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."
The education in the form of literacy is not incidental, it is most the entire point. Imagine how US Capitalism would function with a 10% literacy rate?
Without Public education or something similar to replace it is unlikely that we would have the high levels of literacy to which we are accustomed. Public Education successfully teaches most of the population to read and write English (including the children of immigrants whose parents may not speak English). This is a historically impressive feat.
1000 years ago the world literacy rate was less than 1%, 100 years ago the world literacy rate was less than 10%. Now it is roughly 80%!
It is clear Public Education could do much better, but lets not confuse failing to do better with failing to do anything or its most important job.
The literacy rate cannot function as a measure of the success of public education in the US. Rather, it is a measure of how useless the US public education system is, because it accomplishes little more than maintaining a basic level of literacy for the majority of the US population.
"it is generally accepted that literacy rates in the United States were quite high before compulsory schooling was mandated starting in the 1840's."[1] See the extensive citations at the link.
>"it is generally accepted that literacy rates in the United States were quite high before compulsory schooling was mandated starting in the 1840's."
This is why I wrote "Public Education or something like it". We need education systems for literacy, however it does not to be compulsory or public if nearly everyone uses it and can afford it. It seems unlikely that these two conditions (affordable and widely used) would be met in our present society without public funding of education.
Note that in that article you link to they say that Southern Whites in the 1860s had a "56.4%" literacy rate.
But even then we are falling... My great grandmother taught school back in the 1940's-1970's, and I recall reading through one of the 5th grade English subject books from around 1950, and it was significantly more advanced than what I was seeing in an English class for high school seniors (short of AP).
So, effectively even at the subject you mention, literacy (english language communications), we are teaching less with 5 more years than we taught just over half a century ago (assuming that it hasn't improved since I left HS about 24 years ago).
I love technology... I love history.. and a lot of things.. that said, I think we're letting the core that is pure communication (reading, writing, and effectively communicating) is falling behind at the expense of being able to follow [INSERT_CELEBRITY] on [NEW_SOCIAL_MEDIA_PLATFORM].
The textbook was more advanced, but how was well was the information retained? Perhaps most fifth graders are retaining information better now with books more suited to them?
If it was replicated/repeated for the next several years, I'd imagine the retention was relatively good. Likely as good or better for most people than today.
Far fewer people in the past graduated Highschool as well. For instance only 50% of students graduated Highschool in the 1950s. As of 2008 the Highschool graduation rate is 80%.
> 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.
And it doesn't even do a good job at that either! Most public school start (830am) after parents leave for work and finish (3pm) well before parent's get off work to pick them or be home. Sure there are after school programs to cover it a bit but overall it's a pretty crappy schedule for a publicly funded babysitter.
It would be more honest if this mission were made explicit--to serve as a holding place for children without daytime caretakers. Then, one of its primary objectives would be to pragmatically assess which children were capable of self-care, or even full independence, before the arbitrarily designated age of graduation.
I'm consistently amazed by friends/family who put their kids to bed well before 9pm (even as early as 7:30-8pm). I don't think I've been able to get to sleep before 2am or so regularly since I was very young... Even if I force myself up at 7-8am, I'm still up until 2-3am most days.
On either saturday and/or sunday I'll let myself sleep until I wake up (usually 12noon-2pm). I'm fortunate enough that my first morning meeting is 9:30, and it takes about half an hour commute. My alarm starts at 7:15, and I usually snooze until around 8... it takes me nearly an hour to get going once up, and even then, I'm usually walking in the door just as standup is starting.
I'm amazed by the early-start types, as I've tried... It only made me really tired and funny for a few days, then increasingly grumpy. At 19, I worked two jobs, first at 4:30am, and second ending around midnight... I was a really grumpy young man by the end of that month (quit one of the jobs, just couldn't keep up with both).
Then I managed to find a job doing creatives/design, and fell into programming from that. All the same, in a lot of places "office hours" have been the biggest contention in the workplace for me. I get things done, I have high quality output, and significantly so.
Have you ever gone camping for an extended time (week or two)? Real camping, where you don't have access to any screens, and filled with daytime activities (such as fishing or hiking)? If so do you still end up wanting to stay up till past midnight, and sleep till noon?
I've found that if there are no major artificial light sources, and if I've been outdoors active all day, I tend to want to fall asleep soon as its dark. And I wake up way earlier, soon as the daylight starts to hit the tent.
Importantly, the same research that indicates that kids would do better starting later also indicates that they (teenagers, at least, who were also the indicated population in the study about later start benefits) will generally have trouble getting to sleep much before midnight, regardless of when you 'send' them to sleep.
I still am not one of the accursed 'morning people'.
Maybe it's natural for /you/ to get up that early, but it never was for me (the closest I came was waking up super early for reruns of Mr. Wizard, then falling back asleep).
More constructively phrased: make them run around outside a bunch during the day, and don't let them use devices with screens after dark.
Works for adults, too (especially if you also reduce use of artificial lighting) though it can be a struggle to fit that into modern life—especially in the Winter, since kids don't do much running around at school these days and it's dark shortly after they get home.
As a parent, I can state that getting lots of exercise is very useful in persuading kids to go to sleep at a reasonable hour. It's not bad for the parents, either.
>>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.
You are absolutely correct.
The point of public school in the US has always been to 'educate' in the broader cultural sense, not in the narrow sense of learning a subject (or range of subjects) or learning how to do a particular job. From its earliest forms in the US in the early 19th century until it was widely institutionalized by the late 19th century, it was always explicitly promoted as a method of integrating into 'productive' society all the religious outsiders, immigrants, lower classes, Indians, Blacks--everyone who was not a middle-class, white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant.
This is still an explicit objective of public school, except that now it also has a normative function for the middle class--in other words, it has become the de facto normal condition of the middle class to have had a public school experience. That is why the defenders of public schools nowadays go further and claim that without having had a public school experience, a child literally has no place in adult society and is incapable of functioning normally. This is the single most common public objection to homeschooling, even more than fears of child abuse, child neglect, or educational neglect.
> That is why the defenders of public schools nowadays go further and claim that without having had a public school experience, a child literally has no place in adult society and is incapable of functioning normally.
Strawman alert.
I don't think any of the homeschool criticism revolves around this extreme argument. It's more along the lines of - in school, you have to socialize with someone other than your family, at homeschool this is neither required nor expected.
Nor are there any standards or tests in terms of socialization. Thus the stigma.
There's also the issue that if a homeschooler is trained with a large body of questionable content contradicting public understanding, these children could be reared to have their own set of "facts". Clearly this is disturbing to those who agree on other facts.
