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

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

#691

Post by scrapcode » Sun, Mar 19, 2023, 9:43 PM UTC

throwaway675309 wrote: post #389

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.

I would argue that it's not necessarily the job of a computer science degree to teach you programming, which is more about the craftsmanship and likely should be practiced and learned individually. Computer science is about the theoretics. I greatly value the CS education I received in linear algebra, discrete mathematics, etc. which I decidedly would not have learned on the job. If you just want to learn programming…

There were some decent courses that I got something out of, mostly business-related courses. Even those seemed pretty outdated, though.

If I was spending my own money on a 4-year degree in Computer Science with a focus on Software Development, I would certainly expect to come out of it with some sort of foundation of proper development.

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

#692

Post by Nasrudith » Sun, Mar 19, 2023, 11:31 PM UTC

bumby wrote: post #500

Larrikin wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 learn math when we all carry a superhuman calculator in our pocket?

Because it does computation, math is understanding the problem. Even with things like Wolfram Alpha to handle integration and derivation.

Without an understanding of math you can only cargo cult problems. You can get away with being lazy with computation with no real issur but only if you understand the underlying theory.

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

#693

Post by dr_kiszonka » Sun, Mar 19, 2023, 11:39 PM UTC

xyzelement wrote: post #98

azinman2 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re: critical analysis. 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. > If that's what you are hungry for, college is perhaps even your least likely bet.…

Re second point, I mean something else. 200 years ago I had to go to university because why? That's where the books and smart people were concentrated. So I would pay a lot of money and physically relocate myself to access those books and people. Now? I can study online, I can read, I can converse with super bright people of my chosing without the friction and limits of doing that in a college environment.

> I can converse with super bright people of my chosing without the friction and limits of doing that in a college environment

Genuine question: how do you get those people to talk to you? (I am assuming you are not famous or wealthy enough to pay them to talk to you; I am neither.)

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

#694

Post by alexjplant » Mon, Mar 20, 2023, 1:24 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…

I was dropping fry baskets and doing IT work for $5 an hour at a restaurant when I was 12 years old. Unfortunately I wasn't cognizant enough at that age to determine my career trajectory on the basis of which type of work I enjoyed... it was more that I was a lot better at configuring networking on the computer in the back than I was at making Reubens as a line cook.

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

#695

Post by michaelbrave » Mon, Mar 20, 2023, 1:32 AM UTC

cat_plus_plus wrote: post #544

rootusrootus wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Culture is a shared fiction of unity and greatness that enables great civilizations to overcome otherwise inevitable tribal warfare. So Native Americans and Pilgrims sat down together for a Thanksgiving feast with Turkey and mashed potatoes. Should we teach this to children despite there being more to the story? Well it depends, do we want descendants of Pilgrims and Native Americans to sit down for a Thanksgiving fe…

as I understood it the whole thing with pilgrim's natives and turkey never happened and that thanksgiving was a post civil war holiday that somehow turned into that.

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

#696

Post by quadrifoliate » Mon, Mar 20, 2023, 3:37 AM UTC

_gabe_ wrote: post #574

wolverine876 wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 If we are going to be collegiate, let's critically examine our own posts. What is that based on? It doesn't match what I know.

If you want to be collegiate this literally happened a year ago[0]: > When Professor Stuart Reges challenged the University of Washington’s position on land acknowledgements, administrators punished him, undermining his academic freedom But don't worry, you don't have to go so far as critically teaching about all the aspects of different cultures to risk being accused as a racist on college campuses. I also remember…

Stuart Reges seems like a well-known controversy generator, looks like he was in the news about this other thing [0] a while ago as well.

Given this background, I think it is a mark of academic freedom that literally all the university did was offer a separate course section for people who wanted it. I fail to see how he is being retaliated against in any way -- if the university is offering an alternative to his course for people who want to exercise their academic freedom, why is he against that?

Sounds like it should be useful to promote free thought! You can either take the course where the whackjob professor has weird takes on women and code, and rails against acknowledging Native American tribes in a computer science course -- or you can take the course that, you know, focuses on computer science. And hey, maybe the whackjob professor is a good enough teacher that his content outweighs the land theory nonsense, and people actually take his course? I certainly know a lot of good professors I learned from at college were eccentric.

I admit the second one is far-fetched and weird; but almost entirely removed from academia. Sounds to me like a bunch of administrators making work to justify their own inflated salaries.

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[0] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/education/why-dont...

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

#697

Post by zamfi » Mon, Mar 20, 2023, 4:02 AM UTC

cperciva wrote: post #639

obscur wrote: post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your first sentence is interesting, why do you think that?

Harvard takes in a lot of students on the basis of athletics, legacy, and other non-academic considerations. While I've seen students admitted to specific colleges in Oxford due to family ties, that has always been a matter of which college a student attends; I've never seen someone get in that way who wasn't already going to be admitted to the University on academic grounds. If you look at the top 1/3 of Harvard stu…

At Harvard, about 12-15% of recent classes are legacy. Zero are admitted on the basis of athletics alone, that is literally the tenet on which the Ivy League was founded.

Even if you were right, though, it’d be an odd take — even if 25% (or 50%!) of Harvard students were admitted noncompetitively, they would simply not be part of the top 5% of Harvard students? Like they’re not diluting the top 5%, they’re just not in it.

I stand by “top 5% of Harvard” is a higher bar than “top 1/3 of Oxford”. But I will grant you that these are all based on GPA anyway, a rather noisy measure of even academic ability, let alone anything else we might care about.

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

#698

Post by Slava_Propanei » Mon, Mar 20, 2023, 4:08 AM UTC

hiddencost wrote: post #626

cat_plus_plus wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Culture is a shared fiction of unity and greatness that enables great civilizations to overcome otherwise inevitable tribal warfare. So Native Americans and Pilgrims sat down together for a Thanksgiving feast with Turkey and mashed potatoes. Should we teach this to children despite there being more to the story? Well it depends, do we want descendants of Pilgrims and Native Americans to sit down for a Thanksgiving fe…

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

#699

Post by vxNsr » Mon, Mar 20, 2023, 4:21 AM UTC

dahart wrote: post #655

vxNsr wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether it’s fair to say or not: trusting professors to do a fair study on whether their expertise is necessary isn’t exactly an unbiased study. I’m sure they meant well but it’s just hard to take anything they’re saying at face value.

That’s not fair to say. Read some of the literature. The Fed study isn’t even professors.

The first name on the study was a Wash U professor for over 25 years. The 2nd name has so far spent a significant amount of her life in academia. Only the 3rd author appears to have spent most of his career in public service.

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

#700

Post by wolverine876 » Mon, Mar 20, 2023, 5:12 AM UTC

Animats wrote: post #604

wolverine876 wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of blithering, you are only parroting some Internet tropes in an echo chamber (which is probably where you learned them). You know by now that such things are nonsense; they are a waste of time and a poison to knowledge and reason. And I think you are far behind the times - I'm not sure many people study Derrida these days. What have you read recently?

> 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.)

Sorry, I meant, 'what have your read out of academia recently' that matches these claims?