37% of the American population between 25 to 34 has a Bachelor's degree now. The subset of people who are literate and conscientious, but do not have a degree has become vanishingly small in recent decades.
This is a horrible and vicious feedback loop, but it's hard to blame the employers, who are actually being fairly rational about their use of a BS degree as a filter (it's the new HS diploma). The blame lies at the feet of an uncontrolled government loan policy that has given the BS this new status.
College is eating years of our lives and is transferring vast amounts of middle class wealth to the education sector of the economy. In the US, it's probably the greatest misallocation of resources outside of our health industry.
This only makes sense if you think that bachelors degrees contribute no value during the entire lifetimes of the people who receive them, which seems like a pretty huge assumption that should not pass unexamined.
I agree that college financing is out of control, but that doesn’t mean a college education is a waste of time. Secondary education was once the domain of rich kids too, but we changed that and the long term value to the world is obvious. Financing public goods is a solvable problem.
It seems pretty reasonable to me that as human society grows more complex and specialized, humans would benefit from more education.
I know you said this with some degree of sarcasm, but for the vast majority of people, you are right on the money. A bachelors degree does not only “contribute no value” but in fact leaches value from the economy. I work at a FAANG with no degree, and the reason I did so (In my 20s) was because instead of wasting my time in a classroom, I was out in the workforce working on real business problems at a telecom since I was 16, in a field where educators are 10-15 years behind reality. Most of the cutting edge work at Google or Facebook or Amazon is not public information, so how the hell would a college even teach that? It’s under NDA. Same as Ma Bell and the extraordinary innovations that came out of the telecommunications industry.
A degree doesn’t just steal value in terms of money, which puts you tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of compounding debt, but it also steals your time, and indoctrinates you into a top-down style of learning. Your time, the most valuable asset in the world, could be spent solving real problems in the real world. The whole system is a scam, and I’m truly sorry for those who have fallen for it.
My advice would be to cut your losses and get into entrepreneurship or work for a company that interests you ASAP. Life is too short to participate in someone else’s profit centered system of learning (Doctors and Lawyers excepted, but only because the level of gatekeeping in those fields is so high and perverted, and backed by government, that learning only via apprenticeship has literally been outlawed)
For a lot of people, going to college is going to be a great opportunity. Not many people can simply leave school at 16 for a meaningful job that gives top tier work experience. You need to live in the right area and either get really lucky or know the right people. A lot of things need to line up well for you. A bachelor's degree is guaranteed if you can pay for it and pass the units, something that doesn't need as much of life to line up perfectly for.
Within a couple of years of starting my CS degree, I was far better at programming than every hobbyist programmer I've met. I didn't have many opportunities out of school. I was from a poor country town that topped the state crime statistics. I know my mum hadn't finished high school and I don't think my father did either. I joined the military, got a trade and went to university at 30 as a single father working full time. University changed my life for the better, gave me a lot of tools and made me much more valuable.
For real. The information you learn on-the-job v.s. the information you learn in academia is a Venn diagram where _maybe_ 50% overlaps, but that doesn’t mean the non-overlapping bits were useless. Having a broad background gives you tools to draw on and helps you see ways of framing things that could massively simplify the problem you’re facing.
I can’t imagine I would have developed the concept of LTI systems outside of academia (EE), nor realized how much of signal processing tasks can be deconstructed to just convolutions or correlations, but these modes of thinking have proved powerful in my early career and especially as a hobbyist.
I am not sure this is true. Maybe 25% overlap. Going to college allowed one to build a network. This network is what provided most of the value over time.
When in the workforce one can pick up a skill/s, from a technical institutes or college extension programs. These programs focus directly on educating for an area focus with relevant industry experience and problem sets.
I went to university but I didn't study CS, I studied mathematics. I don't think I'd be a better programmer if I'd studied CS. Am I glad I went to university? Yes, but frankly it's nothing that you couldn't learn out of a book for a lot less money.
Man, I get where you are coming from, and good for you all your success. But your opinion is so extremely narrow it doesn't mean much for most of the world. You might step out of your IT bubble from time to time, real world and real people are much bigger spectrum than you seemingly understand.
Reasons are more than I can cover in one post - gatekeeping is real, very super real in most well paid jobs. Nobody hires new accountants, managers, electricians, architects, any kind of engineers, and many more without school. Nobody is going to give them expertise coming from job required to grow. Not all jobs are learnable just from online tutorials and books. You don't want to have your house built by guy who aced some online architecture test but has no degree, do you.
You were lucky and seemingly very talented. That is great, but not a usable advice for maybe 95% of the folks. I don't like how things are, but currently they are like that all around the world and there is no change coming soon.
>You don't want to have your house built by guy who aced some online architecture test but has no degree, do you.
That's not really the primary problem I think, I gladly would. But what I would like even more is an entity (probably a company) that has enough assets that if something goes wrong with the house I can get compensation from them. And this company probably isn't going to hire that guy. That's where the actual problem is.
This is a great point. The vast majority of people should simply get a job at a FAANG in their 20s with no degree, rather than wasting their time in a classroom.
> Most of the cutting edge work at Google or Facebook or Amazon is not public information, so how the hell would a college even teach that?
This is a highly questionable assertion, given that these firms largely recruit candidates from CS degree programs to staff their most cutting edge projects.
The people directly recruited from CS programs to work on cutting edge projects on these companies are going to be PhD, not graduates. I can't fathom any of the above companies inviting an undergrad to work on their cutting edge projects, in doing anything but the most boilerplate of work.
Ok, but good luck getting a Ph.D. in computer science without first getting a bachelor's degree.
The point is, it's silly to condemn the value of college by waving around employment in a company that is well-known for recruiting from top-tier universities.
> I can't fathom any of the above companies inviting an undergrad to work on their cutting edge projects, in doing anything but the most boilerplate of work.
Computer science is still a young field with low-hanging fruit everywhere, all you need is a very bright person who knows the basics to make meaningful contributions on cutting edge projects because the "cutting-edge" isn't that sharp yet.
You are simply wrong. WTF is with all the misinformation in this thread? Of course, the big tech companies staff their projects, yes including cutting edge stuff, with BS grads. Maybe they'll expect you to do some grunt work too starting out, but that's just life. You're going to pay your dues, even if you skip college (possibly even more so)
It's not just them either, there are tons of non-FAANG jobs that pay very well and do cool things, that recruit recent grads. There isn't even consensus in the industry that further education is valuable; sometimes people don't even trust those that go this route (I think this is a bit harsh, but it's due to bad anecdotal experience).
This is just false. I went to an ivy+ school and have countless peers with just a bachelor's degree that work on cutting edge projects for data science, systems engineering, autonomous vehicles, etc.
This isn't questionable at all imo. College is supposed to teach you the core fundamentals, using which you should be able to learn all that other stuff.
Straight out of college, I was hired to write code in a language that didn't even exist when I started college. Why? Because those companies rely on students learning more than just "language A". They want quick-learning generalists who can pivot to any tech or language if there is a need. And I can safely say, I definitely learned all of that stuff in college, and I am very thankful for the very solid understanding of CS fundamentals that have carried me in the industry over the years.
The very best case for the non-college trajectory which is that you were able to work on real, cutting edge problems from your entry into the workforce and had the discipline to learn the important parts of CS fundamentals required to work on them.
The very worst case of college education - doing only the required for the degree, no side projects, industrial placements, or advanced topics.
Yes, a good autodidact doing genuinely interesting work is going to be a more valuable contributor at 22 than someone who has spent the last four years doing a CS degree by the numbers. That's not a good example because those are two different people. Many people who enter the tech workforce at 18 may spend years doing paint-by-numbers business applications using a single set of tools, those people aren't going to FAANG jobs.
I agree with everything except for your advice. For the vast majority of people getting into tech, college is probably the right answer. Basically, to go with the system, and accept that you're being taken for a ride (being scammed). It's the most common-sense way to get your foot in the door, even if it's "pay to win". Colleges end up being the gatekeepers and selling a product (you), usually to companies that are already satisfied with it.
As anecdata, my most successful peer from school and college is a guy who didn't finish HS and calling him, at that time, an average talent (even in soft skills) was sympathetic. He happened to start working in a software company around 1998 doing menial work and today he is a continental sales manager. By the other hand I have several bright and hard working peers that are struggling in life despite having (anachronic) master degrees.
Education aside, I find that just the network of people I made from going to college was worth the cost.
While focusing on developing marketable skills should be the top priority of students, there are a lot of other values that a college experience provides.
"more education" does not equal to college education. Education can take many different forms. It can be career and technology education, internship and apprenticeship, also self-study.
College has an entrance barrier and is very disconnected to the outside world, so it has a strong signal effect.
Also consider this: with four years of college time, you can get two career educations with real life industry experience and come with much less cost.
This seems a bit out of touch with the current career reality Americans face. Companies aren't training people nor do they want to train people, and 'career educations' generally don't exist outside of the trades and even that has been moving more towards in-class experience first, then training.
College also increasingly ties in industry experience with in-class experience as companies are only willing to take on interns that are currently studying at colleges they're partnered with. Not to mention the way people use it as a networking opportunity and a chance to try out new things before having to dedicate themselves to a career they might despise.
Career and technical education covers many fields, such as agriculture, business, education, service, military, mechanics, construction, programming, etc... Yes, field training does come later. However, in general, CTE provides more direct field experience than four-year college.
And never be exposed to a single social, political or ideological idea outside the spheres you happen to land in.
Democracies depend on voters who are lucid, informed and rational. Modern technological civilization provides so much, and in very abstract ways, that it is non-optional that people be able to understand, or know they don't understand, massive swathes of broad-reaching ideas and concepts. Because democracies say "choose a candidate to represent you on all these things".
Wasn't my experience taking courses in political science and political philosophy. Was exposed to a lot more viewpoints discussing with working class family, reading literature myself (reading primary sources and focused secondary sources was actually often strongly discouraged by my professors as an inefficient use of time, something that would of course change doing post-grad work, but that isn't what we're discussing here), etc.
To the extent that viewpoints not part of the accepted doctrine are presented, they are presented poorly and without passion.
> reading primary sources and focused secondary sources was actually often strongly discouraged by my professors as an inefficient use of time, something that would of course change doing post-grad work, but that isn't what we're discussing here
I think that’s exactly right. Reading primary sources is much more complicated than reading undergrad-level sources: you need to read not just the source, but enough supporting material to understand the context the source was writing in, competing movements and how they were viewed at the time, etc. You simply don’t have time in a one-semester course on, say, political thought in the 19th century, to dive into the details of any one particular movement, be it abolitionism, women’s suffrage, or anything else. The scope of these questions is enormous, and whatever primary sources a student is likely to find will have tremendous selection bias, because the student won’t even know what sources they’re ignoring or what context they might be missing.
Part of the professor’s job in undergraduate courses is to give the lay of the land. And if an enterprising student decides to put in the primary source work, to not let that one student derail the conversation into hyperfocusing on a single topic, while hopefully also preventing the student from getting hopelessly lost.
Sounds like someone hasn't heard of U Chicago, or the college professor at U Toronto, Jordan Peterson.
Or George Mason U's Mercatus Institute, headed by Tyler Cohen -- one of the larger investments in schools made by the Koch Bros. There are lots of others.
this is academic speak for "the masses should do what the elites want". exposure happens wherever people are. to the extent that it happens in universities it's because there are many people together, often not having much work, but the overton window is very limited.
The academic bubble has grown and shifted over the years, this is evident to most people i know who can peek outside their academic circles. Academia is slowly moving itself to irrelevance
1) Democracy never relies on citizens to go to college to get political education
2) The general public has far more political diversity than faculty and administrators in universities
3) The general public is exposed to a wide range of political and ideological ideas through traditional and social media.
> with four years of college time, you can get two career educations with real life industry experience
...depending on both the student and the career.
Many tech jobs require not much more than literacy, 6th grade algebra, and a tiny bit of grit. Most smart middle schoolers could make mid five figures slinging PHP part time. I did in early high school, and I'm not particularly smart or hard working.
But there are many jobs, even in relatively easy fields like programming, where nonnegative productivity requires years of practice.
I couldn't disagree more. College teaches people to learn independently, to communicate their problems and their progress effectively, to write emails professionally, to manage their time and deal with more work than can be handled, to mentor more junior people, etc. Sure, someone straight from high school could have some of these skills, but doing well at a university practically guarantees it.
> It seems pretty reasonable to me that as human society grows more complex and specialized, humans would benefit from more education.
That narrative is totally destroyed by knowledge retention studies. It's one of the few things in life where the data is completely unequivocal: people don't keep what they don't use, and most people use almost none of what they learned in college. (I predict anybody who disagrees will be a STEM major in a STEM job, i.e. extremely unrepresentative of former college students at large.)
Knowledge retention is the wrong metric in a world where you can look anything up in 5 seconds on your phone.
Getting a college degree requires one to work with large amounts of information. Even if you retain none of those facts and figures later in life, you can still retain facility at working with information. And that is much more important to long-term success than how much you memorize.
But a college degree is suppose to be far more than learning how to study and some minor industry exposure which is the vast majority of what it is being used for. It means people are paying for 90% fluff they don't want or need at exorbitant rates to overcome an invisible wall. Numerous classes I myself took and needed credit for to work towards a degree, while entertaining and informative, ultimately ended up as no more than what I could of obtained by reading a decent book on the subject myself. And it cost me a damn pretty penny.
While I think those types of classes should still exist, they shouldn't be used as an artificial financial and time barrier to getting a decent job.
I'm a programmer with a bachelor degree, majored in CS and minored in math. I can't do my kids AP calc anymore. I haven't used it in 20 years of programming.
In my experience, in college I learned the theoretical and on the job I learned the practical.
For example, I learned how to conjugate verbs in foreign languages, and algorithms with O(n) vs O(log n) in computer science.
Then later in a foriegn country I expanded my my vocabulary. On the job, I learned about version control, how to read other people's code and how to fix bugs.
Most students in CS are hired prior to graduation. On both sides the savings of skipping that last semester are marginal, and on the student side there's a nontrivial opportunity cost. 6 months of: studying whatever problem you want with the background you need to maybe solve it, networking, building code/ideas you own, socializing with a purpose (courting) or for fun, or, if you're smart, a bit of all 3.
There's a discrete jump in the career value of the education between not quite finishing a degree and graduating. It's not because there's some super important final semester that's worth much more than any of the previous ones. It's no doubt because it signals some quality like conscientiousness, or perhaps is just easier for an employer to evaluate the meaning of.
> I agree that college financing is out of control, but that doesn’t mean a college education is a waste of time.
The issue is that it's a waste of time for people who will never use it for anything. If you spend four years to get a BS and then find a career as a factory worker, it was a waste of time -- the education is worth less to you than the cost in time it took from you.
This comes from subsidies causing oversupply. If you're going to actually be a doctor or an engineer then a college degree is worthwhile. But some people are going to be retail clerks and factory workers. Just blindly sending everyone to college because Everyone Should Go To College is wasting their time and the taxpayer's money.
I'm surprised that nobody in this thread has brought up economist Bryan Caplan's 2nd most recent book, "The Case Against Education".
This economist has looked at economic research on the effects of education, such as:
* How well students retain information
* How well students apply their knowledge in contexts outside of the classroom
* How much college graduates make versus how much someone makes after dropping out of school at the last minute
* How much more productive nations are after educating large swaths of their population
* How many companies outright tell their new hires that the knowledge they gained in school needs to be forgotten, and that they need to start learning everything from scratch.
And the conclusion Caplan comes to is that college education is a social signal, i.o.w. it's a zero-sum game where getting a college degree comes at the expense of everyone else with a college degree since the signal is degraded and is not as special as it once was.
> If you're going to actually be a doctor or an engineer then a college degree is worthwhile. But some people are going to be retail clerks and factory workers.
The WSJ article linked up at the top is literally about how factory work increasingly requires professional education like a college degree.
> The WSJ article linked up at the top is literally about how factory work increasingly requires professional education like a college degree.
But does the job really require a degree in order to do it, or is it only the employer that requires the degree, as a filter, because now they can get away with it as a result of the oversupply of college degrees?
Can you explain how an employer gains any advantage by pointlessly requiring degrees today, when they did not previously? What would that do other than raise their labor costs?
Anyway, the article is clear that increasingly automated factory work requires more educated and independent employees.
This is starting to happen in retail too. Thanks to self-checkout machines, there are now more employees in the pharmacy at a local CVS than in the rest of the store combined.
It is an easy filter for job applicants, who are also likely in debt and desperate for stable work. If they had or could get a decent job in their field of study they wouldn't be applying for factory work unless they were an automation specialist.
> Can you explain how an employer gains any advantage by pointlessly requiring degrees today, when they did not previously? What would that do other than raise their labor costs?
Suppose that people with a degree are significantly less likely to quit shortly after you've spent a lot of money training them on your equipment, regardless of whether what they studied in college has any application to the job. If you have to pay the person with a degree a lot more money then maybe it isn't worth it just for that, but if everybody gets degrees and there is an oversupply such that there are more people with degrees than jobs that actually require them, now maybe you can get someone with a degree for a low enough price to be worth requiring it.
> Anyway, the article is clear that increasingly automated factory work requires more educated and independent employees.
That's just the signaling value again. They're not looking for someone with knowledge of GAAP or materials science or economics, they're looking for someone with the proven capacity to earn a degree by studying those things, because it implies they can also learn to run the machines well.
If not as many people had degrees then it wouldn't be worth paying the premium for one of the people who do, and then people who are going to be machine operators don't have to burn four years of their lives and incur significant student debt just to engage in signaling behavior. Instead the employers would have to bear the (lower, but unsubsidized) cost of more attrition as a result of not having the degree to use as an early filter against low quality employees.
