U.S. women are outpacing men in college completion in every major group
pewresearch.org
pewresearch.org
But for a society that acts like everyone’s worth is wrapped up in whether or not you have a degree, we should be a lot more concerned about this than we are.
They aren't useless, but as tuition rises it is inevitably going to be a worse investment. Not to the point where trades are worth its equally annoying but different kind of annoyance, though. Pay depends on unions, and get into trade unions is anything but a meritocracy.
If you actually use specific things you learned, it's useful in the way that training and certification is useful.
If you don't, it's mostly just an indicator of "this person is at least this smart". Which only really matters to the extent that employers use it to save time on interviews.
Also, can you pay student loans with pre tax income?
I've worked with many talented engineers over the years who didn't have degrees and have had no trouble finding jobs and moving around. I imagine a degree might help you get a foot in the door, but once you can demonstrate you can do the job, seems to be easy to pick up more work.
I really wonder how damaging that debt would be for a young person who is also trying to save for a house and start a family.
That's very atypical. The average student loan size at graduation is around $33k to 41k. The only way you get "hundreds of thousands in debt" is if you go to an expensive private university and pay full price.
https://educationdata.org/average-student-loan-debt
>The average private nonprofit university student borrows $33,910 to complete a bachelor’s degree.
>For-profit students borrow an average $40,970.
If you go to a private school, or a public school in a state you don't live in, you can easily double or triple those costs, but there are routes for bright students to study at excellent schools for pretty low cost.
You're asking if student loan debt repayment is tax deductible, and the answer is no.
For example, many top private schools have tuition+board costs upwards of $90k/yr, now— yet if you (or your parents) bring in less than $100k-$200k/yr (again, depends on the school), tuition is completely free, with a sliding scale on incomes based above that threshold. Stanford does not even publish their total cost for a degree any more so much as a matrix to provide a ballpark estimate.
State schools often provide massive discounts for their tax-paying residents to attend. In California, that could be the difference between $20k/yr versus $70k+/yr for UCLA or Berkeley. University of Texas just announced tuition will be free for all in-state families earning less than $100k/yr going forward.
Then of course, there’s the need-based and/or merit-based scholarships, which schools may give out to entice someone they particularly want to attend, or through blanket policies to incentivize their student body: e.g. University of Southern California (tuition with board around $90k/yr now) still gives out 50%-tuition scholarships based on an objective SAT score cutoff.
That’s not to say paying full sticker price for college never happens, but there’s many options before taking on hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. I believe the average amount of total debt per student is something like $40k, or ~10k/yr.
EDIT: most of these discounts usually only apply to US citizens; international students are often paying full sticker price, and ineligible for government-backed student loans. Some schools use this policy to have international students subsidize their domestic students, to the point that the UC system got in trouble for prioritizing international students over US ones because it was better for the balance sheet.
Plumber - median $61,550 per year
HVAC tech - median $57,300 per year
Electrician - median $61,590 per year
Framer(Carpenter) - median $56,350 per year
Bricklayer(Mason) - median $53,010 per year
I agree that investing heavily in many degrees is probably ill-advised.
But regardless of career path, the real trick is to raise your children to aim higher than median. :)
You don't want to be a plumber, you want to run a plumbing empire!
I think the silver-lining here is: be competent at your job and all aspects related to it, but do that while being your own boss.
Not much different from other areas but in this case, trades are in high demand and the initial investment in terms of capital is very little compared to "start a company and hope to break even in an year or two".
Seems plausible. If you click around you find the report explicitly excludes self-employed workers.
>Self-employed persons are not included in the survey or estimates.
Probably because they are entirely different jobs. The “tradesmen” making the big bucks are actually business owners, who are hiring others to clean the toilets and wire circuit breakers. This makes them more like CEOs than individual plumbers. It would not make sense to lump their salaries with employed trade workers.
The last plumber I hired was two brothers, who do good work, charge like $100+/hr on labor, but are considered self employed and thus don't show up in that dataset.
And I’d bet their rate even has to take into account the time in their “off” hours when they are writing estimates, invoicing, communicating with clients, marketing, and so forth.
They don’t just clock out when they finish fixing your plumbing. Even at $100 each, it’s not pure profit. Running the business probably eats into a big chunk of their hourly rate.
So you're prone to falling into survival bias, while also needing skills beyond just being good at your job in order to sell yourself so you can get customers to begin with.
>the initial investment in terms of capital is very little compared to "start a company and hope to break even in an year or two".
2-3 years of apprenticeship is "very little"? In addition to however much experience you need to be trusted as a business? And who's to say you will break even in a year or two?
You can see what union trades make in a specific area by searching for “prevailing wage [city name]” and looking at the wage tables.
