I suspect the answer is that our culture is confused, we want people who are smart and well rounded to also be useful. And the ugly side of it is, we want clear class divisions. One would never refer to law school or medical school as "vocational".
I suspect the answer is that our culture is confused, we want people who are smart and well rounded to also be useful. And the ugly side of it is, we want clear class divisions. One would never refer to law school or medical school as "vocational".
Sure you would. They are 100% vocational schools. Their cost, acceptance rates, time commitment, and difficulty level may be higher than other vocational schools, but that doesn't change what they are -- 100% focused on giving you the knowledge and skills to do a specific job.
It's almost like they rose from the death of many for-profit technical schools (DeVry, WestWood et al.) and took their ecological niche. But in contrast to bootcamps, these for-profit schools were too big, slow, and ineffective.
You don't have to have an engineering degree to get a co-op job. The student gets paid well over minimum wage (and learns on the job) and the employers get financial incentives from the gov't to hire students. Its win-win for both the student and the employer.
Co-op programs are optional, and take place in the summer or in a gap year. The affiliation of companies hosting co-ops is loose, and the schools charge large fees for participating in these programs (with the exception of Waterloo).
Speaking from personal experience, results may vary.
Note that my degree is from a well-reputed Canadian school that has a "software engineering specialization", and as far as I can tell (though I did not take it) that specialization is indistinguishable from the main CS curriculum, and is not valid vocational training.
Hell, they aren't even focused on teaching you to pass the bar, which is why most people pay for separate cram schools.
Arguably, "a school one must go to in order to practice a vocation" can be referred to as a "vocational school." I understand that vocational schools are often thought to be purely practical and not theoretical, but I think this definition does a disservice to the reality of entering certain vocations.
Not to toot my own horn but I got a perfect score on the math part of the SAT with little prep, and I've tutored others on the same and only managed to eke out a little improvement. (In contrast, I've tutored math course work and had more success there.)
The math isn't very advanced, it's just a matter of doing it quickly and accurately.
The truth is more nuanced [1].
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/03/05/these...
Whether this is correlated to anything important in real life is an entirely separate question.
From a research-into-today's-hot-button-issues perspective, they are routinely slammed for being about cramming, but the effect of test preparation on test scores tends to be very close to zero when you look into it.
There's actual employment law that prohibits using IQ tests? I'd never heard that before
http://cdn8.openculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Test1...
The value and definition of "IQ" is widely disputed and generally seen as of limited relevance to the actual work and performance of that work (uncorrelated). Look it up and do some research if you're interested, this is just a quick showing of _why_ tests may be considered bad.
I'm not saying that IQ tests are useful measures of ability to do a job. I just wasn't aware there was actual law or precedent forbidding their use.
> If there is any sort of "test" given as a condition of employment, it must be relevant, standardized, non-biased, reviewed by specialists and approved, etc.
Wouldn't this disqualify a lot of whiteboard interviews too? Most startups don't have a standard question bank reviewed by experts or grade on a standard rubric.
1. http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2013/06/28/voting_right...
The real reason companies don't do it is because Fizz Buzz is a better test than IQ tests.
a) Whether you were able to get the work done. b) Whether you were smart enough to do the work well.
It's the combination that's important, not either single one. Employers want people who show up on time, actually care enough to try, and are smart enough to figure it out.
The college degree has a better than zero correlation to that. After you get the job it's mainly about performance and output, once you've been promoted a few times your college degree mostly doesn't matter.
On the other hand, I have known a number of people who used their self-identification as a nonconformist as an excuse for why they couldn't cut it someplace, whether it's school or a job or some interpersonal situation. It's a bad excuse because it gives the person an easy out for not reflecting on how they could have handled the situation better, or avoided getting into the situation in the first place. It also pushes all of the blame on other people, which is comforting but very rarely 100% true. We should all be our own worst critics, lest someone else beats us to it.
There’s another issue with using educational attainment as a proxy of intelligence: it doesn’t really help you distinguish among candidates who all have a bachelors degree. All you know is that they’re above some threshold, but not how far above. You can use the prestige of the school as a proxy for this, but it all seems like a hell of a lot of hassle when you can figure this all out in a half hour with an IQ test.
I believe the words "bored to tears" summarize the experience quite well.
While the majority of pupils get a standardized curriculum designed to keep their interest at a steady pace, pupils with a high learning capacity get no such thing. If they try to learn faster, it doesn't fit with the governance and management model within which the teacher must operate. Therefore, most teachers are at a loss when faced with these statistical outliers.