>> That is why the defenders of public schools nowadays go further and claim that without having had a public school experience, a child literally has no place in adult society and is incapable of functioning normally.
>Strawman alert. I don't think any of the homeschool criticism revolves around this extreme argument. It's more along the lines of - in school, you have to socialize with someone other than your family, at homeschool this is neither required nor expected.
You make the exact criticism that you say isn't being made.
The public school system fails in socialization in many ways, and bullying, substance abuse and school shootings are symptoms of that failure.
This is not a 'strawman', this is the actual content of every substantive criticism I received in 12 years of homeschooling my child. Because we followed a structured curriculum and she excelled in verbal ability, they had no other basis for criticism.
Also, at the time we were homeschooling, there was literally no relevant research in the ERIC database by anti-homeschoolers--it consisted entirely of polemics about socialization.
Starting in the 18th century, public education in America was an aspect of New England communities. The stated purpose was to spread literacy for understanding of scripture and for commerce. By the 19th century, it was widely understood throughout the U.S. that literacy improved the regional economy and provided opportunity for one's children. Public education became an expected government service, and many localities' education spending dominated their budgets.
At the time, education was a drain on agricultural families, so the child care aspect wasn't a benefit. City dwellers may not have employed their children, but child care wasn't especially beneficial since household labor without running water was substantial.
The modern phenomenon of public education as childcare is only made possible by widespread employment of women with children. The issue is best discussed from this standpoint, not a false idea of what public education was originally intended to accomplish.
This highlights why compulsory public schooling was so long in being established. It follows the trajectory of the US transitioning from an agricultural economy to an industrial economy, and children were actually expected to participate in both but even more so in the agricultural economy. Only in the 20th century were people expected to not work at a 'real' job until the age of 22.
>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.
No one you know is a teacher? I can't speak for the US, but many of my friends went into teaching here in the UK. There is plenty wrong with education but the people I know who went into it definitely want to teach and want to teach well. This kind of blanket statement is quite disrespectful to them.
I don't see it as an indictment of the teachers, but the institution itself. I know many inspired teachers whose work ethic and selflessness can put us all to shame. There are also some pretty bad teachers. But neither point illustrates that the public education system (in the US at least) is engineered for many other concerns before considering how best to educate its students.
You can see it in this paraphrased anecdote from a middle school science teacher: The principal asks me to do a lot of things. Sometimes, he asks very sternly. However, as a teacher, there is only one thing I am legally required to do for these children every day: take attendance.
I don't think that quote means much of anything other than it's very difficult to legislate efficacy.
Suppose you had the absolute dream of a public education system -- one that existed solely to provide a real education for the children. What would the actual laws around that system look like? Is it a misdemeanor to make a D on a math test?
It also ignores that there are a wide range of well-meaning (but probably counterproductive) things we require of teachers that are for all intents and purposes legal requirements. If your kids perform too poorly on a test, your school may lose funding, for example. Again, I think that crosses the line beyond which such mandates make sense, but it's pretty clearly intended to improve the legitimate education your kids get. If it were about babysitting, they wouldn't bother.
In a vacuum, you're right, and it would be difficult to convey all the context that might sway you such that this anecdote is indicative of the structural problems in the education system. But this is just one of millions of anecdotes on how the system as a whole is largely concerned with anything but education.
The accounting machinery is needed to get money to all the schools sure, but when that accounting machinery becomes the focus of 40% of admins... You're not running an education system. You're moving money around that happens to educate...sometimes.
Whether teachers have noble motivations is completely irrelevant to whether the institutions perform their function well. All it means is that the teachers are working for institutions that take advantage of them.
You can have inspired worthy people working in the midst of a crappy institution infested with bureaucrats and sports programs that suck up most of the money that could have been used to pay teachers.
I think the education system in the US is vastly different from the UK. In the US, the teachers are massively limited in their freedom to choose how and what to teach their kids. Mostly because the No Child Left Behind Act(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Child_Left_Behind_Act), which requires teachers to teach for tests and nothing else. And this IS coming from someone who knows a teacher in the US. My uncle was an art teacher for several years, and ended up leaving because of the politics and lack of care given to students.
I'm not saying that any particular system is good or bad (and for what it's worth there are similar complaints about teaching in the UK with regards to teaching to tests).
But looking at that summary it's pretty clearly intended to improve schools. It might (or might not) be the wrong way to do it - but it's certainly about trying to give children a good education.
I understand that's the intent, but what happens is that schools lose money if too many of its students do poorly, which leads to a lowering of standards and a teaching towards tests alone to shovel as many students through the system as possible. The students can make an educated guess at a multichoice question, but lack any real understanding of the topic being taught.
>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.
> 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.
I would argue strongly that university DOES NOT teach anyone how the world works. Wet behind the ear college grads are worthless in most "blue collar" professions, for example. If you get a degree in English Lit, what do you know about the "real world" that a peer who has worked construction for 5 years doesn't know???? How much more knowledge about the "real world" does a journalism major know than a military veteran?
The first two years of "learning" at American universities are generally filled with bullshit pre-requisites that serve almost no purpose in the "real world!" The last two years are more specialized but hardly teach shit about the "real world."
Wet behind the ear grads are useless in white collar organizations too. College doesn't teach you about your job, it teaches you about the wider world. Being a military vet is an admirable use of your time, but the picture it paints of the world is very different than that of a university education. Likewise, I wouldn't want to debate a construction worker about the proper building code for a multi-occupancy building, but I'm willing to bet one semester of finance would far outweigh the knowledge that construction worker has about why the building is being built like it is.
You make good points about getting a broader picture, but the notion that the military or blue collar jobs are the "real world" is false, IMO. That's one aspect of the real world, it is far from a broader picture of it. University is supposed to present the other side, a far deeper picture of the other side.
And for the record... what I'm talking about is the pre-reqs. I'm specifically saying those pre-reqs are not bullshit and are the most important part of a university education. I just want to be clear on that. Job training is better left to an internship/apprenticeship.
Finance and marketing and math and science and English classes are the real benefits of college that you can't replicate on a construction site.
> College doesn't teach you about your job, it teaches you about the wider world.
Playing devils advocate for a second...
How does college teach you about the wider world? By taking a bunch of tests on subjects being taught by TA's (if you are lucky) or professors that sometimes struggle with English?
Or
Cramming for tests and writing papers you don't want to write is learning about the wider world?
Find me the Engineering major that would rather take 2 semesters of humanities|Literature|etc or graduate sooner!
Find me the doctor students that wish undergrad was a like 2 years shorter! Fuck it, make it 4 years shorter and call it a day! Strait to med school if you have the aptitude.
