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

https://www.visaalambalam.com/the-invisible-curriculum/

by visaals • 5 years ago

42 114 5 years ago

visaals10• 5 years ago

After the experience of meeting the Uber driver with an degree in actuarial science unable to apply his education it shattered my rose colored glasses about how education today is "The Great Equalizer" and the solution to all of our problems.

I wanted to share these thoughts to discuss any cool ideas to bridge the gap between an education and effectively increasing opportunity for people as automation take away more and more low-skill jobs

xwolfi3• 5 years ago

Don't be down just because you met one guy - who knows, maybe he cant work a week without insulting a client.

Dont forget that when colleges didnt exist for everyone, say 200 years ago, most people were farmers.

People are selective when it comes to timeframe, but it's just a mean regression - some periods reach peak, some get back lower, but all in all, we're trending up.

mettamage2• 5 years ago

The story that hit me the hardest was when I was chatting with an Uber driver

This sentence implies that he didn’t meet “one guy”

rayiner2• 5 years ago

Farming is arguably more complicated and requires more domain knowledge than most service jobs today.

visaals10• 5 years ago

He seemed like a genuinely nice dude who came from humble background who tried to improve his life situation but failed to do so, but at the same time you're right there could be something I'm missing from only having a ~20 minute chat with him.

I agree that we're trending up which should feel AMAZING, but we're human so people's individual stories are what make us feel the most ;)

Also at my high school the metric for our school's success was 99%+ of the graduating class going to college, and it felt like pure vanity because it meant more likely than not tons of people going into debt and getting nothing out of it for the sake of "education"

WhiteOwlEd• 5 years ago

Founder of https://www.whiteowleducation.com here. Undergrad dual major in Actuarial Science and Computer Science (with a MBA a long time after undergrad).

Without additional context, my guess would be that the Uber driver maybe focused on applications of math and statistics to the insurance industry, but maybe focused more on passing actuarial exams and less on using programming in order to implement the models. Some of the actuarial exams cover finance, statistics, and math; it feels like the driver would be suited to do data science work. It would be interesting to hear more about where the driver is located and whether he/she was only targeting the insurance industry or if that person was looking at other jobs in analytics.

EDIT: I started my business on the premise that universities teach a lot of "fundamentals", but that I don't believe higher education does not do as much as they should to teach the practical "day to day" skills (like data visualization or software version control / git) that are needed to get development work done. My thought is that a couple of online courses can quickly help to bridge the gap between theory and practice.

hervature• 5 years ago

I'm a little more skeptic than you. I don't think an Uber driver would admit that they failed the prerequisite exams required to enter the field. This is just the system working. Barring entry to those who have a degree but didn't actually learn the skills.

visaals10• 5 years ago

I like the idea! Maybe it shouldn't be only college or nothing else but rather a mix of college + an industry specific bootcamp OR more co-op or shadowing programs that could bridge the gap.

I think the solution might lie in teaching people the process of learning what they don't know on their own. Some people are just naturally "scrappy" or want something so bad they'll go out of their way to figure it out without connections. Maybe if we can deconstruct that into a course it could help people chart their own path rather than rely on other people to tell them what to do.

ip263• 5 years ago

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

visaals10• 5 years ago

Wow that's the first time someone has said that (other than my immediate friends and family lol), so thank you!

Mind if I ask what in particular you liked? I am interested about certain topics like education + improving access to opportunity + building cool stuff with tech + thinking about economic systems and incentives to drive success, but I also don't to come off as someone who just yells into the void about my opinions.

Ologn• 5 years ago

I have worked in IT for a long time, but have taken night and weekend college classes over the years. I took a CS 3xx class with mostly college seniors a few years ago. Most were CS majors. Once a bunch of us were outside talking, and I said something about software version control. The person I was talking to said "what's that?" I asked the others if they knew what software version control was. None knew. I said, "you know, like git". None of them knew what git was. Some of them were months from graduating and looking for a job as a programmer.

torbTurret• 5 years ago

On the other hand, one of the required lower div CS courses at Berkeley has a project requiring students to implement git from scratch.

sokoloff2• 5 years ago

Is university meant to be vocational training or learning the unchanging fundamentals and how to learn new things in the field? I think it serves a better purpose to teach the underlying fundamentals and not to do vocational training.

