OT: College is a rip off

[dadiOH]

I wanted to and did major in geology. I never used it, never made a dime with it. I never used "History of Northern Renaissance Art" either nor did it ever make me any money; nevertheless, it has enriched my life. _____________

I must disagree. Doing as you say above may well turn out someone able to code well but it also restricts his problem solving *to* code. It does nothing to enable him to relate that code to real life because he is so narrowly focused that what may seem obvious to him is not to the code

*user*. As an example, more than 30 years ago I was writing a program for my business; my brother was visiting so I sat him down and told him "do what the computer tells you". In this case, the computer told him to enter a last name; naturally, he entered numbers. Whoops, back to coding.

Then there is the matter of being so narrowly educated that someone cannot play nicely with his peers; someone who can not expound - let alone write - an idea in intelligible sentences.

Technicians are a dime a dozen; thinking generalists are scarce as hen's teeth.

[Percival P. Cassidy]

A friend has recently submitted the manuscript for the 5th or 6th edition of his widely used text book. The publisher wants each new edition to have shorter sentences, shorter paragraphs and more graphics.

Perce

[Percival P. Cassidy]

Studying *is* work, and getting a college degree should be a more-or-less full-time job. The fact that so many students (have to?) work while they are in college contributes, IMO, to the declining standards: students don't have time to study sufficiently, and the prof. can't fail more than a certain percentage of the class, so the pass standard declines; same applies to high school. And assignments are often pathetically undemanding. At the non-US university from which I graduated, the prof. explained the grading system for one of the first classes I took: "We reckon that anyone who gets 85% should be up here teaching the class"; the university-wide grading scheme expected that only about 5% of the students in any reasonably large class would get the highest grade, and a teacher consistently awarding a higher percentage of such grades would get a "please explain" memo from some higher-up or other.

Perce

[Percival P. Cassidy]

The bulk of that general education should have taken place in high school, but now we have kids doing AP Chemistry in HS and learning many equations without having had a background in general descriptive chemistry. Perhaps this is an overreaction to the state of affairs I saw described many decades ago in _Reader's Digest_: much of what Americans are not studying until they are at university was already studied by UK students in high school.

Perce

[krw]

Nonsense. Fewer college kids work now than did fifty years ago. There were no student loans when my father went to college (they didn't cover much when I went). By your logic, standards should have improved.

If they "don't have time" it's because they're partying (yes, I did my share, too).

Irrelevant.

[mike]

backintheday, I interviewed many very intelligent people with good grades from top engineering universities. Few of them could "think". I could teach 'em engineering. I was never successful teaching anybody how to "think". Being able to solve complex equations is useless if you can't figger out which equations to write.

They had zero real world experience. "Whaddayamean that pot has a 30% tolerance??? My calculations say it needs to be 10K."

The ones I hired were those who had designed and built something on their own, outside the classroom. Didn't matter whether it was a computer, model airplane, house, something....anything!!

And there's no substitute for a GOOD mentor. Nobody mentored Joe, so Joe never mentored Bill who didn't learn how to mentor Jane... Pretty soon, the whole place is a bunch of ineffective people. But that's ok, 'cause they've all been promoted to management!!! All the real work is being done in China or India or....

[clare]

"The problem with today's specialization in education is one learns more and more about less and less, untill he knows all there is to know about nothing"

[notbob]

Likewise so many other cultures. India, China, Japan.

Over 25 yrs, I worked my way up from a ditch digger to design engineer (mostly promotion and ojt), but I had a great K-12 education (50-60s). Most of the foreign engineers in our Silicon Valley company could not "think". Given A and B, could not come up with C. They could do rote math like crazy, but didn't have the common sense god gave a peanut butter sandwich. Worse, it meant little. HR hired based on the paper trail alone. I was fortunate, as our hi-tech company also promoted based on ability/merit and was willing to train promising employees. I finally went back to college to get my degree, but by then the industry had collapsed in the US and thousand of jobs evaporated into thin air, putting legions of engineers on the street. I jes threw up my hands and retired.

I kinda miss it, but then I really don't. Seriously stressed out, I was. Now I watch the river flow past my window and am happy. ;)

nb

[HeyBub]

Unemployment rate, 25 years and over, college degree: 4.5%

"The Employment Situation" Sept 2011, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

[RickH]

I'll take the guy on my team who eats sleeps and drinks computer code and is continuously excited by creating new things with it and making it perfect, any day.

