I always wonder if this is a symptom of a bigger problem that we created.
As soon as having a bachelors degree became almost an expectation, not having one became a problem to be avoided. We have people borrowing money to go to school because they think they have to...not because they necessarily even need to. Many of the best programmers I know never even went to college...they are just interested in the subject and taught themselves.
At the same time, we have a public school system that after 18 years with a child...has not actually prepared them to get a job. That's borderline criminal IMHO.
I always wonder what the effect would be of transitioning public high schools to a structure closer to Cornell's one-course-at-a-time approach (http://www.cornellcollege.edu/one-course-at-a-time/). It seems like giving kids the opportunity to deep dive into one thing (actually, learn it instead of memorize stuff) would be more effective. At the same time, scheduling of classes that taught real skills would a lot simpler.
Just imagine a gardening and cooking class where you could teach:
1. Plant biology and genetics of seeds
2. Chemistry and Soil Biology, Composting, Decomposition.
3. Use geometry to design raised bed frames
4. Learn some vocational carpentry to build raised bed frames
5. Plant in different environments, track growth, production, measures in a scientific experiment
6. Learn to cook some different recipes with what you've grown as well as how different temperatures affect what you're cooking (caramelization of onions, etc)
In a single intensive class you can bring together so many subjects and life skills that seem otherwise unrelated on their own.
Heaven forbid you take it to the next level and get into programming a farm bot.
I've always thought that if I homeschooled I would take a "one course at a time" approach.
I think you're mistakenly assuming the point of public school is to educate. I think it exists more so the proles have somewhere to dump their kids when they're working. The "education" happens to be incidental.
But yeah, there's an issue with the way we treat bachelor's degrees. I haven't found (in my admittedly limited experience) that it effectively signals anything these days, other than that you probably grew up at least "middle-class."
>Many of the best programmers I know never even went to college...they are just interested in the subject and taught themselves.
The problem with that is, college teaches a lot of things that are not directly related to core technical competencies. It's very easy to learn programming on your own these days, sure. But it's a lot harder to learn public speaking, finance, management principles, marketing, college-level reading and writing, technical writing, time-management, political science, biology, physics, and all of the other stuff that you're taught in college.
Going to a university or a college, I think, is still a very important thing. It's not worth the money right now, which I hope will change, but I know a lot of smart people who didn't got to college, people working in many different diverse fields, and it's almost always possible to tell who did and who did not go to a university. Do you want to be laser-focused on just being a programmer, or do you want to have marketable skills outside of a pure technology focus?
To put it simply: it's easy to learn how how a computer works and how to program it to work for you. It's much harder and takes much longer to learn how the world works and how to make it work for you. For 99% of the corporate/enterprise jobs people will end up working, being the best programmer is the world is far less important than every other skill you learn in college. If we do away with traditional universities, we need to find a way to replicate that other type of learning.
Credentialism is often a side-effect of rent-seeking, where existing participants in an industry agree to create barriers to entry (eg requiring a bachelor's degree) while often 'grandfathering in' existing market participants who may lack the qualifications in question. It's one approach to self-regulation, and can interact with governmental regulation in various ways.
>Just imagine a gardening and cooking class where you could teach:
1. Plant biology and genetics of seeds 2. Chemistry and Soil Biology, Composting, Decomposition. 3. Use geometry to design raised bed frames 4. Learn some vocational carpentry to build raised bed frames 5. Plant in different environments, track growth, production, measures in a scientific experiment 6. Learn to cook some different recipes with what you've grown as well as how different temperatures affect what you're cooking (caramelization of onions, etc)
One of my kids attends just such a class in high school half of each day. What you have described is pretty much exactly what they do. They have a carpentry shop, a huge garden, a kitchen, a science lab, etc. It sounds great, but the teachers suck. All the students hate it and are encouraging other students not to sign up for it next year.
