So the crux of this article is that kids shouldn't go to college because they feel like they are meant to but they should go because it makes sense for their personal goals and I agree. I have long held the belief that America needs more apprenticeships and technical schools.
That being said, this is one of those things where people are instead going to want to debate the value of college itself(because they didn't actually read the article).
I'm an American that didn't go to college. And as I've said, college is far less than ideal but here are some reasons why I personally wish I got my degree
1. I have a harder time getting jobs than people with degrees. Not people with CS degrees, people with any degrees. Despite having job experience, I have a rougher time getting interviews and emails back than my friends with degrees. I have worked at the same companies as my peers and they have recruiters beating down their doors while I barely get emails back.
2. If you want to move to another country, a degree will more than likely be part of your visa requirements. Even if it isn't, it would absolutely help in a points based system.
3. I still get imposter syndrome because I can barely solve leetcode questions in interviews and feel like I'm missing something. Would a degree resolve that issue? No idea. But fact or fiction there is a part of me that believes it would've at least given me a bit more confidence in my abilities.
I have my masters in computer science and work on the Linux kernel at a company you know for a product that you know. I often miss the point of leetcode questions and lose points because I don't use some certain tricky thing that they specifically want me to study for before the interview. I personally think it's just a handy way to build ageism into the interview process, because it's all this academic-style stuff that I've used maybe twice since I graduated 5 years ago. And for people like you, you've probably only really heard about these things in passing because they're not part of most people's workflow.
Kind of like applying for a job restoring Native American artifacts and being asked tricky questions about artifacts discovered in Egypt 5 years ago. Sure, you might have noticed the story or even read a lot about it 5 years ago, but it's not going to be a part of your daily work. Different procedures, different materials, and different local laws? I guess you should get studying if you want this job! And really, I just wanted to see your problem solving style when I ask irrelevant questions!
But ya, I think it's fair to say that my degree helps me not take that sort of thing as a rejection of my intelligence or qualifications though. I don't feel lesser than. I just feel belittled by someone who doesn't put effort into their interviews, which is useful information if you're considering working with them.
I'm in the same boat as you (American, no degree), and I mostly agree (though I think that a debate around the value of college itself should be had, because I think there are too many cases where it isn't as high as people think it is).
1. The way I handled this was to insinuate on the resume that I had a degree. I went to a university for a couple years (before flunking out) and before that I did a couple summer classes at an extension program. Those add up to four years, and I point out that I studied computer science (which is true). If they don't outright ask that's not my problem. And if they do then I explain that something personal came up, and not completing it is one of my biggest regrets in life, but at this point I don't see how a degree would help my career blah blah blah.
This has only actually affected me once, and it's for a role I'm starting this week. The net effect is that my software engineering title can't have "Engineer" in it because I don't have an "Engineering degree".
3. A degree doesn't resolve that. I interview people every week for a role at my MAGMA company, most of whom have degrees, and most of whom act like they have impostor syndrome. Practice it. Do interviews for companies you don't expect to join just for the interview practice in a low-stakes setting. You'll get over it.
>3. I still get imposter syndrome because I can barely solve leetcode questions in interviews and feel like I'm missing something. Would a degree resolve that issue? No idea. But fact or fiction there is a part of me that believes it would've at least give me a bit more confidence in my abilities.
It likely wouldn't. What would help you with solving leetcode questions is just grinding leetcode questions. Taking an algorithm class years ago wouldn't help beyond your first attempt at the problems.
That said for all the other reasons you listed, getting a college degree is usually a good idea.
If it's any condolence to yourself, I have a college degree and I am always incredibly impressed by people who are able to be software developers without one. The perseverance required to not only learn the subject matter without structure, but get through the gatekeepers without a degree is immense.
And everyone gets imposter syndrome, so I doubt college would help with that.
I'm an American that finished university later than most. I was 40 by the time I finished my degree, working full time as a software engineer. After I got my degree, I found out a lot of my peers that I thought held degrees do not.
For me, I've found that my course-related knowledge provides a little more context than before, but ultimately I'm not really better at solving leet-code style questions. It hasn't resolved any imposter syndrome. I haven't noticed any difference in recruiting efforts.
I am very happy I completed my degree, it was an important goal for me. I think college is important because it results in more well-rounded individuals, with broader perspectives.
I don't think college should be viewed as a means for job-training. We are not our jobs, and I really think we need to find a way to stop treating people like their role in society is exclusively to work for 50 years and then go away.
This is excellent and taking lessons from the Swiss apprenticeship programs. Typically working with local companies to provide training, in return they get excellent labor, and the labor pool is far better off without any student loans or burden of spending 5 years in college.
Yes. Speaking for the US, if your personal goals include having things like PTO and health insurance you're going to want the degree. Most white collar jobs are off limits without a degree in something, even if entirely unrelated to the job itself.
Not that there aren't other paths, or non-degree-gatekept jobs with those things. But they are harder and fewer and becoming increasingly so.
Programming is one of the few prestigious, highly paid jobs left that doesn't have a pretty hard req on having a degree to get into. That's why I do it. But yes I've also run into all the things you mention.
4. There are companies that will not even consider an applicant w/o BA degree, no matter what experience (HR filters).
Anyway, in large measure, we are only talking how college is not for everyone because it's so expensive. It's fine to have alternatives but education needs to be more accessible to those that want it.
How many years of experience do you have? I don't have a degree but it's literally never come up, and I've been working as a software engineer for two decades.
Regarding #3 I think it's a completely broken industry practice and I would not take it on me, but I would try to find companies with different hiring practices. As you described, this whole Leetcode industry is demoralizing and hurts almost everyone for very small benefit in general.
In our company (and my previous too BTW) I was strongly advocating working on real problems during the interview. I find it really troubling that the industry still sticks to this outdated way of interviewing (I refer to Leetcode) instead of:
A. Having accreditation which would require renewal after X years
B. Having other types of competency checks
I really don't understand how Leetcode is superior to let's say Coderpad or Codeinterview.io (I am not affiliated with either of them).
These tools actually pretty much allow you to set up a relevant coding exercise in the candidate's preferred language and framework, and it only takes a few minutes to customize their templates to the candidate's experience and the interviewer's imagined coding problem.
Just yesterday I set up a React coding problem in just below an hour, which allowed me to ask relevant questions about: language syntax, state management, routing, code organization, system performance, error handling, and data organization among others.
Isn't that the end goal here? To ask relevant questions from the candidate so that we make sure his skills match the imagined role and/or project?
Based on all this above, if I would be back to interviewing now, I would generally take it as a signal of a broken organization, lack of clarity about the role/project in the company, if they would shove a Leetcode/Codility/Hackerrank coding problem first in my face without asking.
Given the voting divide based on education, people in the U.S. are getting something else out of college education. I have no issue with shoehorning more liberal education into primary education, but a liberal democracy cannot survive if blue-collar workers have no historical context and vote for authoritarians who are intent on destroying democracy.
> 1. I have a harder time getting jobs than people with degrees. Not people with CS degrees, people with any degrees. Despite having job experience, I have a rougher time getting interviews and emails back than my friends with degrees. I have worked at the same companies as my peers and they have recruiters beating down their doors while I barely get emails back.
I'm not discrediting your experience but I've never had any issues on this front. I went to college for ~3 years before dropping out because I didn't see the point in continuing and I've never had any issues getting a job in tech. I've also far outpaced my peers (geographically and friends) when it comes to salary so I'm struggling to figure out what the difference is. Potentially we are going after different jobs or want different jobs. On the recruiter-front, I have recruiters in my inbox 24/7 pestering me. I don't see recruiters reaching out as a measure of how good of a developer someone is (also almost every external recruiter is trash), it just means you got put on a mailing list at some point. I believe you when you say your friends with similar/same experience get asked back more than you do but I'm hesitant to automatically assume it's because of college (due to my lived experience). I have only interviewed at 1 place that I can remember that I actually was interested in getting a job at which ended in them saying they weren't interested (though I've only worked at 4 companies over 11+ years and interviewed about 6-8 times total, the other offers weren't ones I was interested in taking).
