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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

#781

Post by esrauch »

lurk2 wrote: post #760
esrauch wrote: post #632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what evidence you would expect to see if it was self-selection because of an in-group mentality versus explicit hostility to intentionally keep some out. By comparison, is there some affirmative evidence for the reason why there are so few liberals in the FBI is because they self-selected out, instead of that the FBI being perceived as a conservative institution causes them to self-select out?

> I'm not sure what evidence you would expect to see if it was self-selection because of an in-group mentality versus explicit hostility to intentionally keep some out. What about an explicit roadmap? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_march_through_the_institu... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deplatforming > is there some affirmative evidence for the reason why there are so few liberals in the FBI is because they se…

> What about an explicit roadmap?

I'm not sure what you're pointing at in the links: I don't see any "explicit roadmap" to exclude mainstream conservative thinkers from professorships documented there. The main examples seem to be Creationists and Alex Jones and similar inflammatory content creators having paid speaker invitations rescinded due to student pressure, which is an radically different topic than what I thought the thread was about.

> In either case, if the FBI skews conservative, I would guess that this was due to internal gatekeeping, not self-selection, and I think the history of the organization supports that assertion.

The FBI very dramatically skews conservative compared to the American base, and I think it is a conspiracy theory level claim that the explanation is that the FBI is deliberately keeping out mainstream-left-leaning people from being agents.

It's always very attractive to believe that there's some shadowy cabal explicitly and deliberately controlling the strings to the outcomes that you don't like, when in reality it essentially is never the case. The reality is always far messier, and nearly all bad things stem from complex emergent systemic outcomes with no X-Files Smoking Man at the center of it all.

Any claim of an affirmative explicit decision for the bad outcome requires exceptional justification, because it's just such an appealing thing to want to believe and its almost never true.

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

#782

Post by amanaplanacanal »

pfdietz wrote: post #662
amanaplanacanal wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see much evidence that's the US wants to defend the world from authoritarians. Some of their closest allies are authoritarian countries.

Expansionist authoritarians, which in the post war world was communists. Why would the world need defending from non-expansionist authoritarians?

Maybe. They seem to actually like expansionist authoritarians now. Evidence being the Russia Ukraine peace effort.

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

#783

Post by infecto »

potato3732842 wrote: post #538
maxglute wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in terms of raw productivity In terms of dubious financialized metrics of productivity, i.e. debt + fx driven growth. Which is valid indicator, but also the same inflated indicator that suggests 2025 tertiary that cost 200% 1980 tertiary (income/inflation adjusted) is somehow more productive and not parasitic. The entire problem is spreadsheet doing gangbusters is dependenant on increasingly inequitable CoL extract…

Exactly. In a man who wants to construct a septic for a house pays a man with backhoe who understands the nuances to make it happen. Concrete and diesel are bought, etc, etc, etc. Let's say $5k USD added to GDP. In US same thing happens. But the man is compelled by threat of law to pay for engineering studies, permits, as are the man with the backhoe and the man making the concrete, etc, etc. $10k is added to GDP. Ha…

This is a wild take imo. Yes, I am sure there there are definite cases of overreach and I generally sit squarely in the libertarian camp but most permits, studies, etc are there for a reason. Maybe you have lived in a developing nation but I have and I can say you are at much higher risk of death because of the lack of oversight. The number of commercial building fires, risky electric installations, lack of common code is highly dangerous.

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

#784

Post by btilly »

nobody9999 wrote: post #212
btilly wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This one case isn't the full story, but I firmly believe that it is a big deal. See https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/401/424/ for the case. The problem is that any hiring test that blacks and whites pass at different rates, is presumed racist. Never mind that the real issue might be that the blacks went to worse schools and received a worse education. Never mind that there is a big body of research showing…

>The problem is that any hiring test that blacks and whites pass at different rates, is presumed racist. Never mind that the real issue might be that the blacks went to worse schools and received a worse education. Your first sentence is the result of bigotry against those with "enhanced" melanin content, not the cause. The cause is laid out in your second sentence. Resolve the systemic bigotry (not just against thos…

I agree with your point.

My point was a "don't shoot the messenger".

A politically powerful minority calls ability tests racist because they make minorities look bad. An opposing offensive minority uses those same ability tests as evidence that minorities are simply inferior. Courts ruled that those using the tests should be presumed racist because the results show racial differences.

The result of all of this is a policy, meant to help minorities, that fails them. At great expense to all of us.

And an actual easy to identify factor which sustains racial differences - poor educational policies - is politically off limits to think about. "Because that would cost money."

