College became the default – Let's rethink that

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/05/opinion/college-high-school.html

by tptacek • 4 years ago

176 306 4 years ago

neonate• 4 years ago

I already did for my kids, and I didn't have to wait for the New York Times to tell me. College is a scam (specifically the debt-based form of it) and nearly completely unnecessary for most work.

kspacewalk2• 4 years ago

Yet it remains completely necessary to make it to the interview so that you can be hired and paid to do a lot of that work. Including interesting, desirable and rewarding work.

joshstrange2• 4 years ago

This just isn't true at all. After my second job I stopped even listing college on my resume and my first two jobs didn't care that I never graduated. I'm sure it depends on the industry but in tech the companies that are worth working for care about what you can do, not where you went to school or if you graduated.

platistocrates• 4 years ago

Speaking from experience... Degrees are not at all required in software engineering. Passion & skill are sought after in early career developers, and years of experience will suffice in more advanced engineers.

ryanmcbride• 4 years ago

In a lot of fields that's changing, but not in nearly as many fields as it should be. Outside of academic fields a training program could provide just as much, if not more knowledge needed for a specific career as a college. Especially with college requirements including a lot of things not necessary for the specific degree being sought.

Obviously there's many exceptions. I don't want a doctor that just took a training course, but my doctor not taking american history or calculus? Not a deal breaker at all.

recuter• 4 years ago

I don't know how or why but nobody ever asked me once, they just sort of assumed. I'm guessing this isn't the common experience.

pasquinelli• 4 years ago

this is kind of a tangent, but you know what makes work really interesting, desirable, and rewarding? it's not anything about the work itself, it's that it actually, truly needs doing.

xanaxagoras• 4 years ago

Indeed it is more of an anti-education for many, who come in a lot smarter and capable than they leave. The grievance study disciplines provide next to no social benefit while poisoning the minds of the next generation with imagined sleights and resentment while saddling them with insurmountable debt. College attendance still helps with job prospects for a narrow set of fields, but any applicant with a degree conferred after 2016 or so should be held under a microscope as the radical beliefs they spent $60k studying are toxic to any organization.

colinmhayes5• 4 years ago

College is a scam (specifically the debt-based form of it) and nearly completely unnecessary for most work.

Signalling remains incredibly important. Employers want to know that their junior employees are capable of overcoming adversity. There are many ways to check for that, but the easiest is check if they've succeeded in a stressful environment before. That's effectively all a degree is for most jobs.

No, you don't need a college degree to get a white collar job, but convincing employers that you are the type of person who overcomes adversity is much harder without the degree.

As far as the price, last time I checked getting a college education is still statistically the best investment you can make. The price is increasing because people are willing to pay since they recognize how much it will add to their earning potential.

hooande2• 4 years ago

I would not look at a college degree as an indicator that someone can overcome adversity. They are incredibly common. Almost everyone applying to certain categories of job will have one. And I've personally seen a large number of people with at least one degree fall apart under the real pressure of a startup or FAANG job. The whole point of a leetcode interview is to separate the applicants who merely graduated from the ones who can handle very difficult questions under close observation.

And I would be remiss of I didn't point out that people who go to college at all are more likely to be from well off families and have educated parents. It's a "great investment" for those who already have a huge head start.

sealaska2• 4 years ago

The price is increasing because people are willing to pay since they recognize how much it will add to their earning potential.

I assumed prices for colleges were increasing because of the availability of cheap debt. I know plenty of people who went to college, taking out large amounts of debt, and not seeming to directly consider their earning potential post-graduation.

fullstackchris2• 4 years ago

I love that it's considered 'adversity' - working in some of the most advanced labs in the world, on some of the most wealthy campuses in the world, all the while partying with your friends, doing the minimum work to get a B or C average.

Not saying I was exactly one of those types, but those types ALSO got jobs just fine, and I'm ready to brawl anyone that says they faced any true 'adversity'.

invalidOrTaken3• 4 years ago

Signalling remains incredibly important.

This is the kind of thing that remains true until it doesn't. Don't get me wrong, it is definitely true right now, and I'd advise my own child to go---but this would a pragmatic knuckling-under, not a fundamental need.

There's significant psychic distress that's created by being a maverick, which I doubly wouldn't wish on my children, so I would still advise them to go. But I would also advise them to not take it too seriously, to be interested in learning things outside of school, and to keep an eye out for off-ramps.

rufus_foreman2• 4 years ago

> the easiest is check if they've succeeded in a stressful environment before

I guess you...overcame adversity by going to college?

Least stressful time of my life. I fucked off, did drugs, and somebody else paid for it all.

So much stress.

dilap• 4 years ago

perhaps it has become a scam (and it certainly has become expensive), but i defnly got a ton of value from my education at University of Oregon back in 2001-2006ish.

you've got your whole life to work! it's valuable to take some time as an adult (or almost-adult) to learn random stuff in some depth; this will be hard for 99% of us to do once we've got the rest of the real world to deal with.

(now, if we could restructure life to allow for a more lesiurely pace, that would be great. but until then, college is a pretty precious "out" from the rat race imo.)

scarecrowbob• 4 years ago

I generally agree with this position.

However, my son wanted to be an engineer, so he learned calculus and got into a well-regarded engineering program. My mother is pretty well off and she's been funding his education. Now he's about to graduate with his degree and become an ME.

My feeling is that there are a number of occupations that meet a couple of criteria:

- you actually need both a highly-specialized education - there is a certificate that you can only get through formal education - there are jobs waiting for successful applicants - the student in question has a good chance at succeeding - there is some underlying support for the student (in the case of loans, this would tighten up the question about success and and the kinds of jobs available)

I believe in the utility of a deep humanities education, but the US university system makes that ruinously expensive to the point where I more or less agree with your sentiment. It sucks that "necessity for work" has become the only reasonable way of deciding to pursue deeper education.

tabtab2• 4 years ago

College is a scam (specifically the debt-based form of it)

Degrees are statistically worth it, salary-wise. Just don't go to an expensive college. There are a few degrees where it may matter, but for the vast majority of subjects the expensive colleges are NOT worth the premium. Find a boring reliable but inexpensive college, hopefully near inexpensive lodging. Some states make it easy to go to a community college for the first half of the education.

seibelj• 4 years ago

Boston University - $51,574 for the 2011 year https://www.bu.edu/articles/2010/tuition-room-and-board-to-r....

Boston University - $79,760 for the 2022 year https://www.bu.edu/admissions/tuition-aid/tuition/

How did BU get ~$30k more expensive, per year, in 11 years? What will it be in 10 more years - $120k per year? This is absurd. It's cheaper to buy your child two Porsche sports cars and attend state school than it is for 4 years at BU

paxys2• 4 years ago

Well inflation itself makes up for $20K of that. And Boston is fast becoming the most expensive city in the country. Add on the fact that BU is a private college.

Tuition + housing at UMass is $30K/yr.

polskibus2• 4 years ago

Acc https://www.in2013dollars.com/Boston-Massachusetts/price-inf... Inflation is just 10k over those 10 yrs.

eweise• 4 years ago

supply vs demand.

paganel• 4 years ago

At first I thought that sum was for the entire cycle/duration, but even 51k per year was predatory, nevermind 80k like it is now. Multiplied by 4 (let's say), that's 320k, you add some other costs that I guess are not part of the tuition and I can see that easily getting to 400k, even half a million. Stuff like this will be the intellectual ruin of the US university system.

polskibus2• 4 years ago

Could it be indirectly related to massive increase in housing costs over those years ? https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ATNHPIUS14454Q

taylodl• 4 years ago

Do the math - that's basically a 4% increase per year. Now put that math to work for your retirement! :)

willturman• 4 years ago

$51,574 in 2011 to $79,760 in 2022 represents a growth rate of ~4.04%

$51,574 invested into the S&P 500 in 2011 would be worth more than $225,000 today.

BU enrollment was 32,727 in 2011, and is currently 33,678. I'm surprised it hasn't gone up considerably more.

Damogran63• 4 years ago

A 4 year BS is $320,000 without Room and Board. That's what my mortgage was 22 years ago. I have 30 years to pay that off, and I can live in it while doing so.

(Now, multiply by the number of children you have, in my case, 2.)

hitpointdrew• 4 years ago

Comparing tuition to the growth of the S&P 500, or any fund or stock for that matter, is like comparing a first class dining experience to a computer, the two have nothing in common.

Why would you expect education costs to move with the value of public businesses? How does that make any sense? A businesses worth has actually gone up (acquired assets, generating more revenue, etc.), has the value of a college education gone up 400% from 2011 to 2022? Because that is what you seem to be suggesting. Are new grads from BU on average making 400x what they were in 2011? Even going from $51k to $79K that's about a 47% increase, is BU college education 47% better today than it was in 2011? Probably not.

WalterBright8• 4 years ago

With high school math, you can figure out what percent increase that is per year:

((79760/51574)^(1/11) - 1) * 100 = 4%

In 20 more years:

79760 * 1.04^10 = $118000

Your guess is pretty good.

cracker_jacks• 4 years ago

"College became default"

vjust2• 4 years ago

Lets put our thinking caps on & start believing this new truth, since the New York Times has spoken.

colinmhayes5• 4 years ago

This is an op-ed. This "NYT tries to arbitrate truth" trope is so tired, especially when it's usually used on opinion pieces.

vmladenov• 4 years ago

It’s also the opinion of a linguistics professor at Columbia, so this really is just someone opining on his field, not making an autoritative declaration. And he probably didn’t write the headline. People need to stop looking so much at which brand is publishing something and focus on the byline.

bradlys5• 4 years ago

Good luck keeping a date once you’re out in the world. Not having an four year degree as a man in the dating world is heavily frowned upon. Maybe in 30 years we’ll drop the “gender equality for me but not for thee” mentality but ain’t happening anytime soon.

johnnyanmac2• 4 years ago

It's not about the degree, it's about the money. It's not like the dates looking for some sort of Doctor or Rocket Scientists are changing their opinion over a "regular" 4 year degree anyways, no point in worry about them.

We could talk about the "fairness" of this all century, but for traversing in 2022; focus on your successes, not your shortcomings. It's harder, but not impossible to have a successful career without a degree.

bradlys5• 4 years ago

It’s both actually. If you’re making 7-fig then sure - no one bats an eye. But work in the trades? Do something that isn’t known for having an educated workforce? Please accept your new destination: Purgatory.

By all means - come to SF or NYC as a plumber and let me know how it goes.

Supermancho• 4 years ago

In the US, I'm not sure why would a woman use a filter that's so trivial to lie about?

Not having an four year degree as a man in the dating world is heavily frowned upon.

Sometimes I've talked about what was studied in school or what my profession is (that's an important relationship anchor), but I don't believe I've ever been asked about a 4-year-degree (whatever that's supposed to tell you). This just isn't practical and certainly not common.

caddemon4• 4 years ago

It's a pretty visible part of the profile on any major dating app. It's true that one could fairly easily lie about it at first, but you'd have to be committed to the lie if you're trying to get into a long term relationship. There are plenty of small things that could signal something weird about your supposed college experience, and lying about that is a good way to end a relationship even with someone who wouldn't have minded.

As you get older and especially as you get a higher status job you could start to get away with leaving off the education section of the dating profile, and then sure it probably doesn't come up until later in the relationship when it's an unimportant point. But for a trade worker like OP I could see a degree having some effect on dating app success even into their 30s.

I wish dating apps weren't the de facto way to meet people now, but where I live it's uncommon to find a couple that met outside of either dating apps or work/school. Obviously not going to college eliminates meeting at college, and working in trades one probably does not have many female coworkers. So basically that leaves dating apps. Women get a lot of swipes usually and can afford to be picky with the early screening. Hell, they might have to be picky with screening otherwise they would be bombarded by messages.

