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More students are turning away from college and toward apprenticeships

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Re: More students are turning away from college and toward apprenticeships

#481
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also grows the intellectual souls, exposing people to far more depth of thought. It also builds professional networks. If a person is smart enough to receive it, more education is almost always good. Of course money is a factor, and schools have gotten insanely expensive. I’m glad to hear that more people are finding alternative routes - it shouldn’t be that everyone needs college because quite frankly many career…

Your post makes me consider what other avenues to achieve the growth of intellectual souls and exposure to depth of thought could exist other than paid-for highly-structured institutions. I think people wax poetically about their own experiences without really considering the experiences of others. We've had free public libraries for centuries now. We've had a pretty open Internet for decades. There is literally noth…

Of course there's something stopping them from learning.

It's called their own lack of understanding. Take virtually any topic about anything and do a search for it on the internet. If it's even remotely controversial, there will be thousands of pages screaming at each other in opposition to each other. Meanwhile, the academics who are doing actual research are sitting over there in the quiet corner, making an attempt to cut through the bullshit.

It definitely gets easier to cut through the bullshit on your own once you've been around the block a few times, but that's as an actual adult with an actual education, not a child who doesn't know much about anything or a man-child who can be convinced to believe the truthiness of a topic.

The internet is a problem because actual knowledge is often boring. There's no controversy in many fields amongst scholars because they've either exhausted the research on a topic or there's so much data supporting the general consensus that it's not likely to budge. People don't get excited about knowing the things that everyone should know. They get excited about knowing the hot, new thing regardless of whether it's even verifiable or valid.

Re: More students are turning away from college and toward apprenticeships

#482

Price of college is going up. Wages are stagnating. Quite unfortunately, it makes perfect sense that fewer people would think the expense is worthwhile. I wish we offered free high quality university educations. The USA can coast on its dominance for only so long before the lack of educated people sinks us.

> I wish we offered free high quality university educations. You could sponsor somebody's university or college education, pay a full or part scolarship.

We need an army to defend our nation.

You could stand at the border with a rifle.

Re: More students are turning away from college and toward apprenticeships

#483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both can still be valid. Mental health days are good, and burn out is a real phenomenon. It's a shame that blue collar workers don't have access to these facilities, and yes office workers are by and large 'softer' than blue collar workers. But we should fight corporations and organisations to provide those facilities for everyone , and not pick sides in a working class debate (not that you did that). All paid worker…

>All paid workers real enemy is the capital class, and we should never forget that. I totally agree with you up to this point, so just want to explain why i disagree with this particular point. I want better treatment for all humans, and I agree that some of the "capital class" is actively fighting this, but some is actively helping it as well. For example, I think Bill Gates, the Collison Brothers, and some of the K…

The people can do good things, but in an exploitative manner?. Earning billions off the labor of others and then giving back is still not moral in my eyes. And I think it's an exception to the rule any way that any in the capital class produce a net benefit to society.

Re: More students are turning away from college and toward apprenticeships

#484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are referring to something on one hand very valuable, on the other hand it's very easy to graduate college without learning that, and I think colleges themselves in recent decades are pivoting away from. A hundred+ years ago when "almost nobody" went to college, college was a place for those hungry and willing to sacrifice for intellectual growth. Nowadays college is a baseline consumer good that "almost…

> I had a class that really critically analyzed native American cultures. Today the class would be considered racist, it would have to a priori be an admiration of those cultures, rather than a critical analysis. It's amazing that now we're getting hit from both directions in this regard. The left would like minorities treated with kid gloves, and now the right wants to muzzle schools that would say anything critical…

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Re: More students are turning away from college and toward apprenticeships

#485

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I would say that knowing eligibility requirements of the governor of Kentucky without using the internet is useless information to everyone that doesn't work in the Kentucky election office. The useful skill is being able to find the information on the Internet if you want to run for governor of Kentucky. If you grow up in Kentucky learning it once in seventh grade is sufficient so you know it's a possibility, but wi…

Why do we need this stupid metric of "will I ever use this"? That is a recipe for ignorance. You will never be able to handle novel circumstances if you limit your knowledge to shit you think you will need.