Seems reasonable to me. I'd love a better method for quantifying the value of education, too. It's too easy for Big Ed to argue how college is essential as they jack up the prices.
If we fixed those 3, or at least dramatically reduced their impact, we would unlock 30+ years of growth. Its basically free money, just sitting there, waiting for someone to restructure each of them.
There are a lot more broken cost structures - housing, which has similar potential losses to incarceration with the stress of rent driving drug use and homelessness costing a ton and taking potentially productive people out of the economy.
Transportation and infrastructure are broken requiring private car ownership and whose design holds back community and local growth around the country (in transit and in broken water, electric, and internet monopolies).
Agriculture is also super broken with subsidies for unhealthy corn syrup, half of food wasted, huge meat subsidies, an industry dependent on undocumented labor, etc.
Really they all come back to planned bad incentives - housing is regulated to be cost prohitive and NIMBYed, all infrastructure is deeply controlled to protect encumbant oligarchs, prison industrial complex is lobbied by the prison supply chain and police forces. It all comes back to politicians acting in the interest of few over the many contextualized over many circumstances. And that can only happen if they are unaccountable, which is the root problem to fix.
Yes, Food. I spent a couple of years in California and I miss it very much. However, the one thing that I would not have been able to work around, if I were to make my home there, is the food. Not that it tastes bad, but that it is bad, and there is no escaping from that food chain, and its long term effects on health, compounded generation by generation. I now live in a supposedly poor EU country - of course there are problems, but everyone is smart and healthy. It is the food. Adopt EU food regulations now.
For what it's worth, the parent comment didn't explicitly mention weight, and health has a lot to do with nutrition, and I would imagine they were commenting on that as well.
Right but 100% of overweight people are unhealthy. So clearly that can't be right that EU food regulations are ensuring good health.
I guess they could be saying that among the remaining third of the population, the Californians are still unhealthy even if not overweight while the French are healthy. Seems unlikely to be true, though.
Indeed. And the average American will spend more in mortgage interest + rent than any of those others: 5x to 10x more than a college education. Unfortunately, since housing has become a ponzi scheme, mortgage interest is confused with investment.
Housing is cheap in small towns. As I understand it, America has "Section 8" housing which pays most of the rent for unemployed people and they pay 30% out of their unemployment benefit. So are homeless people really just choosing to live in a city where they're not eligible for section 8 because they don't want to live in a small town? Or have they done something so badly wrong that they can't get it anywhere? If your income is too high for section 8 but too low for rent, then you need to move because your labor is worth less than your living costs.
To get section 8 you must meet a list of requirements. Just being unemployed is not enough.
Even if you qualify, there is limit to how total many section 8s are given out. So there is a waiting list of several years, during which time you must still qualify.
You can not just sign up on that waiting list. There are small windows open at random a few days a year when they will accept names.
No leasor is required to accept section 8 people and very few do. So even if you get a section 8 voucher, you still need a lot of luck to find a place.
But in order for affordable housing to drive economic growth it needs to be in areas with lots of good jobs. Just imagine if you could rent a decent apartment in silicon valley for $600 a month, we'd see an explosion of new companies and jobs!
That 37% of people really needs to be understood as bifurcated though. There is the (smaller) group that do the degrees that lead to high skills and gainful employment (medecine, engineering, finance), and the other (larger) group that are enrolled in mostly cotton-candy degrees (Communications, Business, Media) that lead just to debt.
Paying for the Party is a good book that explores this modern issue.
I think comms/broadcast degrees often are pointless. But in media, anything web/video and journalism focused was a solid career until very recently. Wages are dropping fast in that field. Social media and phones really took a chunk out of it. It feels like the collapse of newspapers all over again, especially in the TV sector.
Let's assume you're telling the truth, how many would be needed? How many social media experts versus engineers? Sales is the real hidden people employer, you'll probably have as many or sales people than engineers, but the fact of the matter is now all degrees are created equal.
I can well imagine "ran a Youtube channel with x,xxx subscribers in High School" being way more valuable for getting into media work than a degree in media would be, which is something that wouldn't have even been possible not that long ago.
Problem with Afghanistan/Iraq is that the US lost the knowledge on how to conduct a war since WW2. There was no plan on how to fix/rebuild the country after the threat (Taliban/Saddam) was eliminated - which led to the Taliban rising again with public support and the Iraqi political landscape essentially fractured.
With Germany, in contrast, the priority was to get us up and running as a democratic society. Mostly this was a side effect of needing a stronghold against Communist-Russia dominated GDR, but still - had the US gone through with de-industrialization of Germany as some plans wanted to, Germany would have been in chaos again.
> Problem with Afghanistan/Iraq is that the US lost the knowledge on how to conduct a war since WW2.
Did Vietnam and Korea not happen? Plenty of nation building going on there. Vietnam failed because peacekeeping isn't the same as peacemaking. The Nazi fought to the last man (or close to it) and were beaten down completely; the Japanese were nuked into submission. Both of those are not or were not options in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, where there was/is still strong opposition backed by foreign powers.
> There was no plan on how to fix/rebuild the country after the threat (Taliban/Saddam)
Afghanistan wasn't intended to be a long term fix, just chase out the Taliban, kill Osama, and let the Northern Alliance take over. That didn't work out so well. Nation building is also a lot easier when the nations were already global empires; Afghanistan is still having a hard time catching up to the 20th century.
Iraq was a deliberate failure in this regard, and troop numbers were kept deliberately low to more easily sell the operation to the public.
I think an important part of the story with Germany is that Hitler's rise was substantially aided by the Germany's treatment after WW1. Everybody was aware of the importance of doing a better job this time.
First off you just stated that 63% of the US population 25-34 is either illiterate or non consceintious, so, yikes.
Secondly, I'd love to see some real data on college as a misallocation of resources. Everything ive seen would suggest the opposite. The "college experience" is kinda the height of a true free market place for ideas and people leave better for it. The government should be funding more for education, not cutting people off from it.
> The government should be funding more for education, not cutting people off from it.
College costs an insane amount of money in the States. I'm not sure more money is the answer. The government should be pushing ways to make it cheaper. Ceasing to guarantee public student loans and making private debt more easily dischargeable in bankruptcy would be a great start.
Turn off the money firehose and colleges will return to their core competencies - teaching and research - instead of building football stadiums, basketball arenas, and doing other stuff that's irrelevant to a good education. They may also differentiate by having tuition prices better reflect costs and future job prospects. So for example art, writing, polisci, history degrees may cost way less than engineering, science or medical degrees. Making community-college-to-state-college transfers easier would be another thing to try.
Basically there are many things one could do to expand access to college, and leave students better off, without spending more tax money.
To me the solution is simple, make college debt dischargable through bankruptcy. The only people who are actually going to declare bankruptcy are people who aren't and can't pay for their loans in the first place. It isn't just a simple reset button like people pretend, declaring bankruptcy has a serious repercussions, but at the end of it all they will end up in a better position and will contribute far more to the economy than they will stuck in a poverty trap.
I went to an excellent college, and I don’t think public money should be spent on “the college experience.” It’s not like American college graduates are leaving well versed in the works of Aristotle. We’re talking about spending tax dollars subsidizing what is mostly drinking/sex/video games/partying, with someone occasionally picking up a shallow idea.
Hold up. I know college is like that for some people, but not everyone. I pretty much never partied and spent my time studying at the library. I wouldn't have been able to usefully work on Rust without a lot of the PL theory that I learned at university—is Rust just "shallow ideas"? Before learning PLT I thought that the C type system was all anyone needed. I sure wasn't going to write an H-M style typechecker—the original version of which I wrote for rustc—for fun on my own time. (And I did end up with a decent knowledge of Aristotle, too.)
Are there too many people who get in to Ivy League schools just to party? Sure. But fixing that problem—which I agree is worth fixing—need not involve burning higher education to the ground and depriving those who are actually going to get use out of it.
> Are there too many people who get in to Ivy League schools just to party? Sure. But fixing that problem—which I agree is worth fixing—need not involve burning higher education to the ground and depriving those who are actually going to get use out of it.
Within Ivy League schools there are a ton of (very bright!) kids who get a degree just to have a credential they use to punch their ticket at a bank or consulting shop. And outside the Ivy League there are tons of kids who get a degree, spend a lot of time partying, to get a job they could have done without the degree. All told, probably a majority of people who get a degree today don’t need one. (Back when we sent a man to the moon only 10% of Americans had a college degree. It probably never needs to get higher than that.)
There is a place for public funding of college. We need engineers, doctors, even writers and journalists. And we need to address the plight of people from disadvantaged backgrounds. But I suspect you could get most of the economic benefits with a targeted system that gave out full ride scholarships based on merit, need, and plan of study, instead of making college into grades 13-16 as we have today.
> And outside the Ivy League there are tons of kids who get a degree, spend a lot of time partying, to get a job they could have done without the degree.
Reminds me of something I recently read. iirc, it was some local news story regarding a college student at a nearby state university. I remember someone asked him his plans after college and he replied something about wanting to start a landscaping business. I wondered why the hell someone would bother with all that debt for something that they could have started years ago.
>I pretty much never partied and spent my time studying at the library. I wouldn't have been able to usefully work on Rust without a lot of the PL theory that I learned at university
Did studying by yourself at the library really require being enrolled in a university though? I mean which part of this education is not indefinitely scalable? Pretty much only the personal attention of a professor. Did you require the personal attention of a professor to learn PLT? Somehow I don't think so.
>Before learning PLT I thought that the C type system was all anyone needed.
Using C for a while would've fixed that for you, too.
I surmise that pcwalton may have higher standards for "useful work on Rust" than the average HNer. (It is, after all, quite difficult to appreciate a "complex design" that doesn't yet exist - not in its current form, at least.)
> I mean Rust isn't exactly very difficult to use.
He's talking about working on Rust, not working in Rust. A Rust compiler, with its borrowing/type-checking, is an order of magnitude more complicated than one for C.
i know you're just being needlessly flippant, but, givenmost hs curriculum don't cover classical philosophy how is a student supposed to know they're interested in the field if not exposed to it during higher education ( i know I personally got into Foucault during conversations I had with classmates after snubbing the field like many an edgy teen).
Plenty of people meet their co-founders, find their passion, pivot their lives entirely during the time; even if the only activities a student takes are "drinking/sex/video games/partying" they're probably out making connections that end up serving them pretty well interms of employment/relationships.
Restricting access just so some group youve determined "doesn't deserve it" is elitist to the extreme. I'd much rather have 5% ( or more)of my income go to funding state run education rather than subsidizing my extracurriculars (which ironically are way more drinking/sex/video games/partying than I ever had time for in college).
I’m not being flippant. I don’t think college is valuable for most people, and the “four year vacation for already privileged kids” isn’t something I want to see public money being spent on.
As to being elitist: subsidizing college is a handout to people who are already pretty well off. The people who need help the most aren’t going to college. I’d very much like to see colleges defunded and that money redirected to social services for kids in high-need communities.
It's not a 0 sum game; it's very possible to have subsided education and meaningful social services; hell you can even deliver on economies of scale and do both academic out reach run by the local school with the intention of preparing applications from high-need communities.
In today's system if you can afford university with no debt you're very well off and it's probably a wash since the funds are coming largely out of your taxes (ie just about everyone that works in US tech and comments on this forum). The biggest winners are middle class families that can prepare their children for college but can't pay for it; but again, helping one group doesn't mean that it's no longer possible to help another group.
I can't see how restricting higher education back to the days when the hyper rich gathered to circle jerk about how much of the classics they've memorized helps in anyway (other than give all of us already educated in the workforce a lovely gate against the next generation).
The money is spent either way, whether it's tax dollars in a "free college" system or tuition dollars in the system we have or anything in between. Every dollar spent on college is a dollar that didn't get spent on some other service.
Meanwhile, if university education really is mostly a vacation for wealthy young adults, then funding it is regressive, because no matter how directly accessible you make it financially, it's still tilted towards the wealthy because they have the means to forego 4 years of income to attend, and because they're better prepared to apply and take advantage of it in the first place.
By that logic there should be no progressive programs at all because "someone" wealthy might also benefit. Especially in the current system, a college degree is overwhelmingly income positive[0]. Progressive programs don't imply the wealthy don't benefit just that the wealthy do pay for them. A student unable to afford university would be far better equiped to "forgo 4 years of income" (because there are so many well paying jobs for the highschool graduate in a low income area) if state schools were publically funded at the level they were 40 years ago.
A dollar spent on accessible college is just a dollar that can't be spent else where not necessarily a dollar taken from another services. Despite what some people might lead you to believe, taxes can be raised to pay for things (usually disproportionately affecting those wealthy people you're so concerned about getting a handout).
This rebuttal pretends to say something, but really doesn't. Obviously, there are cases where subsidy makes no sense (universal free yacht moorings) and where it makes lots of sense (the fire department). The question is, where does a 4-year university degree fall on that spectrum? It's Rayiner's contention, and mine as well, though to a lesser extent, that college is a yacht mooring, not a fire department.
You can disagree, and then make your case, but you have to make it on the merits, not with mic-drop logic.
Note that my side already has a highly instructive example to argue from: the mortgage interest tax deduction, which turned out to be expensive, distortive, and highly regressive.
You're not going to get everyone into college. If you make the government pay for college then you're also asking those who couldn't go to college to pay for others to be able to go to college. Essentially, poor(er) people paying so that rich(er) people can drink/sex/video games/party.
Maybe you went to a great college. I went to a large state school, and the "college experience" there was not at all like you described it.
At best, it could be close to that if you chose the right major and friends. But the majority experience seemed closer to binge drinking, cheating on homework assignments, and wasting time in class by asking the professor if X was going to be on the test.
College is absolutely just a continuation of high school for most people, and I'm afraid it's going to become even worse as the demands for free college get louder.
I also went to a large state school (although to be fair, one that's fairly highly rated for STEM). Access to people, both socially and academically, access to information, access to opportunity (I did not get a degree in CS yet here I am making piles of cash in this field) all increase with the resources available at uni.
Asking a high school student, especially one that likely grew up in a small town with limited exposure to people careers, and ideas, to go into an uncaring workforce essentially unable to pivot for the rest of their lives sounds heartbreaking. I strongly believe that my opportunity should be available to every person.
As a side bar I think this probably should start way earlier than college; more well run state boarding schools would be a huge life line to high performing students stifled by their geography.
I think it also comes down to the "quality" of the college, good schools and great teachers can make a massive difference. College allows you to explore your interests, make friends with a wide variety of people, which you may not be able to do later in life. I got a good education - but besides that, I made great friends who introduced me to interests which am still pursuing. Unfortunately, a lot of the American college experience centers on binge drinking, getting laid, frats and sororities and college sports. Find a school that is not about the above BS and you'll get a first-class experience.
There has been some study that shows the school itself correlated with post school achievement with a large caveat: those who were accepted to “higher” quality schools but ended up attending a lower regarded institution did just as well. The implication being it has less to do with the school and more to do with the students who can get accepted to those schools.[1] There was a comparatively larger impact on those coming from lower level income families.
There’s also been some follow on studies that look for differences in the effect depending on race and gender
Its not just the college but a program. #1 thing no one told 18 year old me that I wish they had- a mathematics degree (for example) from generic state university will pretty much get you the same job interviews as a fancy school degree will. Because employers respect the fact that Mathematics is hard wherever you do it. An Economics degree from nowhere gets you pretty much nothing while a Ivy Econ degree will get you into consulting or banking, and even more so for pure humanities. The less technical the material the more work the reputation of the school has to do.
Makes sense, but an Economics degree from Harvard teaches you a lot more ( the course and projects are way harder, the people teaching it are top-notch in their field).
In engineering, as well, I've seen the same computer science degree and courses being a joke at another university compared to where I went.
>37% of the American population between 25 to 34 has a Bachelor's degree now. The subset of people who are literate and conscientious, but do not have a degree has become vanishingly small in recent decades.
So you think 63% of the population under 34 are either illiterate or unconscientious?
I think a larger misallocation of resources is money that is syphoned off / sucked out of every sector and sent to offshore tax havens..
University did take a chunk of my life that I would have liked to be earning money and growing my family. But it was a much better experience, and made me a much better person than when I was surrounded by ignorant and bitter men working in the trades as a commercial electrician.
>who are actually being fairly rational about their use of a BS degree as a filter (it's the new HS diploma).
It just chaps me that employers immediately think (in my case) 14 years of professional working experience is worth less than being able to APA format your paper and temporarily remember stuff for a test between rounds of beer pong.
More so than real estate? You might pay $50k for your education, but in hot markets with no construction you might pay literally a million dollars more than for the same house elsewhere. Huge allocation of resources there on the zero-sum competition with other buyers in the market.
The allocation is the huge portion of your salary going towards your mortgage.
The (arguable) "mis-" part is that while it's normal for some property to be worth more than others, and the housing market is functioning as it should given the parameters, we have chosen to make the supply highly inelastic in desirable places with predictable outcome.
Alright, technically it was only settled, but I'm referring to:
Four Silicon Valley companies -- including Apple and Google -- have agreed to pay $415 million to settle an antitrust lawsuit that accused the companies of conspiring not to hire away each other's employees.
> transferring vast amounts of middle class wealth to the education sector
Confusing to me. Who are the institutions most benefitting from this? Are they not simply the _financial_ institutions furnishing the liquidity? I am not seeing the towering edu-monopolists' gravitational pull warping markets and other economic realities.
> In the US, it's probably the greatest misallocation of resources outside of our health industry.
There are a few others, such as the Military-Industrial Complex, the Prison-Industrial Complex (Militarization of Police, War on Drugs, etc.), Monocrop Agriculture chewing through our ecological endowment, etc.