For #2 yes, I could see that being an issue but it's not something I'm looking to do so I don't really care
For #3, everyone feels this and college doesn't change it. Interviews are notoriously terrible on the whole and serve as an ego boost to the interviewer more often than they actually tell you if someone would be a good developer.
Counteranecdata from someone who did go to college in Europe and didn't graduate:
> 1. /../ they have recruiters beating down their doors while I barely get emails back.
I have recruiters beating down my doors. Because of job experience. Unless they assume I finished college just because linkedin says I went for N years.
> 2. If you want to move to another country, a degree will more than likely be part of your visa requirements. Even if it isn't, it would absolutely help in a points based system.
I was able to get multiple O-1 (special ability) visas in USA without a college degree.
> 3. I still get imposter syndrome
Me too. But if you were hired then the company thinks you can do the thing. Just do the thing.
edit: It is very likely the things that enabled me to do #2 also unlock #1. To this I can't offer much more than "Do interesting things and make sure people know about them"
>I have long held the belief that America needs more apprenticeships and technical schools.
These exist, but the problem is the jobs are not the good and neither is the pay. You need a lot of certification and training, which is time consuming and costs money.
Many low-skilled young and middle-aged men are more content with an easy retail job or just living with parents or with friends or with girlfriend than going down the apprentice route. It's sad that America is going down this route, but I don't see any way out of it.
The degree wont help with leetcode unless you did it in the last year or so. Leetcode is about practice. Doing a degree and revising for an exam is a similar kind of practice.
Natural aptitude to a certain extent is required, but if you are coding you probably have it. Then it is practice: there is nothing easier than a question you already answered in practice and you recognise the shape.
I don’t remember where I heard it, but someone said degrees, certifications, etc, are good because they show you have understanding of $topic to someone who doesn’t have an understanding of said $topic. You aren’t always interviewing with engineers themselves, and a piece of paper is an easy way to communicate your skills to non-technical people.
You should be very happy you didn't go to college for precisely these same three reasons.
So for the purposes of points 1 and 2, college degrees are bullshit harmful things. So having a harder time getting jobs and visas are identical. Yes, you get little brownie points for a college degree, but you used to get the exact same little brownie points for a high school degree. What happened? It's a filter, nobody gives a shit about what degree you have in an ultimate sense, plenty of places see college-degree only as insufficient, guys saying what you just said but about a master's, or a PhD, or a post-doc.
What this is is a rat race. They want you to be a rat, and race. To do so, they say they'll only take the rats with under a certain time. But if many rats make that time, the time is reduced. Then as the rats really race more and more the times they individually have to make to make the cut keep falling and falling. Also, keep in mind you get paid for working but nothing for studying, in fact you pay for studying, or parents pay (same thing, the benevolence that is for you is spent). So the rats racing means the guys setting up the rat race--the rats who won in the past, often--get more work all the time from the racing rats in exchange for less and less cheese of their own. So by demanding college degrees and being shitty to people who don't have them--all the things you describe are vulgar fuck-yous from employers for not having raced hard enough as a rat. What do you get for racing harder? Well if you do well enough, you get a "chapita". A chapita means badge, like you get badges in bags of fried crisps sometimes if you're very lucky because only a third contain them. These badges are very powerful, superhero badges that give you magical powers of invisibility and flying through the air, but superpowers. Real superpowers, or they better be, because these chapitas are morally equivalent to college degrees, and those
They both say you're special, now it's true the college degree is letter-sized, so they take up more area, and they have more letters in them, everyone but me says they're prettier than the chapita, but I say WAIT, that chapita is printed in color, good drawing of real art, it's got a metal back, it's got plastic on the front so it doesn't look shitty if it gets wet, and you can attach it to your clothes! You can go around with that chapita everywhere you go. And as for the powers, they both have the same superpower granting ability because they both SAY you have that power! And in fact the chapita superpower, invisibility or flying through the air, is a much better power than the college degree, which is that you've got a major, and IMPLIES you have more powers.
Now it's true that perhaps you STOLE your chapita from its true owner! You didn't buy the bag of fried crisps yourself and open it with your own hands, and eat the crisps one by one without any falling to the floor, slowly eating them and enjoying them, until finding the chapita in a moment of beautiful merit! You STOLE the chapita from its true owner, you stole those powers, you do not deserve it, you are stealing someone else's invisibility! Or you bought it, that's just wrong, you're supposed to buy the fried crisps and have GOOD LUCK OF YOUR OWN.
But the college degree is no different because tons of people cheat their asses off, leading to learning literally nothing[1]. And some people just buy college degrees outright, like pay $400 and they email it to you, or OK they fedex it but you pay for the fedex, if you're stupid and pay $400. If you're smart you can ask the fried crisp company what software they use (and pirate it obviously) and design your own letter-sized college degree. Or fuck it, just write COLLEGE DEGREE [YOUR NAME] on a page in a notebook, real big, look at it, be proud of yourself. Now let's turn the page to the real work.
Leetcode? Leetcode sucks. Not leet. So it has a few different functions, so first it's a way to get workers to work for nothing to "apply" to a job where they can earn money. That's good! Gets the boss much better terms ie. more submissive workers more afraid of getting fired because then they have to waste more money to get another job, or "reeducate" to get another chapita wasting more resources, becoming poorer and more indebted and more desperate, good things all around. That's the first part, worker impoverishment.[3] Then, to make you feel stupid. You say, "I can't solve this shit"--it's true you can't, it's very elitist in that regard, I've never met anybody who can solve this kind of problem from nothing. Well there's some math wizzes, like Math Olympiad guys, there's some, but they are gluing together clever things a lot of the time. So what people do is they look it up. Then, to brag by getting lots of internet points, notice leetcode is a point system? You add up the points? Try to get a lot of points on a high score? You can't just solve one problem to get a good leetcode score, you have to solve lots. And there's usually a story in the media at some point about the top leetcoder getting hired due to his leetcode score, like with Github or Kaggle.
Then you have to "grind leetcode" for interviews. Well you do, I don't, but you do. You have to know all the tricks, and sometimes be able to come up with something clever in the moment. And so then they tell you it's meritocratic, FAANG just cares about these tests. Well what this does is produce lots and lots of rejects. This is good, rejects generally maintain a highly positive impression of the places that rejected them, blaming themselves for their failure (you get little brownie points for self-blame like talking about getting fired in suck-uppy terms), and these companies don't have to pay absolutely anything to the rejects. In fact, they tell the rejects to apply again in a few years. Plus--well they're stupid for buying into their own bullshit like this they ought to remember their lies--but the companies then say, oh, we're the absolute best, we're the select few, you're in the club, we're special. Well to be fair these filters do get you clever people in general, in most ways. But on the other hand no true dropouts. So Tesla wouldn't hire Tesla.[2]
So for the same three reasons you gave for being unhappy, contrariwise, be happy, be very happy. I believe people act collectively, if you make a choice others will make the same choice with you, if you had made all those painful sacrifices to get a degree, which toward the end are about proving you submissively do stupid assignments against your own interests, well more people would have done that with you and you would not have gotten ahead. Employers would have asked for more chapitas, visas would have asked for more chapitas, leetcode would be a little easier but you'd also be worse at it, and you'd write the same comment with Master's in place of Bachelor's, you'd actually make lower wages, and you would have done harm to the other rats. You would feel worse about yourself, especially because you would have wasted all that money on tution.
