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The Value of an Undergraduate Degree

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Re: The Value of an Undergraduate Degree

#21

Post by teakettle42 »

legalcorrection wrote: post #17
wiremine wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a long conversation with a coworker the other day. He has a 20 year old, and he's allowing this son to stay at home, but is charging rent and forcing him to start paying for more and more things.

I find that people who do that kind of thing just don't get it. Things have changed. It's a much more high-stakes world for young adults than it was when they were that age. It's very easy for middle class kids to now end up poorer than their parents, which was much rarer for the boomers and early gen x. Give your kid every advantage you can.

Giving your child a gradual introduction to the real world is giving them an advantage.

Coddling them through a perpetual adolescence isn’t doing them any favors; it’s setting them up for exactly the kinds of failures you’re referring to.

Re: The Value of an Undergraduate Degree

#22

Post by ren_engineer »

dahart wrote: post #11
ren_engineer wrote: post #3

this is all the same rehashed Boomer garbage defending college. Reality is that all of these benefits could easily be replicated at a fraction of the cost. Cultural inertia is the only thing keeping the current university system alive, everything about the tenure track and how graduate students have to work is broken as well. The current system in the US was not created as a program to efficiently educate a modern wo…

> The current system in the US was not created as a program to efficiently educate a modern workforce to maintain a modern economy , so it fails miserably By what metric is it failing? Why do you think it wasn’t created to educate the workforce? What is your emphasis on “modern” referring to? You clearly have strong feelings about this, and I’m curious why, but your comment doesn’t clearly communicate why you feel th…

>By what metric is it failing?

the trillion dollars of student debt that can't be paid off because many degrees don't produce real economic value to justify the cost of education. Having millions of people waste years of their lives and massive amounts of money is a failure.

>Why do you think it wasn’t created to educate the workforce?

because I know the history of the university system and it's barely changed in centuries

>If it’s “easily replicated” more efficiently then why hasn’t it already happened?

because the government subsidizes it with trillions of dollars so there is no incentive to change

Re: The Value of an Undergraduate Degree

#23

Post by paulpauper »

It was the mid-2010s and "college dropout" was the mark of an up-and-coming genius. Headlines were questioning the need for degrees at all and billionaire Peter Thiel was awarding high school graduates $100,000 not to attend college and become entrepreneurs instead. "Not long ago, dropping out of school to start a company was considered risky," wrote the Wall Street Journal. "For this generation, it is a badge of honor, evidence of ambition and focus."

Yeah, this cannot be a smart move. $100k doesn't even cover the annual salary of a dev. Good luck starting a business or any initiative with that. Advertising is so expensive these days, along with everything else. I would rather put the $100k in an index fund anyway. Thiel had 2 big successes, those being Facebook and PayPal, everything else he says or does has dubious or is wrong, whether it's bitcoin or imploring kids to drop out of college. College is worthwhile because the median is higher in terms of success, income. Focusing on the outliers who drop out of college ignores that the median is lower.

Re: The Value of an Undergraduate Degree

#24

Post by karaterobot »

An undergraduate degree has value, but the costs should be considered, and it should all be weighed against the alternatives. For different people, the outcome of such an evaluation will be different. The unfortunate thing is that many people (like me) just assumed that college was the one and only option, and didn't think twice about it.

When you're in high school, everybody tells you to go to college. Teachers, guidance counselors, most adults. So, you just plan to go to college. Nobody is telling you "consider learning a trade," or "consider traveling", or "consider that you can write books/program computers/start businesses without a degree". Sophomores and Juniors in High School are often not worldly or mature enough to ask these questions themselves, and nobody is revealing to them the complexity of the first big, life-changing decision they'll have to make. Or, at least they weren't in my town in the 90s, maybe it's different now.

Re: The Value of an Undergraduate Degree

#25

Post by seibelj »

paulpauper wrote: post #23

It was the mid-2010s and "college dropout" was the mark of an up-and-coming genius. Headlines were questioning the need for degrees at all and billionaire Peter Thiel was awarding high school graduates $100,000 not to attend college and become entrepreneurs instead. "Not long ago, dropping out of school to start a company was considered risky," wrote the Wall Street Journal. "For this generation, it is a badge of hon…

> Thiel had 2 big successes, those being Facebook and PayPal

How easy it is to brush aside two of the largest tech successes of the last 20 years!

