A generation of American men give up on college

Good point. I did not intend to argue otherwise. To go into trade is not an irrational reaction on an individual level — quite the opposite in fact. What I did argue however, was that making it hard for people to get a higher education is not a good thing for a society. Not good in the short term, because educated societes will make more informed decisions, and at the same time not a sustainable strategy for any western society that wants to play any role in the next century.

Having an educated society should be in the national interest just like having public roads or drinkable water is.

> accurate reading of the issue. The issue is not that Americans work too hard, it's that this hard work is no longer actually amounting to anything.

That was the American dream. This is a nice model to keep big numbers of people playing the lottery and bear a ton of stress, because they have the hope that one day they might win and then everything will pay off.

But even of you are one of the few lucky ones that wins you still live in a society where 90% are struggling and crushed. There may be people that enjoy being on top while everybody else suffers, but I personally would prefer being middle class in a society where nobody is poor over being a billionaire in a society where everybody is crushed. Maybe this is empathy, but maybe it is also just egoistic: I like to walk through my city and not see suffering, I like to walk through my country without having to fear being robbed, shot or angrily screamed at. I simply prefer living in a healthy, happy society where people help each other over living in one where everybody has to kick down to stay on top.

Not that that any nation achieved that goal, but there are certainly observable differences in tone between the industrial nations.

The numbers aren't great, but the majority of students finish with either zero debt or a very manageable amount of debt. There is a small fraction of students taking massive loans that skew the overall picture.

And bachelor degree holders continue to earn, on average, $1 million more than high school graduates over their career.

All that said, I agree college should be affordable without loans. Summer jobs, co-ops/internships, etc.

https://www.aplu.org/projects-and-initiatives/college-costs-...

That sounds...reasonable. I can't speak for the rest of Europe but a $30k student loan would be perfectly normal after a 4-5 year of study in Sweden.

Back of the envelope, $30k for 4 years is $625 a month and that is not much for just food and rent.

Call it toxic or not, there's a male drive toward autonomy. Joining corporations that are run by HR just isn't as attractive.

Thanks cap, there is always this one commenter who thinks we in europe don't understand how taxes work.

Edit: Of course, if you’re very well off and live somewhere that’s relatively stable, large gaps in equality might benefit you. That’s for a select few though.

Germany is much better at shunting people away from university who are not qualified to be there. Generally, they go to trade schools and apprenticeships.

BTW, if you ever see an EE with a card that has printed on it:

   V = I*R
   I = V/R
   R = V/I

https://testguy.net/content/266-Ohm-s-Law-Watt-s-Law-Cheat-S...

A definite no-hire :-/

There is no doubt though that people do better work when supervised and knowing what questions to ask an expert helps sets expectations about what level of work you will settle for.

1) There's a race to the bottom with services in terms of pricing. For example, NHS GPs have strict time limits within which to provide a particular service. These time limits have reduced over the years and so individual doctors are capable of providing a better service but are can't given the constraints. People rarely are willing to pay more for a service unless they know that the quality level will be higher. With services, it is not clear that a higher price will translate to higher quality.

2) Most services are not chosen based on quality. They are chosen based on perception, brand, reviews, pricing and a whole host of other things. Often the most profitable services are the ones who can manipulate these variables best rather than the ones who actually provide a great service. If there is a sole accountant who is fantastic at accounting but poor at marketing and review collection then they are going to struggle and may end up joining a firm who constrains their time such that can only provide the minimum viable service.

Personal story: moved into a EU country and tried to import my car tax-free as personal property. Went to a customs agency because apparently you don't talk to customs directly, you go through one of those. They had me collect all sorts of documents, which took me months before it became evident that this type of car cannot be imported tax-free in the first place.

The stress from expecting people to take their responsibilities seriously has cost me many meaningful interpersonal relationships, not to mention innumerable brain cells. On the other hand, the work to achieve more self-sufficiency is alienating in its own right, and, depending on starting conditions, can twist a person into an unlikable mess.

It's vicious cycles all the way down.

