America's Reverence for the Bachelor's Degree
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
As soon as having a bachelors degree became almost an expectation, not having one became a problem to be avoided. We have people borrowing money to go to school because they think they have to...not because they necessarily even need to. Many of the best programmers I know never even went to college...they are just interested in the subject and taught themselves.
At the same time, we have a public school system that after 18 years with a child...has not actually prepared them to get a job. That's borderline criminal IMHO.
I always wonder what the effect would be of transitioning public high schools to a structure closer to Cornell's one-course-at-a-time approach (http://www.cornellcollege.edu/one-course-at-a-time/). It seems like giving kids the opportunity to deep dive into one thing (actually, learn it instead of memorize stuff) would be more effective. At the same time, scheduling of classes that taught real skills would a lot simpler.
Just imagine a gardening and cooking class where you could teach:
1. Plant biology and genetics of seeds 2. Chemistry and Soil Biology, Composting, Decomposition. 3. Use geometry to design raised bed frames 4. Learn some vocational carpentry to build raised bed frames 5. Plant in different environments, track growth, production, measures in a scientific experiment 6. Learn to cook some different recipes with what you've grown as well as how different temperatures affect what you're cooking (caramelization of onions, etc)
In a single intensive class you can bring together so many subjects and life skills that seem otherwise unrelated on their own.
Heaven forbid you take it to the next level and get into programming a farm bot.
1. Plant biology and genetics of seeds 2. Chemistry and Soil Biology, Composting, Decomposition. 3. Use geometry to design raised bed frames 4. Learn some vocational carpentry to build raised bed frames 5. Plant in different environments, track growth, production, measures in a scientific experiment 6. Learn to cook some different recipes with what you've grown as well as how different temperatures affect what you're cooking (caramelization of onions, etc)
One of my kids attends just such a class in high school half of each day. What you have described is pretty much exactly what they do. They have a carpentry shop, a huge garden, a kitchen, a science lab, etc. It sounds great, but the teachers suck. All the students hate it and are encouraging other students not to sign up for it next year.
That really is too bad. Sounds like a great program but if they can't get good teachers, it is a waste.
What are some of the reasons why the kids think the teachers are bad?
I believe that is an entirely different issue. Our education system is not employing the best teachers especially in the STEM fields because we do not pay them enough. I know plenty of professionals who would absolutely love to teach but they don't because they can make 2x to 3x as much elsewhere and would barely make ends meet teaching.
I'm not the parent, but my guess if any is that it has to do with the teachers' educative background. They're basically trained to teach biology as biology only, mathematics as mathematics only, etc. without putting 2 plus 2 together and spelling out the day to day usefulness.
A corollary question with a similar answer might be why the education system in just about every country (all?) is stuck with "traditional" course separations, as in maths, physics, biology, literature, etc. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It is cool to do experiment once in a while or short experiments you are curious to know what happens. But, if you are able to read experiment based class means waiting till the thing you expect to happen (based on what you already read) finally happen.
I think you're mistakenly assuming the point of public school is to educate. I think it exists more so the proles have somewhere to dump their kids when they're working. The "education" happens to be incidental.
But yeah, there's an issue with the way we treat bachelor's degrees. I haven't found (in my admittedly limited experience) that it effectively signals anything these days, other than that you probably grew up at least "middle-class."
And it doesn't even do a good job at that either! Most public school start (830am) after parents leave for work and finish (3pm) well before parent's get off work to pick them or be home. Sure there are after school programs to cover it a bit but overall it's a pretty crappy schedule for a publicly funded babysitter.
As a parent, I can state that getting lots of exercise is very useful in persuading kids to go to sleep at a reasonable hour. It's not bad for the parents, either.
Works for adults, too (especially if you also reduce use of artificial lighting) though it can be a struggle to fit that into modern life—especially in the Winter, since kids don't do much running around at school these days and it's dark shortly after they get home.
Maybe it's natural for /you/ to get up that early, but it never was for me (the closest I came was waking up super early for reruns of Mr. Wizard, then falling back asleep).
On either saturday and/or sunday I'll let myself sleep until I wake up (usually 12noon-2pm). I'm fortunate enough that my first morning meeting is 9:30, and it takes about half an hour commute. My alarm starts at 7:15, and I usually snooze until around 8... it takes me nearly an hour to get going once up, and even then, I'm usually walking in the door just as standup is starting.
I'm amazed by the early-start types, as I've tried... It only made me really tired and funny for a few days, then increasingly grumpy. At 19, I worked two jobs, first at 4:30am, and second ending around midnight... I was a really grumpy young man by the end of that month (quit one of the jobs, just couldn't keep up with both).
Then I managed to find a job doing creatives/design, and fell into programming from that. All the same, in a lot of places "office hours" have been the biggest contention in the workplace for me. I get things done, I have high quality output, and significantly so.
I've found that if there are no major artificial light sources, and if I've been outdoors active all day, I tend to want to fall asleep soon as its dark. And I wake up way earlier, soon as the daylight starts to hit the tent.
No one you know is a teacher? I can't speak for the US, but many of my friends went into teaching here in the UK. There is plenty wrong with education but the people I know who went into it definitely want to teach and want to teach well. This kind of blanket statement is quite disrespectful to them.
