7 ms·

I think the psychological aspect of first failure and injustice is rough on grad students. Hypercompetitive to get into a good enough BS program to get into a

by VLM 4y ago

I think the psychological aspect of first failure and injustice is rough on grad students. Hypercompetitive to get into a good enough BS program to get into a MS program yet unlike post-BS tracks like med school, 98% aren't getting that job in academia and will fail out. Its a pyramid with a very pointy top, much like college football usually doesn't lead to a NFL career. Meanwhile the "failures" who were not smart enough to get into a good grad program are making incredible salaries etc. 98% of them when they don't get that tenure track professorship "Hey I listened to advice, obeyed, played the game of education, played it VERY hard, put in incredible hours, won top positions, now where's my reward I was promised?" (I get this emotional response originally from my favorite server at Dennys who did a K12 education degree, busted her butt, got a top half of her class place, back then they were overproducing ed degrees to such an incredible extent she never got a teaching job, came home with her student loans to the same server job she had at Dennys when she was in high school. If you're going to try to climb a job pyramid where most people don't make it to the top, don't take out loans to do it... Anyway she sounded a lot like some MSCS students and grads I've met while programming.)

shadowgovt 4y ago
But if you don't take out loans, you almost certainly guarantee failure to reach the top of the pyramid. So we're stuck with two bad choices. Either people take a risk on loans, or the academic pyramid becomes populated with only those with burnable wealth.
- MereInterest 4y ago
  As a society, we have a third option: fund education as a public good.
  - colonelpopcorn 4y ago
    I feel like the third option should be: not conflating credentials with education or ability. Education is a funded public good, I won't say well funded, but funded nonetheless. Credentials are not a well funded public good, and shouldn't be in my opinion.
    - alwayslikethis 4y ago
      Not all education should be funded. Some subjects are in more demand, results in more jobs, and produce greater benefit to society. Government also should not offer loans, but rather grants to make education affordable.
    - drewcoo 4y ago
      Credentials should actually be something we should want to protect the general public. Without credentials, how are non-experts able to tell real experts from charlatans? I realize we don't seem to mind that in software, but software is still a new field, so even though it's known to have a lot of shoddy snake oil peddlers, people still put up with the situation. For now. But for the most part, when any of use needs to hire an expert, if there were no credentials, what would we do? Count on our ability to somehow suss out expertise without actually having anything resembling expertise in the field? Word of mouth and hope for the best? Set a war chest aside for the inevitable lengthy lawsuits because surely selection will fail often? I have friends that insist that acupuncture and chiro-mancy are medicine and not magic. But when I visit a physician, I like to know they're credentialed and have passed through accredited institutions.
    - nebulousthree 4y ago
      Education wasn't always solely or even mainly about earning credentials. It's only when industry offset their responsibilities to train new employees to universities (and thus the taxpayer in publicly funded education), that suddenly education became entirely about getting a corresponding job and getting a piece of paper. If you think of education as a public utility, something that unequivocally raises the standard of living, then it becomes about forming a population of educated and informed citizens who can, amongst other things, participate in democracy a lot more effectively.
    - red-iron-pine 4y ago
      Then what is the point of credentials? How do we prove a level of competency without having to test every single person, in depth, every single interview?
- bryanrasmussen 4y ago
  >or the academic pyramid becomes populated with only those with burnable wealth. yes, but it doesn't reasonable that people should ruin themselves out of - what? Some patriotic duty to keep American schools egalitarian? the people taking risk on loans are making a bad decision for themselves, the academic pyramid population problem is a bad decision for society.
  - lapcat 4y ago
    > the people taking risk on loans are making a bad decision for themselves Everyone in the world takes risks. Can you say it was a bad decision for the people who took the risk, took out loans, and eventually became tenured professors? Of course in retrospect it feels like a bad decision for those who didn't become tenure track professors, but nobody knows in advance who will beat the odds and who won't.
    - MereInterest 4y ago
      > Can you say it was a bad decision for the people who took the risk, took out loans, and eventually became tenured professors? Yes. A decision can only be evaluated using what is known at the time, not what is later known in hindsight. Betting on an inside straight in poker is a bad bet, even if in one particular instance you got the card needed.
      - lapcat 4y ago
        Ok, as long as you're willing to admit by this same logic that basically every billionaire in the world made a series of bad decisions that don't deserve to be celebrated. How do you know in advance, as a 20something, that you're doctor material, or lawyer material, until you actually go through med school or law school? What exactly is the "safe" route in life, Nostradamus?
        MereInterest 4y ago