> but I'm willing to bet one semester of finance would far outweigh the knowledge that construction worker has about why the building is being built like it is.
One semester of finance is craptacular, you wouldn't learn much. Better if you had said Accounting... but most students don't pick accounting. You would do far better listening to Dave Ramsey for a month, IMO. Seriously, where in the bulk of College majors outside of Finance can I find the requirement to take a finance/accounting/econ classes? I'll answer, NO WHERE!
The fact that you bring up finance is interesting because fully half of the Colleges today would go bankrupt if their students knew ANYTHING about money! Why would they go into such crazy debt for what they get in return? The subset of college majors that actually have promising career futures ahead of them are miniscule in comparison the "majors" offered at universities.
Thinking that listening to a radio program is exactly the same or better as a college course is the kind of thing you hear from people that haven't actually gone to college.
This isn't to say you are yourself less intelligent but perhaps you lack perspective?
> Thinking that listening to a radio program is exactly the same or better as a college course is the kind of thing you hear from people that haven't actually gone to college.
I've gone to college I agree with the GP that most gen. ed. college courses are mostly useless. Just the way they're structured usually means you never get a good picture of what you're learning and why. Instead, you usually learn to do a bunch of exercises, with little context about what the point of the exercises are.
They also introduce you to a lot of topics you may not have studied on your own, and give you the opportunity and resources to take them as far as you'd like. I spent a lot of years in universities and I never met a teacher who wasn't willing to spend at least some time with an interested student, or point them in the direction of materials for additional self-study.
Certain classes (particularly the calculus series and chemistry) were pretty exercise-laden but I don't remember anything else that wasn't somewhat obvious what the purpose was, or really many classes beyond science/math/foreign languages with much exercise-type homework. It's obvious with language classes why you're doing rote memorization. Calculus is pretty clearly an engineering weed-out gauntlet, and I have no idea why university chemistry is universally terrible. The context of humanities courses (kept separate from the occupational relevance) was usually obvious. Want to learn what different kinds of buildings are called? Take an architecture history course. Etc.
Mostly I remember undergrad classes as a bunch of 19 year olds who did about 2/3 of what they were assigned, and most of them took zero initiative. Sure, the first floor of the library was packed at night, but there aren't any books there. The stacks were basically ghost towns, and that is where the real learning goes down.
One finance class? Unless we are talking about someone majoring in finance, I don't think one class will get you very far. Look at the classes required for the finance major at USC, for example[1].
Uhh... ok, if you want to do finance for a corporation or similar, great! I don't see much there about managing personal finances... do you? Perhaps if we had more personal finance and less about leverage, in the USA at least, we wouldn't have the crazy debt problems we have. Perspective.
Real world is managing both personal and professional. College isn't great at either.
Did you go to college? I ask because when I went, I had two semesters of accounting, one finance class, both macro and micro economics, and a personal finance class. All of which were required for my Computer Systems degree. You could also take more as electives if you wanted to go deeper.
Your definition of "real world" is extremely limited.
Depending on the construction worker's experience he may or may not know a heck of a lot more about what works and what doesn't on the job site.
Any engineering intern can run some numbers and write a spec. Whether that spec will be easily implementable or whether it will encourage corner cutting in certain cases is a different story. Specs (building requirements, part design, etc) written up by people with little or outdated experience with building the finished product is probably the single biggest time waster in blue collar industries.
Think about that next time you encounter something designed with enough clearance to swing a wrench but not enough clearance to swing a wrench with a hand on it.
"Depending on the construction worker's experience he may or may not know a heck of a lot more about what works and what doesn't on the job site."
Absolutely. And military veteran knows a heck of a lot more about how army works. Neither of them knows enough about building statics nor how to evaluate whether ground is good enough to hold tall building. Neither of them knows about history of country the war was in, something you would expect from journalist.
People that do x know more about x then people who dont, but that does not make construction job reasonable choice if you wants to be architect.
Neither of them was forced to learn hundreds of pages of stuff every semester, something that makes college graduate more likely to be able to learn similar amount of similar difficult stuff again. Part of it is selection bias, but part of it is that good college makes you used to having to learn a lot.
I don't know why you're singling out Humanities degrees, as if STEM degrees are chock full of "real world" knowledge. Many STEM degrees have very clear job positions to enter but "job preparedness" and "real world knowledge" are not synonymous.
I would expect a journalism major to be very good at media literacy which I consider important real world knowledge a construction worker or someone in the military would not develop over the same period of time.
I don't think what he means by real world corresponds to what you think it means.
It's likely that he meant things like policy making, some basic economics, knowing how democracy works, being able to recognize fake news, being able to figure out (faster) who you need to talk to about a problem (be it a person, or an institution), being able to state a hypothesis, gather evidence and update your beliefs, better understanding of systems and what makes them function and a plethora of other things. The pattern here being that these things are very general, allowing the person to do do anything they want, and be able to get better faster.
I am dumbfounded by your answer. As if, college grads have a lock on being smart and figuring things out... You see, other people can do that too. The fact is, most Americans have a really good chance to work for someone who is not a College grad.
How many small business owners do not go to College? I'll answer for you [1].
College is as real place as factory. The construction worker does not know all that much about parts of real world that are not his immediate surrounding.
Honestly, just data structures and algorithm skills seem starkly lacking among the autodidactic programmers I've known. An in-order traversal of a tree data structure is not hard, you just have to know how to do it, in concept if not able to immediately write the code out on your screen.
Even with formal schooling you forget all the stuff you don't use weekly within a semester of last using it.
I think one condensed class on algorithms and data structures could have replaced the three I took if the low level CS classes had emphasized thinking about time complexity and planning before you code. If you're used to thinking about "I only have X resources, what's a not crap way to get Y done" then learning specific data structures and algorithms as you need them is second nature.
I don't think that's true if you learnt it properly the first time. I can still solve a quadratic equation, and I learnt that more than ten years ago and definitely haven't used it since.
I think there's a general rejection of knowledge, and software development has a continue cycle of reinventing the wheel because a large number of developers have no formal training. This something we are now celebrating instead of looking down on.
On the front page today there's separately a 'America needs to reject degree qualifications' and 'How do we get a certified certificate for developers'.....
At least you remember that they exist, and have a rough idea about how they work, which is more than someone who never took the courses. They probably could have condensed the courses and stuck with a few basic proofs instead of the more rigorous proofs I had to do.
The main reason they didn't is because those topics are mostly settled and unchanging, which means they don't have to rewrite a new course every few years. There are easily 5-6 courses I'd rather have taken but some of the most useful topics were too cutting edge to make it down to a Bachelors program in most Universities. The curse of a cutting edge field I guess.
