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Comment by zapataband1 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah we I read somewhere that in Germany 60% of students go into trades and they have seriously beefed up their programs. But yeah there is a stigma here in the US about trades, I think that's partly due to the social consequences of having insane wealth gaps and worshipping billionaires.

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Not only that, but depending on which state you are in in Germany (and Austria) you get routed at around 4th grade. If the teachers decide that you are academically fit for it then you go on to the Gymnasium, which prepares you for college, often with some focus for your class (e.g.: mathematics, arts, or science). If those same teachers decide that you are not up to college, but are still smart enough for something skilled, then you go on to Realschule, which still has some focus on academics, but is steering you to something like being a secretary, or a generic office worker. And finally there is the Hauptschule track. Here you are being groomed for something more involved with labor. The academics are not nearly so rigorous, and there is almost always the expectation that you will be steered into an apprenticeship for the final 4 years of what we (in the U.S.) would have as High School. Some of these apprenticeships can be quite prestigious (e.g.: the BMW technician school in Munich), but many of them are pretty pedestrian (e.g.: learning to run agricultural equipment).

For most people this routing when they are 10 (or so) decides what routes are open to them later in life. There are exceptions to this (my host sister went to Realschule, and later took the Abiture, the the test that got her into college), but they are pretty rare.

I have always been a bit leery of choices made so early in life, but it works pretty well in Germany.

This would never be allowed in America. the notion of “merit” in the US is associated with white supremacy and the idea that you can divide kids by their skills/grades will get you in trouble, especially if you do it that early.

If for whatever reason the demographics at each track are not the same as those of the nation it will get called racist and shut down quick.

> the notion of “merit” in the US is associated with white supremacy

In Germany, our system is far more inclusive at all levels which means we don't have that much of a problem with early stage ethnic discrimination. Not to say we don't have any problems at all (far from it, in fact!) but it's nowhere near as bad as in the US, and additionally for once we Germans don't have historical baggage that's keeping us down.

You can't make something up and apply it to an entire continent.

It actually doesn't work that great in Germany. The college dropout rate is about 28% (https://researchgate.net/publication/267340378_Student_Drop-...). The Hauptschule and Realschule routes seem much better designed than the US, but in terms of predicting who is suitable for college Germany isn't doing a very good job.

28% is much lower than the ~37% failure rate to graduate in 6 years in US.

In somewhere like Iran you may see very high graduation rates in part because you may need to be selected as best student (a former employer I interviewed with, the owner got into college because he was best math student in a class of something like 1000 children.)

Dropout rate because of failure to adapt, of course, would be a good thing. Those who aren't fit for a career in engineering for instance were rapidly ejected into a different program from my public college I went to (like 25+% ejected first year, memory says it was more like 50%), which meant very few people wasted lots of money on a dead career path.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tehran_Farzanegan_School

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allameh_Helli_High_Schools

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Organization_for_Deve...

The point of the split for Gymnasium is supposed to be to only admit those students who would successfully adapt, though. Attending college also requires passing the Abitur, which shows skill in the areas you are planning to study. A failure to understand engineering topics should show up in the topics chosen for the Abitur. (Similar to the choice of A level topics in the UK.)

Somewhat relatedly, college in Germany is more focused on the theoretical than it is in the US. A lot of engineering college programs in the US would be closer to a German technical school than a German college.

I understand. I worry that the more you lower the false positive (accepted to college but uncapable), the greater you raise the false negative (denied college path but capable).

I very much appreciated the way my public college worked. Very few who started electrical engineering finished. But they would accept damn near anyone. The few that survived had the world in their pocket.

>A lot of engineering college programs in the US would be closer to a German technical school than a German college.

Must depend on the college. My experience, as well as most my peers, was that engineering was about 60% raw mathematics. There was so much math, I only use a small fraction of it today. Maybe 10% of the engineering degree was practical labs. The engineering technology programs are maybe what you're thinking of? They flip those numbers on their head. It's hard for me to imagine any 4 year degree except mathematics and physics having more math than engineering programs I'm familiar with.

