Core classes should be cut in Half at least. University has become grossly over priced, because the government is picking up the tab, which has incentivized universities to add as many costs and classes as possible.
A generation of American men give up on college
321–330 of 824 posts
Re: A generation of American men give up on college
#322To people recommending trades, there's nothing wrong with trades, but you can get more out of college than only a job. You can actually learn things that you wouldn't have learned otherwise. The environment also naturally stimulates and values learning, gathering knowledge and understanding. You can learn how to become a better person and think more critically. Seeing how many misinformation is going around and the p…
Some downsides of trades I have not seen mentioned yet are that many of them are hard on the body and/or somewhat risky. So you don't have as long a useful career as in most professions. My dad was a carpenter and I worked with him a few summers when I was young. He asked me how many 50-year-old roofers I had seen during those summers. A friend of his told me there is a reason you never see old welders and painters.
Re: A generation of American men give up on college
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
This reminds me of a passage from Bryan Caplan's book, "The Case Against Education." Paraphrasing, there is nothing stopping you from walking into a lecture at Harvard or MIT or any other renowned center of learning. No one will ask you for identification or lock you outside. You can buy or download the same textbook and fill out the same homework. (In the case of your "socialization" value, again, no one is stopping…
No real value?! Gee. Well, I did it :-) I did 2 or 3 years of philosophy courses at Sydney Uni. I mean, I just turned up. At the beginning of each semester I'd start doing every possible course, then just keep doing the ones I liked, with interesting/good/admirable lecturers, which turned out to be a lot, 2 or 3 times the amount of lectures weekly than if I'd been enrolled. Also was on their mailing list so also went…
Most people don't have the time freedom to be able to do this. The opportunity cost would be too high, as they need to work to eat, and sitting in a class isn't work.
Re: A generation of American men give up on college
#324A 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.
It isn't necessarily just the educational system that's leaving this impression, it is a culture at large, for example on social media, and in various fields including the arts. Parents can influence all they want but the outside world needs to support these influences to an extent or they fall flat.
Re: A generation of American men give up on college
#325Earlier 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…
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 is why the trades work best under a competent contractor who, while not an expert in all fields, brings together the necessary skills and experience to avoid gap defects.
Re: A generation of American men give up on college
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Do you mean by "we know we’re not what companies are looking for even with fancy CS degrees", simply that they're looking for identically qualified people that aren't black? If so, I'm extremely sorry to hear this, and disgusted that its happening. I can't actually think of anyone I worked with who'd knowingly treat or value a black colleague or interview candidate any differently, but maybe that's white blindness on…
>that they're looking for identically qualified people that aren't black?
You see this here on HN all the time, articles about "how we do hiring" that start out with "I would only hire someone who I'd want to get coffee with." Which, to me at least, makes it sound like the person is looking to hire friends/drinking buddies that also have technical skills, not employees. It's a signal that the person is looking for "their type of people."
It's so acceptable to hire this way that people feel comfortable opening publishing that, under their own name, as something they are proud of.
I'm not even black (but I am a woman, I grew up poor, and I'm on the older side) and constantly reading about hiring procedures like that makes me feel like I'm very much not welcome.
Re: A generation of American men give up on college
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
If he? hadn't consumed the resources necessary to get the MA, he would still have paid the same amount of taxes - most of which will be subsidising other people. But if paying the full cost, there would be a choice where down one path there is more money because less resources were consumed, and one that would be roughly equivalent.
Yeah, bit I am willing to pay more taxes if it benefits my environment. Because this is what I think it means to be part of a society. They made it possible for me to choose more or less free of economic pressure what I want to study, so me supporting them is only good and fair. I mean, what is the goal of a good live? Extract as many resources from your surroundings as possible, kicking your competition down and the…
> I want to live a good live and leave my environment in a better shape than I entered it in
This seems like a pretty good guiding principle in life.
Re: A generation of American men give up on college
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
...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.
It isn't necessarily just the educational system that's leaving this impression, it is a culture at large, for example on social media, and in various fields including the arts. Parents can influence all they want but the outside world needs to support these influences to an extent or they fall flat.
Yeah, I suppose that's true, you do need some resilience to peer/societal pressure. I could be a struggle.
Re: A generation of American men give up on college
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
No way. Being white is definitely a leg up. Well, at least for me, a white guy, no college degree. Life is much easier. I don't think there is any support missing for us, that actually sounds hilarious. We need to work on lifting others up.
Based on the number of "affirmative-action" initiatives that I see all over the US, in many tech-companies (I don't know about other fields), I'd say that being a women, or black, is definitely a huge plus to get your foot through the door, with many recruitment programs blatantly saying they are only for minorities, which sounds to me like pretty much segregation in reverse, but that indeed seems to be the agenda of…
I'm a white guy and I bootstrapped my career with no degree and little college (dropped out of community college) by simply padded my resume doing some basic contracting gigs for friends and their professional networks and parlayed that into full-time work. I'm now an engineering manager at a unicorn.
I will also say that for all this talk about how easy Blacks and women have it, I don't buy it, and I think people spinning tales about how "My company only hires Blacks and women" aren't involved in technical hiring. We are desperate for experienced talent and are under tremendous pressure to build an effective team. We don't have the luxury to be picky about demographics. And my team isn't unique: It's the same story from my peers both inside and outside my company. Likewise, the pipeline itself doesn't have very many women or Black candidates from what I can see, so even these people got automatic interviews I doubt it would change team demographics significantly. And finally: if this is indeed "segregation in reverse" (which it's not: it would just be segregation with the roles reversed), where are these tech companies where the majority of their engineers aren't White or Asian men?
Re: A generation of American men give up on college
#330I 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.
You've got a fundamental difference of opinion around the basic purpose of the exercise and can't be trusted to have a rational opinion about what's really going on.
What is 'merit' for?
If your answer is 'distinguishing between things of worth and things that are valueless' then there's a problem, and you are prematurely contextualizing. Briefly, you cannot be trusted to dictate the contexts of value for the whole world around you. You're missing far too much. And it matters. Not just morally, but practically.