True danger is serious business. Approaching an unexploded IED is dangerous. So is going in to reactor #2 to pump out radioactive water.
There's a difference between incorrect and dangerous.
Dangerous Things You Were Taught In School
41–50 of 87 posts
Re: Dangerous Things You Were Taught In School
#42Is it just me, or are the drawings terribly confusing? It took me a while to even determine which "point" they went along with.
Re: Dangerous Things You Were Taught In School
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
From what I can see, there is also a pretty strong correlation in the UK between the "rank" of a school and the amount of time pupils spend playing sports (particularly rugby) as part of the curriculum - presumably for the perceived leadership/team-building that these sports are believed to promote.
At my high school, and at my college as well, the sports players are generally looked down upon by the 'gifted' or 'AP' students. I don't know how sports players compare to the average student, but the average GPA on our cross country and track teams always shocked me a little. Few of my friends ever got below 3.5, and the sports teams often had averages below 2. The football team (by rumor, I never actually saw the…
NB I was using the UK sense of school - high or junior school. People here generally don't refer to universities or colleges as "schools" (apart from "law school").
Re: Dangerous Things You Were Taught In School
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Your earning potential is essentially given to you at birth" Interestingly the data shows otherwise. Factors such as parents' education, where one lives, age, race, family structure, IQ are measured and factored in. Two stats techniques are commonly applied. Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) is more traditional while Instrument Variables (IV) is a newer approach which attempts to account for statistical errors such as om…
Factors such as parents' education, where one lives, age, race, family structure, IQ are measured and factored in. I would classify those as luck factors. They don't really address what I was speaking to. Even if you believe college counts, someone with the fanciest of PhDs is going to really struggle to out-earn high school dropouts if he or she is not willing to work on the job. And that is the point. College is no…
A Ph.D is a filter in that respect, as you have to work hard to achieve it.
And I there are many hard working shop floor workers, but they never make it to management. Just working hard on it's own does not earn you more money.
Re: Dangerous Things You Were Taught In School
#45"On average, a four-year degree is the equivalent of an investment that returns 15.2% a year." - http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2011/06/30/a-college-degree-r... Stay in school kids.
People treat college like it's a checkmark to check off. If try get through four years of it they will make good money for the rest of their lives. False. College is about learning. If you just scrape by and don't learn anything from it, you'll be no better off four years later. In fact, you will probably be worse off, with six figures of debt and no salary.
Re: Dangerous Things You Were Taught In School
#46True danger is serious business. Approaching an unexploded IED is dangerous. So is going in to reactor #2 to pump out radioactive water. There's a difference between incorrect and dangerous.
Dangerous does not have to mean deadly.
Re: Dangerous Things You Were Taught In School
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Opportunity is opportunity. If you weren't in school, you could have worked 30 hours per week as waiter plus the time you were studying. Realistically, if we assume you work for minimum wage, you're going to be around $200K short by the time you finish a four year program, and that does not include any costs associated with actually going to school, which could easily run you another $100K+, depending on the circumst…
This is incorrect. It is unlikely the average individual will work more than forty hours, so the opportunity cost is realistically the difference: 10 hours. At 7.25 an hour, pre-tax annual that's a mere $4k, for a four year degree that's $16K. Out of undergrad I went from a possible annual income of $20K (qualified for nothing but waiting tables) to $50K. The opportunity costs were paid for in the first six months.
It is unlikely the average individual will work more than forty hours
Unless you were only working for 10 hours at your course, this is false. You could have a 40 hour per week job plus the 30 hour per week job at night. You were working anyway.
Minimum wage is actually $10/hr. here, so that skews things slightly, but let's assume $20K per year anyway since you mentioned it. It's been a while since I've done the math, so I was actually off by a bit. It turns out to be about $108K by the time you graduate given the current state of things.
However, if we assume you live to be 80, it actually works out to be about $640,000+ that you lost out on by not working for those four years.
In your case, you are definitely ahead, but can the average student claim the same? I'm not confident that they can. More importantly, were you really stuck at $20K for the rest of your life? If you had the chops to go to college, it seems like you probably had the chops to find yourself in better standing anyway. The first four years of my career didn't pay much more, but I leveraged that experience to move to a six figure income soon after.
Re: Dangerous Things You Were Taught In School
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Factors such as parents' education, where one lives, age, race, family structure, IQ are measured and factored in. I would classify those as luck factors. They don't really address what I was speaking to. Even if you believe college counts, someone with the fanciest of PhDs is going to really struggle to out-earn high school dropouts if he or she is not willing to work on the job. And that is the point. College is no…
A Ph.D is a filter in that respect, as you have to work hard to achieve it. And I there are many hard working shop floor workers, but they never make it to management. Just working hard on it's own does not earn you more money.
I agree entirely. Income increases by the unique value that you can bring to the table, not the degrees you have hanging on the wall.
If everyone in the world studied the exact same subject in college, incomes would remain the same as if those people had not gone to college at all. The market forces would remain unchanged.
What I mean by work is to work to set yourself apart. Maybe you need to hit the gym to become unique that way. Maybe you need to work on your singing skills to become unique that way. College can also bring you unique attributes, but it is no more special than any other avenue, at least with respect to income.
Again, college has nothing to do with it on a macro scale. I won't deny anecdotal instances can use college to their advantage. It definitely happens. Random degree holder is not going to be any better off though.
Re: Dangerous Things You Were Taught In School
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ironically, schools that were set up like that produced more literate and numerate kids, i.e. Grammar schools. In fact these were a key route to social mobility for bright but poor kids. They were killed off by politicians who relied on the lower classes for their votes...
Except many exist today, and there mostly populated by the middle class with ridiculously low levels of poor people. Like 1% on free school meals and majority were tutored for the entry test? Most poor people can't afford tutors. With stats like that, they REINFORCE class structure, not break it. And do poor people want to pay for the education of the elites? Which is what current grammars effectivly do.
That is only because there are so few grammar schools left. When they were all over the country, anyone who passed the 11-plus, regardless of their family's wealth, could go.
These days they are intended to reinforce class structure. You don't need a left-wing, if you don't have a poor working class...
Re: Dangerous Things You Were Taught In School
#50I wish I could recall the name, but I read an essay on the general concept of this topic not too long ago. Essentially the author referenced how schools are stratified into a series of groups: lower class, lower middle class, upper middle class, and elite (not sure if these are 100% accurate). The author explained (from a series of in-person observations) the differences in education at each of the various levels. Ch…
This is the basic premise of "Waiting for Superman." It's a fairly good documentary on the failings of American public education. The majority of the film focuses on the problem of stratification and the impact it has on both lower and upper levels of the stratification.