        First, I don't celebrate billionaires for their survivorship bias. Second, there isn't a safe route, but we as society can avoid putting up additional hazards. As a 20-something, without going through med school or law school, you don't know if it's something you want to do. As a society, we want this hypothetical 20-something to go to med school or law school to find out. Therefore, we should make failure be an acceptable outcome, minimizing the risk for the potential student. In this case, that means publicly funding their education, such that dropping out doesn't place the student with a massive debt. ------- For context on the PhD probabilities, a professor will typically be supervising 3-4 students at any given time. A professor's career is typically about 30-40 years, and the duration of a PhD program is about 4-6 years. Therefore, over the course of a professor's career, they will supervise around 25-ish freshly minted PhDs. With an average 2% annual population growth, the population will roughly double over that time period. So on average, a professor will produce about 25 PhDs, after which there will be one empty position due to the professor retiring, and one new position due to a larger need for professors. Two spots for 25 people is not a good bet, if you do a PhD program will the goal of becoming a professor.
- Balgair 4y ago
  > or the academic pyramid becomes populated with only those with burnable wealth. I've got bad news, it already largely is like that. Maybe not via the person themself, but typically by their spouse then.
- 86J8oyZv 4y ago
  The most sensible option is that we remove academic credentials from job qualifications entirely. We’ve increasingly introduced non-credentialed ways to learn, and we have non-credentialed ways to determine what a candidate can do. So why are academic credentials related to our job applications at all? Why continue to enforce the whole miserable, class-hierarchy-reinforcing, metriculative education system at all? The most straightforward option we have is to fund true public education, without credentials or metriculation. Simple, public class-by-class grades and recommended tests would suffice, and could be done with nothing more than HTTPS servers and .edu domains. We have no need for all the other cruft keeping people uneducated.
DeathArrow 4y ago
You can do a BS and work in the industry. Nobody forces you to get a job in the academia.
- Avicebron 4y ago
  I think in the example case she was trying to get a job in the teaching industry, not necessarily teaching ed students in academia. At least that was my read on it.
- polygamous_bat 4y ago
  _Someone_ needs to get jobs in the academia, otherwise after a generation we will not have anyone to train and offer those BS degrees. Or should we only allow those with plenty of capital to pursue academia?
  - Balgair 4y ago
    Oh, um, many classes are taught by adjuncts and grad students now. PIs don't teach anymore, it's seen as a punishment for failure to get grant money.
- lapcat 4y ago
  > You can do a BS and work in the industry. There's no philosophy industry.
  - mecsred 4y ago
    Which is one of the reasons sane people suggest not getting a philosophy degree.
    - memen 4y ago
      One studies because of curiosity, not because of money.
      - DeathArrow 4y ago
bioemerl 4y ago
> now where's my reward I was promised?" These people deserve more without question, but at the end of the day if this is their reaction they didn't look forward far enough. It's a slightly less bad decision than people who decide to try to become professional athletes. You're subjecting yourself to getting treated like absolute shit for a half a chance at a mediocre job. I do not understand why anyone would ever choose to be an acedemic, at least one at any institution that has this sort of crazy imbalances of applicants and positions, because whenever that happens you don't get in on skill, you almost always get in based on some form of nepotism or politics, and that culture slowly destroys all organizations it's involved with.
- lapcat 4y ago
  > It's a slightly less bad decision than people who decide to try to become professional athletes. Tell that to the professional athletes. > at least one at any institution that has this sort of crazy imbalances of applicants and positions Every institution has that imbalance. That's not particularly relevant, because grad students don't typically get jobs at their alma mater.
  - filoleg 4y ago
    >> It's a slightly less bad decision than people who decide to try to become professional athletes. > Tell that to the professional athletes. I think the point they were trying to make is that you should talk not to professional athletes, but to those who tried to become one. Those who became professional athletes is just a tiny subset of those who tried. And within that, there is an even smaller subset of those who actually made it worth it for them (in terms of career earnings, getting out without debilitating lifelong injuries, etc.). In a similar vein, you shouldn't be talking to Brad Pitt as a way to gauge your decision to become an actor, you should be talking to someone a bit more representative of the pool of those who tried to become actors (aka those who failed to get there, which is the vast majority).
    - lapcat 4y ago
      It's not a question of advice. Of course take a wide variety of advice. The question is whether it's a "bad decision" to pursue a highly competitive field, despite knowing the odds are against you, if you think you might have the talent to make it. I'm not convinced that it's a bad decision. Risky? Yes. Bad? That's debatable. Did Brad Pitt make a bad decision? According to the logic that a big risk is never worth it, then he made a bad decision. But I don't agree with that. And I don't agree that failed actors necessarily made a bad decision either. As I stated in another comment, there is no safe, guaranteed path in life. It's risk all the way down. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35196444 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35196444 Should nobody ever become an actor? Nobody an athlete? Nobody a philosopher? Or are you going to say, only those kids born into wealth? In other words, non-wealthy kids don't ever get to have any ambition?
dralley 4y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26414881 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26414881

by VLM 4y ago

shadowgovt 4y ago

But if you don't take out loans, you almost certainly guarantee failure to reach the top of the pyramid. So we're stuck with two bad choices. Either people take a risk on loans, or the academic pyramid becomes populated with only those with burnable wealth.

