More students are turning away from college and toward apprenticeships • Hacker News Board

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

#511

Post by churchill » Sun, Mar 19, 2023, 1:21 AM UTC

syzarian wrote: post #363

throwaway4aday wrote: post #110

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.

Communism does not lead to deaths and genocide. Concentrated, uncontested power does.

Communism aims to reorganize human interactions down to the tiny details. But, given the option, the average human is individualist, especially in a large society. So, practical communism inevitably requires violence to get people to go along with it!

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

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Post by davidgay » Sun, Mar 19, 2023, 1:21 AM UTC

xyzelement wrote: post #365

quadrifoliate wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Eg 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. This is bullshit. The difference is that today, your own culture e.g. (non-native) American society till the modern day is considered fair game for analysis, whereas 20 years ago there was probably a fair…

// The difference is that today, your own culture e.g. (non-native) American society till the modern day is considered fair game for analysis These was definitely no shortage of ability to analyze and criticize western civilization in a college 20 years ago. // An unnecessary dichotomy. The Internet is not blocked at a college You are replying to a comment about what is accessible . College does not preclude internet…

> These was definitely no shortage of ability to analyze and criticize western civilization in a college 20 years ago.

Not to mention that the whole 18th century is famous for its criticism of (that time's) western civilization...

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

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Post by Dylan16807 » Sun, Mar 19, 2023, 1:21 AM UTC

churchill wrote: post #493

ricardobeat wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"tried to restart society by eliminating people who didn't fit the mold" seems like a decent, if a bit simplistic, description of the Cambodian genocide. What exactly are you up against?

Dude, why not read the article first? Kampuchean communists (under Pol Pot) murdered nearly 20% of Cambodia's population of 7.8 million in just four years. There goal was to build a self-sustaining agrarian society and everyone who even looked like an intellectual, had a university education, had glasses, or some other trappings of Western life was eliminated or sent to concentration camps where they mostly died. Why…

Uh, did you reply to the right person?

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

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Post by churchill » Sun, Mar 19, 2023, 1:23 AM UTC

syzarian wrote: post #437

dahfizz wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And communism leads to concentrated, uncontested power. The dictatorship of the proletariat will never dissolve itself once it gets absolute power.

It is possible to have communism without concentrated, uncontested power. We have seen no such implementation as of yet but it can happen. As with most revolutions there is a period of absolutism that follows its success.

Wow - so you can make it happen, but not Mao, Trotsky, Stalin, Tito, Deng, Ho Chi Minh, Mengistu, Castro, Sankara, etc.?

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

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Post by blululu » Sun, Mar 19, 2023, 1:29 AM UTC

klyrs wrote: post #331

pclmulqdq wrote: post #26

College seems to have ~3 uses from students' perspectives: 1. A trade school for technical professionals who actually need specialist education (scientists, engineers, lawyers, doctors, etc.) 2. A finishing school for the elite 3. A blood sports arena for the brilliant to complete for professorships (almost all of whom will lose and be saddled with 6 figures of debt and 7 figures of opportunity cost) A lot of people…

> 3. A blood sports arena for the brilliant to complete for professorships (almost all of whom will lose and be saddled with 6 figures of debt and 7 figures of opportunity cost) As somebody with a PhD, I say ho hum. I only took on 5 figures of debt, after quitting tech after the "dot com bubble." I had been bored out of my skull with the monotony and lack of intellectual challenge. But 7 figures of opportunity cost?…

15 years is a long time when college tuitions rise by ~10% a year. 6 figure debt is more common than you would like. As for the connection between wealth and university, I would suggest looking at the stats on income and education. You can frequently find them in the admissions literature. Schools/departments brag about favorable career outcomes when selling their services to 17 year olds.

