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I found that college fails to live up to being “The Great Equalizer”

visaalambalam.com

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Re: I found that college fails to live up to being “The Great Equalizer”

#91

Post by graecea »

Foobar8568 wrote: post #71
graecea wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand most people in the 50/60s would also fail the brevet (or baccalaureat for that matter). I can't speak for the math level but I do know that school in the 60s required you to learn every single prefecture and chef-lieu by heart in geography classes, and the name of every single bone and organ in biology classes. Sometimes modern reforms aren't all that bad.

They wouldn't, check the subjects of current brevet, bac and textbooks, it's just fluff. One fault is the drop in teaching hours : https://www.reseau-canope.fr/musee/collections/cache/a65f40c... this is a schedule from 1952. We are lying to kids and parents : https://twitter.com/loysbonod/status/1356128734508679168 Or Pierre Colmez writting : https://webusers.imj-prg.fr/~pierre.colmez/lettre.pdf and https://images.ma…

I was about to submit some objection but it turns out you've posted quite interesting links so I'm going to ponder that for a while. If I don't edit this post consider that you've successfully convinced me and changed my mind. Thanks for the pointers!

Re: I found that college fails to live up to being “The Great Equalizer”

#92

Post by ip26 »

visaals wrote: post #69
ip26 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I enjoyed your writing. It looks like you haven't written much since; life get in the way? Readership low? etc?

Wow that's the first time someone has said that (other than my immediate friends and family lol), so thank you! Mind if I ask what in particular you liked? I am interested about certain topics like education + improving access to opportunity + building cool stuff with tech + thinking about economic systems and incentives to drive success, but I also don't to come off as someone who just yells into the void about my o…

Rather than specific topic, I just enjoyed hearing your perspective, experience, and reflection on those things. Your 'writing voice' is relatable.

Re: I found that college fails to live up to being “The Great Equalizer”

#93

Post by bluefirebrand »

visaals wrote: post #66
bluefirebrand wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was the "kid with a CS degree". My experience interning was "There actually aren't many tech companies in your city and it's 2008 so no one is hiring" I was a broke student so I couldn't exactly afford to relocate for a summer internship, lose my apartment, store all of my belongings and such. I started my career with basically no experience, spent my last money on a deposit and first months rent to relocate to a n…

Dang that's a tough road to persevere through especially in '08. How did you get your big break?

Found a job through a connection I made during that four months and hung onto it for a few years to get some good experience, even though it sucked.

Moved to a bigger city from there and started trading up better positions with that experience.

Doing pretty good now, I'm a team lead at a company building some pretty cool stuff.

Still feels like if I had 2 or 3 internships during university I'd have had a lot smoother sailing. But who knows?

It definitely makes me think Software Development should be taught more like a trade with apprenticeships than anything else though.

Re: I found that college fails to live up to being “The Great Equalizer”

#94

Post by stnikolauswagne »

jimnotgym wrote: post #36
sokoloff wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is university meant to be vocational training or learning the unchanging fundamentals and how to learn new things in the field? I think it serves a better purpose to teach the underlying fundamentals and not to do vocational training. I don't think it's a serious flaw that you can graduate from a top university with a CS degree without ever having written SQL, react, or used revision control. To me, those are vocatio…

You may be right, but then shouldn't the standard route for most developers be vocational rather than academic? How many developers do we need in the workforce with this academic background?

Given how many different technologies/languages/frameworks an average developer has to learn over his career isn‘t a solid background in the fundamentals worth more than 3 years intense focus on one such set?

That‘s not to say that going through uni without having heard of git is the sign of a good program, I don‘t consider my program to be all that great but at least I had to go through two labs that required us to build software from scratch using git or svn.

Re: I found that college fails to live up to being “The Great Equalizer”

#95

Post by TimTheTinker »

dv_dt wrote: post #80
shiado wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A crazy stat is that 85% of autistic college grads are unemployed. Being "normal" really is the most important thing in life to fit in.

The crazy part is that having autistic tendencies correlated to some level of being great at looking at realities and getting work done. Makes me think I should start a company focusing on recruiting in that community.

You wouldn't be the first. In fact, along with certain foreign hires, I'll bet this is a play a lot of companies are keeping close to their chest.

