A lot of this is driven by narratives—A narrative that college isn’t worth it anymore. A narrative that (white) men are uniformly privileged and life is just easy for them. And a narrative that those men aren’t wanted by society any more.
I’m not convinced that all those men need to go to college, but they clearly need something. They need to feel like they’re part of society. Nothing good can come of an entire generation that feels lost, without purpose, and unwanted.
I’m not convinced that all those men need to go to college, but they clearly need something.
This. We are seeing the results of what was reported in the book Boys Adrift.
My older son just graduated high school. He has no interest in college at the moment, and has shown a gift for working with his hands. He is currently doing a carpentry apprenticeship with an acquaintance that runs a renovation and design company. He loves the work, loves the people he works with[0], and comes home and wants to build more stuff. He's making pretty decent money as an 18 year old, and is part of something that very much embodied.
[0] His crew is run by Swedish woman who was trained as a metal worker, so it isn't just a bunch of dudes, which is also great.
I very much struggled with discipline and motivation at university and eventually dropped out. It was not until I started working when I became a highly motivated self-driven learner. Now I love studying and learning (and teaching), but I do it at my own pace and I choose the things that matter for my work or are just plain fun.
Looking back a decade later, it would have been very beneficial if I didn't go to university but instead did an apprenticeship and developed from there, built up confidence and independence incrementally and forming my path iteratively.
Most of my friends and family actually went (are going) on such a path, from apprenticeship/trade-school to working and eventually advanced training or university later in life.
In Switzerland this model is widely appreciated and seems to be the default (I didn't look at numbers). Newly the (first) apprenticeship is called "Erstausbildung" (initial education), implying that it is the first of many steps in our education, revisited/expanded at later stages in life.
In many other (OECD) countries this seems not to be the case and college/university is regarded as the default or thing to aspire to for everyone. I personally don't agree with that notion and have become more and more convinced of a more continuous and flexible education that isn't necessarily tied to academics.
I hope some of the implicit stigma around older undergrads goes away too.
Not everyone is motivated or gifted enough at 18 to grind through 4 years while maximizing social interactions and general happiness.
I really do believe university education is very beneficial to most people but at different stages of their lives and one solution fits all is not good.
My dad used to quote somebody in saying, "Education is wasted on the young".
My experience sounds similar to yours. Though, when I tried to go back to school to dive in again, I found the 'system' was highly oriented towards parenting 18yo kids in all the worst ways imaginable. It was nauseating and unbearable being in that environment, and even going through the application/acceptance process (filling out pledges for conduct, right-thinking, etc). Much has changed with online learning, but I still feel the B&M universities are a very ill-fit for independently-minded adult learners.
Structuring and _deciding_ your own learning, materials, books, projects etc. is time consuming, but it makes everything more pragmatic, focused and tailored. And over time we can leverage that skill in of itself to teach others:
Learning for people who have work experience is really different. We have context, clear goals and so on. Teaching other 'adult' students is really fun, because we get to figure out what suits them instead of trying to hit measurements predefined by some committee. Ultimately it is just about giving guidance and ideas, kind of like consulting to learn, what to learn and so on.
"Education is wasted on the young" - this was exactly my experience. I didn't know it then, but I first needed to build up confidence, make 'real' mistakes and learn from them. I was also completely unfit for the type of scheduled and predetermined learning that happens at universities. My mind wanders too much and I'm driven by answering my own questions that I feel matter or are interesting. Also a reason why I don't work in large/streamlined orgs.
it is a lot easier to be motivated to learn when you're doing something you want to do and filling in the gaps your knowledge as-needed as opposed to grinding gen-eds because they'll be on the test... that gates your placement into another set of gen-eds.
I have a 20 year old (21 in 2 days, god help me) son in college now, and one of his friends and our neighbor the same age dropped out and started welding school. As far as I know he loves it.
As a son of a blue collar mechanic, I am all for this; we need more tradespeople in the US, and I suspect he'll be well on his way to financial security at least as early if not earlier than my son (if he takes care of his finances).
> [0] His crew is run by Swedish woman who was trained as a metal worker, so it isn't just a bunch of dudes, which is also great.
I find it fascinating you needed to drop this comment in order to justify your son's work environment, implying that all male environments are inherently toxic. It's very rare to find people suggesting that an all female work environment is inherently bad.
I'm not justifying his work environment, merely pointing out that it is more diverse than the usual construction site. I simply appreciate that as an 18 year old, he is getting a unique experience.
I thought the same. It gets a little tiresome the very narrow railroad tracks of thought we are now expected to adhere to on any given topic.
Any minor diversion always require some statement to imply "hey Im still on the railroad tracks..."
My belief is that time will prove this to be an excellent strategy. Knowing how to make things of high quality with your hands is the new college degree in many ways in the sense of being a high value minority in the labor market.
> A narrative that (white) men are uniformly privileged and life is just easy for them.
This is very perspective dependent. I’m a black college student now and every conversation with friends back home includes some mention of dropping out because it’s not for us as well. When you see people with equivalent resumes already coasting by in the job market because they could get their last names and LinkedIn photos past the screening and into an interview it’s hard to believe that’ll change post-graduation. And most of us are already in planning on entrepreneurship because we know we’re not what companies are looking for even with fancy CS degrees. It’s like if I’ll have to sell sneakers to make ends meet after college anyways I might as well drop out and use that money bootstrapping this inventory SaaS. Innovation out of desperation, I guess.
It’s no way to live. But I think we’re approaching an inflection point.
Dropping out of a fancy Computer Science program that you're already in would seem like an extraordinarily bad idea.
If someone's trying to talk you into quitting and giving up because no one wants you because you're black, well.. that doesn't sound like a good friend to me.
Don't get me wrong -- a few tech-billionaires dropped out of college, and apparently it worked out for some. So if you want to try that out, then that'd seem like a different issue. But dropping out because you're black sounds crazy.
All that said, if you want to feel out the waters, why not apply for an internship? Internships can be awesome! -- you can get experience and money while still being a student, plus it can be fun!
> Dropping out of a fancy Computer Science program that you're already in would seem like an extraordinarily bad idea
Of course haha the name brand and few cool professors are keeping me at this point. But I never expected to go from the highest ranking/gpa/scores to having leaving academia even at the edge of the table.
> But dropping out because you're black sounds crazy.
It’s more like “if I can make X amount anyways today, why do it Y way when I’ll be behind anyways? Might as well gain the experience and be in the same position 4-5 years from now?” if that makes sense but I understand it sounding rash through text.
> why not apply for an internship?
It seems we all have the same issue of never getting responses online. It’s very odd considering we’ve done incredibly well when the interview is direct with the person hiring (as in this is the person that makes the final decision), but situations like that are limited.
Apologies if this is obvious, but if you're not getting callbacks, usually the issue is with your resume or application. If you haven't already, I would look for groups that review resumes and applications (especially groups that involve people who are already working or have experience hiring.) You could also try posting on the /r/cscareerquestions subreddit to have people critique your resume.
> usually the issue is with your resume or application
The parent commentor stated that their cohort has seen evidence of systematic rejection of their resumes. It is a well-documented fact that this happens all the time for female-sounding, black-sounding etc names and pictures.
Suggesting that "no, it's probably just some missing fine tuning on your resume" doesn't really seem like the right response here...
This doesn't match up with my experience as an interviewer at several FAANGs.
HR typically wants their diversity numbers up badly so if you're gay, a woman, and/or black they are already incredibly inclined to hire you, as long as you pass the interviews.
It's not a walk in the park, but you have this going for you and it's a big advantage imo.
There are a lot more people of color trying to break into the field than there are companies willing to hire them. There is a big difference between what they are saying and what they are implementing and I can say with absolute confidence that diversity is just lip service. FAANGs primarily recruit from other FAANGs. If none of those companies are diverse how are they going to diversify their recruitment?
Why attribute malice to people at these companies when it is possible that all the challenges and disadvantages minorities and women have to surpass, in the end, result in those groups not coming up at the top, with the ultimate sorting function being the hiring process?
I see getting hired as the last stage in the pipeline, with the first stages being your family, then your education and then employment.
The more things go wrong in the first stages, the less likely it is for one to succeed at getting to the top of the next stage.
If people from underprivileged families can only afford to go to the 50% best school in the state, then to the 75% best college, then by the time they enter the job search page, they won't be at the top of the list (again, on average).
I'll use myself as an example: I had the privilege of coding for entire weekends when I was young, while my peers had to work the land. This gave me a distinct advantage early on, which I capitalized on, so at an interview with a company I am more likely to get hired than if those same peers had hypothetically applied, again because it wouldn't make sense for a company to pass on the best candidate when they are all competing for talent, regardless of race, gender, height or other ways of splitting people into groups.
I think everyone agrees that the current situation when it comes to diversity in the workplace is not acceptable, and we should definitely fix it, but in my opinion, if companies are competing fairly for talent, then that part of the pipeline doesn't really need fixing. We can instead use it as a test to see if the attempts at fixing the earlier stages result in better numbers.
P.S. This a difficult subject and I don't intend to offend anyone. Despite my relative privilege above, compared to my peers in the US, I still grew up in a poor and underprivileged family and am behind my current peers both financially and socially, so it's a topic that hits home for me.
It's not offensive per ae but it is a worn-out canard that has been plied by the likes of Richard Rodriguez and apologists for segregated systems for decades. "I'm all in favor for equality but you're too late when it comes to [job applications, college admissions etc] because the damage is already done."
Truly qualified people on the margins are still getting shut out at every level, every age and stage. Mediocrity is still pushing the center ahead of everyone else. The fact that wsj/economist/HN has turned anti-woke doesn't change the facts.
There was actually a big twitter thread by a black recruiter at Google (now cut) who out and out said that Google's interviewing engineers looked down on black seniors and ranked them universally lower than white seniors, particularly black seniors from historically black universities. She had to fight tooth and nail to accomplish getting the first black entry-level-from-college hire in all of Google's history.
And it was specifically about hiring from HBU's vs other elite institutions, not about hiring black applicants in general which is how you described it.
Take Apple for example, out of the 600+ jobs posted on their career website only 19 even mention students. And some of those are actual student jobs: student outreach, student recruiters. If they have a different pipeline for recruiting students I'm not aware of it. If new graduate positions are only recruited at campus job fairs that has a greater potential to be worse. FAANGs haven't been recruiting from majority minority schhols or HBCUs.
Wait wait wait let's get back to how white dudes are dropping out because of woke tyranny! Nobody wants to hear about failing DEI efforts. Sure whites still dominate the workforce but it just isn't fun anymore!
Your experience does not match research on the job market generally. Multiple studies show increased responses to resumes with "whitened" names. This is, of course, at odds with the white victimhood narrative that unqualified minorities are taking jobs, when it is in fact the opposite which is occurring.
It's a sort of interesting read but nothing too dramatic and whether it's evidence of racism is subject to interpretation. What isn't subject to interpretation is the claim that the study shows that "whitened" names increase callbacks. On the contrary whitening names has no effect on callbacks as indicated on page 31:
"Whitening the name only (versus not whitening at all) did
not make a statistically significant difference for black applicants"
The actual study shows that removing racial indicators from experience is what results in a gap in callbacks. So someone who represents themselves as the leader of their campus' "Black Student Business Association" is less likely to get a call back than someone who represented themselves as the leader of their campus' "Student Business Association". They refer to the removal of racial indicators as whitening but I think that's prematurely jumping to conclusions. The name aspect is certainly a form of whitening, since black names are being changed to white names. But it's premature to refer to the removal of racial indicators and making the experience racially neutral as a form of whitening.
Other forms of experience that explicitly mention race result in less callbacks than when that same experience doesn't mention race. Whether this is racism or not can not be concluded strictly based off of the study's parameters. For example, if I were presented with one candidate who was in charge of the university's "Law Society" I would probably pick that person over someone who was in charge of that university's "Black Law Society", and I don't think I would be racist for doing so. I would consider being in charge of an organization that is open to all races or is independent of race as a more prestigious accomplishment than being in charge of an organization that is race specific.
To test whether I was racist in my decision making, I would need to pick someone who was not in charge of anything over someone who was in charge of the "Black Law Society", with all else being equal. The study did not do this comparison and unfortunately the study does not present the raw data so there's no way for me to do this analysis myself.
I could bicker about some of the methodological issues as well which are not exactly rigorous, as well as the fact that this study is not exactly pertinent to this conversation as they only looked at internships for jobs that are not technical in nature, with the bulk of them being sales and marketing, and customer service jobs, instead of engineering, computer science, law, or professional jobs.
Ultimately no study is going to be perfect but one should not read too much into many of these studies. They are not nearly as rigorous or definitive as one would expect and furthermore they don't tend to generalize.
You are assuming that FAANGs are representative of the general job market. The parent was referring to CS degrees specifically.
Imagine you having always bought tasty tomatoes from your local farm, and someone steps in to show you studies that determined that the generally tomatoes in the US are tasteless.
I'm also not arguing that tasty tomatoes are taking shelf space away from other fruit.
I explicitly said the general job market, I made no claims about the behavior of FAANGs. Indeed, I think there is little value in considering the behavior of FAANGs in a discussion of the general job market. I was responding to head off the generalizing of the white victimhood narrative which often happens in these discussions.
Aren't these are known to be extremely difficult interviews compared to most tech interviews? What percentage of candidates who apply get hired? I would imagine the numbers are quite low?
My opinion is that generalist interviews are difficult but not 'extremely'. For example, here is a problem I came up with at one company:
Given a list of chapters in a video course, and a list of user bookmarks, write a function that groups the bookmarks by chapter. Chapters and bookmarks are defined as millisecond offsets from 0 (the start of the video file).
I'd specify the data structures for junior devs and let the more senior people work those out.
Your average developer that gets hired can solve and unit test the solution in less than 35 minutes. Those who don't might be having an off day, or I didn't do a good job at explaining the problem and details, or they didn't ask the right questions or who knows. The point is, a thousand things can go wrong, but the problem itself isn't that difficult. A few loops and a hashmap gets you an acceptable solution.
This and the other problems in the interview question databases at FAANGs are typical of what's in the Cracking the Coding Interview book. Whether someone's ability to solve these types of problems quickly is indicative of their skill level is a hot topic of debate, but if one wants to join these companies, then hacking the process by learning to solve algorithm and data structure problems is acceptable and not a particularly complex process. It's high overhead for the candidate, but at the very least it proves that they can learn, and learning the custom tools and code quickly is about half the skillet required to be successful at a FAANG.
> then hacking the process by learning to solve algorithm and data structure problems is acceptable
Have you considered that underrepresented candidates might not have the free time outside of university, family, and job responsibilities in order to compete with those whose families can support them to focus on only university and preparing for interviews?
If HR wants their diversity numbers up, maybe HR needs to consider having some diversity in the interview process itself? I wouldn't expect a cookie cutter process to result in much diversity of background or thought.
> Whether someone's ability to solve these types of problems quickly is indicative of their skill level is a hot topic of debate
One of the best interviewing tips I learned that has served me extremely well is to try disprove my impression of the candidate. It seems like this process entirely fails at that.
The problem is that companies also want an objective hiring process, because otherwise employee bias will seep in. The fact that these two issues are in opposition (plus the general recruiting pipeline issues) are why this is such a difficult problem to solve.
> The problem is that companies also want an objective hiring process
Usually only at a very superficial level. Enough to comply with the law. And to be fair, some companies do have good intentions with a little extra effort and money put into diversity efforts.
A truly objective hiring process would take into account that Joe and Charley who both got the same results on the coding test are not equally qualified if Joe grew up poor, with parents who never graduated high school, paid his own way through university by working full-time, and along with raising a child as a single parent. While Charley comes from a wealthy family and focused only on studying and job interview prep. With his parents passing along some of their own higher education to him as needed, connecting him to their large network for job opportunities, etc.
Joe is obviously a better candidate. His starting line was far behind Charley's and yet he crossed the finish line at the same time. Joe would be a better candidate even if he passed the finish line a little after Charley. If you want a truly objective hiring process you need to look at starting lines, not just finish lines.
Most companies are doing almost the opposite and only looking at the finish line. They want to look only at the skills and exclude the actual person in a misguided effort to be objective.
All that really does it amplify existing societal bias and privilege by rewarding those who got the most breaks in life.
> this is such a difficult problem to solve.
Agreed. And it would be more expensive. Part of why the status quo is so hard to change. You've got to spend the money and do the work. Or take shortcuts and discriminate on one side or the other.
But looking at what a candidate can do is objective. Trying to compare how tough each one had it is extremely subjective. Is being a woman harder than a minority? Is having a low iq harder than being poor? Being a single parent harder than being addicted to alcohol?
Maybe Charley had depression and anxiety and never made any friends while Joe is outgoing and did allowing him to form study groups easier. Maybe Charley's parents insisted he become a lawyer and he never touched code until college. Maybe Charley has a speech impediment, maybe he is ugly, maybe he is on the spectrum, maybe, maybe, maybe.
We are here to judge how someone can do the job, not go through their life history trying to judge how much harder or easier they had it than someone else.
> We are here to judge how someone can do the job.
You missed the most important part of my point. Someone who crosses the finish line at the same time as someone else, but started from further back is almost always better at doing the job.
I already said it's very difficult to objectively measure. But any improvement in doing so will give you a competitive advantage in finding the best candidates.
I can't agree with your generalization that people who faced more challenges are likely to be better at doing the job. It seems possible those early life difficulties could be traumatizing, leaving those folks less resilient.
The US military used to think successful soldiers with childhood trauma, had coping skills that protected them in deployment. When they ran the studies, they found they were completely wrong - people with childhood trauma, regardless of their military success, were multiple times (4-6x odds ratios) more likely to develop PTSD, (re-)start smoking, or misuse substances.
It's a neat narrative: go through hardship + come out the other side = better coping skills / more productivity. However, humans are complex and often fragile.
I accept the argument that a person who has experienced more hardships has accomplished more to reach that same point. That could be justified if your hiring principles are "who has earned this spot more". It doesn't necessary follow that their trajectory has a steeper slope from the point of hiring.
Clearly the person is not less resilient in the stories I gave. They made it to the finish line. They have already demonstrated years of resilience and dedication to a goal. Why would you expect that to change so suddenly?
You've also created a strawman. I never mentioned childhood trauma or much at all of early life aside from growing up poor. Whatever trauma that may have caused certainly did not interfere with their accomplishments to date.
> The US military used to think successful soldiers with childhood trauma...
This is not war nor the battlefield. Let's see studies about people and their career success.
> Usually only at a very superficial level. Enough to comply with the law
Any objective evidence to support this? My experience has been the opposite - people care deeply about being objective, in order to make better hiring decisions.
Here is a meta-analysis of "every available field experiment of hiring discrimination against African Americans or Latinos".
Just a simple name change on a resume can result in discrimination. Lots of it.
"On average, white applicants receive 36% more callbacks than equally qualified African Americans (95% confidence interval of 25–47% more), based on random-effects meta-analysis of data since 1989, representing a substantial degree of direct discrimination"
> people care deeply about being objective, in order to make better hiring decisions.
They really don't. It costs a lot of money to care deeply. Most companies optimize for rejecting too many candidates, looking for red flags as a time saver. This has been common practice for decades. They do it because there are usually a lot of applicants, and it's a cheap way to reduce the numbers quickly.
But it's even worse now. It's has been codified into job candidate filtering software. "Applicant Tracking System software is used by 75% of US employers to help filter job candidates".
"If an applicant's work history has a gap of more than six months, the resume is automatically screened out"
That's the opposite of caring deeply about being objective for who is the best candidate. You are making decisions based on very superficial information.
It does seem objective at first. Because it is objectively looking at one factor and making a yes or no decision. But that's exactly what I meant when I said at only a superficial level. You aren't objectively screening for the best candidates. Instead you are objectively screening for a signal, and not even a good signal. You need to screen humans, not signals.
The study suggests there is discrimination, it does not speak to anyone's intent. You are doing a lot of psychological projection on a large, diverse group of people whom you have never met nor spoken to about what they care about.
You are judging intention based on results. Those are not the same thing.
If you are discriminating that early in the process and with such high numbers, and with no improvement, you can't be said to care deeply. That's called lip service.
You said that they care deeply. You are doing a lot of psychological projection on a large group of diverse people. I proved the results are concerning. Prove they simultaneously care but have somehow managed to make no improvements in decades in the results. Lacking proof on your side, we'll have to judge based on results.
40 applications and 2 resume consultations later and no interview even offered. Meanwhile, some guy you run circles around in real world programming/business experience is 8 for 10. My white classmates noticed this before I did because I’ve just accepted it as part of life.
> HR typically wants their diversity numbers up badly so if you're gay
You're right, I always fail that interview question where they ask me what my sexual preference is and I say women... ...Seriously? you are just making stuff up now.
Which is demonstrably true; they're not hiring from the general population they're hiring largely from universities, and you can look at those universities and see there's already an imbalance in demographics of the available job candidates.
Do you mean by "we know we’re not what companies are looking for even with fancy CS degrees", simply that they're looking for identically qualified people that aren't black? If so, I'm extremely sorry to hear this, and disgusted that its happening. I can't actually think of anyone I worked with who'd knowingly treat or value a black colleague or interview candidate any differently, but maybe that's white blindness on my part, maybe its been going on and I didn't notice. In case this is helpful info, I know that Capital One tech has robust D&I policies and seeks to redress the balance. They sponsor an organisation called "Blacks in Tech". Their senior management seem to say it makes good business sense and provides competitive edge, to reward talented people who happen to be black, whom other employers are too stupid/racist to consider hiring and/or promoting quick enough once hired. so, if I were a black American looking for a job in tech I'd look at Capital One if struggling to get anywhere with other employers.
>that they're looking for identically qualified people that aren't black?
You see this here on HN all the time, articles about "how we do hiring" that start out with "I would only hire someone who I'd want to get coffee with." Which, to me at least, makes it sound like the person is looking to hire friends/drinking buddies that also have technical skills, not employees. It's a signal that the person is looking for "their type of people."
It's so acceptable to hire this way that people feel comfortable opening publishing that, under their own name, as something they are proud of.
I'm not even black (but I am a woman, I grew up poor, and I'm on the older side) and constantly reading about hiring procedures like that makes me feel like I'm very much not welcome.
Seems to me 100% their loss, if they don't want you! I'm white and male, but the wrong side of 40. Occasionally I've faced ageist "humour". But anywhere that's unfriendly to older people, women, non-white people, would IMHO suck to work even if you were young, white, male etc. Wouldn't wanna work with prejudiced people even if they think I'm "like them". Working in a diverse inclusive team is far more joyful, as well as more productive. BTW in my current workplace, there's a lady who's both older and black. She's awesome at her job, has a unique set of skills built up over many years. IMHO she's irreplaceable as well as a fun nice person to work with. So thank goodness we don't have something that'd have made her feel unwelcome....
Capital One is a great place to work. When it comes to corporate behemoths it doesn't have much competition that I know of. Very supportive culture that is obsessively focused on improving teams, the culture, and processes.
"I’m a black college student now and every conversation with friends back home includes some mention of dropping out because it’s not for us as well."
I can only recommend that you have to base life decisions on your own experience, because it can differ dramatically.
I have an experience from which I have drawn some conclusions - I am an immigrant and many of my co-immigrants are convinced that the locals dislike them, they feel they are being treated unfairly, etc.
I was unable to square my experience with their's: surely they can't be imagining things, but at the same time I cannot be just magically lucky. Some of them are older generation, maybe things were different back then. Maybe, when they face difficulties they are more likely to attribute it to discrimination. Maybe some behavioural stereotyoes play a role - I don't know.
For a while I wanted to try a 'secret shopper' experiment, create two fake Linkedin profiles, identical except background- try applying for jobs with them. Never got round to it.
A study has been made with your experiment here in Canada. The result was that the white-sounding profiles got more interviews based solely on last name, no picture needed.
> For a while I wanted to try a 'secret shopper' experiment
We did something like this! But we swapped slightly reworded resumes and the response ratio leaned even further in the white classmate’s favor. We just laughed, as if we couldn’t believe that what we half-joked about actually happened. I’m long past the point of being sad. I guess that’s life.
> “We know we’re not what companies are looking for”
Why do you say that? Because I can tell you as an employee of a FAANG company that you are exactly what these companies are looking for. They’ve got serious diversity issues - especially among Black men (not assuming a gender here just facts) - and they are desperate to balance themselves out.
I mean that as an encouraging statement. You ARE who is being looked for. Be confident in that and use it to your advantage.
> some mention of dropping out because it’s not for us as well
That is cultural transition & stereotype threat first-generation college attendees face, regardless of race.
> When you see people with equivalent resumes already coasting by in the job market because they could get their last names and LinkedIn photos past the screening and into an interview it’s hard to believe that’ll change post-graduation
If anything, they are probably getting introductions/doors opened for them by friends & family. It sounds like you are probably applying for some of the most competitive positions in the world, Google and many other places have less than 1% acceptance rate for interns. Harvard is an order of magnitude less selective. It sucks, but don't let struggling to get an internship get you down.
I can't speak for your personal experience, but at least on paper, companies are begging for more diverse hires, even blatantly admitting to breaking the Civil Rights act to do so.
>students who are a member of a group that is historically underrepresented in the technology industry will receive priority in the selection process. This group includes women, ethnic minorities and students with disabilities.
Unfortunately, once you’re giving “priority” to such a broad group of people (e.g. every permutation of gender, whatever you consider ethnic, and ability minorities) it becomes easy to say one thing and continue doing another.
The companies that have to virtue-signal do so because you wouldn’t notice if they didn’t tell you. I’d prefer they skip that and hire who they want without the pretense, and if that’s not me, fine, but please be honest.
I think your comment, and the responses to it help advance my point: there are a bunch of narratives out there that are not wholly rooted in reality (or out of date in your case). These can have detrimental effects.
There are certainly black individuals who would pursue a career in tech, if not for the (perhaps earned) perception that tech is hostile towards black people. Things have changed, but the narrative hasn’t, and that is doing real damage.
I’m trying to say the same sort of thing applies to white men and college—just there being a perception of college campuses being hostile to them is going to prevent many of them from going. And people will be hurt by that, in one way or another.
> I’m a black college student now and every conversation
> with friends back home includes some mention of
> dropping out because it’s not for us as well.
Naive question, I don't live where you live. But who is the "us" that your friends speak of? Black people? Black Americans? Black people from a specific subculture?
And finally, what determines that college is not for the "us" your friend refers to? Culture? Post-graduation job prospects? At least from his perspective.