I think you could argue it's created a class of wealthy and super wealth admins who don't add value. From what I've read several studies have shown the vast increase in college expense has been sucked up by administrators and non teaching staff. I was looking at my college's (midwest state school) payroll and the various provost were making $600k. Kinda wondering what in god's name these people do.
I honestly don't think you're far off, but I also tend to think the "wealth admins" are a response to system inputs.
Take an example of catering to veteran students. Previously, many schools had a single person who was the veteran liaison as a side duty and not their primary function. When the post 9/11 GI Bill promised much more money for service members, colleges responded by having entire dedicated teams to help veterans navigate school. From the outside this may look like admin bloat to some, but for the college it actually does add value by helping attract students and guaranteed tuition payments. In a perfect world, that increase in students would ideally offset the salary for those positions, but I'm not sure if that happens. Please note that I'm not necessarily saying that's a bad thing, it just highlights that "wealth admins" may be providing something considered valuable to the university. Multiply that by all the various special interest groups and the number of administrative personnel can grow quite fast.
They sit around and make sure the teachers work. For some reason teachers think their 50k salary isn’t enough, so you need someone to keep them in line.
Note: Actually, I have no idea, but that is what my mind immediately went to when hearing provost.
Why do you assume the financial institutions, rather than the colleges themselves? Don't you think that a person being paid a salary to teach students skills that are less valuable than what the person pays is also benefiting? What about university administrators?
A few years ago, there was a widely publicized article about University of Florida getting rid of their CS programs while simultaneously expanding their English/History programs.
> A few years ago, there was a widely publicized article about University of Florida getting rid of their CS programs while simultaneously expanding their English/History programs.
Do you have a source for this. This is possibly one of the dumbest things I've heard coming from a university.
> The US Federal Government is providing 90%+ of the liquidity. What benefit is it gaining?
A perpetual (young) underclass and whose legal status is favourable, thus tax requirements are firmly intact, but whose job opportunities for social mobility are ever diminishing, should make that obvious. Cheap, local sourced labour is critical to a consumer-driven, service sector economy: which the US is.
The limited manufacturing that does take place in the US is increasingly automated away, and the maintenance, deployment, installing and management of said equipment is limited in both scope and capacity, but could also be learned as an apprentice as it was done for millennia for other of man's highly coveted crafts. University requirements are a subsidy for an industry, much like Insurance was after WWII--they sought to inflate a needless sector of the economy.
No, the US Federal Reserve loans the US Government (treasury) money at interest which is then the basis for its ever increasing debt ceiling; the US government itself has the sole monopoly as having the Reserve Currency of the World (USD), with the largest Military and the biggest pollution based footprint on the World to maintain its inflation based petro-dollar.
They already won. This is merely about keeping the system in place, this the 'American Century' these plutocrats extolled and sold generations on can be viewed as such: they went from exploiting black slaves to being indiscriminate and targeting the youth and poor. Debt is the tool, and its effective.
I really can't understand how you guys in the Valley can just ignore all the homeless so effectively (many are really young) that you cannot see how obvious it all is; I guess being in a place modeled on affording its affluent residents a permanent state of infantile distraction must work.
It’s that and the poor state of public education. I couldn’t read this article so I searched using similar terms. Seiners could only find 15% of applicants that could read at the 9th grade level. Companies are finding that the Federal government has been driving education into the ground since it took over on the 70s.
This mentality keeps on going right up through high-paid white collar work. All job postings inflate the minimum requirements and everybody wants someone else to train their employees.
All junior software engineering jobs that could be filled by recent CS grads or bootcamp grads want 2-3 years of professional experience. The next level up that should require 2-3 years wants 5-10.
The unemployment numbers are crap. Ask anyone who has a middle of the road white-collar job how confident they'd be in quitting and getting a new one and they will laugh at you. Nobody is really hiring on fair terms. Everybody wants a new senior employee for the price of a junior one.
Isn't that true of any market though? Everyone wants to pay less for everything, and will shop around and haggle and negotiate to find the best deal. I don't see how that alone is a problem, if you get an offer and the salary is lower than you want to work for, don't take it.
> Ask anyone who has a middle of the road white-collar job how confident they'd be in quitting and getting a new one and they will laugh at you.
Again, I'm not sure what to make of this. That could mean the job market is weak, or it could also just mean that transaction costs are too high (not the same thing), or maybe they're just perceived to be very high and scary. If we instead look at what people actually do instead of what they'd tell you they feel like doing, we arrive at the definition of the unemployment rate - number of people who are looking for a job and can't find one. And that is quite low.
Now I can't say for sure that you're wrong, but I have to say I find the traditional unemployment rate methodology a lot more compelling than your method.
I mean, if you can't see that there is something different about the current market space we are in now vs the one in the 70s/80s I don't know what to tell you other than to read more or talk to people who lived through it.
My father got hired on as a machine maintenance person almost immediately after he dropped out of college, with no previous training or experience whatsoever, and then bought his first house within two years. They trained him and he worked his way up on the job and held it for over 30+ years. Lets look to a quick Indeed listing typing in that same job title today and read a few off the top listing together that don't have 'senior' in the title.
Applicant must have 3 to 5 years’ experience
Three (3) years equivalent work experience required or a machinist/technical degree.
Technical degree/machinist certification or 4-6 years equivalent work experience required.
I mean if you are going to argue that this is the same way the market has always been, that is just completely incorrect, both anecdotally and statistically.
> if you can't see that there is something different about the current market space we are in now vs the one in the 70s/80s I don't know what to tell you other than to read more or talk to people who lived through it.
A company I worked for in the 1980s went through some financial hard times, and they instituted an across-the-board 10% pay cut. One of the engineers there was furious about it, and we talked about it. He said how mean, cruel, and unfair it was. I suggested if he felt that way, he should quit and work elsewhere. He was angry at me for that suggestion, saying there was no way he could get another good job.
More generally, people in the 70s/80s were not secure in their jobs nor their job prospects.
Two year certificate at a community college. I hate to break it to you, but I know a lot of people who take this route, buy houses, and live fulfilling lives with decent salaries for their area. In rural Minnesota, an electrician can buy a 4 bedroom house, new truck, and take 2 or 3 hunting trips a year to Canada. A machinist makes about the same, and can get a decent job in a 20-30 worker plant, as described in this article.
And yes, traditional high school has not prepared us for this, but the workarounds are there. Many community colleges will allow concurrent study for an associates, often at reduced or subsidized cost. In Saint Paul, MN, you can attend a local community college for free if you graduate high school.
I frankly have the opposite opinion. Parents pushed kids to get a bachelors, the gov pushed kids to it, and colleges played along, and kids who had no aspirations to white collar desk jobs ended up with degrees that didn't help them.
It is the same way the market has always been, everyone always want to pay the best bang for the buck. Back then college dropout is the best bang fror the buck, not many people has college degree. Now more people has college degree, why would company hire someone without degree if they can good hire those who has?
That's kinda dodging the issue though. Is the market still functioning with the same principles it always has? Yes, absolutely. But where does a market where employers generally have more resources and power than employees (even if it's just a little bit) necessarily slowly gravitate towards? A market where prospective employees try to qualify as much as possible to stand out (whether that is actually required or useful for the job doesn't matter, what matters is that it increases the likelihood of getting hired), and in a world where you can essentially "buy" qualification for a lot of money, and go into debt for that money, that results in a lot of (often unnecessary) debt.
> Everyone wants to pay less for everything, and will shop around and haggle and negotiate to find the best deal. I don't see how that alone is a problem, if you get an offer and the salary is lower than you want to work for, don't take it.
The issue is that you can’t even get your foot in the door to haggle. And even if you get an offer, you’re not guaranteed a better one even if you think you’re “worth more”.
> Jobs were never guaranteed in the US. If you were worth more, you still needed the salesmanship to convince an employer that you were worth it.
Right, but from the thread for this post it seems like it’s much harder to even get to the point where you can talk to an employer, and instead you won’t even be able to pass the set of hard requirements that seemingly didn’t exist a couple decades ago. And that just makes it hard for people to really show what they’re good at. (Personal anecdote: I think every job I’ve had has little to do with what I’m actually good at, because I’ve found it hard to sell that sort of thing convincingly on a resume. So I never meet the people who’d be able to judge me appropriately in those topics.)
On the other hand, I go to nwcpp.org meetings, and there's always an outfit there stoning every tern looking for C++ programmers. I've been contacted by Symmetry Investments with 20 D programming positions to fill. Tech companies sponsor and attend tech conferences for the purpose of finding engineers to hire.
Giving an hour presentation is a fantastic way to sell your abilities. Tech conferences are often desperately looking for someone, anyone, to give a talk. Meetups, and nwcpp.org, are always looking for presenters. I often fill in at nwcpp and give a D talk because they couldn't find a C++ speaker. I often get contacted by conference organizers looking for speakers.
Employers will troll through github accounts looking for recruits. Want to get noticed? Contribute to a significant open source project. There is no gate there. Anyone can contribute.
Shotgunning out resumes is generally the most useless way to get hooked up.
I assume you mean “worthwhile” from the selfish perspective of a worker competing in the labour market. Overall, writing résumés and “selling yourself” is a waste of time that is necessary to deter bad actors. People who believe in the “signalling theory” of education think this extends to the whole education system.
Then why is everyone insistent on importing cheaper labor from India and China? They're more willing to do the work for less.
I will say, to get your foot in the door you need to be strategic and realistic with your salary expectations. You're not going to get a great an amount on your first entry level job.
Thinking you're going to be making >100k as a junior engineer outside of SF is optimistic and entitled. Having been in this field for a while at this point it's not unsurprising a lot of engineers are complaining about the skillset required to get the job done. The issue is startups can't afford to hire interns and juniors as they need to actually get work done and not have supervise them.
> And even if you get an offer, you’re not guaranteed a better one even if you think you’re “worth more”.
This isn't an issue, if you "think" you're worth more then you decline that offer and continue looking. If you're struggling for money you take it and keep looking.
> The unemployment numbers are crap. Ask anyone who has a middle of the road white-collar job how confident they'd be in quitting and getting a new one and they will laugh at you.
That's why there's so many unemployment numbers. They actually capture a pretty full picture when we find the right one for the conversation. In this case the rate of voluntary quits has been steadily improving and looks healthy:
Thanks for pointing this out, and you're right that there is good information out there. I meant the popularly reported unemployment numbers which show things as "better than ever". They don't match people's actual satisfaction with the job market.
My company does a good job of recruiting college students as interns, and then converting them to junior engineers when they graduate. Unfortunately they all leave within a couple years and generally double their salaries when they do.
This has been happening for the five years I've worked here and likely longer. For whatever reason no one can convince HR and senior management that we need to give significant raises (%10-20) each year for the first couple years after they graduate in order to keep decent engineers. The last time I brought it up I got some bullshit response about loyalty.
(1) The engineers are not actually all leaving - it may feel like that, but maybe it's cheaper to hire a bunch of junior devs and filter out anyone that doesn't buy the loyalty bullshit and isn't content with 3% annual raises
(2) They don't need decent or senior engineers, hiring and managing cheaper juniors is effective enough and cheaper
(1) HR/Management are incompetent and the business is doomed to failure
Are they doing exit interviews. I’m not talking about the day before or day of exit. But they should be done 30 days after to allow the employee to reflect.
This is not true at all, every large Silicon Valley company hires new college grads by the boatload every year. Literally thousands and thousands every single year. It’s mostly only the smaller underfunded companies that refuse to hire new grads because they don’t have the resources to indulge someone who can’t hit the ground running and needs time to ramp up.
Salaries in programmer are really high compared to practically any other field that requires as little experience as programming does. If you want to verify this, put an ad in the paper for a junior position and say that you only require bootcamp experience, a related degree, or demonstrated experience with open source software. Offer the median salary for a software developer in your area. I bet you won't have enough time to interview even 1/10th of those people. And with the complete lack of credentials you are asking for, you will have practically nothing to help you narrow down the candidates. You might as well interview random selections.
We frequently say that there is a lack of talent out there. Anyone who has ever interviewed knows that this does not mean that there are a lack of applicants. It's just that you really, actually only want to hire one in 100 or one in 1000 of the people who apply. The vast majority of people applying for programming jobs want an easy job with a high salary, not a programming job.
If I'm hiring a junior, it really honestly doesn't matter if they are a new grad, just out of boot camp, a hobby programmer or have 2-3 years of experience. However, if they have 2-3 years of experience, you at least have some way of evaluating them. How do I evaluate new grads? Grades? How do I compare them against boot campers? I suppose with hobby programmers I can at least read their code!
Of course we ask for experience. Same thing goes at every level. People with a couple of years of experience are an absolute mixed bag. You'll get some who are awesome and you will get many who are horrible. At 5-10 years out at least they have opinions that they can talk about without resorting to "Well, I heard that X was crap and so I don't do that".
And this is broken record territory for me, but I'm old. I have something like 30 years of professional experience. Why are you talking about 5-10 years of experience like it's a ridiculous requirement? Why wouldn't you want at least 20 years of experience for a senior developer??? Even that is only half way through your career? Why are we hiring all these young, inexperienced, naive people into mission critical positions?
Are you sure people want "a new senior employee for the price of a junior one". To be very provocative: you've only even talked about experience levels that would be super junior in virtually every other professional career.
Hmm... Maybe I should conclude with "Get off my lawn" ;-) The above is really tongue in cheek, but I hope it provides a different perspective. I agree that we do not hire and train juniors properly, but I think that's mainly because we also do not hire seniors properly.
You are 100% right that my view is clouded by the relative youth of the software industry. Achieving seniority is a much longer road elsewhere.
My main point was that when you've just spent 4 years in college learning and accumulating debt, it's very disappointing to look around and find nobody willing to invest in you. I have friends and family graduating from good 4 year schools ending up doing email customer support for startups and making next to no money. That's employment, but it's not what you want/expect.
I agree with that. My best advice is to look for work where you are doing meaningful work and don't worry so much about salary until a few years in your career.
You are spot on about requirements. Businesses are unwilling to simply be honest a lot of the time with job posting sites. It is enough to turn to twitter DMs/networking just to avoid all of the bullshit.
>Ask anyone who has a middle of the road white-collar job how confident they'd be in quitting and getting a new one and they will laugh at you
Once you do have 1-2 years of experience in dev (nothing glamorous, I did maintenance mostly), it's actually pretty safe. All of my white collar jobs have been middle of the road and I took multiple, extensive breaks was still able to get something. There is a big initial hurdle, then you can sit nicely on a plateau. If you want to challenge yourself, there's always FAANG companies or starting your own business.
If the experience is not enough, networking can get you a position. Same for public side projects.
Silicon Valley is full of new grads. People routinely make Senior in two years; at some companies, there's something wrong if you go more than two years between promotions (e.g. you must be senior by four years).
Speaking as a college dropout, the grass is always greener.
On the one hand, I've never had my lack of a degree be an issue in tech, especially startups. Some founders even place a weird bonus on being a dropout and see you as more of a hustler than degree-holding employees.
On the other hand, there are some opportunities that are closed off to me unless I decide to finish my degree. For example, I would have liked to get an MBA or go to law school for fun, but those options are completely closed off. You absolutely must have a four-year degree.
Another one that came up recently, I've been thinking of taking a break from tech and going into public service, all the jobs I saw in the three-letter agency I was interested in also had a hard requirement on a four-year degree.
A degree isn't necessary for everyone, it certainly wasn't for me and it's nice that I had almost two years as a head start on my career in tech. However, I wouldn't encourage people to drop out.
Having a degree gives you options. You're better off with those options than without. You don't _have_ to take out 200k in loans. There's fantastic public education systems like CUNY that you can take advantage of.
I’m in very much the same boat as you except in Canada. You can’t join most public service jobs, police... though I think CSIS and CSEC recently changed their requirements but you have to be damned good. Don’t quote me on that, however.
Anyway my conclusion is the same as yours. I’d even planned on going back part time as there were some adult grants offered but they were largely removed by our most recent provincial government in the course of a large number of education cuts.
The University of Washington is a well-regarded school, and it costs about $30K/year including room, board, and books. Although it isn't an elite school, you can get an elite education there with careful selection of courses.
That sounds exactly like how car salesmen talk about the latest Ford pickup truck in order to get you hooked on an expensive car loan. And come to think of it, it is actually exactly the same scheme. And Americans are buying it.
You'd be right if you got the CS degree by taking the easiest classes, doing as little as possible, and partying.
On the other hand, if you carefully select the courses, work to get the most out of the opportunities there, etc., you can get a very valuable education at UW. I've seen it too many times for that to be a fluke.
UW isn't going to hold your hand, it's up to you. There are a very large number of local UW graduates who became wealthy.
The same can be said about any education (even self taught). My point is 120k is a lot of debt.
As a hiring manager I don’t even care if you have a degree, I just want to see you can ship. There are a lot of viable alternatives to that 120k, as you say you just have to work hard to succeed, regardless of chosen path.
> "For example, I would have liked to get an MBA or go to law school for fun, but those options are completely closed off. You absolutely must have a four-year degree."
an MBA curriculum is not materially different from that of a BA in business, so if you want the knowledge, just get the BA in business, which then also confers upon you the desired bachelor's degree in the process. an MBA doesn't really build up from an undergrad degree (vs. an engineering degree, for example).
the difference, of course, is that MBA-seekers will come in with work experience, have a professional network, be a little older, have a little more independence/focus, etc.
Are you sure that was a hard requirement, and not just a stated one?
My earliest jobs all stated that in their requirements, but were happy to interview and hire me anyway. (Later on, "or equivalent experience" became popular.)
I've never worked for the government but wasn't Edward Snowden an NSA employee while also being a high school dropout?
