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Escaping High School

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Re: Escaping High School

#31

Post by bell-cot »

light_hue_1 wrote: post #28
bell-cot wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try talking to someone who's worked a few decades as a Development Officer at a major university. Would they want their institution to be associated with Mr. "I will never need to actually work" Trust Fundee? Or with a real-world proven entrepreneur & business management prodigy?

You've either never spoken to people in development or didn't understand what they do. For one, they aren't involved in admissions at all. Their goal is to make long term relationships so that both sides, the donors and the university get something out of it. Not to judge people based on where their money or connections come from.

"Involvement" need not be official.

Development people have influence, and definitely want future financial success stories moving smoothly through their university's admissions pipeline.

Re: Escaping High School

#32

Post by light_hue_1 »

Incredibly narrow minded advice for the privileged.

> Maybe you go to a school in a poor area, or with a lot of violence, or far too many students for the teachers to pay any individual attention to; or, relatedly, maybe you’re required to spend a lot of time caring for siblings or parents, working a low-skill job, or holding your family together or preserving your safety in some way.

Oh if only not being extremely privileged was so easy to undo. When you work a lot of jobs to keep your family together you don't have time for alternative highschool guides. That's why people talk about companies being founded in garages and not on the street in Chicago.

I've had students who never got a good night of sleep in their lives. Or students with abusive family.

People who don't come from privileged backgrounds also cannot see themselves doing a lot of the careers related to this guide.

> It might be easier to talk teachers into letting you off the busywork for their classes

It's exactly the opposite. The idea that something is busywork and you tell a teacher you're going to do something else instead is privilege. Those teachers they're massively overworked and underpaid. They don't have time for this nonsense.

> Your charm advantage gets increased a little bit in this situation; if you reach out to an adult doing some sort of interesting work.

Seeing the author's reaction to being contacted by a student who doesn't talk they way they do, might have a tattoo, might dress very differently, would be interesting. No. Being poor and I'm bad conditions is not charming.

Re: Escaping High School

#33

Post by ameister14 »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #29
ameister14 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Dont put effort just for the sake of grades, they are worthless. They aren't worthless. Grades make it easier and cheaper for you to go to college. Good grades in college make it far, far easier to get jobs and can get you in the door to significantly better and higher paying jobs or grad school. So not worthless, just not the be all and end all.

It is almost certainly not worth your time to try to be in the top 10 in your class. Nearly everyone is much better off doing other things with their time than studying to try to get an elite college for a good deal. There's little evidence that where you go to school matters. If you take Albert Einstein and you put him in a community college, he's still going to be Albert Einstein, and you're still going to just be…

>There's little evidence that where you go to school matters.

That's not quite true. There is little evidence that if you go to Penn instead of Penn State you have different results, but there are caveats. First, you have to be able to get into both.

[edit]The studies control for selection, so the ones showing no increase in wages are studying the same cohort at Penn and Penn State, but there are more students at Penn State that are not members of that cohort than there are students at Penn.

Second, you need to go to a college with enough people and have access to a similar cohort of intelligent, hard-working and advantaged students.

>If you take Albert Einstein and you put him in a community college, he's still going to be Albert Einstein, and you're still going to just be you at Harvard.

Maybe so - most people aren't Albert Einstein, though, and that Harvard degree gets you a look at places where the community college degree does not.

Re: Escaping High School

#34

Post by ameister14 »

hardware2win wrote: post #26
ameister14 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Dont put effort just for the sake of grades, they are worthless. They aren't worthless. Grades make it easier and cheaper for you to go to college. Good grades in college make it far, far easier to get jobs and can get you in the door to significantly better and higher paying jobs or grad school. So not worthless, just not the be all and end all.

In my country higher edu institutions look at final exam scores, not grades. Grades are terrible due to bias, difficulty when it comes to comparing them and lack of transparency. At best they show effort (or "caring" parents) >Good grades in college make it far, far easier to get jobs and can get you in the door to significantly better and higher Thats why there should be fair and transparent exam after college :) Th…

I don't really disagree with you; I was just pointing out the way it currently is, at least in the US.