[1] You learn literally nothing. Yeah you remember some words and google and you're good at cheating now and plagiarizing, OK cheating is great for learning to cheat I'll admit that, and at elite colleges the cat-and-mouse game of cheating is hardcore and a great preparation for professional cheating ie finance, consulting and medicine. It's also good prep for catching cheaters, which is important in becoming a teacher that needs to prevent cheating, so cheating in the School of Education makes sense. You could have a cheating class if you wanted. In one class I was the only one who could actually do the work (I actually design and implement algorithms), and I flunked. I learned a lot in that class though, not cheating is the real way of cheating. You fucking learn. I didn't cheat, I saw the assignment they wanted in a document way in the back of one of the class books but I just wasn't going to copy it and hand it in, wasn't going to get a TA to just give me the answers either in "office hours", just wasn't going to cheat because it's not just about the school's rules, it's about my rules too. So basically everyone who passed cheated, and this class was a requirement for the most prestigious major in the world.
[2] I will say I have a remarkably favorable impression of Elon Musk, partly because I view people I do good things for more favorably, like victims I've protected from crime, or in this case, because I acted to protect his capital in a company he funded, where I got a great job by going around their filter and showing up and working my ass off until they took me in long-term. The wage was so high and conditions were so good. So back to protecting his capital, I didn't know it was him funding the company. But, Tesla wouldn't hire Tesla, not through the normal pipeline at any rate. His companies are huge and they care about chapitas.
[3] Every piece of bitchwork (meaning "homework" you do it for free to impress the potential employer, who is assigning it, in order to get hired) reduces your salary by 3%. Always charge for time, not completion, or apply to other places instead with the time you would spend on it.
The argument that "most kids don't need to go to college" is the same argument that British intellectuals were making at the end of the 19th and early 20th century, except replace "college" with "high school." The main reason that the United States became the dominant superpower of the early-mid 20th century and eclipsed its European peers was that many more kids in the United States had been going to high school for a long time. So "most kids don't need to go to college" seems historically shortsighted.
That being said, I do question whether the not-inconsiderable amount of money we're spending on tertiary education is actually well-spent. For one, it's incredibly unequal - rich public and private universities (which disproportionately cater to the children of the wealthy) soak up far more than their fair share of funding. Universities also spend huge amounts of money on non-academic items - fancy buildings, gyms, sports teams, huge administrative staffs, etc. This spending is partially facilitated by the insanity that is student debt.
I don't think educating fewer people is a good long-term strategy, but I think if we want to educate more people we need to take a long hard look at how tertiary education works in the US.
Edit: for those looking for a citation for attributing the U.S. dominance in the 20th century to education, see Piketty, Capital and Ideology, 517-522. Note that by the dawn of the 20th century German GDP per capita per-job was 60-70% of that of the US; that figure was 80-90% in the UK. I'm not saying two world wars didn't contribute, but the US was already ahead before they began.
> The main reason that the United States became the dominant superpower of the early-mid 20th century and eclipsed its European peers was that many more kids in the United States had been going to high school
This glosses over two World Wars and a massive haul of natural resources and confiscated land.
> The main reason that the United States became the dominant superpower of the early-mid 20th century and eclipsed its European peers was that many more kids in the United States had been going to high school for a long time.
The data from the time shows little difference between Canada and the USA in high school attendance. Canada might have even had a slight edge. And now Canada is considered most educated nation on earth, according to the OECD, approaching 70% of the population having a tertiary education, compared to just 40% stateside.
If high school was the significant factor, why has Canada never really become all that significant of a power? Several European powers are more powerful than Canada despite their supposed lack of education. It is questionable if Canada would even be strong as it is if it weren't America's neighbour.
> I think if we want to educate more people we need to take a long hard look at how tertiary education works in the US.
I guess the first question is: What is Canada getting out of it? Certainly the top promise the tertiary education system likes to trumpet – higher incomes – hasn't materialized. Canadians make far less money than their American counterparts in almost all cases, not to mention that incomes have been stagnant as far back as the data goes.
I went to an elite university on fully paid financial aid.
I don’t think the university made me much wiser than I would had been at a less expensive public school. And I think I could have learned many things on my own based on my abilities at the time.
However, having a degree from an elite university is an effective signal that you made it through the filter of their college admissions process. This is what companies like to see.
Since those admissions were based on SAT and other metrics, the students they select are among the brightest and regardless of the quality of education, they will do well in the world. This reinforces the value of attending an elite university and feeds more competition for the spots. This is similar to a shoe company sponsoring an athlete. The custom shoe might be better than what the athlete had before and maybe they even provide training from world class coaches, but they’re not just sponsoring anyone. You’re not getting that shoe without already proving something.
My earnings have benefitted from the school network and at the price charged the network is probably still a net benefit for me, without accounting for the financial aid.
So overall, it’s a game, but worth playing. There’s likely a better system we could devise to signal intelligence and ability that didn’t rely on diplomas from 4 year schools. However, the network effects of colleges cannot be replaced in the same manner. For that we have to consider whether these effects are disadvantaging others and worth perpetuating.
This does not play to the anti-college sentiment on this site. But there is good evidence that secondary and university education is a large part of a nation's ability to support a strong economy.
The questioning of the value of university education also coincides with an ageing cohort of men with university educations they got when men dominated university attendance being replaced by women who now dominate university graduating classes. Hmmm.
Question is - is college education in current form really useful? I feel we get more practical education from the internet than from the structured courses in traditional college education.
Yeah and they were right. We keep inflating the time children spend in school but don't proportionately scale the content. People are taking Calculus the second year they're in college now. People are graduating high school practically illiterate and innumerate.
This isn't a call to educate fewer people. It's to educate more efficiently which, when done right, will reach more people.
I'm not convinced that most kids need High School either.
For smart kids, High School is basically just
a grade-grubbing competition to determine
who gets to go to the best college.
This mostly gets in the way of actual learning.
I think bright students would learn much more if, after 9th grade,
they went directly to university,
with admission determined by lottery.
For all other students,
High School is basically just prison.
They already know how to read, write, and do arithmetic.
They know that the earth goes around the sun
and that America invented freedom and fought in half a dozen wars.
They know everything that they're ever
going to remember learning in school
or that they'll use afterward.
But, for some reason, they're forced to spend years
doing stoichiometry and reading old books
that they're never going to appreciate.
A liberal arts education is valuable,
even if it's not directly applicable to daily life,
because it can elevate the spirit.
But can you elevate the spirit by force?
I think not.
As it stands, I know plenty of people who have degrees only to work in offices for $16 an hour, and to be offered terrible health insurance. Without those degrees, no matter how inapplicable to jobs they actually are, they'd be working in food service, probably under the table, without even shitty health insurance.
If you're middle class or lower, your kids will be relegated to even shittier jobs without degrees than the shitty jobs they can get with degrees.
Degrees in the US act as a class filter for employers, who are irrationally averse to hiring what they consider to be the riff raff, and degree-holders at the HR and hiring level use them to gatekeep, as well. Degrees are not about aptitude, proficiency, intelligence or tackling adversity, they're about keeping "those people" out, and signaling that you aren't one of them.
If your kids can't afford healthcare even with your help, a degree is still a good idea for them, even if the entirety of their estate gets clawed back by creditors to pay back student loans when they die. Being able to see a doctor and incurring debt is better than being denied preventative care for lack of insurance or inability to pay.
Trades often don't pay well, either, as an employee. I've heard for years about how welders can make six figures. Around here, employers expect to hire welders at $17 an hour, and whine that McDonald's pay rates impact their ability to hire, because fast food now pays better than they do.