He was a contractor, which is the same mistake the grandparent post makes. Yes, government employment with most TLAs requires a degree. But most government work is not undertaken by government employees -- it's contracted out, e.g. to Lockheed, Leidos, Booz Allen Hamilton, etc. Those organizations do hire people without degrees; I know this because I worked with lots of them for many years. Practically speaking, there are a relatively tiny number of actual government employees in tech, and they collaborate with or oversee a comparatively huge number of contractors.
When did you drop out? I went straight into the workforce rather than college 11 years ago but I feel like especially in the US the situation today might be pretty different for entry-level positions. Your average hiring manager might just put you at the bottom of a long pile of CS grads.
Old guy trying to put things together ahead:
I think that this mentality may have started as a result of the Griggs vs Duke Power Co case from 1970. Griggs was a black man who was turned down a promotion because he failed a company aptitude test, which was later determined to be racially biased against him . . . something to that effect. Companies were hesitant to continue using such tests, so they started requiring college degrees instead. Higher demand for higher education led to higher costs.
It's a bit more complicated than that. Duke Power Co had an explicit policy restricting its black employees to "labor" positions. It changed its requirements exactly 1 day after the 1964 Civil Rights Act took effect, and added a mechanical proficiency and Wonderlic Cognitive Ability Test to its requirements. The Wonderlic Cognitive Ability Test itself isn't a terrible good measure of fluid or crystal intelligence, but it does a good job of measuring how much you remembered from high school... although some of the questions are word problem versions of "How many tablespoons in 2.5 cups" which IMO is just rote crap.
Yes, we were taught SI in middle school (and I think even a little in elementary school) -- for a country which would be all SI by the time we graduated. So that was basically the worst of all possible outcomes.
... requiring college degrees, of course, being a nice way to wash your hands of any controversy while still effectively enjoying the same biased applicant filtering
Important to note it was only determined to be biased on the basis of disparate impact, which I think is a baloney concept. In other words, if one group of people doesn't do as well on something as another group on average, the thing can be considered a violation of the 14th amendment.
The NY City fire department recently had to shell out millions to people who weren't hired because of a similar ruling. No discrimination found other than that black people didn't do as well on a test as white people.
Understandable but we cannot ignore how history plays into these decisions you know?
> No discrimination found other than that black people didn't do as well on a test as white people.
I don't know the details of this case but there are a lot of systemic effects if the history of racism in the US that have lingering effects in society today.
Consider how practices like redlining significantly affected finance and education access. Jail sentence time disparity and a lot of other often invisible ripples of what happened in the early years of this country.
It's very hard to know what causes some of these disparities and sometimes a society tries to deal with it by using equal/similar outcomes as an admittedly flawed proxy for equal treatment while we try to address the underlying factors ( better schools, representation, access, etc.)
I think the problem is that there's no way to tell if it's just an unintended correlation or if the test was chosen intentionally because it favors the racial majority. In that case, the only way to prevent the latter is to ban all of them.
That case actually covered disparate impact of high school degrees as well, and the trend towards requiring college degrees is also exhibited outside the USA.
IMO, the failure in the US here is the fact that money can no longer flow towards innovation because far too much of it is trapped in the hands of a very small elite that are fearful of taking _real_ risk. Freeing up those cash flows, some of which would flow into government (which can take huge risks that the free market simply can't, since the profit motive doesn't exist: example: educating _everyone_), and also would put more money into the hands of recent college graduates, who are definitely more in touch with the current technological trends of the day than I am with my 20 yo comp sci degree, and probably more so than those who have captured the vast majority of wealth and power and are now just sitting on it, or use it to prevent advancements in society, energy, and scientific endeavors.
The inertia that this has created frustrates me deeply. Of course there is value to a broad liberal education that includes STEM, philosophy and art. That should be obvious. The fact that our economic system cannot reward the great effort that people go through to get them is a failure of the economic system, not of the education system (edit: there is plenty to condemn in the education system, for instance the cost, and the fact that many college degrees are only job preparation programs now, and the general free market/business take over of education).
The "employers" are at fault. Until we can release the stagnation of monetary flows in the US, we are going to have these issues. Unfortunately, based on the current state of regulation, I imagine that the monetary flows that are most likely to occur will be the allowance of those already wealthy to take their money elsewhere. Reading Foreign Policy magazine has made me aware of what it will mean to live in a waning US, and this is obviously a symptom.
>a very small elite that are fearful of taking _real_ risk.
Shouldn't it be the opposite? If I was worth a gajillion dollars, I could spread it over many many bets. That diversification would let me take higher risk bets compare to if that gajillion was spread over a larger number of people.
Once you have enough wealth, you can find better, less risky bets which, while they might not move the cultural needle, will be able to make a guaranteed profit.
A bit like the House of Mouse making sequels and remakes, rather than taking a risk on a newcomer or interesting (and therefore risky) concept film.
It doesn't mean anything. It just is. My primary concern is human welfare, and I always try to argue, as logically as possible, in defense of human welfare, or at least the way it will best be achieved, which is an opinion. It means nothing other than I have a specific view on human compassion that I believe the Western world could have achieved.
Regardless, widespread education is of tantamount importance. It will give our society greater meaning.
I haven't yet read the article, but just from the name it brings to mind something I've been seriously considering lately:
I've been thinking about leaving my job fixing computers, networks, and servers at an MSP-like business, and getting a basic factory job.
Why? Because in my town, factory workers are making more per hour than I do, they get overtime, and they get full benefits and good vacation packages. Meanwhile I'm overtime exempt for a decent wage (but compared to what these "simple" factory jobs are paying, it's peanuts), no benefits at all except a small stipend to help with health insurance, and a shitty vacation policy (normal-ish by american standards, however).
Sure, they work 12 hour shifts, yeah that sounds hard. But: I work 10 hour shifts so it's not that big of a difference.... and they also work four days a week where I work my ten hours M-F plus an extra 5 every other Saturday (running a storefront with a small number of employees sucks). The exception is when they're in crunch mode and working overtime, but they're getting beaucoup bucks for those overtime hours where I get zilch extra.
The kicker here is that this is all something I could do without leaving where I live. To get a better paying IT job, I'd have to move, which at this exact moment, I'm not able to do.
This really just sounds like you need to unionise. The conditions of the factory workers were hard fought for and they display an understanding of the value that they bring to their company. This is absolutely something IT workers around the world need to recognise and begin to organise for for when the market isn't quite so good for IT workers.
Rural South Dakota; not one of the small farming towns but not a huge city, either (one of the larger ones in the state, but that doesn't mean much). That's about as detailed as I'd like to go at the moment.
My family are all in this town, I like it here, cost of living is cheap(ish). And because of my own bad decisions regarding student debt, credit cards, and just generally not being good with money ten years ago, I'm still working off my debts - the end result is that I'd have to already have a good job lined up in order to move (I couldn't afford it otherwise), but I have never heard back from any companies out of state, when I applied using my current address.
Stuff like this is why I have a problem questioning the value of a college degree. Even if you never need what you learned during college the degree is still an entrance ticket to a lot of jobs. If you don’t go to college you are handicapping yourself. It’s just bad advice not to go to college.
Positions in factories are changing. My friend works in robotic welding. The old job of welder, a skilled trade that you learned as an apprentice on the job, is being phased out. It's being replaced by more complicated and more technical jobs, such as my friend's.
To get his job, my friend completed a 3 year program at a local community college. He learned about welding, robotics (obviously), a bit of control theory, destructive and non-destructive testing, metallurgy, safety certifications, and more. The latter bits of training are critical, since his job involves setting up and monitoring the robots that weld together the pieces of truck frames.
You probably won’t need to know about Descartes specifically. However, making persuasive arguments and writing clearly are parts of many jobs, and liberal arts classes are excellent training for those skills.
> Or you could fix the real problem and stop the lunacy of requiring four year degrees for positions that can be thought while on the job.
No one teaches at the jobs anymore because those people then leave.
You need to smack the owners and HR departments who can't get their head around the fact that raising someone's salary is cheaper than having to hire a replacement.
Unfortunately, as things stand in American business, if you want to get ahead you have to jump around at least every 5-8 years.
> No one teaches at the jobs anymore because those people then leave.
This is circular though. Companies don't invest in their employees because they leave anyway <-> employees leave for better opportunities because their companies don't invest in them.
Which is nonsense, as college can NOT, by its very definition, teach you a job!
(I guess some very specialized community schools / community colleges can.)
Or we could just not make getting such an education financially burdensome and we can go forward as a universally highly educated and thoughtful society?
Even if it were free, the idea that it would take someone with an existing career four years as a full-time student to pursue a different career is too much.
We need to start questioning bad assumptions about education. Shuffling money around isn't going to do it.
> You're talking about career changes as opposed to initial schooling
Yes, but it's the same question. Initial schooling is implicitly accepting a working age adult contributing no income for four years. We're just accustomed to it.
> what assumptions do you think need to change?
* 18 year olds are capable of making decisions about what career they will want for the rest of their lives
* Leaving (or pushing back entering) the work force for four years in pursuit of a degree is a nigh-universal good
* Taking four years of time / 120 credit hours is a reasonable and good target around which to structure degrees, regardless of what amount of knowledge must / should be imparted
* Training on the job cannot replace any meaningful amount of what four year degrees can offer
* Anyone can get a degree, and should be encouraged to do so regardless of whether or not they actually can or will
Not everyone needs to go to Princeton but everyone who wants a degree and is willing to do the requisite learning should be given the opportunity at a solid degree.
Further, outside of some niche circumstances, most of the people who wouldn't "thrive" would be much more able if the earlier systems hadn't failed them so spectacularly.
I tend to agree, but look what happened; supply went through the roof, and the four year degree is today's equivalent of a 1960 high school diploma. It's not like all of the people going to college are getting much out of it. It's just a thing you are told you have to do now. Most of my friends spent more time drinking than studying and got very little out of it. They would have been far better off learning a trade.
>most of the people who wouldn't "thrive" would be much more able if the earlier systems hadn't failed them so spectacularly.
Most? Maybe, maybe not. Some amount of them absolutely, but that's once again a different problem to solve, not something to band-aid over later.
The issue with education is that it's not just about the jobs. There are lots of other positive externalities that aren't as easy to account for. Things like financial literacy, political literacy, economic mobility, and a whole slew of intellectual tools that can help them later in life regardless of job.
Personally, I'm totally ok with making college just as mandatory as high school as long as it doesn't place an undue burden on individuals.
Also, we know that education rates skew heavily with SES. It's much more an issue of availability and quality of education than it is some kids being dumb or something...
To be fair, I like to learn new things and see no need for me to get a Master or PhD degree. I have no idea why I would want or need an alphabet after my name, be that for an extra half dollar per hour or feeling smug enough to not talk to the janitorial staff.
People go to graduate school to learn new things and, specifically, to learn to discover new things. A PhD is essentially an apprenticeship for researchers. You spend very little time in the classroom, maybe a half dozen classes or so over as many years.
If you go for the title or for the money, you're going to be very disappointed, very quickly.
"Fixing the real problem" is huge - you need to get hundreds of millions of people to change their behavior. Leading your life as if you may not have the ability to materially change the world isn't a bad idea.
Can I fix it though? Is my unemployment somehow going to fix the multi-trillion dollar pipeline that the education and business sectors have carved their way into?
For the individual I would just recommend you play the game. Just like with leetcode questions in SWE interviews, its stupid but you have to get a job so..
Many jobs require on the job training anymore because every company has proprietary systems or hardware, do things their way, etc. For my job, which ultimately becomes glorified data enry on paper, requires 3 full weeks of classroom training and a 6-12 month learning curve before you're considered at normal production levels. But hey, for new hires now 13.5 years after I hired in they want a degree and I can't move up because, they want a degree!
I bet if the federal gov mandated a higher minimum wage (say, $50k) for any position that required a college degree, they'd stop that nonsense pretty quickly.
This is exactly where the phenomena of "college-educated person who loses out on low-level job to a GED-holder because they're overqualified" comes from.
It's a supply and demand problem.
We've inflated the supply of college graduates, so when a company decides to hire someone, they choose the person with a college degree over someone without.
To fix this problem, you would need to stop the supply of overqualified people. You can do this by having more jobs, or by getting rid of the government guaranteed student loans.
As a reminder, high education in Europe is basically free (well, as compared to the US, I've met a few low-middle class people whose parents refused to help them pay the remaining costs involved).
Well, this depends a lot on the country. University obviously requires some minimum level - for instance you'll have to learn to read/write before you're accepted. The best students often get bigger grants than others.
Or you could teach the people about the hardships that come from accepting government-guaranteed loans to purchase an education that does not ensure income proportional to the size of the loan. But, yes, definitely get rid of the government meddling in student loans that has warped the market for education.
Generally speaking, cutting off educational opportunities for people that desperately need them is probably a bad idea.
Even if you did get rid of government guaranteed loans, companies would happily step in to grant people guaranteed loans in exchange for servitude over the rest of their lives. If they don't find a well-earning job well that's even better.
There were multiple non-government loan options back when I was in college that were just that.
Yeah, I'm sure you've never made a typo on a phone. You really believe I confuse 'taught' with 'thought'? You made a throwaway account just to leave this brain dead comment?
I think higher education in general is valuable for, well, any job. Especially because of the dire state of highschool education in the US due to a combination of factors. That's partly why companies demand a college degree because it's a guarantee of a certain level of performance (and wealth, for that matter).
There are only really two ways to fix this problem.
1. Make college education free. This includes trade schools for those that would want to go that route.
2. Government regulation to cut back on companies demanding higher education for blue collar work. Since this is the result of the free market (companies wouldn't demand that level of education if they couldn't get away with it) then you would have to add some restrictions on the free market to solve it.
College is fundamentally a positional good, it lets you skip to the head of the line for a lot of jobs. Not everyone can be at the front of the line. So while it's still good advice to go to school, it's the height of insanity to try to elevate large segments of society via subsidized college education.
I’ll never cease to be amazed by the number of people who think it’s obviously true that nothing of “fundamental” value is imparted by education. It’s a flawed system, sure, but people do actually learn things and that’s good.
I agree, but what may be individually rational may be detrimental from a societal standpoint.
There's a compelling case that most college degrees are mostly valuable for signaling reasons. Most people use very little to none of what they learn at university. Yet employers still care a lot about degrees because they signal that the worker is most likely intelligent and diligent enough to successfully complete the degree.
Even if its mostly a farce, it's still a smart idea to play along. Not having a degree can lock you out of a lot of important activities. But from a policy perspective, the signaling model tells us something very different than the human capital model (which assumes that higher education is valuable because it confers useful skills).
If we're all just getting degrees to signal our good qualities, than its inherently a wasteful zero-sum game. The more people that get degrees, the less they're worth. Rather than talking about expanding people's access to higher-education, we should be figuring out policies to discourage people from going to college.
A thought experiment. Would you rather have a Harvard degree without ever attending Harvard or attend Harvard but have no provable record that you did so?
The overwhelming majority of people would choose the former. Which is pretty strong evidence that the value of a Harvard degree is the social status and credibility that it gives you, not the things you learn in class.
Education has obvious value as a signal. I’ve never understood the step in the argument that leads to the conclusion that it has no other value, and therefore should be seen as “waste” to be minimised.
Actually it's not. An ISA can save a ton of debt and it's more efficient (less than a year versus 4 years) to get a good job. It's up to you to show you can execute. I know people at lambda school who work weekends and week nights building their portfolio, and have online followings already and are creating awesome projects. No need for a degree. I'd hire the best of them in a second if I were a manager.
What people mean by value here is murky. Some people are talking about intrinsic value in terms of education. Others, about market value, or overall value. If companies required four years of watching paint dry, would you call that experience valuable? It depends on how we're defining value.
Different definitions may be appropriate in different cases. Deciding whether to go is one case (extremely valuable, depending on discipline). Evaluating how useful it is for education is another (in my opinion, it's a pretty terrible value).
But how is this not a simple rephrasing of the broken-window fallacy? When employers require four-year degrees for jobs that don't, is any value actually being created?
I always wonder about qualifications and if anyone is paying attention what is really required to do a job.
I worked for a tech company that was acquired by some big valley tech company. They couldn't find any of the fancy CS degree folks they were looking for in the valley so they decided to "try" bringing a few of us over from this nobody company (that they had picked up just to absorb customers, we were just the folks left over after the layoffs because they didn't want to deal with supporting those customers themselves).
I didn't finish college, and I was warned that this was high tech stuff and they usually hire some pretty smart people to do it.
So out to the valley they fly me and some others and first day i'm absolutely overwhelmed ... by how simple a job it was they were doing, and some pretty poorly.
They were so invested in their resumes and being in the valley I don't think they really understood that day to day the job was basic troubleshooting. At one point one of them showing me how things worked asked "What do people do in Minnesota for work?" I told him "The same thing you're doing..." He found that hard to belive.
In about 6 months a handful of us from nobody company were churning through work at twice the rate of the other folks and with higher customer satisfaction scores (it was basically technical support)... and engineering was asking that critical cases be transferred to us "for efficiency".
Ultimately the job was customer support some mild technical skills / ability to learn / take good notes / ask good questions / the ability to formulate a theory, test it, and so on.
I knew dozens of people who could do that job at a third the cost, but they'd never hire them.
Years later I change careers and I sit through interviews where they hum and haw about my lack of CS degree again ... for a job maintaining their wonky CRUD app.
At one point one of them showing me how things worked asked "What do people do in Minnesota for work?" I told him "The same thing you're doing..." He found that hard to believe.
I've long suspected that much of what the algorithm testing craze (and other grilling on "strong CS fundamentals") in the current default hiring process boils down to is -- they just want to have some kind of vague reassurance that the people they're hiring are somehow "better" than the folks the other companies are hiring.