> Just imagine a gardening and cooking class where you could teach:
> 1. Plant biology and genetics of seeds 2. Chemistry and Soil Biology, Composting, Decomposition. 3. Use geometry to design raised bed frames 4. Learn some vocational carpentry to build raised bed frames 5. Plant in different environments, track growth, production, measures in a scientific experiment 6. Learn to cook some different recipes with what you've grown as well as how different temperatures affect what you're cooking (caramelization of onions, etc)
> In a single intensive class you can bring together so many subjects and life skills that seem otherwise unrelated on their own.
> Heaven forbid you take it to the next level and get into programming a farm bot.
Add in "the student is interested in learning about biology/genetics", and you have unschooling.
As someone who went to that Cornell, I somewhat regret my decision. Sure you can cram in as much information as possible in that month, but long-term memory generally requires periodic refreshes. I've forgotten pretty much everything I learned there. :(
> Many of the best programmers I know never even went to college...they are just interested in the subject and taught themselves.
You must not know that many great programmers. I work in Silicon Valley and most of the great programmers I know absolutely crushed college. That doesn't necessarily mean they went to top schools (which it turns out, is not a great predictor of programming skills), but they at least went to college, and most of them majored in a STEM field and performed well academically also.
I have met one or two who didn't go to college and were great programmers also, but they're by far the exception and not the norm.
If I were to blame one group, it would be the loan industry. Though I wouldn't fault them for it or say it was intentional (at least at the on set).
First you become forced to make loans easier (it only take a quick glance to see them taking sure and comfortable bets, combined with a little social Justice a statistics the govt. Mandates unsure bets). This open the flood gates of who can get loans, people apply in great numbers (combined with culture, and people not realizing what they're getting into). Which leads to a huge glut of college grads no one knows what to do with... With market pressure the students go for lower and lower positions. Which becomes the new baseline qualification.
I'm so glad that something like "one course at a time" exists. I've been thinking about this a lot recently -- I start a semester excited and eager to learn, but end it off just knowing the basics at a mediocre level, just enough to do well on the exams for all five courses. It's impossible to get any sort of depth of understanding on five topics during three months. It's optimizing for a 4.0 GPA rather than maximum understanding.
>At the same time, we have a public school system that after 18 years with a child...has not actually prepared them to get a job.
Maybe I just went to a great public school, but I could have easily done by first professional job at the age of 18 with no college. However, having a BS was a requirement, so I wouldn't have been able to get hired without that piece of paper.
Could you kindly email me (address in profile), this is a very interesting comment and I wish to discuss some of it with you offline.
One thing I've noticed among "hacker spaces" and the machine shop company is that they have very few ties to higher edu, but they're doing VERY similar things. Even considering the machine shop company has a deal with Arizona State University, their crossover is limited. At that location, the spaces are actually physically delineated.
>Just imagine a gardening and cooking class where you could teach:
>1. Plant biology and genetics of seeds 2. Chemistry and Soil Biology, Composting, Decomposition. 3. Use geometry to design raised bed frames 4. Learn some vocational carpentry to build raised bed frames 5. Plant in different environments, track growth, production, measures in a scientific experiment 6. Learn to cook some different recipes with what you've grown as well as how different temperatures affect what you're cooking (caramelization of onions, etc)
That's already pretty close what happens in elementary schools.
I don't understand American's new-found fascination with vocational training. Why is it they expect education to now provide people with narrowly focused job training over the more traditional broad education?
Yes, college is expensive and I absolutely think something should be done to resolve that. And certainly not everyone needs a BS to be productive citizens. But societies "reverence" for the Bachelors degree was earned. Historically, these programs equip people with the background and education necessary to advance their careers.
Like many people here, I have a BSCS, and if computing became obsolete tomorrow, I feel entirely confident in my ability to transition into many other technical careers. My feeling is that a BS should be designed to open up entire classes of career options for people. But I also feel that people who opt for technical training in lieu of general education shouldn't be upset when they find out they can't transition as easily into other fields that require skills they may have never learned.
I honestly think this article serves as a cautionary tail to reinforce Bachelors "reverence" more than it does to dispel it. A person who spent years learning the depths of Italian cooking shouldn't be surprised when people don't want him managing their businesses. Knowing how to field for truffles and prepare them in a traditional way is nice, but it's not analogous to knowing how to run the logistics of a business.