In the United States, I think the larger problem is that expensive college became the default. It also became common for universities to increase the course requirements for graduation, making it more difficult to graduate in 4 years.
At my alma mater, the average time to degree was 4.25 years during my cohort [1]. Fortunately, this graph seems to be moving downward, and is currently at 3.95. However, my guess is that it's still particularly rough for engineering students. During my time, if you transferred into engineering, you were guaranteed to take 5 years. Naturally, the university doesn't have a strong incentive to correct this (more semesters = more $$$). At least until admissions start declining as more people learn about it.
I think many will agree the largest problem with colleges today is the price. I’d like to point out the immense growth in US college administration personnel size over the last few decades versus the growth of the student body and/or tuition:
“The number of non-academic administrative and professional employees at U.S. colleges and universities has more than doubled in the last 25 year”
I already did for my kids, and I didn't have to wait for the New York Times to tell me. College is a scam (specifically the debt-based form of it) and nearly completely unnecessary for most work.
I think the true tragedy is simply trying to identify the passion and or interests of high school aged kids. It's always been true that kids of that age spend way more time trying to fit in or find their social group than anything else. And at the same time, you _can't_ know what you want to do for the rest of your life at that age. Hell, I'm one of the many who only found what they REALLY liked to do the second year of my master's program. (hint: wasn't what my degree was in)
The real joke is that college is some 4 year, very specific journey for a very specific degree, which many have said already, is often largely wasted on 'unecessary' or 'useless' knowledge. I'd love to see much more industry or real hands-on work come to universities, no matter what area of study it is. Liking to study or research in an area is almost always extremely different than actually working in that area.
The problem is instutitions (i.e. colleges and universities) are always slow to change; its the nature of institutions themselves. Not sure if any radical change is actually possible, but rather at best case a slow molding or attempting experiments over time - a similar conclusion to what McWhorter arrives at.
How did BU get ~$30k more expensive, per year, in 11 years? What will it be in 10 more years - $120k per year? This is absurd. It's cheaper to buy your child two Porsche sports cars and attend state school than it is for 4 years at BU
It's cost shifting, folks. Employers have successfully duped the public into thinking that they are responsible for paying their own training costs before even having a job lined up. That's why the discussion is centered around how colleges can best prepare their graduates for the job market. It's all a red herring; typical four-year colleges were never meant to be a job pipeline, their purpose is to refine and transmit human knowledge, whether or not that knowledge has any direct demand in the job market.
What we have now is a few generations of people who bought $40,000 lottery tickets to the middle class, while hiring managers get their pick of applicants with a wide variety of degrees.
Employers are the freeloaders here, it's time we hold them responsible.
Disclosure: i graduated from a trade school, and promptly got a handful of certifications for heavy diesel mechanical maintenance.
The trades have always been there, but i suspect the reason boomers steered their kids to college was twofold. One, they watched tradecraft in the fifties slowly kill their parents before OSHA was really a thing, and second, boomers lost touch with just how predatory colleges became as they went from general educational institutions to undergrad paper-mills grinding graduate students into dust and milking student athelete slave labor for fame and cash.
If youre thinking of the trades, we need you. We need electricians, HVAC, and mechanics. We need welders, nurses, ironworkers, and plumbers. we need linemen, boilermakers, and radiologists. most importantly WE NEED YOU. check around your local city for community colleges and trade techs, and try to stick with the public ones where youll spend a couple of years alongside old-timers and professionals. Read up on the unions in your region and join up where youll be PAID to work alongside skilled journeymen instead of service a lifetime of debt for the privilege of learning basket weaving.
Tradecraft isnt golden gate bridge levels of dangerous anymore. for example my shops had an 11 year run with no lost time accidents. Theres hard, rewarding work waiting for you that respects your intelligence and gives ample changes for advancement, and it pays a living wage.
College is one those transitional experiences, a short retreat after high school, before you are thrown into the "real world". You can let loose, party, be free--and learn some interesting things along the way. It's a luxury experience and you pay a lot for it. But it's hard for me to deny that experience or say with a straight face that you're not missing anything.
I dislike the idea that Collage/University is for preparing people to be in work force: "The question is why we can’t just prepare students for the work force.".
In collage/university you learn how to learn, field does not matter.
For future of society we need people who are not educated to do "the job" - we need more and more people who can think for themselves and shift between jobs.
It is sad observation that many people go there to get "the paper" it is also sad observation that I see people complaining "it is not part of my job description".
Yet again, another person who parlayed his prestigious college education into a good-paying, high status career who now is trying to tell us, no, college is not the way.
Ok man, nice pulling up the ladder.
Even adjusted for student loan debt and inflation the gap between college grads and non-grads is the widest it's ever been. Crisis such as the Great Recession and Covid has seen the gap widen, even as anti-college movement has gained popularity online. That's the funny thing about this, you got these people with degrees who who are saying to not go to college even as the wage premium is the widest it's ever been and keep widening with no end in sight. High inflation only makes college more attractive. Inflation hurts poor people whose wages suck.
Same for Peter Thiel...he is wrong to encourage ppl to drop out of college. You ware more likely to get rich with college, even with a liberal arts major major at a mid-ranked school, than you are to drop out (unless you got rich parents, I guess).
I graduated from a reasonably well ranked liberal arts university and have worked in tech for the past 4 years.
After buying my first property and realizing how much I didn't know about fixing anything in the place, I started to think more heavily about how we've basically designed an education system and society that will forget how to maintain and build itself.
We need to almost a) create a cultural stigma against office workers (yes, seriously) or b) subsidize viable alternatives to college, such as trades, much more than we're currently doing.
I post this because I'm so very tired of this particular conversation about higher education, and I really wonder if we could maybe get back to the original thing we were trying to do with colleges, wherein we promoted our general humanity and allowed people to be better, richer (in the "broth of humanity", as opposed to the dollars) versions of themselves in a better, richer society, and sort of step back from this notion of "that book of poetry you just read isn't going to translate to additional income later, so why'd you do it" that seems to be the only way we engage with any of this lately.
I know, I'm shouting into the void, and there's a bunch of real world stuff and broken things here, but my god, I'm just so, so tired of a conversation that just really feels like people complaining that the canvas on which that work of art was painted costs much, much more than just painting the wall white and doesn't seem to offer any actual practical benefit.
As much complaining there is about college, it's hard to deny that it's very very popular. People really love their schools, so they are providing a service. Maybe what we need to rethink here is just the purpose of college. Seems like a lot of people treat it as a job training program, and would be happy to get rid of every department that isn't in the STEM acronym. The justification usually being that such degrees are unemployable and therefore worthless.
But college is so much more than a job training program, it's a cultural institution at this point. College shapes young people in a way that aligns them culturally. People who go to college have the same sort of formative experiences, and after graduation these are used to relate to others who went through a similar time. It allows young people a time to explore their identities in a safe and understanding environment, to form social bonds, to test their preferences and try different classes, clubs, friends, romantic partners, etc. People call academia a bubble, and I think that it's necessarily so. Maybe think of it more like an incubator.
College is also a melting pot that increases social cohesion. What other institution mixes citizens from all around the country and the world? College forces people from different religions, countries, states, cultures, and ethnic backgrounds to work together on constructive, creative, productive, and important tasks. There are so many voices out there telling us to hate one another and to work against our common man, we can't afford to lose institutions and environments that teach cooperation, unity, and understanding.
It's important that people experience different perspectives, and for all the talk about how academia is a monoculture of ideas, I really must push back on that because there's no other place I can think of with such a diversity of people from all imaginable walks of life. Having exposure to this is crucial to being a citizen of the world.
