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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

#841

Post by esrauch »

lurk2 wrote: post #817
esrauch wrote: post #781

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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seem to be Creationists and Alex Jones and similar inflammatory content creators having paid speaker invitations rescinded due to student pressure, which is an radically different topic than what I th…

> 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seem to be Creationists and Alex Jones and similar inflammatory content creators having paid speaker invitations rescinded due to student pressure, which is an radically different topic than what I thought the thread was about. I’m pointing you towards the trends; you aren’t going to find documentary evidence stating: “We didn’t hire this guy because of his voting history” because a) it’s illegal…

I may have misinterpreted "explicit roadmap", to be that implied a directing/organizing entity that is coordinating the exclusion of right-leaning people from professorships, versus your reply here clarifying you mean something different.

> If you found out 100% of agents were not left-leaning, would you still consider this a fanciful, tin-foil hat style conspiracy

Yep, I would. I think we are in the world where FBI agents are skewed as dramatically to the right as university professors are skewed left (which is to say: very). I don't believe either one as the deliberate exclusion of interested individuals from those positions based on their voting records, but instead more likely that both are self-selection and direct correlation to political views effects even when it's too such an extreme degree.

It's the same effect as theater having way more queer people in it than football, which is also not due to any conspiracy.

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

#842

Post by terminalshort »

jswelker wrote: post #809
terminalshort wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't need to rationalize what is already rational. My degree isn't even related to my job, so why would working harder at it have paid off?

In short, soft skills. It depends on your degree I guess. In an MBA or education program, the distance between try hard and slacker is narrow. In more abstract less career oriented programs, the difference on critical thinking and comm skills is huge. If you can't imagine how deeply studying great works and thinkers improves your mind, that tells me maybe you missed something big.

I'm a software engineer. I have no CS degree. The people who have one aren't any better.

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

#843

Post by qcnguy »

tovej wrote: post #837
qcnguy wrote: post #773

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They weren't heavily involved and to claim otherwise is historical revisionism.

They were heavily involved, computing was seen as a female profession. The human computers we had before digital ones were women, and they were very heavily involved until computers became profitable.

Sure, if you don't use the standard definitions of common words you can argue false things. Children know that. It has no intellectual merit and you should stop playing silly word games to try and "win" an incorrect argument.

The computing industry does not refer to people sitting in rows doing calculations by hand.

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

#844

Post by bathwaterpizza »

jswelker wrote: post #102

Higher ed is like employer based health insurance in that they are both weird path dependent historical accidents. People want cheap healthcare, and it got shoehorned into an odd employer fringe benefit system that really is not at all related healthcare in any intrinsic way. People want job training, and it got shoehorned into extra departments at liberal arts universities intended as aristocrat finishing schools. J…

Higher education is very much alive in the rest of the world where we don't pay for it

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

#845

Post by immibis »

lurk2 wrote: post #767
immibis wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this a problem? We expect universities to have a pro-truth, pro-reality, pro-knowledge bias, which are things the Republican party overtly rejects. We could expect that Republicans might not make it to universities as often, or they might not want to attend, or they might cease being Republicans upon learning facts and logic. None of this would be surprising and none of this would necessarily be a problem by itsel…

> We expect universities to have a pro-truth, pro-reality, pro-knowledge bias, which are things the Republican party overtly rejects. The people you’re pretending to be harbingers of truth believe that men can get pregnant. > or they might cease being Republicans upon learning facts and logic. So why is the bias the strongest in the least rigorous fields (communications, anthropology, music) and weakest is the most r…

Well they can. Some transgender men can get pregnant AFAIK.

This bias might be strongest in humanities because of self selection - conservatives think those are useless, but can see the utility in engineering - among other reasons.

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

#846

Post by lapcat »

ta20240528 wrote: post #819
lapcat wrote: post #665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is false.

It would be nice if you could elaborate - I'm here to learn.