I don't understand American's new-found fascination with vocational training. Why is it they expect education to now provide people with narrowly focused job training over the more traditional broad education?
Take everything you know about how nonsense the tech hiring/interviewing process is, and just for a second play with the idea the problem is deeper than anyone thought.
What if barely any employers have the faintest idea what they need from the workforce? No real understanding of how to screen for it at all? Limited ability to assess what portions of those needs are most effectively created through self-organization among the workforce at no line-item cost to the employers (school, etc...)?
If we, for a moment, assume that was true, we'd probably expect to find a world that has cargo-culted a definition of what a qualified applicant looks like. A person who is smart in general, and knowledgeable in a domain with a surface-level resemblance to what they would be expected to do at work. Enter the bachelor's degree.
Like any other metric standing in for something the user doesn't know how to (or can't) measure directly, the metric started getting gamed. Once "BS degree" = "employable" was well-known, and a generation run through that system from birth through college, then you have respectable news outlets writing thinkpeices about the value of a BS.
And if the person doing the hiring doesn't really know what they want, the population of people that just want to find a way for everyone to pay their bills doubly don't. So the next step of the dance is absorbing the on-the-job training that employers don't want to pay for, and rarely figure out how to do properly anyway.
What happens after flushing a generation of kids through the new process without really figuring out what we're trying to accomplish in the first place will be _______________________.
Vocational training is a wash if industries change to meet market demands, which they always are. Your IBM mainframe certificate doesn't mean shit in 2017, neither does the 6 week course you took on Microsoft Access if the job doesn't call for it.
Same thing applies to bootcamps. In 2-4 years, the frameworks and concepts you've learned to implement web apps will have changed. In ten, it will be an entirely different game.
I think the problem isn't that a Bachelor's degree is good, but that it is becoming a basic job requirement for any decent job right now, which is rough. Not everyone is capable or has the desire to be a high-level manager or executive. Many just want to do their job and collect that paycheck. Why should a degree be required for a job like that?
I only got about a third away through this but the beginning doesn't make me want to believe/empathize with the author at all.
"my nephew was set to graduate from Maryland’s Towson University with a degree in political science. After six long years,"
Six years for a degree in political science. You have to actively try to take that long to graduate. Maybe he changed majors.
"Holding up their son’s transcript, his adviser pointed out that he had taken the same economics course twice—one year apart. My nephew hadn’t noticed."
Really? I've met plenty of people in college who would do things like this. They all had no motivation or interest to graduate. They were there just because their parents made them and could afford it. I think this defends the authors point. However, using two people who clearly have no idea how to pave their own path to a successful life should be used as an example to argue against universities and trade schools.
Maybe the author is trying to say its the high schools fault for not teaching them. I disagree. Everytime I've seen behavior like this it's because the student just doesn't care or their parents have plenty of money and know they'll be fine no matter how bad they do.
The stock photo for this article is an interesting choice. The graduate paid zero dollars for his quarter-million dollar education, and was guaranteed a job at graduation. In return, he owes them a full commitment for five years of work, and partial commitment for another three.
The organization that promised to hire him ran the admissions process, set the curriculum, and after training screened him into a particular path for at least the first stage of his new career. He was surrounded for four years by people who will be his professional peers for the entirety of his career. He knows that the likelihood of him reaching the pinnacle of his profession is increased substantially through this network.
Obviously the military is well set up to do this. I am surprised though that other industries haven't attempted to build schools to train their respective employee bases.
Also, there's this strange belief that getting more people through degree programs will increase the number of people with higher paying jobs. The number of high paying doesn't change simply because we're increasing the number of degrees per capita - it merely devalues the degree - just as printing money devaules currency leading to inflation. Companies don't just decide to hire more candidates just because there's more of job candidates available. Utlimately, they hire to create value based on market demand for their products.
I don't mean to sound insensitive but why is it the institution's fault that it took someone without passion or drive 6 years to graduate and why wouldn't the same problems which persisted during college not continue to persist after graduating?