You can see it in this paraphrased anecdote from a middle school science teacher: The principal asks me to do a lot of things. Sometimes, he asks very sternly. However, as a teacher, there is only one thing I am legally required to do for these children every day: take attendance.
Suppose you had the absolute dream of a public education system -- one that existed solely to provide a real education for the children. What would the actual laws around that system look like? Is it a misdemeanor to make a D on a math test?
It also ignores that there are a wide range of well-meaning (but probably counterproductive) things we require of teachers that are for all intents and purposes legal requirements. If your kids perform too poorly on a test, your school may lose funding, for example. Again, I think that crosses the line beyond which such mandates make sense, but it's pretty clearly intended to improve the legitimate education your kids get. If it were about babysitting, they wouldn't bother.
The accounting machinery is needed to get money to all the schools sure, but when that accounting machinery becomes the focus of 40% of admins... You're not running an education system. You're moving money around that happens to educate...sometimes.
But looking at that summary it's pretty clearly intended to improve schools. It might (or might not) be the wrong way to do it - but it's certainly about trying to give children a good education.
Without Public education or something similar to replace it is unlikely that we would have the high levels of literacy to which we are accustomed. Public Education successfully teaches most of the population to read and write English (including the children of immigrants whose parents may not speak English). This is a historically impressive feat.
1000 years ago the world literacy rate was less than 1%, 100 years ago the world literacy rate was less than 10%. Now it is roughly 80%!
It is clear Public Education could do much better, but lets not confuse failing to do better with failing to do anything or its most important job.
"it is generally accepted that literacy rates in the United States were quite high before compulsory schooling was mandated starting in the 1840's."[1] See the extensive citations at the link.
This is why I wrote "Public Education or something like it". We need education systems for literacy, however it does not to be compulsory or public if nearly everyone uses it and can afford it. It seems unlikely that these two conditions (affordable and widely used) would be met in our present society without public funding of education.
Note that in that article you link to they say that Southern Whites in the 1860s had a "56.4%" literacy rate.
So, effectively even at the subject you mention, literacy (english language communications), we are teaching less with 5 more years than we taught just over half a century ago (assuming that it hasn't improved since I left HS about 24 years ago).
I love technology... I love history.. and a lot of things.. that said, I think we're letting the core that is pure communication (reading, writing, and effectively communicating) is falling behind at the expense of being able to follow [INSERT_CELEBRITY] on [NEW_SOCIAL_MEDIA_PLATFORM].
Literacy rates have increased throughout the years: https://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp
You are absolutely correct.
The point of public school in the US has always been to 'educate' in the broader cultural sense, not in the narrow sense of learning a subject (or range of subjects) or learning how to do a particular job. From its earliest forms in the US in the early 19th century until it was widely institutionalized by the late 19th century, it was always explicitly promoted as a method of integrating into 'productive' society all the religious outsiders, immigrants, lower classes, Indians, Blacks--everyone who was not a middle-class, white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant.
This is still an explicit objective of public school, except that now it also has a normative function for the middle class--in other words, it has become the de facto normal condition of the middle class to have had a public school experience. That is why the defenders of public schools nowadays go further and claim that without having had a public school experience, a child literally has no place in adult society and is incapable of functioning normally. This is the single most common public objection to homeschooling, even more than fears of child abuse, child neglect, or educational neglect.
Strawman alert.
I don't think any of the homeschool criticism revolves around this extreme argument. It's more along the lines of - in school, you have to socialize with someone other than your family, at homeschool this is neither required nor expected.
Nor are there any standards or tests in terms of socialization. Thus the stigma.
There's also the issue that if a homeschooler is trained with a large body of questionable content contradicting public understanding, these children could be reared to have their own set of "facts". Clearly this is disturbing to those who agree on other facts.
>Strawman alert. I don't think any of the homeschool criticism revolves around this extreme argument. It's more along the lines of - in school, you have to socialize with someone other than your family, at homeschool this is neither required nor expected.
You make the exact criticism that you say isn't being made.
The public school system fails in socialization in many ways, and bullying, substance abuse and school shootings are symptoms of that failure.
Yes he did. I was a little shocked by that. Apparently the public school system failed him in rhetoric and logic.
Also, at the time we were homeschooling, there was literally no relevant research in the ERIC database by anti-homeschoolers--it consisted entirely of polemics about socialization.
At the time, education was a drain on agricultural families, so the child care aspect wasn't a benefit. City dwellers may not have employed their children, but child care wasn't especially beneficial since household labor without running water was substantial.
The modern phenomenon of public education as childcare is only made possible by widespread employment of women with children. The issue is best discussed from this standpoint, not a false idea of what public education was originally intended to accomplish.
I don't mean to suggest all credentialing is bad, obviously I would prefer doctors to have been to medical school and so on. but rent-seeking is a powerful economic force that often goes overlooked and is worth taking time to understand because it's so widespread.
Also lol at that username ;)
I have twice had the experience of doctors (generalists) looking up symptoms on Google and picking a site - with me there. They didn't even go to a school for learning how to search on Google.
People tend to overestimate the value of credentials.
The problem with that is, college teaches a lot of things that are not directly related to core technical competencies. It's very easy to learn programming on your own these days, sure. But it's a lot harder to learn public speaking, finance, management principles, marketing, college-level reading and writing, technical writing, time-management, political science, biology, physics, and all of the other stuff that you're taught in college.