Fairly true, but uni grads seem to do better at both and just general programming. There are definitely lots of people from both camps that are interviewing for programming jobs that can't actually write code.
College definitely forces you to learn a breadth of topics in whatever field. There's also a lot to be said for being out of "the rat race" and devoted to learning. It's hard to study 40 hours a week if you're working 40 hours a week. It's even harder to study when rent is due and you're about to be fired from your job (as a 'for instance')
The only thing people need to learn, whether with a formal instructor or on their own, is opportunity and reason. That's where society fails, the system is designed to hoard and dole it out from the top. If you want people to learn you have to enable them to stay on the edge of what they know. Programming isn't "easy" to learn on you own, its easy with a computer and an internet connection to keep your self on that edge. Any time you are forced to interact with people there are political barriers in place. That's where the failure of the system is, it prevents people from staying on the edge and getting to the next step by denying them opportunity and reason.
To be honest, I didn't find the extra "things" that my university taught outside of my Computer Science program to be of value. I took two public speaking classes, multiple business courses, and plenty of other general education courses. You can sit in a classroom for years and learn theoretical ways to be better at public speaking or how to grow a business, but that won't make you a good public speaker or successful entrepreneur. The experience of running a business or speaking in front of a large crowd is what will force you to improve those skills. If you never have to run a business or speak in front of a large crowd, then those theories are quite useless.
The issue I have with the requirement of a college degree that so many companies impose is that the degree proves nothing other than that the applicant can go through a long drawn-out process of getting a degree. It says nothing of their competency. I've interviewed multiple candidates for software engineering roles that had a bachelors or masters degrees in Computer Science, and more often than not, they can talk for hours about theories behind programming concepts or data structures, but when given a fairly trivial coding challenge, they fall flat on their face. When I graduated college, I was one of those people, but luckily I recognized that quickly and spent countless hours learning new languages and frameworks until I felt I could build a fully functional piece of software by myself.
In my experience, I often prefer candidates straight out of a short vocational computer science program or self-taught programmers to work on my team. Going 4+ years before actually putting concepts into practice is way too long. There are plenty of unaccredited programs that only take a few months and often churn out much more competent candidates than a four year uni program.
tl;dr: People spend way to much time talking about doing things rather than doing things.
On the flip side, I've met a lot of programmers who decide to install Mongo or Redis to solve some data storage problem, and that works okay for a while, but they never stop and think what kind of data they actually have, how they're going to commonly access it, or what kind of trade-offs they're willing to make. This causes problems down the line (currently dealing with some right now) that could have been avoided entirely with a little theory.
I would argue that a bachelors or masters in computer science was not designed to produce programmers, in the same way that a degree in physics doesn't let you start building bridges. On the other, it's also hard to build bridges without physics.
>To be honest, I didn't find the extra "things" that my university taught outside of my Computer Science program to be of value. I took two public speaking classes, multiple business courses, and plenty of other general education courses.
I don't think you would get great values in those public speaking and business classes. I personally agree that people who want to do those things better just start doing it (although, the article tells a different story about the cook). Introductory science courses (which I would otherwise not being able to learn on my own) were certainly worth the price I paid for. I was in a public university and those 3-credit hours courses used to cost me about 800 USD per. There are not many other things that I could better spend my money - I think those are of great value (Although the MOOCs have shown that the price point for really good basic education could be set much lower, but with some trade-offs.)
The other day a person asked on HN - he stated he taught himself to program, but feel insecure because he feel he can never be a legitimate programmer, he even doesn't know how to deal with pointers. I find myself the same way before I went to college -- I tried to program in Pascal with a college level textbook and couldn't gasp the idea of pointers. Not until college do I understand what pointers are -- after only 5 minutes of lecture from my professor.
I had a lot of a-ha moments in college like that. That is to say, the example above is for something I knew that I didn't know, there were many a-ha of something I didn't know I didn't know. Science courses are often dense and not everyone can easily gasp ideas in the textbooks or online resources without help. I wouldn't know to look up and study chaos theory, game theory, and many other interesting ideas without a primer in college. Plus, being able to interact and ask and see as things progress when the professor explains the problem is quite worth the money to me. Again, MOOC can provide some of those, but with trade-offs (I can't interrupt the professor to ask something everyone understands, but I don't). MOOC was not an option when I went to college though.
>t'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.
Am I insane, or really bad at programming? Because with the exception of biology and physics, the other things you mentioned are significantly easier and more intuitive to learn on your own compared to say, computer science concepts and math.
Computer science is hard and I don't know any good place online to learn it for free. Picking up a Rails tutorial, on the other hand, is free and very very easy.
I would say that real, fundamental computer science is one of those things that universities are better suited to teaching. Other comments seem to agree with that.
The point I was trying to make is that college forces you to learn a lot of things that you may choose not to study if you're learning on your own. And those things you're forced to learn end up being more worthwhile than the skills you wanted to learn, whether you realize it or not.
If I waited with learning English till I needed it, it would be too late. I was forced to learn it and benefited from it. If I waited with learning how to write coherent text till I needed it, it would be too late. I was forced to learn it and benefited from it.
I did actually used linear algebra and mathematical analysis on couple of projects and if I did not had math background before, I would not be able to understand what I needed.
I discovered programming at high school. If the teachers did not showed it to me back then, I would not even think about programming as a possible career.
The value of high school and college was in having me to learn things I would not learned otherwise. The things I would learn by myself, I learned by myself.
So true! On the job, almost all of your new knowledge is specialisation on an absurd level of being specific to your job and only to your job. Framework X isn't your specialisation, framework X is the most general knowledge you acquire while on the job. The specialisation is knowing the implementation Y built on top of X and remembering the misconceptions and politics that led to business decision Z which caused module Y to be implemented like it is.
All the education that came before that was to complement that on the job specialization. You start out very general (walking, talking, basic social behavior) and then dive into an increasingly narrow funnel of stuff that is somehow related to your future X,Y and Z that you will learn on the job, but is not not identical with them. Education is for learning the things practice won't teach you (an extreme example: knowing a bit about Plato or Cesar would likely be more relevant to making sense of Z than understanding the halting problem or being good at regex).
It depends a lot on what they mean by programming. Building nice looking small crud app? Technical challenge is rather easy, the hardest is to make it good looking. Making physics simulator or writing eventually connected database first time when they did not existed anywhere else yet is harder.
You're probably holding yourself to too high a standard. If you think about performance before you commit then you're probably doing better than average.
