amphetamine to treat ADHD and leeches to help heal skin grafts. I believe that even cocaine is used in medicine today, but I'm not quite sure.

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

#174

Post by abecedarius »

josephjrobison wrote: post #163
milesvp wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I have just shown up and asked the prof if they minded, at the end of the first class.

The irritating thing nowadays is that sometimes materials are behind a wall on the university website.

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

#175

Post by JMTQp8lwXL »

hopler wrote: post #131
JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The credential signifies that you indeed spent years writing bad code, and got better. Maybe it does have value there. Many companies are weary of hiring someone who has a few years of self-taught experience.

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

#176

Post by snowwrestler »

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.…

> doctor someday who was educated at least in part by YouTube or comparable online resources

Emphasis mine.

No one cares if medical students avail themselves of digital resources to help them through medical school. Good for them.

Show me how many practicing doctors passed the boards and made it through residency after ONLY using Youtube channels and flash cards to self-educate.

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

#177

Post by Mirioron »

gist wrote: post #154

The article gives the impression that he is a professor at Princeton but he is not. He is a professor at George Mason University. The picture caption is "Princeton" and this paragraph is what had me thinking that: > If a student wants to study at Princeton, he doesn’t really need to apply or pay tuition. He can simply show up and start taking classes. As a professor, I assure you that we make near-zero effort to stop…

He got his PhD from Princeton though. That's probably why he mentions Princeton as his example.

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

#178

Post by milesvp »

sdaslo wrote: post #162
milesvp wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I was one of those students who didn’t care about the grade except as a proxy for learning. I never understood why other students would try to argue with profs about test grades, when it was clear they list points because they misunderstood something. That said, the thing that kept me from getting C’s in courses I didn’t like was that I was motivated to do at least decent at the things I do.

For the classes I sat in on, the motivation was that I was interested in the topic. But the social aspect really helped. Even though I wasn’t enrolled, knowing I was going through the same pain helped. I’m not surprised that MOOCs havn’t taken off like people assumed they would. There is nothing like sitting near people to really feel like doing something.

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

#179

Post by snowwrestler »

pembrook wrote: post #73
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…

We’re in the minority. Most professions aren’t engineering. Or medicine. Think of the average student graduating with a generic business degree. What actual skills does this person possess after 4 years of schooling? This is why so many Fortune 500 companies have new grad trainee programs that they funnel people through. The fact is, most of these generic “business” jobs can be done by anyone with a few months of on…

Surprisingly few. New grad training programs still depend on the "grad" part.

It's not like Fortune 500 businesses are stupid. If they could hire random high school grads for all their jobs and pay them less, don't you think they would? As you point out, college degree requirements have not always existed, they were added. Chesterton's Fence is a useful mental guide here. People don't generally make things harder on themselves for no reason.

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

#180

Post by gist »

Mirioron wrote: post #177
gist wrote: post #154

The article gives the impression that he is a professor at Princeton but he is not. He is a professor at George Mason University. The picture caption is "Princeton" and this paragraph is what had me thinking that: > If a student wants to study at Princeton, he doesn’t really need to apply or pay tuition. He can simply show up and start taking classes. As a professor, I assure you that we make near-zero effort to stop…

He got his PhD from Princeton though. That's probably why he mentions Princeton as his example.

It's super ironic that he would use the sleigh of hand in his writing in that way. Sure at the end it's disclosed that he is not (currently) teaching at Princeton.
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