Going to a university or a college, I think, is still a very important thing. It's not worth the money right now, which I hope will change, but I know a lot of smart people who didn't got to college, people working in many different diverse fields, and it's almost always possible to tell who did and who did not go to a university. Do you want to be laser-focused on just being a programmer, or do you want to have marketable skills outside of a pure technology focus?
To put it simply: it's easy to learn how how a computer works and how to program it to work for you. It's much harder and takes much longer to learn how the world works and how to make it work for you. For 99% of the corporate/enterprise jobs people will end up working, being the best programmer is the world is far less important than every other skill you learn in college. If we do away with traditional universities, we need to find a way to replicate that other type of learning.
remove autodidactic from the sentence and it is still true.
I think one condensed class on algorithms and data structures could have replaced the three I took if the low level CS classes had emphasized thinking about time complexity and planning before you code. If you're used to thinking about "I only have X resources, what's a not crap way to get Y done" then learning specific data structures and algorithms as you need them is second nature.
I think there's a general rejection of knowledge, and software development has a continue cycle of reinventing the wheel because a large number of developers have no formal training. This something we are now celebrating instead of looking down on.
On the front page today there's separately a 'America needs to reject degree qualifications' and 'How do we get a certified certificate for developers'.....
The main reason they didn't is because those topics are mostly settled and unchanging, which means they don't have to rewrite a new course every few years. There are easily 5-6 courses I'd rather have taken but some of the most useful topics were too cutting edge to make it down to a Bachelors program in most Universities. The curse of a cutting edge field I guess.
money is just fictional status points. if we really decide the thing is important there will be money for it.
it's not worth the time right now and that's the larger problem. there's no way to make more time and we spent waaaaaay too much time in school.
Disagree. For many, money is the literal difference between life and death. Every dollar spent on college is a dollar not spent on food or medicine or safe housing. Time and money, for a poor person, are exchangeable at nearly a 1:1 rate. Most poor people spend all their time trying to get just enough money to scrape by. If they had more money, they would have more time. Since they don't have any money, they don't have any time.
I don't know you or your history, but saying money is just status points indicates to me that you don't know what it's like to not have any money. It's far from fictional, and it's far from status.
Money is still fictional status points. That doesn't change anything about the nature of the thing. It's value is based entirely on social constructs. I call it "status" points because it represents how much "buying power" you are granted by your society. That's a form of social status. It is only very indirectly correlated to how much material benefit you produce. For example, a nurse who saves lives at a hospital ER is paid much much much less than a bank executive who takes phone calls all day. Do you understand my point now?
For fictional "status points" it sure has the ability to drastically change your life.
I would argue strongly that university DOES NOT teach anyone how the world works. Wet behind the ear college grads are worthless in most "blue collar" professions, for example. If you get a degree in English Lit, what do you know about the "real world" that a peer who has worked construction for 5 years doesn't know???? How much more knowledge about the "real world" does a journalism major know than a military veteran?
The first two years of "learning" at American universities are generally filled with bullshit pre-requisites that serve almost no purpose in the "real world!" The last two years are more specialized but hardly teach shit about the "real world."
You make good points about getting a broader picture, but the notion that the military or blue collar jobs are the "real world" is false, IMO. That's one aspect of the real world, it is far from a broader picture of it. University is supposed to present the other side, a far deeper picture of the other side.
And for the record... what I'm talking about is the pre-reqs. I'm specifically saying those pre-reqs are not bullshit and are the most important part of a university education. I just want to be clear on that. Job training is better left to an internship/apprenticeship.
Finance and marketing and math and science and English classes are the real benefits of college that you can't replicate on a construction site.
Playing devils advocate for a second...
How does college teach you about the wider world? By taking a bunch of tests on subjects being taught by TA's (if you are lucky) or professors that sometimes struggle with English?
Or
Cramming for tests and writing papers you don't want to write is learning about the wider world?
Find me the Engineering major that would rather take 2 semesters of humanities|Literature|etc or graduate sooner!
Find me the doctor students that wish undergrad was a like 2 years shorter! Fuck it, make it 4 years shorter and call it a day! Strait to med school if you have the aptitude.
> but I'm willing to bet one semester of finance would far outweigh the knowledge that construction worker has about why the building is being built like it is.
One semester of finance is craptacular, you wouldn't learn much. Better if you had said Accounting... but most students don't pick accounting. You would do far better listening to Dave Ramsey for a month, IMO. Seriously, where in the bulk of College majors outside of Finance can I find the requirement to take a finance/accounting/econ classes? I'll answer, NO WHERE!
The fact that you bring up finance is interesting because fully half of the Colleges today would go bankrupt if their students knew ANYTHING about money! Why would they go into such crazy debt for what they get in return? The subset of college majors that actually have promising career futures ahead of them are miniscule in comparison the "majors" offered at universities.
This isn't to say you are yourself less intelligent but perhaps you lack perspective?
Uhh... ok, if you want to do finance for a corporation or similar, great! I don't see much there about managing personal finances... do you? Perhaps if we had more personal finance and less about leverage, in the USA at least, we wouldn't have the crazy debt problems we have. Perspective.
Real world is managing both personal and professional. College isn't great at either.