> 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
I took 2 of those courses. first year physics and english course. The english course wasn't even a requirement for CS, it was for math.
I learned more in high school than I ever learned in any of my courses in college (and I was a Literature major at NYU, which is apparently a good school).
Most of my learning in college came from following paths my courses "didn't have enough time to teach."
(I'm a front-end engineer now -- I learned programming on my own on the side!)
Disagree. For many, money is the literal difference between life and death. Every dollar spent on college is a dollar not spent on food or medicine or safe housing. Time and money, for a poor person, are exchangeable at nearly a 1:1 rate. Most poor people spend all their time trying to get just enough money to scrape by. If they had more money, they would have more time. Since they don't have any money, they don't have any time.
I don't know you or your history, but saying money is just status points indicates to me that you don't know what it's like to not have any money. It's far from fictional, and it's far from status.
My family is middle class, I'm college educated, and have a middle class wage as a software engineer. I'm not wealthy. I spent 4 years in my early 20s in rock-bottom poverty and I know exactly how much of a struggle it is for some people. I've been there before.
Money is still fictional status points. That doesn't change anything about the nature of the thing. It's value is based entirely on social constructs. I call it "status" points because it represents how much "buying power" you are granted by your society. That's a form of social status. It is only very indirectly correlated to how much material benefit you produce. For example, a nurse who saves lives at a hospital ER is paid much much much less than a bank executive who takes phone calls all day. Do you understand my point now?
There is a point where money becomes fictional status points, but everyone I've heard say this is a relatively wealthy person, often multi-million dollar net worth. For the majority, money is often more of a limiting factor than time.
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.
Isn't it more just a reflection of assessing people being very hard, so you either prefer people with some work behind them, or use a widely available metric (a degree), even if it only improves the chances of finding good people a tiny bit, because it doesn't cost you anything?
That's a factor too, and likewise you can point to things like legal liability driving pressure for employers to pick people who look good on paper.
I don't mean to suggest all credentialing is bad, obviously I would prefer doctors to have been to medical school and so on. but rent-seeking is a powerful economic force that often goes overlooked and is worth taking time to understand because it's so widespread.
> obviously I would prefer doctors to have been to medical school
I have twice had the experience of doctors (generalists) looking up symptoms on Google and picking a site - with me there. They didn't even go to a school for learning how to search on Google.
People tend to overestimate the value of credentials.
>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.
That really is too bad. Sounds like a great program but if they can't get good teachers, it is a waste.
What are some of the reasons why the kids think the teachers are bad?
I believe that is an entirely different issue. Our education system is not employing the best teachers especially in the STEM fields because we do not pay them enough. I know plenty of professionals who would absolutely love to teach but they don't because they can make 2x to 3x as much elsewhere and would barely make ends meet teaching.
> What are some of the reasons why the kids think the teachers are bad?
I'm not the parent, but my guess if any is that it has to do with the teachers' educative background. They're basically trained to teach biology as biology only, mathematics as mathematics only, etc. without putting 2 plus 2 together and spelling out the day to day usefulness.
A corollary question with a similar answer might be why the education system in just about every country (all?) is stuck with "traditional" course separations, as in maths, physics, biology, literature, etc. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
From what I can tell the teachers are wanna-be hippies who aren't really interested in teaching but enjoy collecting a paycheck while hanging out miles from supervision by administrators. Most of their teaching doesn't seem to be STEM related per-se, but more political ranting.
We had similar classes and I always found them waste of time. It sounds fun, but a lot of time is basically wasted in (needed but still) busywork. Conventional class allows you to learn exactly same amount of things, but much faster and then you can do whatever you actually find fun. Specifically, planting in different environments and tracking growth takes a lot of time and boring work.
It is cool to do experiment once in a while or short experiments you are curious to know what happens. But, if you are able to read experiment based class means waiting till the thing you expect to happen (based on what you already read) finally happen.
> 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.
Ok, I went to Uni, indeed I did postgrad. But I never studied CS, I think I did two programming subjects in total. Plus some others that simply expected me to know how to program.
The point is that non-CS STEM education doesn't teach programming, it just collects people who learn it on the side. Given the poor abilities of most CS students, I would say the good ones are also people who "learned it on the side".
For a company recruiter, looking for (any) STEM degree is a cheap way of finding such people. But for society, this is inefficient. And unfair on people from poor communities who never get that degree.
To clarify, I know more great programmers that went to college. In my hiring experience, it's more the person than then degree though. In my opinion, most of the guys who I know who went to college would have been just as successful if aimed at the books at given time to study.
Level of interest is what drives learning and in this field that is a huge key.
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.
But in many other countries, University places are either taxpayer funded or funded by a government loan scheme with with fiarly easy terms. As you can imagine, that leads to the same result as in the US.
So I would say these countries had a pre-existing moral ideal that everyone should have an undegraduate educaton, and then solutions (such as the US student loan industry) came about to implement that ideal.
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.
You're not supposed to learn ideas in depth in your undergraduate. It provides a foundation and exposes you to many different topics. That is it. If you want to learn in depth you should go to graduate school or start learning on your own.
The most important lesson I learned in my first year is that if you want something, you're going to have to get it yourself. The world won't babysit you like it did before. Would be nice if I didn't have to pay $20k/yr for the opportunity to learn, though.
>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.
> 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.
hacker spaces and universities strike me as nearly polar opposites. what do you think it is they're doing that's similar?
>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.
This is the biggest issue that rural America is facing right now. There's an incredibly large voting bloc of people that had vocational training in mining, manufacturing, etc, etc. Their training is now worthless and nobody has a great plan to get them either a real education or more useful vocational training.
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?
Companies are completely entitled to ask for proof that a person can perform the job requirements and they feel like having an education is important to performing at the level they need.
I wouldn't walk onto a construction site and expect the foreman to give me a job as a carpenter without some proof that I can do the job.
>I wouldn't walk onto a construction site and expect the foreman to give me a job as a carpenter without some proof that I can do the job.
The big problem is, historically the very thing has happened and that's how a lot of baby boomers got their first job. The day after high school graduation, my grandpa walked into a factory and asked for a job, he was given one right there on the spot. The foreman handed him a broom and he started sweeping that very day.
The way the world works has changed far faster than at any point in human history, and our society is still struggling to keep up with that. But yeah, 50 years ago you could walk onto a construction site, ask for a job, and you'd be given one. No experience required.
> The big problem is, historically the very thing has happened and that's how a lot of baby boomers got their first job.
To subvert your comment; High school jobs used to be a thing. Whether running a successful lawn mowing business or working at the nearest construction site when you turned 16.