I've had "wanna be" programmers who took up computer programming as a fall back when their plans to be a performance artist or philosopher fell through. They rarely work out and their ideas often fail the giggle test or the thats obvious test when you put them in a room with some real industrial, electronic and embedded systems engineers. You cant be good in a technology without gaining language and reading skills beyond that of an English major, the material is just different. A person with soft skills can maybe do good at a field like accounting with some business basic math skill, but real engineering no way.

[RickH]

I'm interviewing right now about 12 people a week for 4 more weeks. So far only two of them (after 16 interviews so far have any hope of cutting it). And they are the ones who eat, sleep and drink code. If they cant crank it out, they are not getting the job. If they cant sit in the interview and explain in great detail their though process on design, code and device architecture and also show that they are truly excited and love it, and can handle the math, and can do some assembler (machine language code) they simply are not getting the job. "Generalist" Liberl Arts major computer programmers are a dime a dozen and do not have the capability to create state of the art embeded devices. They belong in the accounting department writing spreadsheets and being "well rounded" with their cube mate.

[RickH]

College is a party. College is having to listen to your neighbor in the dorm playing video games shouting obscenities at the screen until

3AM while you try to sleep. The hard level of effort is just not there for the vast majority. I disagree about having to work while in college, the students that do the most always seem to have the best time management skills and actually do better.

[Ed Pawlowski]

Still is. I have a nephew that graduated collage and figured he be a wealthy financier in three years. Pretty much could not get anything right. After a series of speeding tickets, accidents, etc, he joined the Marines.

Today, he is a Lt. Col. makes a good buck and loves what he is doing. He could have easily taken ROTC or even West Point and gotten there sooner, but I think starting at the bottom did a world of good for him.

[Ed Pawlowski]

On Mon, 17 Oct 2011 15:55:48 -0400, "Percival P. Cassidy"

I disagree. Of all the people I've known and worked with, the ones that had to pay a major portion of their own schooling benefited better in the end, appreciated and better used that education.

The ones that got a free ride spent more time drinking, not more time studying. This is just my observation. If you have statistics saying otherwise, I'd like to see them.

I know of one such student that has some sort of literature degree and a trust fund. He wants me to hire him to work in shipping at minimum wage. Lots of education, no ability.

[DD_BobK]

While I was at a UC during the 90's my boss served on various committees. I was able to share in the knowledge he gleaned from serving on these committees.

One that applies well to the discussion at hand was a committee "undergraduate learning experience".

UC's real mission is research, teaching of undergrads is "sidelight".

One of the biggest takeaways was ...... undergrads working (jobs unrelated to their majors) had insufficient time to adequately address their studies. LIke, duh!

But the real secret was, most weren't working to pay for school, they were working for the "extras"; cars, entertainment, 'toys', vacations, etc

Their undergrad studies were not their top or only priority, they had chosen to spread themselves thin and their education suffered as a result.

I see this as a failure of parenting, failure to instill the concept of learning / study as full time (actually more than full time) work.

cheers Bob

[DD_BobK]

Hard to argue Steve's post, having seen what he described up close for many years.

cheers Bob

[Steve B]

In my senior year of high school, I left home. I worked busboy at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas on Graveyard. Got off at 8, went to school at nine. Took English IV (an honor class), physics, government, and chemistry.

Things are the way they are because of our decaying society and the teacher's union.

Life is a buffet, and if you go away hungry, it's your own fault.

Stve

[Peter]

So the child unfortunate enough to be born to a teenage single drug addicted mother, living in a vermin infested slum along with multiple siblings, without adequate nutritious food to eat, dwelling in a dangerous neighborhood without safe convenient affordable transportation to other neighborhoods, attending a local school filled with disruptive children who preclude any semblance of education in the classrooms and therefore grows up lacking the basic skills to progress academically is responsible for their circumstances?

[Han]

"Steve B" wrote in news:SYhnq.58114$CK4.39937 @news.usenetserver.com:

Mostly because some (too many) parents do not have time to spend with the kids or do not feel like it. I wish we could change fertility so that proof of parenting ability was necessary to produce offspring.

[Peter]

...and a certain modicum of common sense and intelligence is necessary to gain the right to vote. The unsolved problem with democracy (not that any society has developed the optimal system) is that given enough time, circumstances tend to devolve to the lowest common denominator: our basest instincts of self-righteousness and greed.