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A generation of American men give up on college

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Re: A generation of American men give up on college

#311

Post by long_time_gone »

zarkov99 wrote: post #281
usename_Here wrote: post #273

I agree on some of the points about support structures for women that don't exist for men. I've seen it occur even at the professional level, female co-workers are reached out to, invited to groups, given networking opportunities that I would have to put loads of effort to keep up with. It's biased treatment in the now, even if it's trying to offset the errors of the past.

Its not that the support structures do not exist, after all they never did and men did fine without them, its that college is suffused with an ideology that is anti-men, anti-merit and, for the most part, useless for anything but its own self-propagation.

==its that college is suffused with an ideology that is anti-men, anti-merit and, for the most part, useless for anything but its own self-propagation.==

I never felt like this kind of victim while in college (mid-2000s). I wonder if all colleges have changed or if society has changed. If it is society that has changed, maybe our colleges are simply reflecting the real-world change.

Re: A generation of American men give up on college

#312

Post by j1dopeman »

exporectomy wrote: post #240
WalterBright wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EE programs tend to focus on electronics, not electrical systems. But learning how house wiring works is a simple book away. But be careful - unlike electronics, house electrics can kill you. On the other hand, electricians have weird gaps in their knowledge. If I ask them to do something slightly out of the ordinary, this becomes apparent. For example, none of them understand inductive coupling, or even know what it…

Don't you have codes and license requirements for electricians and roofers? In my country, most of what makes electricianing harder than electronicsing is the rules. There are rules about how close you can put mains and low voltage wires, which your guy should have followed even if he didn't know why, rules about what parts of the house you can fix them to, or if they can be laid loosely or must be stapled to the fra…

The small subset of codes in my area that I personally looked at were significantly out of date and it was unlikely that they would be updated anytime soon. There are state codes which were out of date for a long time but they just recently updated. However there are also local codes which are not up to date. When they're not in direct conflict you need to follow both, if they are then technically the state should take precedence, but if you look into it then you'll find that the locality doesn't care and will fine you and it's up to you to defend it which will be expensive and you could still lose. The codes are only as good as the people maintaining them and it seems that the maintenance is not a priority. This was not for electrical - perhaps that one is given more attention.

Re: A generation of American men give up on college

#313

Post by teekert »

baron816 wrote: post #63

A lot of this is driven by narratives—A narrative that college isn’t worth it anymore. A narrative that (white) men are uniformly privileged and life is just easy for them. And a narrative that those men aren’t wanted by society any more. I’m not convinced that all those men need to go to college, but they clearly need something. They need to feel like they’re part of society. Nothing good can come of an entire gener…

...an entire generation that feels lost, without purpose, and unwanted. I'd argue that it is largely up to the parents to instill a feeling of worth and help kids/young adults find intrinsic motivation, not the educational system.

Re: A generation of American men give up on college

#314

Post by hollerith »

atoav wrote: post #112
smitty1e wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My brother in law is an electrician. I had enough EE in college to change a light switch without burning the house down. However, that book-learnin' fell apart when confronted with troubleshooting a strangely wired room, and I got very polite while asking him over to bail me out. These fellows eschewing the ivory tower, where being of European extraction and bearing a Y-chromosome on the college campus is an indictme…

I am a certified EE and have a MA of fine Arts (film). Living in Europe where I had to pay 350 Euros per semester (which included a public transport ticket for the whole province), I didn't have to make a choice between the two. I did both because I was interested in both. After university I was well equiped to do freelancer work in my field and earned well. I don't think this "you have to be hard or else you won't s…

I am pretty sure that the US graduates a larger fraction of its population from college than Germany does. At least that was true in 2012: https://www.businessinsider.com/r-us-falls-behind-in-college...

(ignore the headline and go to the actual numbers)

Re: A generation of American men give up on college

#315

Post by Applejinx »

atoav wrote: post #159
ceilingcorner wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "you have to be hard or else you won't survive"-mentality Europeans often have this opinion but I don't think it's an accurate reading of the issue. The issue is not that Americans work too hard, it's that this hard work is no longer actually amounting to anything. In the past, you could pay for college by working summers at the local restaurant. Today the average debt is $30K and you still won't get a decent job.…

> The article (and others) just show that American men are starting to put their efforts into places that do reward them; namely, the trades and entrepreneurship. Good point. I did not intend to argue otherwise. To go into trade is not an irrational reaction on an individual level — quite the opposite in fact. What I did argue however, was that making it hard for people to get a higher education is not a good thing f…

I'm an American and agree completely. My concern is that this '90% struggling' is considered by too many to be a default, the desired state of things. This pops up over and over again in so many ways.