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Re: More students are turning away from college and toward apprenticeships

#486

I think we need to treat apprenticeships better. We need a stronger blue collar sector. At the same time, I'm worried about this trend towards anti-intellectualism I'm sensing these days.. It smells fascist, and that is bad.

I am not anti intellectual but I am anti college. It is a racket. Costs have exploded while at the same time transmitting information is as cheap as it is have ever been. It is about the signal you give from your degree rather than the education you get.

Re: More students are turning away from college and toward apprenticeships

#487
post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been quite widely studied, actually. Many papers conclude that it’s a mix of causation, there is (unsurprisingly) some amount of actual learning of skills in college, and also (unsurprisingly) some amount of credentialism in the job market. What does it matter though? Parent was presuming to argue from a students’ perspective. The amount of relative causation might be pretty irrelevant to a student who just…

No, the main question is are the highest paid workers getting that because of college, or did the most driven and smartest go to college, and would have been equally successful had no one gone to college? Back in the day (pre-WW2) most successful people did no go to college. College was for wealthy trust fund kids to spend some time meeting other wealthy trust fund kids, because there just weren't all that many colle…

Yes, that is precisely the question that has been asked & answered, and the general consensus in the academic literature (for example https://www.nber.org/papers/w7322) is that it’s both.

The Fed paper I linked to here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35212497 shows dramatically higher income and wealth premiums for educated people in the 30s and 40s, so you might want to take a peek.

Re: More students are turning away from college and toward apprenticeships

#488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The narrow thinkers / cranks dilemma is beautifully described, thank you. You aren't in the academia, are you? Because you explain things in simple terms, yet very efficiently. One of the diseases of current academia is use of an extremely stilted language, perhaps intended to paper over some logical cracks.

> One of the diseases of current academia is use of an extremely stilted language, perhaps intended to paper over some logical cracks. One word. Derrida. ChatGPT and its successors may put a big dent in the pretentious blithering industry. It's now too easy to generate a pseudo-academic style. Large language models are really good at this, because they have so much obscure text upon which to draw.

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Re: More students are turning away from college and toward apprenticeships

#489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguably, the Cambodian people could have potentially avoided the genocidal deaths of millions of people by analyzing the weaknesses of the Soviet/Communist culture, weaknesses that repeatedly lead to mass death. Seems pretty meaningful and deserving of study to me.

But would academic wisdom have avoided the rise of Pol Pot? The German people were pretty well educated and recently had been reminded of the cost of letting political forces spin out of control given the debacle and horrors of of WWI, yet they made the same mistakes as Cambodia in 1932 in allowing the rise of Hitler (whose Mein Kamph provided plenty of forewarning of an incoming regime based in hate). I don't see ed…

I don't think 1920s-1930s Germany and 1970s Cambodia are comparable. By the 1970s there was a significant amount of hindsight available for any country that was aspiring to either ultra-nationalism or communism, not so much in the late 1920s when Russia was still in significant flux after Lenin's death. What would the Germans have compared the Nazi regime to?

Re: More students are turning away from college and toward apprenticeships

#490
post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The narrow thinkers / cranks dilemma is beautifully described, thank you. You aren't in the academia, are you? Because you explain things in simple terms, yet very efficiently. One of the diseases of current academia is use of an extremely stilted language, perhaps intended to paper over some logical cracks.

I've done a bit of both so to speak. I studied History and Philosophy of Science as an undergrad, but have worked as self taught software engineer for nearly 30 years. I don't think that jargon is created to confuse or obfuscate, most likely the opposite. My favorite example is in sailing. Every functional part of a sailboat has a name, because precise communication between crew can be critical and saying "pull the r…

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