One of the things everyone hears from some cousin, uncle, aunt, brother, sister, parent, or friend when they don’t get selected for something these days is some form of, “oh you didn’t get it because you are insert [black, white, latinx, male, female, young, old, etc].” This comment is about them not you.
Avoid this line of thinking. It may be true, or it may not be. You will probably never know. What I do know is this is an unhelpful and defeatist line of thinking. Instead prove the haters wrong.
I can't speak to hiring practices at larger companies, but if my experience working at smaller companies is any indication I think things might be shifting. At my last job, they were focused on hiring for diversity to create a more desireable workplace and improve retention. I think this mindset is starting to become more commonplace, so you may find that you're no longer in such a bad position once you graduate.
As far as I can tell, Big Tech has terrible numbers for diversity and they are tripping over themselves trying to bring the numbers up. I really, truly believe that non-white, non-male candidates are not going to suffer if they can get the resume on the table.
Where are you and your friends getting your information from? If you're in the US or Europe, IMO the market for programmers has never been better. It may be a struggle to get the first job but if you persevere, it will get easier.
You must have bad information because FAANG companies compete over hiring black software engineers. They want to get their numbers up and there aren’t many to hire.
The top 5 have recruited over a million people between 2000 and 2018. That's an average of about 50,000 new recruits per year. Not all of those are in engineering of course, and those are global numbers, but still they hire tens of thousands of engineers every year. Here in the UK local software companies constantly complain that the cream of every year's CS grads emigrate to the US.
Doing the rough math, Google employs about 80,000 engineers today. Generously assuming the other FAANGs employ as many engineers, you get about 400,000 engineers. There are about 26 million software engineers in the world.
So that's 1.5% of all engineers. And that's being very generous. The real number is surely below 1%. No surprise that the most desirable companies hire the top 1%.
(Happy for someone to correct my numbers and the resulting percentage - it's based on a few Google searches).
Unless my numbers are way off, it's safe to say that over 99% of engineers in the world are not working at a FAANG. I stand by my claim that we should not be using what happens at FAANGs as reliable anecdotal evidence of the interview experience for most candidates.
A charitable (and, I think, reasonable) reading would be that the poster used FAANG as a representation of the overall trend in tech. FAANG are what the rest of the industry aspires to be, after all.
How many CS jobs are even in the "the industry" though? Home Depot, Walmart, and Nestle are examples of massive companies that do not aspire to be Facebook or anything like it, but who hire lots of software engineers. Most companies are not tech companies, although a handful of tech giants have done very well.
What's "tech?" Large VC funded B2C companies get a lot of press and are most well known but I'd imagine most software engineering jobs are either at "non-tech" companies or companies that provide B2B services.
It's not as extrem for me, but I was told by HR that all female/non-white applicants had to move automatically to the phone screen step, regardless of the resume.
I personally do count them as "non-white" when reviewing applications. Our DE&I group only reports "white vs non-white" and "males vs females" ratios, so I assume they are considered "asians" and lumped into "non-white".
That really makes no sense if the goal is to increase “minority” representation. In my experience at BigTech Indian and Chinese applicants outnumbered white by at least 2:1.
Our application form has a required field for LinkedIn profile, so we use the picture/name. If there is no way to make a guess we just treat it as a normal application and review the resume.
>It’s like if I’ll have to sell sneakers to make ends meet after college anyways
Just for what it's worth, I (not black, but from a different group that is not looked upon kindly by HR types) took the route of EEE Degree -> PhD (dropped out) -> Software Engineer at Relatively Elite company (not FAANG, but about as good as we have in Melbourne, AU) -> running eCommerce businesses from home (selling used video games on eBay as well as a USB oscilloscope I designed as a student, mostly through Amazon).
If you're smart and skilled, you can make an absolute killing doing something that stoners or less intelligent people do to "get by", and at the same time spend massive amounts of quality time with your (probably at this stage future) wife and kids.
If you want to have a chat about it, feel free to shoot us an email (see profile). But long story short, even if you're locked out of the traditional job market it doesn't mean you should give up on developing your skills or give up hope. Capitalism provides, man.
Both can be true. The number you really need is what percentage of black people with a CS degree end up actually getting a job offer.
And highly publicized diversity efforts by tech giants does not necessarily reflect what the average company in Ohio is doing. The news is not the data, so yeah, you really do need more evidence than "it's what I heard".
I'm sorry, I'm black and this is not my experience. I will not bother posting evidence either, because why does evidence matter when you already know something to be true, right?
I had enough EE in college to change a light switch without burning the house down.
However, that book-learnin' fell apart when confronted with troubleshooting a strangely wired room, and I got very polite while asking him over to bail me out.
These fellows eschewing the ivory tower, where being of European extraction and bearing a Y-chromosome on the college campus is an indictment, are going to trade schools and will make fat piles of cash repairing plumbing.
Hopefully, they are gracious with all the Grievance Studies majors who are standing by to condescend in their direction.
EE programs tend to focus on electronics, not electrical systems. But learning how house wiring works is a simple book away. But be careful - unlike electronics, house electrics can kill you.
On the other hand, electricians have weird gaps in their knowledge. If I ask them to do something slightly out of the ordinary, this becomes apparent. For example, none of them understand inductive coupling, or even know what it is. When I ask them to do certain things to avoid inductive coupling, they give me this indulgent smile, and do what I ask, although it's clear they don't understand why.
I eventually wound up doing the low voltage wiring myself, because I simply couldn't explain to them why you don't run low voltage wires through the same holes as the A/C wires. One of them tried to run a 12VDC wire in 25 feet of conduit with a 120VAC wire.
They also simply did not understand how generators worked, and botched up the wiring for mine.
It's the same with roofers. They have no idea what galvanic corrosion is, and will invariably use the wrong nails for anything metal.
I find this with everything. You have to become an expert at everything if you want it done right. Maybe it's because the truly expert help is generally too expensive.
Examples:
- Taxes/Pensions - if you just rely on your accountant then they'll do the bare minimum and you'll miss out
- Energy company - we're rolling out smart gas/elec meters in the UK. There is an old type (smets1) and a new type (smets2). You don't want to be stuck with the old type but the company had no idea which type they were installing. (I ended up with the old type)
- Lawyers - We're constantly having to chase ours and highlight things to them to make progress
- Doctors - If I haven't done my research then they invariably try to fob me off (maybe this is a UK nationalised healthcare thing)
I could go on but the crux is that the average professional does the bare minimum to move you along. I'm not old enough to say if it's always been like this but it has been my observation over my decade of adulthood. If it's a new thing then maybe it is partly to blame for the anti-vax and lack of faith in experts.
This is an interesting observation and matches with my experience. I'd add:
1) There's a race to the bottom with services in terms of pricing. For example, NHS GPs have strict time limits within which to provide a particular service. These time limits have reduced over the years and so individual doctors are capable of providing a better service but are can't given the constraints. People rarely are willing to pay more for a service unless they know that the quality level will be higher. With services, it is not clear that a higher price will translate to higher quality.
2) Most services are not chosen based on quality. They are chosen based on perception, brand, reviews, pricing and a whole host of other things. Often the most profitable services are the ones who can manipulate these variables best rather than the ones who actually provide a great service. If there is a sole accountant who is fantastic at accounting but poor at marketing and review collection then they are going to struggle and may end up joining a firm who constrains their time such that can only provide the minimum viable service.
I agree totally agree on both points. I also think though there is an opacity element, If you can’t see/will know if these service providers did a good “quality” job corners are habitually cut.
E.g. if I have a new button that’s been sewn on a jacket, or have my house painted, I can easily see if the right button was used, or if spots were missed while painting. However if I take my car in for an oil change, I don’t really know if the right grade of oil and an OEM filter was used, nor do I really care to recheck my accountants work on my taxes (as long is it roughly pencils to what I expected).
I blame the extreme penetration of capitalism everywhere. We've created a culture where everyone thinks like a business and looks to do the minimal effort for the maximal compensation. If you don't do this, "you're dumb" (and, unfortunately, maybe there's some truth to this).
In a culture obsessed with looking for exploitation opportunities at every corner, what do we expect? Everyone is running so "lean" and "efficiently" that anything beyond the lowest cost options can hinder you. Are you getting ROI, or diminishing returns and if you are getting diminishing returns, then that's now viewed as waste and a poor path to choose.
Capitalism has been great at motivating people to innovate and create but the current state of capitalistic systems, I say, isn't healthy for humanity. We need to acknowledge this and fix perverse incentive structures across the board (that doesn't mean destroying the system, simply fixing it). Much of what you're seeing these days used to be used in arguments for capitalistic systems against socialist systems--what really seems to have happened is that we've just traded who we want to give power to. Instead of those who tower over government systems in an authoritarian manner in socialist systems, we seek business leadership who... tower over us in an authoritarian manner.
One reason the US had been so fantastic is that we had a government and economic system that forced capitalistic ideals to compete with socialistic ideals. We had government services inspired by socialist systems that kept capitalistic drivers from going off the rails into too competitive of states with social safety nets to protect us. Meanwhile, to avoid the stagnant systems you see in prior socialist systems, we had capitalism provide incentives to motivate people to work, to do better for themselves and improve their lives and therefor those around them. Now, we seem to have mostly swept away socialist ideals (competition in policy simply isn't there anymore), capitalistic policy has won, and we're witnessing what unconstrained capitalism looks like. It's less value creation and more wealth extraction.
If you're a capital holder, it looks pretty good. My investments that I simply threw money at have grown beyond belief--without any sort of effort on my behalf--it's astounding to think how much money I earned doing nothing. It's an interesting situation because I still work and get paid fairly well, but when I look at my investment portfolio I can't help but think I'm cheating because asset growth well beyond inflation just appear in my accounts, meanwhile, at my day job, everything has grown more and more demanding without equal compensation.
It's an interesting time and I hope we course correct this nonsense before I get too old.
Looked at another way, capitalism has commoditized services that were historically unobtainable by certain classes for all intents and purposes. So now you have mediocre servicing at prices everyone can afford. You can still get expert services if you can truly pay for it, and that hasn't changed.
Making something a "human right" doesn't make it immune to the rules of scarcity. Expert services are scarce, which is why they cost more, even in socialist/communist countries. Communism is, after all, just state-owned capitalism. :) People still get rich in communist countries, experts still get outsized reward, it's just that the opportunities to get rich are constrained to the bureaucrats, and the outsized reward will either come from the system or be facilitated by a black market.
Personal story: moved into a EU country and tried to import my car tax-free as personal property. Went to a customs agency because apparently you don't talk to customs directly, you go through one of those. They had me collect all sorts of documents, which took me months before it became evident that this type of car cannot be imported tax-free in the first place.
The stress from expecting people to take their responsibilities seriously has cost me many meaningful interpersonal relationships, not to mention innumerable brain cells. On the other hand, the work to achieve more self-sufficiency is alienating in its own right, and, depending on starting conditions, can twist a person into an unlikable mess.
Well put. When you become medium-level at all areas where you like tinkering, it’s hard not to get bitter about people who aren’t doing it correctly for you…
It's closer in meaning to "no one really knows what they're doing". Half-assing implies lack of effort. This expression implies lack of insight or direction.
If you're spending that much time doing all those things then maybe truly expert help is just expensive rather than too expensive.
There is no doubt though that people do better work when supervised and knowing what questions to ask an expert helps sets expectations about what level of work you will settle for.
This feels so true to me. I think this is the biggest reason that things feel so unfair to many average people. because the resources required to get good service in almost every meaningful endeavor are just totally unobtainable to people so you either make yourself an expert in everything or get screwed left and right.
This is starting to push me in the direction of off grid/ sustainable living just to minimize these dependencies
Your observation about gaps in knowledge is true for all trades, and is at least conceptually what separates trades or job skills training university education.
A good university program teaches very few hard skills, but you learn to reason about your field essentially from first principles. On the other hand, to do a mechanical job, you really need just the job skills, and the connection to cause and effect is almost irrelevant.
This is typically why university education is held up as a better key to long term career prospects, because of the adaptability rather than rote memorization.
University is supposed to teach you fundamental ideas that help you think about the world not hard skills. That’s why it’s called a university and not a boot camp.
Don't you have codes and license requirements for electricians and roofers? In my country, most of what makes electricianing harder than electronicsing is the rules. There are rules about how close you can put mains and low voltage wires, which your guy should have followed even if he didn't know why, rules about what parts of the house you can fix them to, or if they can be laid loosely or must be stapled to the framing, the spacing between the staples, how to pull a wire through a hole, where you can drill holes for wires, using a wrong colored wire with a sleeve on the end, etc. All the understanding of electrical engineering in the world won't have you knowing those rules.
The small subset of codes in my area that I personally looked at were significantly out of date and it was unlikely that they would be updated anytime soon. There are state codes which were out of date for a long time but they just recently updated. However there are also local codes which are not up to date. When they're not in direct conflict you need to follow both, if they are then technically the state should take precedence, but if you look into it then you'll find that the locality doesn't care and will fine you and it's up to you to defend it which will be expensive and you could still lose. The codes are only as good as the people maintaining them and it seems that the maintenance is not a priority. This was not for electrical - perhaps that one is given more attention.
And then you have old houses with all sorts of weird wiring and constraints and the contractor/electrician works around those and does things mostly to current code the best they can.
That's the thing with vocationals skills - they make you really good at understanding how something works or how to fix something without breaking something else, but beyond that range of problems and solutions, you need to talk to an engineer.
Not that vocational jobs are not important - clearly they add value and create employment.
I’m not saying that most people aren’t formula pluggers (and that’s a big problem) but, my first impression of that kind of card would be that’s it’s meant to be branding, not a tool. Someone is carrying around a piece of what they love.
Just out of curiosity (I don’t mean this to be a dig and don’t carry either cards), why are Maxwell’s Equations good but Ohm’s Law is an instant no-hire? How I remember the story is that, when Ohm published his equation, it came as a huge shock because no one was expecting it to be so simple. There’s a lot of beauty in that simplicity. Maxwell’s equations aren’t that complex but they aren’t exactly _linear_. Valuing complexity is an interesting hiring tactic but would probably be a great filter on younger engineers?
1. Ohm's Law is taught the first day of 4 years of an EE degree. Ohm's Law should be part of your soul, not something a cheat sheet is needed for.
2. The 3 versions of the formula are obvious to anyone who remembers high school freshman math. It's barely even algebra.
Carrying that cheat sheet signals you know neither electronics nor the most basic algebra.
Maxwell's Equations, however, get introduced in 2nd or 3rd year in college. You'll need a year (probably two) of calculus to even understand the notation. The equations unify the theories of electric fields and magnetic fields.
Only people who have studied Maxwell's Equations will even recognize them, so by putting them on a t-shirt you're signalling that you are an educated EE to other educated EEs. Other people won't even know what they are.
Then a smug physicist will walk by with either the the equations of quantum electrodynamics or Maxwell's equations in terms of differential forms on their t-shirt
Besides, EEs usually cheat by assuming a sinusoidal solution anyway.
Here in the US, the NEC specifies a one-foot separation for low voltage unless crossing at a perpendicular angle. Low voltage is generally a specialty, so a lot of electricians don’t know.
The bigger issue is that there are tons of electricians that never went through apprenticeships and who never picked up and read a copy of the code (which has major changes every three years). The result is a lot of cargo cult installation which may or may not actually be correct.
I built my house with union labor (union shop) and found the level of competence higher than was typical with jo the random contractor (of course there are exceptions, and for some jobs it doesn’t matter).
Likewise with the machine shop a few jobs ago: although we weren’t a union shop, for some jobs we hired contractors in for the union members produced better work, especially for the safety critical stuff.
I have no experience with unions outside the skilled trades — certainly there are many horror stories.
> built my house with union labor (union shop) and found the level of competence higher than was typical with jo the random contractor
So you built two homes, one with a well researched union labor group and one with a well researched contractor? Or is this just some BS elaboration based on comparing contractors you hired for small time shit with the big house job?
Excellent epistemic inquiry. I’ve owned homes for over 30 years, and have experience with hiring contractors for remodels. Also hired non-union contractors to do building work on offices over the years. And the company that had a machine shop? One of our channels was home construction and overall I was not impressed with the kind of work I encountered.
But to really get to your question: I started my 3-year home construction odyssey with a non-union contractor who had to be fired due to poor execution. The replacement was a union shop. That’s about as much A/B testing as one can get.
I find this is why the trades work best under a competent contractor who, while not an expert in all fields, brings together the necessary skills and experience to avoid gap defects.
I remember a conversation with a plumber in Cambridge, UK a few years ago. He was helping me pick out plastic pipes for a project. I asked "What material are these - are they HDPE? He gave me a weird look, and told me "They're plastic pipe!".
The same thing happened the next state over. At least this time, the electrician allowed me to explain it, and then did the low voltage wiring correctly.
> It's the same with roofers. They have no idea what galvanic corrosion is, and will invariably use the wrong nails for anything metal.
Maybe, they don't need to? These trades should have cheatsheets where they can check for certain scenarios - like the 2 described, and it would provide Do's and Don'ts?
If you run, say, the telephone wires through the same holes, they'll pick up a maddening 60 Hz hummmmmmmmmmm. You're screwed because when this is discovered, the house is finished, and it gets very very expensive to rewrite it.
The closer the low voltage wires are to the high voltage ones, and the longer the distance, the more hmmmmmmm they'll pick up.
This isn't the main reason running low and high voltage through the same conduit is not code compliant though.
The reason you don't mix low/high in the same raceway is because if exposed low/high voltage conductors come in contact with each other, the low voltage cable has a much higher chance of catching fire.
The AC voltage will induce noise onto the low voltage wire. That noise can be of a higher voltage then the low voltage and damage the equipment behind it.
This isn't the main reason running low and high voltage through the same conduit is not code compliant though.
The reason you don't mix low/high in the same raceway is because if exposed low/high voltage conductors come in contact with each other, the low voltage cable has a much higher chance of catching fire.
Electric fields are easy to shield against with a Faraday cage, but magnetic fields are a royal pain. You can use mu-metal shielding, but that's rather expensive and only reduces the magnetic field. Technically, if you wanted to entirely shield from magnetic fields, you'd need to surround the wire with a superconductor, but that requires liquid nitrogen/helium cooling that is out of the scope of most residential work.
In practice home LV wiring is rarely shielded, maybe with CAT6 as an exception. Things like speaker wire, doorbells, vacuum control wires, etc are not typically shielded.
Also the shield needs a low impedance return path to be effective.
I am a certified EE and have a MA of fine Arts (film). Living in Europe where I had to pay 350 Euros per semester (which included a public transport ticket for the whole province), I didn't have to make a choice between the two. I did both because I was interested in both.
After university I was well equiped to do freelancer work in my field and earned well.
I don't think this "you have to be hard or else you won't survive"-mentality in the US is very beneficial to its society as a whole. Ideally you want to live in a society where everybody is well educated, healthy, happy, friendly and so on. Maybe it is a naive idea, but I think this is more achievable if there is collective investment into those goals rather than internal economical warfare where everybody is a army of one, except for the big corporations who will happily milk a atomized, divided population.
Yet I am constantly amazed by how much some of you guys endure. I just wish you wouldn't have to.
> "you have to be hard or else you won't survive"-mentality
Europeans often have this opinion but I don't think it's an accurate reading of the issue. The issue is not that Americans work too hard, it's that this hard work is no longer actually amounting to anything. In the past, you could pay for college by working summers at the local restaurant. Today the average debt is $30K and you still won't get a decent job.
The article (and others) just show that American men are starting to put their efforts into places that do reward them; namely, the trades and entrepreneurship.
> The article (and others) just show that American men are starting to put their efforts into places that do reward them; namely, the trades and entrepreneurship.
Good point. I did not intend to argue otherwise. To go into trade is not an irrational reaction on an individual level — quite the opposite in fact. What I did argue however, was that making it hard for people to get a higher education is not a good thing for a society. Not good in the short term, because educated societes will make more informed decisions, and at the same time not a sustainable strategy for any western society that wants to play any role in the next century.
Having an educated society should be in the national interest just like having public roads or drinkable water is.
> accurate reading of the issue. The issue is not that Americans work too hard, it's that this hard work is no longer actually amounting to anything.
That was the American dream. This is a nice model to keep big numbers of people playing the lottery and bear a ton of stress, because they have the hope that one day they might win and then everything will pay off.
But even of you are one of the few lucky ones that wins you still live in a society where 90% are struggling and crushed. There may be people that enjoy being on top while everybody else suffers, but I personally would prefer being middle class in a society where nobody is poor over being a billionaire in a society where everybody is crushed. Maybe this is empathy, but maybe it is also just egoistic: I like to walk through my city and not see suffering, I like to walk through my country without having to fear being robbed, shot or angrily screamed at. I simply prefer living in a healthy, happy society where people help each other over living in one where everybody has to kick down to stay on top.
Not that that any nation achieved that goal, but there are certainly observable differences in tone between the industrial nations.
You have still missed my point. The American dream was an effective, real thing for a long period of time. Most Americans today are descendants of poor immigrants that worked hard and gave their children a better quality of life. This wasn’t “a lottery” and your characterization of it as such is both historically misinformed and just ideological in nature.
As I said, the issue is that this hard work no longer results in progress. The system has become broken. This is easily observable via a bevy of statistical measures like inequality and college costs.
I'm an American and agree completely. My concern is that this '90% struggling' is considered by too many to be a default, the desired state of things. This pops up over and over again in so many ways.
I think it leads to people drawing their distinctions, around who is superior and who is inferior, and then it leads to those people making an unnecessary logical jump and deciding that those inferior people need to be HURT or REMOVED… and we've seen all this before.
And they go from there to decide that anyone arguing, wishes to crown those inferior people as the kings, and hurt the superior ones, because that's the only way they can perceive anything anymore… and they just get hostile and paranoid we've seen all that before too.
I don't know how to convince them that seeking a civilized environment for all the people (without it being conditional on performance) produces the best societal result, through the widest possible range for SOME person of whatever description to excel.
It seems like there are a lot of people for whom, they're more than happy to throw away overall system performance because they're mad that anything lower-performing can even exist. They are PC builders so mad that RAM can't run as fast as L2 cache that they're all CPU and refuse to have any RAM installed. It's stark madness from my point of view.
People are not components in an engineered system. When you work with statistics it might appear that way, but people have a way of creating conflict and chaos when least expected. It is a fallacy to think that one need only set up the right societal structures and this problem will magically vanish.
Define 'problem' and why anybody would think the requirement was that it would magically vanish, else society does not count.
Society functions THROUGH conflict and chaos. It's like brownian motion, noise in circuitry: if you're trying to define an ideology where there's no more conflict, the most direct way is to define an enemy and then rally everyone to destroy it. And that is said to work for a thousand years but actually blows up within ten, leaving enormous wreckage and shame.
Better to design the fault-tolerant system that runs through conflict and chaos.
I hope you are not talking about people. We break bones, bump our heads, or lose too much blood and we are out of commission.
What you are talking about is a war-based society, a fault-tolerant system, with lots of redundancy, that runs through conflict and chaos. The last two decades were an experiment in that one.
> The article (and others) just show that American men are starting to put their efforts into places that do reward them; namely, the trades and entrepreneurship.
Call it toxic or not, there's a male drive toward autonomy. Joining corporations that are run by HR just isn't as attractive.
To clarify a bit...
42% of students graduate (undergraduate studies) without any debt.
And 78% of graduates have less than $30k in debt.
The numbers aren't great, but the majority of students finish with either zero debt or a very manageable amount of debt. There is a small fraction of students taking massive loans that skew the overall picture.
And bachelor degree holders continue to earn, on average, $1 million more than high school graduates over their career.
All that said, I agree college should be affordable without loans. Summer jobs, co-ops/internships, etc.
Agreed, there should be a threshold where people can get the minimum to live a normal life. Basic healthcare, a job with liveable wage, easy access to education etc...
However, there should be a playground for innovation as well.
Europe makes it so damn hard to innovate because of it's many laws. Ambitious people inevitably move to the US.
having a degree is no guarantee that you possess employable skills.
Germany is much better at shunting people away from university who are not qualified to be there. Generally, they go to trade schools and apprenticeships.
If you are a certified EE, you almost certainly paid for your own MA with your own taxes.
So I don't have a problem with the MA, but the framing of "life is wonderful in Europe" is missing the fact that the only theoretical upside is you had less choice.
How do exactly do you get from "I could afford to go to college for a STEM professional degree and an arts MA without any debt or financial stress" to "Less choice"?
If he? hadn't consumed the resources necessary to get the MA, he would still have paid the same amount of taxes - most of which will be subsidising other people.
But if paying the full cost, there would be a choice where down one path there is more money because less resources were consumed, and one that would be roughly equivalent.
I just want to point out that a MA in film was extremely cheap at one time. A friend of mine got one at a state school for about $5 grand in the early 1990s. The issue is that inflation and rising costs in the US have wildly diverged from real wages. People aren't going to college in the US because it isn't economically feasible. Meanwhile, all my European friends have PhDs which were subsidized by their native countries. The fact of the matter is that the US is not taking care of their citizens, and has failed an entire generation.
I determined I didn’t want to continue school around 17/18 for a variety of reasons. Some out of my own arrogance and some I still hold to this day. Because of this of course, I didn’t “set myself up” for school so to speak. Didn’t bother with managing good grades, taking standardized tests or building my portfolio with any of the academic or non academic line items schools typically look at.
Flash forward and I start to rethink the decision. I want to go back now, but I’ve attempted multiple times to investigate it and the numbers never work. Because I didn’t play my HS years correctly, the bureaucracy will not let me in, regardless of the things I’ve accomplished in the years since. Additionally the price is just so prohibitive, combined with the fact that I would get next to no aid and even a standard State school would be ridiculously expensive. These are just a handful of the issues though. Let’s not even bring up how I would need a simultaneously drop out of the workforce, suddenly turning the financial burden into Tuition/Books/Fees + everything needed to survive.
I’m really convinced that universities in the US do not want non traditional students at all. Obviously there are some programs that target them, but are often limited. I.e. you have to be part of the right demographic, be limited in the areas you can study. A notable state university near me offers over a dozen online Bachelors programs, but not a single “useful” degree, they’re all BA’s in subjects that people in HN mock. Other seem to cobble together “made up” degrees, which are bachelors that don’t have a traditional or on-campus equivalent and seem to be not particularly useful for employment in attempt to scam poorer, non-credentialed people out of their money.