[1]http://www.marshall.usc.edu/faculty/fbe/curriculum/undergrad...
Your definition of "real world" is extremely limited.
I've gone to college I agree with the GP that most gen. ed. college courses are mostly useless. Just the way they're structured usually means you never get a good picture of what you're learning and why. Instead, you usually learn to do a bunch of exercises, with little context about what the point of the exercises are.
Certain classes (particularly the calculus series and chemistry) were pretty exercise-laden but I don't remember anything else that wasn't somewhat obvious what the purpose was, or really many classes beyond science/math/foreign languages with much exercise-type homework. It's obvious with language classes why you're doing rote memorization. Calculus is pretty clearly an engineering weed-out gauntlet, and I have no idea why university chemistry is universally terrible. The context of humanities courses (kept separate from the occupational relevance) was usually obvious. Want to learn what different kinds of buildings are called? Take an architecture history course. Etc.
Mostly I remember undergrad classes as a bunch of 19 year olds who did about 2/3 of what they were assigned, and most of them took zero initiative. Sure, the first floor of the library was packed at night, but there aren't any books there. The stacks were basically ghost towns, and that is where the real learning goes down.
Any engineering intern can run some numbers and write a spec. Whether that spec will be easily implementable or whether it will encourage corner cutting in certain cases is a different story. Specs (building requirements, part design, etc) written up by people with little or outdated experience with building the finished product is probably the single biggest time waster in blue collar industries.
Think about that next time you encounter something designed with enough clearance to swing a wrench but not enough clearance to swing a wrench with a hand on it.
Absolutely. And military veteran knows a heck of a lot more about how army works. Neither of them knows enough about building statics nor how to evaluate whether ground is good enough to hold tall building. Neither of them knows about history of country the war was in, something you would expect from journalist.
People that do x know more about x then people who dont, but that does not make construction job reasonable choice if you wants to be architect.
Neither of them was forced to learn hundreds of pages of stuff every semester, something that makes college graduate more likely to be able to learn similar amount of similar difficult stuff again. Part of it is selection bias, but part of it is that good college makes you used to having to learn a lot.
I would expect a journalism major to be very good at media literacy which I consider important real world knowledge a construction worker or someone in the military would not develop over the same period of time.
It's likely that he meant things like policy making, some basic economics, knowing how democracy works, being able to recognize fake news, being able to figure out (faster) who you need to talk to about a problem (be it a person, or an institution), being able to state a hypothesis, gather evidence and update your beliefs, better understanding of systems and what makes them function and a plethora of other things. The pattern here being that these things are very general, allowing the person to do do anything they want, and be able to get better faster.
How many small business owners do not go to College? I'll answer for you [1].
[1]https://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/Issue%20Brief%202,%2...
Am I insane, or really bad at programming? Because with the exception of biology and physics, the other things you mentioned are significantly easier and more intuitive to learn on your own compared to say, computer science concepts and math.
I would say that real, fundamental computer science is one of those things that universities are better suited to teaching. Other comments seem to agree with that.
The point I was trying to make is that college forces you to learn a lot of things that you may choose not to study if you're learning on your own. And those things you're forced to learn end up being more worthwhile than the skills you wanted to learn, whether you realize it or not.
I did actually used linear algebra and mathematical analysis on couple of projects and if I did not had math background before, I would not be able to understand what I needed.
I discovered programming at high school. If the teachers did not showed it to me back then, I would not even think about programming as a possible career.
The value of high school and college was in having me to learn things I would not learned otherwise. The things I would learn by myself, I learned by myself.
All the education that came before that was to complement that on the job specialization. You start out very general (walking, talking, basic social behavior) and then dive into an increasingly narrow funnel of stuff that is somehow related to your future X,Y and Z that you will learn on the job, but is not not identical with them. Education is for learning the things practice won't teach you (an extreme example: knowing a bit about Plato or Cesar would likely be more relevant to making sense of Z than understanding the halting problem or being good at regex).
The issue I have with the requirement of a college degree that so many companies impose is that the degree proves nothing other than that the applicant can go through a long drawn-out process of getting a degree. It says nothing of their competency. I've interviewed multiple candidates for software engineering roles that had a bachelors or masters degrees in Computer Science, and more often than not, they can talk for hours about theories behind programming concepts or data structures, but when given a fairly trivial coding challenge, they fall flat on their face. When I graduated college, I was one of those people, but luckily I recognized that quickly and spent countless hours learning new languages and frameworks until I felt I could build a fully functional piece of software by myself.
In my experience, I often prefer candidates straight out of a short vocational computer science program or self-taught programmers to work on my team. Going 4+ years before actually putting concepts into practice is way too long. There are plenty of unaccredited programs that only take a few months and often churn out much more competent candidates than a four year uni program.
tl;dr: People spend way to much time talking about doing things rather than doing things.
I don't think you would get great values in those public speaking and business classes. I personally agree that people who want to do those things better just start doing it (although, the article tells a different story about the cook). Introductory science courses (which I would otherwise not being able to learn on my own) were certainly worth the price I paid for. I was in a public university and those 3-credit hours courses used to cost me about 800 USD per. There are not many other things that I could better spend my money - I think those are of great value (Although the MOOCs have shown that the price point for really good basic education could be set much lower, but with some trade-offs.)