From the linked BLS report:
>These estimates are calculated with data collected from employers in all industry sectors in metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas in every state and the District of Columbia.
I'd take country wide figures from government agencies over haphazardly doing your own research for a few cities on google.
or are these full-timers.
I'm sure they're almost certainly the former, and that 77/hr doesn't look so amazing after taxes and other overheads. I'd bet that gets down closer to 40/hr actual spending money, and that's not as amazing around big cities like DC, NYC, or SF.
Journeyman electricians get $53/hr wage in Mpls/St Paul, total package is around $100/hr (includes health insurance, defined benefit pension, employer FICA, unemployment insurance, union dues, apprentice program funding, vacation pay, etc) Foreman get an extra $5 an hour and a general foreman gets another $5 on top of that.
NYC and SF electricians get around $70-75/hr wage, DC is around $65/hr.
Trade unions are so hard up for new members that they’ll educate you while you’re an apprentice, so after 5 years you’re a journeyman with no education debt making $100k+ a year. It takes a while for a college educated person making $100k/year to catch up to the electrician in lifetime earnings.
If you’re a non-union residential electrician in say, Alabama or Kentucky, you’ll probably make $60k a year. If you’re a commercial union mechanical or electrical tradesperson in a decent sized metro area, you’ll make significantly more.
It's a hard requirement a lot of the time in tech as well. Doesn't matter anymore whether you have 10+ years experience at a large company in <very fancy subfield that requires at least grad school level expertise in something very academic> like compilers or something. You'll be viewed as a neanderthal that probably can't or didn't pass Calculus.
In the past, that was less of an issue. A culture of self study (on prerequisite academic topics) was more prevalent. Now the base assumption is that you stumbled into your position and have been flying under the radar as a dimwit changing the color of buttons.
Theories as to why this is now the case:
- Increased competition and rise of CS enrollment and improved perception of CS degrees.
- Bootcamp grads giving recruiters and hiring managers a bad impression about everyone self taught.
- Overhiring in certain subfields and at certain large tech companies causing a reduction in the signaling value of experience.
- Age discrimination
So in other words, with the exception of physical trades, credential inflation is definitely a real thing and it definitely has an impact on how easily you can move positions and/or negotiate compensation.
And if you couldn't tell, yes I'm salty on account of having had to waste time and money going back to finish a degree that I was overqualified for just in order to not immediately get lumped in with bootcamp grads. The entire ordeal was academically worthless. Don't make my mistake kids...stay in school even if it feels like you aren't learning anything so that you don't have to go back and do it while also juggling adult responsibilities. I think this is a mistake that men are probably more likely to make than women as well, which could help explain some of the gender discrepancy in graduation rates. Call it overconfidence fueled by testosterone or something.
I've always seen "or equivalent experience". I'd assumed that including that alternative was mandatory-ish for the same reason that explicit intelligence tests are reportedly lawsuit magnets.
However, when I say it's often a hard requirement, I do mean that literally. The "or equivalent experience" bit isn't there a significant percentage of the time for the sorts of jobs I typically apply for (nothing that has actual regulatory reasons to require a license or degree). Then you wind up with the person that was trying to hire you having to petition up to the division executive for an exemption to company policy or something ridiculous like that. If you aren't really really good, that's often a dealbreaker. I suspect I lost out on many opportunities that way because I can only really evaluate the instances where they tell you about the petition and then tell you it went well (if it went poorly, might as well tell you "we decided to go with another candidate" or just not tell you about the policy).
Additionally, sometimes the lack of strict degree requirement doesn't mean a lack of paperwork that could be prohibitive. Or they'll say something like "every three years of professional experience will make up for one year less of education", which besides being a silly ratio, is essentially a prohibition on hiring people without a degree because I'm not about to accept a very underleveled offer due to how they arbitrarily weight years of education vs years of professional experience. I've been desperate before but never that desperate thank goodness.
As far as being a legal standard, I'm not aware of and have probably never lived in an area where an "or equivalent experience" statement was actually required, on account of it being missing for maybe ~50% or so of the jobs I've applied to or been hired for. If companies are being sued and losing over the lack of that statement, absent other evidence of discrimination based on applicant membership in a protected class, that would be news to me.
Funny you say this 1.5 months after I find out that the university where I got my master's dropped calculus classes (from the bachelor subjects, there never was much non-applied math in the master years). Logic (mathematical logic), discrete math, combinatorics and theoretical statistics have been dropped years past (more than a decade for logic). Applied statistics and "Math I + II" (essentially revision of high school calculus, practical only, no theory, e.g. no more treatment of the difference between Riemann and Newtonian integration) are all the math that's left.