I know plenty of folks that went to Towson and the only thing that they could do after freshman year was funnel a beer. I know a few that went on to pursue respected middle class careers in tech, legal, education, and health care.
When will our youth finally start taking responsibility for their own actions or lack there of?
> After three years in a college-based apprenticeship
> program and three years of solid work experience, he
> was still the equivalent of a brand-new high-school
> graduate in the eyes of higher education.
So much this. I've considered getting a degree countless times over the years, but have been prevented by the fact that my 2 decades+ professional experience in the field counts for nothing in terms of meeting educational requirements. And the more experience I get, the more painful that fact gets...
> 2 decades+ professional experience in the field counts for nothing in terms of meeting educational requirements
Yeah, professors have experience with people like this. They're the students that stop lecture to ask a 5 minute long "question" that somehow hits the high points of their 20+ years of experience and doesn't really go anywhere, that roughly ends up at the same kind of "when will we ever use this in the real world" question that you'd expect from a 19 year old kid, when you're lecturing on rings and fields.
> I've considered getting a degree countless times over the years, but have been prevented by the fact that my 2 decades+ professional experience in the field counts for nothing in terms of meeting educational requirements.
That's generally not all that true. While many degree programs have no formal credit for experience and have minimum "residency" (time in program) requirements, the latter tend to be substantially shorter than the normal time to complete all coursework, and many programs have, instead of the former, means to satisfy some portion of credit requirements without actually taking classes if you can demonstrate equivalent knowledge gained elsewhere (e.g., credit-by-examination.)
I will counter your anecdote with another...
My wife never completed her undergraduate studies. After working her way from reception to middle-management, she bored of that career path and applied to a Masters program at a well-regarded institution, was accepted, and 2.5 years later, she has an expensive piece of paper.
With that paper, plus her decades of experience, she was able to transition into a career she likes. She's still in corporate America, but not middle-management.
Probably because professional experience has little to do with academic experience. I know many brilliant software engineers but not all of them are prepared to prove NP-completeness.
I think the answer lies somewhere in having 2-3 years of mandatory civil service for high-school grads which rotates them in various industries: Construction, IT, Mechanical works, Tool & Die, Hospital volunteering, Office clerks, building maintenance, etc.
In addition, high school should have 'guest' speaker from different lines of work come in (engineer, scientist, mechanic, doctor, HVAC, florist, baker, etc.) and tell grade 12 students about their job responsibilities, how much money they make and advise students frankly about the job.
Only then the kids can decide with full knowledge what they would like to pursue and their expectations would be realistic.
Lets harm all the kids who actually know what they want to do, have construction, IT and hospital work done by uninterested stoners (because what else are young people going to do when they have no options)?
This would be amazing. I feel a lot of high school kids are forced to decide what field they want to go in without really knowing what it entails or having experience in much of anything else.
I think the problem is the idea that you spend the beginning of your life learning things, and the rest of it doing things.
The current system does not leave much in the way of learning things (or at least getting credit) later on. This is a problem, because your average 18-22 year old knows nothing about what work they'll find satisfying, or what work will be in demand.
You also don't know what you'll actually be learning. For instance I did management classes at a well know university. Did I expect to learn something about how to manage? Yes. Did I learn anything about how to manage? No, that's not what management class is about. I suspect many people had similar experiences with their classes. To be fair engineering classes are not about how to be an engineer either, so I don't think it's a science/humanities thing.
What you do find out in uni is that pretty much anything academic can be learned if you dedicate some time to it. Read a few books about economics, and you'll know the major ideas of that field, presented in a somewhat coherent fashion.
So what we need is a way for someone who's found an interest to be able to pursue that. You work a bit as a coder, and you realise you should get a CS degree. So you find a course, read, practice, do an exam.
What's important is people who've discovered this need tend to be in a different life situation from ordinary college attendees. They might have work already, family, and so on. So incentives need to align to allow people to learn things without tearing up their whole life.
1. Author complains her lazy nephew's approach to school (and resulting Political Science degree) did not result in a good paying job.