Out of curiosity, why do you think you would not be able to learn introductory science without spending $800 on a uni course?
I had a lot of a-ha moments in college like that. That is to say, the example above is for something I knew that I didn't know, there were many a-ha of something I didn't know I didn't know. Science courses are often dense and not everyone can easily gasp ideas in the textbooks or online resources without help. I wouldn't know to look up and study chaos theory, game theory, and many other interesting ideas without a primer in college. Plus, being able to interact and ask and see as things progress when the professor explains the problem is quite worth the money to me. Again, MOOC can provide some of those, but with trade-offs (I can't interrupt the professor to ask something everyone understands, but I don't). MOOC was not an option when I went to college though.
I would argue that a bachelors or masters in computer science was not designed to produce programmers, in the same way that a degree in physics doesn't let you start building bridges. On the other, it's also hard to build bridges without physics.
Most of my learning in college came from following paths my courses "didn't have enough time to teach."
(I'm a front-end engineer now -- I learned programming on my own on the side!)
I took 2 of those courses. first year physics and english course. The english course wasn't even a requirement for CS, it was for math.
hacker spaces and universities strike me as nearly polar opposites. what do you think it is they're doing that's similar?
> 1. Plant biology and genetics of seeds 2. Chemistry and Soil Biology, Composting, Decomposition. 3. Use geometry to design raised bed frames 4. Learn some vocational carpentry to build raised bed frames 5. Plant in different environments, track growth, production, measures in a scientific experiment 6. Learn to cook some different recipes with what you've grown as well as how different temperatures affect what you're cooking (caramelization of onions, etc)
> In a single intensive class you can bring together so many subjects and life skills that seem otherwise unrelated on their own.
> Heaven forbid you take it to the next level and get into programming a farm bot.
Add in "the student is interested in learning about biology/genetics", and you have unschooling.
Maybe I just went to a great public school, but I could have easily done by first professional job at the age of 18 with no college. However, having a BS was a requirement, so I wouldn't have been able to get hired without that piece of paper.
You must not know that many great programmers. I work in Silicon Valley and most of the great programmers I know absolutely crushed college. That doesn't necessarily mean they went to top schools (which it turns out, is not a great predictor of programming skills), but they at least went to college, and most of them majored in a STEM field and performed well academically also.
I have met one or two who didn't go to college and were great programmers also, but they're by far the exception and not the norm.
The point is that non-CS STEM education doesn't teach programming, it just collects people who learn it on the side. Given the poor abilities of most CS students, I would say the good ones are also people who "learned it on the side".
For a company recruiter, looking for (any) STEM degree is a cheap way of finding such people. But for society, this is inefficient. And unfair on people from poor communities who never get that degree.
Level of interest is what drives learning and in this field that is a huge key.
That makes much more sense, even from a purely prior probability point of view. Thanks for clarifying that.
I also agree with your point that personal interest and initiative ultimately determines success in this (or any) field.
First you become forced to make loans easier (it only take a quick glance to see them taking sure and comfortable bets, combined with a little social Justice a statistics the govt. Mandates unsure bets). This open the flood gates of who can get loans, people apply in great numbers (combined with culture, and people not realizing what they're getting into). Which leads to a huge glut of college grads no one knows what to do with... With market pressure the students go for lower and lower positions. Which becomes the new baseline qualification.
So I would say these countries had a pre-existing moral ideal that everyone should have an undegraduate educaton, and then solutions (such as the US student loan industry) came about to implement that ideal.
>1. Plant biology and genetics of seeds 2. Chemistry and Soil Biology, Composting, Decomposition. 3. Use geometry to design raised bed frames 4. Learn some vocational carpentry to build raised bed frames 5. Plant in different environments, track growth, production, measures in a scientific experiment 6. Learn to cook some different recipes with what you've grown as well as how different temperatures affect what you're cooking (caramelization of onions, etc)
That's already pretty close what happens in elementary schools.
Yes, college is expensive and I absolutely think something should be done to resolve that. And certainly not everyone needs a BS to be productive citizens. But societies "reverence" for the Bachelors degree was earned. Historically, these programs equip people with the background and education necessary to advance their careers.
Like many people here, I have a BSCS, and if computing became obsolete tomorrow, I feel entirely confident in my ability to transition into many other technical careers. My feeling is that a BS should be designed to open up entire classes of career options for people. But I also feel that people who opt for technical training in lieu of general education shouldn't be upset when they find out they can't transition as easily into other fields that require skills they may have never learned.
I honestly think this article serves as a cautionary tail to reinforce Bachelors "reverence" more than it does to dispel it. A person who spent years learning the depths of Italian cooking shouldn't be surprised when people don't want him managing their businesses. Knowing how to field for truffles and prepare them in a traditional way is nice, but it's not analogous to knowing how to run the logistics of a business.
I wouldn't walk onto a construction site and expect the foreman to give me a job as a carpenter without some proof that I can do the job.
The big problem is, historically the very thing has happened and that's how a lot of baby boomers got their first job. The day after high school graduation, my grandpa walked into a factory and asked for a job, he was given one right there on the spot. The foreman handed him a broom and he started sweeping that very day.
The way the world works has changed far faster than at any point in human history, and our society is still struggling to keep up with that. But yeah, 50 years ago you could walk onto a construction site, ask for a job, and you'd be given one. No experience required.