Even if the standards of "better" (and they means of measuring it) are - when we think about it - pretty dubious.
(To head off some of the tangential discussion that would otherwise likely ensue from what I just said: I don't dispute the value of doing some algorithm testing -- the point is that a lot of places seem to overtest these days, and it seems also that the only reason they're doing it is because they think that's what other companies - or at least the ones they'd like to fantasize that they're emulating - are doing).
IMO the 'testing' done these days for CS interviews is just a by-product of the "big" "OG" companies starting out with a lot of "top university" grads/students. So when those guys needed to hire new recruits, they wanted a way to screen them that resonated with what they were used to: rigorous testing and exams. So they replicated the kinds of tests they needed to pass to get into Stanford/Ivies/MIT/etc. and the ones they had during coursework and produced the basic idea of what SDE interviews are now.
And since that became the standard from the beginning, it's what remains now.
There are pretty clear differences in what a BS in Computer Science represents from different schools.
1st Tier schools a Bachelor's degree holder has most of the fundamentals of mathematics within computer science. Complexity of algorithms, complexity of operations on various data structures, models of computation, problems that can be solved with different models, etc..
20 years on from going to school it took me a long time to figure out a lot of schools don't cover almost all of that until you're working on a Master's degree or Ph. D. It's really surprising.
I think some of CS questions in interviews are because the degrees are so variable. I don't think this is a problem when you're hiring a Mechanical Engineer or a Civil Engineer who is licensed. All the schools need to teach to a uniform enough standard that their graduates can pass the licensing requirements.
CS is a mess. The Top Tier schools seem like they may be so much better that a Bachelor's degree is worth more than a Master's degree from other places.
Few real world programming problems are straight forward enough to test on. Or at least I don't expect computer science to turn into a physics/chemistry/math level of science.
I think it's hovering around medicine. Where there is a seemingly art form to deal with the realities of our too complex biology.
> Ultimately the job was customer support some mild technical skills / ability to learn / take good notes / ask good questions / the ability to formulate a theory, test it, and so on.
> They couldn't find any of the fancy CS degree folks
Fascinating.. I wonder if their creating a high barrier of entry actually backfired and caused them to hire less competent people?
My hypothesis: people with CS degrees are fairly high in demand, and on average are qualified to get much "better" jobs than customer support. This being the case, if you require a CS degree, you end up with predominantly the people who were unable to get a better job elsewhere, who are less capable whether it be due to motivation, intelligence, or something else.
Note this completely assumes that software engineering jobs have better compensation/benefits than customer support and I acknowledge I don't know your previous employer's specific case. I also don't want to knock any customer support people, so I hope you will excuse my liberal use of the word "better": I only mean better in terms of compensation and I understand there are more important things than money.
> Fascinating.. I wonder if their creating a high barrier of entry actually backfired and caused them to hire less competent people?
Depends on the exact question; degrees trigger Berkson's Paradox [0]. If you do a survey of company workers doing [task X] then there will be a negative correlation between formal qualifications and competence. That is because all the the uncertified individuals doing the task will have gotten in by being very, very good at it but the statistical outcome is that the certification becomes a negative competence signal.
I'm pretty sure I've observed this exact phenomenon. The tricky part is hiring unconventional candidates requires an unconventional process, which requires figuring it out, getting everyone on board, and being able to defend it to upper management. Requesting the standard resume and doing the standard interview allows everyone to throw up their hands and say "we did everything we could".
>I wonder if their creating a high barrier of entry actually backfired and caused them to hire less competent people?
A property manager told me once that if you are having problems finding good tenants that you should lower prices. Perhaps counterintuitive, no? He claimed that it opens you up to a much larger pool of people that allows you to discover better tenants.
Interesting. I've heard the opposite. Charge more money assuming that higher income individuals tend to have more to lose when it comes to apartment damage or getting evicted.
A poor family can make better tenants because they need the place to function and need a stable home. A rich college student with rich parents will sue you to death over anything if they choose to break the lease or a dispute arises.
Anybody who's heard or increased the rent like that must be in a rather prime location, definitely not in the country side for sure (little jobs and little tenants there).
My hypothesis would be that the type of person that gets a CS degree does not tend to be the type of person that likes dealing with customer support issues or that is even necessarily good at it.
I was in your same position until I decided to just get the degree. It was a positive experience that I now recommend to anyone in the same position, because:
1. The hands-on subjects will be very easy for obvious reasons
2. The theoretical subjects are going to be extremely interesting to you, because you will be able to investigate the theoretical basis of things that you've learned from experience - when a subject is very interesting to you, automatically it's less hard to study.
3. Studying at a relatively mature age is actually awesome! Studying feels more like a privilege and less like a chore. And the interaction with younger students is probably not going to be as hard as you think.
I took some time to take a class for a career change and I LOVED IT, i was shocked how much I enjoyed it, but don't have the time / resources to go all in at this time.
I completely echo your sentiment about taking classes at a mature age being completely different. I was not a good young student but I found myself excited EVERY DAY for class when I was going. It was so much fun. There were a few of us older students and we were always excited with a handful of younger students.... the rest of the students looked like they were greatly inconvenienced by going to class (admittedly I probabbly did too at that age).
The difference taking classes now vs then is night and day for me.
There was a core group of us who worked together a lot showing up early / staying to help each other, and it was about 30% older and 70% younger and it was a great experience.
I don't really agree with this for all people. I'm sure it's true for some, but I'm less sure that it's widely applicable. I got a CS degree from a fairly well ranked (somewhere in the 25-50 range) school.
For context, I went to school several years later in life than most undergrads, but I wasn't a developer during the intervening years. I came into university with nothing more than a hobbyist's knowledge, but through continued extracurricular activities and paid internships, I kept myself perpetually well ahead of the curve.
1. True, and the ability to complete over-engineer undergrad CS projects just because you have the time to do so is often a lot of fun.
2. Didn't work that way at all for me. I already had a better theoretical understanding than the undergrad curriculum was designed to teach me, so I was constantly bored. I didn't even do particularly well in the theory-focused classes because tests often asked to regurgitate what the class taught rather than asking for an explanation of the theory that was the subject of the class.
3. I find this one utterly baffling. How anyone could consider studying (as distinct from learning!) a privilege is totally beyond me.
The same thing happens if interested in a graduate degree. The work is not nearly as hard as it is claimed to be, and ones real world work experience dwarfs graduate school projects. When completing, one gains confidence as well as realizes what a load of BS these degrees really are.
There’s a world of difference between a college degree with no experience and no college degree also with no experience. There’s a significantly smaller difference between a college degree with ten years experience and no college degree with ten years experience.
I’m a techlead who is in charge of mentoring the juniors on my team, most of who have a CS degree.
There is a world of difference between work and a degree, particularly in the UK where a CS degree varies widely.
It’s a surreal experience to be teaching people who on paper blow me away on academic qualifications on the other hand I’ve decades of producing code that produces value, experience with business side of things and knowing how to get stuff done mostly on time and mostly on budget which by the standards of our industry is pretty good.
Not the only one at my company either, the senior dev/tech lead side of things is about 50/50 degrees/no degree depending.
The CTO and Head of Software Engineering are firmly on the a CS degree is only a weak signal at best that someone will make an effective commercial developer.
Not like we are doing crud of the week either, we have VR division, are solving complex problems and have about 4K employees (only about 100 devs though).
>It’s a surreal experience to be teaching people who on paper blow me away on academic qualifications [...]
Can corroborate this experience, however I do not think it has much to do with having a degree as much as it does with having the motivation to learn and excel. Our industry has people who are in it to just coast through life as safely as they can, and it shows in the interview and the day-to-day work life.
In my limited experience, the feistiest of developers have been those who have learned how to code well, and ship software at an age before they set out to do their degrees (and still went and did a traditional, 4-year CS degree).
I have had a great pleasure of working alongside some of them, and to this day I have yet to see this level of aptitude be matched by people who got into CS as a matter of course for a job.
Young people don't understand that succeeding in college and succeeding in the real world are two different things. Nobody cares if you graduated from mit with a 4.0. We care if you can succeed at the job and are worth the king's ransom great developers get in this market.
We find it "hard to understand" because job opening descriptions tell us that a degree and/or an excellent GPA are minimum requirements for anything that doesn't pay minimum.
And to pre-empt the inevitable "5 years experience is just as good," that 5 years can't come unless you either a) got that degree 5 years ago to get a job for that experience, b) managed to befriend a hiring manager, or c) started a company.
What an applicant can or can't do means nothing if they don't make it to the part of the hiring process where they can demonstrate it, at least without blatantly lying on their resume.
My path was working minimum wage while doing side work for people, eventually I had more coming in from the side work than the day job but kept doing both because day job at least covered the rent/bills eventually someone I was doing side work for offered me a full time job at enough to match both day job and side job, three years later I moved on and have kept moving every 3 years or so since.
At this point with my CV no one even asks about academics and hasn’t for a decade or so, the work/references speak for themselves.
I’d hate to be young in this market though which is why I’m so happy a good chunk of my time is/will be spent on the mentoring side.
Helping people get started in a rewarding career is itself rewarding.
I think the other option is just networking and having a good portfolio that shows off your skills. Granted that leads you to point b that you made as you will likely befriend people who are in positions to hire you or suggest to others to hire you.
Applicant A (me, the following scenario is literal copy pastes from email exchanges, with identifying information changed):
No degree, 13 years direct experience
Company: "Hope all is well, Ryan! I wanted to extend a virtual wave and thank you for your interest in joining our team. You obviously have many of the skills we're looking for. However, for the -job title I applied to- role we require a BA/BS degree as well as previous experience in a broker role doing entries and customs classifications."
At this point I forward the email to a friend
Some days later, after friend shot the CEO an email semi-chastizing him for demanding degrees
Company: "Hi Ryan,
My name is -name-, I run Commercial Recruiting at -company-. I was hoping that I would be able to connect with you next week as I would love to chat about the -job title- role in -city-. We have made so recent changes to our role requirements and looking at your background, I think you could be an excellent fit!"
Applicant interviews: asked "what is your superpower?" "what sort of major projects have you worked on?" "What major career accomplishments have you made?"
This was for an entry-level position that I've been doing longer than the company has existed...
Company: "Hope you're doing well, Ryan. I wanted to drop you a note to let you know that after discussions with the team, it seems we’re not quite the right fit for your skills at this time. " email received WHILE I was on the phone doing the interview, minutes before it concluded.
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Hypothetical applicant B: successfully exited a company unrelated, with no degree, and no experience in the field
Company: "hey, you sold your company for xx million, well you're probably not right for this position but congrats you're our new president of enhanced quantum user AI learning experience! Congrats, uh, you're the first person in that division, we were really impressed with the AI company you sold to Megacorp, here's 20 million in VC money, make is some AI!"
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Hyp0thetical applicant C: has a degree, has no experience, has unrelated experience in CS
Company: "hey, could you describe that project you mentoned in your CV, it sounds really neat. We see you also dod coding for XYZ Company, well you don't have any experience doing the job but that's ok we can teach you and it'd be great because you can go ahead and tell us how to improve our systems and possibly even do some of the coding yourself, congrats you're hired! Seriously though, don't worry, the complex legal paperwork and ever changing regulations isn't that big of a deal we'll just have someone help you for 6 months and check all of your submissions"
To be clear I don't mean to criticize the skills that a CS degree provides, nor anyone with one.
I wish I had the time to go back to school and get one. I would do it if I could afford to do so in a heartbeat. I wasn't a very good student in my early years, but during a career change took a class and found I loved it, but that time has passed for me for now (kids and career obligations for now). And honestly after I changed careers to a more coding centric career I certainly see the value.
I do think the differences you describe VERY MUCH depend on the tasks / job, and are not universal by any means.
This is complicated by PERM process for green cards. While many companies might not give damn about college degrees it is safe for them to advertise the job as if it requires college degrees. Just open the San Jose Mercury news and see all those job postings. There will be ads like "Want an individual with Masters Degree or Bachelors degree with 2 years of experience with courses in AI, Database and Web Programming".
There might be artificial factors requiring the factories to hire people with white collar education.
In fact after the company was acquired again later (well a few acquisitions later) I had moved on and was thinking of changing careers when a former coworker(s) and a manager contacted me desperate for help. I was only mildly interested but I agreed to interview at the new company. Their system rejected me for no CS degree, it was an automated email from their HR system ;) I had years of experience with some of their proprietary systems, but nope.
Before they could fix that glitch I had reconsidered and told my friends I wanted to move on (more so based on my personal interests).
> I'd be surprised if companies have a CS degree requirement for that job.
I wouldn't be as there are not a lot of 'technical support' degrees.
Someone once told me something to the effect of "the two people groups that understand a program the most are the developers and application support", which I interpreted to mean that just because you didn't write the program doesn't mean you don't gain close familiarity with its problem domain, inputs, outputs, behavior under adverse conditions etc.
I worked tech support for years and completely agree with that statement. I work in test automation these days and try to meet regularly with support to figure out what usage patterns are like and what pain points people are actually having in the field. My current company is too small to have a dedicated support team so I just get all the emails for the engineering team, but as we grow I plan on implementing something similar. Good support people are worth their weight in gold and I feel like they get dismissed too often in the field. It seems like that's starting to change though as I see better pay at startups for support positions.
It's good to hear startups care, although my experience from company to company is support is largely seen / treated as an expense. Lots of talk about support, but the quality of leadership and resources tell another story in my experience.
Wondering whether it was a second grade company and a low paying position in SV?
If you're any good and in SV, you try to move up role or move up the ladder, ain't staying in a low paying support position. The opportunities are everywhere waiting to be taken. It's kind of a brain drain.
If you're any good and in side Minnesota, it might be quite harder to move up.
>I knew dozens of people who could do that job at a third the cost, but they'd never hire them.
That isn't the point. The point is to blow up your valuation to multiple billions without making a dime in profits by making all sorts of vague and pompous statements. Like claiming that you only hire the best (and actually hiring the people based on their ability to make buzz) and then dump it on the unsuspecting retail investor from outside the Valley.
This will prevail until the public investors stop drinking the hypergrowth kool-aid and start demanding actual profits. May take another decade though.
they didn't seem to learn from the dot.com era, it if anything they learned better to pass the bucket to small investors right before the collapse to retain most profit from the bubble while hiding toxic investments into derivatives
College is only partially about getting educated directly - it's also about proving you can adult on some level. Can you get to classes on time and manage a schedule that's more complex than "be at this building for 6 hours a day"?
Of course that's a very poor proxy (some people live at home while getting 4 year degrees, etc), and often times college becomes more about signaling you're part of a certain socioeconomic background (with all the subtle discrimination that entails).
Either way, even if the things you learned are entirely irrelevant to the actual job, a lot of employers look to it as a very rough signal for "had things together", and have a set of beliefs about people who have them.
> College is only partially about getting educated directly - it's also about proving you can adult on some level. Can you get to classes on time and manage a schedule that's more complex than "be at this building for 6 hours a day"?
If that was the real requirement companies are interested in then wouldn't someone working variable shift at a fast food restaurant proving that they can "adult" just fine? Those jobs have very real repercussions for not showing up even once unlike college.
Tbh, there's so much variance between colleges / unis - hell, even between classes at those school - to use it as any meaningful predictor for such things.
At my Uni (my major, that is), there were exactly zero classes with compulsory attendance. What would happen was this: First 2-3 weeks were packed with students, then it would thin out, and two thirds into the semester you'd sometimes have only a dozen of students.
Come last lectures and class review, lectures would be packed.
That is even more relevant today, with video / streamed lectures.
I met a fellow at a Google I/O event who was working for a very large, well-known company here in Canada who was living in Ontario working for the company full time while he completed his CS degree at UBC. He would just fetch the coursework, complete it, and never attend a class until there were finals then he would fly out and complete them before returning to work. Attendance can even be an inhibitor as his employer hired him knowing his situation and because he was going to graduate with a degree. Granted this guy was clearly very smart so I can imagine why they accepted those conditions.
To echo this sentiment, I probably only attended ~45% of my classes throughout all of college.
With some notable exceptions the classroom experience was pretty poor and all of the information and resources were readily available on the internet. And if you're not the best autodidact there were plenty of study groups were students got together and figured things out just fine.
That said, I still think self-directing yourself through that kind of environment takes a lot of agency and skill, agency and skill that companies require for jobs where neither ageny or skill of that magnitude will be required.
I think homeschooling is an excellent hack given the current constraints of the system. Homeschooled students can move at their own pace (which can be much quicker than the standard curriculum schedule) and take courses at community colleges that double as high school and college credit (or just college credit - but that’s still time and money saved). I’ve seen smart homeschool students graduate high school years early with GE college credits already earned.
Another interesting hack is to go to Europe for college/grad school. My wife got a Master’s degree in 1 year in England, and could have spent only 2 more for a Ph.D. (And college there is often only 2 years.)
Modern university-as-business institutions try to keep students enrolled for as long/late as possible, so any approach that potentially counters that is interesting.
Is the socialization problem for homeschooling solved?
Every kid I knew in University that had been homeschooled had pretty serious issues with social skills, something I suspect is just lack of exposure to enough peer social interaction to learn how to get good at them. To be fair this is a pretty small sample to draw conclusions from.
I suppose there could also be a pretty strong selection bias at play where the only kids homeschooled in the current environment either have pre-existing issues or messed up family dynamics.
> Every kid I knew in University that had been homeschooled had pretty serious issues with social skills
I’ve heard this narrative before but have yet to see it in real life. All the homeschooled kids I’ve met were years ahead of their peers in every respect, especially in social development. They carry themselves like adults and interact with adults as a peer at 16 or even younger.