2. Author complains her other nephew's lack of a degree and previous chef jobs did not result in a good paying job.
3. Author advocates for community colleges, blames higher-ed for being "too rigid" for her nephews, and says how much better Germany and other European countries are at training.
I think there's a case to be made that the decision in Griggs vs Duke Power Co. (employers may not administer IQ tests) is the reason we're in this mess. IQ is really important and correlates with lots of outcomes. Employers therefore want to know it. They're not allowed to ask, but admission to/success at an exclusive college correlates well with IQ, so they ask about that instead. Means everyone spends hundreds of thousands of dollars and years of their life to advertise something that could be measured in an hour.
The problem boils down to a twofold issue to me: 1) Schooling is getting in the way of education and 2) Schooling is misinterpreted by lazy employers as education.
In this day and age, what we need is some sort of more granular description of education and experience. I don't have a finance degree, but I've gone through the Yale econ lectures online.... how do I reflect that knowledge gained when all an employer wants is where did you graduate?
I see granular descriptions like this all the time on certain forums, down to people listing their audacity courses, tech certs, etc.
We need to find ways to revive intellectual curiosity and a yearning for knowledge in the masses, not stifle it by arbitrarily tying it down with businesses wants, especially in an information age where much of it is freely available online.
I think much of the "useful" college experience can be shrunk to two years for most majors. May be not more specialized fields like aerospace, physics, or the like but even those can do just fine with a 3 yr undergraduate degree. But CS, finance, any arts/commerce majors, liberal arts should totally not need four long years.
Employers don't really have that much else to go on. In-house tests are a legal minefield, and there are places you can graduate from high school without learning how to read.
No it doesn't. It needs to up standards for a secondary degree and double down on its investment in post secondary education. We need more literate, culturally aware, mathematically and analytically capable, scientifically knowledgeable humans, not less.
The fact that Americans are some of the least intellectually engaged people on the planet is not proof that we need better alternatives to college. We need better alternatives to intellectual disengagement.
There should be a room for disruption. Start working right after school, continue education at own paste at MOOC. Get company to allocate 10% time to studying.
Technology (streaming) enables everyone to have MIT grade education for free (theory part). Exams could be paid. The only labour intensive part of education is the practical part. This could be paid or community based co-study.
[+] [-] brightball|9 years ago|reply
As soon as having a bachelors degree became almost an expectation, not having one became a problem to be avoided. We have people borrowing money to go to school because they think they have to...not because they necessarily even need to. Many of the best programmers I know never even went to college...they are just interested in the subject and taught themselves.
At the same time, we have a public school system that after 18 years with a child...has not actually prepared them to get a job. That's borderline criminal IMHO.
I always wonder what the effect would be of transitioning public high schools to a structure closer to Cornell's one-course-at-a-time approach (http://www.cornellcollege.edu/one-course-at-a-time/). It seems like giving kids the opportunity to deep dive into one thing (actually, learn it instead of memorize stuff) would be more effective. At the same time, scheduling of classes that taught real skills would a lot simpler.
Just imagine a gardening and cooking class where you could teach:
1. Plant biology and genetics of seeds 2. Chemistry and Soil Biology, Composting, Decomposition. 3. Use geometry to design raised bed frames 4. Learn some vocational carpentry to build raised bed frames 5. Plant in different environments, track growth, production, measures in a scientific experiment 6. Learn to cook some different recipes with what you've grown as well as how different temperatures affect what you're cooking (caramelization of onions, etc)
In a single intensive class you can bring together so many subjects and life skills that seem otherwise unrelated on their own.
Heaven forbid you take it to the next level and get into programming a farm bot.
[+] [-] jinfiesto|9 years ago|reply
I think you're mistakenly assuming the point of public school is to educate. I think it exists more so the proles have somewhere to dump their kids when they're working. The "education" happens to be incidental.
But yeah, there's an issue with the way we treat bachelor's degrees. I haven't found (in my admittedly limited experience) that it effectively signals anything these days, other than that you probably grew up at least "middle-class."