Master degree holders starting 4 years from now will all be "neanderthals that probably can't or didn't pass Calculus". Or at least know little of the theoretical underpinnings of calculus.
As they say, ignorance is bliss, I guess.
One of ways that I've seen middle-aged people succeed in the trades is to hire a crew and turn it into a business. But by definition, not everyone can be the boss.
It can be a great career if you stay healthy! But I think we should be careful about answering every employment or education question by immediately saying "trades."
I’m with you on the moral argument. My dad was a master carpenter and is one of the smartest people I know. And his work will be around long after mine has become obsolete.
Citations:
https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm
https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes472152.htm https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes472031.htm https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes472111.htm
Young women are doing worse than their male peers in rural areas economically. This gap is closing.
What implications this has for society at large I can only speculate.
Thats only sixteen percent of women. Or put another way, 84% of men still make more than women.
> Younger women in urban/metro areas are doing significantly better than their male peers economically (higher employment rates and income). This gap is increasing.
In 22 metro areas.
You’re framing your argument in a way that seems especially combative and antagonistic towards women gaining a level playing field. It’s not a zero sum game, but men will absolutely lose privilege as women even the playing field. There will be cases where women make more, and that’s life. And if women as a whole for a while make more than men, big deal, it’ll eventually even out.
Is that accurate “most”, and is it only when compared to trades?
Trade,Estimated Employment Construction Laborers,1,019,090 First-Line Supervisors of Construction Trades and Extraction Workers,777,420 Electricians,712,580 Carpenters,700,290 Operating Engineers and Other Construction Equipment Operators,450,370
Bls2023
Where as there’s nearly 4 million acredited teachers and 3 million registered nurses
45-0000 Farming, Fishing, and Forestry Occupations 432,200
47-0000 Construction and Extraction Occupations 6,225,630
49-0000 Installation, Maintenance, and Repair Occupations 5,989,460
51-0000 Production Occupations 8,770,170
53-0000 Transportation and Material Moving Occupations 13,752,760
That adds up to 35 million total employed.
[1] https://blog.dol.gov/2023/03/21/data-spotlight-employment-of...
- these aren't the only trades. Sorry i got confused by chatgpt - I only meant to point out, this seems like a very small amount of people compared to what I thought - Not a mistake, but I was kindof joking with the post and it wasn't obvious. For this alone I deserved the massive downvote I got. I do think these numbers don't reflect the true number of people working in the field as say registered nurses or professional teachers because... how do i say this in a nice way.... many of them may be sharing a ssn and that's much more dangerous from a regulatory perspective than doing that as a REGISTERED nurse or PROFESSIONAL teacher. However there's a lot of peop[le nursing and teaching who aren't in those stats as well
</rant
It’s not that boys are making a decision in high school not to go to college and therefore letting their grades slip. Once your grades slip, pathways to college narrow dramatically.
To illustrate my point, we can compare earnings of men with no college to women with a bachelor’s degree. Men make $45k, women make $65k. To believe that men are choosing trades you have to believe that men would voluntarily choose to make 30% less.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2024/05/23/labor-m...
But this is 12-14 years out of date. Maybe standards rose or they couldn't continue this guarantee.
I may be taking the surface level for grantes, but: based on the article, men were a lot more likely to in fact make my decision:
> A 2021 Pew Research Center survey asked Americans without a bachelor’s degree why they chose not to seek one – and found some gender differences in the responses. For example, men without a bachelor’s degree were more likely than women to say they just didn’t want to get one.
And women in another study suggest that they more or less need a degree due to less non-degree options:
https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2022/mar/why-women...
>What these numbers reveal is that, indeed, getting more education is an important way to close the gender pay gap. College entry—whether it is to get an AS or a BS—helps women gain access to careers where they have a comparative advantage (e.g., office work). Men on the other hand have better access to lucrative careers that don’t require a college degree (e.g., construction work). This appears to be the most reasonable explanation for why women outnumber men in college.
Encouragement goes a long way, but of course kids aren't dumb either. I'm sure some boys simply seek to work these blue collar jobs and realize you don't need to go to more school (which yes, they do worse in) to star doing this stuff.
Using the men's average is not the right metric. We're looking at a choice here, so the proper thing is to look at the percentage of men without a college degree who earn comparably to men with one, vs the same with women. I think you'll find a greater percentage of high earning men without degrees than you will find with women.
If we zoom out we can see that even the perspective of "who is doing this might motivate me to do it" is already misplaced for many technical jobs. I would think the best way to motivate anyone to do something technical would be to convince them that it is worth doing, not by proxy (because someone like you is doing it) but directly... because that activity is worth doing.