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

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Post by gibspaulding » Sun, Mar 19, 2023, 1:30 AM UTC

confidantlake wrote: post #472

listless wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the risk of sounding like a terrible person, I'd like to be honest for a second about why I went to college, which is to avoid this exactly reality that you just laid out. I enlisted in the military after finding college to be too boring for my taste. 3 months later I found myself doing the hardest manual labor of my life on a riverboat for the Coast Guard. The pay was not great and nobody cared if you didn't feel…

You don't sound at all like a terrible person, in fact I think this is a fairly common experience. My grandpa told me a very similar story about freezing his ass off in a far north oil town and seeing how the foremen lived compared to him. That spurred him to go to college and live a much nicer life. I went through a smaller version of that myself, working at a shitty job in the lifeguard in the hot sun as a teen. Sa…

Not too different a story here. I worked for a roofing company through college. It was a good job in many ways. It was a union shop so benefits/safety/etc were great, and journeyman scale was actually more than I make now. It would have been a great gig through my twenties, but I had coworkers tell me over and over to stay in school and that I didn't want to end up like them.

I got a degree in Math and a minor in CS thanks to income based scholarships, but ended up bouncing around for a while in various IT and computer adjacent jobs not making a ton of money, and not loving being cooped up inside, so I sometimes wonder if I'd have been better off just accepting a apprenticeship, but I've been working towards "the good life" as you say, so in the long run I think college will have been the right choice.

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

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Post by john1633 » Sun, Mar 19, 2023, 1:32 AM UTC

pclmulqdq wrote: post #32

hotpotamus wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of those is not like the other in that it requires extensive college. It also happens to be the one that pays more than the others.

Being a high-end plumber doesn't take much college. I joke, but most lawyers actually don't make a ton of money. Like programming, the profession is very bimodal. By the time you get out of law school, unless that law school is a big name like Harvard or you get a good clerkship or associate job, you will be heading for a career that tops out at $200k/year if you don't burn out in the mean time. Plumbing, electrical…

Weirdly lucrative? Not weird at all. These professions are the backbone of society.

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

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Post by Minor49er » Sun, Mar 19, 2023, 1:36 AM UTC

mnd999 wrote: post #42

Minor49er wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is to get an education that can be used to get into more valuable areas of employment. $80k is a lot to spend on fun when fun can be found for free

You’re doing both, that’s the point. Too many folks on hacker news see everything in black and white.

I fear that you aren't understanding what college is about

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

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Post by gitfan86 » Sun, Mar 19, 2023, 1:36 AM UTC

bee_rider wrote: post #158

varunjain99 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd also add 4) A social / networking experience. As an adult, rarely will you interact so often with so many people of your age. 5. A signaling mechanism. I have X credentials so give me job Y. This is far from ideal because the signal can be noisy. But it is a data point. It's similar to how physics PhD's are targeted for quant finance roles - they've signaled they can solve hard problems!

4) is the main thing for 4 year, in person colleges, I think. You can learn anything online. Credentials are nice but you can get pretty good credentials doing 2 years at a community college and finishing up at a state university. But meeting a bunch of ambitious people your age at the same point in their career is pretty valuable I think. At least it is an opportunity to roll the dice on meeting your startup crew.

And just making friends in general. Most Jon's are not full of people the same age and interests

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

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Post by jltsiren » Sun, Mar 19, 2023, 1:39 AM UTC

lumb63 wrote: post #496

azinman2 wrote: post #40

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…

I suspect the folks here defending philosophy had a very different experience with philosophy than I did. I took an ethics class in college through the philosophy department and all I remember from the class was the professor telling us that pro-choice was the only philosophically defensible position, and reading various excerpts from Plato, etc., without ever discussing “how to think about it” like some siblings men…

A single class is too little to really learn anything. As a rule of thumb, a semester of full-time work is enough to learn one "thing". That thing can be wide, in which case you get an overview of the topic, or it can be narrow, allowing you to dive deeper. Anything less, and the only thing you'll likely retain is a random selection of ideas and factoids.

If the degree nominally takes 4 years to complete, you have enough time to learn approximately 8 things. Use one slot for a subject, and most universities will give you an introduction to the topics covered by the subject. Use another, and then you may start understanding the arguments and issues in one subfield.