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Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost

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Re: Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost

#431

Post by nebula8804 »

conductr wrote: post #302
nebula8804 wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the rigid nature of other systems leads to more promising people being eliminated early on. America was always more fluid: the country of Homer Simpson: A guy that got second chance after second chance and with his own way of doing things(which others like Frank Grimes find absurd), managed to make something of himself. Applying this logic to college, schools used to be more strict yes but there was always le…

I definitely like the flexibility our system provides. I changed majors a couple times before I found what I could tolerate (can't say it's a passion). I do not think the kids today are as comparable to the kids of yester*. I think in past, people desired those things in a day dreamy way, but knew it wasn't realistic. They also knew they'd get disciplined for poor grades; perhaps even harshly. We just culturally have…

>I think it's more accurate to say that more socially adept people have infiltrated the tech scene due to the loot. Sure tech no longer equates to nerd like it did back then, and bullying is managed differently now, but let's not pretend that the same type of kids that were into tech back then are ruling the world today.

Ok you do make a good point about people coming into tech for the money. It was quite a recent phenomenon. About 15 years ago I was finishing at my engineering focused university and my CS department was considered loser ville. Only the deeply passionate people wanted to enroll in that program. Everyone else went into Engineering or the sciences. Fast forward a few years later, and they are the largest department in the university. We are at the tail end of a massive bubble and its possible that if AI sticks around or the tech industry cannot support these valuations, its likely that high salary gigs will become scarce. I guess we will then see if this field grew because most people genuinely wanted to be here vs people just looking for dollar signs.

>This is why I chose the words "bookworm" and "studious" because those things do not necessarily mean tech.

Yeah I'd imagine those kids would have gone into Engineering or similar fields instead. They really arent the people I was talking about. I considered the social structure growing up to be the "jocks" at one end of the social spectrum and the "techies" at the other end with a massive amount of regular people in the middle.

If you take these middle people and just filter for B average grades or higher, these middle people wouldn't necessarily consider tech because it just wasn't really a 24 hour lifestyle thing for highschool kids in the 2000s. Yeah we had computers and video games but for most people, computers were that beige box in the den you'd play with once in a while, not a career. I recall in high school (mid 2000s) coding was offered and they couldn't even fill the entire class. The only course computer related that had any relevance was graphic design. The industry really expanded post iPhone when computing became a 24/7 lifestyle. In my opinion thats when the normies started considering computing as a career because it now impacted them directly.

Re: Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost

#432

Post by DrBazza »

hnhg wrote: post #408
petesergeant wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The median grade at Harvard is an A It’s been 20 years or so since my knowledge was up-to-date, but Oxbridge undergrads used to bitterly complain that their 2:2 (grade C I guess?) wasn’t seen as equivalent to getting a 1st(A?) or 2:1(B) from other good UK unis by graduate schemes and large employers. Oxbridge workload seemed to be significantly higher for most undergrad degrees than it was at other unis, and the fe…

I've worked a lot with Oxbridge and Ivy League folks and there is nothing particularly special about them. An Oxbridge degrees bestows an out-of-the-box premium personal brand, as you've demonstrated, as well as the social network, but not superior ability, in my experience

When I graduated, ahem, a few decades ago, the main difference between Oxbridge (maths graduates) and non-Oxbridge, specifically the Cambridge Maths Tripos, was that is was teaching the same content it had for the previous decades, whereas the maths courses at mine, and other 'Russell Group' universities had been dumbed down for the first couple of years. You could reach the same level as previous graduates by the final year, but you had to take a new additional course.

Re: Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost

#433

Post by baiwl »

ben_w wrote: post #423
baiwl wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Immigration is about short-changing the natives to make the billionaires wealthier, yes, we know. People are also now learning this fact, which is why you’re getting unpalatable politicians elected.

"I'm being short-changed!" claims rich minority whose high pay even fresh out of university leads to SF rents being unafordable by key workers. Irony is, that doesn't prevent such sentiments as yours leading to people like Trump. I had a chance to live in the USA years back, I'm glad I didn't bother to take it.

I didn’t say anything about tech workers.

Re: Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost

#434

Post by ben_w »

baiwl wrote: post #433
ben_w wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I'm being short-changed!" claims rich minority whose high pay even fresh out of university leads to SF rents being unafordable by key workers. Irony is, that doesn't prevent such sentiments as yours leading to people like Trump. I had a chance to live in the USA years back, I'm glad I didn't bother to take it.

I didn’t say anything about tech workers.

Motte, Bailey. You responded in a thread about tech workers and H1Bs, on a tech forum.

Re: Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost

#435

Post by markus_zhang »

IMO most of the stuffs in colleges can be self taught nowadays so the only two benefits are 1) that piece of paper and 2) networking. And good network only exists for certain colleges so for the majority out there it’s just that piece of paper.

Re: Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost

#436

Post by numbsafari »

markus_zhang wrote: post #435

IMO most of the stuffs in colleges can be self taught nowadays so the only two benefits are 1) that piece of paper and 2) networking. And good network only exists for certain colleges so for the majority out there it’s just that piece of paper.

