581–590 of 914 posts
Better than asking "is college worth the cost," and getting into ROI calculations per major is asking "could we provide a similar (or better) educational and social experience at a fraction of the cost"? To that the answer is yes.
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Anecdotally my wife came very close to finishing a 4 year degree but ultimately did not for various reasons (she comes from a very disadvantaged family...) and not having one has been a major burden or blocker for her pursuing all kinds of jobs. I am hoping to help her finish, but it is hard to restart later in life and lots of past credits will probably be lost or not count anymore due to various academic bureaucrac…
Yep, I've seen this with a lot of my friends who did a similar thing. HR employees screening you out alone is a huge problem. I have some middle and upper middle class gen X and older friends giving their children TERRIBLE advice about how degrees aren't worth it anymore and you get more out of getting started in your career ASAP than spending 4 years in school. The problem is that a BS now is like a high school dipl…
The correct way to do it is to utilize high school dual credit or dual enrollment offerings. Then you can shave off a year or two of college but still be eligible for freshman scholarships. Often cheaper than community college too.
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Most of the world has severed the two. A lot of what you'd consider key parts of the university experience just doesn't exist in most of Europe or the highly developed parts of Asia. In practice, it's attaching job training to a very, very expensive resort, regardless of who is paying for it. It's pretty nice, in the very same sense that spending 4 years in a beach resort ls also great, but one needs to be absurdly w…
> Most of the world has severed the two Yes, and the US system is the envy of the world and is responsible for the overwhelming majority of wealth generated in the US over the past few decades. I'm not sure how that's an argument against the US Higher Ed system. Edit: The real issue you seem to be pointing to is the cost of attending universities in the US. There are 2 parts to this. 1 is the costs of running a unive…
If I believed in conspiracy theories I might think this was all planned.
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If you can't solve FizzBuzz in half an hour with a language of your choice while being able to look up syntax, your problem isn't that you failed to cram for leetcode, it's that you don't know how to write code. There's nothing inherently wrong with not being able to write code, but you probably shouldn't be applying for software engineering roles where the main responsibility of the job is ultimately to write workin…
Just to be clear I have no problem passing these interviews, I just spent a few weeks cramming leetcode and got a job at Google. Leetcode wasn’t the main reason I was hired, but it was a filter that I had to get through (I’ve never been given fizzbuzz before, but I assume that is just because it’s no longer in style and hasn’t been for more than a decade). You just don’t throw yourself into on the fly coding, you pra…
While my career involves writing code, I am not a SWE, I have never done any formal leetcode prep, and I have no formal education in technology beyond a high school CS class. I have no college degree whatsoever, not even an associate's degree.
I had a rule I stuck to when doing these interviews (which were for a SWE role) that felt very fair to me - I would not give these candidates any problem I couldn't solve in the same circumstances.
For reference, in the allotted time, one such candidate spent a good chunk of their time reading up on JS if/then syntax on w3schools. As I watched, I reminded them they could use any language they wanted, if they were more comfortable or familiar with others, and this Harvard CS grad declined, stating JS was their "strongest" language.
My best guess about these cases were rich kids / legacy admissions that weren't allowed to be failed for political reasons.
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Well that specific example paragraph was about financial aid, not the value of a high school diploma, so I fail to see your point.
Well, I’ll elaborate as a Gen-Xer; what you describe about financial aid was the exact same scenario we faced. You are conflating the “exceptional” kid coming out if HS who is offered full rides (who clearly should take advantage of that and go straight into university with that full ride) with an average student who will have to pay for some or all of college. For the latter, community college for 2 years was and st…
we've allowed capitalists and rent-seekers into our educational system and it's nigh impossible to root them out. same goes for healthcare, housing, etc.
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Information is not culture. Universities teach culture - moral attitudes. They don't just transfer information. This applies to science and engineering as much as it applies to the arts, but you need a good education to understand what "morality" means in this context. The collapse of the West started when the old Enlightenment morality - education of all kinds as a collective good - was replaced by the MBA culture o…
The chemistry department teaches culture? nonsense.
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That's historical revisionism. The percentage of American adults over age 25 who have a college degree was only 20% as recently as 1990. When America was truly at the top of the world in the 1950s and 1960s, it was under 10%. A high fraction of college attendance is better correlated with the 21st century decline in America's situation.
> When America was truly at the top of the world in the 1950s and 1960s, it was under 10%. A high fraction of college attendance is better correlated with the 21st century decline in America's situation. I think this is a textbook example of correlation not implying causality. The US was awarded a unique competitive advantage with WW2, which allowed it to become the world's hegemon. Much of the reason that the US was…
America’s preference for common wisdom over book learning is a strength, not a weakness. Formal education filters for risk averse, process and credential-oriented people. And you need some of those people, but you don’t want your society to be like India where you worship credentials and degrees like religion.
The GI bill isn’t a counterpoint. GI’s still had to gain admissions at a time when colleges were far more selective than today: https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2024/01/23/why_college... (undergraduate IQs fell from 119 in 1939 to just 102 in 2022). So you created a filter that was extremely rigorous. It supported college education for people who were both significantly smarter than average, and also had served in the military—the Marcus Aurelius type.
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That's historical revisionism. The percentage of American adults over age 25 who have a college degree was only 20% as recently as 1990. When America was truly at the top of the world in the 1950s and 1960s, it was under 10%. A high fraction of college attendance is better correlated with the 21st century decline in America's situation.
> The percentage of American adults over age 25 who have a college degree was only 20% as recently as 1990. When America was truly at the top of the world in the 1950s and 1960s, it was under 10%. Due to automation and the great advance of technology, the floor for most jobs has risen such that the skills/knowledge that a 1950s school dropout had would be insufficient for anything but the most menial jobs today. Outs…
I love to point this out to anti-welfare people and make them blue screen. Especially when they're not willing to acknowledge unethical solutions, such as euthanizing the stupid or acknowledging that not having welfare for an unemployable population shits things up for the rest of society.