I don't think it's a serious flaw that you can graduate from a top university with a CS degree without ever having written SQL, react, or used revision control. To me, those are vocational topics and can be learned on the job or in [paid] internships.

jimnotgym3• 5 years ago

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

rjsw• 5 years ago

If I was teaching CS then I would ask students to use VCS so that I could see the stages they had gone through to get the submitted solution.

No different from expecting to see workings for maths homework.

DylanSp• 5 years ago

CS programs vary pretty widely in how much they focus on the theoretical/mathematical side of computer science vs. practical software engineering. I was in a similar boat to the CS majors in your comment at one point; I only started learning Git after talking with some fellow students who had practical experience.

Some programs, at least, are conscious of this problem. MIT built and shared their "Missing Semester" [1] course to help with this. There are also some schools developing more practical software engineering/computer engineering degree programs.

[1] https://missing.csail.mit.edu/

jimnotgym3• 5 years ago

This is so true. I was recently interviewing grads for a job that, while not development, had a number of applicants with CS degrees (in UK). I couldn't believe how little coding they had done. Their main projects were mostly machine learning based, and all were using Pandas and Scikit learn... Great for data science but hardly a coding challenge!

rayiner2• 5 years ago

The economy that mobilized on a dime to defeat Nazi Germany and sent men to the moon had only 5% of adults with a college degree. Is it so much more complex now that kids need four more expensive years of education? And if it is more complex, is college as currently structured the cheapest way to develop those additional skills?

rowanG0772• 5 years ago

I think you are approaching this from the wrong angle. You are assuming because the cream of the crop could achieve something (I.e. most certainly had college degrees) 70 years ago that we can still form society like that today.

But society is not the same as it was then. I don't think you can argue that the median job today requires the same amount of knowledge or skill then it did 70 years ago. And that is what college is for currently.

Of course you can still argue we don't need that many college graduates but your argument by itself is not convincing.

rfrey• 5 years ago

Please name some of these skills.

tptacek2• 5 years ago

One of the highest-growth jobs for liberal arts graduates (which make up the majority of graduates) is human resources. I'll plant a flag in this conversation right now and say that no part of the human resources job requires a 4-year college degree.

watwut4• 5 years ago

The engineers inventing the machinery necessary for landing I the moon all had college degrees.

The mobilization for the war does not require super educated population.

tptacek2• 5 years ago

Yes, but his point is that the society that marshaled those degree-holders only had a pool of 5% of graduates to draw on. There's no question that some jobs require college education; the question is whether there are enough of them to justify pushing the majority of 18-year-olds into 4-year colleges.

tzs• 5 years ago

What was the percentage in Germany?

mettamage2• 5 years ago

It’s already happening with companies like Lambda School focused on cultivating the next generation of software engineers by educating

Bad example. Lambda School had some pretty bad press on HN about having lower completion rates than advertised, etc.

visaals10• 5 years ago

Yeah I originally wrote this a while back and recently saw that press on twitter and HN. It's still the best example I've got so far, do you know of other programs that are doing a better job than Lambda?

6gvONxR4sf7o• 5 years ago

Seems like college fails to live up to being “the great educator” in too many cases too. For those of you who interview new grads, what percent of the time do you interview someone with a degree in the field who can’t do the most basic things in the field? In my experience, it’s pretty high.

Even at the college level, education doesn’t seem to extend past “teaching to the test” horrifyingly often (horrifying, given the amount of time and money our society is spending on it).

watwut4• 5 years ago

Given that schools are judged by tests results and students are judged by test results, it is surprising that both focus on the tests?

xyzzyz• 5 years ago

What is the alternative, though? Even if schools taught actual skills and knowledge, and didn’t focus on teaching to the test, we’d still want and need some method to verify that they are doing so, and that the students actually mastered the material being taught. This means at least some kind of tests.

In my opinion, the problem is not with the testing regime, or even “teaching to the test”. It’s the tests themselves that suck. The top priorities for tests designed and used today are ease and efficiency at mass administration, ease of grading, and reduction of subjective in favor of objective measures. Is it any wonder that multiple choice questions are king?

