I don't see value in graduating with 6 figure debt for those degrees. In the words of Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting:
“You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library.”
I also have deep and engaging conversations with mathematicians and physicists. I’ve tutored them in odd math they’ve simply never encountered.
Unless collective resources are needed for something like a nuclear reactor design study, a whole lot of application doesn’t require the college debt.
It’s almost as if we just need to agree on what some things are for social stability reasons, and we can debate the rest.
Instead we seem keen to be filtered for willingness to go into debt on education and housing, so we can justify demanding $200k/year for something open source programmers do for fun.
I’m pretty sure a whole lot of why we do things is satisfy social memes, and little to do with economic utility.
I think you should be clear that when you say "some new grads going into FAANG", the word "some" actually means "very very few". Because, very very few grads going into FAANG actually make $200k/yr starting.
We should talk about free college education or heavily subsidized one, but this same group here has been heavily against these ideas because they are socialist. However, happiest countries in the world seems to be mostly social democratic[1] and for one, if possible, I will happily trade my US pay for a lower pay, less worried life.
On a side note, I have a feeling that US prefers a "dog eat dog world" because everyone here thinks they will be the ones doing the eating and caring for the underdog is a sign of weakness/waste of resources.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurabegleybloom/2020/03/20/ran...
If I was the leader of this country, I'd see placing market pressure on the citizens would coerce them to yield to market efficiency. That is to say, if people have to pay for college, it would push more people towards degrees that run the economic/productive component of this engine (due to the higher salaries from the demand). The wealth generated from this omni-cultural push will benefit the country, both it's leaders and it's citizens. Deep down in the depths of the human mind is a little chunk of the brain that is terrified of death and inferiority. This goop collectively bubbles up to the surface sometimes, taking the form of war.
If this is one of the prices to pay to live in a country that no other country in the world could conquer, i'd say it's worth it. Human history is full of evidence that reality.
[0]This comment is just a one dimensional thought experiment
It already exists. It's called the internet. You can learn almost everything you need, and in much greater detail, than a traditional 'higher education' offered by a brick and mortar institution.
The problem is only convincing the gate keepers.
What I remember most, and consider most valuable about my college years, is not the teaching/coursework. The net cannot begin to compare. Facebook is free.
[0]https://www.amazon.com/Applied-Cryptography-Protocols-Algori...
Additionally, Applied Cryptography is an outdated (“classic”?) book. It’s most recent introduction clearly states this, and refers the reader to a different book (“Cryptographic Engineering”) for more current information.
Can you give me a bibliography of books readable by a person without an advanced degree, that would teach them how to create brand new, secure fully homomorphic encryption algorithm?
Edit: my spell checker changed “homomorphic” to “homophobic!”
School isn't just a funnel of knowledge being poured into your brain. It's about the people that teach you and verify that you are actually learning the right things. Sure, you can pick up books on cryptography, but who would you rather hire? A self-taught cryptographer, or a university-vetted cryptographer?
This is a caricature. It's not much different than saying people are for free college because they're lazy and don't want to work for a living.
> I have a feeling that US prefers a "dog eat dog world" because everyone here thinks they will be the ones doing the eating and caring for the underdog is a sign of weakness/waste of resources.
I have a feeling the reason you think this way is because you haven't made a serious effort to empathize with the people who disagree with you.
The default or dominant culture in America is upper class cis het white male. Historically, yes, those people could pretty count on being the ones doing the eating.
Women and people of color were the ones taking up many other roles and it was possible to sometimes care about them -- or just treat them like absolute crap while benefiting from a relationship to them because they had little to no recourse -- without that impinging on the professional part of your life where, by default, killer instinct could rule the day.
I think part of what is messing things up is the rise in human rights for women and people of color. This is disrupting these historical patterns which have something of a tendency to carry forward.
We are largely failing to ask "So, just what kinds of patterns actually work for a world in which we assume all adults have similar rights and opportunities?" Many people are quite oblivious to the many layers of baked in assumptions about, for example, how work gets organized and how we provide benefits to the people.
It is largely invisible the degree to which we assume a man is doing certain kinds of work and there is probably a woman at home doing the cooking and cleaning and other "women's work." And I tend to get a lot of flak anytime I try to comment on it because I'm a woman and HN is overwhelmingly male, so people (seem to) think I'm some man-hating, feminazi who is intentionally shit-stirring or something and tend to not think I'm someone who has actively studied the space because of the ways it has negatively impacted my life, so I'm somewhat knowledgeable about such topics.
EDIT: I'll flesh this out with an example of why I don't value liberal arts degrees. Approaching one Christmas I was struggling. My work didn't go on break until 5pm on the 23rd, I was juggling that plus parenting plus all the other tasks that go into preparing for a family Christmas. I stumbled across a news article that I would summarise as "We need to thank all the women that are working hard right now to make Christmas special for us". I emailed this journalist, a graduate of the liberal arts, and mentioned that there are a number of men out there in situations like men working towards the same goal and the gendered language can be harmful. The journalist reponded that it's mostly women so there isn't an issue with this language. The same journalist who writes about how we need to make STEM more hosptitable to women, etc.
Her formal liberal arts education only taught her to see gender issues in one direction and didn't give her to critical ability to think about gender issues in a broader sense. So yes, I don't value when people have some parts of a liberal arts education.