If we don't want college to be the default, I think we're going to have to seriously consider how to actually replicate the cultural aspect of college in other contexts. Your local trade school might not see enrollment from outside of your county or state. If we decrease enrollments in college and redirect those students just to jobs programs without any other adjustments, I worry we will be destroying something important.
While there are cultural forces at work pushing kids to college, you'll never free yourself from them until companies loosen educational requirements in job listings. And you cannot accomplish this with New York Times think-pieces.
Remember how thought leaders in the technology industry pontificated about how the resume would be obsolete once GitHub repositories and LinkedIn profiles became widespread - which they have - and yet to date the vast majority of technology hiring is done with a resume?
You're going to need a change in corporate cultural. And I should stress: corporate culture is a global affair; you cannot simply change the thinking of the typical American and assume that will immediately be reflected by a multinational corporation. Companies deeply value education, and will continue to do so, even if elite wordsmiths decide it's not that important.
I do not hold a college degree and my family carries no college debt, and when reviewing resumes I put very little weight on education, but I recognize I'm an anomaly in this industry.
What luck, I was just commenting on Reddit this morning on a post criticizing for-profit schools about how I went to trade school and don't regret it.
A little copy-paste here…
I went to essentially a for profit trade-school 15 years ago. On the one hand, it was more expensive than I was lead to believe by the salesman (this was a whole ordeal), and let me tell you it was EXPENSIVE. On the other hand, I genuinely believe I received a very high quality education. All of my teachers had actually worked in the industry for years and knew their fields inside and out. Additionally the class sizes were tiny. Lots of one-on-one time with the teachers.
I actually got a pretty high paying job within 6 months of graduating I held for 5 years before moving to an even better company. The school was massively helpful with placement presumably to improve their numbers.
My only real regret is that I can’t really continue my education without starting over. They went out of businesses and my degree isn’t really recognized by state schools.
[+] [-] neonate|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] QuikAccount|3 years ago|reply
That being said, this is one of those things where people are instead going to want to debate the value of college itself(because they didn't actually read the article).
I'm an American that didn't go to college. And as I've said, college is far less than ideal but here are some reasons why I personally wish I got my degree
1. I have a harder time getting jobs than people with degrees. Not people with CS degrees, people with any degrees. Despite having job experience, I have a rougher time getting interviews and emails back than my friends with degrees. I have worked at the same companies as my peers and they have recruiters beating down their doors while I barely get emails back.
2. If you want to move to another country, a degree will more than likely be part of your visa requirements. Even if it isn't, it would absolutely help in a points based system.
3. I still get imposter syndrome because I can barely solve leetcode questions in interviews and feel like I'm missing something. Would a degree resolve that issue? No idea. But fact or fiction there is a part of me that believes it would've at least given me a bit more confidence in my abilities.
[+] [-] skierguy|3 years ago|reply
Kind of like applying for a job restoring Native American artifacts and being asked tricky questions about artifacts discovered in Egypt 5 years ago. Sure, you might have noticed the story or even read a lot about it 5 years ago, but it's not going to be a part of your daily work. Different procedures, different materials, and different local laws? I guess you should get studying if you want this job! And really, I just wanted to see your problem solving style when I ask irrelevant questions!
But ya, I think it's fair to say that my degree helps me not take that sort of thing as a rejection of my intelligence or qualifications though. I don't feel lesser than. I just feel belittled by someone who doesn't put effort into their interviews, which is useful information if you're considering working with them.
[+] [-] shaftway|3 years ago|reply
1. The way I handled this was to insinuate on the resume that I had a degree. I went to a university for a couple years (before flunking out) and before that I did a couple summer classes at an extension program. Those add up to four years, and I point out that I studied computer science (which is true). If they don't outright ask that's not my problem. And if they do then I explain that something personal came up, and not completing it is one of my biggest regrets in life, but at this point I don't see how a degree would help my career blah blah blah.
This has only actually affected me once, and it's for a role I'm starting this week. The net effect is that my software engineering title can't have "Engineer" in it because I don't have an "Engineering degree".
3. A degree doesn't resolve that. I interview people every week for a role at my MAGMA company, most of whom have degrees, and most of whom act like they have impostor syndrome. Practice it. Do interviews for companies you don't expect to join just for the interview practice in a low-stakes setting. You'll get over it.
[+] [-] kapp_in_life|3 years ago|reply
It likely wouldn't. What would help you with solving leetcode questions is just grinding leetcode questions. Taking an algorithm class years ago wouldn't help beyond your first attempt at the problems.
That said for all the other reasons you listed, getting a college degree is usually a good idea.
[+] [-] frankbreetz|3 years ago|reply
And everyone gets imposter syndrome, so I doubt college would help with that.
[+] [-] sircastor|3 years ago|reply
For me, I've found that my course-related knowledge provides a little more context than before, but ultimately I'm not really better at solving leet-code style questions. It hasn't resolved any imposter syndrome. I haven't noticed any difference in recruiting efforts.
I am very happy I completed my degree, it was an important goal for me. I think college is important because it results in more well-rounded individuals, with broader perspectives.
I don't think college should be viewed as a means for job-training. We are not our jobs, and I really think we need to find a way to stop treating people like their role in society is exclusively to work for 50 years and then go away.
[+] [-] systemvoltage|3 years ago|reply
This is excellent and taking lessons from the Swiss apprenticeship programs. Typically working with local companies to provide training, in return they get excellent labor, and the labor pool is far better off without any student loans or burden of spending 5 years in college.
[+] [-] giraffe_lady|3 years ago|reply
Not that there aren't other paths, or non-degree-gatekept jobs with those things. But they are harder and fewer and becoming increasingly so.
Programming is one of the few prestigious, highly paid jobs left that doesn't have a pretty hard req on having a degree to get into. That's why I do it. But yes I've also run into all the things you mention.
[+] [-] antattack|3 years ago|reply
Anyway, in large measure, we are only talking how college is not for everyone because it's so expensive. It's fine to have alternatives but education needs to be more accessible to those that want it.
[+] [-] robbyking|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] feqbbui3|3 years ago|reply
In our company (and my previous too BTW) I was strongly advocating working on real problems during the interview. I find it really troubling that the industry still sticks to this outdated way of interviewing (I refer to Leetcode) instead of: A. Having accreditation which would require renewal after X years B. Having other types of competency checks
I really don't understand how Leetcode is superior to let's say Coderpad or Codeinterview.io (I am not affiliated with either of them).
These tools actually pretty much allow you to set up a relevant coding exercise in the candidate's preferred language and framework, and it only takes a few minutes to customize their templates to the candidate's experience and the interviewer's imagined coding problem.
Just yesterday I set up a React coding problem in just below an hour, which allowed me to ask relevant questions about: language syntax, state management, routing, code organization, system performance, error handling, and data organization among others.
Isn't that the end goal here? To ask relevant questions from the candidate so that we make sure his skills match the imagined role and/or project?
Based on all this above, if I would be back to interviewing now, I would generally take it as a signal of a broken organization, lack of clarity about the role/project in the company, if they would shove a Leetcode/Codility/Hackerrank coding problem first in my face without asking.
[+] [-] druddha|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshstrange|3 years ago|reply
I'm not discrediting your experience but I've never had any issues on this front. I went to college for ~3 years before dropping out because I didn't see the point in continuing and I've never had any issues getting a job in tech. I've also far outpaced my peers (geographically and friends) when it comes to salary so I'm struggling to figure out what the difference is. Potentially we are going after different jobs or want different jobs. On the recruiter-front, I have recruiters in my inbox 24/7 pestering me. I don't see recruiters reaching out as a measure of how good of a developer someone is (also almost every external recruiter is trash), it just means you got put on a mailing list at some point. I believe you when you say your friends with similar/same experience get asked back more than you do but I'm hesitant to automatically assume it's because of college (due to my lived experience). I have only interviewed at 1 place that I can remember that I actually was interested in getting a job at which ended in them saying they weren't interested (though I've only worked at 4 companies over 11+ years and interviewed about 6-8 times total, the other offers weren't ones I was interested in taking).
