This is why big name degrees on resumes are generally a red flag for me. The bigger the name, the more likely the value of degree is BS.
How college became a ruthless competition divorced from learning
221–230 of 247 posts
Re: How college became a ruthless competition divorced from learning
#222Something that keeps me up at night is my fear that I only studied computer science and became a programmer because of economic and status reasons. I do feel incredibly lucky to have the job and freedom I do, but it drains me. And now I feel it's such a specialized education and I didn't explore enough to know anything else, and so I have no idea if I would have liked something completely different.
I’m in the process of trying going back right now (for a non-CS STEM field). It’s going to be contrived and expensive as the education system really doesn’t seem to care for non traditional students (and much to my dismay is not as hackable as I had hoped). Yes, I will come out in debt, yes I could make more money doing what I do now in the time it would take now, but I don’t particularly care.
What’s not hackable?
From the schools I’m familiar with, there is a minimum number of credits you need to fulfill at that uni. That’s unavoidable.
Sometimes you can test out of courses; other times you can skip pre-reqs by getting the instructor’s permission to enroll.
I’ve finished my last 60 credits (well 4 credits remain this summer term) of a statistics degree at a Canadian uni by attending midterms and finals. I only attended 4 credits worth of classes because 1/3rd of the grade in one 3 credit class was due to in class participation. The 1 credit class was 2/3rds in class participation. The rest, I didn’t go to a single lecture.
I did that part-time while working full-time.
Obviously there are some (many) disadvantages, but I took courses with profs that stuck close to a textbook for the course and I took courses without lab components. 1 course is a humanities course this summer and the remaining courses were stats, math, or comp sci.
I’m not a hacker, so maybe it’s not hackable in the sense you mean.
Re: How college became a ruthless competition divorced from learning
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wealth helps tremendously indeed. Usually, before accessing those schools, you have to study for 2 years in a preparatory program called a Classe Préparatoire. Point is, the best can be quite expensive. The most egregious thing though is that during school holidays in France, some private organisms (in Paris) offer 1 or 2-week cramming programs for €10-15k a pop where you get tutored by the very people that write the…
TL;DR: wealth helps a lot, but not in the "parents paid the diploma" direct way. More because good social status helps putting people in the right track. Hard work is still required IMHO (at least for the engineering track, I do not know about the business schools variant). Wealth definitely helps in the sense it gives you a better environment to support you during your studies. About it helping you being tutored by…
> You are not going to enter Polytechnique or ENS solely because of that. It still requires a lot of work or talent.
What's interesting is what they put the emphasis on. Polytechnique is probably the most theoretical math heavy engineering program I've ever seen.
It's probably better exemplified by an anecdote from someone who did a double diploma from Polytechnique Paris and Montreal. He got flak in Paris for solving a problem using a numerical approximation, because there was a way to get to an exact answer. And in Montreal he was asked by a professor if he could "borrow his micrometer CNC machine" since he gave an answer that was way too precise for the material whatever he was working on was going to be made of.
Re: How college became a ruthless competition divorced from learning
#224As a current student, I see this first-hand. I go to a school that is moderately prestigious, but not well known for CS. Far too many of my classmates are obsessed with the same hamster wheel of optimizing grades, superficial extracurriculars and rec letter chasing. This isn't surprising; it's what got them into this school in the first place. Unfortunately for them it's also quite useless in tech. Some of them go as…
> This culture teaches you to build your own personal potemkin village. Yes, there are some truly exceptional candidates. But for every Malala Yousafzai there are hundreds of students that merely built a very convincing facade. I remember a kid in my high school who worked on the school newspaper website with me. He wrote an API for users that returned the user's hashed password when queried. He didn't understand what was bad about that. I had to take over his work entirely. He's now at MIT.
He did something. Bad code is better than no code.
> Another kid did no work on the website but begged me to put his name on the masthead when he applied to college. He's now at Penn. A girl at my school lied about being captain of the track team. She went to Harvard.
They understood probability: what are the chances the school would audit carefully these claims? Just doesn't scale. That's shady, but the risk v. reward functions heavily skews toward embellishing your application. And was there really a captain tittle given at the school? Often sports league won't record these since they aren't official tittles. So there's little way to know.
Now, with the Harvard admission scandal, it's also tempting to choose an "ethnicity of convenience too".
Re: How college became a ruthless competition divorced from learning
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
Respectfully, this is not the crux of the article. The article is an examination of American cultural beliefs about meritocracy, our systems of meritocracy, and relevant societal effects. In my opinion this quote is more representative of the “crux” of this particular piece, “A social and economic order based on the immense labor incomes of extravagantly educated workers traps high-achieving students in a pitiless co…
I admit to being biased against articles about higher education that are dismissive of Science and Engineering majors. They don't understand the contributions of such to modern society. They talk about art, but isn't a cell phone a work of art? Isn't a Saturn V a work of art? Isn't knowledge of how stars work amazing? What could be more beautiful than Yosemite? I recall a quote (can't remember where it came from): "A…
“I felt I was learning the keys to the universe in college.”
I am currently pursuing a PhD in mathematics and studied computer science and mathematics in college, so I certainly don’t intend to disparage science majors, but I have a vague sense that attitudes about engineering degrees are different nowadays.
