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I agree with most of his premises but I don't see how his premises lead to his conclusion - US collge education is near to collapse. 1. School loan debts aren'

by qiskit 5y ago

I agree with most of his premises but I don't see how his premises lead to his conclusion - US collge education is near to collapse. 1. School loan debts aren't ideal and we should look for ways to eliminate them permanently. It's ridiculous that american students have to start their adult lives with so much debt. However, the fact that so many students are willing to go into debt for college shows that they there is tremendous demand for college education. My alma mater has continuously raised tuition ( far higher than inflation ) and also increased enrollment and yet have no problem finding students. Even if they doubled the tuition, they would have no problem meeting their enrollment goals. The domestic and international demand for US college education is simply too great for it to collapse any time soon. 2. I've never worked with anyone in tech who didn't have at least some college education. Maybe the college education wasn't in CS, but they all had some college education. So the idea that tech companies are going to hire people without some college education seems suspect to me. 3. It's blatantly obvious colleges are discriminating against asian students to a ridiculous degree and white students to some degree as well. It should stop but I don't see how that would collapse US college education? Asian and white students still want and are going to get a college education. 4. Stopping standardized testing is also ridiculous. It shouldn't be the only factor in admissions, but certainly we need some form standardized testing in the mix. Admissions should be given more data to work with, not less. But once again, I fail to see how this would collapse US college education.

randomdata 5y ago
> I've never worked with anyone in tech who didn't have at least some college education. Maybe the college education wasn't in CS, but they all had some college education. So the idea that tech companies are going to hire people without some college education seems suspect to me. I have worked with some, but they were the type who could succeed in college if they had reason to. Whereas a lot of the population simply cannot hack the academic rigor, and these people tend to struggle in the workplace for the same reason. I expect what he is trying to say, which is something we've known for a long time, is that college looks good by the numbers only because it does a good job of filtering out those destined to fail, so to speak. If we take it to the logical extreme, we know someone with, say, down syndrome is unlikely to go to college and unlikely do well in the workplace and we understand that it is their disability that produces that outcome, not because they didn't 'pull up their bootstraps' and work hard. The same idea applies across the continuum of the population. What employers want are the people on the right side of that continuum. The people born to be successful. Coupled with the social pressure for the capable to attend college, meaning that most people on the right side attend, it has served as a really good proxy for employers to evaluate. However, tech has found even more reliable methods for determining where one sits on said continuum, so that's where things are starting to break down. In terms of people, tech is incredibly small potatoes in the grand scheme of things, though. It's not clear if other industries have figured out the same. All that said, at this point, college has become religion. Even if we can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is entirely useless, people will still want to spend their life savings on it to satisfy their inner craving for a sense of meaning in the same way that other religions attract that mindset. A collapse is laughable. That is like saying that Christianity will collapse because businesses no longer require you to pledge your allegiance to God.

by qiskit 5y ago

randomdata 5y ago

> I've never worked with anyone in tech who didn't have at least some college education. Maybe the college education wasn't in CS, but they all had some college education. So the idea that tech companies are going to hire people without some college education seems suspect to me. I have worked with some, but they were the type who could succeed in college if they had reason to. Whereas a lot of the population simply cannot hack the academic rigor, and these people tend to struggle in the workplace for the same reason. I expect what he is trying to say, which is something we've known for a long time, is that college looks good by the numbers only because it does a good job of filtering out those destined to fail, so to speak. If we take it to the logical extreme, we know someone with, say, down syndrome is unlikely to go to college and unlikely do well in the workplace and we understand that it is their disability that produces that outcome, not because they didn't 'pull up their bootstraps' and work hard. The same idea applies across the continuum of the population. What employers want are the people on the right side of that continuum. The people born to be successful. Coupled with the social pressure for the capable to attend college, meaning that most people on the right side attend, it has served as a really good proxy for employers to evaluate. However, tech has found even more reliable methods for determining where one sits on said continuum, so that's where things are starting to break down. In terms of people, tech is incredibly small potatoes in the grand scheme of things, though. It's not clear if other industries have figured out the same. All that said, at this point, college has become religion. Even if we can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is entirely useless, people will still want to spend their life savings on it to satisfy their inner craving for a sense of meaning in the same way that other religions attract that mindset. A collapse is laughable. That is like saying that Christianity will collapse because businesses no longer require you to pledge your allegiance to God.