Re: Escaping High School

#35

Post by Fricken »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #12
BirAdam wrote: post #9

Personally, I’ve always felt that schooling is a waste of time, money, and resources. The default model of civilization is that children are absent from life. This means that kids are missing out on seeing adults interact, so they mature more slowly, and it also means that their life experiences are limited to what happens in a building. Importantly, after 18 years, people in the USA leave school in debt and are no b…

My parents do not speak fluent English, they have zero grasp of the sciences or even basic math (they still have trouble grasping percentages and fractions), and are very susceptible to scams by cult leaders from their country of origin. Same for almost all of my aunts and uncles, who lives hundreds or thousands of miles away. I would have been doomed without an external setting where I got to interact with much more…

Well, yes, the adage that "It takes a village to raise a child" still holds.

Re: Escaping High School

#36

Post by [deleted] »

Fricken wrote: post #35
lotsofpulp wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My parents do not speak fluent English, they have zero grasp of the sciences or even basic math (they still have trouble grasping percentages and fractions), and are very susceptible to scams by cult leaders from their country of origin. Same for almost all of my aunts and uncles, who lives hundreds or thousands of miles away. I would have been doomed without an external setting where I got to interact with much more…

Well, yes, the adage that "It takes a village to raise a child" still holds.

[deleted]

Re: Escaping High School

#37

Post by dweekly »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #29
ameister14 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Dont put effort just for the sake of grades, they are worthless. They aren't worthless. Grades make it easier and cheaper for you to go to college. Good grades in college make it far, far easier to get jobs and can get you in the door to significantly better and higher paying jobs or grad school. So not worthless, just not the be all and end all.

It is almost certainly not worth your time to try to be in the top 10 in your class. Nearly everyone is much better off doing other things with their time than studying to try to get an elite college for a good deal. There's little evidence that where you go to school matters. If you take Albert Einstein and you put him in a community college, he's still going to be Albert Einstein, and you're still going to just be…

Somewhat surprisingly, the impact on lifetime earnings of attending an elite college is nil for men but strong for women.

https://www.nber.org/papers/w25315

Re: Escaping High School

#38

Post by Mezzie »

A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #11
op00to wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m confused. Are you suggesting children should be working?

As I read the parent's point, I think he is advocating for kids seeing their parents work more often. As it is, kids in US don't experience the reality often. More than that, parents shield them from the reality as long as it is possible, because the reality mostly sucks. I would think of it as 'take your kids to work', but more often. I am not a big fan. I was coming to my dad's car shop after school and I can't hon…

They probably expect the kids to be involved/help, but that depends a lot on the parents' jobs. Like I was of some help to my dad in elementary school (helped him with basic IT/networking/data stuff), but my mom worked with biohazards that had very good reason for not wanting children around so any time we had to go to mom's work we were locked in a break room for hours.

Re: Escaping High School

#39

Post by Tade0 »

> As a bare minimum, high school is supposed to give kids somewhere to go while their parents are at work and keep them from ending up pregnant, in jail, or dead

Perhaps we should start with putting some trust in the people who are close to the age of majority.

High school is not daycare in any shape or form. Highschoolers can largely fend for themselves. Of course they get ideas, but you consistently see less of that when there's trust and mutual respect in place.

Re: Escaping High School

#40

Post by lordnacho »

BirAdam wrote: post #9

Personally, I’ve always felt that schooling is a waste of time, money, and resources. The default model of civilization is that children are absent from life. This means that kids are missing out on seeing adults interact, so they mature more slowly, and it also means that their life experiences are limited to what happens in a building. Importantly, after 18 years, people in the USA leave school in debt and are no b…

I love this idea. It's done a teeny tiny bit in the form of work experience, but actually we should make a scheme where workplaces get some kind of incentive to let the kids come and hang around, maybe even do some work depending on what it is.

I would sprinkle this around the school calendar so that you had a few weeks a year where you could sit at various places of work and see what was going on, instead of little weeklong academic breaks plus a mega long summer holiday. Not everyone loves the academic side of things and this could be a good break, plus it might provide some motivation for the question of "why am I learning this" that everyone has at various points in their education.

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