Hacker News Reader

Comment by theLotusGambit | Hacker News Reader

Perspective (anecdote) from a high school student: There is a real push for college. It's an unstated assumption that you're going to go, and the topic of debt seems to be passively avoided ("Don't worry, it'll all work out!"). We receive a grade for the college application process, so you can't not apply. College is still probably a good deal the majority of the time I think, but I wish there was some acknowledgement that it is less important in some fields than others. As for me, I think I'll take a pass on it, for now anyway. There's always time to change my mind later on.

View on HN

> College is still probably a good deal the majority of the time I think, but I wish there was some acknowledgement that it is less important in some fields than others.

I'm certainly not advising you what to do - I don't know you at all and you didn't ask - but speaking generally about the issue: I think the unstated premise that college is vocational training for careers is very misguided. College is the acquisition of knowledge, of cognitive skills, and of a personal foundation for life, and life is so much more than career, and you'll probably have several careers. In fact, I'd argue that if you are using college to train for a specific career, you're wasting college. The world is so much bigger than Python or JavaScript, or even than computer science fundamentals. There are so many more issues, so many great thinkers and ideas to learn from, and so many critical thinking skills to acquire, 4 years isn't enough.

IMHO, theory is worth the time, a much broader understanding of the world is worth the time, JavaScript you can learn outside of college.

Sure, we all want to be well-educated and conversant in all the sciences, arts, and humanities. Even more than that, we want to be able to feed ourselves and start a family. From an individual perspective, it makes sense to take care of the latter first. IOW, get a degree that'll put some coin in your pocket, and if you really want to get yourself into the patches-on-your-suitcoat-elbows set, you can do so after you've set yourself up to take care of your responsibilities.

Only the megarich can afford to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars (representing decades in median salary) and four years to do these things before they've even worked out how they can support themselves. If you want that experience for your children, you first need to work out how to be megarich by the time they reach 18.

Education will greatly benefit all that you want to do in life, from family to community to finance to career to citizenship to everything else. It teaches you critical thinking, which applies to all of it, and real knowledge of the world, and give you opportunity to excel, live your dreams, and build a better world (for your children too). You have so much more opportunity than you believe; it's sad to see so many throw it away for ideological dogma.

> start a family [first]

This is not a realistic view of families. People with families have no time for anything else; to generalize, they live for their children - a fulfilling thing that I'm not criticizing, but they don't have a lot of time. Also, who will teach your children about the world if you don't know about it yourself? Who will shape the community and country they grow up in, if not you?

> the patches-on-your-suitcoat-elbows set ... Only the megarich can afford ...

This creates a class-based system, an aristocracy where others are serfs who work for the 'megarich' who have the tools to run things. In fact, in the land of opportunity, everyone can do it. College is generally too expensive in the U.S., but not in all countries, and even in the U.S. there are ways to afford it (including by changing government).

Or, collectively, we figure out how to ensure college doesn’t cost hundreds of thousands in tuition for a BA.

When I attended UVA, back in the late 90s, my family was able to pay with no loans. Same for my sister a few years later. Looking at current tuition, that might not be true today. That’s with an engineer father and mom was a teacher (ie, we were comfortably upper-middle class, far from rich, but def. never had financial worries).

Yes, absolutely. This is what we want to do. If you're currently 18 though, it's too late for you to wait for systemic change. You have to start adult life under the current system, and under that system you have to look out for your physical welfare first, which means studying something practical.

John Adams once wrote to his wife: "The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences; the arts of legislation and administration and negotiation ought to take the place of, indeed exclude, in a manner, all other arts. I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain."

As a society, we still have the obligations of Adams' generation: to establish equitable government and administration. As individuals, many of us have moved on to the obligations of his rhetorical children. The political and professional classes ("megarich" earlier), who have the money to send their kids to get liberal arts degrees with no direct vocational applications, have moved on to enjoy the rights of his rhetorical grandchildren.

I 100% agree.

Do you mind if I ask what state you're in? My high school made people write down colleges to send their ACT scores to, but I remember the confusion as some neither knew what to write nor were offered guidance afterwards.

I'm not the guy you're responding to, but I had a very similar experience in Missouri. College "advertising" started in middle school (~7/8th grade), and most kids knew a name or two they'd send ACT scores to; I think the minimum you had to send to was 1, but might've been two. (You had to put them on the scantrons alongside your name, birthday, etc).

As an aside, the push is so strong I ended up leaving high school (after 10th grade) to attend college early at one of our early-entrance-to-college programs that effectively is a building full of high schoolers going to college (and, e.g. being locked in the building at 8pm each night, not being allowed to have a car, etc) and getting backfilled highschool credit for classes also -- you get your high school diploma alongside an associates degree.

It's a massive push, and the assumption is generally a mix of "everyone needs to go to college or you won't find a job" and "you can get a job without college but all those jobs suck and you'll wish you went to college but by then it will be too late". After years of having it hammered into you, kids finally listen. That, and mandatory college applications being part of your class grades (sometimes as early as 8th/9th grade depending on your classes), as well as the school requiring you to send your ACT scores to colleges.

Edit: this was around 10 years ago for me -- my highschool graduation date was 2010 (even though I had been in college for 2 years by then).