It also shows how out of touch education is that these gains don’t lead to better real world success.
When I was in college I got good grades. My professors told me my grades were so good, I’d almost certainly do better if I dropped out.
That’s how I learned higher Ed’s dirty secret: high performing drop outs do better than graduates.
You’d think that would lead to some soul-searching in academia. But that doesn’t seem to be happening.
Well it makes sense... IF you can afford to drop out. the media praises people like Gates and Jobs for never finishing college but making billionaire empires, but it's not like they didn't each burn millions on failed projects first before hitting the gold mine. How else are you supposed to stand out as someone "high performing" but with no certifications to show for it? You gotta be your own business.
If you don't have that business acumen (and a small loan of a million dollars), dropping out is horrible advice.
In my anecdote of one, college did help me discover topics that really mixed together my mix of talents and passion into one field. I just wish they told me earlier that the jobs tend to expect masters before my grades tanked. I made out okay and am taking a long cut, but you always wonder about what could have been.
Not really. I was studying something I loved but was really impractical. I had the money to major in basket weaving, so I did.
But if I needed cash, it would be coding and Google.
We have a name for groups who target and isolate vulnerable individuals for personal gain...
But I don't think the root causes that started as millionaires already and only get richer are ignorant per se. You need a certain discipline, narrative, and overall feel on the mood to properly become that successful on a grift. I doubt many of them went from rags to riches on this.
> There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge'.
Well, if you think about it for five seconds, it's because people in general (but especially children) identify with and look up to people who look like them and share their culture. That's just human nature.
on one hand you are saying boys with female role models do not develop their masculinity and on the other you are saying there is a link between criminal behaviour and single mothers? this criminal behaviour is coming from their feminine side?
It's also not clear to me at all that the person you are responding to is correct about mothering being about pampering or whatever. You could easily ascribe a tendency like that to the higher likelihood for single mothers to also be more stressed or less well off and with less time to invest in doing much more than trying to placate the child in the quickest way possible. Plenty of mothers that don't pamper and fathers that do, so that claim needs a citation I would think.
The word they were looking for is "coddle".
Masculinity is porn, soldiers, guns, cars, savior fantasies, and suffering.
We will get a positive representation and celebration of masculinity at around the same time when a term like “toxic femininity” gets used as much as toxic masculinity does today.
This is a strange juxtaposition. Are the women in universities making men homeless? Why are the two sides contrasted with each other when there's seemingly barely any relation between the two? How is this any different than something like "it's kinda shocking to see so many single moms barely making ends meet, then silicon valley filled with tech bro programmers"?
Realism, to be frank. Even a single mom has better odds statistically to find a partner than 90% of males. That's why there's not anywhere near as many homeless males than females.
Women still have a cultural option to retreat to the role of a housepartner. Very few men have that option.
>Sixty-seven percent of all people experiencing homelessness within the 2018 Point-in-Time (PiT) Count are individuals. There are 260,284 men compared to 106,119 women. Thus, men are the majority of individuals experiencing homelessness (70 percent) followed by women (29 percent).
https://endhomelessness.org/demographic-data-project-gender-...
From what I see, there is no state that skews so far that women are even close to a majority. The worst cases still almost have a supermajority of homeless men.
To be clear, I think those are all real problems, all hard to solve, and we should be doing a lot better at them. I just don’t think gender _explains_ homelessness as much as it correlates with some of the root causes.
This doesn't make sense. The ratio of men to women is roughly equal (there's slightly more men at younger ages, but they tend to die younger so after middle age there's slightly more women). The odds for either sex should be roughly similar, though it could differ more based on geography since sex distribution is not geographically equal (rural areas tend to have more men, as women tend to leave for the cities more).
Either way, when you have some portion of the 18-24 women dating men in the 25-34 demographic, that skews the portions for 18-24 men. Men who obviously can't date down and are much less likely to date up.
As another bit of trivia (but not likely to change major statistics), women are slightly more likely to be gay than men.
It doesn't imply any causality or relationship.
So you'd be fine with the above statement about single moms and tech bros?
* MIT is 49/51 female/male
* Harvey Mudd is 50/50
* Caltech is 43/57 (the exception, I guess)
* Olin is 52/48
Of course, these schools are not feasible options for most people but it is still a relevant counterexample.
By the way, love how you addressed us as “straight men”, flushing down the toilet any interest we had in taking you seriously.
Except the economies. When dual income becomes more common, housing starts to charge under that assumption.
Most people literally cannot afford to be single income. There are divorcees who stay together simply because either cannot afford to move out and go it alone for a while.
https://www.rocketmoney.com/learn/homeownership/womens-housi...