I suspect those who homeschool because they think their family and community has something much better to offer than the standard fare often do.
Healthy families beget healthy children, regardless of schooling option chosen. I’d argue that unhealthy/unstable families are the ones whose kids would benefit from being educated outside the home.
Homeschooled mid-life adult here (graduated high school in 2001)
Socialization is an issue because, depending on the size of the community you interacted with and how integrated your parents let you be with the rest of America, many of us who were more sheltered are literally from a different culture that people who live in the same country. I have worked long and hard to be able to socialize with people from ‘Regular’ America, and I still, nearly 20 years after I graduated high school, and more easily socialize with people from a Midwestern conservative homeschooled background.
I sometimes tell people I grew up the in the same geography as you, but not the same place.
> I have worked long and hard to be able to socialize with people from ‘Regular’ America, and I still, nearly 20 years after I graduated high school, and more easily socialize with people from a Midwestern conservative homeschooled background.
There is no "regular America". It's a big diverse country. We only think that "coastal elites" aren't part of "real America" because the effect of the Electoral College in the 2016 election is fresh in our minds. Change a few historical decisions about state lines and we'd be talking about how the election of Hillary Clinton proves that middle America is out of touch with real Americans from California and New York.
I tend to think it's a good thing when people from one part of the US are able to socialize with other people in different situations. Insularity is a lot of the reason we're in the mess we're in today.
This. I think acting like an adult is construed by other children as a lack of social skills, when it is actually great preparation for the 80-90% of their lives when they won't be children anymore. As adults, we remember all the "weird" homeschooled kids we knew as kids. But look around your office and see if you can identify someone as homeschooled (as opposed to any other, regular old kind of weird).
We're in the very early stages of homeschooling our kids and all we've noticed is that kids on the playground who go to school are surprisingly mean (obviously not most of them, but on average). Thanks to the internet, our kids aren't missing out on pop culture, but they're also not taking their social cues from the coolest 7 year old. Seems like a win-win.
The kids I knew weren’t “acting like adults” in college - they were off.
Didn’t know how to hold a conversation, they were uncomfortable, and had a hard time with social cues and basic listening/including people in conversation.
If I had to speculate I’d guess they had a harder time modeling other people’s mental states along with just generally knowing less what to do - which I think comes from having less peer social exposure to learn from. This creates a feedback loop of social anxiety which can be limiting.
Part of the reason it may be hard to distinguish homeschooled people in the workplace is because they’re largely not there.
It’s hard enough to develop comfortable social skills even with siblings and a lot of exposure. I’d be worried that removing your kids from an environment where they’d get a lot of exposure makes this even harder for them in the long run.
Anecdote for anecdote, all of the homeschoolers I knew when I was younger (N of about 5 or 6) who I thought were fatally weird turned into perfectly normal adults and I'm ashamed to have been so judgmental.
As for homeschooled people in the workplace, my hunch is that there are more than you think there are, and you don't notice because they look like regular adults, but I have no proof! I happen to know a few professionals who were homeschooled, but I never would have known without having had a conversation about our kids and mentioning homeschooling.
That's cool - I'd hope that's generally the case. This could also be more evidence that it is an exposure issue and it takes longer for them to catch up.
I'd be curious to ask adults that were homeschooled if they would want to do the same for their kids.
I'd wonder even if it's the common case they end up perfectly normal adults if it's hard for them prior to that.
I think I'd be nervous about being able to do it effectively for my own kids (both for the social and academic reasons).
That doesn't mean I don't think it's a solvable problem and there is probably a way to create a community of people to do this well, but that might just end up looking like a secular private school.
Don’t have immediate plans to homeschool our children (4 and less than a year). We have found that the 4 year old does much better with outside authority than with us, plus he is a highly social creature who will benefit from the relationships at school, we think. He has done great at preschool, although no plan survives contact with the battlefield. Plus, my wife, while an educator, has no real desire to homeschool, and my career is the more lucrative one so I am likely to be the primary wage earner for now. We are open to homeschool if circumstances seem to dictate it.
Anecdote of 1. I have many friends who were homeschooled who homeschool their kids, and many who refuse to.
Also anecdotal but I was the first child of young parents with no siblings, cousins, or children of parents' friends around for a lot of my life. When other kids did come along in our social circle they were much younger so I spent a lot of time socializing with the adults instead. I had to consciously context-switch my behavior to a huuuuuuge degree whenever I spent time with my friends at school and such because acting the way I did in a lot of my life outside school just didn't work. Nobody would have understood how to relate to me. I've always been very social and never had any anxiety around it but I still had to put in some work to act normally around other kids/teenagers after spending so much time with adults. And I went to a normal public school and did a zillion activities with other kids!
> I’ve heard this narrative before but have yet to see it in real life. All the homeschooled kids I’ve met were years ahead of their peers in every respect, especially in social development. They carry themselves like adults
I don't think you're contradicting fossuser's narrative. Being correctly socialized (evaluated as an adult) is being maladjusted (evaluated as a student). By this theory, homeschooled kids are well equipped to interact with the world, but unsuited to interact with college students.
I was homeschooled until sophomore year of high school. While there were certainly some benefits and I don't totally resent my upbringing, I do feel like I've had to work extra hard to develop my social skills. I know dozens of other homeschooled kids and I would say that the vast majority of them ended up having major social deficiencies.
I don't regret being homeschooled through elementary school as it gave me plenty of opportunity to explore areas that I was interested in, only mildly regret missing middle school since many of my friends consider it a miserable time of their lives, but I absolutely regret missing freshman year of high school.
I would very highly recommend that any parents thinking about homeschooling their kids very thoroughly consider their choices. So many of the parents I knew taught their kids at home out of fear and ended up negatively impacting their children's lives dramatically.
> They carry themselves like adults and interact with adults as a peer at 16 or even younger.
This is exactly the problem. They can relate to adults but not to their teenage peers. I'd bet they feel terribly uncomfortable at social events with only kids their age present.
You're absolutely right. I was homeschooled K-12 and grew up hearing praise because I was good at "carrying myself like an adult" and socializing with adults, but I had no idea how to make friends or socialize with PEERS. Homeschool kids don't have the opportunity to have "cringe" moments that other posters here seem to regret and feel are unimportant to kids (or should avoided altogether) because they're often admonished to act like small adults.
Which, I'm guessing, just leads to cringe moments as adults? Sounds like you've turned it around nicely though! Do you feel like you caught up eventually?
It can lead to cringe moments as an adult, but more crucially I think it leads to fear of cringe moments, so you never really get the chance to fail, look like a goober, and reorient and try again. It also makes it easier to constantly judge other people for social slip ups or for not having a perfectly predictable personality.
I think I've mostly caught up. I moved to NYC for college, which was sort of my socialization boot camp. I learned how to start and maintain relationships VERY quickly. If you don't learn to like (or at least tolerate) just about any kind of human, the city can become very lonely and difficult.
A very stubborn part of my brain still judges Very Extroverted people and, weirdly, athletes. I'm working on it.
I'm not sure that's very important. I cringe at a lot of my behavior as a teenager, and I was very good at being social. I mean, I'm still good at being social, but I had to unlearn a lot of the behavior that made me good at being social in school.
But imagine you didn't do any of those things and therefore weren't as social in high school. Would you be as well-adjusted as an adult? Or would you have felt isolated in ways that affected your development and left you worse off in adulthood? All the teenage cringe is pretty developmentally appropriate even if it's awful in retrospect.
I don't think I agree with that. I'm a big fan of Sasse's "the Vanishing American Adult." He points out that what you call "teenage cringe" is a fairly modern construct. For most of human history, teenagers were integrated into the adult world, not set apart and left to their own devices in the modern context of "school." It's a malign symptom, not a necessary developmental stage.
Yeah, I tend to think the world would be a better place if we made more room for young people in the adult world. I think kids are capable of a lot more than we give them credit for and I think setting them apart, as you say, erodes their ability to participate in the world and makes us want to set them even further apart. If we treated them like whole people who can do things, I think they would start acting like whole people who can do things, much, much earlier.
I totally agree with you on this. Kids can take on more responsibility than they're given today - see any generation that came of age before the last 15-20 years. It would benefit many of them enormously to do so (jobs, babysitting, driving, etc). I just think it's too easy as an adult to look back on your teenage years and project your current level of social and emotional development onto your younger self or teenagers in general.
Purely anecdotal of course but the kids I met in college who were nerdy and studious and sat out that kind of social jockeying in high school were the biggest jackasses in college because they hadn't gotten any of that out of their systems yet. I kinda think we need to learn a lot of this stuff from experience - we don't learn compassion by being told to be compassionate, we learn compassion by looking back with a more mature perspective on our own actions and how they affected other people. Middle school and early high school made Mean Girls look like a documentary and while it wasn't the best time in my life I learned how to be a much better person from those experiences where I was on both the giving and the receiving end of the teenage nastiness. People are going to learn these things one way or another because we're not all born saints; in my opinion it's better to do so alongside immature peers when the stakes are lower than to do it later on as an adult.
Edit: this is in reply to ksdale, not sure why I can't reply to your comment
The need to be a "jackass", "party"... in college and high school seems uniquely American (probably a couple other 1st world countries as well). Not only have we extended adolescence nearly indefinitely, we've invented a desperate need for people to embrace self-destructive behavior to better match pre-adult societal expectations. The 20th Century did a real number on people's personal and social philosophy. It's going to take generations to shake off "sex, drugs and rock 'n roll" as the primary motivator.
All of this is to say, that just because school better aligns an individual's behavior with that of their expected peer group, it doesn't mean that's a good thing.
While I don't share your opinion on "sex, drugs and rock 'n roll," that's not really what I'm talking about here either. I'm referring to learning how to navigate complex social relationships in a low-stakes environment. It's easy to roll your eyes at high school friend or relationship drama (because it's usually stupid) but you learn a lot about how to treat other people, how not to treat other people, how to expect other people to treat you in this world etc etc. It's a crash course in the complexity of social relationships that will heavily inform how you act in adulthood, like it or not. The context goes from "Susie and Bobby kissed at the dance and I was jealous so then I kissed Bobby and now Susie won't speak to me" to "I'm jealous of Susan's relationship with Bob, but I know that hurting Susan isn't going to solve anything because the problem is my unfulfilling relationship and acting out like that will only cause me to lose a friend." Silly example but I'm tired and I hope you get the idea.
None of this is stuff you learn by spending your teenage years exclusively with siblings (homeschooled) or chilling out playing video games 24/7 with a couple other quiet kids (nerdy/sheltered). When I say "jackass" I'm specifically referring to the guys who were like this in high school, who were invariably the ones in college doing stupid things at parties to impress their new friends and also treating girls like crap because they were suddenly thrown into a social whirlwind they couldn't handle with any level of maturity.
> None of this is stuff you learn by spending your teenage years exclusively with siblings (homeschooled) or chilling out playing video games 24/7 with a couple other quiet kids
To be fair, I don’t think anyone learns much that is important by being socially sheltered like you describe. When I advocate homeschooling, that is not what I mean.
Sadly, our culture has lost many of the (adult) social constructs that used to bring people together, leaving school as one of the only viable options for kids to be social with one another. Healthy homeschooling necessarily involves intentionally finding social outlets for kids and teenagers, which is harder than letting school stand in—but, I would argue—is much easier when the adults in the family are pursuing healthy relationships and social outlets with other adults in various walks of life who are raising kids of their own (and I don’t mean at bars, dance clubs, etc.; there are still some non-kid-hostile places where adults and kids can both socialize with peers and be involved in something they enjoy, like churches, volunteering, fishing, hiking, biking, sports, etc.).
> Sadly, our culture has lost many of the (adult) social constructs that used to bring people together, leaving school as one of the only viable options for kids to be social with one another.
I think you're onto something here, especially because teenagers these days reportedly spend less time with friends than any previous generation. As a 2010 high school grad I always find these stats pretty alarming: http://theconversation.com/teens-have-less-face-time-with-th...
Feels like kids get home from school and immediately get online - they mainly interact with peers through social media and video games, which is totally different from being face to face. That has to be detrimental in some way. Most parents probably work so much they don't have time to have their own hobbies to share with their kids so unless the kids are on sports teams year round they're likely not doing a whole lot of IRL socializing outside of school. I think more kids are being socially sheltered these days, homeschooled or not.
Homeschool kids don't have to be isolated though, and as you say the nerdy kids at regular school are the ones that exhibit this type of behavior (which isn't bad btw, people mature at different rates). I think it's not as difficult to socialize as a homeschooler as you think it is. In fact they're often at a distinct advantage for socialization because they're usually not burdened by hours of homework so have more free time to hang out with their friends. They also can have more unstructured play time during the day if their parents choose to go that route.
Good point about homework, honestly I didn't even consider that angle. The only homeschooled kid I know is my cousin, whose parents homeschooled him because they considered him some kind of special genius (he's smart but no smarter than your average high achieving kid). He's in college now and a nice kid but just feels a bit off. They didn't homeschool either of his siblings and both of them are much better adjusted socially. Tiny sample size and definitely biased but all three grew up with the same parents, same level of extracurricular activities, etc and the only one who's not all there socially is the homeschooled one. Obviously I'm a bit biased though!
I don't really mind the embarrassing things, I cringe about the times I acted like a jackass in pursuit of social approval. I was relatively well-behaved as far as it goes, but I still wasn't as compassionate as I should have been and I think I would absolutely have been better off if I had never been tempted to seek status among high schoolers.
A family I know just decided to home school their daughter because the school didn't have adequate support for her disability. (Tourette's)
The home school group will always include more unusual cases that didn't fit the public school mold. So the entire group gets labeled, when we really should just probably avoid stereotypes for that group.
There are just too many vastly different reasons someone could be home schooled. They could be preforming at a higher level than average, or lower. Yes in general they have less access to peers their own age, but I don't know what percent of "poor social skills" is due to lack of social exposure.
I have a friend who coached a club sport for high school students. They said that they saw, over their tenure, over 100 homeschooled kids come through their teams, and they can remember only a single one without significant social challenges.
There are probably a few jobs out there that do not require the ability to interact successfully with bosses and peers, but I'd imagine they are few and far between. Looking at "success" in a given job holistically, I would be inclined to argue that "soft" or social skills make up a nontrivial portion of the requisite skillset.
I guess that depends on what you mean by 'social challenges'. What are the expectations?
We participate in a homeschool community which gives weekly (if not more often) opportunities for both structured and unstructured (i.e. play) social interactions. Balance this with home-interactions between their siblings, kids in the neighborhood, and folks at our church, they interact with a pretty big array of people, and we end up getting to work with them on issues a lot more diligently and quickly.
Our group has a wide range of social skillset folks. From kids who are very hard-to-manage to visible gifted and talented people.
IMO, the "problem" only exists if you, as a parent, don't get involved in the raising of your children.
The cumulative effect of wasting (more or less) 8 hours a day 5 times a week is also dramatic. You can work to improve the social life of a homeschooled child, improving the education of a publicly schooled child is a much bigger challenge if for no other reason than the amount of time they're "stuck" receiving a rote and mediocre (at best) education.
I was homeschooled in a similar way described above, starting community college at 16. I was relatively sheltered and never attended any sorts of sports clubs or any other activities that would involve socializing with people I didn't know. I would say it definitely had a negative impact on my social skills, as if I was learning how to socialize 5 years later than everyone else my age. Working jobs helped develop these social skills to a point, but I'm not great at making friends outside of work and I still deal with social anxiety. I believe homeschooling is a great idea, but social development should definitely be considered. Not sure about the best way to handle it though.
> never attended any sorts of sports clubs or any other activities that would involve socializing with people I didn't know
There’s a big part of the problem there. If you know ahead of time that your kids will need lots of socializing with other kids, you can mitigate the relative isolation of homeschooling pretty effectively. Sports clubs, co-op groups, church groups, etc. — all are great places for kids to make friends and socialize.
> Is the socialization problem for homeschooling solved?
Is the socialization problem more due to lack of social interaction because they don't go to a school building, or more due to the kinds of people who homeschool being fringey types who wouldn't let their kids socialize with "normal" kids for fear of contamination?
Maybe I'm too "Midwestern" but my mental model of homeschooled kids is kids who were kept away from the sinful secular world by parents who really, really wanted them to grow up utterly immersed in one specific dogma, such that even the local parochial schools were too broad-minded for them. They're going to have problems integrating once they leave home, but it isn't because their parents lacked the opportunities to let them run around down at the local playground, and building more playgrounds isn't going to help them, because their parents wouldn't want them around "those" kids anyway.
That may have been the case in the past, but recently there's a trend for non-religious parents to move their kids to homeschooling to better their education and remove them from the toxic socialization that is public school (in the US at least). Many of these parents are well off professionals who can afford to support a family on a single income.
Sure. We homeschooled our kids. When we worried about socialization, we grabbed them, dragged them into the bathroom, and beat them up for their lunch money.
I'm kidding, and I stole that, but I have a point. Much of "socialization" in school is horrible. It's not quite as bad as socialization into prison, but it's socialization into a society that's rather broken. Why do we assume that socializing into that is going to produce healthy adults?
Me, I wasn't homeschooled. I attended a private school until fifth grade, and then public school. I... um... wasn't all that well socialized by the process.
I’d argue there’s a difference between socializing and being bullied - the former is just more general exposure to social interaction. I suspect the more you get of that the better, I also suspect you need it from peers too (adults are not the same).
There’s also some value in learning to stand up for friends and handle complex social dynamics which don’t go away when you become an adult.
Being removed from this entirely is probably not helpful, though obviously there are limits.
> handle complex social dynamics which don’t go away when you become an adult.