Man I'd really love to see some real disruption to the current dating app scene. But the more wholesome stuff wouldn't necessarily be a great business model I guess.

caddemon4• 4 years ago

Do you really find many women without college degrees that reject you over not having a college degree? I'd guess the problem is more the sheer number of women that get degrees - look at almost any subpar liberal arts college and you'll find an out of whack gender ratio. Those degrees really should not confer any legitimate social status, but unfortunately because they check the college box they sort of do.

I'm not doubting your experience, I'm just saying I don't think it is hypocritical in the way you're implying. A lot of women, especially in coastal cities, have a degree. So they think their dating pool should be people with degrees. It's not rooted in double standard, they are just severely overestimating the value of their degree.

And at the core, the reason a lot of women get such shit degrees is that other options like various trades are not as accessible for them. There are a lot of reasons for that - it's a complicated issue that I don't think can be boiled down to just misogyny or just misandry (or just both for that matter).

bradlys5• 4 years ago

Personally, this is not my issue. I have a smartass degree from a reputable target school that makes everyone assume I must be a genius. That said - I meet a lot of women with masters or PhDs who look down on my woeful bachelors. (Ignoring I’ve had 7-fig jobs - SF is hellishly annoying on this)

I just know men who have had this issue and I have a lot of compassion for them.

Usual articles out there these days are like, “women are outnumbering men in college education. Men turning to other forms to get ahead. Women suffer.”

And I think you’re really overestimating the rationality of most women on coastal cities - I’ve been married to one. She knows how many double standards she and all her friends have. She’s astutely aware but she’s like, “is what it is! I’m not changing!” And that’s how most women I meet also are. “Double standards are okay for me but not for thee…”

We’ll get there someday but it’s not happening anytime soon. Idk why anyone here is all agro with the downvotes. Do none of you talk to single women under 35?

vjust2• 4 years ago

Not just college for kids, I have seen people take up Executive-MBAs, and not observed a positive career impact.

fullshark• 4 years ago

Masters programs were recently skewered by the WSJ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27779775

QuikAccount3• 4 years ago

So the crux of this article is that kids shouldn't go to college because they feel like they are meant to but they should go because it makes sense for their personal goals and I agree. I have long held the belief that America needs more apprenticeships and technical schools.

That being said, this is one of those things where people are instead going to want to debate the value of college itself(because they didn't actually read the article).

I'm an American that didn't go to college. And as I've said, college is far less than ideal but here are some reasons why I personally wish I got my degree

1. I have a harder time getting jobs than people with degrees. Not people with CS degrees, people with any degrees. Despite having job experience, I have a rougher time getting interviews and emails back than my friends with degrees. I have worked at the same companies as my peers and they have recruiters beating down their doors while I barely get emails back.

2. If you want to move to another country, a degree will more than likely be part of your visa requirements. Even if it isn't, it would absolutely help in a points based system.

3. I still get imposter syndrome because I can barely solve leetcode questions in interviews and feel like I'm missing something. Would a degree resolve that issue? No idea. But fact or fiction there is a part of me that believes it would've at least given me a bit more confidence in my abilities.

giraffe_lady• 4 years ago

Yes. Speaking for the US, if your personal goals include having things like PTO and health insurance you're going to want the degree. Most white collar jobs are off limits without a degree in something, even if entirely unrelated to the job itself.

Not that there aren't other paths, or non-degree-gatekept jobs with those things. But they are harder and fewer and becoming increasingly so.

Programming is one of the few prestigious, highly paid jobs left that doesn't have a pretty hard req on having a degree to get into. That's why I do it. But yes I've also run into all the things you mention.

randomdata5• 4 years ago

if your personal goals include having things like PTO and health insurance you're going to want the degree.

Only ~40% of Americans have completed some level of post-secondary schooling, and only ~30% have a college degree. ~60-70% of jobs do not offer PTO and health insurance? That seems a little hard to believe. The BLS indicates that 79% of jobs offer PTO.

robbedpeter• 4 years ago

Networking and other IT fields are pretty open.

Degree requirements are lazy gatekeeping by organizations too big to hire people that actually care.

kapp_in_life• 4 years ago

3. I still get imposter syndrome because I can barely solve leetcode questions in interviews and feel like I'm missing something. Would a degree resolve that issue? No idea. But fact or fiction there is a part of me that believes it would've at least give me a bit more confidence in my abilities.

It likely wouldn't. What would help you with solving leetcode questions is just grinding leetcode questions. Taking an algorithm class years ago wouldn't help beyond your first attempt at the problems.

That said for all the other reasons you listed, getting a college degree is usually a good idea.

baq• 4 years ago

Precisely this. What the algorithms class would help with is understanding written solutions. Leetcode is grind, grind, grind.

llbeansandrice• 4 years ago

Even grinding the questions is pointless imo. Look at the solutions and determine the patterns that are present. Once you've seen the answer to a category it's trivial to ID and reproduce the solution.

This approach will save you hours if not days and you can still do more practice problems later if you really feel like that's important.

ssully• 4 years ago

Can confirm. I started messing with leetcode and brushing up on some algorithm stuff lately. It's been about 4-5 years since I took an algorithm class and I've lost nearly all of my knowledge because it's just not something used in the kind of programming I do. I do feel myself regaining those skills, but I don't know if having a degree is exactly the reason why I am regaining those skills, because it has still been difficult reacclimating myself.

rozularen• 4 years ago

Yeah, I agree with you in points #1 and #2 but point #3 in my opinion is only a matter of practice.

shaftway3• 4 years ago

I'm in the same boat as you (American, no degree), and I mostly agree (though I think that a debate around the value of college itself should be had, because I think there are too many cases where it isn't as high as people think it is).

1. The way I handled this was to insinuate on the resume that I had a degree. I went to a university for a couple years (before flunking out) and before that I did a couple summer classes at an extension program. Those add up to four years, and I point out that I studied computer science (which is true). If they don't outright ask that's not my problem. And if they do then I explain that something personal came up, and not completing it is one of my biggest regrets in life, but at this point I don't see how a degree would help my career blah blah blah.

This has only actually affected me once, and it's for a role I'm starting this week. The net effect is that my software engineering title can't have "Engineer" in it because I don't have an "Engineering degree".

3. A degree doesn't resolve that. I interview people every week for a role at my MAGMA company, most of whom have degrees, and most of whom act like they have impostor syndrome. Practice it. Do interviews for companies you don't expect to join just for the interview practice in a low-stakes setting. You'll get over it.

radicaldreamer• 4 years ago

"The net effect is that my software engineering title can't have "Engineer" in it"

Where is this? There are plenty of people in Software Engineering (with Engineer as their title) without engineering degrees (or college degrees at all), even at large companies like Facebook/Google etc.

systemvoltage2• 4 years ago

DeSantis just passed an apprenticeship funding in the state of Florida: https://flgov.com/2022/03/30/governor-ron-desantis-announces...

This is excellent and taking lessons from the Swiss apprenticeship programs. Typically working with local companies to provide training, in return they get excellent labor, and the labor pool is far better off without any student loans or burden of spending 5 years in college.

alistairSH• 4 years ago

The only question I have is how do we shift the cost of and/or the general tax-payer?

This question is meant more generally, not as a jab at Florida's program.

maxerickson• 4 years ago

That's something like $50 per student.

Michigan has a program where students can earn an associates degree (or something equivalent) by doing a 5th year after high school. I expect many of the participants could do it in 4, and I bet that the reason they can't is because of squabbling over funding.

We need to make a commitment to considerably expanding the opportunities available to 14-15 year olds in the public school system, not slightly expand their options after graduation.

3 tracks would be great (roughly, wants to finish high school, wants to finish high school with some skills and wants to finish high school on a trajectory for a 4 year degree).

robbyking2• 4 years ago

How many years of experience do you have? I don't have a degree but it's literally never come up, and I've been working as a software engineer for two decades.

QuikAccount3• 4 years ago

Still early in my career. 3-4 years.

akhmatova2• 4 years ago

I don't have a degree but it's literally never come up, and I've been working as a software engineer for two decades.

How do you know it has "never come up"? Because you've never been asked about it?

If people have passed on your profile completely for that reason -- then it has still "come up" on their side, even though of course never know that's the reason.

scruple• 4 years ago

I'm at 15 years of experience. I also don't have a degree. It's come up a handful of times but it's been a few years since the last occurrence.

rosndo• 4 years ago

1. I have a harder time getting jobs than people with degrees. Not people with CS degrees, people with any degrees

Probably an unpopular take, but you could lie, essentially 0 risk (especially if you’re even a little clever about it).

frankbreetz• 4 years ago

If it's any condolence to yourself, I have a college degree and I am always incredibly impressed by people who are able to be software developers without one. The perseverance required to not only learn the subject matter without structure, but get through the gatekeepers without a degree is immense.

And everyone gets imposter syndrome, so I doubt college would help with that.

post-it2• 4 years ago

The gatekeepers are the only meaningful barrier. The amount of content I learned in my CS degree that ended up being useful to my software development career could fit in a one-month course. Lots of writing Java out on paper (or, marginally better, in a shitty online code editor without access to docs), not a lot of debugging other people's code.

antattack2• 4 years ago

4. There are companies that will not even consider an applicant w/o BA degree, no matter what experience (HR filters).

Anyway, in large measure, we are only talking how college is not for everyone because it's so expensive. It's fine to have alternatives but education needs to be more accessible to those that want it.

jfengel• 4 years ago

In way way those are two sides of the same coin. College has become so expensive because it's so indispensable. You earn more money with it than without it.

It's become almost a Veblen good -- the more expensive it is, the more desirable it is. And that pushes all colleges to be more expensive.

Having people treat non-college experience as valuable would decrease the necessity of college, and hopefully lower the price. The prestige factor would still exist, but hopefully it would reduce the costs on the lower end that more people can afford the education (if not the networking and prestige benefits).

indymike• 4 years ago

It's fine to have alternatives but education needs to be more accessible to those that want it.

As long as funding for college is a lifetime of debt, college as a delivery vehicle for education may not be a very good choice. There are many alternatives to college.

skierguy2• 4 years ago

I have my masters in computer science and work on the Linux kernel at a company you know for a product that you know. I often miss the point of leetcode questions and lose points because I don't use some certain tricky thing that they specifically want me to study for before the interview. I personally think it's just a handy way to build ageism into the interview process, because it's all this academic-style stuff that I've used maybe twice since I graduated 5 years ago. And for people like you, you've probably only really heard about these things in passing because they're not part of most people's workflow.

Kind of like applying for a job restoring Native American artifacts and being asked tricky questions about artifacts discovered in Egypt 5 years ago. Sure, you might have noticed the story or even read a lot about it 5 years ago, but it's not going to be a part of your daily work. Different procedures, different materials, and different local laws? I guess you should get studying if you want this job! And really, I just wanted to see your problem solving style when I ask irrelevant questions!

But ya, I think it's fair to say that my degree helps me not take that sort of thing as a rejection of my intelligence or qualifications though. I don't feel lesser than. I just feel belittled by someone who doesn't put effort into their interviews, which is useful information if you're considering working with them.

grogenaut• 4 years ago

I have trouble with leet code problems because I'm 100% used to teasing requirements out of real people, whereas leet code has a skill of exactly reading and understanding the exact implementation requirement the question is asking. That and well real debugging tools in real life versus the sometimes broken web versions (I spent 45 minutes on an 'friendly' interview debugging the debugger in an online testing system which was truncating output and having threading issues).

Which is funny because I was prepping my Daughter for leet code for interviews, she only practiced leet code all summer despite me pushing her to do some open source or pet projects (aka real code). She's much better at LC than me despite barely being able to code in real life. What's really funny is that she got completely owned when I and some friends asked her the same leet code questions verbally but leaving ambiguity in and not specifically calling out all edge cases. We did about 10 practice verbal questions before she actually interviewed so she got better at it... and then she got asked one leet code question read off of the site.