[+] [-] freehunter|9 years ago|reply
The problem with that is, college teaches a lot of things that are not directly related to core technical competencies. It's very easy to learn programming on your own these days, sure. But it's a lot harder to learn public speaking, finance, management principles, marketing, college-level reading and writing, technical writing, time-management, political science, biology, physics, and all of the other stuff that you're taught in college.
Going to a university or a college, I think, is still a very important thing. It's not worth the money right now, which I hope will change, but I know a lot of smart people who didn't got to college, people working in many different diverse fields, and it's almost always possible to tell who did and who did not go to a university. Do you want to be laser-focused on just being a programmer, or do you want to have marketable skills outside of a pure technology focus?
To put it simply: it's easy to learn how how a computer works and how to program it to work for you. It's much harder and takes much longer to learn how the world works and how to make it work for you. For 99% of the corporate/enterprise jobs people will end up working, being the best programmer is the world is far less important than every other skill you learn in college. If we do away with traditional universities, we need to find a way to replicate that other type of learning.
[+] [-] anigbrowl|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] irrational|9 years ago|reply
1. Plant biology and genetics of seeds 2. Chemistry and Soil Biology, Composting, Decomposition. 3. Use geometry to design raised bed frames 4. Learn some vocational carpentry to build raised bed frames 5. Plant in different environments, track growth, production, measures in a scientific experiment 6. Learn to cook some different recipes with what you've grown as well as how different temperatures affect what you're cooking (caramelization of onions, etc)
One of my kids attends just such a class in high school half of each day. What you have described is pretty much exactly what they do. They have a carpentry shop, a huge garden, a kitchen, a science lab, etc. It sounds great, but the teachers suck. All the students hate it and are encouraging other students not to sign up for it next year.
[+] [-] LyndsySimon|9 years ago|reply
> 1. Plant biology and genetics of seeds 2. Chemistry and Soil Biology, Composting, Decomposition. 3. Use geometry to design raised bed frames 4. Learn some vocational carpentry to build raised bed frames 5. Plant in different environments, track growth, production, measures in a scientific experiment 6. Learn to cook some different recipes with what you've grown as well as how different temperatures affect what you're cooking (caramelization of onions, etc)
> In a single intensive class you can bring together so many subjects and life skills that seem otherwise unrelated on their own.
> Heaven forbid you take it to the next level and get into programming a farm bot.
Add in "the student is interested in learning about biology/genetics", and you have unschooling.
[+] [-] bonesmoses|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vecter|9 years ago|reply
You must not know that many great programmers. I work in Silicon Valley and most of the great programmers I know absolutely crushed college. That doesn't necessarily mean they went to top schools (which it turns out, is not a great predictor of programming skills), but they at least went to college, and most of them majored in a STEM field and performed well academically also.
I have met one or two who didn't go to college and were great programmers also, but they're by far the exception and not the norm.
[+] [-] lithos|9 years ago|reply
First you become forced to make loans easier (it only take a quick glance to see them taking sure and comfortable bets, combined with a little social Justice a statistics the govt. Mandates unsure bets). This open the flood gates of who can get loans, people apply in great numbers (combined with culture, and people not realizing what they're getting into). Which leads to a huge glut of college grads no one knows what to do with... With market pressure the students go for lower and lower positions. Which becomes the new baseline qualification.
[+] [-] JamilD|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dikdik|9 years ago|reply
Maybe I just went to a great public school, but I could have easily done by first professional job at the age of 18 with no college. However, having a BS was a requirement, so I wouldn't have been able to get hired without that piece of paper.
[+] [-] tlow|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tres_bien|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mason240|9 years ago|reply
>1. Plant biology and genetics of seeds 2. Chemistry and Soil Biology, Composting, Decomposition. 3. Use geometry to design raised bed frames 4. Learn some vocational carpentry to build raised bed frames 5. Plant in different environments, track growth, production, measures in a scientific experiment 6. Learn to cook some different recipes with what you've grown as well as how different temperatures affect what you're cooking (caramelization of onions, etc)
That's already pretty close what happens in elementary schools.