Those affect both genders, yes.
>Lastly, straight men, I’ll give you a secret women choose to go to school because we are taught at a young age that if getting an education is the #1 way to not be dependent on anyone.
Well I can give you a secret back: for better or worse, men know we have more options without a degree. Both my uncles weren't college material so my grad dad put them both in the army. another uncle went straight to trades. My cousin went to the peace corp and another cousin did go to school but on a sports scholarship.
These aren't male exclusive but very male skewed. It could be a chicken and egg but for a lot of "us" there is nowhere near as much pressure to go to college in order to get a job. So the stats aren't surprising.
Totally agree about how women should go to school of course. I'm not sure there was anybody in this chat or the article really questioning that, but you made a good case for it anyway.
Nobody says you must be a tradwife. You should seek your dreams in life. If that means you want a degree and career, definitely go for it. That's your choice to make. If you give this choice to anyone else, you will be screwed.
Generic stereotypes of men shouldnt be a major factor in making decisions in your life. This is a you decision.
But there's consequences here that you dont seem to acknowledge and you're going to struggle greatly in the dating scene.
It's still shocking to me that women saw men working very hard jobs, coming home absolutely destroyed and worn out and women wanted this? lol?
https://www.payscale.com/career-advice/do-men-or-women-choos...
Sure, when I was in high school and college, there were significantly less women. And sure, women experience discrimination in many forms, many in ways that men don't understand or have to deal with. I get it, I'm speaking from a "position of privilege" as a man.
But I had numerous female teachers and college professors in my programming and math classes. The female students in my classes were smart, capable, and dedicated. Never once did I see them denied anything or treated differently. Female friends told me about negative experiences facing sexism, and they always came from people outside the school, or at the very least outside the CS program.
And yet literally everyone I talked to at this overwhelmingly left-leaning school assured me that being a female CS student was a form of torture. They could never explain why. Forget about the female-only scholarships, the conferences, the special clubs and interest groups. These middle-class college students living in one of the world's richest cities are suffering in this field, and we should be doing anything and everything to help them, we will not be satisfied until we have an exact 50%-50% split.
I'm not saying it's all rainbows and sunshine. Obviously sexism is still a systemic problem in many parts of American life. I have sisters, they have told some awful shit. I'm simply posing the questions - at what point does a minority group stop being disadvantaged? When do they stop being considered a minority? Who gets to decide when and how that happens? Why are there so many scholarships, interest groups, and initiatives designed to help women in STEM who are struggling, but the very real problem of men and boys struggling in other fields is largely ignored? How large does the gap between male and female education have to get before it reaches public consciousness?
It seems like we (the US) should be doing more across the board to help students and provide them opportunities, regardless of gender, race, sexuality, etc. Constant culture war spats and identity politics aren't helping anyone. The vague impression from my social group is that Europeans have it figured out and we just don't, but I really don't know if that's true.
It's a nice sentiment, though a quick look at our history reveals that it's all about identity politics and culture wars. There is no way to move past it because the US is, and will remain, a divided, multicultural, individual-focused nation. It's one of my favorite aspects of the country, though it's caused no small amount of grief.
now you are policy maker and you say “what do we do to bridge this gap? what do we do to get more women to join the industry?” the answers are largely in your comment, scholarships, interest groups, outreach, summer camps…
now are we at the point now to say “ok we good, lets ‘tone this down’” - possibly. in my personal experience I would say women are still disproportionally underrepresented but maybe we’ve “done enough”…
People have all sorts of just-so explanations for why this should be; boys are more interested in manipulating physical objects, or more interested in building things. But none of it holds up when you compare across all the fields; moreover, 40 years ago you could be making the same sorts of just-so stories up about law or medicine.
No you couldn't as women were barred from those fields pretty recently then. No women working today has been barred from physics or engineering, the situation is not the same.
And that's how we should treat it. It's too later to get people interested in engineering in college. you need to start 5 years earlier minimum. Ideally 10 years earlier.
That's a whole generation off the ads of the 80's that was selling this as a toy for boys. The bulk of that marketing was already culturally set by the new millennium.
And you may have missed the 90's marketing too. If you watched Hackers (1995) or any other media featuring "nerds" with computers in that decade and weren't at least turned off, the marketing worked. Because you chose to go through and it likely portrayed hacking as an undesirable male hobby for women.
> Changing that isn’t a matter of correction. You need to actively remove boys that are more interested which not yield the best results
You underestimate the power of marketing. Going from barely any women in the 2000s to 20% in the next decade (half a generation) is herculean effort. That doesn't happen naturally.