It's fun watching how fast she picks things up esp with the ability to ask me and her mentors questions. She calls that "powerleveling"

zozbot2345• 4 years ago

I mean, it's literally called l33tcode... It's really a handy way of building l33t d00dz culture into Big Tech firms. Gatekeeping at its finest.

mgfist• 4 years ago

I think the issue is that you're not taught how to interview people. So usually you'll notice that you need to do an interview in a few hours and scramble to think of what to ask and leetcode is the easiest thing that comes to mind.

musicale• 4 years ago

Leetcode-style interviews seem to be somewhere between "what year did you take your last algorithms course?" and "have you seen this problem before?"

sangnoir• 4 years ago

I personally think it's just a handy way to build ageism into the interview process, because it's all this academic-style stuff that I've used maybe twice since I graduated 5 years ago.

I'd argue it's time-ist in that it works against those who don't have time to prepare for a leetcode interview. Candidates of any age can grind leetcode, but I concede college students have more time on their hands, compared to someone with 3 kids and a demanding job.

IMO, interviewing at big tech is like the Spelling Bee competition; asking people to spell 4 or 5 letter words is hardly a filter; so you start giving increasingly longer and unusual words and it becomes a feedback loop with kids have to getting coaches and spending an inordinate amount of time studying, which raises the bar further. The end result is only those who invest a lot of time can get anywhere (and sometimes still fail), and those who don't prepare barely get off the ground unless they are geniuses.

Swizec• 4 years ago

Counteranecdata from someone who did go to college in Europe and didn't graduate:

1. /../ they have recruiters beating down their doors while I barely get emails back.

I have recruiters beating down my doors. Because of job experience. Unless they assume I finished college just because linkedin says I went for N years.

2. If you want to move to another country, a degree will more than likely be part of your visa requirements. Even if it isn't, it would absolutely help in a points based system.

I was able to get multiple O-1 (special ability) visas in USA without a college degree.

3. I still get imposter syndrome

Me too. But if you were hired then the company thinks you can do the thing. Just do the thing.

edit: It is very likely the things that enabled me to do #2 also unlock #1. To this I can't offer much more than "Do interesting things and make sure people know about them"

quickthrower2• 4 years ago

The degree wont help with leetcode unless you did it in the last year or so. Leetcode is about practice. Doing a degree and revising for an exam is a similar kind of practice.

Natural aptitude to a certain extent is required, but if you are coding you probably have it. Then it is practice: there is nothing easier than a question you already answered in practice and you recognise the shape.

sircastor• 4 years ago

I'm an American that finished university later than most. I was 40 by the time I finished my degree, working full time as a software engineer. After I got my degree, I found out a lot of my peers that I thought held degrees do not.

For me, I've found that my course-related knowledge provides a little more context than before, but ultimately I'm not really better at solving leet-code style questions. It hasn't resolved any imposter syndrome. I haven't noticed any difference in recruiting efforts.

I am very happy I completed my degree, it was an important goal for me. I think college is important because it results in more well-rounded individuals, with broader perspectives.

I don't think college should be viewed as a means for job-training. We are not our jobs, and I really think we need to find a way to stop treating people like their role in society is exclusively to work for 50 years and then go away.

sudosysgen• 4 years ago

Some universities (such as McGill) now have leetcode classes.

joshstrange2• 4 years ago

1. I have a harder time getting jobs than people with degrees. Not people with CS degrees, people with any degrees. Despite having job experience, I have a rougher time getting interviews and emails back than my friends with degrees. I have worked at the same companies as my peers and they have recruiters beating down their doors while I barely get emails back.

I'm not discrediting your experience but I've never had any issues on this front. I went to college for ~3 years before dropping out because I didn't see the point in continuing and I've never had any issues getting a job in tech. I've also far outpaced my peers (geographically and friends) when it comes to salary so I'm struggling to figure out what the difference is. Potentially we are going after different jobs or want different jobs. On the recruiter-front, I have recruiters in my inbox 24/7 pestering me. I don't see recruiters reaching out as a measure of how good of a developer someone is (also almost every external recruiter is trash), it just means you got put on a mailing list at some point. I believe you when you say your friends with similar/same experience get asked back more than you do but I'm hesitant to automatically assume it's because of college (due to my lived experience). I have only interviewed at 1 place that I can remember that I actually was interested in getting a job at which ended in them saying they weren't interested (though I've only worked at 4 companies over 11+ years and interviewed about 6-8 times total, the other offers weren't ones I was interested in taking).

For #2 yes, I could see that being an issue but it's not something I'm looking to do so I don't really care

For #3, everyone feels this and college doesn't change it. Interviews are notoriously terrible on the whole and serve as an ego boost to the interviewer more often than they actually tell you if someone would be a good developer.

vmception• 4 years ago

Interesting post, I have a CS degree and want some of those years back!

paulpauper4• 4 years ago

I have long held the belief that America needs more apprenticeships and technical schools.

These exist, but the problem is the jobs are not the good and neither is the pay. You need a lot of certification and training, which is time consuming and costs money.

Many low-skilled young and middle-aged men are more content with an easy retail job or just living with parents or with friends or with girlfriend than going down the apprentice route. It's sad that America is going down this route, but I don't see any way out of it.

TylerH• 4 years ago

As if college doesn't also require a lot of certification and training which is time consuming and costs money.

u2077• 4 years ago

I don’t remember where I heard it, but someone said degrees, certifications, etc, are good because they show you have understanding of $topic to someone who doesn’t have an understanding of said $topic. You aren’t always interviewing with engineers themselves, and a piece of paper is an easy way to communicate your skills to non-technical people.

feqbbui32• 4 years ago

The funny thing is, most universities are accredited institutions in their own country. Which means that whoever gets their diploma is accredited too to work in any company in the field of their accreditation.

And this is the norm in many industries to signal your competence (plus the renewal in every X years).

Would you ask a surgeon to do a surgery before you hire him? So why do we put up with all this bullshit that low-IQ HR departments impose on us?

I would rather take the effort to pass accreditation each X years and then let me join a company with a simplified process (background check, personal interview, etc), than putting effort into practicing before each and every interview.

druddha• 4 years ago

Given the voting divide based on education, people in the U.S. are getting something else out of college education. I have no issue with shoehorning more liberal education into primary education, but a liberal democracy cannot survive if blue-collar workers have no historical context and vote for authoritarians who are intent on destroying democracy.

gruez2• 4 years ago

I'm not sure what's more authoritarian, the "authoritarians" that you decry, or the implication that we should educate people so they vote on the correct side of the "voting divide".

AnimalMuppet2• 4 years ago

In addition to what gruez said, this is disgustingly elitist. "They're too uneducated to know how they should vote! They need to get an education, so we can tell them how to vote!"

Do you wonder why Democrats are having trouble connecting with blue-collar voters? Attitudes like this are a big part of it.

daniel-cussen• 4 years ago

You should be very happy you didn't go to college for precisely these same three reasons.

So for the purposes of points 1 and 2, college degrees are bullshit harmful things. So having a harder time getting jobs and visas are identical. Yes, you get little brownie points for a college degree, but you used to get the exact same little brownie points for a high school degree. What happened? It's a filter, nobody gives a shit about what degree you have in an ultimate sense, plenty of places see college-degree only as insufficient, guys saying what you just said but about a master's, or a PhD, or a post-doc.

What this is is a rat race. They want you to be a rat, and race. To do so, they say they'll only take the rats with under a certain time. But if many rats make that time, the time is reduced. Then as the rats really race more and more the times they individually have to make to make the cut keep falling and falling. Also, keep in mind you get paid for working but nothing for studying, in fact you pay for studying, or parents pay (same thing, the benevolence that is for you is spent). So the rats racing means the guys setting up the rat race--the rats who won in the past, often--get more work all the time from the racing rats in exchange for less and less cheese of their own. So by demanding college degrees and being shitty to people who don't have them--all the things you describe are vulgar fuck-yous from employers for not having raced hard enough as a rat. What do you get for racing harder? Well if you do well enough, you get a "chapita". A chapita means badge, like you get badges in bags of fried crisps sometimes if you're very lucky because only a third contain them. These badges are very powerful, superhero badges that give you magical powers of invisibility and flying through the air, but superpowers. Real superpowers, or they better be, because these chapitas are morally equivalent to college degrees, and those

They both say you're special, now it's true the college degree is letter-sized, so they take up more area, and they have more letters in them, everyone but me says they're prettier than the chapita, but I say WAIT, that chapita is printed in color, good drawing of real art, it's got a metal back, it's got plastic on the front so it doesn't look shitty if it gets wet, and you can attach it to your clothes! You can go around with that chapita everywhere you go. And as for the powers, they both have the same superpower granting ability because they both SAY you have that power! And in fact the chapita superpower, invisibility or flying through the air, is a much better power than the college degree, which is that you've got a major, and IMPLIES you have more powers.

Now it's true that perhaps you STOLE your chapita from its true owner! You didn't buy the bag of fried crisps yourself and open it with your own hands, and eat the crisps one by one without any falling to the floor, slowly eating them and enjoying them, until finding the chapita in a moment of beautiful merit! You STOLE the chapita from its true owner, you stole those powers, you do not deserve it, you are stealing someone else's invisibility! Or you bought it, that's just wrong, you're supposed to buy the fried crisps and have GOOD LUCK OF YOUR OWN.

But the college degree is no different because tons of people cheat their asses off, leading to learning literally nothing[1]. And some people just buy college degrees outright, like pay $400 and they email it to you, or OK they fedex it but you pay for the fedex, if you're stupid and pay $400. If you're smart you can ask the fried crisp company what software they use (and pirate it obviously) and design your own letter-sized college degree. Or fuck it, just write COLLEGE DEGREE [YOUR NAME] on a page in a notebook, real big, look at it, be proud of yourself. Now let's turn the page to the real work.

Leetcode? Leetcode sucks. Not leet. So it has a few different functions, so first it's a way to get workers to work for nothing to "apply" to a job where they can earn money. That's good! Gets the boss much better terms ie. more submissive workers more afraid of getting fired because then they have to waste more money to get another job, or "reeducate" to get another chapita wasting more resources, becoming poorer and more indebted and more desperate, good things all around. That's the first part, worker impoverishment.[3] Then, to make you feel stupid. You say, "I can't solve this shit"--it's true you can't, it's very elitist in that regard, I've never met anybody who can solve this kind of problem from nothing. Well there's some math wizzes, like Math Olympiad guys, there's some, but they are gluing together clever things a lot of the time. So what people do is they look it up. Then, to brag by getting lots of internet points, notice leetcode is a point system? You add up the points? Try to get a lot of points on a high score? You can't just solve one problem to get a good leetcode score, you have to solve lots. And there's usually a story in the media at some point about the top leetcoder getting hired due to his leetcode score, like with Github or Kaggle.

Then you have to "grind leetcode" for interviews. Well you do, I don't, but you do. You have to know all the tricks, and sometimes be able to come up with something clever in the moment. And so then they tell you it's meritocratic, FAANG just cares about these tests. Well what this does is produce lots and lots of rejects. This is good, rejects generally maintain a highly positive impression of the places that rejected them, blaming themselves for their failure (you get little brownie points for self-blame like talking about getting fired in suck-uppy terms), and these companies don't have to pay absolutely anything to the rejects. In fact, they tell the rejects to apply again in a few years. Plus--well they're stupid for buying into their own bullshit like this they ought to remember their lies--but the companies then say, oh, we're the absolute best, we're the select few, you're in the club, we're special. Well to be fair these filters do get you clever people in general, in most ways. But on the other hand no true dropouts. So Tesla wouldn't hire Tesla.[2]

So for the same three reasons you gave for being unhappy, contrariwise, be happy, be very happy. I believe people act collectively, if you make a choice others will make the same choice with you, if you had made all those painful sacrifices to get a degree, which toward the end are about proving you submissively do stupid assignments against your own interests, well more people would have done that with you and you would not have gotten ahead. Employers would have asked for more chapitas, visas would have asked for more chapitas, leetcode would be a little easier but you'd also be worse at it, and you'd write the same comment with Master's in place of Bachelor's, you'd actually make lower wages, and you would have done harm to the other rats. You would feel worse about yourself, especially because you would have wasted all that money on tution.