For #2 yes, I could see that being an issue but it's not something I'm looking to do so I don't really care
For #3, everyone feels this and college doesn't change it. Interviews are notoriously terrible on the whole and serve as an ego boost to the interviewer more often than they actually tell you if someone would be a good developer.
[+] [-] Swizec|3 years ago|reply
> 1. /../ they have recruiters beating down their doors while I barely get emails back.
I have recruiters beating down my doors. Because of job experience. Unless they assume I finished college just because linkedin says I went for N years.
> 2. If you want to move to another country, a degree will more than likely be part of your visa requirements. Even if it isn't, it would absolutely help in a points based system.
I was able to get multiple O-1 (special ability) visas in USA without a college degree.
> 3. I still get imposter syndrome
Me too. But if you were hired then the company thinks you can do the thing. Just do the thing.
edit: It is very likely the things that enabled me to do #2 also unlock #1. To this I can't offer much more than "Do interesting things and make sure people know about them"
[+] [-] paulpauper|3 years ago|reply
These exist, but the problem is the jobs are not the good and neither is the pay. You need a lot of certification and training, which is time consuming and costs money.
Many low-skilled young and middle-aged men are more content with an easy retail job or just living with parents or with friends or with girlfriend than going down the apprentice route. It's sad that America is going down this route, but I don't see any way out of it.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] quickthrower2|3 years ago|reply
Natural aptitude to a certain extent is required, but if you are coding you probably have it. Then it is practice: there is nothing easier than a question you already answered in practice and you recognise the shape.
[+] [-] u2077|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rozularen|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vmception|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daniel-cussen|3 years ago|reply
So for the purposes of points 1 and 2, college degrees are bullshit harmful things. So having a harder time getting jobs and visas are identical. Yes, you get little brownie points for a college degree, but you used to get the exact same little brownie points for a high school degree. What happened? It's a filter, nobody gives a shit about what degree you have in an ultimate sense, plenty of places see college-degree only as insufficient, guys saying what you just said but about a master's, or a PhD, or a post-doc.
What this is is a rat race. They want you to be a rat, and race. To do so, they say they'll only take the rats with under a certain time. But if many rats make that time, the time is reduced. Then as the rats really race more and more the times they individually have to make to make the cut keep falling and falling. Also, keep in mind you get paid for working but nothing for studying, in fact you pay for studying, or parents pay (same thing, the benevolence that is for you is spent). So the rats racing means the guys setting up the rat race--the rats who won in the past, often--get more work all the time from the racing rats in exchange for less and less cheese of their own. So by demanding college degrees and being shitty to people who don't have them--all the things you describe are vulgar fuck-yous from employers for not having raced hard enough as a rat. What do you get for racing harder? Well if you do well enough, you get a "chapita". A chapita means badge, like you get badges in bags of fried crisps sometimes if you're very lucky because only a third contain them. These badges are very powerful, superhero badges that give you magical powers of invisibility and flying through the air, but superpowers. Real superpowers, or they better be, because these chapitas are morally equivalent to college degrees, and those
They both say you're special, now it's true the college degree is letter-sized, so they take up more area, and they have more letters in them, everyone but me says they're prettier than the chapita, but I say WAIT, that chapita is printed in color, good drawing of real art, it's got a metal back, it's got plastic on the front so it doesn't look shitty if it gets wet, and you can attach it to your clothes! You can go around with that chapita everywhere you go. And as for the powers, they both have the same superpower granting ability because they both SAY you have that power! And in fact the chapita superpower, invisibility or flying through the air, is a much better power than the college degree, which is that you've got a major, and IMPLIES you have more powers.
Now it's true that perhaps you STOLE your chapita from its true owner! You didn't buy the bag of fried crisps yourself and open it with your own hands, and eat the crisps one by one without any falling to the floor, slowly eating them and enjoying them, until finding the chapita in a moment of beautiful merit! You STOLE the chapita from its true owner, you stole those powers, you do not deserve it, you are stealing someone else's invisibility! Or you bought it, that's just wrong, you're supposed to buy the fried crisps and have GOOD LUCK OF YOUR OWN.
But the college degree is no different because tons of people cheat their asses off, leading to learning literally nothing[1]. And some people just buy college degrees outright, like pay $400 and they email it to you, or OK they fedex it but you pay for the fedex, if you're stupid and pay $400. If you're smart you can ask the fried crisp company what software they use (and pirate it obviously) and design your own letter-sized college degree. Or fuck it, just write COLLEGE DEGREE [YOUR NAME] on a page in a notebook, real big, look at it, be proud of yourself. Now let's turn the page to the real work.
Leetcode? Leetcode sucks. Not leet. So it has a few different functions, so first it's a way to get workers to work for nothing to "apply" to a job where they can earn money. That's good! Gets the boss much better terms ie. more submissive workers more afraid of getting fired because then they have to waste more money to get another job, or "reeducate" to get another chapita wasting more resources, becoming poorer and more indebted and more desperate, good things all around. That's the first part, worker impoverishment.[3] Then, to make you feel stupid. You say, "I can't solve this shit"--it's true you can't, it's very elitist in that regard, I've never met anybody who can solve this kind of problem from nothing. Well there's some math wizzes, like Math Olympiad guys, there's some, but they are gluing together clever things a lot of the time. So what people do is they look it up. Then, to brag by getting lots of internet points, notice leetcode is a point system? You add up the points? Try to get a lot of points on a high score? You can't just solve one problem to get a good leetcode score, you have to solve lots. And there's usually a story in the media at some point about the top leetcoder getting hired due to his leetcode score, like with Github or Kaggle.
Then you have to "grind leetcode" for interviews. Well you do, I don't, but you do. You have to know all the tricks, and sometimes be able to come up with something clever in the moment. And so then they tell you it's meritocratic, FAANG just cares about these tests. Well what this does is produce lots and lots of rejects. This is good, rejects generally maintain a highly positive impression of the places that rejected them, blaming themselves for their failure (you get little brownie points for self-blame like talking about getting fired in suck-uppy terms), and these companies don't have to pay absolutely anything to the rejects. In fact, they tell the rejects to apply again in a few years. Plus--well they're stupid for buying into their own bullshit like this they ought to remember their lies--but the companies then say, oh, we're the absolute best, we're the select few, you're in the club, we're special. Well to be fair these filters do get you clever people in general, in most ways. But on the other hand no true dropouts. So Tesla wouldn't hire Tesla.[2]
So for the same three reasons you gave for being unhappy, contrariwise, be happy, be very happy. I believe people act collectively, if you make a choice others will make the same choice with you, if you had made all those painful sacrifices to get a degree, which toward the end are about proving you submissively do stupid assignments against your own interests, well more people would have done that with you and you would not have gotten ahead. Employers would have asked for more chapitas, visas would have asked for more chapitas, leetcode would be a little easier but you'd also be worse at it, and you'd write the same comment with Master's in place of Bachelor's, you'd actually make lower wages, and you would have done harm to the other rats. You would feel worse about yourself, especially because you would have wasted all that money on tution.
