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

nytimes.com

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

#401

Post by devwastaken »

worker767424 wrote: post #251
devwastaken wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just humanities degrees that are the problem. The problem is the market is not actually in "high demand" like higher education advertises. Graduating CS students across the U.S. are turned down by employers constantly and end up working in a job that doesn't require their degree nor does it use any skills from it. I have multiple friends in this exact situation. We need to remove federal student loans for co…

Could you elaborate on CS graduates getting turned down? I've seen how much trouble companies have hiring, so the only reasons I'm coming up with are these graduates aren't willing to relocate or they studied CS because it pays well, but they're not actually that good at it. Something very underappreciated, and possibly the cause of the classic CS class bimodal distribution, is how many students live the stuff outsid…

Companies do not have trouble hiring. They have trouble hiring high experience for entry level pay. They have trouble hiring people who know exactly how to solve their abstract set of requirements on a resume.

Your comment embodies the problem. If you expect CS students to have a wide array of specific work experience then you're siphoning experience and not creating any.

Companies should be much more concerned with teaching while building. Most of these students can do the work - they simply need an introduction to the specific special environment that company uses. But those companies refuse. Therefore they don't get workers. It's a self created problem.

It's also in line with basic market economics. Surplus of hiring candidates means you have more leverage.

Another proof is how often big name companies will do diversity hires that are not related to competancy. If there was such demand and competancy required then these would not happen.

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

#402

Post by rsj_hn »

ido wrote: post #359
rsj_hn wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, the majority of US college kids would not be able to get into university in Germany nor Austria. You are comparing apples and oranges. In the US, the best students get scholarship and aid and don't need to pay either (or at least have the option of free education unless they insist on going to a school that does not offer them scholarship). The poorest students don't need to pay. The middle pays fo…

Almost all German pupils that want to can study, the old haupt-, realschule and gymnasium system you refer to is a lot less meaningful these days than a few decades ago (e.g. lots of kids can go to a gesamtschule and still get into university even if they weren't admitted to a gymnasium). Germany is actually a couple of places above the US in the education index (that measures years of schooling): https://en.wikipedi…

You can study something somewhere, say at a trade school, or night school, but not at a university and we are talking about university education. We are not talking about secondary education or vocational trade schools. Telling a kid who wants to go to university that they can't do that because their test scores are too low but there is a great refrigeration maintenance vocational school that will accept them does not mean that university education is available to them.

In the US if you have a checkbook and pulse there will be a university that will accept you regardless of your test scores. Not every university, not MIT, but Joe Bob State will take you. Universities even offer remedial education programs so those who are barely literate and innumerate can still enroll, stay longer, and graduate from the university. In Germany you would have been routed out of the system and rerouted to a vocational school, which you are lumping in with a university education by using the vague word "study". "Anyone can study". Well, anyone can study at a library in the US, too, but we are talking about admission to university.

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

#403

Post by WalterBright »

imtringued wrote: post #382
WalterBright wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been regularly bemused by people graduating with a degree in X, and then bitterly complaining that nobody told them that the pay for X was very low. I wondered how can one go through 4 years of college majoring in X, and never once google: "starting salaries for major X".

It's not bemusing if those people took on debt.

For someone going to college, there are no excuses for not checking starting salaries with google before making a huge commitment.

Heck, in the 70s when I went to college, long before google, everyone knew what starting salaries were for the various majors (at the time, Chemical Engineering was the highest paying). Everyone also knew that an Astronomy degree meant unemployment.

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

#404

Post by disqard »

mcguire wrote: post #393
imtringued wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Having seen world-class researchers up close, and having experienced their teaching first-hand over many years, I don't believe that being one is any guarantee of also being the other.

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

#405

Post by the_only_law »

WalterBright wrote: post #403
imtringued wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not bemusing if those people took on debt.

For someone going to college, there are no excuses for not checking starting salaries with google before making a huge commitment. Heck, in the 70s when I went to college, long before google, everyone knew what starting salaries were for the various majors (at the time, Chemical Engineering was the highest paying). Everyone also knew that an Astronomy degree meant unemployment.

random, but I recall seeing a graph a while ago of average starting salaries of engineering salaries and chemical was still on top.