[1] You learn literally nothing. Yeah you remember some words and google and you're good at cheating now and plagiarizing, OK cheating is great for learning to cheat I'll admit that, and at elite colleges the cat-and-mouse game of cheating is hardcore and a great preparation for professional cheating ie finance, consulting and medicine. It's also good prep for catching cheaters, which is important in becoming a teacher that needs to prevent cheating, so cheating in the School of Education makes sense. You could have a cheating class if you wanted. In one class I was the only one who could actually do the work (I actually design and implement algorithms), and I flunked. I learned a lot in that class though, not cheating is the real way of cheating. You fucking learn. I didn't cheat, I saw the assignment they wanted in a document way in the back of one of the class books but I just wasn't going to copy it and hand it in, wasn't going to get a TA to just give me the answers either in "office hours", just wasn't going to cheat because it's not just about the school's rules, it's about my rules too. So basically everyone who passed cheated, and this class was a requirement for the most prestigious major in the world.

[2] I will say I have a remarkably favorable impression of Elon Musk, partly because I view people I do good things for more favorably, like victims I've protected from crime, or in this case, because I acted to protect his capital in a company he funded, where I got a great job by going around their filter and showing up and working my ass off until they took me in long-term. The wage was so high and conditions were so good. So back to protecting his capital, I didn't know it was him funding the company. But, Tesla wouldn't hire Tesla, not through the normal pipeline at any rate. His companies are huge and they care about chapitas.

[3] Every piece of bitchwork (meaning "homework" you do it for free to impress the potential employer, who is assigning it, in order to get hired) reduces your salary by 3%. Always charge for time, not completion, or apply to other places instead with the time you would spend on it.

tintedfireglass• 4 years ago

This hits home....

feqbbui32• 4 years ago

Regarding #3 I think it's a completely broken industry practice and I would not take it on me, but I would try to find companies with different hiring practices. As you described, this whole Leetcode industry is demoralizing and hurts almost everyone for very small benefit in general.

In our company (and my previous too BTW) I was strongly advocating working on real problems during the interview. I find it really troubling that the industry still sticks to this outdated way of interviewing (I refer to Leetcode) instead of: A. Having accreditation which would require renewal after X years B. Having other types of competency checks

I really don't understand how Leetcode is superior to let's say Coderpad or Codeinterview.io (I am not affiliated with either of them).

These tools actually pretty much allow you to set up a relevant coding exercise in the candidate's preferred language and framework, and it only takes a few minutes to customize their templates to the candidate's experience and the interviewer's imagined coding problem.

Just yesterday I set up a React coding problem in just below an hour, which allowed me to ask relevant questions about: language syntax, state management, routing, code organization, system performance, error handling, and data organization among others.

Isn't that the end goal here? To ask relevant questions from the candidate so that we make sure his skills match the imagined role and/or project?

Based on all this above, if I would be back to interviewing now, I would generally take it as a signal of a broken organization, lack of clarity about the role/project in the company, if they would shove a Leetcode/Codility/Hackerrank coding problem first in my face without asking.

roughly• 4 years ago

The often brilliant SMBC recently, on liberal education: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/liberal-education

I post this because I'm so very tired of this particular conversation about higher education, and I really wonder if we could maybe get back to the original thing we were trying to do with colleges, wherein we promoted our general humanity and allowed people to be better, richer (in the "broth of humanity", as opposed to the dollars) versions of themselves in a better, richer society, and sort of step back from this notion of "that book of poetry you just read isn't going to translate to additional income later, so why'd you do it" that seems to be the only way we engage with any of this lately.

I know, I'm shouting into the void, and there's a bunch of real world stuff and broken things here, but my god, I'm just so, so tired of a conversation that just really feels like people complaining that the canvas on which that work of art was painted costs much, much more than just painting the wall white and doesn't seem to offer any actual practical benefit.

dorchadas3• 4 years ago

Just wanted to let you know I completely agree with you. I went to an undergraduate university that required two semester of philosophy and two of theology, and I certainly think I'm better off for them. I think we need to get back to that and away from expecting universities to be job training. Let the employers train their employees instead of foisting it on universities.

afthonos• 4 years ago

This is not that conversation.

I'm a huge fan of the comic, but there's a difference between discussing the worth of having art at all, discussing how we make art, and discussing whether every wall everywhere should be covered in art on expensive canvas.

There are two possible reasons for universal college: first, societal ones, where we presume that everyone going to college is good for society. In those cases, it must be justified as such, and crucially must be paid for by society (or viewed as a social duty).

The other case is to benefit the individuals that to go to college. In that case, you have to make the argument that going to college is a better option than not for (essentially) everyone as individuals. This is the tack that the US is taking.

None of this involves the wonders of carrying on a conversation unbroken since Plato. For one, many people don't have a liberal college education, they have a STEM education which, while enforcing some level of humanities exposure, views them as annoying requirements—this is both at the institutional and the student level. For another, most people think they're going to college to get a better job.

Using that comic to justify universal college, is like using a biography of Michelangelo to insist every mason should learn how to sculpt the Pieta. Some people just want to build walls. And we need walls.

belthesar• 4 years ago

This. I didn't go to college myself, and have a fortunately successful career thus far, but the two key reasons I wish I had gone ultimately boil down to "I wish I had established a broader knowledge on topics related to my industry," and "I wish I was better versed in more worldly subjects."

With that said, I think we're poorly equipping high school students to make those evaluations as to if/when that's a smart choice for them. I support the argument for more trade schools and apprenticeships because for a number of folks, myself included in my early post-high school years, going to college straight out of HS would have been a giant waste of time and money. I wouldn't have taken it seriously, I didn't understand what I really wanted from life, only that I was "good at computer." High school guidance councilors are spending time and energy on getting you testing well, getting into school, because "it's good", but not once did I get counsel on whether that would have been right for me, or if there was a route I could take later on in life where I could take a path towards short term success that would give me the security to figure out "what do I want to do" after I'd learned enough about who I was.

zozbot2345• 4 years ago

The often brilliant SMBC recently, on liberal education: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/liberal-education

Try doing some liberal arts grad school, it will quickly disabuse you of the naïve wishful thinking that's reflected in this comic. It's way more insanely competitive and credential-driven than even the hardest STEM fields. Undergrad doesn't count, it's easy mode.

duffyjp• 4 years ago

The huge number of people who end up working in roles totally unrelated to their degree should be evidence enough something is wrong.

MaxLeiter3• 4 years ago

not that I completely agree with it, but many proponents of college would say its more about learning how to think not what you learn.

rob_c6• 4 years ago

I remember asking someone what prompted them to leave the field whilst their partner stayed on to do a doctorate. They were adamant that they had spent 4 worth-wile years on a degree. When I asked why it made them better at their current job (unrelated to their academic specialty) they got overly defensive asif I was being unreasonable... (for the record, yes they also probably had better on-paper results than me in uni) The conversation went badly when I then asked why they believed the public should have payed for that...

WalterBright8• 4 years ago

My experience:

1. teaches strategies to solve complex problems

2. teaches one how to learn

3. teaches foundational material I likely would never have learned on my own (like math)

4. teaches how to discern truth from nonsense

5. teaches understanding of things that give one a lifetime of enjoyment

As for making college publicly paid for, the difference is making sure you aren't wasting your own money vs being paid to avoid getting a job for 4 years.

FredPret• 4 years ago

Perhaps quite the opposite in some cases?

A trained engineer/physicist should be able to approach any new problem in a disciplined and systematic way, which opens up a lot of career options. This is probably true for other disciplines as well, but that is outside my wheelhouse.

If you see engineers and physicists in random but still good careers, like software, consulting, finance - that would indicate their education succeeded rather than failed.

whakim4• 4 years ago

The argument that "most kids don't need to go to college" is the same argument that British intellectuals were making at the end of the 19th and early 20th century, except replace "college" with "high school." The main reason that the United States became the dominant superpower of the early-mid 20th century and eclipsed its European peers was that many more kids in the United States had been going to high school for a long time. So "most kids don't need to go to college" seems historically shortsighted.

That being said, I do question whether the not-inconsiderable amount of money we're spending on tertiary education is actually well-spent. For one, it's incredibly unequal - rich public and private universities (which disproportionately cater to the children of the wealthy) soak up far more than their fair share of funding. Universities also spend huge amounts of money on non-academic items - fancy buildings, gyms, sports teams, huge administrative staffs, etc. This spending is partially facilitated by the insanity that is student debt.

I don't think educating fewer people is a good long-term strategy, but I think if we want to educate more people we need to take a long hard look at how tertiary education works in the US.

Edit: for those looking for a citation for attributing the U.S. dominance in the 20th century to education, see Piketty, Capital and Ideology, 517-522. Note that by the dawn of the 20th century German GDP per capita per-job was 60-70% of that of the US; that figure was 80-90% in the UK. I'm not saying two world wars didn't contribute, but the US was already ahead before they began.

la64722• 4 years ago

Question is - is college education in current form really useful? I feel we get more practical education from the internet than from the structured courses in traditional college education.

postingposts3• 4 years ago

Yes, it is.

But not as education. It’s just an expensive stamp of approval one must receive to work with certain institutions. You pay the institutions for the stamp, fill out worksheets for children and write papers for no one for 4 years and then bravo! You did it!

You didn’t do anything! Now it’s time to learn the actual job. But this process is time-tested. The only fault is the parents lying to the kids attending that they’ll learn something. They won’t. But they’ll start understanding how to show up (without their parents waking them up) and do tasks (without their parents making them) which is really what college is these days.

codingdave• 4 years ago

The "current form" is changing. I'm hearing more and more schools who integrate their curriculum with real-world projects, and who encourage travel and international study to expose the students to wider perspectives. I've seen some programs that almost make me envious of current students, and feel like my own education from 30 years ago was fairly lame in comparison.

I think college is getting better and more valuable with time, at least in some programs. I doubt the programs that are not evolving will fare as well in the future. But the costs are the true problem. If the evolution of higher education continues and becomes available to all, we could really have something.

wolverine87611• 4 years ago

Perhaps what you find on the Internet is not nearly the same quality as what you find at college, and much it is misinformation, having a negative impact - you are better off not reading it. You could always try to learn from books you found at the library, and those were much higher quality on average than what you find on the Internet! Personally, it's hard to imagine a worse idea that 'learning' from 'the Internet'.

But if we throw out the values of truth and knowledge, then the Internet is filled with stuff!

practical education

College isn't supposed to be practical, only to transform your understanding of the world and your thinking skills. Go to a vocational school for practical information.

tmp_anon_22• 4 years ago

The main reason that the United States became the dominant superpower of the early-mid 20th century and eclipsed its European peers was that many more kids in the United States had been going to high school

This glosses over two World Wars and a massive haul of natural resources and confiscated land.

ceejayoz• 4 years ago

Yeah, it seems quite a bit easier to become the dominant power when most of your potential competitors have had their cities and industry flattened for half a decade.

postingposts3• 4 years ago

And that the USA stole a TON of Nazi scientists and then brought them to the US, giving them new identities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip

1600 is the official number, in practice it was a lot more and their identities were concealed.

adhesive_wombat2• 4 years ago

massive haul of natural resources and confiscated land

And the pick of scientists and engineers from most of the world (handily snuck some of them in before adding "have you been a member of the government of Nazi Germany?" to immigration forms)

whakim4• 4 years ago

See my citation above; the US was well ahead before WWI. And while the economic damage wrought by the wars was not inconsiderable, it simply exacerbated an existing trend.

rufus_foreman2• 4 years ago

The pieces were in place long before WWI. The United States of America was never not rich.

native_samples• 4 years ago

The main reason that the United States became the dominant superpower of the early-mid 20th century and eclipsed its European peers was that many more kids in the United States had been going to high school for a long time.