Iedereen doet maar wat ( Dutch )

Loosely translated : Everybody just fucks around, wether it is car mechanics, doctors or laywers.

Would love to hear a more canonical term for the phenomenon.

edit: And if it is absolutely critical it is done right? Do it yourself.

I understand good vocational training (for example certified plumbers) in a country pays itself back very much.

Information asymmetry is a real problem, particularly when people are selling information.

This is starting to push me in the direction of off grid/ sustainable living just to minimize these dependencies

See also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_induction

But like everything else it depends. Is the DC feeding something like a lightbulb or a fan? Then it probably won't matter.

Does the DC feed something that has a good low pass filter or is it an expensive AC cable with good shielding? Then it might also not matter.

None of the above should be considered be professional advice and it's probably a good rule of thumb to never mix wires like that.

The closer the low voltage wires are to the high voltage ones, and the longer the distance, the more hmmmmmmm they'll pick up.

These are decades apart in time, too.

So you built two homes, one with a well researched union labor group and one with a well researched contractor? Or is this just some BS elaboration based on comparing contractors you hired for small time shit with the big house job?

So I suspect it is not in the building codes. I don't think the codes say anything about about low voltage wires.

I wore a fitness tracker then and now. I averaged about 10 km in a given shift, where as my daily total now is now closer to 5 or 6. However, now I have time and energy at the end of the day to do an actual physical activity instead of coming home like a limp noodle and taking the next day to recover.

Mentally, there is comradery that I absolutely miss. This is something really hard to explain unless you’re in it. When things got tough, the dark humour got us through. We took care of each others’ loved ones (at their family’s request). We demanded excellence from each other, and (rightfully) called out unsafe practice and supported staff as needed.

However, my home life suffered. It was fine at first as my partner is also a nurse so there was a mutual understanding. However, it started to wear on me when I had kids. I’d come home and my kids would be asleep/at school/daycare, so I’d have missed out on a day’s interaction. I realized that they’re only little once and no job in the world is worth missing out on them.

This is an-ex Google engineer talking about one he saw and created a video about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pizXzR7ZQ8Q

When "positive discrimination" makes it before a judge, it usually gets stuck down.

You've been reading too much news. That doesn't happen to normal people in real life. Blacks have a huge disadvantage of poor upbringing by their own family and community and women have a huge "disadvantage" of not wanting to be a computer programmer.

I'm mixed so I can generally wriggle out of such accusations by playing the race card. The only situation I ever feel good about doing so are ones like this.

Given a list of chapters in a video course, and a list of user bookmarks, write a function that groups the bookmarks by chapter. Chapters and bookmarks are defined as millisecond offsets from 0 (the start of the video file).

I'd specify the data structures for junior devs and let the more senior people work those out.

Your average developer that gets hired can solve and unit test the solution in less than 35 minutes. Those who don't might be having an off day, or I didn't do a good job at explaining the problem and details, or they didn't ask the right questions or who knows. The point is, a thousand things can go wrong, but the problem itself isn't that difficult. A few loops and a hashmap gets you an acceptable solution.

This and the other problems in the interview question databases at FAANGs are typical of what's in the Cracking the Coding Interview book. Whether someone's ability to solve these types of problems quickly is indicative of their skill level is a hot topic of debate, but if one wants to join these companies, then hacking the process by learning to solve algorithm and data structure problems is acceptable and not a particularly complex process. It's high overhead for the candidate, but at the very least it proves that they can learn, and learning the custom tools and code quickly is about half the skillet required to be successful at a FAANG.

How could that be? I was under the impression that a huge amount of new hires come in each year from fresh university graduates.

I see getting hired as the last stage in the pipeline, with the first stages being your family, then your education and then employment.

The more things go wrong in the first stages, the less likely it is for one to succeed at getting to the top of the next stage.

If people from underprivileged families can only afford to go to the 50% best school in the state, then to the 75% best college, then by the time they enter the job search page, they won't be at the top of the list (again, on average).