I could still probably go back, but since I can not hack my way out of the bureaucracy or financial cost, majority of the value proposition would be completely dead by the time o could manage it.
Start with community college part time, get grades and take prerequisites, then apply to other programs. Spending two years at community college and then transferring to a 4 year college is pretty common as well if you want to attend full time, but part time is going to be easier.
I don’t know where you live or what you want to study, but if you focus on taking the coursework you need it becomes a lot easier. I’d suggest calling admissions departments as well, not trying to piece everything together yourself online. Feel free to email me if you want to share more information and I can give more specific and better researched suggestions.
The problem with part time is it adds significantly to the time cost. The attractiveness of a degree to me declined significantly if I won’t be able to complete it till my 30s. I can stomach the lost wages if education could be completes in a mostly standard time, but otherwise there’s already a very good case to be made for staying with what I do now.
Yeah, bit I am willing to pay more taxes if it benefits my environment. Because this is what I think it means to be part of a society. They made it possible for me to choose more or less free of economic pressure what I want to study, so me supporting them is only good and fair.
I mean, what is the goal of a good live? Extract as many resources from your surroundings as possible, kicking your competition down and then die in an slightly above average house? I want to live a good live and leave my environment in a better shape than I entered it in, because the two are not a contradiction.
There are upsides to living in a society where the average person is more well off, especially when those who have it hardest also have to struggle less. We are social animals living in a complex society, and no man is an island.
Edit: Of course, if you’re very well off and live somewhere that’s relatively stable, large gaps in equality might benefit you. That’s for a select few though.
Area, ethnic, cultural, gender, and group studies (I'm assuming "Grievance Studies" falls under this category), at least in the US, have been in steady decline since 2008, and even at their peak only accounted for 0.5% of majors (now just 0.3%). Even if you want to add in humanities in general that has gone from 3% to just above 2%
The idea that college campuses are ever more filled with people studying "useless" majors is a fiction. The largest areas of major concentration are business, biology, health professions, and engineering and all of these have been more or less growing for years.
There is this pervasive myth that most students in undergrad are having trouble transitioning to industry because they wasted their time studying their non-practical passion, but the data[0] clearly shows that the trends for the last decade have been increasing focus on career oriented practical majors.
I don't see where in your source the data paints that picture? Social sciences and history is 8%, family and human sciences is another few percent, journalism is also listed out separately, as is liberal arts and humanities... Maybe there are better sources that break things down per major so we can see the growth?
I really appreciate this kind of discussion: data driven, narrative free. I'm very sad to see that giving up facts for narratives accelerates the decline of the US.
A colleague of mine had a physics degree and decided to become an electrician. Took very little time to learn.
That's not to condescend on electricians, they clearly have a useful skill. And being able to certify a house pays a good few hundred pounds a day, nothing to sniff at.
But if you're used to looking at physical models, learning a few conventions and adding another model won't be terribly difficult.
I think a lot of people are actually better off doing that kind of work. There's a tangible output that is much easier to connect to purposefulness than if your job is mainly in the ideas realm. A cousin of mine that I grew up with is a carpenter and seems to cheerful all the time, now that he knows what his thing is. I grew up with him and it wasn't always so.
> I got very polite while asking him over to bail me out.
> all the Grievance Studies majors
So you're polite to those you find useful and insulting to people majoring in something you presumably disagree with? And assuming they will all be condescending to a plumber or electrician for some reason?
Perhaps you don't have to look quite so far away if you're looking to reduce the amount of condescending happening in the room you're standing in?
The piles of cash come at the expense of physical health. I can’t imagine being a labourer at 55.
I’m a registered nurse which is a weird hybrid of university-level knowledge (understanding pharm and patho) but also it is a physical trade (turning patients, providing personal cares, mental resilience). It has roots in being vocational with a push in the last 50 years to provide an academic background to turn it into a profession.
Floor nursing is the bread and butter of the profession, but it burns you quick. Older nurses, particularly in medical-surgical nursing, tend to take on less stressful 8 hour day shifts, end up as spinsters, or have a terrible home life that they’ve resigned into accepting.
I moved into a desk position in my mid 30s and can’t possibly imagine going back to the physicality of it all.
I can’t imagine it can be better for you physically or mentally to hunch over a desk for 8 hours a day in dead silence vs being on your feet, walking and talking to people.
There is a trade-off indeed. My overall quality of life improved.
I wore a fitness tracker then and now. I averaged about 10 km in a given shift, where as my daily total now is now closer to 5 or 6. However, now I have time and energy at the end of the day to do an actual physical activity instead of coming home like a limp noodle and taking the next day to recover.
Mentally, there is comradery that I absolutely miss. This is something really hard to explain unless you’re in it. When things got tough, the dark humour got us through. We took care of each others’ loved ones (at their family’s request). We demanded excellence from each other, and (rightfully) called out unsafe practice and supported staff as needed.
However, my home life suffered. It was fine at first as my partner is also a nurse so there was a mutual understanding. However, it started to wear on me when I had kids. I’d come home and my kids would be asleep/at school/daycare, so I’d have missed out on a day’s interaction. I realized that they’re only little once and no job in the world is worth missing out on them.
> However, that book-learnin' fell apart when confronted with troubleshooting a strangely wired room, and I got very polite while asking him over to bail me out.
This feels very much like the "astronomy/telescope" argument.
Get in early. Get in a union. 25-30 years to retirement in most unions. You don't want to be 60, and still in construction.
The test is easy, but figure 1000-2000 guys are taking the test too, so you need to get most of the questions right to get in. An oral interview counts for 1/2 the hiring process.
Just say you love working with your hands--love unions, but understand the needs of the contractors too.
Remember it's construction. You're around guys all day long. It's brainless work, and you will never have to act cheery when the owner's spoiled kid comes to work.
I do not recommend non-union construction at all.
Then again---hide in school for a long time. I loved college. It was cheaper 25 years ago though, and not that fun, but much better than any job I've had.
I think that's exactly how racism works right? You segregate people by how they look like and you make them believe that because how they look like and their origins they are less important then the others. Kind of funny how we humans think: "let's correct a mistake repeating it over and over again".
When one of progressives guiding philosophies is “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” then this is exactly the plan. It’s all in their texts and one only has to read them to see plainly the type of policy they work towards.
I think it's pretty clear from the full text that he's not advocating for racism against past racists or their offspring (which, intentional or not, is what your use of the quote makes it sound like).
He's advocating for "anti-racism" which claims there is no such thing as "not racist" policy, only racist policy and anti-racist policy. But he jumps through hoops to redefine racism so that it can suit his argument that "not racist" doesn't exist. That if you don't consider race in literally everything then you are racist, by his definition. This is in direct opposition to the Civil Rights act of 1964:
"Since the 1960s, racist power has commandeered the term “racial discrimination,” transforming the act of discriminating on the basis of race into an inherently racist act. But if racial discrimination is defined as treating, considering, or making a distinction in favor or against an individual based on that person’s race, then racial discrimination is not inherently racist. The defining question is whether the discrimination is creating equity or inequity."
I think the redefining racism you mention is simply pointing out, at a high level, that one law does not erase injustice ingrained into power systems that were instructed by racism for literally hundreds of years, or the effects those systems have had on the targets of this racism and their offspring (things like generational wealth accumulation), and everyone else subject to those systems.
The other thing is the idea that, for those of us growing up in various segments of society that are affected by the above, our very mechanism of thought was generated by this system, and that affects how we think about and perceive these systems (and everything else).
I believe he's simply advocating for being conscious of the above two facts, when examining these systems and reforming them (and of course when teaching the history of these systems). To ignore race and racism as if it never happened is to allow all of that ingrained racism to perpetuate (of systems and of thought). All of this sounds pretty reasonable to me, but that may be due to my particular experience.
That said - I'm no expert, I've only read the linked passage so far, though I've now ordered the book and will start reading it tonight. I'll refrain from commenting further here (I think we're pretty off-topic already). Thanks for the discussion!
In the linked article, for lower income groups white men trail black men for college admissions. (Let alone black women.)
You can't always unequivocally state that white people are privileged over non-whites in every circumstance. Obviously it's going to be true in many cases, but it can't always be just assumed.
It's not as off-topic as you might think as critical theory covers a wide range of things.
One of the biggest issues with Kendi and similar works (of which there are many in the academic world) are they paint a false dichotomy and they frame themselves as the only legitimate response to historical racism, etc. That is, anti-racism is the only way to combat "white supremacy". It's illiberal in this regard (and in fact, the entire body of critical theory is not only skeptical to western liberalism but actively attacks it as "the tools of the oppressor") and I hope you find his remedies as totalitarian and insane as I do. For instance, I don't think a "Department of Anti-Racism" which is staffed by "formally trained anti-racists" and not appointed by elected officials with the authority to "clear" all local, state, and federal policies to ensure they are "anti-racist" is a good idea. And to be equipped with "disciplinary tools" to punish non-compliance...
Just so you know, chalk me up as an 'anti-woke' leftist. Which might mean "Economist(TM) centrist".
I can be in support of anti-systemic-racism actions that do not act on an individual level. I can support universal healthcare, higher income equality and whatnot, without the binary race worldview that Kendi puts out.
Yes you can - you'd be a "Western Liberal", or "Liberal Scientist" or whatever else we want to name the philosophy of thought that began with the Enlightenment. And being a "leftist" in that is 100% consistent with that.
We tend to refer to "liberals" as people on the left but in general a liberal is anyone who is consistent with liberal beliefs which include a fair amount of "conservatism" as well. However, there's quite a few folks on the right that are as illiberal as the progressives are on the left.
Read “How to be an Anti-Raciat” by Ibram X Kendi. It was a top selling book last year and he is a leading figure of the progressive left. His academic work is cited heavily in other progressive academic literature.
There's an interesting dynamic here where imo the silent majority of progressives don't buy his approach and think it's counterproductive, but any lone soul who says so is called out, which side are you on here anyways.
So this guy gets to represent himself as a spokesman for the movement and nobody really wants to contradict it under their real name.
Perhaps, but I think it’s often less a matter of being afraid of calling extremists out, and more of what I heard someone once refer to as “sane-washing”. Progressives hear extremist views and say “when they say X, what they really are saying is Y. No one actually wants X”, when in reality that’s exactly what extremists want and it gives them cover to continue to push the Overton window until it’s no longer an extremist view. The above exchange is a perfect example.
He isn't a lone wolf or something though. Critical Theory covers not only race (as in this case) but gender, sexuality, disability and fat studies, and all types of "social justice" scholarship. They all come from Postcolonial Theory (essentially deconstructing Western thought and Western Liberalism) which has had a massive influence on all of these as they have adapted them.
From bell hooks and Kimberle Crenshaw (intersectionality) into leading theories on feminist and racial thought - this is the progressive and academic left. It is the leading thought in every elite university. And you can't run away from it and say "us silent majority progressives...." - a progressive is either this or they aren't progressive by today's standard. It is a social force that is trying to get inside of everything it can, from unrelated academic scholarship (look at what's in modern STEM curricula) as well as corporate America and now elite high schools.
My advice is to choose Liberalism without identity politics and reject this school of thought as illiberal, totalitarian, and harmful.
(For what it's worth, the entire scholarship of critical theory isn't all awful. There's good things in there and the identification of many societal problems is probably right. However, it isn't unique to them and their solutions for these problems are awful and regressive.)
Really, from what I can see all of current progressivism is compatible with his approach.
The silent majority of people who would have called themselves progressives a decade ago are silent because they are silenced and called racists or just right-wing if they question the new orthodoxy.
Ergo, the people you are referring to as a silent majority are no longer included as progressives.
If all of my policy preferences code as progressive but I think Kendi and the white fragility lady are jackasses, what does that make me then under your definition?
Charitably, cognitively dissonant and more harshly, a useful idiot some would say. I’d assume an egalitarian person who means well and has started to become suspicious of the more illiberal aspects of progressive motivations.
“Useful idiot” is a term coined back in the day to describe people who unwittingly spread the propaganda of communists without really understanding the ultimate goals. In this case being a progressive while disagreeing with the leading ideas of the movement.
And no it doesn’t mean a vote for Trump. It means not supporting candidates that parrot this type of rhetoric and to not support causes/movements that are a part of it. FWIW Trump did ban critical race theory from being brought into federal offices and Biden quickly reinstated it under the guise of “learning to be nice to each other” - which it isn’t. Biden, in this case, I believe is a useful idiot for propagating their propaganda, mistaking it for harmless “diversity training”. There’s a big difference!
I think that the issue goes both ways. Modern conservatives have adopted a strategy of ignoring or exploiting discrimination and inequality. So if someone cares about addressing those issues, then the current progressives are the only game in town.
> So if someone cares about addressing those issues, then the current progressives are the only game in town.
If you believe in the approach of Kendi and DiAngelo, they are the only game in town.
If you believe Kendi and DiAngelo’s approach is counterproductive then supporting modern progressives is acting against the very issues you care about.
You don’t have to make a choice of which foot to shoot yourself in. You can simply not fire.
There are plenty of more moderate political voices, even within the parties. You can support them and you can denounce the groups whose policies you dislike.
Modern progressives are only in the ‘game’ because people support them. If you don’t like what they represent, you can stop.
> Modern conservatives have adopted a strategy of ignoring or exploiting discrimination and inequality
Are you saying that conservatives today are more likely to engage in "exploiting discrimination and inequality" than conservatives yesterday? Or what did you mean by "modern"?
"Narrative" makes it sound like there's nothing behind. The extreme cost of college - and living in general, rents/home ownership, etc - and the decreasing edge it gives to owners of degrees isn't a fabrication by any stretch.
It's easier to think people are being misled than to think people are taking different decisions because their reality is actually different.
Is it a "narrative" that college isn't it worth it anymore or is that largely based in fact in the US? Especially when it comes to specific degrees that don't have a demand in the workplace. The cost of higher education in the US has financially crippled millions. And trade jobs pay well for far less education costs. Doing a cost / benefit analysis would seem the wisest choice.
The bigger problem to me is that with such a high cost for university education, our future electricians won't have one. Whereas in Europe they very possibly might. I know which society I prefer to live in and it's not the one where people are less educated.
What narrative about uniform privilege? Can you give some sources?
I've also never heard privilege explained as making life "just easy". I've heard just for example that life can still be hard but your skin color is not one of the things making your life hard.
I'd be interested in reading these narratives that are so different from the narratives I've read about privilege.
I don't know. I think living in a society where most people don't do any meaningful work and are exposed to just theoretical academic style education till they are 24-25 isn't good either. I don't think it's a good use of anyone's time to sit in a chair and look at the whiteboard for 15-16 best years of your life.
Being a white male, anecdotally there is more peer and cultural pressure to care about sports, cars, tv, eating tons of meat, and drinking then there is to succeed at school. And for a few decades now a major political party has been bolstering anti-science and anti college messages.
It is unsurprising less men are finishing college in the face of that culture.
While there’s going to be many causes, the aforementioned seem more important than a message of privilege.
Is it entirely false though? What benefit does a college degree in sociology does to a person (and even broader society) when the person will likely be in over 100k+ debt?
The right question is - why does it have to cost so much when it's possible to teach the same exact thing for ~3k USD in eastern Europe :) And then these developers come to USA or western Europe and it doesn't seem that they are performing badly :)
No way. Being white is definitely a leg up. Well, at least for me, a white guy, no college degree. Life is much easier. I don't think there is any support missing for us, that actually sounds hilarious. We need to work on lifting others up.
Based on the number of "affirmative-action" initiatives that I see all over the US, in many tech-companies (I don't know about other fields), I'd say that being a women, or black, is definitely a huge plus to get your foot through the door, with many recruitment programs blatantly saying they are only for minorities, which sounds to me like pretty much segregation in reverse, but that indeed seems to be the agenda of some leftists.
I'm a white guy and I bootstrapped my career with no degree and little college (dropped out of community college) by simply padded my resume doing some basic contracting gigs for friends and their professional networks and parlayed that into full-time work. I'm now an engineering manager at a unicorn.
I will also say that for all this talk about how easy Blacks and women have it, I don't buy it, and I think people spinning tales about how "My company only hires Blacks and women" aren't involved in technical hiring. We are desperate for experienced talent and are under tremendous pressure to build an effective team. We don't have the luxury to be picky about demographics. And my team isn't unique: It's the same story from my peers both inside and outside my company. Likewise, the pipeline itself doesn't have very many women or Black candidates from what I can see, so even these people got automatic interviews I doubt it would change team demographics significantly. And finally: if this is indeed "segregation in reverse" (which it's not: it would just be segregation with the roles reversed), where are these tech companies where the majority of their engineers aren't White or Asian men?
This. Everywhere I have been as a team lead has had issues hiring. I don't remember ever having two desirable candidates in the pipeline at the same time and getting one felt like striking gold. We didn't give two shits what your gender or race was.
You must not have a lot of women friends in tech to say this, all of my women friends in tech have had one hell of a bad time breaking in. The default attitude of recruiters and interviewers when they interview a women is to assume they know nothing.
It is illegal, but that doesn't stop people from doing it. In the US, things like this have to go to court to actually be struck down, and there haven't been any sympathetic plaintiffs suing over these laws yet.
When "positive discrimination" makes it before a judge, it usually gets stuck down.
Yea, but we got no problem getting to that door. Minorities might get pulled over and get a knee on the neck. Women might get assaulted on their way. Being a white dude, I'll get a taxi there, no problem. So if I have to try harder to get the position, pretty understandable, since I got the head start.
Not saying life is easy for anyone, saying it's so much easier being a white dude with a nice hair cut. You know I used to be so broke I had to "beg" for gas money at a gas station to get to my first day at a new job, first person I asked gave me a $20. Life. is. easier.
You've been reading too much news. That doesn't happen to normal people in real life. Blacks have a huge disadvantage of poor upbringing by their own family and community and women have a huge "disadvantage" of not wanting to be a computer programmer.
No, I just get outdoors and live with real people, and see it myself. I've been pulled over in a car with two other dudes, and watched the darkest skin guy get the crap kicked out of him because they thought he is a gangster, while we had to sit on a curb and watch. Where I went to school, counselors tried to get me to take AP classes, which I didn't want, while my friends with darker skin, and better grades, had to go on the wait list. I lived in an area where 13 year old pregnancies were regular. Guys raping chicks while they are passed out drunk in high school was regular. Jumping the gay kids were regular. I got to watch it, empathize with my friends, but I never had to bear the burden. My burden was folks like you, denying there are any problems because you are so safe, can't fathom life being different, even when it's across the street.
> normal people
Point exactly, when you say normal, you are thinking of white dude America. And yes, this does not happen to them.
> the darkest skin guy get the crap kicked out of him
On his way to a job interview? And also for many of your other darker skinned friends on their way to job interviews? And your female friends on their way to theirs? I'm not denying it happened in some isolated cases, but that it causes normal people to not get to "the door". It didn't even happen to normal people among your "dark-skinned" friends.
I think "to the door" might be a metaphor for going through life up to that point, but I like you literal interpretation better, like everyone in those stories specifically faces atrocities ONLY on the way to an interview. Because if you get shitbagged on a Tuesday and have the interview Wednesday, then really, it's an equal playing field.
Again, with the normal, who are you talking about? People are complex, all people, normal is your perception of others, check yourself.
This is what the science actually says. Black disfunction is attributed to culture spread from adults to children. Black mothers, for example, criticize their children more often than they praise them, but the reverse is true for white mothers. That's just an example of the kind of cultural effect that can be included - I'm not sure if that one specifically has been shown to be causative of lifelong disadvantage.
You want researchers to not attempt to identify the causes of black social problems? Why's that? So you can promote your own ideologically motivated causes without any bothersome science getting in the way?
Women have the disadvantage that if they reveal their gender online, they're barraged with sexual harassment and even death threats for nothing but being a woman. Do you suppose this treatment encourages curiosity in computing?
Can you hear yourself though? Can you put yourself in the shoes of a young white man? They are recipients of this message on a regular basis. When many of them end up having a difficult time despite being told how easy they have it, and how if they received help that would just be resources being taken away from less privileged people, it's easy for them to think something's wrong with themselves, to feel unwanted, depressed, and to end up taking the route outlined by the article.
The examples in the article tell a different story. Mr. Briles could easily go to college if he wanted to. It's just that he would rather stay at home and "invest" in cryptocurrencies and make music, and his parents fund it. That is a very privileged position to be in.
I was young once, and I am white. Yea sure, I understand it. And this is no way new, I had plenty of other white people feeling sorry for me because, "the country is being taken from the white man". That is ooooold, old, old. Fear based racism been around.
But to your weak sauce point, some folks are just going to have a hard go at life, but is it easier being white through life, no matter what? Yea, for sure. No one says it's an easy life, but it is easier being light skinned.
> unwanted, depressed
I think there used to be some organizations that helped with that. Specifically white men. You know, the kind that would give them a purpose, make them feel wanted. You got a hood and everything.
My observations are not racist, or rooted in fear. They are, however, rooted in compassion for my fellow human beings who find themselves in the crosshairs of reactionary political ideologies, even if they wear labels like "progressive", "feminist", or "anti-racist".
I'm mixed so I can generally wriggle out of such accusations by playing the race card. The only situation I ever feel good about doing so are ones like this.
haha not so much, feeling sorry for someone that can afford a Ferrari and then complains about the car insurance would be ridiculous. Similar to feeling sorry for white guys having to deal with politics, its warranted, not serious, and does not deserve more attention that many other REAL issues. But anyways, have a good day.
That's not the point that person was making. But (figuratively) its very true not many people at all can own such a car. Imagine owning one, you got well over $100k of f-off-money, but then tell your barista "life is rough with these car insurance prices on Ferraris". It's perspective.
Yeah. I think its really difficult (impossible?) to know what its like for the other gender/other ethnicities - even if there is more cultural outputs/conversations out there about different groups its still really hard/impossible to know what its like for others.
Having said that working class (poor) white males are known to have amongst the worst educational performance in the UK. This is different from employment.
If I had my time back I would seriously consider not going to uni/get a masters and just become a plumber/electrician. I reckon I would be as happy/if not happier then doing an office job.
I am definitely glad to be gay. I think it allows me to see things from outside the bubble of "get a wife, be a defender, raise your children, stay strong and never cry, man up and if you can't provide, you're useless, you can't cry because men don't cry." that heterosexuality seems to favour (both men and women perpetuate this).
Men who fail to provide or "fit in" to their "role" in society become depressed, and then they kill themselves. :/
I would like to bring up a point often missed with blue collar housing work (plumber, electrician, dry wall, etc). It is EASY to start your own thing. Once you are licensed and bonded you can quickly buy your own truck, hire an apprentice, setup yelp, setup an online receptionist and be overbooked. Right now plumbers are hard to get and electricians are months out. The plumbers I work with cannot keep up with the work and make over $80 per hour (no where florida). If "Bobs orlando plumbing" runs out of work, they just park the truck. There is NO overhead.
If you contrast to an attorney or doctor -- those firms/practices are extremely challenging to start and operate on your own. The salaries of your employees are high at best, marketing is extremely expensive, and insurance can wipe out a firm/practice.
Not withstanding restrictive licensing systems that require you to put in X years working crap jobs for crap pay under someone who already has the license to ensure that you've "paid enough dues" you're not gonna go around undercutting everyone once you get your license.
They need options. I feel our current school system isn't set up for young men at all. A lot would prefer hands on work as opposed to classroom learning. Promotion of trades schools as alternatives that aren't "lesser" would help a lot.
...an entire generation that feels lost, without purpose, and unwanted. I'd argue that it is largely up to the parents to instill a feeling of worth and help kids/young adults find intrinsic motivation, not the educational system.
It isn't necessarily just the educational system that's leaving this impression, it is a culture at large, for example on social media, and in various fields including the arts. Parents can influence all they want but the outside world needs to support these influences to an extent or they fall flat.
I wonder how woman feel reading such comments. Men dominated better paying jobs and positions of power since forever. It took 50+ years between equal rights before the law to equal opportunities in the labour market and education.
Men still have every opportunity a woman has. In addition, they are still recognized more for leading positions. They also dominate about every trade related job.
Yet, they are 'left without a purpose', when all they need it to do is do whatever they want.
"all they need it to do is do whatever they want" sounds like a very middle class take on things.
People from working class rust belt towns in the UK, for example, can't just do what they want, since there are no opportunities. But they are told that they are privileged and can do what they want, and then people wonder why support for labour/leftism has plummeted in working class communities.
Women didn't and don't need well paying jobs to start a family.
What "equal right" do you mean, that "equaled opportunities in the labor market and education"?
Also you seem to miss on the fact that men get worse grades in school (which some say is because of discrimination), which makes it harder for them to enter university.
That's not what their argument is about at all. Don't change the context to argue in bad faith.
Women don't have the same financial expectations as men do. This is true even today, despite all the push for equal pay and equal rights. Often, that's prior to even getting into a relationship. If you seek an indication, ask a bunch of guys if they would settle for a girl still living at home and then ask the inverse, both groups aged in their 20s.
Given how men are increasingly "giving up on society" because of these standards being harder to achieve every day, GP's argument isn't that improbable at all.
I'm not changing context or attempting to argue in bad faith. The statement is just asinine and delusional with regards to American culture at least.
You sound like you have some preconceived notion of you or your friends being wronged by women or something that I'm not going to be able to shake or have a reasonable discussion about.
I will however say, in words that may appease your ideology - it's honestly never been easier to get a banging hot girlfriend than in the current climate. You literally just have to not be completely fucking weird, have a hint of how to dress in something that compliments your figure, have the smallest standards of 21st century developed country hygiene, and one ever so slightly interesting hobby. Seriously, women will throw themselves at you.
But keep telling yourself what you want to think and reinforcing your views. I've honestly felt nothing but bad for women in STEM lately after an internship as a MechE in a fairly large and well known company. The older men acted fucking disgustingly towards the female interns, when all they're trying to do is make a career in STEM.
First you kneejerk towards "who says women want X?" when the argument was clearly "men often need this to be perceived as a partner, to get X". How you fail to see the leap there is beyond me.
Second, please keep your preconceived notions of me to yourself. They do not add to the discussion at all.
As for what's left worth responding to. Look up the rise of male sexlessness compared to female sexlessness if you seek further evidence of what's happening. The massive filtering and selection criteria happening in online dating. Considering your American-based view, surely you aren't blind to the increasing rates of gymgoers and even steroid use, and the men's grooming industry growing ever more. If anything, that doesn't signify a lack of men trying to maintain themselves, yet it still contradicts your idea of "just take a shower, go buy some clothes and get a girlfriend bro".