[1] You learn literally nothing. Yeah you remember some words and google and you're good at cheating now and plagiarizing, OK cheating is great for learning to cheat I'll admit that, and at elite colleges the cat-and-mouse game of cheating is hardcore and a great preparation for professional cheating ie finance, consulting and medicine. It's also good prep for catching cheaters, which is important in becoming a teacher that needs to prevent cheating, so cheating in the School of Education makes sense. You could have a cheating class if you wanted. In one class I was the only one who could actually do the work (I actually design and implement algorithms), and I flunked. I learned a lot in that class though, not cheating is the real way of cheating. You fucking learn. I didn't cheat, I saw the assignment they wanted in a document way in the back of one of the class books but I just wasn't going to copy it and hand it in, wasn't going to get a TA to just give me the answers either in "office hours", just wasn't going to cheat because it's not just about the school's rules, it's about my rules too. So basically everyone who passed cheated, and this class was a requirement for the most prestigious major in the world.
[2] I will say I have a remarkably favorable impression of Elon Musk, partly because I view people I do good things for more favorably, like victims I've protected from crime, or in this case, because I acted to protect his capital in a company he funded, where I got a great job by going around their filter and showing up and working my ass off until they took me in long-term. The wage was so high and conditions were so good. So back to protecting his capital, I didn't know it was him funding the company. But, Tesla wouldn't hire Tesla, not through the normal pipeline at any rate. His companies are huge and they care about chapitas.
[3] Every piece of bitchwork (meaning "homework" you do it for free to impress the potential employer, who is assigning it, in order to get hired) reduces your salary by 3%. Always charge for time, not completion, or apply to other places instead with the time you would spend on it.
[+] [-] rosndo|3 years ago|reply
Probably an unpopular take, but you could lie, essentially 0 risk (especially if you’re even a little clever about it).
[+] [-] whakim|3 years ago|reply
That being said, I do question whether the not-inconsiderable amount of money we're spending on tertiary education is actually well-spent. For one, it's incredibly unequal - rich public and private universities (which disproportionately cater to the children of the wealthy) soak up far more than their fair share of funding. Universities also spend huge amounts of money on non-academic items - fancy buildings, gyms, sports teams, huge administrative staffs, etc. This spending is partially facilitated by the insanity that is student debt.
I don't think educating fewer people is a good long-term strategy, but I think if we want to educate more people we need to take a long hard look at how tertiary education works in the US.
Edit: for those looking for a citation for attributing the U.S. dominance in the 20th century to education, see Piketty, Capital and Ideology, 517-522. Note that by the dawn of the 20th century German GDP per capita per-job was 60-70% of that of the US; that figure was 80-90% in the UK. I'm not saying two world wars didn't contribute, but the US was already ahead before they began.
[+] [-] tmp_anon_22|3 years ago|reply
This glosses over two World Wars and a massive haul of natural resources and confiscated land.
[+] [-] randomdata|3 years ago|reply
The data from the time shows little difference between Canada and the USA in high school attendance. Canada might have even had a slight edge. And now Canada is considered most educated nation on earth, according to the OECD, approaching 70% of the population having a tertiary education, compared to just 40% stateside.
If high school was the significant factor, why has Canada never really become all that significant of a power? Several European powers are more powerful than Canada despite their supposed lack of education. It is questionable if Canada would even be strong as it is if it weren't America's neighbour.
> I think if we want to educate more people we need to take a long hard look at how tertiary education works in the US.
I guess the first question is: What is Canada getting out of it? Certainly the top promise the tertiary education system likes to trumpet – higher incomes – hasn't materialized. Canadians make far less money than their American counterparts in almost all cases, not to mention that incomes have been stagnant as far back as the data goes.
[+] [-] twobitshifter|3 years ago|reply
I don’t think the university made me much wiser than I would had been at a less expensive public school. And I think I could have learned many things on my own based on my abilities at the time.
However, having a degree from an elite university is an effective signal that you made it through the filter of their college admissions process. This is what companies like to see.
Since those admissions were based on SAT and other metrics, the students they select are among the brightest and regardless of the quality of education, they will do well in the world. This reinforces the value of attending an elite university and feeds more competition for the spots. This is similar to a shoe company sponsoring an athlete. The custom shoe might be better than what the athlete had before and maybe they even provide training from world class coaches, but they’re not just sponsoring anyone. You’re not getting that shoe without already proving something.
My earnings have benefitted from the school network and at the price charged the network is probably still a net benefit for me, without accounting for the financial aid.
So overall, it’s a game, but worth playing. There’s likely a better system we could devise to signal intelligence and ability that didn’t rely on diplomas from 4 year schools. However, the network effects of colleges cannot be replaced in the same manner. For that we have to consider whether these effects are disadvantaging others and worth perpetuating.
[+] [-] Zigurd|3 years ago|reply
China, for example, is limited by quality education being concentrated in first-tier cities and substandard education being widespread in the countryside: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-05-03/poorly-ed...
That's not how most people think of China.
The questioning of the value of university education also coincides with an ageing cohort of men with university educations they got when men dominated university attendance being replaced by women who now dominate university graduating classes. Hmmm.
[+] [-] oneoff786|3 years ago|reply
Not, say, two world wars in Europe?
[+] [-] la6472|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] usrn|3 years ago|reply
This isn't a call to educate fewer people. It's to educate more efficiently which, when done right, will reach more people.
[+] [-] pgcj_poster|3 years ago|reply
For smart kids, High School is basically just a grade-grubbing competition to determine who gets to go to the best college. This mostly gets in the way of actual learning. I think bright students would learn much more if, after 9th grade, they went directly to university, with admission determined by lottery.
For all other students, High School is basically just prison. They already know how to read, write, and do arithmetic. They know that the earth goes around the sun and that America invented freedom and fought in half a dozen wars. They know everything that they're ever going to remember learning in school or that they'll use afterward. But, for some reason, they're forced to spend years doing stoichiometry and reading old books that they're never going to appreciate. A liberal arts education is valuable, even if it's not directly applicable to daily life, because it can elevate the spirit. But can you elevate the spirit by force? I think not.
[+] [-] heavyset_go|3 years ago|reply
If you're middle class or lower, your kids will be relegated to even shittier jobs without degrees than the shitty jobs they can get with degrees.
Degrees in the US act as a class filter for employers, who are irrationally averse to hiring what they consider to be the riff raff, and degree-holders at the HR and hiring level use them to gatekeep, as well. Degrees are not about aptitude, proficiency, intelligence or tackling adversity, they're about keeping "those people" out, and signaling that you aren't one of them.
If your kids can't afford healthcare even with your help, a degree is still a good idea for them, even if the entirety of their estate gets clawed back by creditors to pay back student loans when they die. Being able to see a doctor and incurring debt is better than being denied preventative care for lack of insurance or inability to pay.
Trades often don't pay well, either, as an employee. I've heard for years about how welders can make six figures. Around here, employers expect to hire welders at $17 an hour, and whine that McDonald's pay rates impact their ability to hire, because fast food now pays better than they do.
[+] [-] austinl|3 years ago|reply
At my alma mater, the average time to degree was 4.25 years during my cohort [1]. Fortunately, this graph seems to be moving downward, and is currently at 3.95. However, my guess is that it's still particularly rough for engineering students. During my time, if you transferred into engineering, you were guaranteed to take 5 years. Naturally, the university doesn't have a strong incentive to correct this (more semesters = more $$$). At least until admissions start declining as more people learn about it.
[1] https://www.purdue.edu/datadigest/?dashboard=Degrees_TTD_1
[+] [-] MaxLeiter|3 years ago|reply
“The number of non-academic administrative and professional employees at U.S. colleges and universities has more than doubled in the last 25 year”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/higher-ed-administrators-grow...