I'll use myself as an example: I had the privilege of coding for entire weekends when I was young, while my peers had to work the land. This gave me a distinct advantage early on, which I capitalized on, so at an interview with a company I am more likely to get hired than if those same peers had hypothetically applied, again because it wouldn't make sense for a company to pass on the best candidate when they are all competing for talent, regardless of race, gender, height or other ways of splitting people into groups.

I think everyone agrees that the current situation when it comes to diversity in the workplace is not acceptable, and we should definitely fix it, but in my opinion, if companies are competing fairly for talent, then that part of the pipeline doesn't really need fixing. We can instead use it as a test to see if the attempts at fixing the earlier stages result in better numbers.

P.S. This a difficult subject and I don't intend to offend anyone. Despite my relative privilege above, compared to my peers in the US, I still grew up in a poor and underprivileged family and am behind my current peers both financially and socially, so it's a topic that hits home for me.

Which is demonstrably true; they're not hiring from the general population they're hiring largely from universities, and you can look at those universities and see there's already an imbalance in demographics of the available job candidates.

http://www-2.rotman.utoronto.ca/facbios/file/Whitening%20MS%...

It's a sort of interesting read but nothing too dramatic and whether it's evidence of racism is subject to interpretation. What isn't subject to interpretation is the claim that the study shows that "whitened" names increase callbacks. On the contrary whitening names has no effect on callbacks as indicated on page 31:

"Whitening the name only (versus not whitening at all) did not make a statistically significant difference for black applicants"

The actual study shows that removing racial indicators from experience is what results in a gap in callbacks. So someone who represents themselves as the leader of their campus' "Black Student Business Association" is less likely to get a call back than someone who represented themselves as the leader of their campus' "Student Business Association". They refer to the removal of racial indicators as whitening but I think that's prematurely jumping to conclusions. The name aspect is certainly a form of whitening, since black names are being changed to white names. But it's premature to refer to the removal of racial indicators and making the experience racially neutral as a form of whitening.

Other forms of experience that explicitly mention race result in less callbacks than when that same experience doesn't mention race. Whether this is racism or not can not be concluded strictly based off of the study's parameters. For example, if I were presented with one candidate who was in charge of the university's "Law Society" I would probably pick that person over someone who was in charge of that university's "Black Law Society", and I don't think I would be racist for doing so. I would consider being in charge of an organization that is open to all races or is independent of race as a more prestigious accomplishment than being in charge of an organization that is race specific.

To test whether I was racist in my decision making, I would need to pick someone who was not in charge of anything over someone who was in charge of the "Black Law Society", with all else being equal. The study did not do this comparison and unfortunately the study does not present the raw data so there's no way for me to do this analysis myself.

I could bicker about some of the methodological issues as well which are not exactly rigorous, as well as the fact that this study is not exactly pertinent to this conversation as they only looked at internships for jobs that are not technical in nature, with the bulk of them being sales and marketing, and customer service jobs, instead of engineering, computer science, law, or professional jobs.

Ultimately no study is going to be perfect but one should not read too much into many of these studies. They are not nearly as rigorous or definitive as one would expect and furthermore they don't tend to generalize.

Imagine you having always bought tasty tomatoes from your local farm, and someone steps in to show you studies that determined that the generally tomatoes in the US are tasteless.

I'm also not arguing that tasty tomatoes are taking shelf space away from other fruit.

Women don't have the same financial expectations as men do. This is true even today, despite all the push for equal pay and equal rights. Often, that's prior to even getting into a relationship. If you seek an indication, ask a bunch of guys if they would settle for a girl still living at home and then ask the inverse, both groups aged in their 20s.

Given how men are increasingly "giving up on society" because of these standards being harder to achieve every day, GP's argument isn't that improbable at all.

Nobody says you have to do that, but if some men and women want to do it, it will show up in the statistics.

Also even if you don't want a family and just want to explore the world alone, you don't need that much money. What exactly, do you want all the money for, that a high end career would give you? Also working 60 hour weeks would also prevent you from exploring the world, wouldn't it?

