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A generation of American men give up on college

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Re: A generation of American men give up on college

#461

Post by bernulli »

zabzonk wrote: post #436
thatfrenchguy wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe the price in the US just isn't right anymore. Has it be right since at least the 1990s though? There’s clear divergence between income and college costs in the USA, and it’s hard to see why, given everyone in the industry seems to be taking a part of the honey pot. Seriously, how did we arrive to “textbook for a semester are more expensive than tuition is in other counties”?

> Seriously, how did we arrive to “textbook for a semester are more expensive than tuition is in other counties”? Academic corruption. They get kickbacks from the publishers for forcing these (always crap) textbooks on their students.

That's not really a thing. Also, wait till you hear how much an academic makes from the articles they publish, and from those lucrative research grants from big-[oil,pharma,etc].

Re: A generation of American men give up on college

#462

Post by baron_harkonnen »

smitty1e wrote: post #74
baron816 wrote: post #63

A 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…

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…

> all the Grievance Studies major

Area, ethnic, cultural, gender, and group studies (I'm assuming "Grievance Studies" falls under this category), at least in the US, have been in steady decline since 2008, and even at their peak only accounted for 0.5% of majors (now just 0.3%). Even if you want to add in humanities in general that has gone from 3% to just above 2%

The idea that college campuses are ever more filled with people studying "useless" majors is a fiction. The largest areas of major concentration are business, biology, health professions, and engineering and all of these have been more or less growing for years.

There is this pervasive myth that most students in undergrad are having trouble transitioning to industry because they wasted their time studying their non-practical passion, but the data[0] clearly shows that the trends for the last decade have been increasing focus on career oriented practical majors.

[0] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_322.10.a...

Re: A generation of American men give up on college

#463

Post by PaulHoule »

savanaly wrote: post #58
PaulHoule wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah i am a p-hacker who can do any kind of statistics so long as it is nonparametric statistics because i only know the binomial distribution

On a site like this where anyone can comment and only a few do, this is the far greater problem compared to p-hacking: https://web.ma.utexas.edu/users/mks/statmistakes/filedrawer.... . There are probably 512 people in this thread right now that have had that same experience you did but didn't reject the null hypothesis so they're not commenting.

I dunno.

I play the game of assessing the gender balance of groups a lot.

Some of it is wondering where society is going, some of it is just trying to avoid sausage parties. Trans people don't give me any trouble because they want to be assigned a certain gender, non-binaries might force me to learn the multinomial distribution but those seem to turn up at the 1/256 - 1/512 level if that.

I stopped going to Yoga classes in my ZIP code because they attract a lot of middle-aged and older men who, I think, are there to look at women without doing anything too strenuous.

Re: A generation of American men give up on college

#464

Post by selimthegrim »

School-Cotton wrote: post #361
WalterBright wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My grandmother worked as a mechanic for the phone company in the nine-teens. Her sister did whatever she wanted, she started and ran her own business.

What are the “nine-teens”?

Given he went to Caltech in the 80s, probably the 1910s

Re: A generation of American men give up on college

#465

Post by aogaili »

aogaili wrote: post #367
pwthornton wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I am starting to wonder about is if there is a systematic guidance counseling failing in high schools and colleges. There are so many well paying tech jobs that we just aren't getting that many candidates for. Forget not having a great gender ratio, it is often hard to find a lot of candidates for my openings. If I can't offer sponsorship, it can take awhile There clearly seems to be a lot more knowledge in…

When I was studying software engineering, I met a girl who switched major after the first year. I saw her again once in the lab, and I asked her why did you switch, she said, and I quote her exact words: "why would I sit and code all day when I've this a$$, pointing at her back." I honestly didn't know what to say afterward. Our program had special scholarship for women, and we had only one woman (out of 30 or so) an…

Why the downvote? I don't share her opinion, I'm just sharing an encounter I had. I was really surprised by her response, coming from different culture to the west, both of my parents are engineers.

I met several great women developers in my career and I personally think the field will benefit a lot by having more diverse perspectives on the tools being created.

Re: A generation of American men give up on college

#466

Post by lyaa »

icare_1er wrote: post #389
lyaa wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has experience with the educational systems of the middle east, I find it amusing how you are misinterpreting the situation. It's extremely hard for women in these countries to get good careers in any field other than teaching or medicine especially since they are often forced to marry and leave the work force (they can't work without their husbands' permission and they almost always handle all child c…

So: "women choose a career that would give them less pain". You can flip it any way you want, you will always end up with the following conclusion which demolishes your feminists dogmas: that women and men have inherently different interests, which, big news, is not surprising, given that they are different.

?? It's entirely reasonable for two populations to make statistically different choices when they are under different pressures. It is exactly what is happening with what is being discussed in this thread: white men skipping college because they have face pressures to earn money, feel college is not for them, etc. Women face different levels of these pressures and also pressure to skip STEM and go into "feminine" majors.

The different pressures are sufficient to explain much of the different major choices, especially when considering the changing distribution in other countries with different sets of pressures.

There are indeed differences between men and women -- cis-men can't give birth, for instance. However, other than the statistical population differences, an average man and an average women with equitable socioeconomic settings are incredibly similar in many areas. Perhaps even in an ideal world there would be more female biologists and more male IT workers. That would be fine. What matters is that a human who is interested in something would have a fighting chance to get there.

Right now, cultural and societal factors are tipping different scales in different ways. For future generation, we would do well to reduce the imbalance -- encourage and support minorities, women, and, yes, white men. People face different battles and helping some does not mean others have to be ignored.

Re: A generation of American men give up on college

#467

Post by phkahler »

ashtonkem wrote: post #401
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #360

Great news, the concept that you need college to succeed was one of the greatest lies told to my generation. Pleased the next generation is waking up. End of the day if the loan can't be written off, if the loan is just handed out to 18 year olds and has almost no limit then the organization that asks for the loan will inevitably balloon out of all proportion and no longer be reflective at all of the value you get ba…

> Great news, the concept that you need college to succeed was one of the greatest lies told to my generation. I guess it means what you mean by “succeed”. Going to college is and always has been a reliable way towards earning more money[0]. The issue isn’t that college doesn’t work, the issue is that it’s basically an asset bubble of sorts and the cost exceeded its value. If huge chunks of future generations skip co…

>> Going to college is and always has been a reliable way towards earning more money[0]. The issue isn’t that college doesn’t work, the issue is that it’s basically an asset bubble of sorts and the cost exceeded its value.

That last part about exceeding it's value contradicts the notion that it currently IS a reliable way toward earning more money. At least net more money.

IMHO a bunch of professors should be able to start their own "non-profit" college with minimal overhead. But I suppose a lot of them aren't really into teaching anyway. Maybe we need to separate education from funding their hobbies (research).

Re: A generation of American men give up on college

#468

Post by pwthornton »

ogwh wrote: post #202
trzy wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software engineers with ~5 years of experience (and probably less) can earn $300k-$400k annually in the Bay Area or New York if working for a large tech company.

This is a tiny fraction of software engineers. The vast majority in the wider Western world earn less than an average tradesman. The higher end of salaries in the UK is £40-50k, most earning substantially less than that. The much higher salaries paid by the major US companies are so anomalous that they may as well be discarded in any comparisons.

While most software engineers in the U.S. don't make 300-400k, you will make above 100k pretty quickly. You can make 150k-ish total comp at tons of places in the United States. These places will usually offer very good benefits too.
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