The resulting mess is in alternating turns absurd and sad.

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

#785

Post by btilly »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #671
qcnguy wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They worked at a power plant, a place where dumb mistakes can cause explosions and kill people. The power plant wasn't racist and hired blacks into the labor department, but because it was just manual labor that department paid worse than the other more technical departments. When SCOTUS found against the power company they sent a clear message that merely being a technical, safety-critical job was an insufficient ba…

> When SCOTUS found against the power company they sent a clear message that merely being a technical, safety-critical job was an insufficient basis to establish a need to test people for intelligence. That's your interpretation. The court regarded the test used the power company as unrelated to the demands of the job. You're welcome to disagree with the court about that (as the company probably did), but don't misre…

The court regarded the test as unrelated to the demands of the job, despite a large body of research showing that the test is generally predictive of performance on a wide class of jobs, which that job is in.

The bar was set to, "You must have good statistical evidence that this test is applicable to this job." That is an extremely high bar, that very few private companies are ever going to be able to collect sufficient data to establish.

In fact the only organization that I'm aware of which can pass that bar is the US military. Which is why they are allowed to use ability tests in hiring and initial promotions that no private company would be allowed to use.

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

#786

Post by btilly »

JuniperMesos wrote: post #291
btilly wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This one case isn't the full story, but I firmly believe that it is a big deal. See https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/401/424/ for the case. The problem is that any hiring test that blacks and whites pass at different rates, is presumed racist. Never mind that the real issue might be that the blacks went to worse schools and received a worse education. Never mind that there is a big body of research showing…

> (My suspicion is that an ability test would lead to a less racist outcome than requiring college. Why? Because minority families struggle more to afford college.) This might have been true when the United States was mostly white, and "minority" specifically referred to the black population who was mostly descended from slaves brought to the US mainland pre-1808, or to an even small number of native Americans. Today…

While minority technically means what you said, in practice people only care about those identifiable nonwhite groups who are doing poorly.

The result is that Academia is broadly in support of discriminating against certain identifiable minorities, despite their suffering well-known histories of discrimination. The logic is literally that the current success of Asians and Jews means that they are now in the oppressor class, and so should give up opportunities in the name of achieving equity. The same universities that used to discriminate against Asians and Jews out of simple racism, now wish to discriminate against Asians and Jews because they are trying to NOT be racist.

Many in my generation (I'm in my mid-50s) find this twist absurd beyond belief.

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

#787

Post by selimthegrim »

alephnerd wrote: post #777
selimthegrim wrote: post #690

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Living in Louisiana, salaries here are in the same bucket as FL.

Oof that is a shame given how severely CoL has risen across much of the South. Salary expectations on the employers side is just too low, but then again, I guess most industries are low margins ones sadly.

Hopefully, it’ll get better in a longer time scale than I have unfortunately - I’m targeting a move to the East Coast.

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

#788

Post by pinkmuffinere »

maxlybbert wrote: post #642
swydydct wrote: post #531

I’m not in CS, so maybe it’s different, but I don’t know how we can expect to get skilled biologists, mechanical engineers, psychologists, etc without something that’s very similar to the 4-year degree.

I'm not sure American universities are still issuing things similar to 1990s 4-year degrees. They issue documents claiming to be degrees, but the quality has dropped, and they aren't what they used to be.

Having taught the new engineers, and having worked with those 1990s mechanical engineers, I strongly disagree. It’s a recurring belief that the new generation is regressing. When typewriters became common, teachers worried about handwriting. When calculators became common, math teachers worried about mental math skills. If anyone alive was old enough to protest, “the greatest generation” probably would have a different name.

Edit: initially i said “ People bemoaned the loss of chalk-on-blackboard skills when paper and pencil got cheap”, but apparently that’s not true, it was first claimed in a piece of satire, and then became mistaken for the truth.

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

#789

Post by selimthegrim »

h2zizzle wrote: post #623
carlosjobim wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's easily solved with labor market reform. First implement federal and state law that requires every worker performing any profession to have a college degree in that field. Then companies are evaluated on how much work is produced in their business (for example by revenue), and they have to either contract the equivalent number of people with college degrees, or even better - license the degree from a college gr…

I... can't tell if this is satire or not.

This sounds like those UChicago people who were floating the idea of sponsoring immigrants with cash (read: indentured servitude)

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

#790

Post by billy99k »

The problem is that because lots of people have a degree now, employers have no problem finding candidates by requiring one.

So now, almost all white collar jobs require a degree. You may not ever be able to move into management without one either.

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