I say this and I'm 30. However, I noticed when I was 16 that I was the only one on the block mowing lawns; none of my neighbors started mowing lawns when they were 12. [ or that I'm one of the few that has worked on a construction site, even some.]
Yep. When I was in high school, I picked asparagus on a nearby farm. My sister bagged groceries at our local grocery store. I'm sure I could still get a job picking asparagus (at least around here, most farms use legal migrant workers who are paid at least minimum wage, so they're just as happy to hire Americans for the same job). The grocery store doesn't have baggers anymore, they went to the cashiers bagging, and then to self-checkout and self-bagging years ago.
I don't know if the interest in summer jobs went away or if the abundance of summer jobs went away (chicken or egg), but it's not nearly as common at all. Doesn't help when underemployed college graduates are working at Burger King instead of high schoolers.
> The foreman handed him a broom and he started sweeping that very day.
Exactly. Most office jobs don't have an analog to "broom sweeping." Which is why they have educational requirements. One wouldn't expect to go from janitor to accountant without getting an education.
> Most office jobs don't have an analog to "broom sweeping."
There used to be entry-level, no-skill "mail room" type jobs for people with little or no education. I'd imagine many Baby Boomers got their start that way (the same Baby Boomers who are amazed that their Starbucks barista has a PhD).
Right. And a lot of those jobs have either mostly gone away because of computers. Look at an officeplace from the 1970s and there are a heck of a lot more true entry-level jobs.
And offices actually do still have "broom sweeping" but it's outsourced to a janitorial services company.
That's the thing, not all organizations need to outsource their helpdesk to have a major impact on all of the low-level jobs in the area. I'm in the third largest city in my state, I hold several IT certifications, and I can't even get a helpdesk job without a degree here. Enough organizations outsource to make it nearly impossible to get started without a degree plus 2+ years experience. This is the case across the country for most industries right now, and it's a huge source of political instability seen at the moment.
Historically, you could do that in the US. They are called 'apprenticeships,' and they were pretty common before globalization made the demand for labor drop to nothing.
This would not be a job as a carpenter, it would be a job as a carpenter's apprentice. Many white collar office jobs require some requisite education before you can even get an entry-level or apprentice-like job.
>I wouldn't walk onto a construction site and expect the foreman to give me a job as a carpenter without some proof that I can do the job.
Of course companies can have education requirements. I think the point that many of these companies miss is that a college degree isn't proof of competency, and "having an education" is not the same as being educated. Specifically in the field of computer science, there are plenty of people that already have the skills needed to excel as a software engineer, but they do not have the resources to get a college degree.
Low-level jobs shouldn't have huge, if any, barriers to entry. If a manager/foreman/etc can't teach high-school graduates how to do a basic job well, it reflects much more negatively on the manager/foreman than the high-school graduates.
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.
If you read a little further, you'd find his point is that his nephew was not well-suited to university, but that his family felt obligated to shove him through it because your prospects are so limited if you do not get a bachelor's degree.
I think his family should have felt obligated to shove him through it. I also think it's his fault for not understanding why or what he could have done instead. I do think he is better off too. Sure, he's worked a couple bad postgrad jobs and is currently unemployed but someone with his work ethic that stops after high schools usually ends up way worse. Maybe married with two kids working at costco just trying to scrape by. No one wants to be in that situation.
It's probably unfair for me to be assuming so much about him but it just reminds me of so many people I've seen in my life and I don't empathize for him at all.
> Six years for a degree in political science. You have to actively try to take that long to graduate. Maybe he changed majors.
I disagree. Life circumstances can keep you from graduating as well.
I spent nearly 7 on a CS degree. There were a few hold ups. The biggest being until VERY recently, I was unmedicated with Bipolar Disorder. I would sign up for classes while manic, and barely scrape by or fail when depressed. It has taken me 5 years to get a proper diagnosis and find the right meds. Meanwhile, I still tried to do my best in the classes I was attending.
Another reason it took me so long, I attended community college and got a 2 year degree in programming I was told would directly translate to my BS in CS. This was not the case. I found that my university only took certain credits off of my AS, effectively putting me at about a year of coursework when I was under the impression I had 2.
None of this was me trying to take that long to graduate. I do take some of the responsibility for it, I could have done better to get out of bed and go to class some days. I could have done more research about PBSC's transfer degree. I could have fought harder for the right diagnosis when I was 18 and everything started happening.
Those are fair reasons. I assumed if anything like that came up the author would have included them. Your experience with community college was probably frustrating. It can be a good choice to help keep debt low but there's always that "transfer factor"
He's not arguing against trade schools. It's a fairly explicit endorsement of trade schools -- just accompanied by lamenting that that's not the actual world we live in.
The article isn't presenting the two nephews as the same argument at all. The idea is that the one who went to college did what society demands, and it clearly wasn't the right move. The second made the "correct" decision, only to have society fail to reward him.
I'm not sure how you took away something different there, unless I'm just misunderstanding your argument.
It's probably because I didn't read the entire article. I got to this point
"Unfortunately for Jeffrey, however, it’s very hard to make a decent living as a cook, even in the best restaurants of New York. So after three years of hard work and great experience but very little money'
and assumed it was all downhill for him too. I was mostly infuriated by the first nephew being used against universities.
I agree. Of all the other examples that could have been used, that one was ridiculous. That person simply had no motivation whatsoever and the degree was probably a total loss for him (other than the piece of paper itself)
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.
In part, it's probably because other industries have a limited ability to toss you in the brig if you decide to give your notice after a year.
There are trucking schools, mechanics school, cooking schools (as in the article). But the trades in general tend to be more of an apprentice system.
Finally, some specialized companies do have extended in-house training. But this sort of thing is definitely less common, in part because people skip around jobs a lot more so there's going to be a lot of free-riding on a company offering expensive training.
> Finally, some specialized companies do have extended in-house training. But this sort of thing is definitely less common, in part because people skip around jobs a lot more so there's going to be a lot of free-riding on a company offering expensive training.
Don't blame worker "free-riding" so much. I'd say lack of in-house training has even more to do with the fact that companies are much more eager to lay off workers based on short term financial metrics.
Worker training (and loyalty to workers) is a long term investment that doesn't fit well in a culture driven by short term results.
I think it's not simply that firms don't think long-term, it's that they can't confidently project 10+ years in the future, so they prefer not to take the risk. Maybe the market will change dramatically by then, making the product obsolete, or maybe improved techniques, automation etc. will have made the position obsolete.
I wonder if you could do something similar with a student loan/financial aid program. The company doesn't take on the risk of building a university, but can set curriculum and performance standards to maintain the scholarship. If it's structured as a loan, worst case you're on the hook the way anyone is for a student loan.
