Comment by motohagiography | Hacker News Reader

Comment by motohagiography | Hacker News Reader

motohagiography

The basic problem is colleges aren't producing people who are sufficiently distant/different from the people who don't go, and many of the ones who graduate have a seething hatred for those who didn't, because the education they sincerely believed would elevate them so that they could never ever be confused for the non-group - did not.

These days you need to complete a top PhD before you can really either carry off the conceit or afford the magnanimity that the views of less educated people are not a threat to your social station.

STEM doesn't have this as much because if you don't have the maths, you really aren't part of the conversation and so there's no risk to your social status in fraternizing with the less-educated. Or as we cringingly (if not sickeningly) refer to them, "the left behind."

I'm of the view that the culture war is primarily an example of this "Girardian Terror," where in our good intentions we used the college system to create a whole new class of precarious and economically cornered ideologues equipped with nothing but resentment, and we're about to unleash them into our institutions.

This decade is going to be a trip. :)

Except that it is increasingly possible to tell grads from non-grads. If all you are concerned with is coding, there isnt much different. But of you look for writing ability, communication capacity, and cultural knowledge, those with only highschool or a few years of online junk really do stand out, not in a good way.

I think this is a good point, but I'm not entirely sure that these skills distinguishes grads from non-grads. I think grads are much more likely to possess these skills for sure, but I would guess that a large percentage of grads don't possess these skills either (at least in my experience).

I don't intend this as a criticism, but rather just an observation, that someone could see writing ability and communication capacity and cultural knowledge and assume a grad, and thus make these types of observations a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Much depends on which degrees and knowledge we are talking about. Anyone with a STEM degree knows the metric system. Anyone with a law degree can string sentences together into something useful. But a political science undergrad...a few years doing coding bootcamps .... these are not assurances of anything.

Great writers and orators are born, not made. In just the same sense as musicians and artists.

Naturally all of the above hone their skills with practice, but the great ones started from a different baseline.

Yeah, but I don't need great writers.

I need people who I can trust to given presentations to clients, executives, or directors of other divisions of the business.

I need people who can communicate clearly in writing with clients/stakeholders.

I need people who can write good commit logs, comments, and technical documentation for other engineers.

In the extremely limit, I need people who can write a white paper or research paper.

I'm not looking for the next Dickens or Fitzgerald.

How can we tell the difference between great writers who are born, great writers who end up on the edge of the Bell curve through random decisions during childhood, and great writers who are deliberately raised to greatness?

Taking you literally, I can't see any reason why greatness should be determined solely at birth.

Did those Great writers learn writing in the womb? Which language are they good at writing in and how did they learn that?

> I think grads are much more likely to possess these skills for sure, but I would guess that a large percentage of grads don't possess these skills either (at least in my experience).

I agree with this assessment. Even some top-tier CS programs seem to routinely graduate students with poor writing skills and sub-par cultural awareness.

I always recommend to interns that they take some writing-intensive courses, and possibly even pick up a minor in a writing-intensive field like English or Philosophy. And then not just take the course, but also use what they learned to write about things free time they way they (should be) writing code outside of their CS courses.

I think a lot of the strong disagreement in HN re: the value of college basically boils down to the huge amount of variety in the college experience.

Surprisingly, this variety has less to do with the quality of the institution and more to do with the quality/preparedness of the student.

A good litmus test for whether someone is wasting college might be to ask the question: what did you read/build/do this semester outside of your courses that used stuff you learned in your curses during the last year or so?

The less impressive the answer to that question, the more likely it is the student should maybe think about leaving college until they're ready to fully engage.

(Obviously, that litmus test only makes sense for full-time undergraduate students... for working students, it might be something more like "how are you using what you're learning in your day job".)

"Surprisingly, this variety has less to do with the quality of the institution and more to do with the quality/preparedness of the student."

Possibly. But there is an enormous range of institutional quality, from diverse, not necessarily elite or even large, schools to the ones existing almost entirely to absorb GI bill and scholarship funding and maybe provide job training.

Kind of selection bias, though. A lot of getting into college is dependent on already being an OK writer. I was pretty good when I got in, studied Econ, and was pretty ok when I got out, without much effort. I ended up with a job where I literally wrote analytical papers for 5 years, straight out of school. That job did a lot more for my writing than college did. I figure I wrote more in my first 2 years of my job than all of high school and college combined.

You forgot to mention that many of the ones who didn't go have a seething hatred for those who did, possibly because they don't see sufficient difference.

Not sure that's a thing, as hard to imagine anyone caring about an undergrad, no? If you have a trade or competence in any domain, it seems hard to believe any significant number of people are preoccupied by this, as opposed to say, the contrasting anxiety about uneducated rednecks driving policy, etc. The graduates of state colleges seem like unlikely villains to anyone.

However, I would give you the reactionary view of campus politics, but even that seems separate and not 1:1 to the status anxiety of people who thought university would make them palpably elite.

The graduates of state colleges end up being the ones who get out of the dying towns in the areas being left behind. They move to a thriving city often out of state and in doing so become the "elites" that are so hated by those left behind.

While reciprocal, it does assume a class concsiousness I don't see in small towns. I'd argue they'd need higher education to appreciate fully how fucked they are. Their upside is running a business or marrying into a family that does, and while the pretenses of city people are absolutely a bogeyman, it's not defining to their identity. The small town conservatives I know dont talk about politics, they talk about business, hunting, hobbies and macro economic trends that impact their lives like interest rates and commodity prices. Complaining about "the libs," is considered whining. They're not defined or unite as a community based on their opposition to something. They're tolerant, not liberal, value freedom based on the necessary rules, and admittedly, see elites who lack traditional virtues as illigitimate but temporary. It's a bit complex to be dismissed as hatred.

"The small town conservatives I know dont talk about politics, they talk about business, hunting, hobbies and macro economic trends that impact their lives like interest rates and commodity prices."

A good friend talks about those. And he likes to go on long rants about the evils illegal immigrants. Pointing out that the lack of those workers would put a number of his best friends out of business doesn't help.

You're right, it's complex.

Have you ever heard of the cliche of the high school football star whose career peaked his senior year and has been going down hill since? It happens. People who were the top of their social circles, but are not now, at times begin to resent anyone who can be a scapegoat. It doesn't help that those who left for a state school both have wider experience and an overly inflated sense of how wide their experience is.

And, be honest, having a degree does open doors that are closed otherwise. A welder may make more money than a junior suit just out of college, but may forget that fact when he's working on a pipe outside in 40°F weather.

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