Re: The Value of an Undergraduate Degree

#26

Post by ryanklee »

_8j50 wrote: post #10

If you like college good for you. But the first two years are bullshit. The last two, you should be able to learn them on the job for many career tracks and test them out. Articulate for me exactly why biology, chemistry, philosophy,etc... are neccesary for a Compsci or IT degree? Because the british said so many centuries ago is not a good reason. Neither is "what about the profits of colleges". We put up with 12 ye…

University is not trade school. There is more function there than simply learning to do the narrow job one believes the future may have in store for them. Here are some others:

  - Obtain fodder for sufficient individuation
  - Find sexual mates
  - Find platonic mates
  - Learn many disconnected things
  - Learn many connected things
  - Learn to take criticism in the open
  - Learn to render criticism in the open
  - Engage diversity
  - Engage similarity
  - Discover the value of value
  - Make mistakes in the open... recover
  - Watch others make mistakes in the open... help them recover
  - Learn to how to think
  - Learn the history of thinking
  - Become a robust citizen of the universe
  - Learn you are much smaller than you thought you were

Re: The Value of an Undergraduate Degree

#27

Post by paulpauper »

seibelj wrote: post #25
paulpauper wrote: post #23

It was the mid-2010s and "college dropout" was the mark of an up-and-coming genius. Headlines were questioning the need for degrees at all and billionaire Peter Thiel was awarding high school graduates $100,000 not to attend college and become entrepreneurs instead. "Not long ago, dropping out of school to start a company was considered risky," wrote the Wall Street Journal. "For this generation, it is a badge of hon…

> Thiel had 2 big successes, those being Facebook and PayPal How easy it is to brush aside two of the largest tech successes of the last 20 years!

facebook was 17 years ago. What about since? If you cannot adjust to the times or if your new advice is bad, it does not matter how good your prior successes were.

Re: The Value of an Undergraduate Degree

#28

Post by corrral »

_8j50 wrote: post #10

If you like college good for you. But the first two years are bullshit. The last two, you should be able to learn them on the job for many career tracks and test them out. Articulate for me exactly why biology, chemistry, philosophy,etc... are neccesary for a Compsci or IT degree? Because the british said so many centuries ago is not a good reason. Neither is "what about the profits of colleges". We put up with 12 ye…

> We put up with 12 years of random but generally useful things forced on us. Once we decide a career as adults, information not directly useful to the job we will be working should be optional.

It is optional. You just can't get a bachelor's degree without doing that, because that degree indicates completion of a broader course of work than you're interested in.

Bonus: auditing classes is usually cheaper.

Re: The Value of an Undergraduate Degree

#29

Post by arethuza »

tedheath123 wrote: post #14
_8j50 wrote: post #10

If you like college good for you. But the first two years are bullshit. The last two, you should be able to learn them on the job for many career tracks and test them out. Articulate for me exactly why biology, chemistry, philosophy,etc... are neccesary for a Compsci or IT degree? Because the british said so many centuries ago is not a good reason. Neither is "what about the profits of colleges". We put up with 12 ye…

Was it the British that said so? AFAIK most British undergraduate courses don't have general education requirements

Yeah - I did a CS degree at a UK university in the 1980s and it was 4 years of maths & CS stuff - pretty focused.

Learning how to actually write code was something you were pretty much expected to pick up by yourself - most of the CS classes had requirements to do a personal project which was a large part of the marks for that class. Absolutely no way could any graduate from that course without having produced multiple applications in everything from assembler (6502 and 68000) through to Pascal on a mainframe (yuck) and C and Prolog on Unix minis and graphics programming in C on Atari STs - which was great fun.

I loved it - although I did make a bit of a mess of my first year, but you just had to get through that - no impact on my final degree.

Edit: I should explain - Scotland so first degrees are 4 years rather than the 3 years of the rest of the UK.

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