You don't get automatically sent to the brig for not fulfilling your commitment, IIRC, you have to pay the retail cost of your military academy education, and if you don't do that, then you are in trouble
There isn't any way to skip out that does not violate the laws of the UCMJ. Getting dishonorably discharged is the result of that process, but it's not like you can just cancel your contract, write a check, and walk out.
Yep. It's amortized about $50k/year over the five years active requirement. You can also leave any time in the first two years of school without any penalty. And they don't throw you in the brig, you get a tax lien. It sucks, but it's really no worse than a student loan.
Fair enough although I suspect the military is in a better position to collect than a private company would be, any signed contracts notwithstanding. (Companies can apparently recoup training costs under some conditions but it can be a complicated area.)
My mother's debt for nursing school was cancelled if she agreed to work in the hospital system affiliated with the school after graduation. I think it was year-for-year trade off.
The military can put you in jail for not fulfilling your end of the bargain. On top of that, there are no competing militaries - you can't decide in year 2 of you contract to go work for a different military, so there is a low risk on the part of the military for paying for the initial training.
It may also be worth observing that in the case of that particular example, a (paid for) four-year university education is part of the packaged education and on-the-job training deal. (I assume that's a graduation at Annapolis.)
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.
> The number of high paying doesn't change simply because we're increasing the number of degrees per capita
It should. Not necessarily in proportion to the number of degrees, but having more degrees out there should increase the number of high paying jobs. Superior education should make people both more intellectually malleable and capable of creating value in unforeseen ways.
If it doesn't, it would be evidence there's something very wrong with the degrees.
What your saying may have been true hundreds of years ago when the number intellectual jobs was much smaller and far less diverse.
But, today, professions are far more specialized than people realize. How much of what you learned in your degree do you still remember? 1%? of that 1%, how much do you actually use on a daily basis? and of that subset, how much of that knowledge is things you couldn't have easily learned on the job.
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.
FYI there are experienced students who do not do this. Many, in fact. I think I can recall only a few occasions where re-educating professionals did what you're describing.
Most of my gripes with interruptions came from 18-20 year olds.
> 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.)
> 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.)
Can you name some of those programs? I keep hearing about those but can't find them.
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.
> Masters program at a well-regarded institution, was accepted
I had been considering that, good to know it's possible! I couldn't find clear guidance that says a Masters is even possible without the requisite undergraduate degree.
I don't remember anything unusual for entry. They did have a probationary period, but I don't recall the details - I assume it was more of a CYA for the school.
It's also worth noting that she's in a niche field. The program coordinator was accessible. It's a small program, cohort based, so relatively easy to ensure the student is meeting expectations once enrolled. YMMV when trying this on a more common subject.
My dream is to study urban planning. There are lots of masters programs, but no undergraduate studies, and I don't have BA, only a technical diploma. I've been trying to figure out a way to do this without resigning myself to 6 years or more of expensive education. It would be amazing if I could get in without the BA.
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)?
Would it really be a much higher percentage than the work done by uninterested stoners now? Lots of people already have jobs they aren't particularly excited about and just fell into. At least this way they'd get a chance to try out a few different things first.
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 don't think you're quite in the spirit of the article there. How about:
1. Author has a nephew who was forced into a degree program he didn't want because he mostly hates school, but blue collar jobs don't pay enough anymore. Neither do white collar jobs for people who don't enjoy classroom learning.
2. Author has another nephew who also didn't like classroom learning, got a degree in chef's school and made alot of progress in the field. However, chef's don't get paid well either.
3. Author thinks maybe the problem is there isn't a path for people who don't like classroom learning and maybe Germany is better at this IDK?
Not to sound like some kind of socialist, but maybe the problem is many jobs don't pay very well anymore?
This is a very unfair interpretation of the article at least for point 1. It never described the nephew as lazy, it could've been that they were depressed or had something going on. It also says that he might have been better doing something physical, not necessarily political science.
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.
Which is, almost ironically, going back to vocational training instead of standard Liberal Arts degrees. I triple-majored in Math, Physics, and Computer Science because I had to be there for the whole degree, so why not. But all I really needed, and all I use to this day, is the Computer Science portion.
We could probably eventually overhaul the system to that end, but I don't envy those trapped in the transition period.
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.
Lots of people just get a Ph.D to have a higher starting salary and avoid a possible glass ceiling later on. I'm planning on doing exactly that. It depends on the job market in your location though.
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.
The high achievers are going to be well read anyways; if you stuffed everyone accepted into Stanford into a room for four years instead of teaching them, you'd wind up with a bunch of intellectually engaged and well-read individuals.
It's the marginally-engaged folks that barely get into college that post-secondary education makes a difference for. And, uhh, they kind of treat it like a four-year party with less parental involvement.
IMO, the fact that Americans are some of the least intellectually engaged people on the planet is a cultural problem that is basically fixed by the time children have gone through primary education.
I wouldn't say 'practically everyone' has one. Only ~30% of the US population holds one: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/24/education/census-finds-bac.... Just most of us on HN run in social circles were that number is 85%+, that we feel like everyone has one.
I would argue that "everyone has one" is inherently "everyone in my career has one", which the number that matters. If a heavy equipment operator doesn't have a bachelor's degree, well that doesn't really matter to me because I'm not competing for his job and he's not competing for mine. What matters if, what's the percentage of people competing for my job that holds a BS? Because that is the only determining factor of whether or not I should get one.
Isn't 30% is more than enough? If 3-4 people apply for a single position and 1-2 of them have a degree, then it's a fairly reasonable decision to ignore the other two.
And the ratios I've seen are far more than 3-4 applications per position.
> If 3-4 people apply for a single position and 1-2 of them have a degree, then it's a fairly reasonable decision to ignore the other two.
Years ago I found a copy of "The Screwing of the Average Man" at a thrift shop. According to Mr. Hapgood, getting preferential consideration for jobs was always the reason wealthy families sent their children to college.
After WWII the proletariat class got congress to subsidize college so they too could access jobs that had traditionally been reserved for the upper class. Thus began the college price spiral.
The problem is that everyone and their dog has their grade 12. Or at least that a Grade 12 education no longer guarantees that a Grade 12 no longer guarantees basic skills in reading, 'riting, 'rithmetic and reasoning.
Both of my grandfathers went to school through 8th grade. Both were quite successful and able to raise large families and retire well. At some point, we need to stop believing that more schooling is the only way for people to find their way in the world.
Then again, your grandfathers (and mine too!) weren't competing in a global economy where labor is fungible, but were able to rely on generational stability in smaller local economies.