Also, other pupils may experience emotions of inadequacy and unfairness when a fellow pupil just blasts through the material in minutes that would take them all week. This may lead to the high capacity pupil being a target of some unfortunate group dynamics.
Since schools have no governance model for this, the high learning capacity pupil's school experience is essentially unmanaged. At a loss, society almost invariably resorts to platitudes like "No need to feel sorry for them, because they are so fortunate to be smart. We must focus on the pupils that struggle."
A few years down the line, the pupil's inner motivation may be completely replaced by depression, self-blaming or worse. Then the platitudes take a turn for the worse with blaming the pupil's willingness to work: "In fact, high IQ can reduce grit, since clever pattern matchers use their cleverness to avoid working hard on the toy problems of childhood."
Fortunately, my own school days are long since gone. Without blaming any person in the system, I can say: "Good riddance!" to this whole pitiful affair of how society treated me as a child.
Instead, I can draw attention to this problem by saying clearly that these are children that never asked for these gifts in the first place. Let's as a society realize that what we are doing to them is absolutely wrong and woefully irresponsible.
Fortunately, at least one western country has political attention on this right now. I will work hard and with "grit" to make sure that my experience and observations can help in creating new policies. In particular I wish to address how to practically leverage the pupils' own drive to learn without incurring social/peer stigma or ridiculous costs.
We are perfectly happy to identify athletic talent and enact systems so that the athletically talented are matched up with peers who share their gifts, but we mostly refuse to do this for intellectual talent.
I was fortunate enough to attend a program that handled this pretty well. Basically it was 120 kids from 11-18 who skipped high school and attended university together instead. It’s called the Early Entrance Program and it’s at Cal State Los Angeles:
http://www.calstatela.edu/academic/eep
The issue I face is that I am raising my children in Portland, Oregon, so this program will not be an option for them. Our personal approach is to home school instead. And I’ll probably investigate starting something like the Early Entrance Program at the state university in Portland here.
At least the graduate can show that he/she can commit to a multi-year long, sometimes boring, project successfully. A high IQ person could just leave your company after 6 months because "they're bored".
Also, agree that educational attainment gives you more information about a candidate, but in terms of assessing intelligence, it is a coarser measure than IQ. I’ve hired a few people in my day, and there is huge divergence in intelligence among college grads. For lots of jobs it is useful to be able to distinguish between not-stupid, bright, and ridiculously smart. Educational attainment doesn’t really help with that, but IQ tests would.
I think you're wrong about that,
http://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/sto...
Another way to approach this is to ask yourself: if not as a proxy for intelligence, then why do some jobs require a college degree?
https://www.hiresuccess.com/blog/is-employment-testing-legal
>I think that supports my point
I didn't say it invalidated your point. I'm trying to draw your attention to a specific area in your statement that is wrong. You can simply say,
>Higher education is used as a proxy for intelligence by companies
That's enough. Nobody will argue with you about that.
You may disagree with some of its conclusions (I personally am skeptical of its conclusions about racial differences in IQ), but to call it pseudo science is, I think, unfair. FWIW, Steven Pinker, who is about as thoughtful and level headed as they come, agrees:
https://mobile.twitter.com/sapinker/status/84691284703672320...
And, anyway, the point I was making had nothing to do with racial IQ differences. It was referring to what the rest of The Bell Curve is about (discussion of racial IQ differences makes up only about 25% of the book): how the US society’s transition away from most people working in agriculture toward most people working at desks has created a class structure stratified by intelligence.
It’s actually a shame that the book discusses racial IQ differences at all, because everyone got hung up on that and totally missed what is, IMO, a much more important point. And I think it explains a lot about current politics in the US.
It's my understanding that the main data presented hasn't been overturned or disproved (In-fact quite the opposite)
They're also very expensive to attend, and the most immediate value they offer is to get people jobs
I often hear people talk as if education was something that happened to them, then it finished. (Like learning is something you just do in an institution.) I guess training is more like that, teaching knowledge and skills for some particular task/role/job.
What? I suspect that it's typically, if not exclusively, those in the upper classes that want this. The ugly side of it is human nature is selfish.
I have known several people who went to medical or law school and every single one them went only because it is a per-requisite to becoming a doctor or lawyer. What is your explanation, that people attend these schools to expand their mind, and then entirely coincidentally, manage to end up in the corresponding career as though by accident?
Get real.