When I went to university in Eastern Europe (majored in Mathematics), in many courses we had a final oral exam. The professor would drill into you, and would not get distracted by regurgitation of irrelevant memorized stanzas, he wanted a clear explanation of everything he asked about. This approach to testing is not perfect — for one, time limitations only allow to cover rather small part of the topic, and you might get lucky to get something you actually know. At the same time, there is really no way to teach and study to an oral exam other than actual understanding of the subject matter. However, this is insanely inefficient for the grader: this makes testing a full week’s worth of constant work, as opposed to few hours of just sitting on an exam, and then few more hours grading (even shorter if it’s mostly multiple choice problems). No wonder teachers prefer the latter.

ip263• 5 years ago

Some of my classmates were in nature just not cut out for engineering. Several would even tell you as much. But there's an implied contract- work hard, make the grade, get the degree. It might ultimately be more merciful if students with no aptitude could be ejected from the program- but how do you make this selection?

My alma mater didn't really push internships, but in retrospect perhaps a strong internship program would help students self select against employers.

SL61• 5 years ago

I took a few English classes as electives, and it was astonishing to see the number of English students (in a third-year class) who struggled with basic grammar and composition. The majority of the students wrote at what I'd consider early high school level. I don't know why. Maybe the professors were all afraid of giving bad grades, or the freshman-level intro classes weren't filling the role they were supposed to. But those students were going into a lot of debt to coast through easy classes that don't teach them the fundamentals of their degree.

I saw signs of that academic dysfunction from other departments too. This was at a very non-prestigious state school, but that's the type of school that most students attend. There must be millions of people in the US walking around with degrees in subjects they don't know much about.

yardie• 5 years ago

I've never seen companies work so hard to keep applicants away as much as they do today. Boomers are retiring, millenials are looking to fill those roles, X and Z are barely a rounding error (sorry to say). And yet the job descriptions could fill a journal going on about company culture, requirements, ideal candidate, etc. So when a job posting goes up that requires a college degree or equivalent experience you soon learn they really want the later. And if you could get experience without the expensive time wasting degree then what was the point?

wayoutthere2• 5 years ago

Yeah, there’s a big difference between “kid with a CS degree” and “kid who interned at Microsoft for 3 summers and knows industry dev practices well”. This is why internships matter; it doesn’t even have to be a well-known company as long as it teaches you how to work on a dev team (git, agile workflow, DevOps, cloud, etc).

In my experience it’s the tools and tech around working as more than a singleton. That’s the job. To be blunt, most industry jobs do not require a deep computer science background, so the content of the degree is worth less than the experience it gets you access to.

bluefirebrand3• 5 years ago

I was the "kid with a CS degree". My experience interning was "There actually aren't many tech companies in your city and it's 2008 so no one is hiring"

I was a broke student so I couldn't exactly afford to relocate for a summer internship, lose my apartment, store all of my belongings and such.

I started my career with basically no experience, spent my last money on a deposit and first months rent to relocate to a new city for work after getting a job. Lost that job four months later as the company failed to meet the projections they had.

It's been a rough road. I'm doing pretty good now, but overall my bachelor of computer science definitely did not feel like an equalizer.

visaals10• 5 years ago

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

wayoutthere2• 5 years ago

It’s crazy how variable experiences of that time are across geography; I was living in a high-growth city at the time (where I went to undergrad) and we basically went from 30% Y/Y growth to 20% for a couple years, so we never really even felt the recession. I didn’t even have a CS degree but they were hiring anyone with a pulse and PHP skills.

Luck plays into career success to an incredible degree. I was just in the right place, right time to build a long career. I’m certainly not very talented or hard-working.

RivieraKid• 5 years ago

A hugely important factors behind getting a job are: being likeable, looking good, not being weird, having a good sense of humor, etc.

If you are in the bottom, say, 10% in these factors, employers will pick other candidates. And obviously, they won't tell you why.

Veen• 5 years ago

Sadly this is true. I've had conversations with very smart people who can't find a job. They often attribute it to some hiring shortcoming or bias, and sometimes that's the case. But for a couple of these people the reason was obvious: they were not "presentable" and didn't have a personality that would enable them to function well in a team, i.e. they didn't dress properly, didn't look after their personal hygiene, and were quite unpleasant to talk to.

anticristi2• 5 years ago

Reminds me of my wife. :)

After her PhD, she was writing cover letters that were screaming "I hate the recruitment process".

One day, something clicked. Her next cover letter read like the first chapter in her bibliography. And one month later, she had too much work. :)

kcplate3• 5 years ago

i.e. they didn't dress properly, didn't look after their personal hygiene, and were quite unpleasant to talk to.