I think it leads to people drawing their distinctions, around who is superior and who is inferior, and then it leads to those people making an unnecessary logical jump and deciding that those inferior people need to be HURT or REMOVED… and we've seen all this before.

And they go from there to decide that anyone arguing, wishes to crown those inferior people as the kings, and hurt the superior ones, because that's the only way they can perceive anything anymore… and they just get hostile and paranoid we've seen all that before too.

I don't know how to convince them that seeking a civilized environment for all the people (without it being conditional on performance) produces the best societal result, through the widest possible range for SOME person of whatever description to excel.

It seems like there are a lot of people for whom, they're more than happy to throw away overall system performance because they're mad that anything lower-performing can even exist. They are PC builders so mad that RAM can't run as fast as L2 cache that they're all CPU and refuse to have any RAM installed. It's stark madness from my point of view.

Re: A generation of American men give up on college

#316

Post by dotancohen »

throwtheworld wrote: post #99
baron816 wrote: post #63

A lot of this is driven by narratives—A narrative that college isn’t worth it anymore. A narrative that (white) men are uniformly privileged and life is just easy for them. And a narrative that those men aren’t wanted by society any more. I’m not convinced that all those men need to go to college, but they clearly need something. They need to feel like they’re part of society. Nothing good can come of an entire gener…

> A narrative that (white) men are uniformly privileged and life is just easy for them. This is very perspective dependent. I’m a black college student now and every conversation with friends back home includes some mention of dropping out because it’s not for us as well. When you see people with equivalent resumes already coasting by in the job market because they could get their last names and LinkedIn photos past…

  > I’m a black college student now and every conversation
  > with friends back home includes some mention of
  > dropping out because it’s not for us as well.
Naive question, I don't live where you live. But who is the "us" that your friends speak of? Black people? Black Americans? Black people from a specific subculture?

And finally, what determines that college is not for the "us" your friend refers to? Culture? Post-graduation job prospects? At least from his perspective.

Re: A generation of American men give up on college

#317

Post by jen20 »

ogwh wrote: post #202
trzy wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software engineers with ~5 years of experience (and probably less) can earn $300k-$400k annually in the Bay Area or New York if working for a large tech company.

This is a tiny fraction of software engineers. The vast majority in the wider Western world earn less than an average tradesman. The higher end of salaries in the UK is £40-50k, most earning substantially less than that. The much higher salaries paid by the major US companies are so anomalous that they may as well be discarded in any comparisons.

The higher end in London is substantially more than that across banking, insurance and foreign tech companies and contracting day rates were really rather good. Admittedly I’ve been out of the U.K. for long enough to see what impact Brexit has had, especially on contracting day rates.

Still nothing like the US though, and the cost of living is not much different than New York City IME.

Re: A generation of American men give up on college

#318

Post by xphilter »

exporectomy wrote: post #300
jpxw wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn’t. But nobody cares about that. Employment law appears to only work in one direction.

Yep. I've converted myself to a member of the native ethnicity because my government has a policy of preferentially buying from native-owned businesses but failed to define nativeness using any immutable or objective characteristics. I just have to remember my new ethnicity on any future forms that ask for it. It may also entitle me to enhanced healthcare services.

I hope you’re kidding. What a terrible thing to do.

Re: A generation of American men give up on college

#319

Post by notjes »

And women are more depressed than ever, swallowing Xanax by the hand full. Consumption of anti depressants rose 50% in the last 15 years, especially by women. 1/4 of women and 1/10 of men are doing it by now. One might argue, it is a very degen society if women need 1lb of happy pills per month to endure it.

Re: A generation of American men give up on college

#320

Post by dboreham »

dkarp wrote: post #158
WalterBright wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EE programs tend to focus on electronics, not electrical systems. But learning how house wiring works is a simple book away. But be careful - unlike electronics, house electrics can kill you. On the other hand, electricians have weird gaps in their knowledge. If I ask them to do something slightly out of the ordinary, this becomes apparent. For example, none of them understand inductive coupling, or even know what it…

I find this with everything. You have to become an expert at everything if you want it done right. Maybe it's because the truly expert help is generally too expensive. Examples: - Taxes/Pensions - if you just rely on your accountant then they'll do the bare minimum and you'll miss out - Energy company - we're rolling out smart gas/elec meters in the UK. There is an old type (smets1) and a new type (smets2). You don't…

Having lived in the UK and USA: Drs are the exact same.
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