>But keep telling yourself what you want to think and reinforcing your views. I've honestly felt nothing but bad for women in STEM lately after an internship as a MechE in a fairly large and well known company.
As an aside, how can you in the same breath accuse me of wanting to form an echo chamber when you immediately cite your own anecdote as a reason to push your own view, despite the fact your anecdote does not invalidate the concerns of men at all? Surely you do not lack the capacity to feel for both the struggles of men and women, regardless of the cause? Men and women have their own troubles, and this incessant need to trivialize one over the other is exactly why we're not getting any further.
Lots of people want to start families. It's not something I invented or "default to". There is nothing wrong with wanting to start families, either. Some may find that nothing in the big as cool world is as cool as having children.
Nobody says you have to do that, but if some men and women want to do it, it will show up in the statistics.
Also even if you don't want a family and just want to explore the world alone, you don't need that much money. What exactly, do you want all the money for, that a high end career would give you? Also working 60 hour weeks would also prevent you from exploring the world, wouldn't it?
They literally have. That's exactly what nearly all of history has been. Women face an entire pipeline of people trying to stop them from pursuing anything beyond a family. My wife, in high school, was directly told never to take any math in college because girls can't do math. From the moment they are born, most women were told they can't do things boys can do. Yes, these days a fair amount of girls are finally told they can do things, but they still face discrimination. A man fails at something and they'll be told to stand back up and keep trying. A woman fails, and they get told, "well, nice try, you did your best! Go ahead and start a family!"
As another anecdote, I have friends that are married and both in the same science field in academia. Both work at the same university. The woman was told that she needed to prove that she wasn't just hired because of her husband. The man was not told the same.
As recently as 1970 women in the US weren't allowed to open checking accounts or get loans from a bank by themselves, but tell me more about how no one _ever_ stopped women from doing what they want.
I fail to see how a women being unable to open a bank account in the 60s, explains why a girl born in 2000, would not want to spend her time geeking on her computer trying to build a website, in 2012. But i'm all ears.
> would not want to spend her time geeking on her computer
Well, based on studies I have seen, if the family had only one computer, it waay often in boys room rather then in girls room. PC was assumed to be boys toy.
The culture emerges from there.
Anecdotally, that is patter I do see around. Parents of young girls are way more often enforcing "no screen till this or that age" while parents of young boys almost brag about boys playing games on them.
Yes, out of the blue, in all countries, and all cultures, on all continents, parents spontaneously put computers and screen, engines, motors, in kids rooms. What a weird collective behavior ! I'm sure it has nothing to do with the many experiments carried out on children, from the youngest of age, showing that even 2 days after birth, boys and girls had different attractions to moving objecs, or human faces for instance !
I've never known a family with a family computer put it anywhere but a common area. I'm sure they're out there but I've never seen it.
Maybe boys get more screen time in families like that because they're more interested in computers? Maybe it's assumed to be a boys toy because boys show more interest in it?
And in 1970 direct deposit did not exist, everyone was paid by check and could go cash it at the issuing bank, which was always local. Man or woman. Whether you had an account or not.
i.e, the banking situation you mention was not a barrier to employment whatsoever.
This famous hoax has been debunked many times. For a start, the countries where women pursue IT and science the most, are the most patriarchists (Turkey, Iran, Algeria, Middle-east, etc...). The more relaxed are gender-roles, the more women choose to study arts and litterature, or "gender studies", the same who then complain that there are not enough women building trains.
Second, as many in the west have seen here, we were all pushed towards studying, pursuing masters, etc. This was the policy in most of the western countries (some may say this was silly but this is another debate). I have seen first hand our teachers (mostly female, by the ways) pushing us to apply to Science curriculums, and my fellow female students do everything they could to avoid it.
As someone who has experience with the educational systems of the middle east, I find it amusing how you are misinterpreting the situation.
It's extremely hard for women in these countries to get good careers in any field other than teaching or medicine especially since they are often forced to marry and leave the work force (they can't work without their husbands' permission and they almost always handle all child care). It is the norm for women to marry right after graduating from college and not doing so is seen as abnormal.
The combination of this results in women going to college and studying what they actually _like_ in their final years of "freedom." They choose STEM because they like it.
In the west, women are probably as inherently interested in STEM as in these other countries, but they also know that they need to get a job and they often choose career paths that would give them less pain due to harassment or discrimination.
Your reasoning is that in brutally sexist societies women choose to study completely male-dominated fields because they don't have to make a living after it, whereas in the most egalitarian societies in the entire world sexism pushes them towards traditionally female fields to escape discrimination?
The point is, in middle eastern societies, the realities of working in STEM don't impact the choices women make for their college majors as much. Most of them go to college before marriage with the expectation of not having a long term career in what they study (public colleges are almost always free there, btw). They decide what to do considering different sets of pressures in comparison to women in the west.
Women in more egalitarian societies make their choices under different pressures. They need more of a long-term plan for their career choice and they don't have as many children or marry or leave the workforce as early nor as often as women in the middle east.
Do note though that as more women get into STEM, the experienced and perceived discrimination levels drop dramatically and even more women make the switch. Also, I think it's useful to note that there has been a systemic reduction in what I call the level of "generational misogyny." I can confirm from my own experience that there is a huge difference in how older vs younger (<40yo) men interact with women.
Younger folks are way more egalitarian and some of them assume that they all get the same treatment from older folks but that is just not true. A 30 years old male researcher could have entirely pleasant and productive working relationships with both female researchers in his generation and male researchers in their 60s. He might not expect or understand the degree of hostility or discrimination his female colleagues face when dealing with these very same older researchers. I believe that as time passes and the egalitarian culture actually gets to the "top of the food chain," we will see a distribution that is more representative of male and female preferences without the added discriminatory pressure.
But time has already passed since greater sexism and males and females have already gravitated in two consistent directions - men working with things and women working with people, even when it defies traditional gender roles, such as computers and business. You expect that trend to change direction after some tipping point of sufficiently little sexism?
So, that makes you reach the following conclusion: "the more a society is egalitarian - say, Scandinavian countries, the more it forces women to do painting and arts".
Are you saying that "egalitarian" societies are in fact sexist, and that teaching schools/staff (largely populated by progressive left-wing women), are in fact preventing little girls from doing maths and learning C in their bedroom ?
A common hypothesis is that there are genetic and social/economic aspects that push people towards one field or another. If you make an effort to remove all social forces, and succeed, then the only forces left are the inborn ones- so their effects maximize. So, if there are any inborn differences in the distribution of interest in e.g. engineering between men and women, you would expect to see their effects most keenly in the most low-pressure countries. Inegalitarianism adds pressure that money is useful for dealing with.
So: "women choose a career that would give them less pain".
You can flip it any way you want, you will always end up with the following conclusion which demolishes your feminists dogmas: that women and men have inherently different interests, which, big news, is not surprising, given that they are different.
?? It's entirely reasonable for two populations to make statistically different choices when they are under different pressures. It is exactly what is happening with what is being discussed in this thread: white men skipping college because they have face pressures to earn money, feel college is not for them, etc. Women face different levels of these pressures and also pressure to skip STEM and go into "feminine" majors.
The different pressures are sufficient to explain much of the different major choices, especially when considering the changing distribution in other countries with different sets of pressures.
There are indeed differences between men and women -- cis-men can't give birth, for instance. However, other than the statistical population differences, an average man and an average women with equitable socioeconomic settings are incredibly similar in many areas. Perhaps even in an ideal world there would be more female biologists and more male IT workers. That would be fine. What matters is that a human who is interested in something would have a fighting chance to get there.
Right now, cultural and societal factors are tipping different scales in different ways. For future generation, we would do well to reduce the imbalance -- encourage and support minorities, women, and, yes, white men. People face different battles and helping some does not mean others have to be ignored.
You speak like someone or something is forcefully preventing a girl from studying IT if she wants to. I like how feminists make it sound like they live under the Taliban. Give me one actual example of a girl that was prevented from doing what she wanted.... it's the opposite. Women are freer than ever to do whatever they want. Bad luck for feminist dogmas: it produces the opposite result of what they hoped for, and confirms the gender bias.
Yeah, I have seen this about Eastern Europe (Russia) and all it convinced me about what that the author dont understand neither Eastern Europe nor sexism. It counted fiends considered non-technical in Eastern Europe as technical. It counted school of basic administration as technical economy too.
It also assumed that sexism is straight line. In fact, while easter europe is overall more sexist, there are many aspects in which it is less sexist. Some aspects of American sexism are present much less.
The confusion is effectively from American assuming that every single aspect of their country must be superior.
The more relaxed gender roles a society has, the more men aspire to be musicians, philosophers, comedians, sports journalists, filmmakers, poets, or motivational speakers instead of studying for a useful STEM career.
Before any of that, I’d blame the disappearance of the sense of service. One’s general mindset should be on what one can contribute, and the rest will follow.
It's more accurate to say that Universities and Colleges are extinct so the story should be what is taking its place and what are the consequences...
Its just like the Ed loan program..
Many don't realize its a teaching goal tool, those that get that they need to form a business around their brand to pay off the loan win and those that do not lose and society loses.
We should not bet on society losing this time around such as the elites did in the US!
> A narrative that (white) men are uniformly privileged and life is just easy for them.
I doubt this has anything to do with it. What is the argument here? They hear this and believe it so they don't think they need school?
I grew up in a white, working class community, and in my experience nobody paid attention to liberals on Twitter calling them privelaged. Certainly not enough to decide not to go to college over it.
> A narrative that (white) men are uniformly privileged and life is just easy for them. And a narrative that those men aren’t wanted by society any more.
As a brown person I think the former is definitely still true. The latter is definitely not true, at least looking at the average white man's number of tinder matches compared to mine.
“Young men get little help, in part, because schools are focused on encouraging historically underrepresented students. Jerlando Jackson, department chair, Education Leadership and Policy Analysis, at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Education, said few campuses have been willing to spend limited funds on male underachievement that would also benefit white men, risking criticism for assisting those who have historically held the biggest educational advantages.”
So this is a direct result of the move away from color blind policies, to race based policies.
> Keith E. Smith, a mental-health counselor and men’s outreach coordinator at the University of Vermont, said that when he started working at the school in 2006 he found that men were much more likely to face consequences for the trouble they caused under the influence of drugs and alcohol.
This is exactly what black students report as racism in school.
Seems like evidence that race based policies are just racist.
> In 2008, Mr. Smith proposed a men’s center to help male students succeed. The proposal drew criticism from women who asked, “Why would you give more resources to the most privileged group on campus,” he said.
Funding wasn’t appropriated, he said, and the center was never built.
Obviously white men are not in fact privileged on university campuses.
“Female students in the U.S. benefit from a support system established decades ago, spanning a period when women struggled to gain a foothold on college campuses. There are more than 500 women’s centers at schools nationwide. Most centers host clubs and organizations that work to help female students succeed.”
Men are failing because it is the policy not to support them.
>assisting those who have historically held the biggest educational advantages
History is just that: history. A white male going to uni _right now_ hasn't really enjoyed those historical advantages; they were before their time.
Yes there are other advantages in the modern world to being a white male, but there are also equivalent disadvantages, too. Easier to get power...but if you're male nobody is there to defend you or help you. Help yourself, defend yourself _and_ others, be the breadwinner (otherwise you're useless) "man up".
This is the best question. Masculinity is just an archetype. It could have been three dudes standing around, "Hey you know, we are all strong, smart, and like to protect our families. I bet it's because we have these third legs, pretty sure that's it." And then we pass it down generations. Tell women the same BS about femininity. Letting just a few folks define what a gender represents, as if one side or the other does not share those traits. Just being human isn't as fun, I guess? Or maybe just the complexity of being undefined is too much for some folks, to know they could be contradictory, complex or different. Either way, masculinity itself is just kind of like a cult-y marketing tool. It's used to either make you feel bad or great, maybe apart of something, (that always ends well), but the people selling it, want it to define you. And if you buy into it, think there is something special about you because you pee standing up, and that makes you superior, that's toxic AF.
And yes I am straight, white, and male, with a nice haircut and could tell you the 7 day forecast everyday of the year. Would love to hear your definition on masculinity and why you treasure it's meaning so much.
> Letting just a few folks define what a gender represents, as if one side or the other does not share those traits.
If you think masculinity is arbitrary and that traits are not specific to a gender, then why do you argue that men should be denied the same supports that other people get at college?
> And yes I am straight, white, and male,
Why are you so angry at white men?
> with a nice haircut and could tell you the 7 day forecast everyday of the year.
What relevance do these have?
> Would love to hear your definition on masculinity and why you treasure it's meaning so much.
Asking you what it means to you doesn’t imply anyone treasures it’s meaning. You are reading that in.
The premise of your question doesn't relate to that last part, (masculinity vs men, different things) but I can answer the last part: they do get the same level of support maybe even better, but no, they shouldn't receive specific support reserved for folks with different obstacles.
I like white men! Love everyone! I dislike excuses around "poor me"s from folks that lack perspective on how they have it better, (I did not say good, said better). And not all white dudes feel sorry for themselves and blame "society", or college, or women, or other skin colors, or etc... Those folks are awesome to hang with. I'll hang with anyone, but you'll get an ear full if you bring that stuff up and are a white dude, still friendly though.
THE RELEVANCE OF MY HAIR IS EVERYTHING, I am in my 30's and it's committing suicide everyday, I'll talk about it while I still can. (You really hate my jokes, still like you though)
I usually don't care if you don't answer my questions but I was truly truly hoping you'd answer what you think masculinity is, I answered for you, come on now.
See it's better when you share your opinion, that way it's easier to see what you are thinking. You are getting mad at me for all these assumptions, but I was right, you really think white people are underprivileged, "it's unfair", and you call me reprehensible. This is where I'd hope you'd be sarcastic.
It's been fun zepto, i thought threads could keep going, but they can't. Here is what you are going to do, you are going to keep looking up statistics why is harder to be white. You'll keep complaining how the white man doesn't get his fair share. And that denying white people even more privilege is the real racism. You are the "poor me", and life is going to be incredibly challenging for you but you'll probably find support in some white guys group where they can "stay proud" and stand up for the white man. Just take care of yourself and don't hurt anybody.
Still never answered the question, thats just cruel, I was really hoping I'd get that answered.
> Men are failing because it is the policy not to support them.
And because men need the support. I suspect that a lot fewer men needed support in, say, 1950.
Why do more men need support than did in 1950? I think the first reason may be because of education. Our education system is failing in a way that it wasn't in 1950. (This may be too harsh. If, say, 10% of high school graduates went to college in 1950, and 50% do now, then that means that the top 10% then were more prepared for college than the top 50% are now. But apples-to-apples would be to ask whether the top 10% then were better prepared than the top 10% are now. I don't have a good feel for the answer to that question.)
> And because men need the support. I suspect that a lot fewer men needed support in, say, 1950.
> Why do more men need support than did in 1950?
My answer is that when men were the vast majority consumers of higher education the system was built to support them.
This accords with what the social justice people would say, and I think they are right about that.
What they are wrong about is that men today should be denied support that other groups have today because men in the 1950s had support that other groups in the 1950s did not have.
Fair point. But my impression (only that) is that college in 1950 was much less hand-holding and "supportive" in general than it is in 2021. What there was, however, was almost certainly tuned for males (and in fact white males).
The question is fully answered. Men today are no less deserving of support than anyone else. They deserve the same support that other groups have today.
If you read the article you’ll see that men do not have the same support that other groups have, and proposals to provide that support are rejected on the basis of history rather than present need.
The desire ‘not to help white men’ is explicitly mentioned.
yea totally changed my mind, it does sound like things just aren't fair and the other "groups" have it better while the white man "deserves" it's fair share. Should we start a group or what? Which other group should we target first to get the "support" that we need?
Your response is dripping with sarcasm. Why do you have such hatred of white men in particular?
Also, why are you making this about race? The basis of the article was about how men are not getting the support they need. Why do you keep bringing “white men” into it?
All we’re taking about is recognizing that there are support services provided to women which are not provided to men, and there is no reason that men shouldn’t also need such services.
These are simply facts stated in the article.
What have you got against men that makes you want to deny them the same services as women?
Is it your opinion that white men, or men in general are somehow less deserving than young women? Or perhaps you think young men are inherently superior to women and therefore don’t have the same needs.
You are making a lot of huge jumps there, incorrectly, (except for the sarcasm, completely on point), and you asked like 5 questions.
Everyone should get support! More support! Everyone. By focusing on men, you are stating it is MORE challenging for men. It is not. Men should get more support, so should everyone, but if we are handing out bread, men should be last to receive, as our plate is the fullest. Do you really think men have it worse? I don't, being a guy is super great, much easier, and complaining about it just makes you seem like you lack perspective. Only you can tell us.
Jesus, zepto:
A) Thanks for such a detailed response
B) Screw you for such a detailed response, my thumbs gonna hurt
I write on my phone while watching travel videos on youtube and drinking, quoting is a pain, you deserve a better conversation, but I'll do my best,(thats a lie).
Sarcasm is great, its meant to get people riled up, you should try it, makes these comments more entertaining while also exaggerating another's end goal to show where those ideals lead.
Regarding focusing on men, (each paragraph to your points), I read the article, (like three times now because I feel like we read different things), its an opinion piece, I am trying to tell you I disagree with the summation that men, and white men, (the article brings up race!), are at a disadvantage and don't have the same LEVEL of support. They get different support, like being white and/or male, which for real, I will not go over again why its so much easier/better to be male and/or white. (Higher paying job while you get through school!)
At this point you aren't stating much, just trying interview me or something, so I'll assume all I want.
The article is providing context as pertains only to college. Disregards that white men have better access to college prep classes, paid more while they go to school, less chance of hardships, (not saying there are no hardships but again white male life = easier life) I really don't care if less men are going to college, I didn't graduate, not the end of the world, still had it easier. And no, not college age, but if you are, I swear life is better when older.
(oi i am only half way through)
Yea, "in terms of" thats the point that gets me, like caring about that, with all the other advantages you get from being white and/or male, you need to made sure no one else can ever have a different advantage, especially one thats easy to get around and still get to where you want.
Again, it's an opinion piece article, I am pointing out I think it's disagreeable because its so shortsighted.
Now you point out it's an age thing, I mean, sleep easy on that point, you are right. I haven't been that age for 13 years. Still live and work with people of all ages, share stories, listen to their lives, try to do my best to figure out whats going on, empathize... But if you want to say its a secretive world I would only understand if I were you, please help me get it, pretty sure these threads can go as long as we want.
I mean, you are debating heavily to prove that men have it worse, "in terms of" whatever, I can take that another step and just say you are complaining. Could go further with sarcasm and take if further but you pointed out you are not a fan.
I get your argument, but I am pointing out that while you are saying "same" you literally mean men should have access to support that is reserved for different people that have different hardships, in order to try to make the playing field more level. You, (not saying you personally, but in case you go there), can't say we should have the same access to support in college while having much different obstacles in life.
And yea definitely not trying to contribute anything, button says "comment" or "reply", not contribute, you feel like my opinions are that lame or what?
And yea, tying in a lot of things, but all related and what your greater point of view may be.
I like you zepto, just trying to help with your perspective. Obviously, that was a lot to write from both of us.
> Sarcasm is great, its meant to get people riled up, you should try it, makes these comments more entertaining while also exaggerating another's end goal to show where those ideals lead.
You aren’t exaggerating another’s “end”. You don’t actually know what that is.
You are simply being dishonest in your representation.
> At this point you aren't stating much, just trying interview me or something, so I'll assume all I want.
Lying about another person’s position is just that.
> Disregards that white men have better access to college prep classes, paid more while they go to school, less chance of hardships,
Even if true historically or when you went to college.
This is certainly not true of every white man today..
Whilst it’s certainly true that statistically Black people are less likely to have resources like college prep classes, that is a function of money. There are more poor white people than there are poor black people, even if statistically if you have black skin you are more likely to be poor.
There are also large numbers of rich and middle class black people who live in nice neighborhoods and have all the supports you mention.
That’s why it’s racist to base your discriminatory policies on race rather than actual hardship.
If you want to argue that people who have fewer resources should receive supports that others don’t, I will agree with you.
If you want to argue that being white means you have access to college prep, I think you are delusional.
> I didn't graduate, not the end of the world, still had it easier. And no, not college age, but if you are, I swear life is better when older.
You may have had it easier in your day, but as the article explains things have changed.
> I mean, you are debating heavily to prove that men have it worse, "in terms of" whatever, I can take that another step and just say you are complaining.
> you are debating heavily to prove that men have it worse
The article indicates that they do, at college. I’m not ‘arguing that’, I’m referencing it.
If you are claiming that I’m making a more general claim, then you are just misrepresenting me - I.e. you are intentionally lying about what I am saying.
> Could go further with sarcasm and take if further but you pointed out you are not a fan.
I’m not a fan because you are being at best fooling and at worst dishonest.
> I get your argument,
The evidence is that you don’t.
> but I am pointing out that while you are saying "same" you literally mean men should have access to support that is reserved for different people that have different hardships, in order to try to make the playing field more level.
I’m not arguing that some general “playing field” should be more level.
I am arguing that men are just people, and there is no reason they should receive less support in their education.
> You, (not saying you personally, but in case you go there), can't say we should have the same access to support in college while having much different obstacles in life.
Your position continues to embody racism and sexism
It seems like you are saying that men today should receive a worse educational experience than other people because men in the past like you had more advantages in life.
The problem is that this hurts those men who are less advantaged deliberately on the basis of their sex.
If there are advantages men as a category receive later in life, then those need to be addressed, but it’s reprehensible to use that as a justification for harming people’s educational experience.
worse educational experience? thats dramatic as hell. You are just mad that can't steal support reserved for other folks.
You keep throwing around priveledge and advantage but I don't think you get it. Do women make less money than men, underrepresented in industries, way higher percentage of being victims of domestic abuse and sexual assault? But your argument, is always "some men", but we are talking about "in general". Huge difference between situational advantage and systematic disadvantage.
Calling me reprehensible, and you are all high and mighty about how mean sarcasm is hahaha. This whole thread, is you getting all bent out of shape because you think the white man isn't getting enough, just leave it at that. I hope one day you see how ridiculous that is.
Please make this your last comment thread on HN, this was painful to read. This type of discourse does much better on twitter or reddit, feel free to keep it there.
"you know what this old thread needs? some hacker news superiority" - you
You jumping in a old thread, and you expect me to believe it's because you want me to stop? sounds like to showed up late to the party and just sad everyone left, and you want me to jump back in to talk to you. How you doing?
The other thing add that it is okay to support men who need that support. This was exactly what the Ontario Ministry of Education was encouraging men to get into teaching a decade ago. They had data that showed boys attainment of literacy was declining and viewed more male role models as a potential solution.
It is also worth noting that providing supports for men does not mean removing supports for other under represented groups.
It's called therapy, not blaming other people that don't look like you coming up. And yea, therapy is expensive and usually not covered by medical insurance. So vote.
all the men on here complaining they aren't getting support while others are, definitely aren't blaming anyone, you're right, I took that too far. Seeing a lot of men write how they are super stoked women are finally getting some small advantages in academia.
> all the men on here complaining they aren't getting support while others are,
Where are these complaining men? I see people critiquing policies. I think you are making up in your head that there are men on here complaining about their situation.
> definitely aren't blaming anyone, you're right, I took that too far.
Your sarcasm is causing you to dishonestly represent what others are saying.
> Seeing a lot of men write how they are super stoked women are finally getting some small advantages in academia.
They aren’t getting a small advantage. The advantage is huge across the entire educational spectrum now.
Nobody should be celebrating that any more than we should have been celebrating men having an advantage in the past.
The goal is for our systems to support everyone. Not to punish present day people based on arbitrary characteristics they share with people in the past.
your right, sarcasm is a tool of the devil and it's so unauthentic, it's like lying but with an even more evil purpose.
You are complaining, right now, about how now women get a situational advantage. And we shouldn't celebrate that they are better represented in academia! No mas zepto, at this point you just need to get out in the world and see what life is like for others, quit worrying about how underprivileged you are.
Men are the competitive gender. In past, only 40% of men survived to reproduce whereas 80% of women did.
Not in absolute terms, but imagine if more competitive men survive with higher probability in each generation, there's a good chance males will be more competitive and females will be more cooperative in next generations.
Now this theory is fringe. But not as nonsense as "Both genders are same, everything is social conditioning" bullshit we hear every day.
> You can't expect to play a game, give one team an advantage for the first half, give neither team an advantage in the second half, and call it a fair game at the end.
The game you are referring to is one in which you presuppose dividing people into ‘teams’.
I.e. you are simply assuming that racism is forever and that the only fairness comes dividing people by race and then balancing resources according to racial groups.
This is just more racism. It’s not the only solution.
We don’t have to ignore the effects of racism. There is nothing wrong with looking at the kinds of disadvantage it has produced and then acting to support those who are impacted.
However if we apply that support through racialized policies, we will never solve the problem.
For example, we can see that black people historically are disproportionately impacted by policies that have prevented wealth building, such as redlining. Of course so have groups of low class white people been denied access to assets, just to a lesser extent.
A racist solution would be to give advantages to black people.
A non-racist solution is to support anyone who has been less advantaged in wealth building.
This will still disproportionately benefit black people but will be self-balancing and won’t perpetuate racism or permanently embed it into our political and legal systems.
You never hear the tree-hugger saying, "it's my turn to clear-cut forests with unsustainable abandon". No, the goal is to stop clear cutting forests with unsustainable abandon. That's how I was raised to think of racism. You don't straighten up by stopping racism over here while increasing it over there. You stop racism by stopping racism.
"The way to stop discrimination based on race is to stop discriminating based on race."
I heard someone else phrase it that the current "anti-racist" movement isn't trying to eliminate the jack-boots, they're trying them on for size, instead.
Yea black people always getting that advantage, you should let more people know. I mean, people just don't understand how hard it is to be white these days with twitter hate and everything. Be the voice! Let me know how it goes.
Why do you think a college would have an "advantage" for someone black that would not be available to someone white? Is it possible, hear me out, that maybe white people are still at a massive advantage getting to college and that colleges are trying to equalize the playing field?
"intellectually dishonest"
as opposed to physically dishonest or...?
Preferential admissions, sure. And that's not new, admissions take a lot of things into account besides race, like religion, family members who were alumni, hell you can even just pay to get in. You think maybe white men get more preferential treatment in life though? "BUt THaTs NOt WhAT We ArE TALkiNg AbOuT". Huge difference between situational advantage and systematic disadvantage.
