More students are turning away from college and toward apprenticeships • Hacker News Board

Re: More students are turning away from college and toward apprenticeships

#181

Post by paulpauper » Sat, Mar 18, 2023, 6:51 PM UTC

Nah, not a fan of the trades, sorry.

Worse job prospects, lower wages, and also debt too. People think trades are cheaper. They are not. You incur a cost because of training, and also opportunity cost from not finding work as easily, and time spent training, which may be unpaid. And then lower wages. You are better off with a generic 4-year degree from a mid-ranking school than trades, imho. Student loan debt has way more payment options, lower interest rates, and forgiveness compared to trades debt.

I'm assuming you are able to graduate from college. Dropouts would generally be better off going into the trades.

Re: More students are turning away from college and toward apprenticeships

#182

Post by hamburglar » Sat, Mar 18, 2023, 6:52 PM UTC

pacaro wrote: post #119

xyzelement wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re second point, I mean something else. 200 years ago I had to go to university because why? That's where the books and smart people were concentrated. So I would pay a lot of money and physically relocate myself to access those books and people. Now? I can study online, I can read, I can converse with super bright people of my chosing without the friction and limits of doing that in a college environment.

There's a two edged sword here, both for the university student and the independent learner Learning in a structured environment provides access to the orthodox in the field of study. This can be very valuable to limit unnecessary exploration of blind avenues (there is of course such a thing as necessary exploration of blind avenues) For those who progress through the academy, the risk is that they become narrow thin…

The self-taught path can also lead to another kind of deficiency, which is someone who knows all the concepts but doesn’t know how to talk about them efficiently. This ends up being the type of person who spends 5 minutes describing a component of their design where items are stored based on a key and can be looked up by that key so another process can stash and retrieve those things rather than recompute them but the things only stay stored for a certain amount of time or based on some other criteria like how much space is available or how frequently they are fetched and—- and you cut in and say “so a cache.”

I used to have a particularly brilliant (not sarcasm; he really was brilliant) colleague who “invented“ lots of things that had already been invented and would have saved a lot of time by just bouncing things off others who would say stuff like “oh, so it’s RPC” or “oh, so like a distributed queue” and stop him from reinventing the wheel.

Re: More students are turning away from college and toward apprenticeships

#183

Post by rg111 » Sat, Mar 18, 2023, 6:52 PM UTC

wootland wrote: post #3

I wish it were easier to get a visa and move to another country without a degree. As someone without a degree, that's been the most annoying issue. The best parts are: not having student loans and not having a mindset that grinding within "the system" leads to success.

I did my Master's degree solely for visa. Nothing else.

What little I learned in Master's, I could have learned from online MIT/GaTech/Michigan/Stanford courses with much more flexibility, and for free. And a lot better quality, too.

All the "network" I built that was of any value to me was made in mailing lists, Twitter, Google Groups, and later Discord.

Re: More students are turning away from college and toward apprenticeships

#184

Post by paulpauper » Sat, Mar 18, 2023, 6:52 PM UTC

xyzelement wrote: post #92

A few posts in this thread talk about the signaling value of college and I wanted to share a thought on that. When's the last time you saw someone wear a suit? For me, most people I see in suits now days are town car drivers. Because that's who needs to signal something (reliability?) to me in a low context environment. People stopped wearing suits at work, even for interviews, because the signaling value of a suit i…

Yeah, outside of finance, it would seem like it's the opposite, signaling lower status and conformity.

Nowadays that's just not the case. Between credible certifications, blogs, gihub portfolios, open source projects, etc - I can get a TON of signal on you that would be more valuable than your college background.

But this is just a tiny subset of jobs though.

Re: More students are turning away from college and toward apprenticeships

#185

Post by lapcat » Sat, Mar 18, 2023, 6:53 PM UTC

I see some people in the comments claim that you can give yourself a good liberal arts education outside of college, using public libraries and the internet, but I'm skeptical. One commenter even repeated a quote about college being a waste of money from Good Will Hunting... which of course is a work of fiction. I attended a state university and still live relatively close to the campus, with a library card for the public library and surrounding library system; there's just no comparison: the university library has vastly, vastly more books and papers of an intellectual nature than the public library system. Moreover, university students have vastly more access to online resources of an intellectual nature than the general public. I would be extremely hard pressed now to access and re-read many of the things I read in school. It might be possible, but I'd have to buy most of them myself, probably online, for an obscene amount of money.