Exactly. Most office jobs don't have an analog to "broom sweeping." Which is why they have educational requirements. One wouldn't expect to go from janitor to accountant without getting an education.
There used to be entry-level, no-skill "mail room" type jobs for people with little or no education. I'd imagine many Baby Boomers got their start that way (the same Baby Boomers who are amazed that their Starbucks barista has a PhD).
And offices actually do still have "broom sweeping" but it's outsourced to a janitorial services company.
Who outsources to a temp agency to cover absences and increases in demand
To subvert your comment; High school jobs used to be a thing. Whether running a successful lawn mowing business or working at the nearest construction site when you turned 16.
I say this and I'm 30. However, I noticed when I was 16 that I was the only one on the block mowing lawns; none of my neighbors started mowing lawns when they were 12. [ or that I'm one of the few that has worked on a construction site, even some.]
I don't know if the interest in summer jobs went away or if the abundance of summer jobs went away (chicken or egg), but it's not nearly as common at all. Doesn't help when underemployed college graduates are working at Burger King instead of high schoolers.
Low-level jobs shouldn't have huge, if any, barriers to entry. If a manager/foreman/etc can't teach high-school graduates how to do a basic job well, it reflects much more negatively on the manager/foreman than the high-school graduates.
Of course companies can have education requirements. I think the point that many of these companies miss is that a college degree isn't proof of competency, and "having an education" is not the same as being educated. Specifically in the field of computer science, there are plenty of people that already have the skills needed to excel as a software engineer, but they do not have the resources to get a college degree.
Same thing applies to bootcamps. In 2-4 years, the frameworks and concepts you've learned to implement web apps will have changed. In ten, it will be an entirely different game.
By real education do you mean STEM, medical or Law? Or something else?
Ah see you say that, but I know a guy who got pulled out of retirement for about $1500 per day by a bank who needed their archaic mainframe fixed.
Take everything you know about how nonsense the tech hiring/interviewing process is, and just for a second play with the idea the problem is deeper than anyone thought.
What if barely any employers have the faintest idea what they need from the workforce? No real understanding of how to screen for it at all? Limited ability to assess what portions of those needs are most effectively created through self-organization among the workforce at no line-item cost to the employers (school, etc...)?
If we, for a moment, assume that was true, we'd probably expect to find a world that has cargo-culted a definition of what a qualified applicant looks like. A person who is smart in general, and knowledgeable in a domain with a surface-level resemblance to what they would be expected to do at work. Enter the bachelor's degree.
Like any other metric standing in for something the user doesn't know how to (or can't) measure directly, the metric started getting gamed. Once "BS degree" = "employable" was well-known, and a generation run through that system from birth through college, then you have respectable news outlets writing thinkpeices about the value of a BS.
And if the person doing the hiring doesn't really know what they want, the population of people that just want to find a way for everyone to pay their bills doubly don't. So the next step of the dance is absorbing the on-the-job training that employers don't want to pay for, and rarely figure out how to do properly anyway.
What happens after flushing a generation of kids through the new process without really figuring out what we're trying to accomplish in the first place will be _______________________.
"my nephew was set to graduate from Maryland’s Towson University with a degree in political science. After six long years,"
Six years for a degree in political science. You have to actively try to take that long to graduate. Maybe he changed majors.
"Holding up their son’s transcript, his adviser pointed out that he had taken the same economics course twice—one year apart. My nephew hadn’t noticed."
Really? I've met plenty of people in college who would do things like this. They all had no motivation or interest to graduate. They were there just because their parents made them and could afford it. I think this defends the authors point. However, using two people who clearly have no idea how to pave their own path to a successful life should be used as an example to argue against universities and trade schools.
Maybe the author is trying to say its the high schools fault for not teaching them. I disagree. Everytime I've seen behavior like this it's because the student just doesn't care or their parents have plenty of money and know they'll be fine no matter how bad they do.
The article isn't presenting the two nephews as the same argument at all. The idea is that the one who went to college did what society demands, and it clearly wasn't the right move. The second made the "correct" decision, only to have society fail to reward him.
I'm not sure how you took away something different there, unless I'm just misunderstanding your argument.
"Unfortunately for Jeffrey, however, it’s very hard to make a decent living as a cook, even in the best restaurants of New York. So after three years of hard work and great experience but very little money'
and assumed it was all downhill for him too. I was mostly infuriated by the first nephew being used against universities.
It's probably unfair for me to be assuming so much about him but it just reminds me of so many people I've seen in my life and I don't empathize for him at all.
I disagree. Life circumstances can keep you from graduating as well.
I spent nearly 7 on a CS degree. There were a few hold ups. The biggest being until VERY recently, I was unmedicated with Bipolar Disorder. I would sign up for classes while manic, and barely scrape by or fail when depressed. It has taken me 5 years to get a proper diagnosis and find the right meds. Meanwhile, I still tried to do my best in the classes I was attending.
Another reason it took me so long, I attended community college and got a 2 year degree in programming I was told would directly translate to my BS in CS. This was not the case. I found that my university only took certain credits off of my AS, effectively putting me at about a year of coursework when I was under the impression I had 2.
None of this was me trying to take that long to graduate. I do take some of the responsibility for it, I could have done better to get out of bed and go to class some days. I could have done more research about PBSC's transfer degree. I could have fought harder for the right diagnosis when I was 18 and everything started happening.