Most of stuffs can, indeed. But how many have actually done so?

Like most investments in yourself, you get out of it what you put into it.

Re: Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost

#437

Post by qcnguy »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #274
btilly wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This one case isn't the full story, but I firmly believe that it is a big deal. See https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/401/424/ for the case. The problem is that any hiring test that blacks and whites pass at different rates, is presumed racist. Never mind that the real issue might be that the blacks went to worse schools and received a worse education. Never mind that there is a big body of research showing…

and yet ... that's not what the case you referenced says at all. Justia's own summary, from your link: > Even if there is no discriminatory intent, an employer may not use a job requirement that functionally excludes members of a certain race if it has no relation to measuring performance of job duties. Testing or measuring procedures cannot be determinative in employment decisions unless they have some connection to…

They worked at a power plant, a place where dumb mistakes can cause explosions and kill people. The power plant wasn't racist and hired blacks into the labor department, but because it was just manual labor that department paid worse than the other more technical departments.

When SCOTUS found against the power company they sent a clear message that merely being a technical, safety-critical job was an insufficient basis to establish a need to test people for intelligence. And as it's hard to argue that testing isn't needed for people who could cause massive power outages but is for , that was widely interpreted to ban such aptitude testing for any kind of job.

Re: Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost

#438

Post by nostrademons »

pjmlp wrote: post #411
rayiner wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you take nukes off the table, the U.S. doesn’t have a 100x military advantage. If China seriously mobilized its industrial capability, the U.S. may not have even a 2x advantage. Remember that, right before World War II, the US didn’t even have a top-10 military, having demobilized it after World War I. It’s vast industrial capacity is what enabled it to build a larger military than all of Europe combined within a…

The most important fact, that people overlook, is that its industrial capacity was never bombed during the war, and Pearl Harbour was the only time the country got directly attacked.

So Australia & New Zealand are the next superpowers.

I remember when I was around middle school or early high school, I attended a geopolitical simulation at MIT that wargamed out a crisis between major world powers, and that was the exact result. New Zealand won, in alliance with Australia. They were able to invest heavily in technology while everyone else was nuking each other, and then ended up with space lasers or whatever the endgame tech was while everyone else ended up back in the stone age.

Re: Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost

#439

Post by expedition32 »

kiba wrote: post #334
roenxi wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US military isn't that scary; the evidence to date is that it's ability to destroy counties ends somewhere around Iran's strength. The modelling I've seen is that any US-China war will take place in Asia and China will probably win it unless the US gets a lot of help (always possible). And the US has already been undermined by the likes of China, Russia and India and there isn't a lot they can do about it in the…

America doesn't and shouldn't fight China or Russia alone, so I don't know why we're talking about that. Russia is basically on its way out as a military power. It can't even conquer Ukraine. As for China, you don't fight China alone. What do you think military bases in Japan are for? Anyway, for the world's sake, China shouldn't start a war, but sometime you just can't stop stupid.

China hasn't started a war since the 1970s.

Re: Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost

#440

Post by qcnguy »

tovej wrote: post #377
seec wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least the good part about the US situation is that people are still free to choose for themselves. The cost isn't redirected to the whole population at large via taxation. In the EU it's much worse, because the same reality is materialising, but it is still advertised as "free". Of course, this is the path to a form of soft communism and all systems are becoming dysfunctional and unable to create real value at the…

The EU is aggressively neoliberal or liberal-conservative, and that is the reason universities have begun to be more expensive. It's related to austerity, privatization, the aggressive revision of tax codes, and New Public Management. The left has not been popular in the EU since the 70s, which is why this development has gotten increasingly aggresive in the last few decades. You cannot seriously suggest that the EU…

> where public funding programs for research has begun to be funneled to startups instead of research groups.

It is darkly amusing that in one post you claim "the left has not been popular since the 70s" whilst admitting that the EU is centrally planning new companies. That's very much the sort of thing the left did in the 1970s.

> You cannot seriously suggest that the EU has moved left in any meaningful way ... the EU commission is currently trying to implement that every new regulation can only pass once an old regulation can be removed.

And who believes they'll really do it? They only got to that point after ignoring decades of warnings from the right that their left wing approach would crush their own economic power, which it did.

It's a common enough claim that "the left" refers to exactly the same set of ideas that it did in 1930, and therefore that no modern entity is left wing. But this is spurious. There are still left wing people and groups, that claim to be so and nobody disagrees with them.

All that happened is that as left wing economics became discredited over the course of the 20th century the left became better at obfuscating what they were doing. After the working classes disappointed by not rising up in revolution, the concept of equality shifted to be about gender and race instead. The EU doesn't want to openly nationalize industries, but is really keen on feminism, regulation and mass third world migration.

And economically, the left didn't need to obfuscate much. The gap between heavy regulation and nationalization is small. CEOs get to pretend that they're still in charge, but with no strong commitment to private property rights they're ultimately just transient administrators and there's not much reason to sign up for the stresses of being one. So - no startups.

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