Citation definitely needed on that one, as I think most casual observers would assume that being destroyed by the most catastrophic war the world ever saw ... twice ... would have more to do with it than some long forgotten fashion amongst British intellectuals.

oneoff7862• 4 years ago

The MAIN reason the US did better in the early 20th century was high school?

Not, say, two world wars in Europe?

meetups323• 4 years ago

Well maybe if the European kids had gone to school they wouldn't have so much free time to go around starting wars. (\s...)

twobitshifter2• 4 years ago

I went to an elite university on fully paid financial aid.

I don’t think the university made me much wiser than I would had been at a less expensive public school. And I think I could have learned many things on my own based on my abilities at the time.

However, having a degree from an elite university is an effective signal that you made it through the filter of their college admissions process. This is what companies like to see.

Since those admissions were based on SAT and other metrics, the students they select are among the brightest and regardless of the quality of education, they will do well in the world. This reinforces the value of attending an elite university and feeds more competition for the spots. This is similar to a shoe company sponsoring an athlete. The custom shoe might be better than what the athlete had before and maybe they even provide training from world class coaches, but they’re not just sponsoring anyone. You’re not getting that shoe without already proving something.

My earnings have benefitted from the school network and at the price charged the network is probably still a net benefit for me, without accounting for the financial aid.

So overall, it’s a game, but worth playing. There’s likely a better system we could devise to signal intelligence and ability that didn’t rely on diplomas from 4 year schools. However, the network effects of colleges cannot be replaced in the same manner. For that we have to consider whether these effects are disadvantaging others and worth perpetuating.

whimsicalism5• 4 years ago

Would this "less expensive school" have paid you to attend? Otherwise, I don't see how it beats your fully paid elite school experience.

--someone else who went to their cheapest college option: an elite private school in New England.

usrn• 4 years ago

Yeah and they were right. We keep inflating the time children spend in school but don't proportionately scale the content. People are taking Calculus the second year they're in college now. People are graduating high school practically illiterate and innumerate.

This isn't a call to educate fewer people. It's to educate more efficiently which, when done right, will reach more people.

rcoveson• 4 years ago

So "most kids don't need to go to college" seems historically shortsighted.

High school was proven important (if we just take that part of your argument as a given), so therefor college must be? By that reasoning, I don't see what makes the highschool cutoff "shortsighted" and the college cutoff correct. Why not four more years for a postgraduate degree?

apsec112• 4 years ago

The US was the world's largest economy even before WWI:

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/2000-years-economic-history...

Plenty of countries (Germany, France, Japan, etc.) are only slightly poorer than the US per capita, but have much smaller land area/population and therefore smaller GDP. Size matters!

Zigurd3• 4 years ago

This does not play to the anti-college sentiment on this site. But there is good evidence that secondary and university education is a large part of a nation's ability to support a strong economy.

China, for example, is limited by quality education being concentrated in first-tier cities and substandard education being widespread in the countryside: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-05-03/poorly-ed...

That's not how most people think of China.

The questioning of the value of university education also coincides with an ageing cohort of men with university educations they got when men dominated university attendance being replaced by women who now dominate university graduating classes. Hmmm.

whimsicalism5• 4 years ago

That's not how most people think of China.

Really? It's exactly how I think of education in China.

Indeed, this is the case for most of the developing world, the only difference being that their Tier 1 cities are much larger and the education quality better (based on my experience interviewing people, students from top (Tsinghua, other C9) universities in China are basically equivalent with the Ivies + Stanford + MIT)

lordnacho2• 4 years ago

Which way round are cause and effect? The US was economically ahead already as you say, but being rich also means you send more kids to college.

It's not clear that going to college lets you win wars.

randomdata5• 4 years ago

The main reason that the United States became the dominant superpower of the early-mid 20th century and eclipsed its European peers was that many more kids in the United States had been going to high school for a long time.

The data from the time shows little difference between Canada and the USA in high school attendance. Canada might have even had a slight edge. And now Canada is considered most educated nation on earth, according to the OECD, approaching 70% of the population having a tertiary education, compared to just 40% stateside.

If high school was the significant factor, why has Canada never really become all that significant of a power? Several European powers are more powerful than Canada despite their supposed lack of education. It is questionable if Canada would even be strong as it is if it weren't America's neighbour.

I think if we want to educate more people we need to take a long hard look at how tertiary education works in the US.

I guess the first question is: What is Canada getting out of it? Certainly the top promise the tertiary education system likes to trumpet – higher incomes – hasn't materialized. Canadians make far less money than their American counterparts in almost all cases, not to mention that incomes have been stagnant as far back as the data goes.

whakim4• 4 years ago

I don't know much about Canada, but I'd be very interested in looking at census data for primary and secondary education in Canada for the whole of the 19th century. Do you have a source? Remember, the argument goes that the U.S. maintained a large educational gap for over 100 years which allowed it to overcome the productivity leads that the advanced European nations had built up.

I also question whether "making money" is the best way to judge education. Without opening up the philosophical Pandora's Box or determining a correct answer, the US is also far more unequal than Canada, a much worse place to be poor, etc.

whimsicalism5• 4 years ago

Canada never really become all that significant of a power?

Canada has a population barely 10% of the size of the US, there's your answer.

newsclues2• 4 years ago

When we look at education numbers it doesn’t show the quality of the education or if people are educated in relevant schools.

Is Canada churning out more engineers that elsewhere (and are they staying in Canada) or something like gender studies?

trinovantes2• 4 years ago

I think the difference is due to entrepreneurship culture. Human capital is useless if they're not used efficiently. There's a lot more monetary capital flowing into R&D and startups compared to Canada that just invests in real estate (it's literally the largest sector of our GDP).

wolverine87611• 4 years ago

If high school was the significant factor, why has Canada never really become all that significant of a power?

Because Canada had far, far fewer high school graduates. It just has a smaller population, currently ~1/9th of the United States. There are enormous economies of scale due to populations. As very simple examples, look at the size of the impact - the market for what a business produces, the people affected by what an activist achieves - or compare the money and military that the populations of the US and Canada can afford to invest in international influence. Consider the difference today, from Russia's or Iran's perspectives, between being cut off from the Canadian market and being cut off from the US market.

selimthegrim• 4 years ago

Surely their points system as opposed to family reunion encourages highly educated immigrants

MagnumOpus• 4 years ago

If high school was the significant factor, why has Canada never really become all that significant of a power? Several European powers are more powerful than Canada despite their supposed lack of education

The same reason as why Norway or Switzerland are not great powers despite being rich - population. At the end of WW2 Canada had 12.5mn people, an order of magnitude less than Germany or Japan, let alone the US or the USSR.

Since then Canada's population has tripled, while the German/French/Polish/Italian population has been flat-ish, so now Canada is considered in the same ballpark -- but it is still one tenth of the size of the US, with 1/10th of the potential for military/espionage funding, 1/10 of the market to bootstrap global market leading companies etc.

heavyset_go5• 4 years ago

Employers want an underclass that they can exploit, and degree holders expect more than subsistence wages and dead-end jobs, creating a problem for companies that want cheap labor.

candiodari• 4 years ago

Maybe, but there is HOW it is being spent. The first 2 years of my university education could have easily, and frankly much better, taken place on something like Khan Academy. And high school would have made an even larger difference. I'm pretty sure at least half the time spent at high school worked against me rather than for me.

I'm not advocating for switching schools 100% to such platforms, I see the problems, but I do believe that perhaps half on those platforms would be an easy and large win over traditional education.

ARandomerDude• 4 years ago

The main reason that the United States became the dominant superpower...

Favorable demographics, abundant natural resources, a relatively safe geographic position between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, culture, and two World Wars were surely greater factors than how many people went to high school.

zozbot2345• 4 years ago

I don't think educating fewer people is a good long-term strategy, but I think if we want to educate more people we need to take a long hard look at how tertiary education works in the US.

As part of doing that, we should take a long hard look at primary and secondary education too. U.S. public school K-12 is a disaster, and modern educational trends are only making the picture worse and more unequal rather than less.

throwawaycities• 4 years ago

The main reason that the United States became the dominant superpower of the early-mid 20th century and eclipsed its European peers was that many more kids in the United States had been going to high school for a long time.

It definitely depends on how you are determining the dominate superpower, GDP is certainly important but it’s not determinative.

If there were a single factor determining a single dominate superpower I think throughout history it is more closely related to the World’s Reserve Currency, and the US Dollar didn’t succeed the British Pound as the Reserve Currency. Though not official until Bretton Woods Agreement in 1944 with 44 nations, it is generally understood this was a concession made in a backroom deal to get the US to enter the War in 1941 while Hitler was actively bombing London.

There are a lot of people that believe, I’ll call them speculators but maybe fair to call them conspiracy theorists, that the economic impact of Covid is leading to a change in the Reserve Currency because the IMF called for "A New Bretton Woods Moment". I’m not sure that will happen, but if it does, I’m certain what that would mean is a passing of the torch of the dominate superpower.

pgcj_poster• 4 years ago

I'm not convinced that most kids need High School either.

For smart kids, High School is basically just a grade-grubbing competition to determine who gets to go to the best college. This mostly gets in the way of actual learning. I think bright students would learn much more if, after 9th grade, they went directly to university, with admission determined by lottery.

For all other students, High School is basically just prison. They already know how to read, write, and do arithmetic. They know that the earth goes around the sun and that America invented freedom and fought in half a dozen wars. They know everything that they're ever going to remember learning in school or that they'll use afterward. But, for some reason, they're forced to spend years doing stoichiometry and reading old books that they're never going to appreciate. A liberal arts education is valuable, even if it's not directly applicable to daily life, because it can elevate the spirit. But can you elevate the spirit by force? I think not.

blippage• 4 years ago

They know that the earth goes around the sun

I'm in my 50's, my parents are in their 80's. Neither of my parents received any O levels (studied by 14-15 year-olds). I just don't think it was considered important. My dad did an apprenticeship after leaving school, though.

When my turn came, it was standard to do O levels. I had a chance to look at a chemistry book and an electronics book, aimed at O level students. And, like you say, pupils who have had a secondary education know that the earth goes around the sun, matter is made from atoms, and will even have learned some calculus.

That's actually a pretty good deal. The secondary education does, or at least /should/, give people a good general level of education. This leaves us with the question of what we think the purpose of tertiary education is. At least some of that answer seems to boil down to nothing more than "well, that's how we do things around here."

My own answer is that I see tertiary education as providing two routes: an academic route, and a vocational route. The academic route has more kudos, but there is a great deal of practical benefit from the vocational route. I, myself, were always more academically inclined. The world only needs so many academics, or people with extensive training like physicians, architects or researchers.

I would prefer to see more on-the-job training, like you see with electricians, and even lawyers and accountants.

The real problem, as I see it, is too many people, not enough jobs. I have no solution to that problem, nor do I think that governments can concoct solutions that will necessarily make things better rather than worse. All I'm saying is that if the balance of supply and demand were to shift, employers would be less fussy about the academic qualifications of the job candidates, and the job candidates wouldn't be in an arms race to pile on more and more certificates.

arkaic• 4 years ago

It feels insane to me that this is still even being asked today. It was no less salient a question over a decade ago, when I was reevaluating the worth I got from my newly received degree.

nimbius• 4 years ago

Disclosure: i graduated from a trade school, and promptly got a handful of certifications for heavy diesel mechanical maintenance.