Which is par for the course.
I do not self identify as a feminist. The things I'm talking about having studied aren't the things you are thinking of.
I have a pretty good track record of being even-handed about gender issues in my comments in this forum. I still get a lot of flak. This discussion is a good example of that. My comment was downvoted and it currently has one reply -- yours -- which is openly hostile.
Given that I have been here eleven years and yadda, that gets frustrating. After eleven years of being reasonable, you would think that other people here would do a better job of meeting me halfway on certain topics.
Our current mode of working tends to create jobs that only work well for cis het white males with a wife at home whose primary responsibilities are taking care of the "women's work." This fact equally screws over not just people of color and women, but men like you who did the single father thing.
You have valid criticisms of how far too many women are openly hostile to men as their default position for trying to self advocate. I'm just as critical of that shit. I don't self identify as a "feminist" because my feeling is that "feminism" boils down "women are entitled to real careers, just like men have, and fuck all y'all men and to hell with the welfare of the children."
It actively disregards the very real sacrifices involved in having a career with the traditional pattern of male success, which includes often barely knowing their own children, and I was a full-time wife and mom for two decades. My adult sons still live with me. There is no way in hell anyone is going to get me to agree with a position of "Women are entitled to careers, even if that means shitting all over the children to get there from here."
I'm human. I certainly don't get everything right. But when I talk about the need to change how we work because the world has changed and our patterns of work are still largely based on this idea that "workers" are cis het white males with a wife at home doing the cooking, I'm not talking about "Fuck all y'all men." I'm talking about "This is why we default to certain patterns and those patterns aren't working for the world currently and there is no objective reason we need to continue to cleave to those patterns."
Some crappy things that happen at work are rooted in real world metrics. For example, harvest time on a farm is always crunch time because food is only ripe and fresh for a short period of time. If you don't harvest it in a timely fashion, it rots. It isn't going to keep and wait until later.
But many of the things we do today are more or less unexamined habits from the past and it's enormously difficult to have any kind of reasonable and productive discussion of that fact because you cannot talk about patterns of work without talking, to some degree, about historic patterns of gender roles and even slavery in the history of the US and people get very touchy about that and it actively interferes with trying to figure out "What piece of what we do is actually something the work, per se, imposes on us? And what piece is bad habits from a different era that are failing to die?"
We are all victims to some degree or another of the ghosts of the past in the form of cultural norms, existing built environment and so forth that keeps alive patterns from the past even well past the time that humans began actively and intentionally changing the things those were rooted in. As just one example: We outlawed slavery in the US, yet Black Americans are still quite far from having genuine equality with Whites. They see high rates of incarceration, high rates of unemployment, high rates of poverty, etc.
Trying to find patterns that are good for people in the here and now is hard and it's made harder by the inability to have a good discussion about the topic to begin with. Far too often, by the time the world agrees that X is bad and Y would be better, Y is also out of date and we should really be doing Z but we can't do Z because Z is the new thing no one trusts or understands and will not accept.
Thank you for replying to me instead of just downvoting my comment into oblivion.
Have a good day.
> tend to not think I'm someone who has actively studied the space because of the ways it has negatively impacted my life, so I'm somewhat knowledgeable about such topics
Those who have actively studied in this area have had large negative impacts on my life. I felt the impacts of gender policy, derived from the liberal arts academia, during the hardest years of my life. I'm sick of having the fact I'm a cis het white man thrown in my face by people "educated" in this area. Here's something I wrote here 8 days ago:
>That video reflects purely on skin colour and I feel that can be harmful. My skin is white but I'm descendant from the Australian Stolen Generation (google it if you want to see more). I was raised in a poor country town and I literally joined the military to escape that life......I make decent money now since I used the military for a CS education but when I go shopping I choose to go to the low socioeconomic area. I don't fit in culturally at the upper middle class shopping centers. I don't dress the same, talk the same, hold the same values, etc. Not feeling like you don't fit in isn't just linked to race.
I don't fit in culturally in upper class white areas. I was born and raised in an area that is in the top 5 for every single crime in my state. My family still has baggage from literally being stolen and given away, not to mention being half casts (part aboriginal). I became a single parent. And yet, I've worked my arse off and managed to carve myself a good career and a lovely life.
I see plenty of black people, women and gay people do very well in life. The trick is to be born in money or into a culture of success (i.e. did you know 2nd generation Nigerians and Ethiopians have better educational success than the general population?). The issue is that a large majority of slave descendant black people are born into a cycle of poverty. In my home town I've seen programs attempting to break this cycle and it's brutally hard.
I'm much more interested in breaking these cycles of poverty than I am in restructing the way society manages productive work. Free, educationally-programmed daycare from 6 months of age? Daycare that has the ability to accomodate people working non-business hours? Some form of universal income to keep people afloat? I'm all ears here, and this will benefit marginal communities immensely.
Blaming it on cis white men? My ears will close. It's a single-digit percentage of white people born into the privilege that those at top have. People of all races can be born here but due to historical reason it's pretty heavily white. The majority of us aren't born into that and are sick of being blamed.
That isn't remotely what I'm saying at all.
And you are making erroneous assumptions about what I've studied.
This is a pointless discussion.
Have a good evening -- or whatever time it is where you happen to be.