In my experience, most of the social dynamics of childhood completely disappear in adulthood. Adult generally don't spend most of their waking time with 30 or so other adults who were all born within 6 months of each other.
But most adults do spend most of their waking time with 30+ other adults (at a point in life when the differences between ages start to flatten out quite a bit). It looks quite analogous to me.
I would not describe a world comprised of 20 somethings straight out of college, 30 somethings with kids, 40 somethings with teenagers, 50 somethings with college-age kids, and 60 somethings with grandkids, nor people at any of these ages without kids as possessing anywhere near the level of homogeneity as you see in a K through 12 classroom.
> I’d argue there’s a difference between socializing and being bullied
And if you could get the socialization without the bullying, that would be great. But I'm not sure there's a way to do that within the existing school structure, so your point seems to be a purely theoretical one.
> I'm kidding, and I stole that, but I have a point. Much of "socialization" in school is horrible. It's not quite as bad as socialization into prison, but it's socialization into a society that's rather broken. Why do we assume that socializing into that is going to produce healthy adults?
True. Unfortunately, a lot of the dysfunctional socialization in school actually gets carried into adulthood.
Right, children shouldn't be socializing mainly with children. That trains them to interact with children. Children grow up to be adults, who interact mainly with adults. Children need to be socializing with adults. That is what most children lack today, but is much easier to do with homeschooling.
>Every kid I knew in University that had been homeschooled had pretty serious issues with social skills
There's a lot of confirmation bias going on here. How many homeschooled kids with good social skills didn't you notice?
There's also a potential selection bias in that parents maybe be more likely to homeschool kids that have social issues because they have social issues and don't fit in at school.
Keep in mind that the reason people homeschool has changed a lot in the past decade. It used to be primarily religious reasons, but there's been a massive uptick of non-religious parents moving to homeschooling to better their child's education and get them out of the toxic school environment.
Unless you're quite young, it's doubtful that you've interacted with many of these next-gen homeschool kids.
>To be fair this is a pretty small sample to draw conclusions from.
I think it's pretty likely given that statement and the small population of home-schooled kids to begin with, that confirmation bias explains your entire experience.
But let's assume it doesn't. Home-schooled kids who do have good social skills are likely to realize that there is a bias against them and thus they aren't likely to advertise that they were home-schooled.
No, at least not universally. My cousins growing up were all homeschooled, and all creepy to be around. One basically never grew up despite pushing 30, another went off to college and OD'd the first week. The other two are nice people who still live at home but feel a little 'babified' to be around. Fast forward to today, just moved in next to a home-schooled family. Parents are really nice people, but their kids remind me exactly of the eldest cousin...something just 'off' when you interact with them. I hope for their own sake they grow out of it.
It isn't "solved" in the sense that there isn't a newly found method of making somebody who stays at home with siblings all day automatically more social.
But all the home-schooling communities I know of solve this problem by making sure they participate in exactly that - a community. This is more often that not tied to a church, but not always. But multiple (5+) families that all have the same approach to home schooling regularly let their kids go to each other's homes for different lessons etc. Then you add the church component and they get exposed to a broader number of families who also could be doing similar things.
You don't end up with kids that are party animals, but you do end up with kids that are very articulate, talk like adults, can read social cues, and all things considered, more well rounded human beings than the average public school attendee. Does it always work out? No, but I'd say if you have the energy and passion, you'll get a better result.
I personally don't have kids (yet) , but if I did, it would be a toss up between a good private school and home schooling.
People meet partners at all sorts of places. Sure, some meet them in high school, but I don't think that's the norm. College is far more common a place to meet, and homeschoolers still go to college. Or work. Or parties. Homeschooling just replaces most of your school years, which to be honest, isn't a great time to be making decisions about choosing life partners.
> Is the socialization problem for homeschooling solved?
Really? All the homeschooled kids I met at our top-ranked STEM college were way advanced technically compared to the other students and are now all married, with children, while the 'regular' kids are still dating around, no kids, no families.
Perhaps homeschooled kids don't fit in to overall American socialization, but given that overall American society is one of falling (below replacement) birth rates, increasing loneliness, more suicide, etc, I'm not sure that's a bad thing.
If done the right way I think home schooling is the way to go. I would occasionally run into home schooled people when I was in the Marine Corps. They were often times a little awkward but I think that that comes mostly from their lack of recognizing authority figures.
Recognizing authorities and hierarchies are what most people mean when they talk about socializing I think.
Not everyone can or should homeschool. My wife and I were both homeschooled our entire lives, and we are absolutely not going to homeschool our child.
I think many homeschool parents vastly overestimate their ability to educate a child. I know mine did. It's hard work and you have to cover all the bases, including socialization, or you'll be responsible for some pretty important shortcomings in your kid's development.
Yes, it was awesome being able to rush through my "boring" school work by lunch time so I could program computer games and read books all day.
No, it wasn't awesome feeling totally incompetent while trying to talk to girls or make friends in college. Turns out, all those "dumb secular public schoolers" were pretty good at some things, like having fun together and bonding.
I would not call homeschooling a "hack". It's an alternative system of education that takes a lot of hard work, a single-income-bearing parent, and enough awareness to fill the gaps that your child is losing by being at home all day, every day.
Humans are social animals. Those silly side effects of school, "having fun together and bonding" with people outside of your family, are critical to growing up to be a well-adjusted adult who can maintain relationships and friendships - which are ultimately the things that make life worthwhile.
I did that - in fact, I accumulated enough credits to complete a 2-year degree before I was old enough to have finished high school. On the whole, I don’t think it was a good thing and I wouldn’t recommend it. My GPA wasn’t exactly stellar (calculus really hurt my average), so I couldn’t use that credit to transfer to a great school. When you graduate, nobody cares how old you were when you took the classes (it wouldn’t even occur to them to ask): what matters is where you went to school and what your GPA was.
It stops mattering after about 5 years, being overtaken by where you've worked in the past - although there's a slight ripple effect there, since where you work right after college depends a bit on your GPA. I do wonder how big a difference really GPA makes in the long run, but a higher one is definitely better than a lower one ; )
I suspect it's like a lot of things. That first job ripple effect helps out in the beginning and then the differences between high and low gpa average out over time.
Like kids in headstart or Pre-K programs. They start out ahead of their peers in kindergarten, bit those differences are completely gone by second or third grade.
Homeschooling as a 'hack' requires your family to be able to afford having one person become a teacher at home as their full time job essentially. For families working two full time jobs, this isn't really an option.
In general that sort of thing would probably be better served going to highschool and taking community college classes on the side, which is what I did when I was growing up.
Yes. This usually only works in an US household where one parent earns six-figures or more. Most people simply are too indentured to five-figure jobs (money and healthcare) to pull this off.
What also works with theis having a city "efficiency" (tiny) dwelling for the working parent and a cheaper house/homestead in a suburban/rural area to raise a family. Preferably, in the office area on weekdays/commuting home for weekends and 50% telecommuting/50% office for 1 or 2 weeks at a time. For these folks who don't make $300k+, living in a big city full time would be unwise. For almost everyone, Commuting long distances in an ICE solo-occupant vehicle is unwise.
Public schools employ eachers that teach at more-or-less the speed of the slowest student, where the time of the teacher is divided n-ways. If a student can learn more quickly than that of the slowest student in the public school or with anything-but-the-least-divided-attention, then the home-schooling adult would not need to be 'full-time'.
The tone of the comment is a little harsh but the idea is right. Moving to another continent, to another country with different traditions, history, and culture is not a simple decision.
> "Mean ACT Composite scores for homeschooled students were consistently higher than those for public school students" from 2001 through 2014, according (PDF) to that testing organization, although private school students scored higher still.
Which is not surprising, since religious schools get to pick their students. I'm the product of 12 years of Catholic education, much of it supposedly high-quality, and expulsion and removal to the public school system was an ever-present threat. Not to mention, I'd already been implicitly selected into the school by dint of my parents being able to afford it, and opting to spend the money.
Selection bias due to "Of homeschooled who took the ACT and/or SAT":
1) The most religious are the least likely to be college bound.
2) "Regarding ethnicity, for example, 72 percent of the homeschool students were White, 5 percent were Asian, Asian American, or Pacific Islander, and 4 percent were Black or African American, while of all college-bound seniors, the corresponding percentages were 49, 12, and 13. The average highest level of parental education was notably higher for the homeschool students than for all students."
Same study also points out that 60% of homeschooling in North Carolina is for religious reasons.
The studies without selection bias show that homeschooling is inferior in almost all cases. The big problem being that the cases of poor schools where homeschooling would be most helpful are also the same places where the parents are least likely to have the bandwidth and resources to homeschool properly.
HN has an extremely high selection bias because they are 1) the most likely to homeschool for quality-of-life reasons and 2) the most likely to be earning enough money that a parent can drop completely out of the workforce to homeschool.
I've never heard of that before. Many homeschooled kids I knew were very smart, but definitely lacked social skills. I've never heard of them having FAR worse educations, especially compared to bad public schools. "Really poor public schools" are an incredibly low bar.
Socialization is a hard problem to fix. I know they try with after school sports/activities/clubs, but that's not quite the same as being around peers for 8+ hours a day. In non-homeschool, the children are around other children more than adults/parents.
My experience was that what passes for "socialization" in k-12 school is extremely weird compared to the same among adults. I wouldn't rule out that it is nonetheless somehow important to kids' development in a way other approaches aren't, but my gut feeling is that socialization among adults and a range of peer students of many different ages rather than mostly the same age +/- one year (how the hell, exactly, is one supposed to model the behavior of socially-successful older kids when one is rarely around them, or easily notice one's own failings when not exposed to amplified versions of the same in younger kids?) would be far better at turning out well-adjusted people.
It might vary by location. I grew up in rural British Columbia and homeschooled for a year due to a family feud with the local grade six teacher.
The other homeschooled kids I interacted with were homeschooled for religious reasons or so they could help on the farm. They were poorly socialized and poorly educated as best as my then eleven year old self could tell.
I was homeschooled for a while and saw a lot of the other homeschooling families via the school district resource center thing, which even the real extremists interacted with at least some. From my perspective, it was broken into three major groups: religious conservatives concerned with the moral purity of their kids, upper-middle class professionals interested in accelerating their kids as much as possible, and a grab bag of students from various socioeconomic stripes who'd had trouble with the standard school system for various reasons.
I was one of the second. My mom has advanced degrees in education. My dad's an attorney. I did fine, as did basically everybody else in that cohort. Even then, the impression my friends and I had was that the religious kids spent an awful lot of time on literal bible study and weren't so hot on "actual" education. These suspicions were borne out when it was time for the state standardized tests they wanted homeschooled kids to take - every kid from the second of those cohorts (and many from the third) blasted though them, while those from the first visibly struggled. The religiously-motivated cohort also managed to out-weird a bunch of kids who spent much of their time on mid-2000s 4chan as young teens, which is actually pretty impressive.
Anyway, I agree that the reason a student is homeschooled (and by proxy the resources and pedagogical methods available to them) is a much better predictor of overall outcomes than a simple homeschooled/not binary. When there's such significant clustering in a category, trying to make judgments only utilizing knowledge/stereotypes regarding the category as a whole is a good way to be misled.
I have a small sample size, but the two homeschool kids I met were brought up in a secular house by a Ivy League lawyer (at a nonprofit for farm workers) and a stay-at-home mom/homeschool teacher (which is two jobs). Although, the teenage girl did runway and elope with a 30-year-old for a while.
Maybe raising kids in the city makes them more streetwise, informed and cautious by sheer number of social experiences in the real world, and rural maybe more Turnip Truck? Like socialized and unsocialized pets? So goes the stereotype. Dunno.
College isn't two years (some vocational courses are two years, that isn't college though). Not all MSc are 1 year. And you will still need 4/5 years for a PHd if you do a MSc (in almost no cases is one year of a MSc a substitute for one year of a PHd).
Also, England's university system (three years, not two) is notorious for turning out unrounded graduates who are unable to think for themselves and know little outside of their subject area. The reason for a four-year degree is that you spend two years doing courses from other areas (inc. your own) and actually develop all the soft skills that are usually of vital importance in the work place. In particular, the ability to turn your hand to something new and manage is going to be very important going forwards.
College is about precisely the opposite of learning as fast as you can. That isn't knowledge that is useful in the real world. You need experience, and understanding.
> College isn't two years (some vocational courses are two years, that isn't college though).
An Associates degrees is college, and is normed at two years.
> The reason for a four-year degree is that you spend two years doing courses from other areas (inc. your own)
While some, especially liberal arts, four year degrees work that way, that's not really generally true except at the level of looseness in the meaning of “other areas (inc. your own)” where it is essentially tautologically true of any course of study. Many engineering programs, for instance, are intensely focussed on the central focus from day one.
Absolutely, though a lot of colleges do a terrible job of explaining that.
Employers often demand a four-year degree, but they don't really know why. They'll test you on your technical skills, but not on those "soft" skills -- writing, understanding requirements, negotiating, collaborating -- and then complain when you don't have them.
Such things are hard to define and hard to test for. STEM majors regularly complain, loudly, about the fuzziness of the classes that teach those skills. I believe that we could all do a better job of explaining why many of the most important things are hard to measure, and some of that starts with (for example) teaching programmers that their job is to understand what the client really wants. Which is practically never being able to sort a list in .02 milliseconds rather than .03 milliseconds.
I don't know if American liberal arts educations are any better than English universities at cranking out students who can think for themselves. While they do get an extra year, full of courses that should be able to help them think about and communicate about what people think and feel, they often treat those as blow-off requirements. The classes are often uninspiring. They are hard to teach, but I think we could do better at trying to show why the notion is important.
> STEM majors regularly complain, loudly, about the fuzziness of the classes that teach those skills.
It is easier, for some people, to be precisely wrong rather than roughly correct.
I agree generally that most universities are bad at producing students who can think for themselves (to be clear, my reference was to Scottish universities that do a four-year degree versus three-year in England). You don't need any extra classes though. Just create classes that test for this and doing classes from other areas will probably help to. Also, clearly, universities try to create courses in a way that limits complaining from students and makes it all about grades...which isn't helpful.
Back when I went into the vocational track in the UK at 18/19 it was 4 years doing day release to get to HNC level - that was specialist thermo fluids for the turbine/ aerospace industry - ironically all but one of us on the course was working for world leading RnD.
Now the same grade the equivalent of ASO (assistant scientific officer) is a degree entry Maggie Aderin-Pocock (one of the sky at night presenters) started out as a ASO at RAE post degree, and ASO is what Bob Howard was recruited as (Bob got screwed on that btw)
I have also heard it said the US has 4 year degrees as high school isn't hard enough.
I have seen nearly zero job postings for positions that could be filled by new college grads.
There are numerous postings seeking interns. There are quite a few require 1-3 years experience. There are many seeking qualified professionals. I have seen almost nothing that would permit a new college grad to gain a position.
This leaves me wondering several things. One, how did business manage to offload the cost of absorbing the educated but inexperienced into the profession back onto the people. You can listen to people in hiring or executive positions bemoan the costs of training new software engineers, but how did we get to a point where literally everyone other than business is expected to bear every cost of doing business.
And two, how do new college graduates find work without either creatively interpreting the meaning of "experience" (that is, lying), or just ignoring the requirements portion of the job postings to which they reply.
We hired about 5 new people in the past 2 years, some were still in college. The roles are junior developers or application managers. 2 were interns.
At the same time, I cannot fill in 2 positions of qualified DBA's for almost one year. That makes the posting for experienced DBA's to stay longer on sites, giving the impression that we hire a lot of experienced people and no freshmen. Not true at all.
Every big software company hires thousands of new grads every year. The caveat is that they recruit almost entirely from the pool of current college seniors, not people who have already graduated. Most competent grads have a job lined up well before they graduate so hunting for your first job AFTER you graduate is a giant red flag and most companies are going to be very skeptical about you. You aren’t seeing those postings on public job boards because they do most of their recruiting on campus.
The company I work for classifies all candidates as “campus” or “experienced hire”. There’s no category for non-experienced hires who are out of college, the company won’t even acknowledge that these people even exist because there’s no interest in recruiting from that pool.
I actually don't believe this. The idea that the army of webdevs that find employment for the first time were recruited out of school strikes me as silly. In addition, your response directly contradicts the other responses, so someone is definitely exactly wrong. This answer sounds less plausible than the others.
I don't think is really true, literally go to Google jobs/LinkedIn and type in new grad software engineer. There are thousands of open positions, all exclusively for new college graduates.
I don't know about google search results, which I wouldn't trust for something like this. But I just logged back into indeed, searched 'new graduate software engineer' and the vast majority, as in nearly every ad, was a thinly veiled recruiter ad, or an internship, or was an irrelevant result; 7+ years experience required in the first 3 results and many more in successive results. This has been my experience on similar job boards.
The issue here is just like how when a country gets older and wealthier, everything starts to cost more. It's not surprising.
We created a country where education started to be widely available and financially supported for a large fraction of the people. What do you expect would happen as more people get educated then? Companies wouldn't use a commonly available criterion to weed out who they want? Or develop technology that takes advantage of large numbers of educated workers?
In the evolution of our demography and economic history too, this is no surprise. We're no longer in a post-war growth phase where any warm body was suitable for filling the basic jobs necessary to fuel our growing economy. Other countries are in that phase, we are not. We have low growth, and for someone to stand out and get hired is now a higher bar. Our labor is expensive, so complicated equipment and automation gets used. And there's an educated workforce to operate it.
What company wouldn't use some available criterion to choose people of with more productive/reliable attributes? College degree is available, it's a not unreasonable proxy.