> The game you are referring to is one in which you presuppose dividing people into ‘teams’.
No, you're arguing against an artifact the analogy instead of acting in good faith to understand the meaning.
Consider a game where all players are independent, but the "referee" arbitrarily chose half of the players to get an advantage. Let that be team 1, and everyone else be team 2. We got a new referee in the 2nd half, and that ref wants it to be a fair game; would it be unfair for them to acknowledging and try to correct for the 1st ref's team choices?
(Now if you argue that there is no "referee" in real life, I'm going to assume you are being willingly obstinate.)
> A non-racist solution is to support anyone who has been less advantaged in wealth building.
So socialism, totally agree, in general that is the direction we should move back towards.
But take note that you'll then have minorities who were forced to work 10x harder than their white peers say, "wtf?! I put in all that extra work to pull myself up by my bootstraps, and now you're just going to hand out success to everyone? I feel disenfranchised!"
In a "fair" race, that person who worked 10x harder than their peers should be appreciably further along in the "game". The only way to make that correction is to acknowledge the divide already drawn by the first "referee".
As far as I can see you just restated the idea of dividing the world into teams based on race. That isn’t an artifact of the analogy.
That is the basis of racism.
We can accept that a game like this was played, stop playing it, and work to undo the damage without continuing to play the game.
>> A non-racist solution is to support anyone who has been less advantaged in wealth building.
> So socialism, totally agree, in general that is the direction we should move back towards.
No, I don’t view socialism favorably and it’s not implied. Creating institutions or programs that facilitate higher levels of economic participation by those who start with less does not imply socialism.
No, no individual or group consciously decided how races should be divided, that happened naturally. What you're saying its that acknowledging the divide exists is racist, which is the classic "color blind" excuse.
> No, no individual or group consciously decided how races should be divided,
I think the Portuguese, the British, the Spanish, the French, the Dutch, and the Danish consciously chose Africans to be imported as slaves to America. Don’t you?
Jim Crow laws were consciously written by people who were deciding how races should be divided.
Race isn’t even a natural category.
> that happened naturally.
Are you seriously suggesting that slavery and Jim Crow happened ‘naturally’?
> What you're saying its that acknowledging the divide exists is racist, which is the classic "color blind" excuse.
This is false. If you can find somewhere I argue for that, you’ll be able to quote it.
Here is something I did say:
“We don’t have to ignore the effects of racism. There is nothing wrong with looking at the kinds of disadvantage it has produced and then acting to support those who are impacted.”
> Are you seriously suggesting that slavery happened ‘naturally’?
Are you seriously suggesting that humans aren't naturally occurring? Are you suggesting that there is something inherent about the "Portuguese, British" etc that gave them the power and influence needed to enslave other races? Of course not.
Randomly populate a geologically non uniform landmass with humans, and over time some will exploit natural advantages over others based on arbitrary factors. The fact that the British colonized everyone wasn't because they were somehow genetically superior or more predisposed to colonization, they just randomly got dealt the best hand.
> If you can find somewhere I argue for that, you’ll be able to quote it.
I'm referring to your core argument that,
> A non-racist solution is to support anyone who has been less advantaged in wealth building.
You're saying that even though we can clearly see how past societies drew their lines when determining how to stunt the "wealth building" of future generations, we should rotate that line so that it's orthogonal to race and only focus on the people who have had the most trouble building wealth.
Consider a hypothetical scenario where we had a "perfectly equal past", where there was no slavery or systemic racism and everyone had been treated fairly based on their own ability. Even in this world, you'd still have some people who fall short at "building wealth" compared to others. You'd still see a "line" drawn based on natural ability. This is the only scenario in which I'd agree with you.
But the natural ability line isn't the only one that history has drawn. We can see the lines that history drew. Lines based on race, based on geography, based on gender, etc. and I think it would be ignorant of us to ignore the existence of any of those lines. It's not an either/or situation.
One day, I hope to get to a point where we're approaching a "perfectly equal past", but until then we have more than 1 line to account for.
> Are you suggesting that there is something inherent about the "Portuguese, British" etc that gave them the power and influence needed to enslave other races? Of course not.
No. I’m saying they made a conscious choice to enslave other races, just as abolitionists eventually made a conscious choice to oppose it.
> You're saying that even though we can clearly see how past societies drew their lines when determining how to stunt the "wealth building" of future generations, we should rotate that line so that it's orthogonal to race and only focus on the people who have had the most trouble building wealth.
Yes, why not?
This is what it means to stop being racist. You stop enacting race based policies, and you take steps to counteract the impacts of past racism on people in the present.
This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t acknowledge that racism was a cause. If you claim that is what I am saying then you are just lying.
Consequences of racism are the largest historical reasons black people as a statistical category have had trouble building wealth.
There is nothing wrong with recognizing this as a priority. As I point out, the groups with the biggest problem will benefit disproportionately by default if we address this.
However black people are not the only ones who have suffered from impediments. Racism is one cause, but there are others.
A person who is struggling today should be helped regardless of their own skin color or the skin color of the grandparents.
What is wrong, is to continue the racist practices of past societies by enacting race based policies.
> You stop enacting race based policies, and you take steps to counteract the impacts of past racism on people in the present.
But by definition, that's not what ignoring race does.
> This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t acknowledge that racism was a cause.
By definition, that's what "rotating the line to be orthogonal to race" does.
> However black people are not the only ones who have suffered from impediments. Racism is one cause, but there are others.
> A person who is struggling today should be helped regardless of their own skin color or the skin color of the grandparents.
Agreed, that's why I said: "We can see the lines that history drew. Lines based on race, based on geography, based on gender, etc. and I think it would be ignorant of us to ignore the existence of any of those lines. It's not an either/or situation."
"Rotating the line to be orthogonal to race" is a bit of a confusing statement, but I don't think it's fair to say that it implies not acknowledging race. What it does imply is enacting policies that are not solely based upon race.
I agree with Zepto. You can't just easily quantify the effects of all of the past injustices against different groups of people. Imagine if today the federal government decided to pay reparations for slavery. How would you decide who receives the money? Do you have to be 1/2 black? 1/4? Do you receive less money if you're less black? What about other minorities? How much are they entitled to?
It becomes messy very quickly. This is a simplified example, but this is why it's best to take enact policies that help those who struggle today regardless of their skin color, gender, sexual orientation, etc.
However, it is still important to acknowledge, teach about, and remember racism and other inequalities from years past (and some which continue today)
> After a few hundred years of race/gender based policies working in favor of whites/males, I don't know what else we would expect from a deliberate effort to reverse it
White hasn't even meant the same thing for over a hundred years in America. Treating "white males" as a monolithic group is a vast over-simplification of all the different sub-groups and cultures who were not equally advantaged.
The great irony of this logic is that you are totally embracing might is right politics. As long as your team wins. But that's not how might is right works.
I hear you, this is alarming. No support! We deserve it, right? Being a young white male is probably the hardest thing to be in the world. Getting profiled... by twitter. And then, not to mention, all the dirty looks we get when we lock our doors, protect our families from this new wave of white hate. I proclaim we change this, but it won't be easy. We'll need to wear some hoods... ... Or just stop being a sad boi, join society and have some fun? Don't be a jerk? Like actively try to make others lives better? Might just get, actually it will, get better for you.
I also wonder about those in Silicon Valley telling young men "don't go to college" and the mostly male fascination with entrepreneurship and crytocurrency. The entire meme stock and "apes together are strong" seems like a young male flex. Could it be that college is just seen as "gay"?
Are Academics Disproportionately Gay?
A new analysis suggests that's the case, and that academic work -- at once solitary and social in nature -- makes it particularly attractive to those who are not straight.
1. White-Males had the lowest college-enrollment-rates across all categories. They got the lowest in the two lowest income-brackets; basically a three-way tie in the next income-bracket; and just a little higher than Hispanic-Males in the highest income-bracket.
2. Asians had the highest enrollment-rates across all income-brackets.
3. Asians were relatively constant in their enrollment-rates, regardless of income or gender, always above 70%. (Always above ~83%, if excluding the lowest income-bracket.) The gender-gap still leaned toward Asian-Females over Asian-Males, but not by much.
4. Blacks varied heavily by income. Blacks had pretty low enrollment-rates in the lowest income-bracket, but got some of the highest enrollment-rates in the higher income-brackets (after Asians).
5. Black-Females had an odd pattern-deviation: like Black-Males, their enrollment-rates increased dramatically with family-income, getting the highest non-Asian enrollment-rate by the second-highest income-bracket. But then, oddly, their enrollment-rate fell by ~8% from the second-highest to the highest income-bracket.
6. Hispanics were pretty consistent with Whites, especially for Males. For Females, Whites had higher rates in the lowest income-bracket, while Hispanics had somewhat higher rates in all other income-brackets.
7. Ignoring race, enrollment-rates increased significantly with family-income.
8. Ignoring race, enrollment-rates were much higher for Females than Males across all income-brackets.
>Once barriers to female careers were lowered and their access to higher education was expanded, two key factors may have played a role in the female college advantage: relatively greater economic benefits of
college for females and relatively higher effort costs of college going and prepara-
tion for males. (girls exceeded boys in secondary school performance
and attainment)
Great news, the concept that you need college to succeed was one of the greatest lies told to my generation. Pleased the next generation is waking up.
End of the day if the loan can't be written off, if the loan is just handed out to 18 year olds and has almost no limit then the organization that asks for the loan will inevitably balloon out of all proportion and no longer be reflective at all of the value you get back for almost all cases.
I say that as someone who managed to actually pay off their student loan, dread to think how people who are late 30s, still renting and still with 5 figures of college debt feel.
Hope this trend continues, why throw away the down payment of a mortgage to an institution that has spent the past decade telling you they don't want you. If in 10 years I'm seeing headlines about colleges unable to stay open from low admissions I'll be smiling.
> Great news, the concept that you need college to succeed was one of the greatest lies told to my generation.
I guess it means what you mean by “succeed”. Going to college is and always has been a reliable way towards earning more money[0]. The issue isn’t that college doesn’t work, the issue is that it’s basically an asset bubble of sorts and the cost exceeded its value.
If huge chunks of future generations skip college because it’s unaffordable, that will be bad for us as a society. It would be much better to reduce the cost of college so that it’s more valuable for more people, rather than having younger generations opt out due to the high cost.
0 - Degree dependent, of course. Music degrees have been always poorly valued by the market.
College degrees are either incredibly overpriced, or incredibly good value for money, depending on how you analyse them.
If you look at some CS graduate making $200,000 a year and assume they'd have made $50,000 without the degree, college looks like an incredibly good investment.
On the other hand, if you look at someone paying $1000 per credit hour for online video lectures? I've seen online video at 1% that price being described as overpriced.
>If you look at some CS graduate making $200,000 a year and assume they'd have made $50,000 without the degree
This is the problem with assessing how valuable college is: you don't know how well off the person would've been if they had chosen not to go to college. You can't just compare all the people who went to college with all the people who didn't. You end up with a selection bias. You need to compare people who went to college with people who could've gone to college, but didn't.
Also, there might be (is) a difference between what's good for the individual and what's good for society.
> This is the problem with assessing how valuable college is: you don't know how well off the person would've been if they had chosen not to go to college.
I think this is absolutely the key. If you just look at some of the figures given in [0], and do some simple math,
you find out that someone with a bachelor's degree makes just a hair more than $26k per year more than someone with only a high school diploma. Over the course of, say, 40 years working, that comes out to a hair over $1M difference in favor of the college grad. So, it would seem that even if a 4 year degree cost $200k (which, sadly, is not an insane estimate these days [1]), it still seems like a no-brainer.
But, that's as far as statistics can take us, I think, because, as you mentioned, we don't see what happens to people who choose not to go to college, but who could have successfully gotten a bachelor's degree. There's no literal way for us to ethically conduct that experiment.
If I were to speculate a bit, I might wonder if the answer lies in looking at children of college graduates and comparing those children who went to college vs those who didn't. I have no idea if such a study is available or not, unfortunately.
The other idea I have is that, although it pays off in the long run, maybe acquiring a significant amount of debt at a young age makes it harder to get by in the initial, post-college years harder. Considering the cost of housing and health care, this seems like a reasonable hypothesis, but I'd also like to see if there's research on that.
The challenge with looking at the statistics for an ROI is that lifetime earnings will vary by field of study, highest degree attained, and location. I am not familiar with US statistics agencies, but Stats Canada has looked at lifetime earnings by field of study. It is a little out of date as this is from 2010 [1], but it shows there are some large differences in earnings by field. In some cases a bachelor's degree results in lower earnings than a high school graduate. [2] shows that depending on major about 30% of graduates go on for further study. That further study may be a lower credential (e.g., certificate or diploma) or a higher credential (e.g., masters or professional degree). [3] shows an analysis of differences in earnings by field, gender, and highest degree level; with the largest increases in earnings coming for those from business, social sciences, and arts. Unfortunately [2] and [3] do not seem to be looking at lifetime earnings.
For men, [1] shows the median lifetime earnings for high school graduates is $882,300. The median lifetime earnings for men with a bachelor's degree is 1,517,200. The lowest field is Fine and Applied Arts at $843,900, which is lower than the median lifetime earnings for those with a high school education, up to the highest median field of engineering with earnings of $1,845,000.
For women, [1] shows median high school lifetime earnings of $458,900, median bachelor's earnings for all fields of $972,500, and lowest median bachelor's earnings of $652,100 (Fine and Applied Arts), and a highest of $1,169,100 (Business Administration). The interesting thing to note is for women there is only 1 of 18 field degree combinations (earnings are provided for bachelor's and associate's) where the woman's lifetime earnings decreases relative to a high school education alone (Fine and Applied Arts associates median earnings are $437,300). For men, 4 of 18 field degree combinations will result in lower lifetime earnings relative to high school education alone.
There is further analysis in [1] of the earnings percentiles by each field showing that men with a business degree earn the most at the 90 percentile. This holds for women with a business degree.
I don't see if this has been restricted to those whose highest education is a bachelor's degree or not, but there is also work that has shown increases in earnings by field for graduate or professional degrees [3]. It's possible that those earnings premiums have been captured in the reporting of [1], but [3] seems to come to the conclusion that most business, arts, and social sciences fields gain a large increase in salary for graduate or professional degrees.
Hopefully those familiar with similar analysis from the US could help to provide that information.
Also, to the degree that college is used as a signal of intelligence/skill, it's a waste for individually and collectively. You could just have the college entry exams and hand out diplomas for those, and it would be nearly as good.
Except they’re not used as a measure of intelligence or skill? They’re used as a measure of ability to go through a series of rigorous tests and do a bunch of work you might not like doing.
They’re a litmus test to see if you’d likely be good for doing a job you don’t enjoy either. End of the day - work is work and they need history to show you can do more than the bare legal minimum of graduating high school.
Yes. However - why would an employer take a risk on a high school graduate when plenty of people with college degrees (often with internship experience) are applying?
Not only that, but in most markets those salaries do not exist.
Even in markets that still pay well outside the valley like Boston, that level of compensation is still extremely limited and are < 1% of available positions most of which are quite senior.
Everyone going to college has turned it into high school- in every metric. I'm a professor, and college is a lifestyle, the classes are a part time job, and there is greatly reduced academic rigor and seriousness. At some age, general education should become a personal journey, or soon we'll have PhDs in general studies and everyone will need one.
My kids will be strongly discouraged from going to college. Colleges have somehow devolved from centers of education into something else entirely. Colleges now often push extreme viewpoints that lack evidence, colleges have dangerous drinking and drug cultures, and colleges bury their students in debt that enslaves them for life.
A good education can now be had on YouTube... I have spent the last year learning construction there and the quality of content is excellent. Years ago, I learned to program quite well using online courses and I am sure those have improved even further. I tried to learn diesel mechanics from a textbook That was the top rated in the field, it is shocking how terrible learning from a textbook is.
I am going to have my kids do a combination of apprenticeships and online learning.
This is a vastly overgeneralized statement. Where I went to college [in the US] was much more than a "part time job" and academic rigor was incredibly high. It was not uncommon for students to work 60-80 hours a week.
> I'm a professor, and college is a lifestyle, the classes are a part time job, and there is greatly reduced academic rigor and seriousness.
Where/what do you teach? When I was doing math & cs - they (especially math) were more than a full time job. Rigor was pretty high - lots of kids failing, dropping out, or transferring schools out. I see this still happening with people I know in school now - mind you not as severe since they’re not in math.
>> Going to college is and always has been a reliable way towards earning more money[0]. The issue isn’t that college doesn’t work, the issue is that it’s basically an asset bubble of sorts and the cost exceeded its value.
That last part about exceeding it's value contradicts the notion that it currently IS a reliable way toward earning more money. At least net more money.
IMHO a bunch of professors should be able to start their own "non-profit" college with minimal overhead. But I suppose a lot of them aren't really into teaching anyway. Maybe we need to separate education from funding their hobbies (research).
It depends on what you're comparing it to. You can go to a trade school and learn contracting, or be an electrician, or an HVAC installer, and in your late teens and early 20's you'll make a lot more than most college grads. But unless you branch out into your own business your income is capped lower than a generic college grad's probably is. And importantly, those careers are typically hell on your body. I know we all like to talk about the dangers of sitting all day but it doesn't compare to doing physical labor for a living, by any stretch. If you have particularly onerous private loans funding a marginal degree from a for-profit institution, you might net less lifetime earnings than a very skilled electrician in an in-demand market.
If you're comparing it to unskilled labor, retail, customer service, or stuff like that, it's absolutely no contest you're still better off with the degree.
And yeah your last bit there seems like the typical HN "let's reinvent this thing that already exist but 'from first principles!!1' but forgetting all the reasons it exists in the state it does now." Public colleges have too much overhead but some of it is justified and necessary to ensure licensing, credentialing, etc.
> and in your late teens and early 20's you'll make a lot more than most college grads.
I question even this. I live in an area of the US without a strong union culture, and known a lot of people in the trades and it doesn’t seem uncommon to see job postings for X apprentice starting at $13-$15 and hour. I could get close to that at a shitty gas station clerk job.
Isn't "apprentice" like an intern. Just the first 1-2 years of on the job training until the wage goes up?
I have a cousin he started as an electrician making $18 an hour as an apprentice. He started making six figures 4 years into the job. Granted he works quite a bit.
It's a feast or famine industry. It's been a feast for a while, and a lot of people who are relatively new to the industry haven't experienced a famine.
My father is/was an electrician and 2008 decimated the industry. He was de facto laid off and worked part time for the better part of three years after. Of course, today there's tons of work and no one to do it. Any young'uns who came in between like 2002-2008 didn't make it through the GFC and switched careers, and the old-timers who weathered the storm don't have enough juice left to work the insane hours.
How competitive are these apprenticeships? A super smart super hard working friend of mine really wanted to do an electrician apprenticeship but at the time (about a decade ago) the wait-list was several year long so he went to college instead.
I'd like to see some harder numbers on this, too. I'm from a similar area, but, maybe things are different in other places. It would be great to see the figures adjusted for cost of living.
It’s hard to get good data broken when you’re looking into things like career level, etc. but when I go on the BLS salary page for my MSA I can see the following
HVAC Repair. It’s a pretty common trade out here. I have a number of family who’s done it at one point. There’s probably a pretty strong demand given how miserable I was when my AC died the other day. Annual median is $42,640
Insurance Claims Processors, which in the particular city I live in tends to be one of the big options for otherwise unskilled college graduates. Annual median: $43,570
Not that big of a difference, though I suppose you could argue the former has the slight advantage of not having as much educational debt burden, which probably exceeds that ~$1k difference.
However like the GP noted, a person in the latter position likely has better options late career.
LOL. I wish the government gave 0-interest loans. As it stands in the US, Stafford Loans are higher than most car loans [3.73% undergrad, 5.28% graduate, 6.28% PLUS]. Costs are skyrocketing despite government loans. It's not the working/middle class students asking for new buildings, new "centers of research", new dorms, etc. Colleges are building these things, giving you the bill, and your options are go:not go.
As the percentage goes lower the amount of debt will increase. The same thing happened in mortgages. The monthly payment stayed relative constant (plus inflation).
It doesn't matter. People care more about the monthly payment than they do the debt #. You can afford a much higher debt burden if the interest rate is smaller.
For fun, assume you can afford $1000/month in housing costs. With a 30yr mortgage and 20% interest rate. How expensive of a house can you afford? What if interst rates dropped to 10%? 5? 2.5?
Very strong correlation with home prices over the last 40 years.
> If huge chunks of future generations skip college because it’s unaffordable, that will be bad for us as a society. It would be much better to reduce the cost of college so that it’s more valuable for more people, rather than having younger generations opt out due to the high cost.
You'd think so. But then again look at healthcare in the US.
Personally, I don't know. But I find it interesting that the only politically permissible way to even discuss it is by looking at how it could hurt women:
> Yet the stakes are too high to ignore, she said. “If you care about our society, one, and, two, if you care about women, you have to care about the boys, too. If you have equally educated numbers of men and women that just makes a better society, and it makes it better for women.”
The possibility that it could be bad for men I guess is not a relevant consideration when evaluating the impact on society.
Well, two ways. First, broadly speaking across the economy, a college graduate 2000 hours a year typically produces more GDP$ to the real economy than a non-college graduate. There are a lot of caveats to that statement, but broadly it's true and that's why people will refer to education as human capital. Second (and I believe this is the more controversial claim), as a society we really do benefit from intellectuals expert in history, literature and other liberal arts and from basic research, by which I mean scientific research which has no immediately forseeable practicable application.
I agree as well. I'm just speculating about OP's point.
Now you can get a pretty decent education from watching lots of videos and an education that commensurate with one that you'd plunk down thousands of dollars for at a university or college.
Especially in the era of COVID where they would have you watch videos anyways during a period of lockdown.
So glad I'm not a student right now. I'd feel so ripped off.
Maybe, but I think it conflates two things: i) getting a college education and ii) the price of it. Maybe the price in the US just isn't right anymore.
At the same time, the "elites" do make sure their offspring does get a prestigious (signaling) college/university education. So baring big changes to how society is run, some things will be difficult to get to without a college education.
> Maybe the price in the US just isn't right anymore.
Has it be right since at least the 1990s though? There’s clear divergence between income and college costs in the USA, and it’s hard to see why, given everyone in the industry seems to be taking a part of the honey pot. Seriously, how did we arrive to “textbook for a semester are more expensive than tuition is in other counties”?
That's not really a thing. Also, wait till you hear how much an academic makes from the articles they publish, and from those lucrative research grants from big-[oil,pharma,etc].
I'm guessing you haven't dealt with the spiral-bound, Kinkos-printed "text" written by the professor, sold for $75, and updated every semester to prevent resale?
My wife had two of these every semester for her last two years of college.
I see the downvotes, but I still don't see how some guy self-publishing and printing his own book at Kinkos is proof for a conspiracy in which publishers collude with professors to force students to buy books from that publisher. If anything, it's an example for the exact opposite.
Sorry, it is. I've worked in higher education and I've seen it happen. What other explanation do you have for the sales of these ludicrous "textbooks"?
It's not like there is a cheap alternative that the professors can switch to. All new edition textbooks are expensive. They can't specify out of print editions because then you can't guarantee that your students can get access to them, and the textbook companies update the problems in the books just enough to make using a different edition from the one specified impractical.
Some publishers may incentivize using their particular textbook, but there isn't some vast conspiracy to jack up prices. The fact is textbooks are a niche product with a steep demand curve that can be paid for with subsidized loans, of course they're going to be ridiculously overpriced.
I always found it funny that there were yearly rewrites to textbooks on subjects which hadn't really changed that much in hundreds of years. You telling me there isn't a good calculus textbook in the public domain yet? Really? This is a totally solvable problem, but the powers that be are getting by on grift.
It's not the information in the chapters that changes, it's the problems that students do for assignments that change. For example a problem where one train is going 105 mph and another is going 90 mph gets swapped for one where one plane is going 605 mph and another is going 590. Conceptually it's the same, but obviously a student doing the one problem is going to get a radically different answer from the one doing the other.
And while calculus might have some public domain works that are acceptable, most fields have advanced pretty far since 1925, which might I remind you was before the discovery of DNA, penicillin, plate tectonics, molecular orbital theory, the neutron, the invention of digital electronics, Keynesian economics, Hemingway's first novel, etc.
Then don't require (note, require) students to buy textbooks at all - what are these lecturers supposed to be doing? Are there no libraries. Don't outdate them every year to make second hand ones useless.
300 kids taking a course in a 90 day semester, 10 copies in a library, each kid gets 3 days per semester with the class textbook. Would you pay 25000 for that semester of education? Maybe some students can go halvsies on a copy but the number of copies of the book that you need is roughly equivalent to the number of students. And before you say "well why doesn't the library just buy more copies" remember who pays for the library to buy those copies.
The professors don't make the changes to the textbooks, the publishers do. Professors don't like it either, they have to update all of their materials every year to keep up with the changes too.
No one is denying textbooks are expensive, I'm denying the conspiracy theory that professors and publishers are all colluding to manipulate the market.
As a professor, create your own PDF and give it to all the students free, update it if there's a new development in the field, which is something you'd know as a professor.
It is really not that hard, these professors often write or collaborate on the textbooks themselves so they're writing them anyway. If the textbook is needed for learning and not just a way to get some extra money then this would be standard practice.
What's the longest text you've ever written that you can judge 'it's not that hard' to write a 500p standard textbook?
As a corollary, only very few professors actually have their own textbook and thus don't make any money whatsoever from choosing a specific textbook.
Finally, why would you deny someone money for work they did, typically in their spare time? Who else do you think should give away their work for free? Musicians? Doctors? Carpenters? Bakers? Do you accept money for the work you do?
I never said anything about someone giving their work away for free. Roll it into tuition, whatever, but this predatory textbook cartel hustle has to stop.
The professor is giving a class, they're going to teach all of what is in the textbook, and for those who can't write it themselves and use ones written by other professors, they can give out that PDF, they don't have to write one.
I was simply responding to this:
> It's not like there is a cheap alternative that the professors can switch to. All new edition textbooks are expensive. They can't specify out of print editions because then you can't guarantee that your students can get access to them, and the textbook companies update the problems in the books just enough to make using a different edition from the one specified impractical.
in the parent comment. I'm pointing out that there is a cheap alternative. We have had digital documents for decades, there are ways to keep those documents up to date without rewriting the entire document, there is no excuse to have a publisher and distributor for educational companion text documents for students in classrooms. It is glaringly obvious that the status quo with textbooks is artificially maintained even though technologically there is absolutely no reason it has to be this way.
