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U.S. Rep. Angie Craig drops college requirement for staffers

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Re: U.S. Rep. Angie Craig drops college requirement for staffers

#291

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

Eumenes wrote: post #224
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This really doesn't happen in technology outside of the US. It seems like way more of a US thing in general, but I can't fully speak to that.

That's not true. I worked for a big tech company with a large European presence and they 100% heavily factored in the prestige of what university you went into for hiring. Also, they do this with career fairs/college hiring - they aren't sending college recruiters to a community college, they're sending them to MIT, Oxford, Stanford, Yale, Harvey Mudd, etc.

Was it a UK based company?

Re: U.S. Rep. Angie Craig drops college requirement for staffers

#292

Post by alistairSH »

xyzzyz wrote: post #282
liamN wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that throwing more people in jail technically is a solution, but it's a very expensive one that does nothing to address the reason why people are committing crimes. There are many factors at play, and I won't pretend to know them all, but most people turn to crime out of despiration. Throwing people in jail for more minor offences and giving longer sentences will not make repeat offenders less desperate. Not…

> I think that throwing more people in jail technically is a solution, but it's a very expensive one It's not, compared to the costs of the crime. Tangible costs of crime are big enough, and the intangible costs are bigger still. Cost of imprisonment is really nothing compared to the economic and social damage done by repeat offenders. There is also big heterogeneity in the cost of imprisonment. Places with high pris…

So, you’re arguing that Americans are just more prone to crime than Germans or Brits or Canadians? And that out incarceration rate naturally should be orders of magnitude higher than peer nations?

Sorry, I don’t buy that. There has to be something else at play.

Re: U.S. Rep. Angie Craig drops college requirement for staffers

#293

Post by Eumenes »

jltsiren wrote: post #275
Eumenes wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not true. I worked for a big tech company with a large European presence and they 100% heavily factored in the prestige of what university you went into for hiring. Also, they do this with career fairs/college hiring - they aren't sending college recruiters to a community college, they're sending them to MIT, Oxford, Stanford, Yale, Harvey Mudd, etc.

If you work for an American company, you usually get the American experience. Local companies tend to be more in sync with the local culture. One thing I remember from Finland is people who went to a prestigious foreign university and then returned home without work experience complaining how difficult it is to find a job. In some fields, a fresh graduate without real professional experience beyond internships is alr…

I agree that things will be more localized depending on the company. But good recruiters should know what schools are good, but they should also be able to assess a resume that doesn't have an elite school attached to it. Obviously this doesn't always happen, but it should in practice.

Re: U.S. Rep. Angie Craig drops college requirement for staffers

#294

Post by kevviiinn »

rayiner wrote: post #113
kevviiinn wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Police should definitely be more highly educated, we see the result of them not being so in the US

So police have college degrees in other developed countries?

Yes, actually

>Also, many other countries require officers to have a university degree - or equivalent - before joining the police, but in the US most forces just require the equivalent of a high-school diploma

>Maria Haberfeld, professor of police science at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, says: "Some police forces in Europe have police university, where training lasts for three years - for me the standouts are Norway and Finland."

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56834733

Re: U.S. Rep. Angie Craig drops college requirement for staffers

#295

Post by metalspot »

LawTalkingGuy wrote: post #104
metalspot wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> employers had a burden of showing that their tests were sufficiently related to the posted job so why not just create a test that actually tests for the skills needed for the job? that would be the obvious way to optimize profit from a business perspective. the fact that employers don't do that is a pretty clear sign that the purpose of degree requirements is explicitly discriminatory, the same as "IQ" tests (which…

> "IQ" tests (which are completely fraudulent) No, not really. Up for debate is pretty much only the overloading of the word 'intelligence'. But whatever it is, it correlates well with job performance and maximum level of education attainable. But they are culturally sensitive, and thus racially sensitive, and you need to apply the right test to people, for the right goals, to get meaningful results. If you want to h…

> correlates well with job performance

highly doubtful, but i would be interested to see your evidence. IQ tests might provide a rough gating mechanism but applying them in the field you don't have any control group so there is no proof that they are actually selecting people correctly (you don't know how many good performers you are rejecting because they didn't score well on the flawed test).

> maximum level of education attainable

since the education system is also designed by the same misguided people who designed IQ tests it wouldn't be surprising if scoring well on IQ tests also leads to doing well in the education system, but that doesn't meant that either are doing anything of any value.

Re: U.S. Rep. Angie Craig drops college requirement for staffers

#296

Post by metalspot »

sokoloff wrote: post #109
metalspot wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if a job has specific knowledge and skills requirements then it needs to have an objective test that people pass to be able to do the job. that is the only way to eliminate the systemic discrimination that the university system and degree requirements propagate. almost all serious jobs already have objective skills tests and licensing requirements for employment: doctors, lawyers, financial services, heavy equipment…

I'm 100% on-board with requiring an actual med school degree for my doctor rather than a skills-based test.

getting a degree is nothing more than passing a series of tests over a period of time. medical licensing is residency, exams, board certifications, etc. it is all tests. the question is who is setting the rules for those tests and whether or not private corporations get to charge you 100s of thousands of dollars to take them.

medicine is way out of my field, so i don't have personal experience and can only go on what i have read, but i would guess that it is a lot like most other highly specialized fields: pre-med is a waste other than basic bio/chem, medical school is mostly information you will never use, residency is where you learn how to actually do the job, and then you get into a specialty and learn that specialty, and what you learn for your specialty is the only thing you really use.