The organization that promised to hire him ran the admissions process, set the curriculum, and after training screened him into a particular path for at least the first stage of his new career. He was surrounded for four years by people who will be his professional peers for the entirety of his career. He knows that the likelihood of him reaching the pinnacle of his profession is increased substantially through this network.
Obviously the military is well set up to do this. I am surprised though that other industries haven't attempted to build schools to train their respective employee bases.
There are trucking schools, mechanics school, cooking schools (as in the article). But the trades in general tend to be more of an apprentice system.
Finally, some specialized companies do have extended in-house training. But this sort of thing is definitely less common, in part because people skip around jobs a lot more so there's going to be a lot of free-riding on a company offering expensive training.
Don't blame worker "free-riding" so much. I'd say lack of in-house training has even more to do with the fact that companies are much more eager to lay off workers based on short term financial metrics.
Worker training (and loyalty to workers) is a long term investment that doesn't fit well in a culture driven by short term results.
It should. Not necessarily in proportion to the number of degrees, but having more degrees out there should increase the number of high paying jobs. Superior education should make people both more intellectually malleable and capable of creating value in unforeseen ways.
If it doesn't, it would be evidence there's something very wrong with the degrees.
But, today, professions are far more specialized than people realize. How much of what you learned in your degree do you still remember? 1%? of that 1%, how much do you actually use on a daily basis? and of that subset, how much of that knowledge is things you couldn't have easily learned on the job.
I know plenty of folks that went to Towson and the only thing that they could do after freshman year was funnel a beer. I know a few that went on to pursue respected middle class careers in tech, legal, education, and health care.
When will our youth finally start taking responsibility for their own actions or lack there of?
Ha, people have been complaining about the youth for 2,000 years.
> After three years in a college-based apprenticeship
> program and three years of solid work experience, he
> was still the equivalent of a brand-new high-school
> graduate in the eyes of higher education.
That's generally not all that true. While many degree programs have no formal credit for experience and have minimum "residency" (time in program) requirements, the latter tend to be substantially shorter than the normal time to complete all coursework, and many programs have, instead of the former, means to satisfy some portion of credit requirements without actually taking classes if you can demonstrate equivalent knowledge gained elsewhere (e.g., credit-by-examination.)
Can you name some of those programs? I keep hearing about those but can't find them.
http://registrar.calpoly.edu/content/stu_info/credit_byexam
http://admissions.utah.edu/apply/special-credit/challenge-a-...
https://registrar.ucdavis.edu/records/grades/credit-exam.cfm
Generally, you should check with the university you'd like to get a degree from to find out if they have such an option.
With that paper, plus her decades of experience, she was able to transition into a career she likes. She's still in corporate America, but not middle-management.
It's also worth noting that she's in a niche field. The program coordinator was accessible. It's a small program, cohort based, so relatively easy to ensure the student is meeting expectations once enrolled. YMMV when trying this on a more common subject.
Yeah, professors have experience with people like this. They're the students that stop lecture to ask a 5 minute long "question" that somehow hits the high points of their 20+ years of experience and doesn't really go anywhere, that roughly ends up at the same kind of "when will we ever use this in the real world" question that you'd expect from a 19 year old kid, when you're lecturing on rings and fields.
Most of my gripes with interruptions came from 18-20 year olds.
In addition, high school should have 'guest' speaker from different lines of work come in (engineer, scientist, mechanic, doctor, HVAC, florist, baker, etc.) and tell grade 12 students about their job responsibilities, how much money they make and advise students frankly about the job.
Only then the kids can decide with full knowledge what they would like to pursue and their expectations would be realistic.
The current system does not leave much in the way of learning things (or at least getting credit) later on. This is a problem, because your average 18-22 year old knows nothing about what work they'll find satisfying, or what work will be in demand.
You also don't know what you'll actually be learning. For instance I did management classes at a well know university. Did I expect to learn something about how to manage? Yes. Did I learn anything about how to manage? No, that's not what management class is about. I suspect many people had similar experiences with their classes. To be fair engineering classes are not about how to be an engineer either, so I don't think it's a science/humanities thing.
What you do find out in uni is that pretty much anything academic can be learned if you dedicate some time to it. Read a few books about economics, and you'll know the major ideas of that field, presented in a somewhat coherent fashion.
So what we need is a way for someone who's found an interest to be able to pursue that. You work a bit as a coder, and you realise you should get a CS degree. So you find a course, read, practice, do an exam.
What's important is people who've discovered this need tend to be in a different life situation from ordinary college attendees. They might have work already, family, and so on. So incentives need to align to allow people to learn things without tearing up their whole life.
1. Author complains her lazy nephew's approach to school (and resulting Political Science degree) did not result in a good paying job.
2. Author complains her other nephew's lack of a degree and previous chef jobs did not result in a good paying job.
3. Author advocates for community colleges, blames higher-ed for being "too rigid" for her nephews, and says how much better Germany and other European countries are at training.
1. Author has a nephew who was forced into a degree program he didn't want because he mostly hates school, but blue collar jobs don't pay enough anymore. Neither do white collar jobs for people who don't enjoy classroom learning.