Even if you ignore careers such as plumbers, dental hygienists, electrical technician, the entire construction industry, etc., ... a lot of web developers don't have one.
I took two years off between high school and college (I ended up with 2 Bachelors and a Masters), but I don't think that has helped me in the least in terms of employability.
I'm not convinced a gap year is meant to increase your employability, rather to help reset your mind after high school. It helps you find out who you are, what you like and dislike, and helps determine if you really want to get that communications degree or if maybe a finance degree is more what you're looking for.
That's funny. Even after two years off, 2 bachelors, and a masters I still didn't know what I wanted to do! I have a bachelors in Ancient Near Eastern Studies, a second bachelors in Linguistics, and a masters in Educational Psychology. But I work as a web developer for the sales team of a large company. I was actually about four years out of college before I started getting a feel for what I might want to do with my life (i.e., about 12 years post high school). I'm very happy with what I do now so it all worked out.
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.
I think America needs to get over its reverence for the "free market". Healthcare and education are critical needs. Without education we wouldn't have modern medicine, food supply, clothing, housing, etc - you name it. Without any and all healthcare we'd all be dying somewhere between 20-40, if we're lucky. Yet, both "industries" experience ever increasing costs. Consumers in both offset actualized needs with financial tools. Insurance only works if a large majority of people do not use it. That's if you can obtain and afford insurance. Education only pays off if your tuition expenses match up with your employment options. That's assuming you manage to find work out of college.
If you can't afford insurance then you're stuck paying out of pocket. By the "one price" rule, doctors have to charge an individual the same they charge insurance. An individual cannot strike a deal as easily with a provider as an insurance company can - so they wind up paying 10-100x what an insurance company would. Notice, that's not saying anything about what an insured person would pay.
There's no corollary to that for education. People finance their education (largely) with loans and up front. They're striking a deal based on what they expect their future income to be. That future income, by the way, probably won't be realized for the majority. For those it is, it may not be realized until 5 or even 10 years down the road. By that point, the loan payments have already started and may have already been scheduled to be paid back completely.
America needs a new economic model. It needs an economic model that allocates nails and food differently than it allocates healthcare and education. Right now, it allocates immediate needs the same way it allocates 'possible demands'. Financial companies estimate 'possible demands' on imperfect data across imperfect realities. Because those two things are not the same, they need to be handled differently.
Trump's victory showed the power of the uneducated. The Bachelors degree is not only a technical degree but especially in America, with a general education requirement, is also important to teach us citizenship, critical thinking, and educate us beyond our own narrow field. Knowledge of basic history (at least on a survey level) of our country and key places around the world, a basic understanding of our political system, and general knowledge is important to be better people and better citizens. Of course extremely smart people might be able to get this on their own but most of us aren't Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates.
I think the title "Reverence for the Bachelor's Degree," is inadvertently misleading.
There certainly isn't profound respect or reverence for a bachelor's degree itself, from employers or anyone else. However, there is an expectation of social and to some degree, field specific exposure.
Perhaps the point of the article is there are far more useful ways to gauge someone's career/field specific potential than a bachelor's degree. And if there are more practical assessment tools than not having a bachelor's degree shouldn't be a barrier to entry.
I think it is telling that the second nephew was a cook. When I think of learning a trade I imagine fitters and turners. And here in Australia we do need more of those skills -- but the chances are that service sector jobs will be more abundant. And some -- like cooking can take the most successful ones a long way.
That said, I would like to see aprentices rather than interns at my big software company.
The answer is simple. Make it generally illegal to ask or provide information about your college education as part of interviewing for a job. If there's bona-fide occupational requirement for specialized training, allow certification by exam - the Fundamentals of Engineering exam or what actuaries go through are good examples of this.
The Bachelors degree of yesterday is almost the equivalent to the Masters of today in a lot of fields. It's sadly used as a gatekeeper, erroneously in so many cases. Alas eventually, I predict, a new type of degree will emerge and it will be a combination of the Bachelors and Masters, because the two will be sufficiently diluted.
The government needs to change education to a protected status, like gender, religion, etc. Make it illegal for employers to ask for candidates educational background and degrees. The core issue here is that companies use degrees and education status as a filter and proxy for perseverance, intelligence, and skill, which forces everyone who wants to be employed to obtain a degree. As more job seekers obtain degrees, companies shift minimum educational requirements higher. Higher requirements cause job seekers to obtain yet more education, and neither companies nor job seekers can break this cycle. This is a market breakdown and vicious cycle which needs intervention by the government. (I fully expect libertarians to complain that the government created this mess as a result of too much easy credit in the form of student loans, and they may be right, but undoing that now is a lost cause and moot point) If the government protects educational status, then degrees can't be used to signal educational virtue, and they will cease to be obtained by everyone. University education will revert back to those who desire education for its merits and not its status.
It already has intervention by the government..
this is called 'student loans' which prop up US treasury bonds..
That the situation of requiring expensive degrees further implies increased dependency on higher paying corporate jobs, in turn further centralizes economic power, increases social pressure to purchase luxury consumer goods, and also strengthens washington lobbying dollars doesn't hurt either..
> The government needs to change education to a protected status, like gender, religion, etc
Protected classes are usually characteristics that people cannot change (eg. race, ethnicity, disability) or that it would be unconstitutional to force them to change (eg. religion). Educational attainment doesn't fit either category so that would be a hard sell, politically. (I don't actually know how protected classes are decided; this is just based on my observation and could be completely wrong)
> The core issue here is that companies use degrees and education status as a filter and proxy for perseverance, intelligence, and skill,
Which implies there's a market opportunity for smart companies to pick up, on the cheap, non-graduates that they can determine, through some other filter, are smart, persevering and skillful (the Moneyball approach, if you will). I personally think it's silly to limit a person's career growth 10-15 years into their career just because they didn't go to college when they were 20. Any "rounded-ness" a person picked up then has long worn off for most.
Bullshit. We need to make it mandatory and free for everyone just like a high school diploma. Alternative option would be mandatory trade skill training. The USA is currently fucked for the foreseeable future due to not caring about education. Let's make it a priority instead of a gigantic military.
Why not? It's administrative work in an office environment. That seems white collar to me. What do you think it is instead? It's not service work (pink collar). It's not manual labour (blue collar).
> And yes, that includes the soft, narcissistic, effete, coffee-shop-frequenting, STEM-grad, man-child "gamers" who prognosticate on YC.
I like this comment, it's kind of like the "brogrammer" thing where you accuse mildly successful men of every negative male stereotype at the same time in case them feeling bad makes them give you stuff.
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.