You're only addressing a few variables in a complex equation here. One of the big problems is the economic model that demands constant growth. A part of the problem with this model is that it requires constant population growth, especially to support the retirement of the baby boomers. This population growth comes at a cost to the proletariat. More competition for jobs means downward pressure on wage growth. More consumers means upwards pressure on cost of living. This creates a general movement of wealth in an upward direction. Sure the whole economy would collapse if we tried to move off this model, but perhaps this is what needs to happen. It's an unhealthy unsustainable model anyway.
Another issue is that employees jump around companies these days making companies less likely to invest in employees. People used to be lifetime employees and thus companies were more willing to invest in them with training and education.
> This population growth comes at a cost to the proletariat. More competition for jobs means downward pressure on wage growth. More consumers means upwards pressure on cost of living.
This is only true if the population growth accelerates (as in: the per-year percentage goes up every year. So 3% this year, 4% the next, 5% the next, and so on). If population growth is stable at a given percentage, then so too will be the proportion of the old to the young.
To give an exaggerated illustration, consider a population that doubles every day. Every day, half of the population is one day old, a quarter is two days old, an eighth is three days old, and so on. While I admit I may misunderstand the statistics, a quick look at the median age suggests that exactly the opposite is happening: The median age has been steadily rising since the 60s.
While constant growth is indeed unsustainable, an overpopulation of youth does not appear to be a part of that unsustainability.
> Another issue is that employees jump around companies these days making companies less likely to invest in employees.
Alvin and Heidi Toffler predicted this with profound accuracy in their 1970 book Future Shock. I highly recommend reading the chapter on Adhocracy, or for a TLDR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adhocracy
I think the idea is that if you don't want to carry heavy weights as your day job, you get a college degree. If you don't mind, it's easy enough to find work doing that without getting a degree.
I think companies just want to make sure you are not so out of shape that you will have health issues. They can use that as an excuse to get rid of a person with health issues so they don't have to deal with a person having medical leave.
My company, for example, requires us to be able lift 30 pounds. They don't have any sort of test or anything like that, but I doubt anybody (except maybe people who deal with printers) lifts more than that.
By french laws, “carrying heavy weight” («port de charges lourdes») means “up to 55kg” (for male workers). Doing so on a regular basis is way above “physical fitness” and constitute a serious health hazard in the long run.
While I agree with your point, firemen are a particularly bad example here since in France most of them are volunteers and there is no such restrictions on physical abilities.
Sure, and in France too, but I'd bet “carrying an average male” (almost 200lbs in the US, and 77kg in France) isn't part of that requirement, otherwise you'd barely see any woman firefighter.
> In 2017, 77,900, or 7%, of the firefighters were female. Of the career firefighters 13,400 (4%) were female firefighters. There were 64,500 volunteer firefighters who were female, 9% of the total number of volunteer firefighters.
Oh, that's interesting. That means there is a cultural difference between France and the US when it comes to firefighters. There are 16% female firefighters here in France, and among the young generation the radio is more like 1/3.
My father was the lead of the chemical safety lab of one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in Hungary. He told me and it stuck with me, how at the start (meaning 1990) he was able to hire from trade schools but by the end (early 2010s) he needed everyone to have a university degree because that's how complex every instrument became.
Exactly. Like IG Metal instead of AFL-CIO. Organized labor pushback is the only way to get fair pay, benefits and conditions. Furthermore, workers need to be members on the Board of Directors, as in most advanced economies. Finally, if you want to have a really good company where people care about their job, quality and the company, make it a co-op to where workers attain ownership and profits too.
The universal problem might be most tech workers stereotypically can't see the "big picture" of the value/power of solidarity, especially when many assume they're being well-compensated, when if fact they're being cheated along with everyone else except the owners and the extremely rich.
Most people will normalize and accept their current situation, including slavery, and keep doing the same thing while believing nothing can be done about it (learned helplessness).
I really liked the graph at the end showing output rising as total numbers of employees decreases. To me it was a good logical illustration of why you would need more specialized/educated workers
True. Bringing back manufacturing jobs looks a lot different than what your average person might imagine. You won't have 100 low-skilled but highly paid people manning an assembly line, it'll be 5 engineers and robots.
Yes. I know from personal experience. Some machines require programming cuts to specifications, measuring and reasoning about tolerances, and understanding the loss of precision during routine use.
It depends severely on how much individual corporations demand workers managing the machine be able to successfully troubleshoot and repair failure modes.
And, based on what I see every day, a license still doesn't always mean "drive[s] a car safely".
FWIW in NSW it's 120 hours logged as a learner and nearly everyone I've asked admits to lying a bit. It was only 50 hours when I did it, and most lied back then - mostly due to just driving until they felt ready for a test without really logging, then adding it later.
I think the license acquisition process is mostly sufficient. What is think is missing is re testing after. There are 80 year Olds who can hardly see anymore who are still driving. As well disqualifying people from driving for offences like using a phone.
60 years ago you could hire plenty of bright, talented high school graduates, especially those with poor English/History grades but good Math/Shop grades. Now the high school counselors push all of the bright, talented students and then some to go on to college. So you have to wait a few years and hire then after college.
It's a result of a much higher proportion of HS graduating classes going on to college.
It's funny reading comments from Americans on the perceived lack of value of a college degree. I've never heard this nonsense repeated in any other country on the planet.
Then again, I don't think any other country on the planet shackles its young to such huge levels of debt in the name of education. Is there a 'fox and the grapes'-type situation going on, where people are hating on something they can't have?
Having a Bachelor's degree or higher means that you're less likely to be unemployed, you earn more money, you have better health outcomes, you're more involved in your children's education, and perhaps most importantly, society benefits from your education.
It is probably because of the immense costs of many US colleges. I wouldn't consider my college years wasted if I wasn't saddled with tens of thousands of dollars of debt from it, and im not even one of the worst off.
Using the figures in the link I posted, a graduate with a Bachelor's degree will make $61k per year on average. So yeah, you may need to get into debt to get a degree, but you also earn more money with which to pay off the debt.
Being a naive European, I think education should be free just like universal healthcare - both of these things benefit society immensely. The sad thing is that those who have paid (or are currently paying) for the privilege of education or healthcare seems to be determined to maintain the status quo. Free stuff for other people is tantamount to communism in some people's eyes.
lol...if you say so. Five minutes on Indeed.com shows that you can get a $24k per year office job with a GED, so maybe you need to set you sights a bit higher.
Maybe the statistics are wrong and you're right, but I doubt it
Maybe in factories, but we’re seeing a real need for craftsmen in Denmark after three decades of university being the only “cool” education path. Mean while white collar students with less attractive degrees struggle to find work.
I’m not sure if it’s really blue-collar if you’re a plumber, nurse or an electrician, because my English is lacking, but we need those a whole lot more, even compared to people who studied the soft-IT educations.
"Blue collar" refers to the blue chambray or denim shirts often worn by factory workers and other laborers in the early 20th century.
These days, it's mostly "laborer" vs "office dweller". But, there are a lot of jobs in the middle.
A plumber who works for somebody else would be considered blue collar. A licensed plumber who works for themselves and can bill at high rates is in that awkward middle - they still have to do some labor, but can be highly compensated (by middle-class standards). Same for electrician.
Nurses are sometimes called "pink collar" - those jobs that are traditionally held by women. Teachers, clerical, hair dressers, too. But, like electricians, they are highly trained and, in the right position, highly compensated.
Nursing is the only field on there that could be considered well compensated. There's this mystique around nursing that it's some crazy well-paying position, but it's really not. When you consider the education requirements and the work involved, it's alright. $35/hr is pretty good, except you have to maintain a license, clean up peoples' shit, be nice to assholes, and get berated by doctors. Or you can take a huge pay cut to go work in a doctors office. (source: married a nurse that couldn't make it 10 years before changing careers)
Teachers make a bit more than the median wage, but most jobs require a masters degree to progress beyond a certain point. Hair dressers require licensing and a surprising amount of education (up to 1,500 hours) to work in mostly flat-rate jobs, sometimes without benefits. And clerical work is basically the lowest tier work in an office.
Not listed: dental hygienists. Also a traditionally female job which has crazy education requirements for mediocre pay.
Depending on your entrepreneurial skills, being a hairdresser can be a lot more profitable than you’d think. My wife’s hair dresser does exemplary work and has a terrific reputation in our area. She earns about $165 for an hour and a half worth of work, works ten hours a day, and is booked solid every day of the week three months out. This is in Texas, where the cost of living is not that high and I would guess she easily grossed around $200k+ last year alone. Yeah, if you just want to clock in and out at Great Clips and not be the best you can be, then it’s not a high paying profession, but for people that invest in their skills and learn how to market and build a solid client base, it’s actually crazy how much money some of them can make. I was very surprised by it.
Sounds like this lady is the equivalent of a developer with a popular App that pulls down millions. If $50k puts a person in the 90th percentile, then $200k is maybe the 99.99th percentile?
Yeah, the well compensated was about nurses. And I was thinking of specialty positions like nurse-anesthetist or nurse practitioner. Both earn well into six figures, but as noted on top of a ton of education/training.
Blue collar basically means anything you have to physically exert effort for, as opposed to sitting in a chair and using a computer and attending meetings.
Once blue collar work starts paying more than white collar work, it will become “cool” again.
Just about everything is require a 4-year degree or 5-10 years of experience for entry level work anymore. As someone without a degree, it sucks.
I saw an administrative assistant at a medical practice wanting 10-15 years of experience AND a 4 year degree and it was like 15$ an hour, similarly I've seen jobs requesting a phd AND experience with a starting hourly pay of 15-16$ an hour.
When you have a dime a dozen ______ Studies majors it makes it pretty easy to find. And having a _____ Studies degree is a good indicator of someone who is willing to sit and do administrative level work for at least 4 years without getting bores
Off the top of my head, when Lincoln was president, most women were homemakers and had a second to fourth grade education. His wife had a twelfth grade education and was considered "difficult" and her own son stuck her in an asylum.
An eighth grade education used to be very normal. In the Deep South, Blacks used to be essentially unable to attend high school. A lot of Black families moved to northern cities -- or sent children to stay with relatives -- so they could attend high school.
The US military invented the GED to give credit to literate members because it used to be very common for people to grow up on a farm and not finish high school. Now even the military treats GED holders like second-class citizens.
If the world doesn't have some kind of serious crash, demographically or in other ways, I imagine it will become increasingly common for people to have advanced degrees and "ordinary" jobs. With 7 billion people on the planet, more information is how you stretch limited physical resources and also how you constructively occupy the masses.
My dad was career army. He was born in the 1920s and fought in WW2. He was a high school drop out who taught ROTC at a college as one of his duty assignments.
It actually got him out of fighting in the front lines of the Korean conflict. He was the only guy in the battalion with all the necessary military schools. His bags were packed. He was supposed to ship out to Korea the next day when he got the call.
My ex was also career army. He was a high school graduate taking college classes while enlisted to try to stay competitive.
The people who actually want to learn would congregate around something that could be used as a decent measure for that and the party people could party and everyone would be happy. We’re near this (if not, we’ve reached it.) if you look at our GDP and what most people are doing for work it makes sense.
I am a "high school graduate" (GED) on paper. But owing to a life of experience and a early start in reading and general awareness of surroundings, I'd gladly go toe to toe with anyone with a paper college diploma for essential skills. And in any reasonable work situation, such as one where I could have several weeks or a month of lead time to get up to speed on the specific requirements of the job... I could score even on their own turf.
The current trend in HR seems to be using the Internet to remove human judgement and "the interview" from the front line of the hiring process. In its place, a machine-like contact involving websites, a sterile distillation process that relegates people like me to the "no callback, not even interested" queue.
What positions are you envisioning in this statement? I'm curious mostly about your statement that "several weeks or a month of lead time" is sufficient for requisite skills (unless, of course, you are implying it's a position that's substantially related to your existing skill set).
The premise of the article is simple, due to the evolution of factories, to get factory work you now require a degree unlike the past where the work was more repetitive and unthinking. They are not making the case there are to many college degrees etc.
It also raises the interesting case women (who get more degrees but have less physic strength) now have factory work opened to them.
The implication I read is the massive amounts of men who can't get degrees are in trouble and so are their families, since people marry at similar levels their wives will not have high paid jobs if any at all. New double income families now will become even richer, single income families poorer.
Take this from a hiring manager: college degree alone is not worth the paper it's written on. What counts is what you've actually learned. Easily 8 out of 10 people who nominally have "CS degrees" can't implement fizzbuzz on a sheet of paper. It's nuts. I don't get how they even graduated.
It’s also a legal way of screening out certain ethnicities.
Many Police and Fire Departments famously used testing as a legal screening method -against black applicants at the times- for what is a purely physical blue collar job.
Could some of this be due to increased amount of automation meaning the factory floor jobs are actually more technical because you're fixing/troubleshooting robots, rather than doing manual labour?
The confluence of lots of degree-holders looking for work and the decline in companies investing in internal training programs has (IMO) rendered the 'firm handshake and a job for 40 years working your way up the ladder' boomer story just about a fantasy on par with a Disney film at this point.
Cynical view / hyperbolic not researched opinion ahead -> Many companies see The Perfect Employee as someone who is overqualified and will burn both ends of the candle, drink the company kool-aid wholesale, do all of their training on their own time and never ask for raises or move to another company on their own, all while doing so for peanuts.
Each particular company adjusts that spectrum back towards reality just enough to hire people to meet their own staffing needs. That's why the particularly grueling companies like restaurants or entertainment venues have such trouble hiring people when the economy is doing well.
when will the reverse happen? College seems to have very little value added these days, so you would expect people with blue-collar educations to be able to take over white collar jobs.
I came to the conclusion that the USA has become a society which goal it is to keep every single citizen below a certain annual salary in debt until their death.
The over class doesn't want their mediocre children to have to compete with smart upper middle class people.
Thus most jobs and situations are engineered so you don't have enough disposable income to get a head. And if you do manage the tax system punishes you for it.
Reading the first few lines of the paywall makes it seem like the WSJ is trying to have its cake and eat it too.
>New manufacturing jobs that require more advanced skills are driving up the education level of factory workers who in past generations could get by without higher education, an analysis of federal data by The Wall Street Journal found.
Considering the 1.5 trillion dollar student loan crisis, it seems natural to tap unemployed grads for manufacturing work, however this isnt happening anytime soon. You dont take 50 years of denigrating trade jobs like ironwork, machining, and manufacturing and expect to hire a college kid whos been told tradework is the devils black hand.
It also implies college begets manufacturing education when in most cases it does not. Statistical Process Control, C(pk) ratios, and center process math can be learned on the job just as easily as it can be learned in college. Trade schools teach this stuff, but for fifty years they too have received a scornful rebuke from boomers pushing collegiate success to every kid, come hell or high water. It means someone who might have been a damn good welder wound up with a philosophy degree and enough debt to sink a city council.
And what of apprenticeships? Well if you have a good union (International Association of Machinists is amazing) you'll get on the job paid training and a rewarding career. On the other, more common hand, unscrupulous profiteers running auto body shops and HVAC will often tell you to "wait for a slot to open" for your apprenticeship. Until then you're mixing paint, buffing wheels, and basically never intended to advance beyond your hopes and dreams.
This might be the tradesman in me, but perhaps its wishful thinking...perhaps this is just a generation of older managers and directors hoping against hope that they can create meaning and worthiness for the college education again if they just demand it in every single hire. That somehow the blunder of turning your higher education system into a profit center will smooth out if you just make sure no one questions the validity of an underwater crochet degree. Or perhaps this is an increasingly terrified old-guard. Boomers who see what theyve done, and are willing to sweep an entire class of workers out the door just to make sure their college graduate kids have something, anything left, before they shuffle off.
I think that any minimum wage law should take into account the requirement of a college degree. If minimum wage were $15 nationally, then require at least a $20/hr or $25/hr minimum if the job posting requires a bachelor's degree -- not if the person has the degree, only if the employer requires it.
Job postings would stop requiring a bachelors degree, but the market wouldn't change. They'd still go with one of the 10 people that interviewed who happened to have a degree.
Ironically the managers in the factory are probably baby boomers who started working their way up from the factory floor straight after high school. Which is the way it should be today.
I don't agree that America is getting ready for Civil War 2.0 -- but there is a huge problem of 'Despair' in the US. There are, it seems, more and more 'roadblocks' to achieving the Good Life (tm). Working hard -- by itself -- is not enough. A lot of folks -- for whatever reasons -- will not get college degrees. Should that mean they are forever unemployed and unemployable? Or be stuck in dead-end jobs? If so, that's damning those folks to a life filled with Despair and Uncertainty - who may turn to drugs and liquor to mollify the pain. I've not seen a single viable solution to this problem so far. It is this unsolved problem that is mostly the cause of strife in the USA today -- and, unless solved, will indeed shred the fabric of society in the USA.
HN is not for political and ideological battle, and certainly not flamewar. It's for intellectual curiosity. Those things can't coexist; flames will quickly take the site over completely if allowed to, so we can't allow them to. Please use HN as intended.
That's not a statement about political and ideological concerns being unimportant—on the contrary, they're more important than most of what gets posted here. It's just a statement about what kind of website this is.
This is a discussion about corporate hiring requirements, not government hiring requirements.
I completely understand the anti-bureaucratic standpoint, but it is good recognize that bureaucracies can be found in organizations that are not "the government". I'm sure you can even find them in large enough families.
This is a horrible and vicious feedback loop, but it's hard to blame the employers, who are actually being fairly rational about their use of a BS degree as a filter (it's the new HS diploma). The blame lies at the feet of an uncontrolled government loan policy that has given the BS this new status.
College is eating years of our lives and is transferring vast amounts of middle class wealth to the education sector of the economy. In the US, it's probably the greatest misallocation of resources outside of our health industry.