[+] [-] nathanaldensr|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fullstackchris|3 years ago|reply
The real joke is that college is some 4 year, very specific journey for a very specific degree, which many have said already, is often largely wasted on 'unecessary' or 'useless' knowledge. I'd love to see much more industry or real hands-on work come to universities, no matter what area of study it is. Liking to study or research in an area is almost always extremely different than actually working in that area.
The problem is instutitions (i.e. colleges and universities) are always slow to change; its the nature of institutions themselves. Not sure if any radical change is actually possible, but rather at best case a slow molding or attempting experiments over time - a similar conclusion to what McWhorter arrives at.
[+] [-] seibelj|3 years ago|reply
Boston University - $79,760 for the 2022 year https://www.bu.edu/admissions/tuition-aid/tuition/
How did BU get ~$30k more expensive, per year, in 11 years? What will it be in 10 more years - $120k per year? This is absurd. It's cheaper to buy your child two Porsche sports cars and attend state school than it is for 4 years at BU
[+] [-] SantalBlush|3 years ago|reply
What we have now is a few generations of people who bought $40,000 lottery tickets to the middle class, while hiring managers get their pick of applicants with a wide variety of degrees.
Employers are the freeloaders here, it's time we hold them responsible.
[+] [-] nimbius|3 years ago|reply
The trades have always been there, but i suspect the reason boomers steered their kids to college was twofold. One, they watched tradecraft in the fifties slowly kill their parents before OSHA was really a thing, and second, boomers lost touch with just how predatory colleges became as they went from general educational institutions to undergrad paper-mills grinding graduate students into dust and milking student athelete slave labor for fame and cash.
If youre thinking of the trades, we need you. We need electricians, HVAC, and mechanics. We need welders, nurses, ironworkers, and plumbers. we need linemen, boilermakers, and radiologists. most importantly WE NEED YOU. check around your local city for community colleges and trade techs, and try to stick with the public ones where youll spend a couple of years alongside old-timers and professionals. Read up on the unions in your region and join up where youll be PAID to work alongside skilled journeymen instead of service a lifetime of debt for the privilege of learning basket weaving.
Tradecraft isnt golden gate bridge levels of dangerous anymore. for example my shops had an 11 year run with no lost time accidents. Theres hard, rewarding work waiting for you that respects your intelligence and gives ample changes for advancement, and it pays a living wage.
[+] [-] ahallock|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ozim|3 years ago|reply
In collage/university you learn how to learn, field does not matter.
For future of society we need people who are not educated to do "the job" - we need more and more people who can think for themselves and shift between jobs.
It is sad observation that many people go there to get "the paper" it is also sad observation that I see people complaining "it is not part of my job description".
I like the Isaac Asimov novella "Profession".
[+] [-] paulpauper|3 years ago|reply
Ok man, nice pulling up the ladder.
Even adjusted for student loan debt and inflation the gap between college grads and non-grads is the widest it's ever been. Crisis such as the Great Recession and Covid has seen the gap widen, even as anti-college movement has gained popularity online. That's the funny thing about this, you got these people with degrees who who are saying to not go to college even as the wage premium is the widest it's ever been and keep widening with no end in sight. High inflation only makes college more attractive. Inflation hurts poor people whose wages suck.
Same for Peter Thiel...he is wrong to encourage ppl to drop out of college. You ware more likely to get rich with college, even with a liberal arts major major at a mid-ranked school, than you are to drop out (unless you got rich parents, I guess).
[+] [-] gr1zzlybe4r|3 years ago|reply
After buying my first property and realizing how much I didn't know about fixing anything in the place, I started to think more heavily about how we've basically designed an education system and society that will forget how to maintain and build itself.
We need to almost a) create a cultural stigma against office workers (yes, seriously) or b) subsidize viable alternatives to college, such as trades, much more than we're currently doing.
[+] [-] duxup|3 years ago|reply
>arbitrary, purposeless and even absurd
But as someone who didn’t finish college, I got the distinct feeling EMPLOYERS do not consider it arbitrary or pointless….
It wasn’t until I was much older did I feel people overlooked my lack of formal education. Even then I’m not sure how often they really do.
Who wants to tell people that they should be the trail blazers here and this be at a disadvantage?
Meanwhile I don’t disagree with the premise, but I also see nothing to indicate that outcomes are better with whatever the idea is here.
[+] [-] roughly|3 years ago|reply
I post this because I'm so very tired of this particular conversation about higher education, and I really wonder if we could maybe get back to the original thing we were trying to do with colleges, wherein we promoted our general humanity and allowed people to be better, richer (in the "broth of humanity", as opposed to the dollars) versions of themselves in a better, richer society, and sort of step back from this notion of "that book of poetry you just read isn't going to translate to additional income later, so why'd you do it" that seems to be the only way we engage with any of this lately.
I know, I'm shouting into the void, and there's a bunch of real world stuff and broken things here, but my god, I'm just so, so tired of a conversation that just really feels like people complaining that the canvas on which that work of art was painted costs much, much more than just painting the wall white and doesn't seem to offer any actual practical benefit.
[+] [-] ModernMech|3 years ago|reply
But college is so much more than a job training program, it's a cultural institution at this point. College shapes young people in a way that aligns them culturally. People who go to college have the same sort of formative experiences, and after graduation these are used to relate to others who went through a similar time. It allows young people a time to explore their identities in a safe and understanding environment, to form social bonds, to test their preferences and try different classes, clubs, friends, romantic partners, etc. People call academia a bubble, and I think that it's necessarily so. Maybe think of it more like an incubator.
College is also a melting pot that increases social cohesion. What other institution mixes citizens from all around the country and the world? College forces people from different religions, countries, states, cultures, and ethnic backgrounds to work together on constructive, creative, productive, and important tasks. There are so many voices out there telling us to hate one another and to work against our common man, we can't afford to lose institutions and environments that teach cooperation, unity, and understanding.
It's important that people experience different perspectives, and for all the talk about how academia is a monoculture of ideas, I really must push back on that because there's no other place I can think of with such a diversity of people from all imaginable walks of life. Having exposure to this is crucial to being a citizen of the world.
If we don't want college to be the default, I think we're going to have to seriously consider how to actually replicate the cultural aspect of college in other contexts. Your local trade school might not see enrollment from outside of your county or state. If we decrease enrollments in college and redirect those students just to jobs programs without any other adjustments, I worry we will be destroying something important.
[+] [-] spamizbad|3 years ago|reply
Remember how thought leaders in the technology industry pontificated about how the resume would be obsolete once GitHub repositories and LinkedIn profiles became widespread - which they have - and yet to date the vast majority of technology hiring is done with a resume?
You're going to need a change in corporate cultural. And I should stress: corporate culture is a global affair; you cannot simply change the thinking of the typical American and assume that will immediately be reflected by a multinational corporation. Companies deeply value education, and will continue to do so, even if elite wordsmiths decide it's not that important.
I do not hold a college degree and my family carries no college debt, and when reviewing resumes I put very little weight on education, but I recognize I'm an anomaly in this industry.
[+] [-] donatj|3 years ago|reply
A little copy-paste here…
I went to essentially a for profit trade-school 15 years ago. On the one hand, it was more expensive than I was lead to believe by the salesman (this was a whole ordeal), and let me tell you it was EXPENSIVE. On the other hand, I genuinely believe I received a very high quality education. All of my teachers had actually worked in the industry for years and knew their fields inside and out. Additionally the class sizes were tiny. Lots of one-on-one time with the teachers.
I actually got a pretty high paying job within 6 months of graduating I held for 5 years before moving to an even better company. The school was massively helpful with placement presumably to improve their numbers.
My only real regret is that I can’t really continue my education without starting over. They went out of businesses and my degree isn’t really recognized by state schools.