Learning for people who have work experience is really different. We have context, clear goals and so on. Teaching other 'adult' students is really fun, because we get to figure out what suits them instead of trying to hit measurements predefined by some committee. Ultimately it is just about giving guidance and ideas, kind of like consulting to learn, what to learn and so on.

"Education is wasted on the young" - this was exactly my experience. I didn't know it then, but I first needed to build up confidence, make 'real' mistakes and learn from them. I was also completely unfit for the type of scheduled and predetermined learning that happens at universities. My mind wanders too much and I'm driven by answering my own questions that I feel matter or are interesting. Also a reason why I don't work in large/streamlined orgs.

"Since the 1960s, racist power has commandeered the term “racial discrimination,” transforming the act of discriminating on the basis of race into an inherently racist act. But if racial discrimination is defined as treating, considering, or making a distinction in favor or against an individual based on that person’s race, then racial discrimination is not inherently racist. The defining question is whether the discrimination is creating equity or inequity."

We tend to refer to "liberals" as people on the left but in general a liberal is anyone who is consistent with liberal beliefs which include a fair amount of "conservatism" as well. However, there's quite a few folks on the right that are as illiberal as the progressives are on the left.

The original article explicitly addresses this.

I think this is absolutely the key. If you just look at some of the figures given in [0], and do some simple math, you find out that someone with a bachelor's degree makes just a hair more than $26k per year more than someone with only a high school diploma. Over the course of, say, 40 years working, that comes out to a hair over $1M difference in favor of the college grad. So, it would seem that even if a 4 year degree cost $200k (which, sadly, is not an insane estimate these days [1]), it still seems like a no-brainer.

But, that's as far as statistics can take us, I think, because, as you mentioned, we don't see what happens to people who choose not to go to college, but who could have successfully gotten a bachelor's degree. There's no literal way for us to ethically conduct that experiment.

If I were to speculate a bit, I might wonder if the answer lies in looking at children of college graduates and comparing those children who went to college vs those who didn't. I have no idea if such a study is available or not, unfortunately.

The other idea I have is that, although it pays off in the long run, maybe acquiring a significant amount of debt at a young age makes it harder to get by in the initial, post-college years harder. Considering the cost of housing and health care, this seems like a reasonable hypothesis, but I'd also like to see if there's research on that.

---

[0]: https://www.northeastern.edu/bachelors-completion/news/avera...

[1]: https://www.collegeavestudentloans.com/blog/estimating-the-t...

Even in markets that still pay well outside the valley like Boston, that level of compensation is still extremely limited and are < 1% of available positions most of which are quite senior.

I question even this. I live in an area of the US without a strong union culture, and known a lot of people in the trades and it doesn’t seem uncommon to see job postings for X apprentice starting at $13-$15 and hour. I could get close to that at a shitty gas station clerk job.

It's important that this is not about any absolute value, but about the sign of the correlation. The "blank slate" hypothesis would predict that the correlation is positive, i.e. the more gender equal a society, the more equal the distribution.

The opposite is actually the case, the correlation is negative.

This strongly suggests that the statistical differences in occupational preferences have an innate cause. That difference is moderated by societal influence, not caused by it. When societal pressure are lessened or removed, the innate differences manifest more strongly.

And of course, it needs to be stressed that these are statistical differences, not categorical ones, just like the outcomes are statistical and not categorical.

These are the three biggest countries (40% of the world population), and also the ones most represented in tech here in the USA, at least (because they are the biggest).

We are talking about whole population segments that dream of one day making $75k. They know that tech pays well but have no idea how outlandish the pay is compared to their experiences and expectations. They think their counterpart is tech is making $10k more than them, when in fact they are probably making $50-100k more.

Why is the other one poster child for feminity? I met guys who dropped out of college, because they could not keep grades due to regular whole night gaming.

I met guys who switched out of CS, because they could not pass exams despite trying.

In both gender, you get some amount of irresponsible, disinterested, troublemakers or simply people with too many mental issues to finish any school.

Does the same thinking carryover to the construction industry which is 97% male?