[+] [-] cossatot|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] id122015|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mywittyname|9 years ago|reply
Yes, college is expensive and I absolutely think something should be done to resolve that. And certainly not everyone needs a BS to be productive citizens. But societies "reverence" for the Bachelors degree was earned. Historically, these programs equip people with the background and education necessary to advance their careers.
Like many people here, I have a BSCS, and if computing became obsolete tomorrow, I feel entirely confident in my ability to transition into many other technical careers. My feeling is that a BS should be designed to open up entire classes of career options for people. But I also feel that people who opt for technical training in lieu of general education shouldn't be upset when they find out they can't transition as easily into other fields that require skills they may have never learned.
I honestly think this article serves as a cautionary tail to reinforce Bachelors "reverence" more than it does to dispel it. A person who spent years learning the depths of Italian cooking shouldn't be surprised when people don't want him managing their businesses. Knowing how to field for truffles and prepare them in a traditional way is nice, but it's not analogous to knowing how to run the logistics of a business.
[+] [-] forgottenpass|9 years ago|reply
Take everything you know about how nonsense the tech hiring/interviewing process is, and just for a second play with the idea the problem is deeper than anyone thought.
What if barely any employers have the faintest idea what they need from the workforce? No real understanding of how to screen for it at all? Limited ability to assess what portions of those needs are most effectively created through self-organization among the workforce at no line-item cost to the employers (school, etc...)?
If we, for a moment, assume that was true, we'd probably expect to find a world that has cargo-culted a definition of what a qualified applicant looks like. A person who is smart in general, and knowledgeable in a domain with a surface-level resemblance to what they would be expected to do at work. Enter the bachelor's degree.
Like any other metric standing in for something the user doesn't know how to (or can't) measure directly, the metric started getting gamed. Once "BS degree" = "employable" was well-known, and a generation run through that system from birth through college, then you have respectable news outlets writing thinkpeices about the value of a BS.
And if the person doing the hiring doesn't really know what they want, the population of people that just want to find a way for everyone to pay their bills doubly don't. So the next step of the dance is absorbing the on-the-job training that employers don't want to pay for, and rarely figure out how to do properly anyway.
What happens after flushing a generation of kids through the new process without really figuring out what we're trying to accomplish in the first place will be _______________________.
[+] [-] darpa_escapee|9 years ago|reply
Same thing applies to bootcamps. In 2-4 years, the frameworks and concepts you've learned to implement web apps will have changed. In ten, it will be an entirely different game.
[+] [-] TheAdamAndChe|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] btkramer9|9 years ago|reply
"my nephew was set to graduate from Maryland’s Towson University with a degree in political science. After six long years,"
Six years for a degree in political science. You have to actively try to take that long to graduate. Maybe he changed majors.
"Holding up their son’s transcript, his adviser pointed out that he had taken the same economics course twice—one year apart. My nephew hadn’t noticed."
Really? I've met plenty of people in college who would do things like this. They all had no motivation or interest to graduate. They were there just because their parents made them and could afford it. I think this defends the authors point. However, using two people who clearly have no idea how to pave their own path to a successful life should be used as an example to argue against universities and trade schools.
Maybe the author is trying to say its the high schools fault for not teaching them. I disagree. Everytime I've seen behavior like this it's because the student just doesn't care or their parents have plenty of money and know they'll be fine no matter how bad they do.
[+] [-] hectorr|9 years ago|reply
The organization that promised to hire him ran the admissions process, set the curriculum, and after training screened him into a particular path for at least the first stage of his new career. He was surrounded for four years by people who will be his professional peers for the entirety of his career. He knows that the likelihood of him reaching the pinnacle of his profession is increased substantially through this network.
Obviously the military is well set up to do this. I am surprised though that other industries haven't attempted to build schools to train their respective employee bases.
[+] [-] pascalxus|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arrty88|9 years ago|reply
I know plenty of folks that went to Towson and the only thing that they could do after freshman year was funnel a beer. I know a few that went on to pursue respected middle class careers in tech, legal, education, and health care.