The trades have always been there, but i suspect the reason boomers steered their kids to college was twofold. One, they watched tradecraft in the fifties slowly kill their parents before OSHA was really a thing, and second, boomers lost touch with just how predatory colleges became as they went from general educational institutions to undergrad paper-mills grinding graduate students into dust and milking student athelete slave labor for fame and cash.

If youre thinking of the trades, we need you. We need electricians, HVAC, and mechanics. We need welders, nurses, ironworkers, and plumbers. we need linemen, boilermakers, and radiologists. most importantly WE NEED YOU. check around your local city for community colleges and trade techs, and try to stick with the public ones where youll spend a couple of years alongside old-timers and professionals. Read up on the unions in your region and join up where youll be PAID to work alongside skilled journeymen instead of service a lifetime of debt for the privilege of learning basket weaving.

Tradecraft isnt golden gate bridge levels of dangerous anymore. for example my shops had an 11 year run with no lost time accidents. Theres hard, rewarding work waiting for you that respects your intelligence and gives ample changes for advancement, and it pays a living wage.

_-david-_• 4 years ago

One, they watched tradecraft in the fifties slowly kill their parents before OSHA was really a thing

I think this may be part of it, but there were also a lot of manufacturing jobs that left the US around this time as well. Many towns become shells of their former selves resulting in a lot of people never find a better job. A prevailing idea was that a college degree would help insulate against such things.

nemo44x2• 4 years ago

If you're a reasonable smart person you'll do really well in the trades. It's easy enough to learn quite a few trades while taking some basic business courses at night and you'll already be well ahead of the game.

A friend of mine runs an industrial insulation business (install, removal, maintenance, etc) and uses union staffing for the contracts he wins. He works about 2 hours a day taking the calls he needs and arranging inspections for bidding on jobs. Makes as much as a software engineer at a FAANG.

Another friend is a general contractor who has connections to custom cabinet shops and he sells home renovations and is getting 30% margin on high end jobs. Did all the jobs for about 10 years so bidding is easy for him and he doesn't lift a thing except the gas cap when he's filling his 100k truck.

bradlys5• 4 years ago

While this is often a thing - it’s definitely one of the most directly leech-like things you could do. It’s quintessential capitalism at its finest (worst). Say what you want about FAANG eng - they’re often doing something.

invalidOrTaken3• 4 years ago

One, they watched tradecraft in the fifties slowly kill their parents before OSHA was really a thing

This is a really good point---to some extent we can see college as individiuals reacting to working environments---"inefficiently" in that it doesn't solve the problem, but it solves it for them---meanwhile eventually society handles it as a whole.

I think there can also be a "prestige" thing going on---jobs that aren't prestigious can become less well-paid (relatively), because those with prestige can at some point say, "Why are we paying these undesireables all this money, can't we bring in some immigrants/subsidize substitutes/outsource?" Which means that it's quite possible that certain trades could become much more valuable, very quickly---as we've seen in nursing, for instance.

legalcorrection4• 4 years ago

If you want to hire the smartest kids in the country, you recruit at the highest ranked colleges you can successfully convince people to join your company from. If you think that you can cut out the middle-man and just hire based on SAT scores, then you'll find yourself on the wrong side of a disparate impact racial discrimination lawsuit. That's the result in Griggs v. Duke Power Co., 401 U.S. 424 (1971). Internet commenters will often argue that you can still legally use IQ tests ("that was just one case!"), but those commenters don't know what they're talking about. No employment attorney worth their salt would advise you to use any kind of intelligence test for hiring if you could feasibly do it any other way. Why is using college as a proxy any different? Well, in part because they use affirmative action to make their student body more diverse. If the Ivy League schools didn't artificially inflate their numbers of black and hispanic students, civil rights activists would very likely sue companies for exclusively recruiting at them. One of the many ways that affirmative action is de facto legally mandated in the US.

So basically, there is no better way to hire a bunch of smart young people than to hire people who went to the top colleges and therefore probably have top SAT scores. To the extent some of them don't have top SAT scores, that's fine because the overall effect is to help your diversity numbers in one of the least organizationally demanding ways possible. And the admissions committees, disciplinary committees, and four years of commitment have done the job of filtering out people who aren't adequately socialized for elite circles.

Therefore, you will not get rid of college until you either get rid of the disparate impact doctrine, or alternatively, come up with a cheaper proxy for talent than college that also has built-in affirmative action.

mountainriver2• 4 years ago

Do SAT scores correspond with work performance?

legalcorrection4• 4 years ago

Yes, IQ correlates really strongly with work performance and generally all positive life outcomes.

rob_c6• 4 years ago

dangerous to call out a billion-dollar lifestyle...

A $100k+ certificate from an academic institution is still as a justification for giving rich people positions of power and influence and there is a massive pyramid of those who believe that having the piece of paper will elevate them to that status.

Having several such pieces of paper with my name on it I'll tell you they're only useful if you follow the field professionally. And even then, people tend to be more interested in the interview discussion of what work you did rather than the actual piece of paper. Other than that they're sed for justifications to grease the wheels and actually present a useful excuse as for making a barrier to entry. I have several wealthy friends who didn't do this route and correctly applied themselves and they're genuinely some of the smartest people I know.

_bfhp• 4 years ago

Funny, I was just talking with someone about The Cult of Smart by Freddie deBoer on another comments thread here. Every American should read it. I read Scott Alexander's critical review and I'd recommend it as a nice response overall but I have a lot of problems with it.

duxup• 4 years ago

I get the focused education based arguments here.

arbitrary, purposeless and even absurd

But as someone who didn’t finish college, I got the distinct feeling EMPLOYERS do not consider it arbitrary or pointless….

It wasn’t until I was much older did I feel people overlooked my lack of formal education. Even then I’m not sure how often they really do.

Who wants to tell people that they should be the trail blazers here and this be at a disadvantage?

Meanwhile I don’t disagree with the premise, but I also see nothing to indicate that outcomes are better with whatever the idea is here.

alanfranz• 4 years ago

Maybe rethink the price and the length? I think associate degrees or 3-year EU style degrees (which usually come way cheaper than US bachelors’) are still a good idea.

Sure, pimping high school curricula, at least for certain schools, could work as well. I don’t have any US high school experience, but in Italy you’re treated as a (silly) kid with a lot of handholding throughout all HS. It’s only with college that you start being treated as a sentient human capable of decisions who makes choices.

(And, in Italy, you can graduate from some HS with zero effort, so value is diluted)

dv_dt• 4 years ago

My maybe cynical take is that unless employers change hiring behavior to not require (or for that matter prefer) a degree, then it's not something that will get fixed from the educational offering portion of the pipeline.

MaxLeiter3• 4 years ago

I think many will agree the largest problem with colleges today is the price. I’d like to point out the immense growth in US college administration personnel size over the last few decades versus the growth of the student body and/or tuition:

“The number of non-academic administrative and professional employees at U.S. colleges and universities has more than doubled in the last 25 year”

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/higher-ed-administrators-grow...

ModernMech6• 4 years ago

I think an understated point in your linked article is the following:

  “I think there’s legitimate criticism” of the growth in hiring of administrators and other nonacademic employees, said King. “At the same time, you can’t lay all of the responsibility for that on the universities.”

  There are “thousands” of regulations governing the distribution of financial aid alone, he said. “And probably every college or university that’s accredited, they’ve got at least one person with a major portion of their time dedicated to that, and in some cases whole office staffs. These aren’t bad things to do, but somebody’s got to do them.”

A lot of people want to treat universities like corporations and apply a corporate model to academia, but that's not quite right; universities are more like cities, the concerns are very broad. Sometimes universities are cities (e.g. State College PA, which doesn't really exist separate and apart from PSU). Cities need bureaucracy. These discussions usually talk about "nonacademic employees" as if they are not contributing to the academic process, but that couldn't be further from the truth.

For instance, the office of student affairs will handle student emotional issues so that I don't have to. I'm not trained in that, I'm an academic, so I prefer that they handle these things. If they didn't exist, I'd have to handle every single medical issue my students have, and I have hundreds of students. Better to standardize the process for everyone, which saves times but creates a bureaucracy that takes personnel and costs money. I think the programmers can appreciate the rationale, we do it all the time in designing code.

Or take the office of research, which has a whole department to help me with my grant writing. It costs a lot to run that office but it saves us all a lot of time and makes our grants more successful, which benefits everyone including students. Get rid of that office and maybe you'd have more budget for academics employees, but they would each be stretch thinner than they would with the office of research.

Taken as a whole I appreciate the support that our non-academic administrative and professional employees provide us. Sure it can be a pain sometimes but my job is easier on balance.

MaxLeiter3• 4 years ago

I appreciate your insight. In general I agree, I’m just skeptical at the massive growth (which I felt the article downplayed). Especially when combined with what you said about universities acting like corporations: I believe corps also have a trend of managers hiring people to expand their team and increase their perceived importance.

heavyset_go5• 4 years ago

Regulations didn't cause universities to replace educators with underpaid adjuncts, though. The issue is that resources are flowing to ever increasing full-time administrative staff, while teaching staff are cut and reduced to adjuncts making $28k a year.

skrbjc2• 4 years ago

As an example, here is an org chart at UC Berkeley for their "Division of Equity and Inclusion". There are 14 positions here that are just at the director level. There are many more people that work under these people. Dania, the vice chancellor, gets paid $277,027 a year.

Universities are chock full of administrators like these that they never had prior and all of these departments will continually strive to grow their budgets and employee counts in an effort to expand and prove their importance and value.

fallingknife• 4 years ago

Why should universities be like cities? They aren't in other countries. All of the non academic services that a university provides are also provided by the private sector, and they would love to have you as a customer.

University students are adults, and their emotional issues are not the responsibility of the university any more than they are the responsibility of your employer. Medical insurance can be bought through the ACA exchanges, and the students can go to any medical provider in the area (yes this system sucks, but it's not the university's job to fix). The grant writing department is the only one of your examples that actually seems like the business of the university.

edit: they probably don't even need to buy insurance because at that age you are probably covered on your parents plan

paulpauper4• 4 years ago

I don't think price is the problem even though there is tons of debt. The problem rather is the high dropout rate. Students nowadays have so much financial aid. Unless you come from a rich family, scholarships and aid are abundant. Students very seldom pay the quoted sticker price.

But I agree that there is probably also a lot of waste too.

banannaise• 4 years ago

This is part of the aggressive financialization of everything. The most direct example is that there are whole departments for handling loans, and the cost of those departments are figured into the price of education!

SantalBlush• 4 years ago

It's cost shifting, folks. Employers have successfully duped the public into thinking that they are responsible for paying their own training costs before even having a job lined up. That's why the discussion is centered around how colleges can best prepare their graduates for the job market. It's all a red herring; typical four-year colleges were never meant to be a job pipeline, their purpose is to refine and transmit human knowledge, whether or not that knowledge has any direct demand in the job market.

What we have now is a few generations of people who bought $40,000 lottery tickets to the middle class, while hiring managers get their pick of applicants with a wide variety of degrees.

Employers are the freeloaders here, it's time we hold them responsible.

colinmhayes5• 4 years ago

I don't think duped is the right term here. Employers have transparently decided that the potential employees are responsible for their own training. It's not a trick. They just hold all the cards and therefore dictate terms.

dorchadas3• 4 years ago

Exactly. This is the main problem with it. But how do we fight back against the employers when they hold all the cards?

WalterBright8• 4 years ago

Start a workers' collective (they're perfectly legal in the US) and run it as you see fit.