Starting your professional career in debt is nobody's definition of "crippling debt". Whether 39k is too much student loan debt really depends on what the expected future earning potential is for a given degree. A quick search turns up plenty of resources that can help somebody make decisions about how much student loan debt they can comfortably or safely take on. Here is a teacher's guide[1] (it's a PDF link) from the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau one could use as a starting point.

[1] https://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/documents/cfpb_building_...

After I quit university and before I found my eventual career path back in the 90s, a relevant picture would've been me stuffing around on the computer as that's largely what I did (writing a book, playing Hextris, typing up things for my dad, seeing what a modem could do, etc).

Folks in Ohio still have trouble leaving Ohio.

And you can, to an extent, buy a nuclear family. Mail order brides still exist (and the arrangement can be beneficial for both parties). You can do this with the expectation of children, which you will pay for in the US. Alternatively, you can check adoption as plenty of agencies will make you feel like you are buying a child. (20k upwards, plus travel).

my best friend had a complicated career trajectory that began with a music education degree, until he found out he hated teaching music to middle schoolers, then he decided to get a two-year online CS degree. this put him in a fair bit of debt as he comes from a very poor upbringing. he got married and moved to the D.C. area a couple years ago to work for a CRM shop there and while he loves the work, he hates the crime and bullshit of the Big City Life, and while he and his wife have gone from enjoying it to tolerating it, they're moving back here to South Dakota at the end of this year before they have children.

I wonder if, going forward, with the advent of remote work and the like, we're going to see less and less people who come from rural/suburban/otherwise sub-100k-population cities choosing to either move back to areas like those they grew up in (if not where they grew up specifically) instead of migrating to The Big City to Make It Big, for these exact reasons. there just doesn't seem to be much to gain from moving to The Big City anymore, if starting a family is your ultimate goal in life.

This is a snide remark, but it is absolutely a factor. I grew up in Michigan, and the number of people who never venture beyond their almost-entirely-white small town to see what other communities and cultures are like is a huge contributing factor to the amount of prejudice and judgmental nature that makes me never want to move back.

Seeing people different from you and different places is broadening and gives you a much better perspective to be able to understand the world. This is important in life as well as in your career.

Specifically, to refer to an average of $1,000,000 as a specific effect size, without controlling for the fact that many people with only a high school diploma would not earn more even if they had a college degree, seems suspect.

Please read “why men earn more” by Warren Farrell or skim the table of contents for a list of some of the factors that influence earnings, such as working longer hours, in a different field, in unpleasant conditions, etc.

The much higher salaries paid by the major US companies are so anomalous that they may as well be discarded in any comparisons.

I play the game of assessing the gender balance of groups a lot.

Some of it is wondering where society is going, some of it is just trying to avoid sausage parties. Trans people don't give me any trouble because they want to be assigned a certain gender, non-binaries might force me to learn the multinomial distribution but those seem to turn up at the 1/256 - 1/512 level if that.

I stopped going to Yoga classes in my ZIP code because they attract a lot of middle-aged and older men who, I think, are there to look at women without doing anything too strenuous.

As for your claim that higher class males avoid trades: yes of course. That is actually a great example of what I mean. People factor in social norms in their decision making, be it male or female.

I believe that norms shape behaviour, that is the extent of my claim.

I think people certainly use the phrase "toxic femininity", but such examples are from the long-tail.

In institutions, it is no-where near as discussed as much as "toxic masculinity", and probably discussing it would be be frowned upon.

You can see mentions of "toxic masculinity" amongst United Nations literature, for example, which can't be said for "toxic femininity". For example, the expectation of being the breadwinner of the family is said to be one of the things that is "rooted in a patriarchal culture, creat[ing] toxic masculinity". [1]

What isn't said, is that the expectation to become a competent man who is tries to support his family can also be a positive example of masculinity (and indeed is desirable to women), in addition to being the traditional one.

If this expectation is cast only being a "toxic" one, then that is a confusing message for young men, and leaves them without what was one of the traditional motivation for going to college, and improving yourself, so that you can get a good job and better shoulder responsibility when you want to start a family.

[1] https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/stories/2019/2/compilation-b...