(Source: aaha.org)
Given that the gender imbalance in physics/engineering/CS is always blamed on men pressuring women against participating, one wonders, what kind of monstrous women are gatekeeping the veterinary field, and what kind of harassment are they inflicting on men who try to participate?
I don't really buy the "computers were marketed towards men" argument that was mentioned a few child comments down. I also don't really buy into the idea that men are just inherently sexist and women aren't, especially since I've heard both mysogynist and mysandrist comments from women in my workplace...
Why are fields like law, medicine, and mathematics more receptive to women?
She knows women who haven’t had this experience as strongly but it definitely happens to a lot of them in fields dominated by men who have very poor social conditioning when it comes to women.
Her experience was actually worse in Europe than the US, too. To the point that she refuses to ever work in a certain country again, which is a shame given it’s a great opportunity
It's not exactly surprising that someone working full time has a higher standard of living than a college student. The question is what happens after graduation.
Well yes, they had jobs. Let's say 10 years after graduation, how are things holding up.
First day of Polytechnic school, one of my instructors asked how many of us had spouses or girlfriends; about half raised their hands. He said very plainly that they should withdraw from the course if they valued their loved one more than their academic performance.
Thing was he was being kind. The course load was targeted around 80 to 100 hours a week in year 1 and then eases off to 60 to 70 year 2 after proving you have the mental fortitude to sustain that kind of pace for more than a few weeks.
Post secondary is hard. It's supposed to hard. Only 9 out of an intake of 60 graduated. We were staking a lot of money on the line that would disappear if we didn't make it through. Is it really so unreasonable to think that some people would look at that and decide they don't want to make those sacrifices even if means higher pay check afterwards?
College, I dropped a lot of that, and my class workload dropped to 3-4 classes a quarter. It was like a huge weight was off my shoulders. less time in classes, more time to myself to choose. classes were harder but I had more time to focus down on my majors instead of being distracted by 3 GE equivalents in high school. It just fit my way of working better.
----
But I think that is part of the point: the standard line of K-12 has been falling while the line for college wants to keep trying to go up. Those determined A/B students will meet that line, but not the people doing the bare minimum to pass. A "C" is not what used to be a "C". I don't know the solution to it, but the current "solution" of grade inflation is not a direction I agree with.
US used to be a deeply racist and sexist country, and in order to "make things up", people overcorrected, effectively creating a society that hates white men. Now the pendulum is slowly swinging back. Give it 50 years, white men will be in the position of power again, albeit to a lesser degree. Then it's going to be women and non-whites again. These cycles will keep going on. The idea that a deeply racist and sexist country would magically stop being such "because we've collectively decided not to be sexist and racist anymore" was naive. It's going to take generations to create a society where people are truly equal.
Not so long ago women were not allowed in academia; shouldn't the first reaction be "yay!"?
Also, many Americans are taught that statistical gaps between different demographics are usually a result of some terrible injustice. (It's certainly been true in the past.) Whether or not this is true always or even in this case, I can't really say, but I do understand why the mostly American audience of HN would have a negative reaction...
If your ideology is "any differences in outcomes must be caused by systemic discrimination, and we should engage in reverse discrimination to fight it", then this is bad news, because according to that ideology, you should be doing a 180 and discriminating against women. That conclusion upsets some people.
Women surpassed men in degrees earned over 40 years ago. How long is the celebration supposed to last?
The second reaction should be to institute a bunch of scholarships for men only, tutoring programs for men only, and so on. Even the elementary school near me a few years ago had a "girls after-school math program" they advertised on a giant banner for the entire time I lived there.
(I don't actually think this, but this is what we collectively did when the "problem" was reversed.)
The reasons, causes, issues, etc. are too numerous to analyze in a comment. But this wasn't particularly new data for me.
Odd that these guys get beaten up on so much, considering that the entire rest of the society spends all their time ranting on social media and not doing actual work.
This is dismissive. Some do it as a hobby or simply to expand their reach (even Tim Walz had a few gaming streams this year), but the people making real money easily put 40+ hours into analyzing trends, understanding their audience, preparing content, editing media, and overall being a business person. Those CCs very easily be the hardest workers in any sort of communications company, but that's not how the market works these days.
I suppose by that metric, most of HN just working on some website frontend or server backend are just typing away for easy money
>considering that the entire rest of the society spends all their time ranting on social media and not doing actual work.
well, no one wanted to give me a full time job this year. Gotta do something between the Workday applications draining my soul and the boring Leetcode practice.
You can argue that the kind of "progress" or "inequality" that's being discussed was pushed forward by a social justice grifter culture that came to form online in the last decade.
Producing "content" for a living is just the natural evolution of the social justice grift, where "$peaking truth to power" becomes just "$peaking", to anyone, on anything, in a way that yields societal or institutional development but of a kind that occurs indifferent to its effects on mankind.