ModernMech6• 4 years ago

As much complaining there is about college, it's hard to deny that it's very very popular. People really love their schools, so they are providing a service. Maybe what we need to rethink here is just the purpose of college. Seems like a lot of people treat it as a job training program, and would be happy to get rid of every department that isn't in the STEM acronym. The justification usually being that such degrees are unemployable and therefore worthless.

But college is so much more than a job training program, it's a cultural institution at this point. College shapes young people in a way that aligns them culturally. People who go to college have the same sort of formative experiences, and after graduation these are used to relate to others who went through a similar time. It allows young people a time to explore their identities in a safe and understanding environment, to form social bonds, to test their preferences and try different classes, clubs, friends, romantic partners, etc. People call academia a bubble, and I think that it's necessarily so. Maybe think of it more like an incubator.

College is also a melting pot that increases social cohesion. What other institution mixes citizens from all around the country and the world? College forces people from different religions, countries, states, cultures, and ethnic backgrounds to work together on constructive, creative, productive, and important tasks. There are so many voices out there telling us to hate one another and to work against our common man, we can't afford to lose institutions and environments that teach cooperation, unity, and understanding.

It's important that people experience different perspectives, and for all the talk about how academia is a monoculture of ideas, I really must push back on that because there's no other place I can think of with such a diversity of people from all imaginable walks of life. Having exposure to this is crucial to being a citizen of the world.

If we don't want college to be the default, I think we're going to have to seriously consider how to actually replicate the cultural aspect of college in other contexts. Your local trade school might not see enrollment from outside of your county or state. If we decrease enrollments in college and redirect those students just to jobs programs without any other adjustments, I worry we will be destroying something important.

Damogran63• 4 years ago

I'm A-B testing this now. Boy I hope I'm not messing up one son's future as a result. (I'm cautiously optimistic)

invalidOrTaken3• 4 years ago

What is the non-college son doing/working on?

Damogran63• 4 years ago

Tech School for Chassis Fabrication and Collision Repair/Paint

He's highly motivated, I'm pretty sure he'd be successful with whatever he puts his mind to it.

postingposts3• 4 years ago

It became the default because going to college was the way to show you were a “high status” person. The people with “high status” will constantly “rethink” anything that challenges it.

Personally this article comes off as classist and that disgusts me.

austinl• 4 years ago

In the United States, I think the larger problem is that expensive college became the default. It also became common for universities to increase the course requirements for graduation, making it more difficult to graduate in 4 years.

At my alma mater, the average time to degree was 4.25 years during my cohort [1]. Fortunately, this graph seems to be moving downward, and is currently at 3.95. However, my guess is that it's still particularly rough for engineering students. During my time, if you transferred into engineering, you were guaranteed to take 5 years. Naturally, the university doesn't have a strong incentive to correct this (more semesters = more $$$). At least until admissions start declining as more people learn about it.

[1] https://www.purdue.edu/datadigest/?dashboard=Degrees_TTD_1

mjfl• 4 years ago

college is a great place to have sex. At this point, that's what the institution is for. You pay a place to be a relatively safe space, where your child will meet other young adults that are in their intellectual strata, have sex with them, and hopefully turn that into a marriage. I don't have kids so I don't know if parents consciously think this way, but it seems clear to me college doesn't have anything to do with any kind of education or skills training.

mountainriver2• 4 years ago

Don’t forget the drugs!

xwdv• 4 years ago

Whether one goes to college or not, I still think after high school young adults should embark on some kind of 4 year journey of discovery and exploration, to really set a foundation for whatever they want to do with the life ahead of them. Without this, you’re just creating a school to workforce pipeline that gives little time for reflection.

tlynchpin• 4 years ago

I am a fan of John McWhorter. I've recently gotten into his podcast Lexicon Valley and I recommend it highly if you are interested in language and how we use it.

https://lexiconvalley.substack.com/

gr1zzlybe4r• 4 years ago

I graduated from a reasonably well ranked liberal arts university and have worked in tech for the past 4 years.

After buying my first property and realizing how much I didn't know about fixing anything in the place, I started to think more heavily about how we've basically designed an education system and society that will forget how to maintain and build itself.

We need to almost a) create a cultural stigma against office workers (yes, seriously) or b) subsidize viable alternatives to college, such as trades, much more than we're currently doing.

bombcar• 4 years ago

Or we need to stop stigmatizing the trades and not going to college, but the politics of "those" people isn't in line with what is considered "proper" and so that's a much harder row to hoe.

stinkytaco2• 4 years ago

We also need more support for people who work trades. Often those are jobs you cannot work until you are 65 or that involve non trivial amounts of physical risk. It's not just the current stigma, it's the long term social impacts. I'll have a comfortable retirement and can work until I'm 70, a welder likely doesn't have a 401k and can work until they are 50.

dlp2112• 4 years ago

Who the hell stigmatizes the trades? I swear in every comment section there is an echo chamber of folks saying this, but never anyone actually saying it. Maybe there are, but I've never seen it.

What I have seen in the last decade in comments sections is folks claiming (despite most of them not actually working in said trades) that the trades are a great living and an easy way to making significant income despite the data saying otherwise.

Zigurd3• 4 years ago

That's what YouTube is for. I'll be fixing a shower diverter later today.

wollsmoth• 4 years ago

yeah, most things are pretty fixable if you're willing to spend some time and buy some tools. You just have to keep an eye out for situations where you need a real pro. Especially if it's some kind of electrical thing.

imtringued3• 4 years ago

And tomorrow you are going to farm your own food.

Why the hell is the division of labor failing us this much?

astrea2• 4 years ago

I assume you went somewhere prestigious and it really just validates my pet theory that you and your peers are really one-trick ponies. Don't blame society or college that you can't fix a clogged drain, blame yourself or your parents.

exogenousdata• 4 years ago

Or you could you allow the market to price those professions. If enough 60/70 year-old plumbers retire and there's no one to pick up the slack, those costs will rise and people will take those professions. Or someone will innovate in the space and make those professions different and more efficient.

The alternative is a top-down approach that requires policy-makers to pick winner & loser professions. Imagine being given the task of investing tax-payers money into incentive programs for trades/professions? How do you know which ones will be viable in 10 years time and which ones will be obsolete?

I'm not recommending a fully market-ist approach. But market forces can help appropriately price scare resources (professional services, in this case).

heavyset_go5• 4 years ago

As it stands, I know plenty of people who have degrees only to work in offices for $16 an hour, and to be offered terrible health insurance. Without those degrees, no matter how inapplicable to jobs they actually are, they'd be working in food service, probably under the table, without even shitty health insurance.

If you're middle class or lower, your kids will be relegated to even shittier jobs without degrees than the shitty jobs they can get with degrees.

Degrees in the US act as a class filter for employers, who are irrationally averse to hiring what they consider to be the riff raff, and degree-holders at the HR and hiring level use them to gatekeep, as well. Degrees are not about aptitude, proficiency, intelligence or tackling adversity, they're about keeping "those people" out, and signaling that you aren't one of them.

If your kids can't afford healthcare even with your help, a degree is still a good idea for them, even if the entirety of their estate gets clawed back by creditors to pay back student loans when they die. Being able to see a doctor and incurring debt is better than being denied preventative care for lack of insurance or inability to pay.

Trades often don't pay well, either, as an employee. I've heard for years about how welders can make six figures. Around here, employers expect to hire welders at $17 an hour, and whine that McDonald's pay rates impact their ability to hire, because fast food now pays better than they do.

paulpauper4• 4 years ago

I think they are about intelligence, to some extent. All else being equal, I can assume a college grad even in a non-STEM field will be smarter than a high school grad.

heavyset_go5• 4 years ago

I don't like putting people into buckets based on perceived intelligence, but most of the people I grew up with who I'd say weren't the most intelligent, went on to get degrees. I'm sure we've all worked with, and went to school with, people who were not exactly intelligent, either, but still had degrees.

caconym_• 4 years ago

College "for the masses" today seems to be less about getting an enriching (in any sense but financially) education and more about purchasing a competitive edge in the job market. It's half grift, half class filter. However, as you say, I can't really argue that the ticket isn't worth the price.

The solution seems to require reducing demand for livable jobs and increasing the liquidity of the labor pool, i.e. giving workers more freedom to develop themselves and allocate their labor efficiently. Universal healthcare is an absolute must for this, and today's increased productivity also ought to pay for some version of UBI. The corporate capture of America's government is not only increasing wealth inequality---it's also gutting America's economic future, and causing all these other symptoms that people tend to analyze in a vacuum.

It's probably too late.

wolverine87611• 4 years ago

I know plenty of people who have degrees only to work in offices for $16 an hour

That is your anecdotal experience - one person in one place and time -but the data shows, very strongly, that people with college educations earn far more over their careers.

heavyset_go5• 4 years ago

I'd genuinely like to see the data on that for younger millennials and gen Z. From what I've seen, employers will keep their older staff at higher compensation rates, but will not match them for new employees, reducing their labor expenses across the board with new generations of workers.

ahallock• 4 years ago

College is one those transitional experiences, a short retreat after high school, before you are thrown into the "real world". You can let loose, party, be free--and learn some interesting things along the way. It's a luxury experience and you pay a lot for it. But it's hard for me to deny that experience or say with a straight face that you're not missing anything.

wolverine87611• 4 years ago

What are you missing that won't get (and in a better way) after you graduate?

imtringued3• 4 years ago

Since when is tertiary education a vacation? In Germany universities don't hesitate to throw their students out with harsh exams. If you let loose and be free you are going to be sorted out. Of course, there is a difference. You aren't a paying customer in Germany so there is no incentive to baby sit you.

rdevsrex• 4 years ago

Well, one thing is for sure, and that there are very few countries where more than half of the people have a bachelor degree.

So clearly there is a limit, either in space, money, interest, or ability. Perhaps the more important question is what does the economy going to need over the next 30-40 years, and what is the best way to prepare young people for it?

mmaunder• 4 years ago

Related: What is the ratio of hours you’ve used calculus vs hours studying it?

zabzonk• 4 years ago

Simply lie about it. No one has ever checked up on my educational history - note not qualification (which a degree is not), though I do have some that qualify me as a state registered health technician.

photochemsyn• 4 years ago

"We should also understand that just as some kids at 16 are ready for a college education, just as many kids at that age are ready to take their places in the working world. Most of us today would have a hard time articulately justifying why people must spend four years taking about 40 courses in this and that before becoming executives, administrators or fund-raisers."

I was someone who went right into the manufacturing workforce at the age of 17 instead of going to college, in California. I worked for a injection plastic mold shop for a year, then worked for a computer cable manufacturer for a year, and then in a Silicon Valley laser welding/cutting shop (by far the best paid and most interesting job). I certainly needed no college education for that work, but let's be honest, that kind of work gets boring fast and I couldn't imagine spending decades at it (like some of my co-workers had). However, I was pretty well-off at the time relative to other people my age and was entirely independent of my family. So, yes, it could be an option... although many of those manufacturing jobs have since been sent overseas.

What I did notice at those jobs, particularly the last one, was that the people up in the R&D labs had far more interesting jobs. So I thought, how do I get that kind of job? It turns out, you do absolutely need a four-year college education, heavy on the math and science, and some graduate school work as well, MS or PhD. I saved a ton of money by finishing up general ed requirements at a community college then transferred to a research-centered four-year school to get a BS, then spent about four years in various graduate programs (which soured me entirely on academic research and the associated departmental politics, incidentally). What I did get was a lot of experience in cutting edge research technology - but not because of the coursework, really, but because I spent about half the time working in various labs (and my assembly line experience was actually very valuable there).