You verbatim wrote "As a professor, create your own PDF and give it to all the students free". How is that not giving away your work for free?
How is automatically deducting textbook cost from student tuition going to help with anything? If anything it will help maintain the status quo, because then it's even less transparent.
The alternative you propose is for professors who don't write their own books is to give other people's work (the original authors') away for free.
So your solution is that because it's easy to copy digital books, the 'problem is solved' by forcibly taking away the fruit of labor of some people at your convenience?
As I wrote elsewhere: if there were a cartel, college textbooks would vastly outprice textbooks for professionals (because they cannot be 'forced' to buy them) - that's not what I see in my field. Professional textbooks easily cost $200-$300. It's just a niche market.
You can be mad because I proposed a solution to an easily solved problem that doesn't need to exist if you want to. I don't mind.
When you see "buy one get one free" do you really believe the second one is free? Think before you toss what you think are gotchas out at people. Roll it into the cost of tuition. It's really not that hard to get, yet I'm saying it a second time.
It does solve lots of problems. Material cost, outlandish distribution, marketing and production cost, and it means the prices aren't externalized and the students know what they're paying for a course up front. Those are basically all the problems with the textbook market. It solves a couple of other problems too, digital documents can't be resold, doubly so if their cost is counted in tuition, so no need to stupidly re edit the document every year just to make sure last year's edition is worthless, only edit when there is an update in the field.
Speaking of which, the fact that they do that, edit books needlessly to prevent the previous year's book from being resellable at any value, is proof positive that textbooks are a racket. Professional textbooks are a different kind of hustle, it's like law dictionaries, they know the books are valuable to professionals so they charge large prices, this fact is not proof that the college textbook racket is not a racket run by a publishing cartel. Your reasoning is as weak as a limp dishrag on this one.
Unfortunately, the incentives are quite different. In France and Germany, once you get a university research position or CNRS appointment, or in Germany a permanent professorship, you can essentially do what you want within the 36hrs/wk, and writing a nice little handout is what professors often like to do.
In the US, new faculty are judged by their research output and grant input and are still under the threat of losing their job if they don't make tenure after a few years. There is zero incentive to write a book on top of the 80hrs/wk that are put into the job already.
Also, in Germany, a university will absolutely buy textbooks in bulk for students to use, but that's a philosophical decision of how you want to run a society: if it's upheld as important that everyone can get (essentially) free access to top education, that's what you get. If education is treated like a business, you get something else.
Yeah, I'm not even sure how that would work? Like, if my department goes with a particular textbook, or a certain number of classes all use textbooks from the same publisher, then sometimes we get discounts on things like solutions manuals or custom editions, but I don't know how a publisher would pay a particular professor for picking their textbook.
I'm still missing the part where I get rich! Please tell me!
Truth be told, in my field the intro level textbooks are essentially indistinguishable, down to graphics and specific examples, and every publisher has one. Even if I got free samples for all of them (I don't), there is zero difference for the student. You look at the classics, maybe check out a new book, but in the end pick the one you're already familiar with because you don't have any time to waste.
Haha, I wish! Most of the books for the intro classes I teach are essentially redundant. It's a lucky occasion when you teach something where you learn something completely new that you find interesting, and these classes are typically small, so there's even less incentive for a publisher.
You can compare the price of college textbooks to the price of textbooks for professionals and you will see there is no difference. It's simply a niche market.
Personally, I prefer decade old textbooks, hardcover, beautifully typeset, clear diagrams and equations, black and white. Of course that doesn't exist for every field. But try to imagine the complaints you get from students for teaching from 'obsolete' textbooks that aren't even in four color print.
The other problem is that prices have no relation to quality. The random private university that will saddle you with $250k in debt and no job prospects costs the same as Harvard, which will both give you more aid and give you a foot in the door pretty much anywhere. But the marketing to kids has been all about finding the right "fit" - not finding the school that will actually land them a job for a reasonable value.
And to top that off, career "fit" has been marketed so hard to kids that no one wants to go into specialized trades, which will both almost definitely pay way better and be way more fulfilling than the random inside sales job that they land right out of school
The marketing on this to Gen X was incredibly effective as well.
There was this pervading "common sense" that if you didn't go to college, you weren't going to be able to attract the kind of spouse that you wanted, or that you would somehow be looked down on in the reproductive market. The smart ones figured out that this was actually a handy way to filter out superficial candidates.
Fast forward 25 years, and I see many middle-aged men who are dissatisfied with their corporate lives but haven't build any income potential in something other than corporate America, so they are stuck in jobs that are increasingly subject to the pressures of globalism, etc.
We can’t all be plumbers.. college is worth it. You get access to technology. For computers it was that way until the 90s when you could get access outside of universities. All of the front end JavaScript web apps will be replaced with automation and drag and drop UIs. This will let some people scale but all those code academy kids will need to find new skills.
Computer Science graduates have done well and will continue to do well, although figuring out a post-40s career strategy is a huge necessity. Other fields, other than the specialties? Many will continue to suffer, IMO.
Ageism. Yes, there are 50 year old devs that are on the cutting edge of their field, and still doing well, but by 40 you're looked at with increased skepticism if you haven't made your way into management
It seems like an irrational made up meme that risks becoming a self full filling prophecy. Much like the view that the only qualified interviews are Google interviews.
I don't think your conclusion is suggested by the statistics in the article. There is a decline in enrollment, but it is heavily focused on men and white men are even slightly behind other ethnicities. This holds true even for very high household incomes where the ROI on a degree is less important than the social prestige of being in a white collar career. If college was a bad deal, you would see women opting out as well.
>If college was a bad deal, you would see women opting out as well.
Not necessarily. Bad deals are generally taken due to deceptive marketing, something that drove a lot of the college applications over the last two generations. If deceptive marketing is still in play but one group, e.g. American men, is no longer being targeted...
A large generalization but in my experience women operate under the assumption that they will marry a partner that has equal or greater earning potential. Men assume that they will have to support their partner.
The other part of this is kids and biological reality. Can't imagine doing a trade or physical job while pregnant. Even after birth it took my wife a solid year or more before she was physically back to "normal".
You're conflating college with student loans. Not everyone who goes to college comes out with tons, or even any debt. Additionally, federal loans for undergraduate degrees are capped (to ~$35kish right now). It is graduate school where people end up with six-figures of high interest debt, as graduate loans are unlimited.
You don't need to go to college to be successful, but the data speaks for itself. College graduates have always, on average, earned more and enjoyed significantly lower unemployment. Even if that weren't the case, the fact that college-level jobs are easier on the body and people can generally do them well for 20+ years longer is a huge benefit.
I was raised by two blue collar people and my parents were big on college. My father worked as an electrician and even by the time I was 16, his body was starting to give out. He's basically unable to ply his trade at this point due to several complications related to his career, and works a near-minimum wage office job now. I'm sure he would gladly trade half a years salary when he was 18 to get an additional 20 high-earning working years.
35, renting and another 12k left here. I am in the (relatively) lucky position that my loans are only about 6% interest so it's not quite an emergency for me to pay them back. Selfishly I stopped making extra payments to see if Biden actually kept his campaign promise of a minimum $10k forgiveness, but of course as soon as he was elected that disappeared.
I know classmates of mine (2008) who still have 20, 30, 40k in debt. Even some of the kids who came from a bit of family money still struggled for the better part of their 20's to pay everything back.
The two are linked inseparably. To have higher education without the astronomical loans that hold the current system up you'd need an entirely new system.
COVID has accelerated this big time. Why spend $5,000 a semester to watch a Zoom lecture from an average professor when you can open YouTube in a new tab and see a world-class professor share the same information for free? It makes no rational sense.
The moment that a serious, legitimate credential system appears, every average university will disappear overnight. We'll be left with an oligarch class that attends the top ±30 universities and everyone else getting a AmaGoogBook certificate of completion.
> Why spend $5,000 a semester to watch a Zoom lecture from an average professor when you can open YouTube a new tab and see a world-class professor share the same information for free? It makes no rational sense.
Because there is much more possible value in college than just the education.
Socializing is a huge part of it. College is a good place to learn how to make friends, date, network, etc.
It's also nearly free at many schools, so I don't envision the future you're describing ever happening. Most 18-22 year olds couldn't think of a better place to be than on a campus almost exclusively filled with people in their age group.
This reminds me of a passage from Bryan Caplan's book, "The Case Against Education." Paraphrasing, there is nothing stopping you from walking into a lecture at Harvard or MIT or any other renowned center of learning. No one will ask you for identification or lock you outside. You can buy or download the same textbook and fill out the same homework. (In the case of your "socialization" value, again, no one is stopping you from just walking into a campus and socializing with peers there)
No one does it because we intuitively understand that there is no real value in doing so; the purpose such institutions serve is credentialing, not education.
Well, I did it :-) I did 2 or 3 years of philosophy courses at Sydney Uni. I mean, I just turned up. At the beginning of each semester I'd start doing every possible course, then just keep doing the ones I liked, with interesting/good/admirable lecturers, which turned out to be a lot, 2 or 3 times the amount of lectures weekly than if I'd been enrolled. Also was on their mailing list so also went to special visiting lectures, a regular discussion group, etc etc. No exam stress! I had such a great time. But yeah, most (non-university) people I mentioned it to laughed as if it was crazy.
Most people don't have the time freedom to be able to do this. The opportunity cost would be too high, as they need to work to eat, and sitting in a class isn't work.
Socialization is a huge part of it - perhaps the biggest in terms of impact - because students who worked alongside each other during a similar stage of life, living within short walking distance of each other 24/7, working toward a similar goal, develop a bond which can be immensely valuable later on in networking for job opportunities.
Those students are much less likely to develop such a bond with some rando who just walked in off the street to check out what's going on. That person has zero investment in the experience other than expressed interest and would I'm certain be measurably less successful forming relationships with other students who could help their career in the future. They aren't in the same tribe.
It makes me sick to say it, but this can be even more important than the credentialing. There are multiple stories of students dropping out to start companies and still benefitting from their college peer network in ways that wouldn't happen for someone that wasn't actually a 'true peer'.
I think this is simply a biological tendency at the end of the day and don't see any easy way of changing it.
It’s not “world class professors” on YouTube that people are watching instead of their own university’s zoom classes. They’re not paying for zoom classes because they want to learn on campus.
They still want to go to college, they just don’t want to learn online.
You don't pay for instruction or certification you pay for signaling. A student from Arizona State can be more competent than one from Harvard. Who do you think is going to have more doors opened for them?
> A student from Arizona State can be more competent than one from Harvard.
The relevant question from the perspective of those doing the hiring is what is the probability a student from Arizona State is more competent than one from Harvard?
Replace competent with well connected and/or otherwise useful.
While you are right, the question still stands. There is no value in the latter two. The only value is in the first, and that's not what you're paying for, so why pay at all?
Which in turn have massively devalued, given the majority of the job market in most Western countries is only interested in the unicorn willing to eat old bread.
> COVID has accelerated this big time. Why spend $5,000 a semester to watch a Zoom lecture from an average professor when you can open YouTube in a new tab and see a world-class professor share the same information for free? It makes no rational sense.
I don't get that line of thinking:
1. Education isn't a passive lecture-consumption activity. A "world-class professor" who put a lecture on youtube is going to have exactly zero time to talk to you as a student.
2. There's probably not that much difference between the teaching ability of a "world-class professor" and your "average" good professor. That's especially true for undergrad subjects.
I think you're assuming a false equivalency, akin to "why have parents when you can watch videos made by the best parents in the world on television?" The tech version may have many similarities, but it's not equivalent.
> Why spend $5,000 a semester to watch a Zoom lecture from an average professor when you can open YouTube in a new tab and see a world-class professor share the same information for free?
Because most employers will not even consider your application without a degree.
I can understand this. I think my parents never questioned the usefulness of a formal education. But I am starting to.
My brother tried several different educational paths, pushed by my parents. In the end he got a sort of burnout. After years now he is picking up some work, mainly helping elderly still living alone on any tasks (from computer related to doing groceries). He seems happy, finally.
My other brother hated all his schools, got bullied a lot, he specialized in agriculture in the end. Now he's a truck driver (with one of those super big ones), he likes it. He can still give nice advice on what to plant in my garden, so there's that.
I see that my son is also really interested in many things, but school is not so much "his thing". Sitting still, listening, it's not making him happy. If he has any aspiration of building a life without formal schooling I'd support it. There is so much to learn online. He can be an entrepreneur and we can help him get there. In fact, I'd enjoy it.
Who knows with the insane cost of education, this generation of men may end up self-taught, happy and (in the US important) debt free. Maybe we should worry about the people missing out on this opportunity?
The article made mention of what the example males were doing and what they were earning. There was mention of the average graduate's earnings vs non-graduate, but otherwise they're judging a person skipping a first year of college while they would otherwise have been spending money in the equivalent year. As you and others have implied, these individuals could earn, buy modest property in a quiet state/town, then live a decent life debt free - there are far worse things to achieve.
My brother was a professional basketball player up until his mid-30s. I remember when he was about the same age as the males of the story, he was deciding between a four-year scholarship at an American college, or a four-year contract in the Australian professional league. The pitch from the college was that he could return to Australia in year five and earn x. The pitch from the local team was that he could earn x by year five, but have been earning for each of the first four years; the pro team offered university payments, car, and so on. Pros and cons either way.
He eventually got his degree studying remotely in the later years of his basketball career and transitioned to a desk job. There's always a sense of what might've been, but I think things worked out well enough.
What these men don't understand, and nobody is telling them directly, is that college is how you essesntially conspire to manage (extract value from) the people who didn't go. College education is a tribe initiation, and you are in or you aren't. The pretenses and pretexts of subject matter and socializing are secondary to this one big thing.
Everyone who graduates knows this, and this is the quiet part most won't even say out loud to themselves, and so we hear it's for other reasons like knowledge, relationships, and the experience. We will deny it and even gaslight people over it, because it's our source of social power, but for young men who need the concept framed concretely, this is the real choice.
What these young men need to be told is: the way the world really works is, there are people who graduated, and people who didn't. The latter almost exclusively work for the former, and the former find each other so that they can assign them to manage the latter on their behalf. Further, the former work together to ensure that they do not work for the latter, or have any accountability to them. As an individual non-graduate, you will always be working against a literal conspiracy against you. The exceptions who appear to "break through" and succeed, mainly exist and have their stories promoted to preserve the invisibility of the ceiling and keep you running on hope.
Sure, you can make "six figures" (the stupidest euphemism for 100k that is the very bottom end salary of membership in the current elite) in a trades job, but what you will not have is opportunity. Salary means nothing if it is not supported by opportunity, autonomy, leverage into assets, and transferrable social status to your kids.
The result is predictable, where they're having their countries, political levers, cultures and opportunities taken from them because they didn't realize they needed defending.
If you have decided not to graduate, welcome to the underclass. They'll tell you that you do it to yourself, and you'll probably never understand.
Ignoring the flowery text here.. this is pretty spot-on. My brother in law is an amazing people person. He's able to convince anyone of anything. He always "knows a guy" and "is that person's second cousin". Never waits on line at a bar, and always the life of the party.
This guy was born for sales.
Perhaps unsurprisingly he also was terrible in college. Just did not work with his brain. He dropped out, worked some odd jobs, settled in to working a tree company, cutting down trees. Dangerous work to say the least.
He finally went back to school and took like 2 classes a semester and graduated with whatever degree he could string together from the local college, and it took him ages, I think he spent 7 years total in undergrad. It was affordable because it was just some local state school.
2 months after graduation? He's a sales rep at a B2B software firm. A year later he's the top of his sales group. His potential is huge now, and that door was firmly shut to him before he graduated. College, for him, was just a piece of paper he needed, and his life took a dramatic turn when he got it.
Disagree, I have several friends who dropped out, and my brother dropped out of high school, and he is making 150k. A college degree will soon be a recognized as unnecessary.
I figured that this was more of less rational.
In Australia, men have more options for decent traditional jobs without a degree. Construction, Manufacture, Mining, Agriculture, fisheries, warehousing, transport, utilities are all male dominated sectors, mostly not requiring a degree.
Retail, food and accommodation services only just skew female.
The big area where women are employed in much greater numbers than men is nursing/social work and teaching. All of which are increasingly becoming bachelor degrees. Historically these didn't require a bachelor's degree, just one year diploma or a two year or certificate. There is a trend for these work forces to become more qualified, take more responsibility and get paid more.
Industry stats:
https://lmip.gov.au/default.aspx?LMIP/LFR_SAFOUR/LFR_Industr...
One thing I am starting to wonder about is if there is a systematic guidance counseling failing in high schools and colleges. There are so many well paying tech jobs that we just aren't getting that many candidates for. Forget not having a great gender ratio, it is often hard to find a lot of candidates for my openings. If I can't offer sponsorship, it can take awhile
There clearly seems to be a lot more knowledge in some countries about which jobs lead to high paying careers, and the U.S. still has an antiquated mindset about this.
When I was studying software engineering, I met a girl who switched major after the first year.
I saw her again once in the lab, and I asked her why did you switch, she said, and I quote her exact words: "why would I sit and code all day when I've this a$$, pointing at her back."
I honestly didn't know what to say afterward. Our program had special scholarship for women, and we had only one woman (out of 30 or so) and that was more than 10 years ago.
Why the downvote? I don't share her opinion, I'm just sharing an encounter I had. I was really surprised by her response, coming from different culture to the west, both of my parents are engineers.
I met several great women developers in my career and I personally think the field will benefit a lot by having more diverse perspectives on the tools being created.
> I met several great women developers in my career
Why is the other one poster child for feminity? I met guys who dropped out of college, because they could not keep grades due to regular whole night gaming.
I met guys who switched out of CS, because they could not pass exams despite trying.
In both gender, you get some amount of irresponsible, disinterested, troublemakers or simply people with too many mental issues to finish any school.
But that incident stuck in my head because I expected many answers but not the one she gave! Anyway, it was a light hearted conversation not to be taken seriously.
You’ll actually find similar gender disparities in China and India. Maybe not as pronounced as the USA, but it’s still there. Somehow there is something going on throughout the industry that crosses cultural boundaries.
From a sample of 3 countries (two with very traditional gender roles), I’m not convinced. In Eastern Europe software engineering was a female dominated field.
That's the gender-equality paradox, STEM version: the more gender-equal a society, the more the genders self-segregate occupationally.
It's important that this is not about any absolute value, but about the sign of the correlation. The "blank slate" hypothesis would predict that the correlation is positive, i.e. the more gender equal a society, the more equal the distribution.
The opposite is actually the case, the correlation is negative.
This strongly suggests that the statistical differences in occupational preferences have an innate cause. That difference is moderated by societal influence, not caused by it. When societal pressure are lessened or removed, the innate differences manifest more strongly.
And of course, it needs to be stressed that these are statistical differences, not categorical ones, just like the outcomes are statistical and not categorical.
> From a sample of 3 countries (two with very traditional gender roles), I’m not convinced.
These are the three biggest countries (40% of the world population), and also the ones most represented in tech here in the USA, at least (because they are the biggest).
It's a legacy of socialist regimes enforcing gender ratios. Gender disparity is usually proportional to freedom of choice. ie. countries where there's less pressure to choose a particular field are more disparate in their gender ratios across disciplines.
I'm not sure about that, i've hear Professor Emeritus Mallard talk about his youth in the genetical field and the first use of computers to assist geneticists, he told me that he basically never saw men doing computer work, and that changed in the 80s, along with the culture.
> The story i've heard is that the olden days, operating a computer was seen as clerical work, just like being a secretary, so ideally suited to women.
The fact is that in the old days, there really was plenty of clerical work around computers that just disappeared. Like rewritting data to punched cards and swapping wheels with punched tapes. My grandmother worked in 'data-processing facility' in a communist country, the facility employed many women, but they were (from whay i heard) essentially clerical positions without much CS/EE knowledge.
Were they 'into' it though, or did the nature of the secretarial work they were doing change? At least as I understand it, that was predominantly (of course there were exceptions, and female scientists, etc.!) the reason for the rise and fall of it.
I'm not arguing for or against '"Women don't really like this stuff"' - I'm just saying an example against it needs to be women liking this stuff, not merely doing this stuff.
I was born in USSR and I don't recall any aspect there that would amount to "enforcing gender ratios". The way I recall the "gender politics" of the communist 1980s was that formally, gender was effectively ignored; in practice there were quite some prejudices; but the notion of discrimination wasn't even discussed much so anything similar to "affirmative action" or even caring about gender ratio would be quite alien to that regime.
And yes, there were proportionally quite many female engineers and computer scientists. I might guess that this perhaps was facilitated by prejudices/discrimination in the "more macho" fields of construction engineering and industrial engineering, so all the high school girls with good STEM results would go to math and computer science fields instead of all the programs with a focus on heavy industry - but even those had a decent proportion of female engineers.
Not true, at least not in Communist Poland. Jobless single men were sometimes prosecuted, but a stay-at-home-mom was something completely normal in families which could afford it (which there weren't that many of).
I'm not commenting on gender disparities in other countries, although I have seen first hand what you are saying about China and India. What I am saying is that when I hire for various tech jobs, I get a ton of non-American candidates. It can be hard to find good American candidates at times. The demand for the jobs is there, but it's clearly not be communicated to American high school and college kids enough.
I have come to realize that most people have no idea how much freaking money people are making in the corporate world...especially in tech. They simply have no exposure except to opportuities or jobs that take a decade or more to work up to the salary that barely-graduated college kids are being pushed to in tech.
We are talking about whole population segments that dream of one day making $75k. They know that tech pays well but have no idea how outlandish the pay is compared to their experiences and expectations. They think their counterpart is tech is making $10k more than them, when in fact they are probably making $50-100k more.
It's also a failure on schools to prepare their top students for the useless signalling rituals necessary to get the job in the first place. Either it's a life skills class in high school teaching you how to fill out paper applications for a part-time job and an interview that will take anyone with a pulse who doesn't mouth off to the interviewer or it's a career development department that is optimized for getting business majors management internships but either clueless or 15 years old advice for getting started in STEM fields.
Good programs exist in this space, but they're the exception (and no single person can possibly create a properly comprehensive survey without resorting to opinion polling).
We pay well, but not Google or Apple well. Not being a huge tech shop, we don't have a lot of H1-B opportunities laying around, which means I mostly deal with domestic candidates. I'll get candidates, for sure, but it can take awhile to fill roles.
These are well paying jobs, but they do require a certain amount of skills. A lot of kids are getting college degrees, but coming out without enough skills to land a lot of in-demand jobs.
Mirrors my experience though, and probably many in eg finance as well. There is a clear, well publicized path from degree -> money that any middle class+ guy can walk.
Sad the article doesn’t go into specifics though, it’s all just “degrees”.
What does your job description say? What are your company reviews on Glassdoor? What does the whisper network say about what it's like to work as a woman in tech at your company?
Using a low estimate of 15% of CS degrees going to women, you'd get 750 women applying.
What are you doing to get so many women to give your company an immediate rejection and apply somewhere else?
Perhaps frankbreetz works for a company that isn't very cool, making it people's third choice; and a disproportionate number of women got hired by their first or second choice employer.
> Using a low estimate of 15% of CS degrees going to women, you'd get 750 women applying.
There were three in my cohort of ~35; and that was much more dense on that programme that was a (more CS-oriented) subset of the EE department's variants - something like 15 of 400 in first year, higher ratio (i.e. fewer female drop-outs/more doing MEng) by the end I think though. Only a few years ago.
And even then, your conclusion is only valid for a graduate entry role - for something more senior you'd need to at least look at grad rates further back, if not what happens to people once in industry. (We've also assumed 100% grads - or even male/female anyway - do apply to industry at all, vs. not, or something else, or staying in academia, etc. I expect that's roughly true though.)
Indeed. What happens to people after they get a job is a relevant factor. It would be interesting to see both dropout rates over a career lifetime and if senior level women in tech are concentrated in a group of companies known to be good to work at via the whisper network.
Even age is a factor. Most folks don't stick with their CS job until retirement age, although some are smart enough to save and retire before that age. Age discrimination is not exactly rare though.
I have no idea where I'd get that kind of data or if it even exists, but maybe someone else does.
Given that kind of data, an industry with a constant deficit of qualified senior level candidates would do well to improve that situation by figuring out how to reduce the dropouts.
Women really really like to study subjects related to people - even "homeland security, law enforcement and firefighting" is more popular among women than computer science.
Getting into debt to get a piece of paper that only lets you begin to enter the job market after gathering enough credentials by either working for free or talking to others and hopefully trying your luck even though there are 100s for a single internship... College is a scam unless you're paying close attention and don't get into debt in the first place.
Those who manage to jump through all of the hoops don't realize that there is a secondary scam waiting for them: working for a wage without significant stock options while someone makes millions sitting around doing nothing off of their effort. We've had movies made about this for many years and still it's so strange how it's not acknowledged.
Also: who is friend or foe? The lines have blurred significantly, which is a driving force in WANTING to change things in the first place. There's even loss of solidarity between family members, next generations.
There's no incentive to try. If I were the same age as these young men, I wouldn't bother either.
Stock options and other scalable forms of compensation are a huge deal for our organization now.
The funny thing is we also don't give a shit about credentials anymore. We just want work ethic followed loosely by experience.
Willingness to endure difficult things and learn is all we are really going for in a new hire these days.
What is amazing to me is all of the business leaders who still insist on upholding these arbitrary gatekeepers. You are leaving a ton of talent on the table.
I think the answer for many is to focus harder on the business value equation and to just let the people be free. Running a business like a power fantasy is not going to get you there. The more you try to control people the harder it will be to make money with them in the long term.
> Those who manage to jump through all of the hoops don't realize that there is a secondary scam waiting for them: working for a wage without significant stock options while someone makes millions sitting around doing nothing off of their effort.
I know this is the thing in US and shouldn't surprise me but I'm based in central Europe and honestly the thought of this still feels so abstract to me. I'd love to have an option of choosing jobs that offer stock options.
I'm a Northern European and just buy stock on the market. My union is pretty strong, and I enjoy healthcare and more than two weeks holiday I hear is typical in the states.
It's not altogether a good idea to have a lot invested in the company you work for, as if they go under, your stock is also not worth so much, and you might lose your income at the same time too.