Out of interest I recently sat in on a graduate class which was supposed to be about complexity theory. On the first day the professor, who is an expert in the field, essentially told us “Complexity theory is trivial, you have a problem and you reduce it to another problem with an algorithm. Now, let me tell you what you have to do to get a software job at Amazon... You have to submit a paper every other semester to such and such conference etc...”
Whereas I wanted to read through the Knuth books, and learn compiler theory, and learn category theory and algebraic geometry etc..., but the climate didn’t seem to support that; outside of a small group of friends I found (and the math graduate students). The climate felt like what this guy’s YouTube channel projects: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=27C-TuJceeI
My friends at a different major public technical university bragged about attending career fairs and studying for coding interviews. It just feels almost devoid of what I imagined the academic spirit to be.
Re: How college became a ruthless competition divorced from learning
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
I admit to being biased against articles about higher education that are dismissive of Science and Engineering majors. They don't understand the contributions of such to modern society. They talk about art, but isn't a cell phone a work of art? Isn't a Saturn V a work of art? Isn't knowledge of how stars work amazing? What could be more beautiful than Yosemite? I recall a quote (can't remember where it came from): "A…
“I felt I was learning the keys to the universe in college.” I am currently pursuing a PhD in mathematics and studied computer science and mathematics in college, so I certainly don’t intend to disparage science majors, but I have a vague sense that attitudes about engineering degrees are different nowadays. Out of interest I recently sat in on a graduate class which was supposed to be about complexity theory. On the…
I know what you mean. It seems that STEM these days is loaded up with people who are in it only for the money. Back when I went to college, there was no such thing as billionaire engineers and scientists. STEM people were "nerds" and did not have nearly the status that doctors and lawyers did. People who went into STEM went into it with full knowledge that it was a low status profession. There were jokes about moms being bitterly disappointed that their progeny wanted to be nerds rather than doctors or lawyers.
I remember once a young lady trying to pick me up. She got around eventually asking me what I did for a living, and I said programming. Her interest evaporated the moment as that word left my mouth. (Her face and posture fell and she turned away.)
"Almost Live" relentlessly mocked engineers as being nerds and unable to get dates.
This all underwent a titanic shift once tech people suddenly started being billionaires and media darlings.
Re: How college became a ruthless competition divorced from learning
#227Divorced from learning? Let's say that it has been an open marriage for quite a while now. I leave it to the interested to look up Henry Adams's remarks on his student days at Harvard.
Re: How college became a ruthless competition divorced from learning
#228I have a (perhaps unpopular) pet theory that college as we know it going to cease to exist sometime in the next several decades. In its current direction it feels like it’s becoming more about gaming the system. Those who do the “best” are really just the best at looking like the best. I saw so many of my peers in college “learning” strictly for the sake of getting good grades, not to understand the material conceptu…
Western Governors University has this really interesting test-based approach. If you pass the tests, you pass the class - however long that takes. You can get a degree just by passing tests, with out ever watching a lecture, even online. That doesn't get you the prestige of a "name" college, it doesn't get you the network of people, but it documents that you provably know your stuff. If I were a hiring manager, I could see regarding that as a plus over a traditional university.
The thing that WGU lacks is breadth of majors. I could see such a system replacing[1] traditional universities in the next couple of decades, but it has to expand to cover more majors, and it needs more than one school doing it. But if it happens, the way it's going to happen is by managers and recruiters realizing that it's better because it's provable.
[1] Well, such a system could replace traditional universities as a source of knowledge. It can't replace them as a source of contacts or a source of elite prestige. Traditional universities will probably survive on students who want those things.
Re: How college became a ruthless competition divorced from learning
#229This kind of acacdemic rat race is very common in developing countries like India and China where there are many times the number of candidates as available good jobs. For a long time, the US colleges avoided this competition mainly because the difference between good and bad career choices was not that great and being a college graduate meant that you were almost guaranteed to achieve a middle class lifestyle. Howev…
> where there are many times the number of candidates as available good jobs And there it is. This same phenomenon is also exactly the "leetcode phenomenon" that we see in the SE field, btw. You could call it an Eastern culture thing, but your summation captures the why more accurately. > being a college graduate meant that you were almost guaranteed to achieve a middle class lifestyle. I imagine that up until the 80…
> The worst part about this modern reality is that the vast vast majority of jobs that "require a degree" really should not be doing so.
And therefore shouldn't require the cost of a degree and the time of a degree. A lower-middle-class lifestyle wouldn't be nearly so bad if you had four more working years and no debt at the start...
Re: How college became a ruthless competition divorced from learning
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. You think Harvard is going to fail the son of a senator or legacy donor? A lot of folks I went to college with did nothing but party, drink, hang out. Education didn't matter to them at all. They were going to get a job at their family's firm, company, etc anyway. Didn't matter what their grades were. Professors know who they can't fail.
When I was at university, there was a "blind examination policy" in place. The people marking the exams did not know whose exams they were marking. It's possible that corrupt professors worked around this, but there was never any scandals related to this policy.
"Policies." I remember lots of policies. If you're rich enough, the policies don't apply to you. That's not a scandal, it's just how the world works.