While I have not (thankfully) been in a hiring role for some time now, I can confirm that these three factors dq’d a ton of candidates when I was. Here is the reality…there are not a lot of roles in medium-corporate companies where a single interview with a single person gets you hired. So if you don’t tick that presentable box, even if you are technically skilled, I have to have a conversation with the next interviewer that goes like this: “I know this candidate comes off as a pompous ass with rumpled cloths and smells like feet, but…”

You better be beyond brilliant for me to sell you despite shortcomings that I have to caveat to the next interviewer.

zokier• 5 years ago

Those are also important factors in being successful in jobs; you need to co-operate with your team-mates, stakeholders, and leadership, and to do that well involves having good rapport with them.

shiado• 5 years ago

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

dv_dt• 5 years ago

The crazy part is that having autistic tendencies correlated to some level of being great at looking at realities and getting work done.

Makes me think I should start a company focusing on recruiting in that community.

humanrebar• 5 years ago

Seems like there's a competitive advantage for some company to make room for people who are not neurotypical. Though I wonder what that would look like.

adolph• 5 years ago

If you are in the bottom, say, 10% in these factors

How do you know if you are in the bottom 10%?

philovivero• 5 years ago

The old adage fits here.

If you can't look around the room and identify who the bottom 10% are, you're the bottom 10%.

mbrodersen2• 5 years ago

Absolutely. The soft skills are key to being successful. Especially when your competition is equally well educated.

twofornone• 5 years ago

College was once a signal of competence. That cannot be true when you push half the population through the system; the normal distribution is still the same. Doubly so given the commodification of education, which creates perverse incentives for phenomena like grade inflation, further reducing the value of a degree as a signal.

The first assumption that needs to change in order to revert the status of the college degree is the well meaning but false idea that competence can be taught to anyone. It gives people a false sense of optimism which frequently results in angst, debt, and wasted years.

Foobar85687• 5 years ago

Because the required level is shit. And it has been downhill since the implementation of modern math and the rejection of math in the modern era or elitist path at school. We see it everywhere and especially in France or Switzerland. 10 years old native kids who can't read fluently. 15 years old who would write 1/2+1/3=2/5. They will keep this level of skills through the end of high school and master degree thanks to grade inflation and/or curve notation.

Public school is at at least 2 levels if not more. Elite will remain in their own world. Rich will just pour money on their kids education, middle class and the poor are fucked.

In France, most 18 years old would fail the brevet (end of middle school degree) as it was given in 1950s/60s. All the exams are pure jokes, and we see it in international education survey (PISA or even better TIMMS, level are dropping beside for the top 5%)

laurent92• 5 years ago

Kids up to 11 years old in France are graded in colors, not numbers or A-F grading.

Also, baccalaureat now includes has a “Grand oral”, an standup exam where women succeed much better, where presentation matters way more than depth, and where positive discrimination can take place without leaving a trail.

graecea5• 5 years ago

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

voakbasda• 5 years ago

You say that like it’s a bad thing. More people should fail. We as a civilization deserve higher standards than what can be achieved by the average student.

Foobar85687• 5 years ago

They wouldn't, check the subjects of current brevet, bac and textbooks, it's just fluff.

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

We are lying to kids and parents : https://twitter.com/loysbonod/status/1356128734508679168

Or Pierre Colmez writting : https://webusers.imj-prg.fr/~pierre.colmez/lettre.pdf and https://images.math.cnrs.fr/R-eduire-les-in-egalit-es.html?l...

wrapupandkeepit• 5 years ago

Was curious so looked it up in PISA[1] and TIMMS[2]. I agree the bottom deciles are being left behind educationally, but I disagree with the implicit sentiment that employers are able to objectively evaluate the intellectual achievement level of their applicants. That would be attributing the labor market with more meritocracy than it has.

[1] https://www.oecd.org/pisa/publications/PISA2018_CN_FRA.pdf [2] https://nces.ed.gov/timss/results19/index.asp#/math/trends

dvt• 5 years ago

who you know than what you know

Yeah, the world is a social place. There's a reason European royalty sent their kids to etiquette classes, and even these days fraternities and sororities have formals. That's how the world works. Someone that's surprised by this in their 20s or 30s was failed by their parents or immediate community and this has nothing to do with college.

You need to be nice to people, you need to be friendly, you need to know people, attend events, be fun and jovial, etc. Politeness and relationships are the underpinning of our entire society.