College doesn't make you smart. I'm not sure to what extent it can teach you to think critically either. Those abilities may be innate, and I brought them with me to college. However, there are books and papers and ideas that I was exposed to in college that I never would have been exposed to if left to my own devices. I didn't even know they existed! Some of those books and papers and ideas were crucial to the development of my thinking. They influenced and changed me. This is a principal value of a college education. Your professors have spent decades reading and studying things that you've never heard of before, and they let you know about it. Even if important intellectual works were not paywalled behind a college tuition — which I admit is an unfortunate situation for the public — those works might get lost in obscurity anyway, because popular culture and market capitalism have little or no interest in promoting them to you.

Students need guidance. There are a lot of people who are self-motivated, including myself, but that's not the same thing as self-guiding. You can guide yourself into a dead end if you don't already know where you're going.

Re: More students are turning away from college and toward apprenticeships

#186

Post by azinman2 » Sat, Mar 18, 2023, 6:56 PM UTC

phpisthebest wrote: post #67

azinman2 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very few on their own would get anywhere close to what a college gives you in terms of an education. Particularly in ways that are far broader than what you’d do professionally. Keep in mind college is 4 years of education on a daily basis.

>>4 years of education on a daily basis. Is it? Really??? For all degrees and all programs.. that is the claim... but I just do not see that manifest in reality. Seem you have a very inflated view of the programs... just how much debt are you attempting to justify?

I carry zero educational debt.

How do you not see that manifest in reality? What school doesn’t have classes 5 days a week that people are taking, or otherwise expected to be somehow participating in an activity related to education? Sounds like a school that should lose its accreditation.

Re: More students are turning away from college and toward apprenticeships

#187

Post by azinman2 » Sat, Mar 18, 2023, 6:57 PM UTC

lotsofpulp wrote: post #74

azinman2 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very few on their own would get anywhere close to what a college gives you in terms of an education. Particularly in ways that are far broader than what you’d do professionally. Keep in mind college is 4 years of education on a daily basis.

>Keep in mind college is 4 years of education on a daily basis. For some, but for most, I bet it is a lot less. There are entire degrees (and schools) designed to require little more than for people to show up somewhere a few times per week.

What degrees and which schools?

Re: More students are turning away from college and toward apprenticeships

#188

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Mar 18, 2023, 6:58 PM UTC

alsaaro wrote: post #88

As someone who has worked two of the most intensive blue collar jobs, people should be wary of romanticizing blue collar work. Blue collar workers are expected to really work at their jobs. White collar workers can chill if there is no work to be done, or be sent home early with pay, or take a relaxation day and just browse the internet and listen to podcasts. They have perks, you see white collar workers leaving wor…

[deleted]

Re: More students are turning away from college and toward apprenticeships

#189

Post by gloryjulio » Sat, Mar 18, 2023, 6:59 PM UTC

tempsy wrote: post #168

gloryjulio wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just proved my point. Since most of the ppl do need to work for money and success or their quality of life suffers.They would need something like unis, trade school, online schools or whatever to bring them to their goal. By this standard lots of low tier unis are not worth the time

no i didn’t. it’s not about the ranking it’s about what you choose to study. if you go to a lower ranked school you need to focus on technical skills. saying it’s not worth it in general is not what i said at all

u changed my word again. i never mentioned ranking like the one u read in the media. i said tier because i meant the actual usefulness whether they r teaching aligns with ur goal. Ultimately it's about how useful they r to the students. I literally bring up effective studying as my own example and do u think the unis have this as an actual subject?

I'm not sure what u r trying to argue here, especially when u keep changing my word. U know exactly what I meant and u r just looking to be a contrarian

Re: More students are turning away from college and toward apprenticeships

#190

Post by ravagat » Sat, Mar 18, 2023, 6:59 PM UTC

InvaderFizz wrote: post #39

Mc91 wrote: post #9

I have been programming for a Fortune 500 company for four years. Not long ago, I applied for a job at another Fortune 500 company. HR really had only question for me, they saw on my resume I did not have a college degree listed, and did I have one? I said I went through most of college towards a Bachelors in Computer Science but dropped out before graduation. I did not get the job, although I don't know if that's wh…

I got my degree at 35 because of this. Not that I actually learned much of anything in the program, I was there purely for the paper. This is where schools like WGU excel for those of us just seeking credentials for what we already know. The terms are six months, you can do as many courses as you want during that six months. Over half the courses are just a final exam. You take a pre-test on day one of the course. If…

+1 for WGU for explicitly getting the paperwork done. I've recommended this to self-taught peers, vets, and those with uncommon backgrounds who had to deal with paperwork bias.

Congratulations on your degree, happy to see other folks take advantage of WGU. It's really good