Louisiana

There is a high school class dedicated to applying to college, with the “final project” being that you applied somewhere? Wow... this is surprising to me!

Can you apply to any school, including trade schools for, say, welding?

> There is a high school class dedicated to applying to college, with the “final project” being that you applied somewhere?

For my particular high school, the class was called Avid (https://www.avid.org). It's a college-preparatory class you may take all four years, with junior year being the year the class focuses on, amongst other things, studying for the SAT/ACT, applying to colleges, etc. My high school's Avid program mostly consisted of low-income, first-generation Hispanic students.

Going on a tangent, it's interesting to think about. Today, I came across an old friend from the same high school, same graduation, and from that same program working at Target full-time. He's Hispanic, low-income, and first-generation. He mentioned school ended not working out for him. I have another old but closer friend from the same high school and same graduation year but not from that program - he's American, middle-class, and not a first-generation student. He graduated from UC Berkeley last December and just started working at a finance company in San Francisco making roughly 85k/year. It's interesting in a way where I'm thinking about what heavily affected their lives to lead to both their different outcomes and the possible ways there are to bridge that gap, at least from the perspective of the old friend working at Target.

The program's site states the success rate of the program itself is high but from mere observation of old friends from that program, I unfortunately don't think that's the case. But above all, it reminds of this note written by and from Jordan Peterson's new book where he talks about lobsters in the first chapter: "to those who have everything more will be given; from those who have nothing, everything will be taken away." It seems to me then that if one wants to get out of, say of a generational low-income family, that person must be do something drastic: deliberate practice, a shift in perspective, etc. But first, they must be aware of this and that's the tough part, I think.

I'll be honest, I have no idea! I can't remember the topic of trade schools ever being brought up in class or otherwise. I think you could probably do it, but it would be very unconventional.

So they have an actual class dedicated to teaching you about this, and that class fails to enumerate all of your options? That seems like a sub-optimal situation. Sounds like my sex-ed class in Georgia which never even discussed birth control.

> So they have an actual class dedicated to teaching you about this, and that class fails to enumerate all of your options?

Two thoughts: (1) such courses are often opt-in and don't necessarily have tons of free time for off-topic discussions; and (2) many schools with such courses do in fact have robust CC-tracked options that all-honors students are not exposed to.

1. A class like this was offered by my high school (years and years ago...) I didn't take it. However, from what I remember talking with friends, our school's course was explicitly for people who were planning on going to college. So it'd be kind of weird to discuss alternatives. That would be like mentioning in a Biology course that Physics or English are also legitimate fields of study.

You'd think such a course would be wishy-washy and have plenty of time for discussing alternatives, but actually it was quite a serious thing.. Most of the students who took the course thought they were on-track for ivy league applications and then got a dose of reality in the form of a below-average standardized test score. They had a couple months to learn how to pattern-match and flash-card their way into the 90th percentile starting from the 50th percentile. I distinctly remember more than one person dropping AP Calc so they could focus on the college prep course...

(In other news, grade inflation and subjective grading are harmful because they are sparse & deceptive reward signals!)

2. Community college was very much not looked down upon; in fact, we had a robust partnership with the regional CC system and many students would spend junior and senior years splitting their week between HS and CC.

However, if you were honors/AP/college-tracked, then you wouldn't really know that those students even existed unless you socialized with those students. I only knew about these programs because of my friend group.

At a recent reunion, I talked with some guys who I recognized from my AP courses. They were complaining that our high school didn't offer non-college-tracked options. I mentioned the various programs my friends had made use of and they were shocked and swore up and down that those programs didn't exist when we were in school.

I wonder if either of these two things is true for OP. IME it's fairly rare for an entire high school -- let alone an entire school district -- to not have robust options for CC-tracked students. Maybe in super-affluent areas?

> Sounds like my sex-ed class in Georgia which never even discussed birth control.

Yeah... state law. Same for me. I had a teacher who risked her job to give us good info. If that was the case for anyone else reading this, consider looking up that teacher and sending a gift card or something their way. Doing so is a huge personal and professional risk.

IME the idea of "tracks" is totally foreign to most urban school districts. We know about "honors classes" and the "vocational students" from movies, but the whole school system only exists to get students to pass state minimum requirements in whatever sketchy, technical way they can, or else house them until they turn 16 and can drop out. The "advisors" presumably exist to check a box on some state form: they certainly don't offer any actual assistance or advice in applying for school beyond being the office where you sign up for ACT or SAT test dates and handing out FAFSA forms.

The idea that a high school would have anything to do with preparing you for post-secondary education, or advising you on what type of institution to get it from, is totally foreign in districts like this.

OP here: You're on the right track in that I go to boarding school. Definitely not super-affluent (it's Louisiana after all!), but not an average high school either. We've got very good teachers and a wide selection of advanced classes, so it makes more sense that college is pushed hard here.

But regarding the first point, the program is mandatory. As for the second, I haven't heard of any other options and I doubt they exist, but as you point out it may just be the circles I interact in. And of course attending boarding school is a choice, though I can't speak for what the situation is at the other schools.

> I distinctly remember more than one person dropping AP Calc so they could focus on the college prep course...

This comment really made me smile. I wonder how much that was actually motivated by wanting to focus on college and how much was just wanting an excuse to get out of AP Calc. AP Calc sucks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com