Re: U.S. Rep. Angie Craig drops college requirement for staffers

#297

Post by injb »

smcin wrote: post #283
injb wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>> Police officers' risk of on-the-job death in most years averages #14 .. #18, behind logging, fishing, farming, construction, heavy manufacturing, trucking The difference is that everyone who works on those jobs has roughly the same risk. A cop who has to respond to a disturbance in a bad area is fat more at risk than someone in the crime lab or the evidence room. If you look at the risk of injury to cops who are…

Sure but can you cite or estimate more accurate stats? I read ~68% of officers do patrol, so as a decent approximation that's most of them. I take your point about cities/areas/zipcodes/states. To me one pattern that keeps jumping out is that the South (LA, MS, GA, TN) has incredible levels of (gun) violence. Ideally we could quote police officer injury and death rates, per-capita population, by region, by circumstan…

>>> can you cite or estimate more accurate stats?

No, sorry. But I don't know if the stats would fully capture what I think the difference is. Like, I remember a case of a cop who shot a teenager who was running away from him in an alley way at night. I think he had been armed but threw the gun away, not sure now. But the discussion about these incidents usually lead to the stats about how being a cop is not that dangerous in aggregate. That may be be true, but the distribution of danger is very peaky for cops and it's not just a question of whether they are patrol cops, but its also a question of the circumstances they're in in a given moment (which I didn't really mention in my previous post).

If you're called to investigate a group of armed young men in an alleyway at night, and you end up chasing one of them in the darkness, alone, you are in far more danger than the stats would imply.

From brief searching & skimming, I'm seeing that US police kill around 1000 people per year, while around 250 cops are shot. I deliberately compare shot to killed because police are usually far more accurate and effective at shooting than the average criminal. Needless to say this doesn't include all the time that police are shot at or attacked with other weapons that would justify shooting. So while yes they are not in as much danger generally as the people who attack them, it's certainly not a trivial amount of danger either.

Re: U.S. Rep. Angie Craig drops college requirement for staffers

#298

Post by wolverine876 »

majormajor wrote: post #176
wolverine876 wrote: post #173

Instead of better educating our population, the low-tax / anti-intellectual / authoritarian-reactionaries have convinced the population that they don't need education. With education, they might aim for socio-economic advancement (remember the American Dream?), think for themselves, challenge the established order (edit: i.e., they might decide to become the powerful and the leaders themselves). Now they know their p…

Most college education right now opens up very little in terms of "socio-economic advancement" besides being "ticks the right box" on an application. Which is basically the opposite of "think for themselves, challenge the established order." The status quo there isn't great; the wealthy were getting very different college degrees anyway and going into very different jobs.

What is your basis for that claim?

The fact is that people earn far more with a college degree. The rest is baseless speculation.

Re: U.S. Rep. Angie Craig drops college requirement for staffers

#299

Post by wolverine876 »

tombert wrote: post #198
wolverine876 wrote: post #173

Instead of better educating our population, the low-tax / anti-intellectual / authoritarian-reactionaries have convinced the population that they don't need education. With education, they might aim for socio-economic advancement (remember the American Dream?), think for themselves, challenge the established order (edit: i.e., they might decide to become the powerful and the leaders themselves). Now they know their p…

I am pretty much part of the academic system now (part time professor, part time PhD student) working in a field that generally expects a degree (software engineering). I don't think anyone would call me "anti-intellectual", and I live in one of the highest-taxed states in the country. That being said, I really think it's reductive to say that not require a college degree on every damn job is "abandoning the American…

> I really think it's reductive to say that not require a college degree on every damn job is "abandoning the American Dream"

This is the quality of argument in your job? I perhaps overestimated academia after all.

Re: U.S. Rep. Angie Craig drops college requirement for staffers

#300

Post by wolverine876 »

gnicholas wrote: post #228
wolverine876 wrote: post #173

Instead of better educating our population, the low-tax / anti-intellectual / authoritarian-reactionaries have convinced the population that they don't need education. With education, they might aim for socio-economic advancement (remember the American Dream?), think for themselves, challenge the established order (edit: i.e., they might decide to become the powerful and the leaders themselves). Now they know their p…

> Instead of better educating our population We need to do a better job educating our population, for sure. Most of the failings are at the K12 level. IMO (as someone who works in edtech, in both K12 and higher ed), the primary issue with higher education is not that we're not doing a good job of educating students, it's that the cost is sky-high and does not correlate well to the value provided. So much of the value…

> So much of the value is in signaling and network-building, not in the actual teaching itself.

People keep repeating that, but what is the basis? Reptition doesn't signal truth; it signals the opposite, arguably, that people are following each other rather than examining the facts and arguments.

It's certainly not my experience.

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