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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

#491

Post by sokoloff »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #254
anonymars wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get the impression you latched on to the word leetcode and took away something very different FizzBuzz, reversing a sentence -- this is programming your way out of a wet paper bag, not elite and esoteric skills that need advanced study and cramming

Similar concept. You have them do some task like fizzbuzz to see if they can program stuff on the fly that they would never need to do in real life. You practice that since school doesn't prepare you for that unless you do ACM programming contests or something. The interview demands this to see if the candidate is capable of cramming for the interview, which correlates with the effort, ability they could put into the…

I agree that some random leetcode-hard problem is not a good indicator, but if you can’t write fizzbuzz or can’t sum an array of integers, you’ve given me important data about your skills as a programmer on that day.

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

#492

Post by somenameforme »

bildung wrote: post #455
the_gipsy wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America is on a isolation downward spiral. Russia will conquer Ukraine, any other prediction at this point is absurd. See point one, America is alone now, it will take decades to repair the damage.

> Russia will conquer Ukraine, any other prediction at this point is absurd. Are you sure? They are advancing, sure, put look what they paid for to achieve this: 300k dead, 700k wounded, depletion of their souvereign wealth fund, 20%+ inflation, lower oil production and so on.

I think literally nobody knows the price either side is paying right now. And I do mean literally, including Trump, Putin, and Zelensky. The fog of war applies to participants, let alone outsiders who are basing our views on figures and claims that obviously going to be driven heavily by propaganda.

But beyond this, I don't think this war is about Ukraine anymore than a war in Taiwan will be about Taiwan. It's little more than a proxy for hegemony in both cases. Russia did not want NATO parked in their Achille's heel of the Ukrainian flatlands. NATO did, and we pushed forward against endless threats of it being a redline, essentially as a means of indirectly imposing our will on Russia and establishing a hierarchy of dominance.

And similarly, for those that don't the Taiwan-China history - the Mao led Chinese revolution was a success. The existing government of mainland China fled to Taiwan where they brutally oppressed the locals, in an era known as the 'white terror' [1], and established power through 40 years of martial law. And of course we backed them, solely to use them as a weapon against China, because geopolitics.

This is why these wars are so important for the participants. The US couldn't care less about Ukraine, but withdrawing without ruining our ability to militarily threaten other peer or near peer countries is difficult. And similarly the last thing Russia needs is more land, but if they never act on claims of red lines, then they can never expect their interests to be considered in the case of a conflict in interests between them and the West.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Terror_(Taiwan)

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

#493

Post by nemo44x »

armchairhacker wrote: post #362
kopirgan wrote: post #351

IIRC Mark Andreessen once said colleges esp ivy league ones, simplify the job of recruiters by acting as filters. Saves them the bother. So they attached lots of value. I guess that's true even now but in a perverse sort of way. As markers of indoctrination and unsuitability for productive corporate roles. Employers probably decided to avoid them. That's not fair to a large number of students but the old system of co…

Do you know any employers actively avoiding students from Ivy-league colleges? I agree that colleges have acted as filters, but the value of degrees has been deflated, even in Ivy leagues, because they’re easier and more common. I think a degree still acts as a filter though; getting a job is hard with a degree but nearly impossible without. EDIT: There’s the Thiel fellowship, which requires not having a degree, but…

I was a hiring manager at a company that didn’t recruit from top universities for strategic reasons. In short we were smaller and a startup so it would have been difficult to compete. As we grew we had a presence at university job fairs but still avoided the top schools.

Similarly we avoided engineers from the Bay Area due to cost concerns.

The company was also a pioneer in the distributed work environment. A decade before Covid. So that opened a huge market for recruitment at that time.

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

#494

Post by master_crab »

bildung wrote: post #455
the_gipsy wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America is on a isolation downward spiral. Russia will conquer Ukraine, any other prediction at this point is absurd. See point one, America is alone now, it will take decades to repair the damage.