When will our youth finally start taking responsibility for their own actions or lack there of?
[+] [-] GrinningFool|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] munin|9 years ago|reply
Yeah, professors have experience with people like this. They're the students that stop lecture to ask a 5 minute long "question" that somehow hits the high points of their 20+ years of experience and doesn't really go anywhere, that roughly ends up at the same kind of "when will we ever use this in the real world" question that you'd expect from a 19 year old kid, when you're lecturing on rings and fields.
[+] [-] dragonwriter|9 years ago|reply
That's generally not all that true. While many degree programs have no formal credit for experience and have minimum "residency" (time in program) requirements, the latter tend to be substantially shorter than the normal time to complete all coursework, and many programs have, instead of the former, means to satisfy some portion of credit requirements without actually taking classes if you can demonstrate equivalent knowledge gained elsewhere (e.g., credit-by-examination.)
[+] [-] alistairSH|9 years ago|reply
With that paper, plus her decades of experience, she was able to transition into a career she likes. She's still in corporate America, but not middle-management.
[+] [-] sdflkd|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m23khan|9 years ago|reply
In addition, high school should have 'guest' speaker from different lines of work come in (engineer, scientist, mechanic, doctor, HVAC, florist, baker, etc.) and tell grade 12 students about their job responsibilities, how much money they make and advise students frankly about the job.
Only then the kids can decide with full knowledge what they would like to pursue and their expectations would be realistic.
[+] [-] tomjen3|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 20years|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lordnacho|9 years ago|reply
The current system does not leave much in the way of learning things (or at least getting credit) later on. This is a problem, because your average 18-22 year old knows nothing about what work they'll find satisfying, or what work will be in demand.
You also don't know what you'll actually be learning. For instance I did management classes at a well know university. Did I expect to learn something about how to manage? Yes. Did I learn anything about how to manage? No, that's not what management class is about. I suspect many people had similar experiences with their classes. To be fair engineering classes are not about how to be an engineer either, so I don't think it's a science/humanities thing.
What you do find out in uni is that pretty much anything academic can be learned if you dedicate some time to it. Read a few books about economics, and you'll know the major ideas of that field, presented in a somewhat coherent fashion.
So what we need is a way for someone who's found an interest to be able to pursue that. You work a bit as a coder, and you realise you should get a CS degree. So you find a course, read, practice, do an exam.
What's important is people who've discovered this need tend to be in a different life situation from ordinary college attendees. They might have work already, family, and so on. So incentives need to align to allow people to learn things without tearing up their whole life.
[+] [-] mti27|9 years ago|reply
1. Author complains her lazy nephew's approach to school (and resulting Political Science degree) did not result in a good paying job.
2. Author complains her other nephew's lack of a degree and previous chef jobs did not result in a good paying job.
3. Author advocates for community colleges, blames higher-ed for being "too rigid" for her nephews, and says how much better Germany and other European countries are at training.
[+] [-] MBlume|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arca_vorago|9 years ago|reply
In this day and age, what we need is some sort of more granular description of education and experience. I don't have a finance degree, but I've gone through the Yale econ lectures online.... how do I reflect that knowledge gained when all an employer wants is where did you graduate?
I see granular descriptions like this all the time on certain forums, down to people listing their audacity courses, tech certs, etc.
We need to find ways to revive intellectual curiosity and a yearning for knowledge in the masses, not stifle it by arbitrarily tying it down with businesses wants, especially in an information age where much of it is freely available online.
[+] [-] blizkreeg|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gozur88|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] segmondy|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jknoepfler|9 years ago|reply
The fact that Americans are some of the least intellectually engaged people on the planet is not proof that we need better alternatives to college. We need better alternatives to intellectual disengagement.
[+] [-] bonesmoses|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taeric|9 years ago|reply
Which, I should add, I'm not against.
[+] [-] typetypetype|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulus_magnus2|9 years ago|reply
Technology (streaming) enables everyone to have MIT grade education for free (theory part). Exams could be paid. The only labour intensive part of education is the practical part. This could be paid or community based co-study.