> It would be nice if you could elaborate

To elaborate, you made a wildly false claim with no supporting documentation, such as links to undergraduate degree requirements from universities. These two go hand-in-hand: there wouldn't be documentation to support wildly false claims, just to refute them. But I'm not going to do your work for you, because your claim was both wildly false and also lazy. You made the claim, so the burden of proof is on you to support it.

> I'm here to learn.

That appears dubious, given the content of your previous comment.

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

#847

Post by mopsi »

somenameforme wrote: post #810
dragonwriter wrote: post #757

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not about immediate intentions, but about strategic options. Imagine Russia decided to form a military alliance with Mexico with the expected intention of deploying weapons on the Mexican border. The problem with pretending this analogy is relevant as a justification (or at least an "other people would have one the same thing" argument, which isn't really a justification to start with) of the Russian invasion…

Ukraine had been striving repeatedly to join NATO until 2010. That's when Yanukovych, who generally leaned more East than West, took power. Ukraine dropped its NATO ambitions under his leadership and re-affirmed themselves as a neutral state. Then he was overthrown, in an action directly backed by the US with John McCain, Victoria Nuland, and others literally on the ground in Ukraine giving speeches and riling up pro…

There's a huge problem with this narrative. The Russian government's public tender database shows that they ordered the production of campaign medals for the invasion of Crimea months before any of this happened. Oops.

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

#848

Post by sokoloff »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #721
sokoloff wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that some random leetcode-hard problem is not a good indicator, but if you can’t write fizzbuzz or can’t sum an array of integers, you’ve given me important data about your skills as a programmer on that day.

I’ve never had an interview question that asked me to do something straightforward. If I did get a question like that, I would be immediately suspicious about what the catch was.

For campus, we ask very straightforward questions to try to weed out the very lowest of coding fluency at that early stage. (Basically to try to guard against late track changers who haven’t actually coded but know that the SWE market is better than whatever their original interest was.)

If I ask that of a senior candidate, it’s because I got a whiff of “this candidate might not be able to code at all, and I’d like to save us both some time and frustration.”

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

#849

Post by torginus »

pfdietz wrote: post #775
torginus wrote: post #761

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was not an act of war since Afghanistan didn't have an official government - in practice the Taliban ran things - but the attacks were carried out by the Al Qaeda which was spread over the Middle East. The Taliban might have been sympathetic to it but they were not actively supporting them or had any official collaboration with them.

Acts of war are between nations, not between governments.

I hope you see where the problem with this is - the US had an enemy in a supranational organization, the Al Qaeda, which resided in many countries including Afghanistan.

The government of said country was unfriendly but not actively hostile to the US and on good terms with AQ, but not outright allies. This could've been said to apply between many Middle Eastern governments and radical groups at the time.

The US decided to invade, and antagonized the formerly unfriendly Taliban to become actively hostile.

The US managed to temporarily win over the Taliban but failed to permanently displace them.

AQ leadership, including Bin Laden moved out of the country almost immediately.

The 'war on terror' went on almost without end, then Bin Laden was killed a decade later, in a different country the US didn't declare war on, thanks to US special force action.

While AQ got weaker, ISIS got stronger (honestly I don't follow ME insurgent groups that closely, I wouldn't be surprised if this was a rebrand/reorganization in part).

So the US-initiated invasion totally failed to reach its stated result while leaving a huge collateral in its wake.

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

#850

Post by ta20240528 »

lapcat wrote: post #846
ta20240528 wrote: post #819

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be nice if you could elaborate - I'm here to learn.

> It would be nice if you could elaborate To elaborate, you made a wildly false claim with no supporting documentation, such as links to undergraduate degree requirements from universities. These two go hand-in-hand: there wouldn't be documentation to support wildly false claims, just to refute them. But I'm not going to do your work for you, because your claim was both wildly false and also lazy. You made the claim,…

I stand corrected, its not what my country's universities do.

But the thought of a theology student being forced to pass a course in evolutionary biology has made my day.

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