Re: I found that college fails to live up to being “The Great Equalizer”

#96

Post by giantg2 »

Zerverus wrote: post #76
giantg2 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's that we live in a two-face system. The schools, companies, etc have policies that are supposed to eliminate or control bias. They claim it's a meritocracy. But then they tout having a network, "who you know vs what you know", etc. So why are bribes, gifts, etc tightly controlled and even illegal in many areas? So one type of bias is ok, but others are not? You end up with people like me who are told by a friend…

This assumes that human social interaction somehow is optional, exactly the mistake the parent went to point out. There is no world where social skills somehow are ‘bias’. They are core.

Social skills are not bias themselves. This who you know thing is - preference is given to people who are known. This makes it less likely that people who have different attributes get an equal chance.

Re: I found that college fails to live up to being “The Great Equalizer”

#97

Post by Foobar8568 »

graecea wrote: post #91
Foobar8568 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They wouldn't, check the subjects of current brevet, bac and textbooks, it's just fluff. One fault is the drop in teaching hours : https://www.reseau-canope.fr/musee/collections/cache/a65f40c... this is a schedule from 1952. We are lying to kids and parents : https://twitter.com/loysbonod/status/1356128734508679168 Or Pierre Colmez writting : https://webusers.imj-prg.fr/~pierre.colmez/lettre.pdf and https://images.ma…

I was about to submit some objection but it turns out you've posted quite interesting links so I'm going to ponder that for a while. If I don't edit this post consider that you've successfully convinced me and changed my mind. Thanks for the pointers!

I took my daughter out of her school two weeks ago for her own safety (sexual harassment with school/direction turning a blind eye), so while I was following a bit how a kid is educated in today world, the last 2 weeks were fairly interesting and just motivated me even more to home-school her (cannot afford what seems to be good private schools here), and I don't see the point to pay 3k a year (Hattemer distance learning and similar) for the same resources that I already have.

So I can drop more stuff, it's just what I had on hand :P

Re: I found that college fails to live up to being “The Great Equalizer”

#98

Post by Foobar8568 »

graecea wrote: post #56
dvt wrote: post #33

> who you know than what you know Yeah, the world is a social place. There's a reason European royalty sent their kids to etiquette classes, and even these days fraternities and sororities have formals. That's how the world works. Someone that's surprised by this in their 20s or 30s was failed by their parents or immediate community and this has nothing to do with college. You need to be nice to people, you need to b…

The problem is that we're being sold the 'meritocracy' narrative in the academical and technical circles. You often see it in HN discussions about hiring decisions (reasoning involving the "top 1% programmers" without any indication as to what that means exactly). If you have the introverted, dilligent, keeping-your-head-down, got-high-marks-at-school mentality that I assume is prevalent on HN, it can come as a shock…

Indeed, meritocracy is among the biggest lie to the middle class/the poor.

Re: I found that college fails to live up to being “The Great Equalizer”

#99

Post by palae »

Foobar8568 wrote: post #71
graecea wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand most people in the 50/60s would also fail the brevet (or baccalaureat for that matter). I can't speak for the math level but I do know that school in the 60s required you to learn every single prefecture and chef-lieu by heart in geography classes, and the name of every single bone and organ in biology classes. Sometimes modern reforms aren't all that bad.

They wouldn't, check the subjects of current brevet, bac and textbooks, it's just fluff. One fault is the drop in teaching hours : https://www.reseau-canope.fr/musee/collections/cache/a65f40c... this is a schedule from 1952. We are lying to kids and parents : https://twitter.com/loysbonod/status/1356128734508679168 Or Pierre Colmez writting : https://webusers.imj-prg.fr/~pierre.colmez/lettre.pdf and https://images.ma…

> One fault is the drop in teaching hours : https://www.reseau-canope.fr/musee/collections/cache/a65f40c... this is a schedule from 1952.

Is that really more than today? It doesn't seem like it.

Re: I found that college fails to live up to being “The Great Equalizer”

#100

Post by kiba »

graecea wrote: post #56
dvt wrote: post #33

> who you know than what you know Yeah, the world is a social place. There's a reason European royalty sent their kids to etiquette classes, and even these days fraternities and sororities have formals. That's how the world works. Someone that's surprised by this in their 20s or 30s was failed by their parents or immediate community and this has nothing to do with college. You need to be nice to people, you need to b…

The problem is that we're being sold the 'meritocracy' narrative in the academical and technical circles. You often see it in HN discussions about hiring decisions (reasoning involving the "top 1% programmers" without any indication as to what that means exactly). If you have the introverted, dilligent, keeping-your-head-down, got-high-marks-at-school mentality that I assume is prevalent on HN, it can come as a shock…

The lie is that Meritocracy is fair or equitable.
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