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

#406

Post by filoleg »

taormina wrote: post #346
filoleg wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, they didn't reduce the rates. It was the same tuition price per semester, regardless of credit hours (as long as you still stay full-time, because the price for part-time is half). Which meant that people who graduated in quicker time spent less money. The cost was also the same for all undergrad degrees. But it wasn't much of a concern at GT, because of the statewide Hope/Zell Miller scholarship cover…

You can call a 3.0 GPA "low" but it's also Dean's List at GT....

My bad, I didn't mean "low" as in "bad". I meant "low" in terms of what people would consider "impressive". 3.0 won't get you into any respectable med school, and 3.0 is also pretty much a very bare minimum required to get into a decent grad school program.

While keeping 3.0 at GT might be a fairly difficult task, it is more than doable, and it wouldn't be considered by most GT students as some ungodly achievement. For comparison, the average GPA for fraternity members at Georgia Tech for Spring 2020 was 3.7 (which is higher than the average GT student GPA, but not by some crazy amount, and I think is a pretty good proxy for showing that 3.0 is not something that only a small number of students can achieve).[0]

0. https://fraternity.gatech.edu/51879_GATech_Guide.pdf

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

#407

Post by selimthegrim »

disqard wrote: post #404
mcguire wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Having seen world-class researchers up close, and having experienced their teaching first-hand over many years, I don't believe that being one is any guarantee of also being the other.

Oh I didn't say they'd be good at the board.

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

#408

Post by croissants »

pisteoff wrote: post #395
croissants wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> From my own personal experience

In the other direction, my personal experience is that a pure math undergraduate helped me to structure assumptions, evidence, and conclusions in a way that I thought was sorely missing in most of my humanities classes. But I doubt either one of our personal anecdotes is all that convincing to a third party.

> 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.

If you're going to jump to this uncharitable a view of my argument, it probably makes sense for us to just stop here.

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

#409

Post by dawg- »

VLM wrote: post #217
awillen wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a couple of other commenters have said, lots of ways to get high-quality education freely/cheaply without going to a university. Beyond that, if schools put a big warning label on their recruiting materials that said "EVEN AFTER YOU SPEND $200K TO ATTEND YOU WILL LIKELY NOT BE ABLE TO FIND A HIGH PAYING JOB" then sure, that would be fine. But that's not what they do. They allude, if only vaguely, to the value of e…

Its also a regulation issue. Medical doctors carefully regulate the number of new doctors to keep wages high. Its difficult to get into med school but when you graduate you'll likely get a medical doctor job. Public school teachers do not regulate the number of new public school teachers at all, and as such the state U system in my state produces roughly twice as many ed degree holders as there are jobs. Assuming hir…

I don't think that's the reason medical school is exclusive. It's expensive and time-consuming to train good doctors. If you are sick, would you rather have your doctor be the one who who graduated from a class of 25, or the one who graduated from a class of 250? Which one do you think got the better education? More hands-on experience? Direct attention from instructors?

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

#410

Post by dakna »

rsj_hn wrote: post #402
ido wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost all German pupils that want to can study, the old haupt-, realschule and gymnasium system you refer to is a lot less meaningful these days than a few decades ago (e.g. lots of kids can go to a gesamtschule and still get into university even if they weren't admitted to a gymnasium). Germany is actually a couple of places above the US in the education index (that measures years of schooling): https://en.wikipedi…

You can study something somewhere, say at a trade school, or night school, but not at a university and we are talking about university education . We are not talking about secondary education or vocational trade schools. Telling a kid who wants to go to university that they can't do that because their test scores are too low but there is a great refrigeration maintenance vocational school that will accept them does n…

You might want to check what a "Fachhochschule" (University of Applied Sciences) actually is. It is not a vocational school in the way the US understands it. You can get accredited Master's degrees there, but usually no PHDs. The line is blurred though, some actually carry out research nowadays, but often in cooperation with another University.
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