> Russia will conquer Ukraine, any other prediction at this point is absurd. Are you sure? They are advancing, sure, put look what they paid for to achieve this: 300k dead, 700k wounded, depletion of their souvereign wealth fund, 20%+ inflation, lower oil production and so on.

Yeah, it wouldn't be a bad bet to wager this is going to be a Pyrrhic victory for Russia.

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

#495

Post by artursapek »

somenameforme wrote: post #478
kiba wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think very few, if any, countries in the world would be stronger than what we turned Ukraine into. You have a massive army being replenished by a constant slew of bodies, to the point of forcefully dragging people in off the streets, and then being armed with hundreds of billions of dollars in Western arms. But what gives Ukraine a particular superpower is their logistics. Most people don't realize is that war is e…

When would the real death tolls be revealed? When Ukraine does a census?

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

#496

Post by firesteelrain »

dmix wrote: post #489
firesteelrain wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those numbers actually back up the point. The jump in education after WWII happened during the biggest boom years the US ever had. The rise to 40 percent college grads happened much later, during globalization and offshoring. So the slowdown is about the economy changing, not people getting more education. It is just a bad correlation.

Right, there was clearly much more capacity for advanced education with the rise of technology (farming advancements, medicine, electronics etc) that started before WW2 There is something to the point about needing a correction in post secondary education and making university again a specialized place rather than the catch all default generalized institutions. Where 70% of the population tries to waits 3-5yrs+ to en…

Sure, there are real issues with cost, debt, and credential creep, but that does not change the basic point: the expansion of education itself was a net positive for decades. The problems we have now come from financing, policy choices, and a labor market that shifted under globalization. Blaming education levels for broader economic or social trends just mixes up the cause and effect.

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

#497

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#498

Post by bojangleslover »

Supply and demand. It's no surprise that when we had 10% of people going to university in the 1960's and now we have over 38.8% [1] that the economic value of a degree seems to be getting watered down.

No different than any other form of inflation from the government blowing on the fire (subsidizing with money) without adding any actual fuel (intrinsic value). Just like housing and healthcare.

[1] https://educationdata.org/education-attainment-statistics#:~...

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

#499

Post by nemo44x »

The 4-year college isn’t a bad system but it has been asked to do a job for which it wasn’t intended. Many people just want an opportunity to develop useful skills within the context of a modern corporate business. Modern corporate businesses want a way to filter and sort potential employees for skills and readiness.

The four-year college isn’t good at either of these as it wasn’t intended for this. I don’t think the trade school model is quite right for this (there’s lots of soft skills to be learned) but it’s closer than the 4-year.

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

#500

Post by dmurray »

nebula8804 wrote: post #289
ajashdkjhasjkd wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People want job training, and it got shoehorned into extra departments at liberal arts universities intended as aristocrat finishing schools I really wish the computer science degrees and even online courses spent like 30 mins on the history of computer science. The entire existence of this field has been dependent on those non job-training liberal arts degrees.

Schools typically have no space to squeeze it in. Here is a typical pathway for a CS student: https://catalog.njit.edu/undergraduate/computing-sciences/co... A 4 year cs degree dumps you into heavy math, physics, and intro CS + Data structures in your first year to weed people out who cant cut it. Second year teaches fundamentals of CS (discrete math, concept of languages, understanding algorithms at least at a basic…

> Schools typically have no space to squeeze it in. Here is a typical pathway for a CS student: https://catalog.njit.edu/undergraduate/computing-sciences/co...

That course has 28 credits in first year, 3 of which are spent on computer science (arguably 3 more on "Roadmap to Computing"). Second year has a little more. Third and fourth year are heavy on CS/SE topics, but still have some time allocated to others.

I don't disagree with students learning Calculus and Statistics and even Physics as part of a CS course, and I think it's excellent that they take at least two courses in English composition. But you can't look at that four-year curriculum and say nothing could possibly be cut (turned into an elective) in favour of a History of Computers module.

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