2. Author has another nephew who also didn't like classroom learning, got a degree in chef's school and made alot of progress in the field. However, chef's don't get paid well either.
3. Author thinks maybe the problem is there isn't a path for people who don't like classroom learning and maybe Germany is better at this IDK?
Not to sound like some kind of socialist, but maybe the problem is many jobs don't pay very well anymore?
In this day and age, what we need is some sort of more granular description of education and experience. I don't have a finance degree, but I've gone through the Yale econ lectures online.... how do I reflect that knowledge gained when all an employer wants is where did you graduate?
I see granular descriptions like this all the time on certain forums, down to people listing their audacity courses, tech certs, etc.
We need to find ways to revive intellectual curiosity and a yearning for knowledge in the masses, not stifle it by arbitrarily tying it down with businesses wants, especially in an information age where much of it is freely available online.
We could probably eventually overhaul the system to that end, but I don't envy those trapped in the transition period.
> In-house tests are a legal minefield
Does it need to be though? What about 3rd parties providing tests and knowledge verification? There's been some developments on that front.
It's easier and safer for employers to use college rankings as a proxy for intelligence.
The fact that Americans are some of the least intellectually engaged people on the planet is not proof that we need better alternatives to college. We need better alternatives to intellectual disengagement.
What evidence do you have to support this? (Not implying that I have any to refute it)
It's the marginally-engaged folks that barely get into college that post-secondary education makes a difference for. And, uhh, they kind of treat it like a four-year party with less parental involvement.
IMO, the fact that Americans are some of the least intellectually engaged people on the planet is a cultural problem that is basically fixed by the time children have gone through primary education.
And the ratios I've seen are far more than 3-4 applications per position.
If you were laid off or moved cities, how many jobs would you apply for? How many of them would you be able to hold simultaneously?
Years ago I found a copy of "The Screwing of the Average Man" at a thrift shop. According to Mr. Hapgood, getting preferential consideration for jobs was always the reason wealthy families sent their children to college.
After WWII the proletariat class got congress to subsidize college so they too could access jobs that had traditionally been reserved for the upper class. Thus began the college price spiral.
Which, I should add, I'm not against.
Technology (streaming) enables everyone to have MIT grade education for free (theory part). Exams could be paid. The only labour intensive part of education is the practical part. This could be paid or community based co-study.
If you can't afford insurance then you're stuck paying out of pocket. By the "one price" rule, doctors have to charge an individual the same they charge insurance. An individual cannot strike a deal as easily with a provider as an insurance company can - so they wind up paying 10-100x what an insurance company would. Notice, that's not saying anything about what an insured person would pay.
There's no corollary to that for education. People finance their education (largely) with loans and up front. They're striking a deal based on what they expect their future income to be. That future income, by the way, probably won't be realized for the majority. For those it is, it may not be realized until 5 or even 10 years down the road. By that point, the loan payments have already started and may have already been scheduled to be paid back completely.
America needs a new economic model. It needs an economic model that allocates nails and food differently than it allocates healthcare and education. Right now, it allocates immediate needs the same way it allocates 'possible demands'. Financial companies estimate 'possible demands' on imperfect data across imperfect realities. Because those two things are not the same, they need to be handled differently.
But maybe the vocational training is better institutionalized here, so people can actually earn enough as a craftsman or in the service industry.
There certainly isn't profound respect or reverence for a bachelor's degree itself, from employers or anyone else. However, there is an expectation of social and to some degree, field specific exposure.
Perhaps the point of the article is there are far more useful ways to gauge someone's career/field specific potential than a bachelor's degree. And if there are more practical assessment tools than not having a bachelor's degree shouldn't be a barrier to entry.
- How to borrow tens of thousands of dollars without any concrete evidence that I would be able to pay it back
- How to google (arguably a good skill, but not worth a five-figure price tag)
- How to write small
- How to misuse big words
- How to misuse buzzwords
- How to use Dreamweaver (I later learned that the correct way to use Dreamweaver is to uninstall it from your computer)
- How websites were made in 2004 (this was in 2011-2013)
Things I was forced to learn after college to be even remotely relevant:
- Every single aspect of my job as a lead software engineer
That said, I would like to see aprentices rather than interns at my big software company.
Would you really want hospitals hiring doctors without medical degrees?
It already has intervention by the government.. this is called 'student loans' which prop up US treasury bonds..
That the situation of requiring expensive degrees further implies increased dependency on higher paying corporate jobs, in turn further centralizes economic power, increases social pressure to purchase luxury consumer goods, and also strengthens washington lobbying dollars doesn't hurt either..
Protected classes are usually characteristics that people cannot change (eg. race, ethnicity, disability) or that it would be unconstitutional to force them to change (eg. religion). Educational attainment doesn't fit either category so that would be a hard sell, politically. (I don't actually know how protected classes are decided; this is just based on my observation and could be completely wrong)
> The core issue here is that companies use degrees and education status as a filter and proxy for perseverance, intelligence, and skill,
Which implies there's a market opportunity for smart companies to pick up, on the cheap, non-graduates that they can determine, through some other filter, are smart, persevering and skillful (the Moneyball approach, if you will). I personally think it's silly to limit a person's career growth 10-15 years into their career just because they didn't go to college when they were 20. Any "rounded-ness" a person picked up then has long worn off for most.
That's not a white collar job.