Social media has virtually destroyed the image of the academic. By virtue of steadily being assumed by demographics who have a peculiar relationship with social media and technology in general (mid-to-late Gen X and Millennials), Academics are adopting personalities more like YouTube streamers and people who make "content".
Academics were at the forefront of the initial social justice grift that contributed to our nascent grift society and the institution will continue to evolve to accommodate this shift.
Young women (young black women in particular) took to the social justice grift hard. So it makes sense that they'll make their new home in academia and young men who were excluded from the social justice grift, will pursue other options and get their "grift fix" elsewhere.
You do know that "content" can be anything from a glorified marketer for some designer brands, to a tech blog talking about computer architecture, to an indie movie director trying to break into the industry, to Khan academy helping to fill gaps or offer alternative education right?
Throwing all "content" as some need to make a political statement on Twitter really shows the generational difference in how people use the word. It's way too general to make any sweeping generalization that I'll buy into. You need to specify to make a concrete point here on what "content" you don't respect.
The rest of what you talk about really has nothing to do with why I replied. I don't really care what "content" t you don't like. Life is about accepting that not all things Will appeal to you, nor want to appeal to you. I'd just rather you not conflate stuff like 3blue1brown with whatever feminist you have a bone to pick with. Both are "content creators".
I was trying to reconcile between the comment that you were responding to (and its relevance in relation to the one that it was responding to) and your own (which was relevant also irrespective of your disinterest in entertaining its relevancy).
> I'd just rather you not conflate stuff like 3blue1brown with whatever feminist you have a bone to pick with. Both are "content creators".
To me it feels like we have similar things to say about the ambiguity of the word "content", but when I speak on it I'm conflating things. But when you're speaking on it you aren't doing anything other than correcting me on my perceived conflation.
Is it because my framing is different than yours that it's unworthy of legitimate criticism? That would suck. Because everything that you did say in response to what I said that reads like criticism on the surface makes me feel more confident in the things that you didn't address.
If you're able to, why not put your perspective on life into practice for me. Engage the part of my comment that has nothing to do with why you replied and doesn't appeal to you.
Evidently I'm in error somehow, but you withholding how I am from me because you don't care about what I'm wrong about does us both a disservice as human beings trying to figure out the present world's terrain.
I wouldn't say that. This is something I tend to do in many topics on HN. My only investment is "I'm lonely and I use social media as a faux conversation piece with others"
>But when you're speaking on it you aren't doing anything other than correcting me on my perceived conflation.
Well neither of us is giving a concice definition to begin with. My was by design becsuse I think there is no precise definition of "content" nor "content creator". It's someone who takes the time to produce some sort of creation, often with the goal of sharing on social media. The content can be nearly anything from there.
>Is it because my framing is different than yours that it's unworthy of legitimate criticism?
I already explained that part. You want to criticize "content" without a precise lens to begin with. It's like criticizing "books" because you didn't like Atlus Shrugged. There's lots of books not by ayn rind, that is fictional, that has pictures, that takes different framing on the world, etc. So saying "books are taken over by social justice" simply rings hollow.
>criticism on the surface makes me feel more confident in the things that you didn't address.
Sure, because I said I don't care about your main point. It's simply a topic I care not to dive down again. Hence, my Apathy.
>If you're able to, why not put your perspective on life into practice for me. Engage the part of my comment that has nothing to do with why you replied and doesn't appeal to you.
I will not. I made a specific reply to someone that wasn't you, you chimed in, and I choose to focus on my specific point. For reasons above.
I wish you a good day.
the homogenization of what used to be referred to as distinct cultural practices and social behaviors, and how they are now being packaged under a single commodity: "content", and how this influences the institutions that traditionally support a culture and its society.
So I reckon that's my definition of "content".
The most basic actions that people used to perform as a part of their daily life are being packaged and experienced alongside obvious commodities and their effects (film, advertisements, etc.)
Everything is being shoved onto online platforms and made to appeal to the standards that suit those platforms and the character and personalities of the people who participate in the "content" economy are stripped of their individuality.
And all of this occurs downstream of whatever the outcome of the Trump/Musk tryst is.
Thank you for you're time. It's been a pleasure.
Women who get into college, meanwhile, have the dynamics set up in such a way that they are less restricted by any urgency to get financially independent fast, since the set of women being able to get into college will automatically self-select for those who have plenty of safety nets.
You see long term brain changes in kids who get prescribed Adderall, you don't see this for adults. Proponents tend to tout this as why we absolutely need to give this to kids, because they say this will permanently heal them, could just as well be permanently damaging them.