But if you're introverted (like me), this takes very deliberate practice. Over the past few years, I've posted in every monthly "who's hiring" thread here on HN as just an exercise and to meet people (mostly local to LA). I've met dozens of really cool entrepreneurs, fellow engineers, VPs, C-levels, and other smart folks. Most of these connections will go nowhere, but I wanted to practice being more outgoing by grabbing a beer or coffee and talking about life/technology/anything with strangers. I was able to put together an investor I met with a friend of mine that's trying to raise money; was able to pitch some startup ideas to folks that worked in that domain; but more importantly grow my rolodex and become more comfortable with the art of networking.

fullshark• 5 years ago

Pretty much everyone has incomplete world views in their 20s/30s and gets a reality check as they make decisions and reap the consequences. It's just a matter of what particular lessons your parents / schooling / experiences failed to flesh out until then.

kiba2• 5 years ago

Parents only one or two life experience, and likely in a narrow range dictated by socioeconomic circumstances. They also have their own baggage in addition to any wisdom gained, otherwise we would be listening to them more.

I have no advice on how to overcome the wisdom/experience gap and unrepaired damage accumulated over time.

SilasX• 5 years ago

Then that means the polices based around promoting college for everyone are equally naive.

graecea5• 5 years ago

The problem is that we're being sold the 'meritocracy' narrative in the academical and technical circles. You often see it in HN discussions about hiring decisions (reasoning involving the "top 1% programmers" without any indication as to what that means exactly). If you have the introverted, dilligent, keeping-your-head-down, got-high-marks-at-school mentality that I assume is prevalent on HN, it can come as a shock that despite following all the 'rules' you don't get to 'win at life'. Learning that there's no such thing as 'rules' (or at least, none of the rules worth following are public or written down or even fixed) or 'winning' isn't something that can be taught in class. 'Meritocracy' is the illusion that life, prestige and status attainment somehow work like getting high grades at school and we'd do ourselves a collective service by getting rid of the notion and viewing life and its opportunities in a more pragmatic way.

giantg24• 5 years ago

Yep, I would be much further along and better off if I just played the game.

rowanG0772• 5 years ago

Or you simply view being sociable as part of Merit. In fact I'd wager that to do well in almost any job you need to be sociable. Merit is not just about technical ability.

Foobar85687• 5 years ago

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

kiba2• 5 years ago

The lie is that Meritocracy is fair or equitable.

hogFeast• 5 years ago

I don't think it is only about being personable. That is obviously very important but it is as much about being able to insert yourself into someone else's life and help them. You meet someone, they have a problem, and you can say: "Oh, I know X or Y". That is very big, being a connector to lots of people with skills is the same as having those skills yourself.

But I agree totally. Most of my family worked in the public sector, I had no idea about any of this stuff until I started trying to get a job. And some of the people who I grew up with who were totally incompetent but were sociable/well-connected ended up doing very well (I went to a private school, so my sample is quite interesting: I know a guy who was very smart, went to college, trained in law at the top law school in my country, worked hard, but couldn't get it together ended up becoming a chef...meanwhile a guy who got straight Ds, scraped into uni, did no work whilst there is working as a PM at a top fund manager...they don't teach you this part of life in school).

On the OP: college isn't real life, it isn't anything like real life at all because you don't need to be an expert or have knowledge to extract economic value (and that isn't a bad thing at all). As someone who went to private school and saw a decent amount of privilege, it didn't helped kids who came from poorer backgrounds. These kids went to college (which probably would have happened anyway, they are smart) but most (not all tbf) struggled in the real world because they had poor social skills. I have a long list of utterly mediocre human beings who are punching well above their weight in life (and tbf, this is a bad thing...the guy I mention above shouldn't be managing anyone else's money...not to be harsh, he just shouldn't), and a list of one or two people who came from a poorer background and got out. I think that is down to a combination of socialization, understanding business, and nepotism (I wouldn't overestimate the latter, all of the people who punch above their weight had the ability to walk into a room and make another person feel like they had known them forever).

giantg24• 5 years ago

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

You end up with people like me who are told by a friend that they will open up a senior dev position just for you. That means the other people who post to that role are putting effort into the interview process but all for nothing since I'm pre-selected. So I don't ask them to open posting so I don't take the position. So I think these backroom deals are wrong, have been taught that by society, and so I get screwed like every other unconnected person.

