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It Depends What You Study, Not Where

economist.com

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Re: It Depends What You Study, Not Where

#81

Post by dilemma »

nostrademons wrote: post #58
_asummers wrote: post #18

The big thing for me with top schools is the "baseline quality of the degree". I didn't go to a top school, but spent my time studying everything math and CS related I could, and managed to get an awesome education. At the same time, I am fully cognizant of the fact that peers who were less driven likely were more easily able to skate by, for the most part. So when a resume comes across my desk from a guy from my alm…

In technical fields this is usually reliable (someone who went to CMU or MIT and graduated probably put in a pretty high baseline level of work), but in more liberal arts fields school quality correlates much less to a baseline quality level. At my alma mater (Amherst), for example, the easiest course of study would be to take 4 humanities classes / semester, spend 12 hours/week in classes, write 3 papers/semester fo…

No, the most common grade at Harvard is A or some variation thereof. See the Carol Joyce Oates interview.

Re: It Depends What You Study, Not Where

#82

Post by nostrademons »

dilemma wrote: post #81
nostrademons wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In technical fields this is usually reliable (someone who went to CMU or MIT and graduated probably put in a pretty high baseline level of work), but in more liberal arts fields school quality correlates much less to a baseline quality level. At my alma mater (Amherst), for example, the easiest course of study would be to take 4 humanities classes / semester, spend 12 hours/week in classes, write 3 papers/semester fo…

No, the most common grade at Harvard is A or some variation thereof. See the Carol Joyce Oates interview.

It's possibly gone up since I was college-aged; this was from when I was living in Boston and hanging around a bunch of Harvard students in 06-07.

Re: It Depends What You Study, Not Where

#84

Post by dpark »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #70
hibikir wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really easy to think that a set of life decisions are good because they worked well for you, but that's not how the world works: Across every road, there are a lot of events we cannot control, decisions made with imperfect information. We make mistakes, we fail, through no special fault of our own. Every path is great if you are talented AND lucky. But it makes no sense to evaluate a road by just looking at the…

There is no "the world". There are only people making choices, often on the basis of a default morality they've never thought about. The kinds of failures you're describing are exactly what you get when the default morality is "Make as much money as possible". You can say it's currently maladapted to expect more, and that's possibly true. That doesn't mean it's an ideal situation, or a praise-worthy one. If the talen…

> If the talents of smart people are consistently underutilised, that's a social problem and not just a series of unrelated individual failures.

I agree, but I think the social failure is that we tell people to "do what they love" and "follow their dreams" instead of "do something important" or "do something where you can make a difference".

The things that, say, English majors do are probably as objectively important as the things I do at work, but the field is overcrowded to the point that the value added by each additional entrant to the field is significantly reduced. So it's hard to find work that pays well for English majors (at least if they stay in their field).

Another thing is that "do something you love" misses is that you should find a career that you love. If you love your college experience but hate the jobs available to you afterward, that degree may not be a net positive.

Re: It Depends What You Study, Not Where

#85

Post by CydeWeys »

nostrademons wrote: post #82
dilemma wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the most common grade at Harvard is A or some variation thereof. See the Carol Joyce Oates interview.

It's possibly gone up since I was college-aged; this was from when I was living in Boston and hanging around a bunch of Harvard students in 06-07.

The grade inflation has been going on at Harvard for longer than that. Best not to rely on anecdata over data. Especially since the group of Harvard students you hung out with was likely far from a random sampling.

Re: It Depends What You Study, Not Where

#86

Post by IkmoIkmo »

ROI is kinda useless in this context.

i.e., they're essentially saying, if the uni is very selective (e.g. Harvard), the ROI is similar to say a state college.

But they're disregarding that Harvard, whoever subsidises you, is a $100k investment or w/e, and state colleges are $10k. Just making up ballpark numbers here.

Now the ROI might be the same, i.e. they might both end up earning roughly 1.5x their investment in annual salary. But seen this way, everyone appreciates there's a gigantic difference in where you study, even though percent wise the ROI is exactly the same.

Re: It Depends What You Study, Not Where

#87

Post by SonicSoul »

this is actually a little disappointing form the Economist which usually has great high quality content. Do we really need to visualize statistics to prove that comp sci pays more than a degree in library studies? how about if you get your MBA from a community college vs NYU or Wharton? Once you compare apples to apples you'll certainly see a statistical difference in ROI based on the WHERE.

Re: It Depends What You Study, Not Where

#88

Post by ori_b »

copperx wrote: post #19
dpark wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Future income is the primary reason people pursue higher education. We tell people from the time they hit middle school that they need to be preparing for college so they can get a good (i.e. high paying) job.

I heard this from my peers in undergrad all the time and it befuddled me. I thought "so ... you have no curiosity about the world? about how stuff works?." I'm not claiming that I had hifalutin ideals; I knew that money was important, but I had this (perhaps naive) idea that if I became an excellent practitioner in whatever I did the money would follow. I just wasn't prepared to hear "I'm just here to get a good job"…

> I thought "so ... you have no curiosity about the world? about how stuff works?."

For most people, a library solves that more efficient and cost effectively than a university, at least to the level that they care about.

It would be nice if university were cheap enough to be an answer to curiosity, but as it stands,

Re: It Depends What You Study, Not Where

#89

Post by mroll »

_asummers wrote: post #31
rm999 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If an applicant has less than a couple years experience, it's fair to expect/ask for GPA. If they have a lot of independent projects and a clear passion, I'll often excuse a low/missing GPA. GPA is about as flawed as alma mater, but I think combined they give a useful signal.

In lieu of GPA I ask what kind of classes they took and what were their favorites. That list is a much better indicator, I think. It also lets you gauge what kinds of questions you can reasonably ask and the types of solutions that you can expect. If someone didn't have to study graph theory, they likely won't see a graph theoretic answer and you shouldn't as a question that leads heavily to that type of solution, an…

But if they haven't studied graphs and are unable to give you rigorous answers, will you forgive them because they haven't taken the right classes?

It seems to me you should ask questions you expect the candidate to be able to give good answers for, period.

Re: It Depends What You Study, Not Where

#90

Post by dgacmu »

madengr wrote: post #64
s4chin wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was it this, by any chance? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11013997

Maybe. It's pay walled for me. It has a chart with compensation.

(Deleted old view-source suggestion)

Load the /amp version of the page: http://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/do-elite-colleges-lead-to-hi...

open javascript console, and enter:

  document.querySelector(".login-section-container").style.display = 'none';
  document.querySelector("div[amp-access='access OR meterCount
(The old /amp hack doesn't work because they added a selector for meter limit.)
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