> I worry that the more you lower the false positive (accepted to college but uncapable), the greater you raise the false negative (denied college path but capable).

Sure, but if you're trying to avoid false negatives the German system is already poor. In the US work is the goal and there's a lot of talk about finding a job you love. The German system is mainly focused on minimizing the number of people who can't find work. In Germany there's also less of an income gap between professions than in the US (a German doctor or highly paid computer scientist only makes 2x what a tradesperson or retail worker makes https://www.iamexpat.de/career/working-in-germany/salary-pay...).

> My experience, as well as most my peers, was that engineering was about 60% raw mathematics.

Was the mathematics mainly proofs? My US university required a minimum of 2 classes with a significant programming project for a Computer Science degree, and many students took 6 or more courses with significant programming projects. My semester studying abroad in Germany, there was only 1 course offered that even had a serious project component. There was a heavy focus on proofs, and all the hardware architecture courses offered were entirely structured around formal verification of hardware.

>My US university required a minimum of 2 classes with a significant programming project for a Computer Science degree,

Computer Science and Computer Engineering are typically significantly different curricula. Engineering is generally part of a school of engineering. Computer science is generally in college of science. This is a generalization of course. This is purely pedantic, but most ABET engineers consider a CS major a scientist while a computer engineer as an engineer. My comments were limited to engineering programs.

To be super pedantic, because I think it's interesting: At the US the Computer Science major was in the college of Arts and the Computer Engineering major was in the college of engineering, but besides general education electives the majors only differed by 1 CSE course and 1 or 2 low-credit math courses (most CS/CE majors took the CSE courses required for both).

In Germany, the equivalent major is Informatik, which literally translates to English as Information Science but is basically Computer Science. There are some colleges that offer technische Informatik, which would be Computer Engineering, and a degree in engineering, but as far as I can tell that's rarer.

Computer Science isn't officially an engineering degree, but I definitely wouldn't consider it a science degree. The only scientific experiments were in gen ed physics courses.

Iran uses comprehensive standardized exams to sort university admissions (the population of the test takers vary between 100k and 600k), but pretty much anyone with a STEM high-school degree can get admitted to some university. The worst universities are for-profits (still pretty cheap though, except a few very good programs in state universities that admit a few people by money), and they basically give you a degree for giving them your money and showing up on classes. Since the universities get a more homogeneous level of talent, the standards they set is compatible with what most of their students can achieve, hence the high graduation rates.

Another factor is that people take life more seriously in Iran (based on my very limited data on non-urban Iranians, and the US). There is virtually no social bubble that does not think degrees are important. “Engineer” is used as a general title of prestige, used as an umbrella term for anyone rich who is not a medical doctor.

I heard that this year, at least in some regions, they're doing the Gymnasium assignments randomly (!) I know someone where their child qualified for Gymnasium but apparently it's not guaranteed this year due to lack of spots so there's going to be a lottery (!).

This is in North Rhine-Westphalia.

Distributing children of age 10 into groups based on their predicted future academic achievement works about as well as you would expect (i.e. not very well), but the redeeming feature of the system is that it is reasonably fluid and you can change tracks. You could, for example, do Abitur after completing Realschule and then move on to university. It is also possible to change directly from Realschule to Gymnasium at basically any point, if you meet certain standards. (You can also take university classes while in Gymnasium without too much trouble.)

There is also the Gesamtschule, which combines the three tracks (Hauptschule, Realschule, Gymnasium) into a single school.

Huh? From Peter Thiel to Bill Gates to Steve Jobs to Zuckerburg, most billionaires don't push the college propaganda and have shown/encouraged path without college education.

It's only the pseudo-social scientists who can't do proper data analysis (finding out the real confounding variable) that push the college propaganda

Don't forget Elizabeth Holmes!

That's true I should've said wealth. I think many people don't see many paths towards wealth if they aren't entrepreneurial, college used to be a good way towards upwards mobility. I think we're all realizing it's not really the case now

Asian migrants (east, south) lok down on trades. Not core US middle class looks down on such.

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