Zerverus• 5 years ago

This assumes that human social interaction somehow is optional, exactly the mistake the parent went to point out.

There is no world where social skills somehow are ‘bias’. They are core.

xenocratus2• 5 years ago

I totally agree. We live in a world that only values some very specific types of diversity, indeed. Sociability is not one of them. If you're not like the norm you have to put in effort to be more like the norm: you don't want to go to team socials, or go to spinning classes with a VP of engineering? Sucks to be you. And not only that, we'll tell you that it's your fault that it sucks!

hammock• 5 years ago

Who taught this man that college was The Great Equalizer?

I was taught (for better or worse), by STEM grad parents no less, that the only college to strive for is an elite liberal arts education, and the purpose was to broaden my horizons and make connections. It explicitly wasn't to decide on a career and learn hard job skills.

visaals10• 5 years ago

My immigrant parents ingrained in me that if you work hard and get an education and a degree that you'll be set for life, which is what I now know as just part of the equation.

My teachers at my liberal arts focused high school definitely were more of your opinion of "broadening your horizons" and "being an educated member of the community"

My argument is mainly that not enough people know what they're getting into they take 10s or 100s of thousands of dollars in loans to get a degree

kcplate3• 5 years ago

It explicitly wasn't to decide on a career and learn hard job skills

This can be good advice, unless you ultimately think you will really want a STEM career. You will ultimately spend an extra couple of years playing class catch up.

lordnacho• 5 years ago

Here's what a degree is.

You read a bunch of books. You go to lectures. You answer questions to see if you understood the material.

The content is entirely in the public domain. You can read the same content as I did and understand how to build a radio, a bridge, etc, just like me. There are literally no secrets below phd level, and nowadays you even have easy access to multiple explanations of the same ideas.

There isn't even that much teaching, and I say that having attended multiple 2-on-1 tutorials each week for close to 100 weeks. So about 3-400 hours total contact time. Add to that quite a few hours studying for those tutorials, maybe 4 hours for each hour of contact? Depends on how diligent you were.

Compare that to my work, where I've regularly worked 60-80 hour weeks for years and years, of which maybe 40 hours was sitting next to a professional superior. Basically in your first months you spend more time sitting next to an expert than your entire degree. My non-contact hours, where I'd read about finance, was similar: after not very long I'd done a similar amount of non-contact work such as reading a textbook.

My point is that there's no way that university can qualify you for work. Yes, there are jobs that you need specific degrees to get, but even in those jobs you are normally not considered anything but a junior, entry-level person when you finish the course. You're literally not a lawyer when you finish a law degree, and not an engineer when you get your Master of Engineering (like me).

So why do employers want to hire graduates, especially graduates of specific universities and courses?

The reason is they think there's a degree to which people who got into top universities in certain courses are capable of learning the necessary material for a new profession. The material may be completely different from what the person studied, in fact it most often is just so. As what I wrote above explains, it should not take long to cover an equivalent amount of material.

Computer Science may well be the only exception to this rule. On CS courses (I've looked over the shoulder of a couple of students, and I know a professor) people actually do things with a rather large overlap with professional coding. For instance, when I was in uni I built a toy radio and a toy bridge using toy tools. A CS student uses the same Git to version control his stuff, and the same compilers to build them. There's a number of CS labs that maintain actual production code that people use.

This probably means a CS student has a shorter spin-up period, but they still hit the professional time dynamics I mentioned: get a coding job and you'll learn a lot about coding that you didn't learn on the course, really fast.

There are also some economic issues about degrees.

There's a fairly strong adverse signalling effect: if you get a degree but you don't find a job reasonably fast, or you lost your job, why is that? Did other employers interview you and discover some sort of attitude problem? Perhaps I should just interview the regular new grads. You definitely don't know what a professional knows, and I can train up someone smart, and there's plenty of smart kids coming out of uni.

The same goes for your uber driver: if they gave up on getting an actuary job, which is one of the highest paying jobs in society and well worth trying to persevere at, why is that? If he's given up, why would I back him? It's an unfortunate dynamic, but it's definitely there.

Regarding "who you know, not what you know", there's a good explanation for that as well.

If you have a field of people who are "good enough", and you aren't short of them, and they're not easily differentiable, the employer might as well hire his nephew (this is where the term nepotism comes from). And because of the dynamic explained, there's an awfully large field of good enough people: they are mostly a blank slate anyway, having shown just a bit of promise. Of course you'll never know if your nephew was actually among the best, but it will certainly seem that way once he starts gaining experience.