What I also realized at the time was that a huge number of my fellow students had no idea why they were in college, and no idea what they wanted. For many it was a four-year social networking party, which seems to be the norm at a lot of elite liberal arts colleges - and to answer the question posed by the author, that was their route into 'executive, administrator and fund-raiser' jobs. Like some posh British Empire school of a century before, they were there simply to get connected with the wealthy and influential, while doing as little work as possible.

Point being if we don't want the USA to turn into some kind of technological backwater while China runs ahead in every sector, yes, we better encourage more students to dive into science and math. If we want to be competitive with Germany, Japan and others, that's going to require supporting four years plus of intense work post high school for a lot of students.

jjtheblunt• 4 years ago

I think the title might be similarly impactful if it were to read

   "College debt became the default - Let's rethink that".

kingrazor• 4 years ago

I never graduated college. The only good that came of me going to college was that I met someone who introduced me to a paid internship program that I'd have otherwise never known about, and would never have been able to qualify for had I not been in college. It only lasted 18 months, but it paid my bills during that time and taught me some useful skills that lead to me getting a full time job at another company. I've thought about going back and finishing, but it just doesn't seem worth the money I'd have to spend to do so, especially since I'm already working in the field I want to work in.

fullstackchris2• 4 years ago

I think the true tragedy is simply trying to identify the passion and or interests of high school aged kids. It's always been true that kids of that age spend way more time trying to fit in or find their social group than anything else. And at the same time, you _can't_ know what you want to do for the rest of your life at that age. Hell, I'm one of the many who only found what they REALLY liked to do the second year of my master's program. (hint: wasn't what my degree was in)

The real joke is that college is some 4 year, very specific journey for a very specific degree, which many have said already, is often largely wasted on 'unecessary' or 'useless' knowledge. I'd love to see much more industry or real hands-on work come to universities, no matter what area of study it is. Liking to study or research in an area is almost always extremely different than actually working in that area.

The problem is instutitions (i.e. colleges and universities) are always slow to change; its the nature of institutions themselves. Not sure if any radical change is actually possible, but rather at best case a slow molding or attempting experiments over time - a similar conclusion to what McWhorter arrives at.

wolverine87611• 4 years ago

college is some 4 year, very specific journey for a very specific degree

It's not that at all IME. That's graduate school. What degree are you talking about? Colleges generally provide diverse, well-rounded educations.

spamizbad• 4 years ago

While there are cultural forces at work pushing kids to college, you'll never free yourself from them until companies loosen educational requirements in job listings. And you cannot accomplish this with New York Times think-pieces.

Remember how thought leaders in the technology industry pontificated about how the resume would be obsolete once GitHub repositories and LinkedIn profiles became widespread - which they have - and yet to date the vast majority of technology hiring is done with a resume?

You're going to need a change in corporate cultural. And I should stress: corporate culture is a global affair; you cannot simply change the thinking of the typical American and assume that will immediately be reflected by a multinational corporation. Companies deeply value education, and will continue to do so, even if elite wordsmiths decide it's not that important.

I do not hold a college degree and my family carries no college debt, and when reviewing resumes I put very little weight on education, but I recognize I'm an anomaly in this industry.

donatj• 4 years ago

What luck, I was just commenting on Reddit this morning on a post criticizing for-profit schools about how I went to trade school and don't regret it.

A little copy-paste here…

I went to essentially a for profit trade-school 15 years ago. On the one hand, it was more expensive than I was lead to believe by the salesman (this was a whole ordeal), and let me tell you it was EXPENSIVE. On the other hand, I genuinely believe I received a very high quality education. All of my teachers had actually worked in the industry for years and knew their fields inside and out. Additionally the class sizes were tiny. Lots of one-on-one time with the teachers.

I actually got a pretty high paying job within 6 months of graduating I held for 5 years before moving to an even better company. The school was massively helpful with placement presumably to improve their numbers.

My only real regret is that I can’t really continue my education without starting over. They went out of businesses and my degree isn’t really recognized by state schools.

wolverine87611• 4 years ago

'You don't really want to go to college.' Ugh, what a depressed, non-optimistic outlook on life and society. IME far more people want to go to college and can't than people who are somehow compelled to go and don't want to. Why don't we let people decide for themselves what they want to do, let them dream their greatest dreams and highest ambitions, and give them the opportunity to succeed or fail, through hard work and imagination. That is the American Dream!

The solution, for a productive, optimistic society, is not to tell them not to. My strong belief is that the reactionary elite dominate public perception, and perception is reality. Very broadly speaking, they want to concentrate power in their hands, and reducing investment in human capital saves them immediate money (costing them the long-term benefits of an educated, empowered, free population) and creating an uneducated underclass. Notice that we are, effectively, talking about college for people who can't now afford it - the best predictor of college education is family wealth, and the rich kids will still go to college, regardless - these op-eds argue for eliminating college for everyone else.

One way they do it - one way they control perception, which becomes reality - is by framing the question. They talk about college as if it's job training, that is, it's preparation for people to assume their role serving the elites who own the corporations. 'We don't need so many of our employees to go to college', and right there your humanity, your value as a human being, is reduced to what you can do to them, and your possibilities, your horizon, your potential is reduced to serving them. (It's also economically short-sighted, somehow defining the current economy, it's current demand, as some end state. It's exceptionally conservative. The economy will transform or become moribund, and the next generation will transform it.)

People go to college because they want to learn, to grow, to open up vistas in their inner and outer worlds, to learn the best of what humanity has created and learn to create their own, to change the world, because they believe in themselves and their dreams. GREAT. Let's give them the opportunity to go there!

jackcosgrove• 4 years ago

Expecting young people to spend more and more time in education is also a statistical trick. You're not unemployed if you're in school. The incentive was there during the 20th century when population growth rates had not yet caught up to the deindustrialization trend.

I think population growth slowdown will reverse this credentialism, because we will need more labor and won't be able to tie it up in schooling for years.

imtringued3• 4 years ago

It's actually a trick to let people pay for their own education instead of letting employers pay for education.

paulpauper4• 4 years ago

Yet again, another person who parlayed his prestigious college education into a good-paying, high status career who now is trying to tell us, no, college is not the way.

Ok man, nice pulling up the ladder.

Even adjusted for student loan debt and inflation the gap between college grads and non-grads is the widest it's ever been. Crisis such as the Great Recession and Covid has seen the gap widen, even as anti-college movement has gained popularity online. That's the funny thing about this, you got these people with degrees who who are saying to not go to college even as the wage premium is the widest it's ever been and keep widening with no end in sight. High inflation only makes college more attractive. Inflation hurts poor people whose wages suck.

Same for Peter Thiel...he is wrong to encourage ppl to drop out of college. You ware more likely to get rich with college, even with a liberal arts major major at a mid-ranked school, than you are to drop out (unless you got rich parents, I guess).

stinkytaco2• 4 years ago

I'm a college educated, well off person and most of my social circle is as well and they are very much on this train. My question is always, "What do you want your child to do?" It's very easy to send other people's kids to trade trade schools.

I come from a family that immigrated and worked in trades (cooking, baking, manufacturing, etc.) and I'd like to think I have a great deal of respect for those professions. But the pay is often poor and the work is hard and risky. A radical rethink of how we treat skilled labor and the long term well-being of the people who do it is required before I actively encourage anyone who's not already expressing interest to go into a trade.

riazrizvi• 4 years ago

Cultural institutions don't get designed around the narrow goals that they were initiated for, they morph into the goals of all the people who set them up and sustain them. Yes it would be good for students if we refactored education around their needs, but if that movement took off, it would itself morph again into the needs of this new round's set of participants, which would include employers, the working public, the retired public, the experts that teach etc. I don't see an insightful analysis by the author describing the incentivized participants of the education system, so I'll just slot this into the opinion pieces by wannabe experts looking for a job.

astrea2• 4 years ago

I really think the biggest issue is the massively inflated price tag. Regardless of where you land on the political spectrum, I believe we can all agree that a functioning society needs people who can build bridges as well as people who can design them. To design them you can't shortcut your way through calculus or physics, so you need to spend some time learning these topics so you can properly learn and apply things like stress analysis. Also not everyone can be a construction worker due to physical ability or just passion. We should all be free to pursue our happiness and contribute to society without unjust burden. Why should we have one less doctor simply because they were born to a family that couldn't afford schooling?

runako• 4 years ago

I know Simon's Rock fairly well via some of its graduates, and have been really impressed by the program. All of the Rockers I know went on to a traditional college, except for the handful who entered with trust funds.

But any discussion of workforce preparation that ignores hiring disparities is irresponsible. McWhorter is no doubt familiar with the studies indicating that the US job market places roughly the same value on white college drop-outs as on Black college graduates[1]; I'm not sure why he chose not to mention it.

The data quite obviously leads toward the notion that a Black high-school graduate will have even fewer employment prospects than a white high-school drop-out. Perhaps their prospects will be similar to those of a white drop-out felon or the like? Compounding that against lifetime earnings, it's really hard for me to make a case for any able Black student to skip a college degree.

(Yes, I know individuals can overcome etc. But since one only gets one shot, it's a huge gamble to bet that one's outcomes will be statistically better than all of one's peers, especially if one has not taken the socially-prescribed steps to signal that one is serious.)

1 - https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2014/06/27/white-hig...

ozim• 4 years ago

I dislike the idea that Collage/University is for preparing people to be in work force: "The question is why we can’t just prepare students for the work force.".

In collage/university you learn how to learn, field does not matter.

For future of society we need people who are not educated to do "the job" - we need more and more people who can think for themselves and shift between jobs.

It is sad observation that many people go there to get "the paper" it is also sad observation that I see people complaining "it is not part of my job description".

I like the Isaac Asimov novella "Profession".

veilrap• 4 years ago

I agree 100%. Learning how to learn is a top goal of college, and most at least, tend to do a pretty good job at it.

Colleges are far more than just a text book with a certification at the end.

wolverine87611• 4 years ago

One elitist thing I keep seeing is romanticization of 'the trades'. We're overlooking what it's like to work physically your whole life, day after day, year after year, for decades, in often miserable conditions. Bodies break down, and many work and live in pain. Sitting at a desk, where your biggest physical problem is remembering to stand up once in awhile, is far preferrable. Many tradespeople work hard their whole lives so that their kids can do something else.

screye• 4 years ago

College should continue being the default. The luxury, expensive, reality-divorced and book focused 4 year programs are what need to end. College should structure programs to serve the needs of a profession and be sustainable in context of the professions they train people for.

College remains the only viable way to get access to the top tier of limited opportunities and non-defaultable-loan-traps are laid everywhere. As long as both remain true, college can continue charging fees that are disproportionate to the actual value it provides. In a sense, college is a protection racket.

Today universities signal class and prestige, serve as primary research institutes, are professional sports academies are a place to have fun and incubate social movements among other things. From a university's stand point, each is lucrative business in its own right.

At its very core college is no more a place for higher education and training. If colleges start focusing on this, then we will start seeing sustainable colleges that 'everyone' can go to. I don't see my pipe-dream of scaled-back universities succeeding and that's because a scaled back university will never be able to attract folks who can facilitate quality higher education or training. Something will have to fundamentally change for that one bottleneck to be resolved.

tabtab2• 4 years ago

It's too all-or-nothing. I would suggest splitting general ed. into 4 levels and the major into 4. Or maybe into 3, with 1 being the optional "minor". Resumes would then have something like "G:2, M:3". The equivalent of a 4yr degree with a minor would be "G:4, M:3, N:1", where "N" is the minor.

However, doing this well will require a degree standardization, and thus cooperation. That's the hard part.

thenanyu• 4 years ago

I thought college was useless earlier in my career and the more experienced I become, the more I appreciate what I learned.

I don't think that's the same for all major-career pairings, but studying EE and CS, and a little bit of economics has many benefits to a career in the software industry.

College became the default – Let's rethink that

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