>working for a wage without significant stock options while someone makes millions sitting around doing nothing off of their effort
This seems to characterise almost every single place I have worked for or interviewed at in different ways. I have interviewed at smaller businesses where the entire "management" team doesn't do anything, doesn't come into the office, and is just various family members of the original founder.
Then there are the larger businesses that have a network of people who all know each other and connected and occupy positions with "manager" in them, whose day consists of just telling people to do things that the person they are telling could figure out and do without their existence and better.
To spoil a little, this book considers a group of low-income whites and a group of low-income blacks.
As teenagers the whites have a pessimistic attitude about success but the blacks are more optimistic. Barriers to the success of both groups are looming.
The first edition of the book stops there: one is left with the feeling that the plight of the two groups is not that different (e.g. "systemic racism" is a real thing but doesn't seem salient when you are know "white people with black problems") Somehow, however, the blacks believe that "they can overcome".
In a follow-up study a decade later both groups are doing poorly, but the blacks in particular have had their hopes dashed by poverty, problems with the law, problems with work, etc.
I agree on some of the points about support structures for women that don't exist for men. I've seen it occur even at the professional level, female co-workers are reached out to, invited to groups, given networking opportunities that I would have to put loads of effort to keep up with. It's biased treatment in the now, even if it's trying to offset the errors of the past.
Its not that the support structures do not exist, after all they never did and men did fine without them, its that college is suffused with an ideology that is anti-men, anti-merit and, for the most part, useless for anything but its own self-propagation.
==its that college is suffused with an ideology that is anti-men, anti-merit and, for the most part, useless for anything but its own self-propagation.==
I never felt like this kind of victim while in college (mid-2000s). I wonder if all colleges have changed or if society has changed. If it is society that has changed, maybe our colleges are simply reflecting the real-world change.
It coincides with the election of Donald Trump. This ideology already had a foothold in some departments and Trump was the accelerant that made it spread everywhere.
Longread if you want a more detailed explanation:
https://newdiscourses.com/2021/04/rise-woke-cultural-revolut...
Calling Lindsay a professional mathematician is a stretch. Also he neglects to cite Derrick Bell and Richard Delgado and the whole critical legal studies movement.
Sure, those structures didn't exist prior, but that doesn't mean their existing now doesn't provide an advantage to those who benefit from them.
And it's not that I'm against such structures or groups on the basis of shared identity that you're born with, but I think it would be beneficial for those structures ( especially when they're company funded ) to have niches for those who don't fit niches.
You've got a fundamental difference of opinion around the basic purpose of the exercise and can't be trusted to have a rational opinion about what's really going on.
What is 'merit' for?
If your answer is 'distinguishing between things of worth and things that are valueless' then there's a problem, and you are prematurely contextualizing. Briefly, you cannot be trusted to dictate the contexts of value for the whole world around you. You're missing far too much. And it matters. Not just morally, but practically.
As to morality and practicality, merit as the optimal way to building hierarchy has worked practically. In terms of morality, what do you have that is better? And why/who says its better?
The thing that struck me right off the bat was that the lead photo of this story is of 18-year-old with a PS5 and pretty sweet setup in his bedroom. I don't have anything deep to add to this, but if you can sit at home in your childhood bedroom indefinitely playing video games and working menial jobs, maybe the allure is there.
The lead image is there to direct the reader towards a specific way of thinking, similar in way that if the article has been about prison it would be an image of black young men dealing drugs. It is a narrative and implication that if "group X" did not choose to do that then the problem that group X has would not exist. The author could as easily chosen an lead imagine of the same person in a class room with a narrative that it is the school system that is failing to get the demographic to enroll, or an image of an college class photo to illustrate the lack of diversity and imply subtle blame on which ever demographic that would dominate the image.
"The author could as easily chosen an lead imagine of the same person in a class room"
Might vary where you live, but my understanding is that the author of a piece is not usually the one picking images and writing the headline. There are some instances where the writer and photographer are the same, but that's not the case here.
It's a story about males who aren't in college, so why would they have photos of males in school? Stats about "people considering not going to college" is not as compelling as this story with stronger stats about what people are actually doing, IMO.
Note that the focus of blame here is on the education system and then look at the image. The person in frame is the teacher, representing the Educational System, and the boy. The article mentions both college rates and high school dropout rates.
You are right that its generally not the author of the written text that chose the image, through the words I would describe if I was being a more technical correct about it would be authors of the article since an article rarely if ever now days has a single author. There is the author/s of the text, the editor, the proof readers, layout design, image selection, and each participated in creation the collaborated created work.
As you said, that's a different narrative with a different picture. OP's story is about individuals saying they feel lost, and then it shows them bumming around at home.
After I quit university and before I found my eventual career path back in the 90s, a relevant picture would've been me stuffing around on the computer as that's largely what I did (writing a book, playing Hextris, typing up things for my dad, seeing what a modem could do, etc).
We don't have a lot of details as to what "invests his money into crypto" means and how that is going. The article doesn't touch on his music and music production skills, both of which could be honed substantially with a further music education. They could also be honed a lot by playing in a band and committing to a lot of practice. People can be self taught, but it generally requires a lot of practice and purpose, and this article doesn't touch on whether or not he is doing that.
You can break into music production without a degree, of course, but it's going to be a challenge in the middle of nowhere Minnesota.
I mean of the choice is between that and crippling debt and a useless degree, he's making the objectively smart move.
The fact that they were able to buy things while living at home just drives the point home even more- he would not have the disposable income to make those purchases for many years if he decides to go to college.
Wut? Are those the only choices? Is there nothing in between? Lay off the drama. I don't feel like my degree was useless (and I'm not even working in the field I got a degree in) and I certainly didn't graduate with crippling debt.
Claiming survivorship bias really makes it sound like we are talking about something much riskier than getting a college degree. I didn't survive, I planned. I got a two year degree from a local community college for a fraction of the price that those same credit hours would have cost at a university. I then went on to a modest in-state University to complete my four year degree. I can't put a sexy Ivy League college, or private college, or even a top-tier state university on my resume now but I didn't graduate with crippling debt. That was the trade off I made.
Starting your professional career in debt is nobody's definition of "crippling debt". Whether 39k is too much student loan debt really depends on what the expected future earning potential is for a given degree. A quick search turns up plenty of resources that can help somebody make decisions about how much student loan debt they can comfortably or safely take on. Here is a teacher's guide[1] (it's a PDF link) from the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau one could use as a starting point.
Oh I completely agree it can be done. But let's consider- did you have children? Were you able to love at home? Did you have to work full-time? Did you need financial aid? There are just a whole lot of variables here.
If you go to college broke, and come out in debt, and are then in debt for years after (I don't know offhand the average) then yes that's crippling debt. When figured against future earnings and actual take-home profit, how will those numbers work out for someone like that? Chances are, not well. Not everyone can just 'learn to program' to get a cushy 120k+/yr job. Also some people with families take longer than 2 years just for an associates degree. This is really survivorship bias wkth N=1.
He works as a landscaper in Minnesota, which I presume does not offer robust employment year round. Even if he could work all seasons doing landscaping, his pay would come out to $26,000 a year, assuming he takes no days off.
I am not sure this is a smart move. It seems like he is hoping his music career pans out, but we aren't given a lot of insight into his talent level there.
That's what I immediately thought, "How convenient, a photo that suits article's the narrative: that all young men are NEETs (not in employment, education, or training). I suppose they couldn't have shown a productive young man as it would be antithetical to the author's thesis.",
One thing is kind of obvious is that male-concentrated majors (hard sciences) in colleges are much much harder than female-concentrated majors (humanities, social sciences), see: https://twitter.com/whyvert/status/1434944460526342147
There's this unfortunately prevailing attitude that you aren't successful in America if you aren't living in New York or San Francisco. It's absolutely bonkers. There are many other great places in this country besides those two cities.
If you can make NYC/SF money and save/invest a portion of your income, you can retire and do significantly better elsewhere. You can't do the opposite.
If you can have a decent lifestyle in Ohio on 40k (big if, when you factor in retirement planning) you can still fundamentally never leave Ohio.
God forbid. Think of all the experiences you and your family will miss out on!
Lately all I want is to get as far away from people as possible. The internet has negated every advantage of these regions and of money broadly. You cannot buy a nuclear family.
The internet has not negated every advantage of regions, unfortunately (Employers are still making folks come to the office) and it still costs money to move elsewhere.
Folks in Ohio still have trouble leaving Ohio.
And you can, to an extent, buy a nuclear family. Mail order brides still exist (and the arrangement can be beneficial for both parties). You can do this with the expectation of children, which you will pay for in the US. Alternatively, you can check adoption as plenty of agencies will make you feel like you are buying a child. (20k upwards, plus travel).
The risk of being tied to a small corner of the country is real and something any Ohioan ought to be sensitive to. Most of Ohio has suffered 50 years of economic back sliding. A lot of people thought that they had realized their modest and reasonable middle class dreams of a good quiet life doing honest work. Major structural changes compromised all of that and a lot of people were stuck holding the bag in places like Toledo, Akron, Youngstown. (Not trying to pick on Ohio, just making a point about risk (though Toledo is the least nice corner of the state and they would have been better of foisting it off on Michigan back when they had the chance))
>God forbid. Think of all the experiences you and your family will miss out on!
This is a snide remark, but it is absolutely a factor. I grew up in Michigan, and the number of people who never venture beyond their almost-entirely-white small town to see what other communities and cultures are like is a huge contributing factor to the amount of prejudice and judgmental nature that makes me never want to move back.
Seeing people different from you and different places is broadening and gives you a much better perspective to be able to understand the world. This is important in life as well as in your career.
also, and this is personal taste of course, it can get to be pretty soul-crushing working with and being around mostly people that don't value a nuclear family, when you yourself do. this was a major reason for moving away from the video game industry and greater Seattle area and returning home to South Dakota a few years ago. it took a lot of mental and emotional effort to kill the lifelong dream I worked toward since elementary school (I turned 30 this year) and "settle for" a local government programmer job... but so far it's been 10000% worth it, I'm much happier than I've ever been, I'm going to start a family very soon, and I'm surrounded by people who have the same core values as I do. nobody in the greater Seattle area wanted to hire a white male with no degree but a frankly ridiculous amount of self-driven personal project experience (plus some team project experience from a few contract positions and an unfinished (stopped halfway when the college fund ran out—best decision of my life) degree) in the fields of game and web development, but my hometown was overjoyed to get someone exactly like myself to write SQL and learn all the ins and outs of the public education system and how it interfaces with state and federal requirements. it's not my first choice of work by a longshot but without having money to either finish a degree (like all my friends did) or make my own gamedev startup (in an increasingly flooded market to the point of ridiculousness), I've finally found happiness, and, more importantly, a very direct path to achieving the actual lifelong goal I kind of always had but never knew it: starting a family. like you said, you can't put a price on something like that.
my best friend had a complicated career trajectory that began with a music education degree, until he found out he hated teaching music to middle schoolers, then he decided to get a two-year online CS degree. this put him in a fair bit of debt as he comes from a very poor upbringing. he got married and moved to the D.C. area a couple years ago to work for a CRM shop there and while he loves the work, he hates the crime and bullshit of the Big City Life, and while he and his wife have gone from enjoying it to tolerating it, they're moving back here to South Dakota at the end of this year before they have children.
I wonder if, going forward, with the advent of remote work and the like, we're going to see less and less people who come from rural/suburban/otherwise sub-100k-population cities choosing to either move back to areas like those they grew up in (if not where they grew up specifically) instead of migrating to The Big City to Make It Big, for these exact reasons. there just doesn't seem to be much to gain from moving to The Big City anymore, if starting a family is your ultimate goal in life.
> don't value a nuclear family, when you yourself do
When you say you value a 'nuclear family', instead of just 'family', the distinction means things like 'I do not want my parents to have more than a minimal role in their grandchildren's lives' and 'my siblings and their children are to be kept separate from my children'. That's what the 'nuclear' part means!
Mom died and now Dad's dropping hints about moving into your furnished basement? Sorry, we're a nuclear family. Going halves with your sister on a duplex with her and her family living next to you and yours so all the cousins can grow up together? Absolutely not nuclear.
On the contrary - I'm not sure of the exact definition, but the meaning of a nuclear family, at least to me, has morphed into a traditional family structure with an at home mother and working father.
If anything, a structure like this would facilitate and encourage visits from and to relatives. Seems like a much nicer life than a situation where both parents work.
Assuming the rest of the world doesn't exist, though. Can't honestly say I'm targeting having more retirement money than needed to get by in some combination of Ukraine, Thailand, and Colombia.
Major life regret? Thinking other countries didn't exist when I was at the age to enter college and taking on massive loans to pay exorbitant US tuition for a school that wasn't anything special when I could have found overseas options at a fraction of the cost.
Until the city grows to encapsulate your neighbourhood, and you find yourself a 'boomer' who was so lucky to be able buy a house for 40k, whose children 'never will'?
Those aren't even that great of places so I think it's pretty regional on thinking that. But definitely there's an attitude of needing to be in a major city to be successful and it's not entirely false. The big difference is major urban area vs not.
Sure, NYC/SF are super expensive, but almost every urban area is when compared to other smaller cities or rural areas.
The issue is that for a lot of people they can only find an ok job in the major urban area, but it's not enough to live there so they get stuck in the suburban wastelands with 45+ minute drives just to go work 8 hours.
They make enough to get by, but not enough to save and move out to a more desirable living situation in a smaller city or rural area without a secure job lined up.
Like $20 an hour is good in Toledo, but it's probably not what most people are making. That's probably a job you have to work up to for years. At $20 an hour in Toledo you very likely can have a higher quality of life then people making far more in the much larger metro areas. But at $10 an hour ($8.80/$7.25) in Toledo area you're probably worse off due to a lack of public support and opportunities for advancement.
Before I left Toledo (grew up there), I made about $18 driving busses with a lot of of overtime. Its not a terribly difficult place to make a living right up to the state median but almost everyone with potential leaves or works out of the city, simply because professional industry is incredibly lackluster.
This is beside your point but HN is such a coastal bubble that I always feel the need to chime in with perspective when someone mentions my hometown.
I know people in the Bay Area who spent two or three hours a day commuting before moving back out to the mid-west again for remote work. This is a typical commute from SF to Mountain View, for example.
The great reshuffling that is happening in front on our eyes might very well push those not in the cognitive elite away from all those great places as well. I am seeing it happen around my area, where housing costs have shot up by 20% in one year, mostly driven by out of state arrivals. I see it in our own family's economic status which has improved several fold, thanks to the remote opportunities brought about by the pandemic. Maybe this is good, maybe it is bad, but there is a profound change coming.
These days, it's not enough to live in a world-class city, you need to have your own kitchen, living room, and bathroom that barely get used. The people I know who complain about high cost of living refuse to live with other people.
That works great until you get married and start a family.
I mean, in theory there could be acceptable ways to let a couple with babies have roommates. But the design problems alone seem too complicated to attempt, let alone the cultural problems.
Also, keep in mind that a young couple with kids might have only one income earner. And that couple is in the same apartment hunt with singles willing to share multi-tenant residences. Sometimes three or four of them!
Point being, "get roommates" doesn't scale over time or over the entire population.
I think the issue is more when people are still having roommates when they're in their 30s and older. it's hard to have families when you still can only a afford a bedroom, driven mostly by debt and low wages if I had to guess
Everyone has to make trade offs. You want to live in the cultural capital of the world or place where the average income is over six figures, but everyone else does as well. There's limited space in these cities, so you need to bid top dollar if you want to keep a place for yourself.
Sorry man, I just don't buy it. Expensive housing is a solveable problem. Six figures isn't that much when you're still spending half your paycheck on rent.
As for the cultural capital of the world? New York used to have a thriving art scene when it was cheap to live in. Now it just has an expensive art scene.
I agree that housing policy is broken and has a lot of room for improvement. There's no way around supply and demand though. At best you'll have a situation like Singapore where housing is expensive, but still attainable.
Are the houses in safe neighborhoods? If there are cheap houses in a city and nobody's buying, there's a good reason for that. Carefully taken pictures online may look okay, but people in many cities know to steer clear of specific areas.
And regarding repairs, I've been to houses that have decent photos online, but upon entering, they're clearly rotting out. It'd be cheaper to knock the house down and start again.
This is only even close to true if this compensation includes a significant employer contribution to a health insurance policy and/or short term disability coverage. If not, this guy will be one broken leg away from a credit card death spiral.
Boilerplate job/career options for young men thinking about attending vs not attending college...
1) Enlist in the military. pay is sub-par, but your living expenses are well taken care of. picking a job that has a civilian equivalent is clutch here.. eg combat medic, electrician, plumber, various IT-related fields.
2) Skilled trades - eg plumber, electrician, HVAC-related. These pay from 50k to 150k depending on what type of work you do. The "high end" for example being a new-construction electrician, working for themselves, making $75/hr with overtime. All these fields have high job security - plumbing, electricity, and HVAC are not a 'fad', and are likely to increase in demand over time.
3) Own a "low tech" business, the sort you might already work for if you are a teenager. Eg...landscaping. You can make $15/hr running a weed eater, or with a small investment and some people skills - you can pay other people $15/hr to run a weed eater, and you run the business. This is more difficult than it seems on the surface (management and people skills), but it is not something you need a college education to succeed at.
4) Specialty/niche fields...these are more difficult to break into if you don't know someone already. Some examples are mosquito spraying(for a city), [water] well digging, or roadside assistance for a larger contract(like cell phone roadside assistance, AAA, or dealer contracts). These are easier to break into if you already know someone who owns that type of business, who will show you the ropes so you know what you are getting into.
This isn't an exhaustive list by any means, but hopefully someone finds it stimulating enough to come up with some ideas about work options that do not involve a mountain of student debt.
To people recommending trades, there's nothing wrong with trades, but you can get more out of college than only a job. You can actually learn things that you wouldn't have learned otherwise. The environment also naturally stimulates and values learning, gathering knowledge and understanding. You can learn how to become a better person and think more critically.
Seeing how many misinformation is going around and the people swallowing it, this seems more important than ever before.
Some downsides of trades I have not seen mentioned yet are that many of them are hard on the body and/or somewhat risky. So you don't have as long a useful career as in most professions. My dad was a carpenter and I worked with him a few summers when I was young. He asked me how many 50-year-old roofers I had seen during those summers. A friend of his told me there is a reason you never see old welders and painters.
I agree that college should be for education and not 'to get a job'. But until the cost of college in the US comes back down to reality, it's going to fail the cost-benefit analysis.
I had a fantastic experience at college 25+ years ago. I went to a small liberal arts school, learned how to read and think well. I really appreciated that experience.
When I graduated with my degree in philosophy I went on to run a small climbing gym. I was able to jump into software development during the first internet bubble, where start-ups needed warm bodies who can learn quickly. Fortunately, I had scholarships and graduated with minimal debt. So...it all worked out pretty well. I'm not sure it's worth taking on crushing debt for that experience without a guarantee of a job.
That said, not every person is wired to go to college. There are plenty of trades that can foster the some sort of collegial experiences, if you find the right the person to train you. There are very thoughtful craftspeople out there.
> Why do you need to pay someone to give you lists of books to read, rather than just buying and reading them yourself?
You don't. However, college isn't just a list of books to read, it also includes practical exercises and, most importantly, accountability mechanisms, and there is plenty of evidence that accountability mechanisms tend to improve performance.
Unless college has changed since I went (to a pretty average state school), you can do all that, but the default seemed to be to start off in a program that sounds cool, realize the science classes are too hard, change to an easier major a couple times, finish off your gen-eds with some random survey classes where you just have to write a couple short papers compatible with the professor's world-view, and stumble your way into a bachelor's degree.
The most interesting college classes I took tolerated non-majors reluctantly, if at all. The expectation was that people who were there to be "well-rounded humans" weren't going to take the course seriously.
From my time at college, any 'critical thinking' seemed to mostly be a way to spread the college's accepted narrative, which contains its own brand of disinformation.
“Over the course of their working lives, American college graduates earn more than a million dollars beyond those with only a high-school diploma, and a university diploma is required for many jobs as well as most professions, technical work and positions of influence.”
From the article.
There are folks getting useless degrees and/or taking on too much debt, but getting a college degree on the whole is worthwhile.
Far too many variables to draw any clear conclusions, in my opinion. Have there been any of these studies that show the effect holding constant when controlling for high school GPA, SAT/ACT, and IQ?
"All of the largest programs in electrical and communications engineering, for instance, allowed most of their graduates to recoup their educational investment in five years or less. But many programs in some fields, like drama and dance, show no return on investment, the report found, meaning most of their graduates are earning less than a typical high school graduate."
So this study more or less backs claim that some degrees offer a positive ROI while others do not. As to whether or not a given degree is "worthwhile," I'd leave that as an exercise for the reader. :)
Not the parent commenter but I think they’re suggesting that the degree may not be the cause of the increase in earnings, but rather that the people who get college degrees have attributes (e.g. intelligence, work ethic, good K12 education, wealthy parents) that would lead them to out-earn their peers even without a degree.
To be clear, I don’t buy that argument. Obviously those factors explain some of the difference, but I think most of the highest-paying jobs in STEM and many of the highest-paying jobs in other fields (e.g. business/finance) require skills that would be hard to reliably obtain without a college degree or something similar.
Yes, that was my angle. And while I share your intuition to some extent, I maintain that it's difficult to get a scientifically sound conclusion without controlling for those variables.
Specifically, to refer to an average of $1,000,000 as a specific effect size, without controlling for the fact that many people with only a high school diploma would not earn more even if they had a college degree, seems suspect.
This is just not borne out by the data. The gap between high school grads and college grads pay is getting wider and wider.
You shouldn't go to college if you aren't going to be a serious student and you'll be a legitimate risk for dropping out. But if you are willing to commit yourself and get decent grades, you'll be in much better shape than most people with just a high school diploma.
Your advice is also sounds really out of touch with what various jobs pay. The average new college grad makes like 60k or so.
I can only speak to my workplace and team, but we pay product designers with very little experience around 90k a year. I have no licenses and am not a professional engineer, and I make several times that.
The issue is that far too many people are going into debt for college degrees and not getting the degrees. That's the biggest. The secondary issue is that college is becoming more and more expensive, but it is still paying off for the majority of bachelor degree holders.
Software engineers with ~5 years of experience (and probably less) can earn $300k-$400k annually in the Bay Area or New York if working for a large tech company.
This is a tiny fraction of software engineers. The vast majority in the wider Western world earn less than an average tradesman. The higher end of salaries in the UK is £40-50k, most earning substantially less than that.
The much higher salaries paid by the major US companies are so anomalous that they may as well be discarded in any comparisons.
The higher end in London is substantially more than that across banking, insurance and foreign tech companies and contracting day rates were really rather good. Admittedly I’ve been out of the U.K. for long enough to see what impact Brexit has had, especially on contracting day rates.
Still nothing like the US though, and the cost of living is not much different than New York City IME.
While most software engineers in the U.S. don't make 300-400k, you will make above 100k pretty quickly. You can make 150k-ish total comp at tons of places in the United States. These places will usually offer very good benefits too.
No it is the international investor effect. People do not invest locally. The money goes to a few proven places rather than circulating throughout the entire country.
You can call the investors kings and the workers are chasing the kings money.
Human-computer interaction. I'm not in my 20s, and I'm not an individual contributor, so that skews my pay, but I also don't think I've come close to my ceiling yet.
According to the article women still believe the trade-off to be worth paying for and attending college since their application numbers are still holding steady.
Are most of them making a huge mistake? I guess it depends heavily in the credential(s), but I think there has to be a deeper reason for falling and unbalanced undergraduate enrollment amongst men.
All Ponzi schemes collapse, the growth colleges experienced in the past led them to be overly optimistic and make promises they can no longer meet. The falling debris from the collapse is already happening, as the wave of unbreakable and unpayable student debt imprisons a generation.
I always assumed no one give me benefit of doubt if I don't have something actually in hand. Which meant for me, I would expect the degree to be necessary for me to get the first job.
Women don’t earn less for the same work. Never married women with no kids actually out earn never married men with no kids.
Please read “why men earn more” by Warren Farrell or skim the table of contents for a list of some of the factors that influence earnings, such as working longer hours, in a different field, in unpleasant conditions, etc.
Anecdotal but I've noticed that for a lot of women, achieving the degree seems to be the end goal and status symbol, while for men the degree is just a path to better financial outcomes. If the calculation for the latter has changed to where degree is no longer worth it compared to alternatives, that could explain it.
There are plenty of degrees that are worth the effort. This idea that college doesn’t have a justifiable return seems to be pushed by people who already have degrees.
I went to pick up a book at the circulation desk at my uni close to the first day of classes and of the people in front of me and in back of me there were 9 girls and 0 boys in line.
If the class were gender-balanced the odds of that would be 1/512; I have no idea what it means ("girls are much more interested in using the library?") but I think it's significant.
> If the class were gender-balanced the odds of that would be 1/512
If each arrival at the desk were an independent draw from the full class, then, sure, the chance of any given set of 9 arrivals having 9 women would be 1/512. (Though the chance of the sequence of 10 including 9 women and 1 man is 10/1024, or about 5 times more likely; by cherry-picking the set of arrivals to consider, you are añready making the set around you seem more unlikely than it is.)
Of course, if they were where independent the case, there’d also be a non-negligible case of a repeat in that set of arrivals; the fact that you chose a set in line at the same time demonstrates that they aren't a set of independent events. So the whole basis of your 1/512 even on the cherry-picked set is invalid.
There are probably 512 people in this thread right now that have had that same experience you did but didn't reject the null hypothesis so they're not commenting.
I play the game of assessing the gender balance of groups a lot.
Some of it is wondering where society is going, some of it is just trying to avoid sausage parties. Trans people don't give me any trouble because they want to be assigned a certain gender, non-binaries might force me to learn the multinomial distribution but those seem to turn up at the 1/256 - 1/512 level if that.
I stopped going to Yoga classes in my ZIP code because they attract a lot of middle-aged and older men who, I think, are there to look at women without doing anything too strenuous.
It is interesting; disregarding nitpicking about the calculation there could be multiple potential reasons that all are connected to the heart of the matter:
- women more likely to study and solve logistical study problems together
- men more likely to pirate books
- men less likely to be out during normal hours
- men less likely to choose majors requiring library books
- and of course, higher college enrollment by women
I am not saying any of these were necessarily in play in your situation, but some probably are and colleges and employers should be thinking about them.
I'd say seeing a 9-0 ratio is an outlier for sure, and maybe we don't need much deeper thought than that. I do, suspect, however, that women are more likely to go to the library than men. My assumption on this is the higher grades that female students earn on average.