This is why we get a lot of famous peoples' kids breaking into fields like acting, where there's a small number of jobs for a large field of people who could actually do the job. (Though I hesitate to use the same explanation in competitive sports like soccer, where there's a very strong differentiation. Eg Frank Lampard didn't need his uncle to put him on the team, he'd have gotten there anyway.)

LambdaTrain• 5 years ago

I was wondering if the question is really about the gap between education and job requirement rather than the mismatch between graduate supply v.s. position demand. The gap one is certainly an important question, but it would not be surprising that most of CS graduates does not get a job relevant to their background if "the colleges supply 1000 while the open position is 100 or less".

With regard to the context of the article, the example that Uber driver gets a degree in acturial science does not tell much. Probably he is just doing worse than other graduates - even though he is qualified for an acturial job, the employer has tons of better candidates.

hardwaregeek• 5 years ago

This is why I think college should be saved for the adults. Because, sorry, this is a pretty basic lesson in adulthood. Competence is only a small part of getting hired. Contacts and charisma are a huge huge factor. If you don't understand this, you should probably take a year or two to work, learn a bit about the world, then go to college. I've met so many students who have been judged purely on their grades, who then encounter the job market and are mystified to discover that their grades matter zero, zip, zilch. It's not their fault; that's what they've been taught in high school and earlier.

I've tried to explain that for 99% of CS majors, your grades do not matter. If you're spending your time in college constantly studying and worrying about getting an A in your test because oh no your GPA will be a 3.8 otherwise, you haven't really assessed what's important. Go to college; do your best to learn because the material is useful and pretty neat; socialize, have fun; then find a job. That's it. A 4.0 isn't that important.

itwrangler• 5 years ago

This thread (the HN comments) is quite interesting, as opposed to the article which says pretty much nothing and is an email harvesting exercise.. If you're going make a statement such as the title (particularly prefixed with I) then you better say something about your own experience and why you believe your 'title proposition' is true.. if not, and you're not just 'fishing' (for hits and/or email addresses), why bother?

visaals10• 5 years ago

hey, author here

thanks for the valid feedback -- I'm still trying to figure out what I want to do with my blog and definitely got carried away with SEO/Growth Marketing tips I've incorporated towards the end of the article. I'm not sure whether to go down mtlynch.io 's path of being a solopreneur or Daniel Vasello's deconstructing his career in SWE or a more pure scott aaronson or star slate codex blog.

I'll change it to something less 'fishing' and rather more open if people want be notified of posts. In retrospect, I'd rather just share my stories, guiding principles, and tacit knowledge I've developed than try to sell a course or a guide at the moment

With regards to the title, I hope the story I shared about the uber driver and my experience with the mismatch between my degree and what I had to learn on my own to become employable speaks to why I believe the title is true. I'll consider changing my essay's point of view from 3rd person-ish -- but again I'm still trying to find my voice so it's a work in progress

thanks for reading! I thought the discussion here was pretty cool too

freedom20992• 5 years ago

Maybe this is a US problem… I graduated (Master Degree) at the 1st university of my country (Italy) for engineering 10 years ago. By graduation day I was already employed… and had the luxury of choosing the offer that inspired me the most (had more than 10 offers… basically every company I interview with made an offer). After graduation my phone kept ringing at least twice a day with companies reaching out to try to schedule an interview for months! And the best part that my education was extremely cheap! Annual university fee was less than 2k euros!

visaals10• 5 years ago

Could you say that for all engineering graduates at the majority of universities (even the bottom 50%)? I know plenty of people who had internships and were effectively employed a year before graduating, but I can't say the majority of people are in that position.

If education is just 2k euros rather than the 15k (public) or 60k (private) in the US, I agree it's much less of an issue for sure because much less is at stake.

freedom20992• 5 years ago

It’s 2k only if your family is on the top wealth bracket. For most people is way less and if you are in the lower. Rackets you even get money to attend. Can’t say it was that easy to find employment for everyone graduating in any university… for sure it was for all my class mates (we graduated in computer engineering). I know it was almost equally easy for other majors graduates…

mbrodersen2• 5 years ago

You are competing with other collage educated people. So assuming the tech skills are similar, other things will make or break you: communication skills, personality, looks etc.

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

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