I'm concerned about potential long term changes to the brain as well. I wouldn't call that necessarily catastrophically consequential on the level that castration would be though, on account of many other drugs also causing long term and potentially negative changes to the brain.
I wouldn't compare underage drinking (known to potentially have long term consequences for the brain) to castration for instance, which is why I think doing the same for amphetamine use is hyperbolic.
What's this utopic ideal you're being sealed from if you take something like adderall in your early years? Can't make it to the NBA/NFL?
I do believe that daily drug use during childhood is likely to fundamentally change that child's adult disposition. many men I have spoken to who were medicated during childhood have agreed, I have higher confidence in their opinion than yours. some kids will benefit from this. lots and lots of kids are victims of overprescription, and effectively will be mentally castrated by having spontenaiety and peaks of enjoyment crushed via permanent downregulation of the mind's reward circuitry. physically castrated too by reducing growth 10-20% which yes would probably impact ability to maximise sporting potential.
Can we just discuss the problems men face without the totally unnecessary victimhood language.
The problem with the way you talk about this issue is that everything you say is comparing things that are off by about an order of magnitude in terms of their typical consequences.
The public sphere gets its attention by appealing to base desires (rage, sadness, humor) and slowly slipping in the pitch for snake oil. If you're giving inconvinent truths, you're being "preachy", and "don't understand my struggle" and "are part of the problem".
Or they simply become famous in various means and in that power make skeletons to be revealed years later. It's hard to have a spotlight on you 24/7 and have your entire life be squeaky clean. That used to be the facade of politicians and even they don't care anymore.
Can't make the horse drink, even if they are dying of thirst because they keep being fed alcohol.
wow, I might have to try this in the bedroom sometime
Feels like you watch too many of the wrong youtube influencers.
What, you thought that in one generation men magically became dumb?
As someone else said, the only problem is the lack of real positive role models (people who build, have ethic and do something useful with their lives), that have been replaced by pathetic characters like JP and other nobodies that only sell victimhood or get rick quick fantasies on the internet.
And then in the next sentence you're victimizing yourself for being downvoted. I can't even downvote you. HN doesn't allow me for some reason. I can screenshot it, if you want proof.
You’re literally making those numbers up, they are not referenced in the linked article and you provide no proof. You may want to take a step back and ask yourself if it is you who is brainwashed.
You cannot downvote because the comment is too old, the 2(lol) downvotes I got and that were cancelled by more upvotes came from those that replied to this shitty thread while it was still fresh.
No gaslighting man, I really don't care, I just don't like like reading what from my point of view looks like stuff that a kid would write. I'm an adult ffs. This BIG problem of the percentage if it's real (don't know, don't care) can be solved in 1/2 year.
There's nuggets of truth, but the overall effect is nowhere near as dramatic, no. Kids (both genders) are subscibed to a lot more medicine than the previous generation. There are a lot more initiatives to promote women in education than men. But it's not like men are failing out in droves nor are being abused in school to not succeed.
There are a lot more holisitic issues with education to fix, like the decreeasing budget and teachers being paid less that starbucks baristas, before we need to worry about nuanced factors like the different ways boys learn vs. girls. But yes, girls tend to do better in K-12 becaue the environment is more suited for them compared to the energy of boys who run around and rough house and other "disorderly" conduct.
The whole "go to trades" argument people are making is already a big reason men are pulled away from college compared to women. They already are doing that, and very few women are.
I think it's bad to give amphetamines to kids...full stop. But it isn't similar to castration or a lobotomy or even in the same order of magnitude in terms of long term irreparable effects.
Stimulant drugs of that nature tend to be more tolerable than opiates or benzos or a lot of other drugs often prescribed for common mental illnesses (and often to kids).
My issue with the whole discussion is not that we shouldn't take a hard look at our amphetamine prescribing tendency and try to resolve the underlying issues instead of putting on a drug band-aid...my issue is that it is implying some sort of long term catastrophic damage for kids or adults that may have undergone that sort of treatment in the past. And it's asking them to start adopting a blame mentality and potentially start using this great potential (imagined) future that was robbed of them as a coping mechanism.
They aren't mentally handicapped, and they shouldn't think of themselves as being the equivalent of somebody that's been castrated or lobotomized and therefore permanently mentally disabled in some way.
Yes, giving amphetamines on a regular basis to kids is mind blowing. It's also not the end of their lives.
technically if we have two people, went to same school, same degree same classes, same grades in every class all the way through. last semester one of the two took one different class and was 1 credit short of graduating and then left school and never got her/his paper. one of these two individuals is setup to have a prosperous career while the other is “unemployable” even though of course academically-speaking they are one and the same