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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

#681

Post by etothepii »

jabroni_salad wrote: post #175
analog31 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Traditionally, how did they get in? Did they come up through sales, or through family businesses?

There are multiple paths and different designations you need to earn to work them. The more letters you can get after your name, the better. So you don't need a degree, but there is a moat to cross. Agencies: oops, all sales! Claims Adjustment: small claims to bigger claims. These are usually independent outfits that service many carriers for their geographic area. In some jurisdictions you can get hired with no expe…

Perhaps this is true in the US, but I don't think it is true in the Lloyds market. Which is ultimately where large chunks of the US risk ends up. The US state level control of insurance does create substantial opportunities for regulatory capture by licensure.

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

#682

Post by etothepii »

analog31 wrote: post #154
etothepii wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Insurance is the only profession I know of where there are many senior leaders in their forties without a degree.

Traditionally, how did they get in? Did they come up through sales, or through family businesses?

In the UK it is not formally an apprentice system but from the outside it looks a lot like an apprentice system combined with luck. While graduate entry is common now (since our University system is only £10k a year for tuition and the money can be borrowed from the state) Lloyd's still runs an apprentice program that has an intake at 18.

Junior people joining the industry will typically be given a great deal of grunt work to do and there can be opportunities to learn the lingo that come with that. Relationships are a large part of the industry and so passing these on from parent to child does happen but a lot of it appears to me to be less direct than that, and so ending up in an apprentice-like relationship with a senior underwriter can cause your career to soar.

It can be very hard for senior underwriters who feel that they have built up high quality relationships over decades to work out how to profit from those in retirement and many fail to fully capitalise on them.

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

#683

Post by ricardobeat »

wolverine876 wrote: post #552
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?

What claim in the original post does that support? None, it has nothing to do with it.

The comment you responded to said

> I agree with you that inconvenient truths now get muzzled because they don’t fit an acceptable meta-narrative. This is very problematic for society and when taken to the maximum, can lead to thinks like Cambodia’s attempt at restarting society by killing all those who didn’t fit the model they were looking for.

And then you took issue with the description of the Cambodian genocide. Despite the fact that he was agreeing with you. Now you start a whole new argument. I'm not even sure what are you trying to argue about.

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

#684

Post by web3-is-a-scam »

phist_mcgee wrote: post #376
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…

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…

Ah yes, the capital class that enables me to have a cushy office job in the first place. So evil. /s

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

#686

Post by Animats »

runlaszlorun wrote: post #677
Animats wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What have you read recently? "Embrace the Suck", by Gleeson. (Yet another Navy SEAL memoir. This author seems to enjoy the suffering a bit too much. Other SEAL memoirs describe the same training, but not with such enthusiasm for the pain.)

I’m going out on a limb here… but did they all tell you about how hard ‘hell week’ was?

Yes. It's about purpose. SEALs all write about how tough it is, but it's seen as a means to an end. People in that business need to be that tough to succeed on actual missions.

Gleeson seems to be into the suffering for its own sake.

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

#687

Post by dilznoofus »

a_e_k wrote: post #609
Balgair wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh got it now, thanks! Here in the US we have a saying of " C equals Degree", so kinda the exact opposite of the UK saying. Strange!

Amusingly along those lines, I once had a prof in my Ph.D. program tell me that if I was getting all A's in my coursework, I was doing it wrong. (I.e., not spending enough time on research.)

This is pretty common at other places - my PhD advisor was exasperated that a polymer chemist would get an A in Physical Chemistry II, when I had a national lab collaboration to work on, a fellowship to write, and a first-author paper to get out the door.

In retrospect? Yeah, I probably should have taken a B and finished relevant things faster. I have almost zero use for my understanding of the mathematic accounting of the particle-in-a-box.

Of course in grad school a C is a failure, so the wiggle room is slightly less generous.

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

#688

Post by downrightmike »

doctorwho42 wrote: post #553
downrightmike wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, if the colleges give out a certain amount of grants to students who can't afford the artificially high tuition, they become non-profits and can bank all that cash into their endowments. That's really the why of tuition hikes. Greed. Thanks MIT who took this to the supreme court in 91 and fucked all future generations!

And their endowment is over 25 billion.... And why again, are their salaries lower than industry again?

The amount of tuition that the incoming Freshman class pays is more than enough to pay for all other edu classes expenses.

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

#689

Post by EmilioMartinez »

ogennadi wrote: post #685
EmilioMartinez wrote: post #455

Just droppping this here: Why We Still Need Masters & Apprentices https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ribdRDO75Rk

We need them for "the Transfer of implicit knowledge from a senior teacher to an apprentice"

Implicit teaching comes to mind

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

#690

Post by scrapcode »

randcraw wrote: post #289
scrapcode wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completed my BSCS at a state school in my 30s after already being a freelance/amateur programmer for many years. I can honestly say I did not learn a single new thing about programming. In fact, almost every single bit of the programming I learned was completely wrong by todays standards, and rife with mistakes.

Sounds like you attended a bad school. I earned a MS in CS at age 30 atop my BS in zoology and 6 years of work as a programmer. My MSCS program introduced me to many new and useful concepts and techniques that have informed all the nontrivial computing tasks I've undertaken since, now 33 years. That degree has proved to be the best investment of my life, by a large margin.

It certainly wouldn't be a program that I would recommend to anyone that wanted to actually learn how to program.
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