Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants • Hacker News Board

Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

#391

Post by mywittyname » Wed, Feb 24, 2021, 4:04 PM UTC

austincheney wrote: post #309

mywittyname wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It takes substantially more to become a truck driver than it does to be a software developer. More what? Licenses? License != skills. A CDL isn't exactly difficult to get. Being healthy and having the ability to see is probably the most difficult aspect. The technical sections contain information that you have to learn or be taught, but it's very high level and most people can learn the material in about a hour or…

> More what? Licenses? License != skills. Right, but what are the minimum requirements to become a software developer? A single 30 minute interview? There aren't any administrative or legal requirements. There is no minimum educational requirement.

Lots of software jobs have minimum educational requirements. When I did control systems software, an engineering degree (or the odd physics degree) was a hard requirement. Where I work now, certifications are mandatory and the interview process includes a real-world project + demonstration (which you're paid to complete).

You have this false impression that every software job has the same requirements. There are plenty of jobs where candidates have no hard requirements, but there is a large number that do have certification & degree requirements and/or rigorous interview processes.

Jobs building dating apps for dogs have substantially different requirements than one building brake control systems for cars, even if the job title for each is "software engineer."

Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

#392

Post by mcguire » Wed, Feb 24, 2021, 4:06 PM UTC

phabora wrote: post #287

mcguire wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" Do the best universities have best teaching technique, or are they best because they pick brightest students and they contribute nothing special? " They tend to attract the best teachers. And by "teachers" I do mean the best researchers in the given field. Which in turn attracts the brightest students.

You can’t use teacher as a synonym for researcher, they’re two completely different things.

Not in my experience.

Good researchers are not necessarily good teachers. Good teachers are not necessarily good researchers. But the best teachers in my experience are fiercely interested in their subjects, which they share with the best teachers.

Everybody likes sharing their interests, right?

Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

#393

Post by mcguire » Wed, Feb 24, 2021, 4:10 PM UTC

imtringued wrote: post #370

selimthegrim wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They won’t be stumped by a question from a smart undergrad. The best teachers might fail to make it a teachable moment.

Why would I need a world class researcher for e.g. linear algebra? Lots of students struggle with it because of bad teaching, not because it's difficult to understand.

Who would you rather be taught by, someone who spends the rest of the week using what you are being taught, or someone interested in something else (at best, teaching itself, at worst, doing anything else)?

I might suspect bad linear algebra teaching is caused by a lack of interest in linear algebra by the teacher.

Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

#394

Post by minitoar » Wed, Feb 24, 2021, 4:18 PM UTC

imtringued wrote: post #375

worker767424 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously. If you're working class or higher, you have to try to not get a high school diploma.

If highschool is really as terrible as you say and any random college is better then why not abolish most of it and let students take a reduced college workload at 16 years old? They would be able to finish college a year earlier. It's weird to have a dumbed down version of linear algebra and analysis in high school and then redo it in college.

Some public high schools offer programs like this, that let students accumulate some college credits while still in high school. This can shave a year off your 4 year degree.

Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

#395

Post by pisteoff » Wed, Feb 24, 2021, 5:39 PM UTC

croissants wrote: post #350

pisteoff wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people are learning how to value educational degrees based on what they'll actually yield financially and making decisions accordingly. So why bother learning about the basis of human thought and culture when instead we should be learning about how to make the next iPhone app that won't matter in 6 months. Anything to maximize those profits, right? People be damned, it's the bottom line that matters! Got it. Only a…

It seems like this elides the difference between the goals of humanities education and the actual practice and outcomes of humanities education. I honestly don't know if humanities education confers the ability to "read closely, think clearly and critically, and synthesize information" at a rate that's so much higher than STEM education that it makes sense to divert tens of thousands of dollars to a humanities major…

> a rate that's so much higher than STEM education that it makes sense to divert tens of thousands of dollars to a humanities major instead of a STEM one.

Likewise, your argument doesn't support diverting funds in favor of STEM programs. From my own personal experience of having both a liberal arts BA and a huge portion of a CS degree, the liberal arts program has improved my ability to think and read deeper and more completely than the CS coursework ever could. It has also proven to have prepared me to face the "real world" better than any of my STEM major peers have been able to.

More and more, and this thread re-enforces it, I think the STEM vs. humanities argument is veiled misogyny. White boys studying science = good, brown girls studying poetry = bad.

The STEM world has no soul and will fail all of us because of it.

Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

#396

Post by kd0amg » Wed, Feb 24, 2021, 6:06 PM UTC

fallingknife wrote: post #182

keiferski wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the world has grown more complex and more education is required. It isn’t 1955 anymore.

How is the world more complex? What else needs to be taught today?

And as a follow-up, what of that "else" is taught to a majority of university students?

Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

#397

Post by neonological » Wed, Feb 24, 2021, 6:17 PM UTC

imtringued wrote: post #364

neonological wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why does a classics degree cost the same as a CS degree when the market value of a classics degree is basically zero? This is good. If degrees were priced based off of supply and demand economics then only rich people would be able to afford a CS degree. Currently the bar for getting a degree is partly economics and partly intelligence. You can't get rid of economics completely but at the very least they keep prices…

>This is good. If degrees were priced based off of supply and demand economics then only rich people would be able to afford a CS degree. What makes you think that? If anything people with a CS degree can afford to pay more because they are in high demand on the job market. Usually the rhetoric is the opposite. Economic STEM degrees will be very cheap or have low interest rates while some of the uneconomic liberal ar…

>What makes you think that? If anything people with a CS degree can afford to pay more because they are in high demand on the job market.

The only people who want a CS degree are people who don't have jobs in CS and who don't have a degree. Your talking as if the people without these degrees are already super rich.

Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

#398

Post by awillen » Wed, Feb 24, 2021, 7:57 PM UTC

keiferski wrote: post #235

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"from a lower or even mid-tier college is a worthwhile investment " I always found this idea amazing, we just accept that univerities are not really there for education but instead a giant sorting machine to separate plebs from (rich/talented/dilligent/take your pick). They don't work like a normal market, there best company grows their production, and supplies millions with the best goods. Oxford/Harvard take their…

The funny thing is how people constantly bemoan the state of politics, yet consistently argue for evaluating degrees entirely based on their financial outcome. As if an educated citizenry will just appear from the ether. The connection between the two seems pretty obvious to me.

Nobody's saying we shouldn't have a well educated citizenry... the point that I was making was about whether it's worth going six figures into debt to become a well educated citizen. When you're investing that much money, it has to be a consideration.

Also, the idea that a four year degree has a monopoly on making people educated is just incorrect.

If you think it's the best thing for a society to have a well educated citizenry, then I hope you're working to get the government to pay for free college for everyone. The idea that people should have to make enormous personal financial sacrifice for the greater good of society is just bad.

Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

#399

Post by awillen » Wed, Feb 24, 2021, 8:00 PM UTC

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #195

awillen wrote: post #7

I think this is generally a good thing. I believe there are really two positive things that can come out of going to college - either you get a name-brand degree that opens doors and gets your resume looked at, or you get useful skills that enable you to go down a particular career path (e.g. CS degree). Obviously in some cases it'll be both. The reality is it's really tough to make any case that a humanities degree…

"from a lower or even mid-tier college is a worthwhile investment " I always found this idea amazing, we just accept that univerities are not really there for education but instead a giant sorting machine to separate plebs from (rich/talented/dilligent/take your pick). They don't work like a normal market, there best company grows their production, and supplies millions with the best goods. Oxford/Harvard take their…

If you think that we have anything resembling a healthy market of affordable education, I'm afraid we're not going to agree on much of anything.

The point isn't about whether colleges are there for education or not, the point is that if you have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and years of your life you should get a return on that investment.

The idea that people should go enormously into debt to become educated for the sake of it is crazy. If you want to educate people for the sake of society, then get society to pay for their education. Until then, people need to make rational choices about what for many of them is the biggest financial commitment they'll make.

Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

#400

Post by colechristensen » Wed, Feb 24, 2021, 8:35 PM UTC

gonehome wrote: post #330

colechristensen wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is fine for trade schools which can reasonably measure success by short term income of new graduates, but this is a terrible metric for higher learning in general.

It's certainly an imperfect metric, but I'm skeptical of the claims that there's a better measure for 'higher learning'. Often when people say this, I've found they're really just using it as a proxy for status or prestige rather than education or critical thinking. I agree with it in the abstract, but disagree with its use in practice.

Who says you have to measure it at all?

A valuation based on immediate financial value turns universities into trade schools (which to be fair, more people need / are really looking for).

And also it would turn universities in to not-very-good trade schools. Why would they train school teachers or social workers when they make so little money?

Metrics change what they observe, unless you are extremely careful, usually for the worse.