Brit here, in my 50's. Everyone should - or ought - to receive a good general level of education at GCSEs (i.e. 14/15 year old). Chemistry, Physics, Mathematics, English, etc.. You'll know a fair bit about these subjects if you study for them in school. Very few people actually "need" training beyond that; although I would of course expect my doctor to know rather more than what's in a biology GCSE.
My former boss of the department learned enough chemistry through self-study. I heard Raspberry Pi was hiring guys to work as microchip design with little prior exposure.
In my worldview, everyone gets their GCSEs and goes and gets a job. OR, they follow a trade route, and attend a technical college (in the UK meaning of the word) to learn a skill. OR, the really brainy ones take an academic route, get their A levels, then head off to university to become part of the intellectual elite. I'm thinking 5% of the population here. OR, you get your A levels and then go into a polytechnic for a highly-skilled vocational job.
Polytechnics don't really exist anymore, they've all converted to universities.
Basically, we should all just return to an educational system that we had in the 70's. It was a system that wasn't broken, but we decided to "fix" it anyway.
It's basically hidden increase in standard of living - people used to join workforce at 18-19, now they do it a couple years later, after getting their degree. It means a couple years less of work and a couple more years of fun/partying. In the few countries (US, UK, anything else?) where Universities aren't nearly free, that's kind of a deal with the Devil (as J. Peterson called it), but everywhere else it's basically a free improvement in quality of life.
I'll repeat what tech companies love to say about hiring underrepresented classes: it's a pipeline problem. Because of a combination of social reasons, maturity, curricula, and pedagogy, men don't perform as well as women academically. Look at the graph on the top of this[1]. Men have lower GPAs in every subject. It's not surprising that leads to fewer going to college and fewer graduating.
This is because in our society, it's more acceptable for men to drop out and get into some skilled trade, like plumbing or climbing telephone poles. People just won't accept that women can also do that. So there's a lot of pressure to make sure your female children go to college and get a degree.
> like plumbing or climbing telephone poles. People just won't accept that women can also do that.
You sure about that? Or is it that the majority of women don't see themselves unclogging toilets for a living? I have never seen it, but I would suspect list of female applications to plumbing or electrician school is very very short.
I do not necessarily agree with the original post’s statement but this response seems confused to me.
Few female applicants to trade schools is consistent with the original statement. If it is societally unacceptable for a woman to be a plumber then I would expect women to act as any rational agent and factor this in when planning their future career.
"societal unacceptability" is only one factor. personal choice is another. there's no reason to assume that gender disparities in a given field or trade are solely the result of the existence of the former.
You’re just infantilizing women by blaming every outcome on “society”. I fully believe women are capable of making their own decisions and there’s no “cabal of men” holding them back from unclogging toilets.
I would argue that I’m neither infantilizing women nor blaming every outcome on society. I never mentioned a cabal of men. It seems you are reading in many themes that are not present in my comment.
I believe that norms shape behaviour, that is the extent of my claim.
It's socially unacceptable for a lot of men to be in trades as well, especially if you factor in family background. Let me know what school promotes trades as a good alternative to traditional education? It's almost always looked at as the options for "stupid" people. I don't think your anecdote holds up at all. It seems fare more likely that women in general just do not want physical labor jobs.
I don’t know what anecdote you are referring to, I did not mention one. I did not even make a statement of agreement or disagreement with the original comment. I just pointed out that I did not see a logical inconsistency.
As for your claim that higher class males avoid trades: yes of course. That is actually a great example of what I mean. People factor in social norms in their decision making, be it male or female.
You are sort of skimming over actual need for actual physical strength in those field. But yes, these are assumed to be boys occupation - including when presented to children.
But like, given they require physical strength, it is hard to make a big deal about it.
I see. And there's no non-college educated professions where women are prevalent? It's plumbing or bust?
Of course clearly when women were under-represented in college, that was due to misogyny. And now that they are over-represented, it's also due to misogyny. No matter what the facts are, the conclusion is the same.
Do you think that when women were under-represented it was because they were plumbers or climbing telephone poles? Because that's the only way your suggestion makes sense.
That is not actually true. The all women are stay at home thing was never true. Society always had women who worked, because they are unmarried, husband is alcoholic, husband died, husband does not earn all that much.
"At the administrative level, 30 percent of human resources assistants had an associate degree as of 2013, 26 percent had a high school diploma and 21 percent had at least one year of college experience" - https://work.chron.com/education-requirements-human-resource...
People have to keep in mind that the trades have generally been pretty sexist and not all that professionally run. I would not want my daughters to go into most trades because of this.
It's a lot easier for men to find a decent paying job that doesn't require a college degree and where you won't get regularly harassed.
There’s a lot of anti-intellectualism that floats around in male culture, and a pernicious attitude that you can make it without a degree (despite the reality that a lack of credentials locks you out of most high paying or leadership roles).
Tech likes to pretend credentials don’t matter, but that’s entirely not true.
Not surprising that enrollment is down when too many men think learning things is for nerds.
I don't have a degree and am from US as well. In most my jobs, I am usually the only one without it. In Europe, it's even more rare, (majority of colleagues have PhDs). When people find out I am not educated, they are not happy about it, initially.
People can be really mean, especially when you aren't "smart". I had to read a lot about a lot of things just so I could go to lunch and participate in the chatter with coworkers.
But, not getting a degree never blocked me from getting great money or any position, I just had to work hard for it, always had to prove myself, earn trust. It's life on hard mode for sure, but not a blocker.
Even people with degrees are locked out of those high paying or leadership roles. Meanwhile, others can make it just fine by learning a trade. As a junior engineer, I was making the same amount as my degree less counterparts working in the oil industry were.
I didn't go to college, and I'm one of the techs you're referring to. But techs also think on-job experience and self-motivated projects are equivalent to or better than college, and both of those are necessary.
There are tons of high paying jobs available to people who learn trades, either in trade schools or on the job. Much of tech is like a trade - as a software engineer, I certainly have more in common with a car mechanic working on custom builds than I do with an accountant, lawyer, doctor or CEO. A lot of Americans were sold the false idea that college would help them know what they wanted to do, and make money. But it's not a magic beansprout you just ride up to the heights of society... definitely not when everyone else is doing it and everyone else is in debt. You have to actually be motivated. And if you're motivated... well it's kike George Carlin said about self help books: You went to the bookstore to go find a self help book, you're motivated, what do you need the book for?
"[...] but you should wonder: when more women enter a field, it means less men did, and if the men stopped going there, where did they go? Why did they leave? I assume they aren't home with the kids, right?
I don't want to be cynical, but boy oh boy is it hard not to observe that at the very moment in our history when we have the most women in the Senate, Congress is perceived to be pathetic, bickering, easily manipulated and powerless [..] if some field keeps the trappings of power but loses actual power, women enter it in droves and men abandon it like the Roanoke Colony. Again we must ask the question: if power seeking men aren't running for Senate, where did they go?"
The Boy Crisis by Warren Farrell covers this issue comprehensively. There are many beliefs and practices in our society that push boys and men out, especially in school.
Not everyone will become a self learning programmer. There are many subjects that college is best suited for. I actually see this as the decline of America. When a generation doesn't value education anymore, this is how China gets ahead of you.
First review the blatant, widespread corruption in Chinese academia, before you consider fully accepting the value of education in China
"In 2015, for instance, Britain-based publisher BioMed Central retracted 43 articles, including 41 from China. Later in the same year, Germany’s Springer retracted 64 papers, nearly all from Chinese scholars, while the Dutch publishing company Elsevier retracted nine medical science articles written by Chinese researchers.
"In what is said to be the largest single-incident retraction of journal publications in history, Springer Nature in 2017 retracted 107 articles in Tumor Biology published between 2012 and 2016, all of them authored by Chinese scholars from universities in Shanghai."
We need learning certified but not controlled, both in cost and required general learning.
2 year associate degrees from community college are very affordable and cover the general education. Even those going into other work could afford that and their employer could offer assistance if not. If for example, the cost of a 2 year associates degree was $5,000- $10,000. That would make college affordable, but we as a society would have to recognize that as more than it currently is recognized for.
The 4 year degree is meaningless now. It doesn't even translate to a useable skill most the time, but it's become the bare minimum.
Then if certificates of specific skills...say "certificate of statistics" which could just be 3-5 classes on statistics were added for those who could afford it, that would bring down the cost.
The idea of "going to college" and moving on campus is not an economical decision most 20 years old are prepared enough to understand. There appears to be too many people losing from that bet.
And women are more depressed than ever, swallowing Xanax by the hand full. Consumption of anti depressants rose 50% in the last 15 years, especially by women.
1/4 of women and 1/10 of men are doing it by now.
One might argue, it is a very degen society if women need 1lb of happy pills per month to endure it.
I'm one of these men. Of course I chose nor to go at a time when the ratio was closer to 1:1. It's one of the best decisions I ever made, I stumbled into it and didn't even make a deliberate decision, I felt bad about it for a few years. A happy accident I guess.
And I've done well for myself. I hear college graduates earn more over their lifetimes but anecdotally I don't see it. Financially I'm doing better than almost every person I know that went, the vast majority of my peers who went have a negative net worth due to student debt and own no property, so the bar is low, but I'm doing fantastic. I think the truth is, when credentials aren't rare, how well you do is more based on your mind and some quality you have than on credentials.
Yeah, a lot of studies seem to report on average income of graduates with various degrees compared to those who didn't finish university, but don't account for socioeconomic status.
I'd be curious what the numbers looked like when controlling for all the other variables which influence someone's income.
The proliferation of video games, especially online ones could also be a reason (besides the cost-benefit of attending college that is declining which other people already mentioned)
More folks should be given the option for vocational training in blue collar roles that pay really really well. Ever had a decent electrician or plumber come to your house to fix something? They make bank/hr. Or even a welder or carpenter etc etc not the whole world needs to be tech service workers, the economy is more nuanced than that.
But social stigma stemms from everything from dating to parents to friends etc if one does not complete a 4-year degree.
Most tech firms are lifitng the requirement for such a degree as in tech if you can do the work you can do the work and can (I'd say should) be hired. (In a sense, most coding/programming work is blue collar in that sense -- you don't need rocket science to center a div ;)
> “I’m sort of waiting for a light to come on so I figure out what to do next,” he said.
Interesting. Maybe guys who are not super-interested scientifically in a subject realize that it becomes a waste of time. Even their academically inclined peers will struggle since there arent nearly enough academic prospects for the number of Phd graduates. Then also these men grew up watching youtube stars etc. making it big without formal education.
Maybe these men should be encouraged to get their education in europe. Credentialism of Ivy Leagues is becoming increasingly irrelevant, but the academic environment is still stimulating and not hostile to either men or women.
This seems to happen in a parallel universe. From my first semester at university with 120 students, 5 were women. Out of those 1 made it till the end, which is more or less exactly the average of those that actually got their degree in the standard period of study.
That said, I think university doesn't count as much as it did before. At least in softwareworld you can make it without a degree just fine. You have disadvantages for some higher positions in large companies. But who wants to do that job anyway? It seems rather unattractive today.
Curious what that means for society if the trend continues. The single people I know are only interested in finding someone in the same education bracket.
Does this lead to many more unmarried people like Japan?
A lot of people in the comments here are spinning it as if boys are being systematically discriminated against when the article explicitly says the opposite:
>>> “Is there a thumb on the scale for boys? Absolutely,” said Jennifer Delahunty, a college enrollment consultant
And many aren't even putting in the proper diligence:
>>> "Ms. Gereghty said she found that girls more closely attended to their college applications than boys, for instance making sure transcripts are delivered."
The issue isn't that college acceptance is discriminating against boys, it's that boys aren't as interested in education. The aftermath of this won't be felt for a while, but it does indicate some shift in society. Some of them might even view college as a hostile place.
Maybe we could have once justified the premium charged by US universities. But now you can get excellent education in most of the world FOR FREE. To see how this impacts our jobs at home, just look at the healthcare field. Most new physicians are imported from abroad. They can work for less because they do not have massive loans to repay.
There’s no idea that rich white people love to push more than the idea that college is unnecessary (yet nearly all of them went to college and you won’t find their kids going to trade school).
Core classes should be cut in Half at least. University has become grossly over priced, because the government is picking up the tab, which has incentivized universities to add as many costs and classes as possible.
1) There's a point to education. Decide what you're going to do and then prepare for it. Most likely you will need to get a job that either does something for someone because it's specialized, do something for someone because it's boring, or you will entertain people. If you want to be an electrician, great, line that up and get on with it. We need electricians. Going to college isn't a goal. It's a strategy to get to a goal, but that's not what we tell kids. We tell them it's the goal. If you want to go to college because you want to work as a civil engineer - awesome - we need civil engineers. Going to college to study civil engineering isn't the goal - working as a civil engineer is the goal. Many jobs, like licensed Civil Engineer, oncologist, or attorney from YouTube videos (even if you read all the comments), require education ** as a strategy to get the job **. Other jobs require you work for a licensed practitioner. Some require a mix of the two (e.g. CPA or Welder).
2) I see too many men have extended adolescences into their 40's. If you want to man up, here's the list: 1) take care of the kids, 2) take care of the spouse, 3) take care of your job, 4) take care of your house, 5) your community, and somewhere along 8, 9 or 10 is 'spend Saturday on the phone with you college buddies from 2007, on your fantasy draft.' If you're childless an unmarried, the list is 1) take care of your job, take care of your house, 3) take care of your community. I see too many guys with the list that focuses on fun. Many of them are unmarried. Mammals are expected to invest in their children. Men who show no ability to invest in anything besides themselves are probably signaling they are poor choices as mates. This is not to say they can't get laid, but are probably not messaging well as a long term bet. I suspect they over-compensate for their poor signaling by signaling hyper masculinity. They buy trucks they don't need, spend too much time at the gym, or engage in high-risk activities.
3) The better the job, the farther it is away from being automated. No one runs to a room to look up your records at the DMV any more - we've automated those clerks away through computers. Call centers are largely automated - thanks to computers. Bus and truck drivers will eventually be automated away - thanks to computers. If your job can be done by anyone with a few hours or days of training, chances are it will be automated away. This includes programmers, as well. Companies like Square will chip away at the market from the bottom up and hyper-scalers from the top down. Developers with the depth of knowledge (usually obtained by getting degrees and often advanced degrees) are better off than going through a boot camp to put buttons on a page. Whatever your field, make sure you are able to do something that automating it away would be impractical.
4) Some skills and jobs are more valuable than others. If you want to be a music producer or DJ, awesome. You be you. Just realize that unless you're better than 99.999% of the other wannabe music producers, DJs, indie game developers, founders with a 'great idea,' or whatever it is, you will make little money. If you want to be a successful book keeper, it's nowhere near as hard and requires only a little more preparation. While people may stream your latest mix on as free wall paper music, they will pay you good money to maintain their financial records and any related filings with the US Treasury or state agencies. That's not saying music is worthless, but it does say the average book keeper is more valuable to most people than the average musician. You're more likely to pay off that degree you got in Empathy Studies as a book keeper than DJ.
What does all this have to do with the article? 1) people are becoming disillusioned with education for the wrong reason. They think that being smart and learned is just a con because they (or someone they know) got an education in a random major and is struggling. 2) Growing up asks how you can be of service rather than how someone can serve you - and I see a lot of men not growing up. Signaling you're a grownup will generally improve your fit and function in a society where people expect grownups. 3) Easy jobs disappear easily - you need to have enough investment in your skill, trade, or business that you provide more value than a shell script. 4) No one cares about your shitty music except maybe your girlfriend (she's lying) and your mother (also lying). Even if you're an entrepreneur, you're filling a need for someone else so think about the utility and value of what you're doing.
Cue article in about ten to fifteen years saying women have a wealth gap because they waste a significant portion of a decade pursuing and not completing degrees that lead to productive careers.
I wonder if it could be because masculinity is being challenged on campus in the current era. Why would a male who has issues with women want to go to a place where he will be challenged to change his views in sensitivty and toxic masculinity courses? Conversely, why would a male who does not have issues with women go to a place where he will be labeled as having toxic masculinity? It's not like these issues haven't been all over the press for years.
#MeToo Is Making Colleges Teach Toxic Masculinity 101
Yet, as there is only the narrative of "toxic masculinity" and not also discussion of "toxic femininity", the term implies masculinity can turn toxic in a way femininity can't.
I'm unaware of any social circles use the term "toxic masculinity" and are not using it to smear men. People outside of those bubbles do not use the term at all, probably because its pretty offensive to males.
I don't know anyone who believes this. Words mean what they're intended to mean and interpreted to mean, and that's how it's used in practice. Claiming otherwise is just a bald-faced "nuh-uh" when people who use the term are confronted with the double standard.
If there wasn't at least a little bit of complicity in it being interpreted as a general diss on masculinity, the term would never have caught on, or a different term would have been chosen in the first place. In the face of repeated misunderstandings, people using the term would pick a new one. They haven't done that. Why? It seems to me that they are quite happy to be "misunderstood" 95% of the time.
The gender swapped equivalent seems to be "internalised misogyny". Do you think I could get away with calling it "toxic femininity" instead? Nobody would let that pass. Do you think I could get away with calling any obviously bad behaviour associated with femininity, "toxic femininity", at all? I don't think I could.
It's widely considered by men to be an insulting term, and if people who use it don't want to insult people, they should pick another one. They don't though, which is telling.
Anyone who actually knows what adjectives are and how they work believes this.
Or people familiar enough with the substance of the discussion to know it includes discussion of what healthy masculinity is. Here's an easy-to-digest example:
All pejorative has a literal interpretation that is not pejorative. The question generally lies in how it will get interpreted and what implied message it carries. In most cases there exist a non-pejorative word that can used as a substitute which does not carry the same disrespectful connotation and hostility. As the pejoration of the word occurs, the assumptions that occurs is that continued usage has the intention of hostility.
> All pejorative has a literal interpretation that is not pejorative.
Even assuming that's true, it doesn't follow that every literal interpretation should be or is understood as pejorative, which leads to the question of why this one should be understood that way.
Given that toxic masculinity has specific definitions and specific criticisms to offer that distinguish critically targeted behavior AND also has associated discussion affirming desirable masculine behavior, it makes much more sense to treat it as a specific technique than a general attack on masculinity.
Unless, of course, you think that things like bullying or other forms of social violence for the purpose of establishing personal dominance or personal entertainment is part and parcel with masculinity. Which sounds kindof, I don't know... poisonous or something to me.
Pejoration is not prevented by a specific definition, and there is many examples of perfectly fine words being turned into a pejorative. As an example there is a very nice defined alternative word for happiness that was commonly used in songs which has no perfect modern substitute, and yet because of a different interpretation this word can't be used because those hearing it will interpret a disrespectful connotation and hostility.
> bullying or other forms of social violence for the purpose of establishing personal dominance or personal entertainment is part and parcel with masculinity
For those who think neither of those has anything to do with masculinity, using the word masculinity to describe it would be wrong. One could be a bit colorful to call it a poisonous use of words, ie injecting an harmful substance into the language.
A few decades ago researchers looked at how language get used in conflicts, and they had a major discover. The most effective way to enable people to attack other people is to describe other human being as being less than human. Toxic waste. Insects. Poison. Garbage. Language that dehumanizing groups of people and dehumanizing their behavior is almost a requirement in order for human on human violence.
> Oh, yes. Nobody would dare talk use the phrase toxic femininity. /s
I think people certainly use the phrase "toxic femininity", but such examples are from the long-tail.
In institutions, it is no-where near as discussed as much as "toxic masculinity", and probably discussing it would be be frowned upon.
You can see mentions of "toxic masculinity" amongst United Nations literature, for example, which can't be said for "toxic femininity". For example, the expectation of being the breadwinner of the family is said to be one of the things that is "rooted in a patriarchal culture, creat[ing] toxic masculinity". [1]
What isn't said, is that the expectation to become a competent man who is tries to support his family can also be a positive example of masculinity (and indeed is desirable to women), in addition to being the traditional one.
If this expectation is cast only being a "toxic" one, then that is a confusing message for young men, and leaves them without what was one of the traditional motivation for going to college, and improving yourself, so that you can get a good job and better shoulder responsibility when you want to start a family.
The discourse around these kinds of topics comes almost entirely from feminists at least the part that is constructive. That inevitably leads to some problems being ignored as they are not so interesting to feminists. I don't think you can fault them for that.
Gender norms that are criticised by feminists are in real life frequently re-enforced by women for example. Even feminists like much of the political left are also fragmented and have differing opinions. This lack of a consensus combined with an expectation to behave in a specific way and a group that can be somewhat trigger happy in going from "statistically this group of people is privileged" to "this person from this group is privileged" is I think deeply problematic and challenging to navigate as a men. I also think it's incredibly stupid from political standpoint.
Unfortunately it's difficult to engage in such discussions in a constructive way because they are very attractive to people who see feminists as an enemy.
I usually try and avoid the discussion online, as it is polarising.
One area I do think is interesting, is the issue of uncollected child maintenance payments (at least in the UK). [1] This has not had a campaign behind it, in the same way as the "Gender pay gap" has had, yet just also affects the material circumstances of many women.
I imagine it could be one issue where there might be agreement on, between those who lean towards "traditional gender roles" and some feminist organisations.
Nobody is attacking competence as toxic, or support of family as toxic.
What is actually critiqued is a normalization of social violence, commenting on bullying or assault with "oh, boys will be boys," dismissal of feelings with "walk it off," the idea that real men don't go to therapy or turn to people for emotional help, etc etc.
One can only think of that as a general attack on masculinity if... that's what you think masculinity is. Which sounds bona fide toxic to me.
> Forbes and Psychology Today are long-tail low-relevance now?
The publications are not, their discussion of "toxic femininity" is. Discussions of "toxic masculinity" have long been the hegemony.
> Nobody is attacking competence as toxic
I see this happening a lot. Particularly, that men who are in positions of power (might own their own company, or run other companies) have only reached where they are, because they benefit from a corrupt patriarchy, not because of their competency and willingness to work.
> What is actually critiqued is a normalization of social violence, commenting on bullying or assault with "oh, boys will be boys," dismissal of feelings with "walk it off," the idea that real men don't go to therapy or turn to people for emotional help, etc etc.
Why is this called "toxic masculinity"? To flip it around, could you imagine "toxic femininity" being used to a describe a woman not wanting to pursue engineering because she thinks it isn't what women typically are seen to do? Why would you say it is "toxic masculinity" when a man doesn't want to talk about his feelings, because it isn't what men typically are seen to do?
The critique is accompanied with the idea that masculinity is itself a social construct, and if only boys/men could be freed from this social construct, then they will be free from "toxic" aspects of masculinity.
However arguably this isn't the case, and leads you to worse outcomes for men and boys. For example, to "stop bullying" a headteacher in the UK banned (typically boys) from playing football at break times. [1] I don't believe masculinity is entirely a social construct, and here boys are being deprived of ways to positively express their masculinity, through competition and team building. I also think there is a difference in how men and women typically bond, with men tending to bond more through activities.
Male bonding through shared activities is something that has declined a lot in the US (see the book "Bowling Alone"). If men are finding it more difficult today dealing with emotional issues, the answer may not be that they need to deal with their "toxic masculinity" by "speaking more", but they are actually suffering from their lack of ability to identify with other men through shared activities.
It isn't, in other words, their own fault, but rather a shift in society, which in this individual example, would rather ban a game that involves competition and winners, in case there are losers, or exclusion. "Toxic masculinity" isn't therefore the issue, rather it would be a lack of ability to express masculinity.
This is another very good example of a ‘motte-and-bailey’ term. The term means whatever you want it to mean, at any given moment. When the term is attacked, it retreats to mean only the toxic parts of masculinity. When not attacked, it means the inherent toxicity of all masculinity.
My first impulse is to agree but thinking about it more what positives are there to take away from masculinity. Is any feature of being masculine that is really desirable? I guess I think the whole idea of trying to be masculine to be kind of lame...
There are plenty of positive traits that are associated with Masculinity: Bravery, Boldness, Self-Sufficiency, Discipline, Self-Assured, Skilled, Strong, etc.
Of course this does not mean that these traits are somehow exclusive to or owned by Masculinity.
> Standards of manliness or masculinity vary across different cultures and historical periods. Traits traditionally viewed as masculine in Western society include strength, courage, independence, leadership, and assertiveness.
Much of that sounds positive to me. I think the toxicity primarily comes from people caring primarily about appearance. For example by trying to avoid being seen as weak or by trying to appear strong relative to other people by making them appear to be weak.
That might be the "theory" (a word which does some heavy lifting in venues infected by "critical theory") but in practice it comes down to straight males and traditional male virtues being "toxic".
Exactly. Universities have become a sink of misandrist neomarxist thought.
It has led to an atmosphere of intellectual immaturity and victim-mentality-agrandizement. Universities now feel more like a coddled highschool experience than adulthood.
Don't expect intelligent, strong-minded, strong-willed men to accept such silly, degenerate distractions from the supposed goal of these universities (to provide "education", skills, network, etc.).
My younger brother in law is in college at a flagship state school. He’s doing it to check the box and show he can maintain a good gpa. But it’s unclear to me what the point is outside helping employers screen potential candidates.
I did tech degrees, but its pretty amazing going to other parts of the campus where there are 2 or 3 or more women for every man in the building. Its also weird to see lots of well educated female friends finding it really hard to find someone to settle down with. Yeah they should probably lower their standards but honestly deep down most guys dont want an over educated achiever wife.
Men want to be wanted, and women generally don't want to be with a lower-status man than themselves.
What proportion of women tend to date men who earn less than them, are shorter than them, have a lesser degree than them? Not a very big one, and men know it, so they steer clear of those women.
Similarly, most men prefer to date women shorter than them, who earn less than them, etc. Why? I'd guess because most men like to feel like they're providers and protectors, and most women like to feel provided and protected for by their partner.
It means I won't be intimidated by my partner's credentials or success. "Over-educated" is not a thing.
If men were free to chase whatever professional growth they wanted and women just had to stuff it because they would be avoided by men if they were "over-qualified" according to you, then that's a dynamic I cannot wait to see completely obliterated. I'm not saying only one partner being a provider or sole breadwinner is a bad thing, but it absolutely does not need to be the only role possible. These men you and GP talk about need to figure out what else they can bring to the table in a relationship, because the ability to put food on the table is hardly the only "desirable" thing people see in a partner, and it doesn't seem like a great thing to tie your self-worth to.