MereInterest 4y ago
As a society, we have a third option: fund education as a public good.
- colonelpopcorn 4y ago
  I feel like the third option should be: not conflating credentials with education or ability. Education is a funded public good, I won't say well funded, but funded nonetheless. Credentials are not a well funded public good, and shouldn't be in my opinion.
  - alwayslikethis 4y ago
    Not all education should be funded. Some subjects are in more demand, results in more jobs, and produce greater benefit to society. Government also should not offer loans, but rather grants to make education affordable.
  - drewcoo 4y ago
    Credentials should actually be something we should want to protect the general public. Without credentials, how are non-experts able to tell real experts from charlatans? I realize we don't seem to mind that in software, but software is still a new field, so even though it's known to have a lot of shoddy snake oil peddlers, people still put up with the situation. For now. But for the most part, when any of use needs to hire an expert, if there were no credentials, what would we do? Count on our ability to somehow suss out expertise without actually having anything resembling expertise in the field? Word of mouth and hope for the best? Set a war chest aside for the inevitable lengthy lawsuits because surely selection will fail often? I have friends that insist that acupuncture and chiro-mancy are medicine and not magic. But when I visit a physician, I like to know they're credentialed and have passed through accredited institutions.
  - nebulousthree 4y ago
    Education wasn't always solely or even mainly about earning credentials. It's only when industry offset their responsibilities to train new employees to universities (and thus the taxpayer in publicly funded education), that suddenly education became entirely about getting a corresponding job and getting a piece of paper. If you think of education as a public utility, something that unequivocally raises the standard of living, then it becomes about forming a population of educated and informed citizens who can, amongst other things, participate in democracy a lot more effectively.
  - red-iron-pine 4y ago
    Then what is the point of credentials? How do we prove a level of competency without having to test every single person, in depth, every single interview?
bryanrasmussen 4y ago
>or the academic pyramid becomes populated with only those with burnable wealth. yes, but it doesn't reasonable that people should ruin themselves out of - what? Some patriotic duty to keep American schools egalitarian? the people taking risk on loans are making a bad decision for themselves, the academic pyramid population problem is a bad decision for society.
- lapcat 4y ago
  > the people taking risk on loans are making a bad decision for themselves Everyone in the world takes risks. Can you say it was a bad decision for the people who took the risk, took out loans, and eventually became tenured professors? Of course in retrospect it feels like a bad decision for those who didn't become tenure track professors, but nobody knows in advance who will beat the odds and who won't.
  - MereInterest 4y ago
    > Can you say it was a bad decision for the people who took the risk, took out loans, and eventually became tenured professors? Yes. A decision can only be evaluated using what is known at the time, not what is later known in hindsight. Betting on an inside straight in poker is a bad bet, even if in one particular instance you got the card needed.
    - lapcat 4y ago
      Ok, as long as you're willing to admit by this same logic that basically every billionaire in the world made a series of bad decisions that don't deserve to be celebrated. How do you know in advance, as a 20something, that you're doctor material, or lawyer material, until you actually go through med school or law school? What exactly is the "safe" route in life, Nostradamus?
      - MereInterest 4y ago
        First, I don't celebrate billionaires for their survivorship bias. Second, there isn't a safe route, but we as society can avoid putting up additional hazards. As a 20-something, without going through med school or law school, you don't know if it's something you want to do. As a society, we want this hypothetical 20-something to go to med school or law school to find out. Therefore, we should make failure be an acceptable outcome, minimizing the risk for the potential student. In this case, that means publicly funding their education, such that dropping out doesn't place the student with a massive debt. ------- For context on the PhD probabilities, a professor will typically be supervising 3-4 students at any given time. A professor's career is typically about 30-40 years, and the duration of a PhD program is about 4-6 years. Therefore, over the course of a professor's career, they will supervise around 25-ish freshly minted PhDs. With an average 2% annual population growth, the population will roughly double over that time period. So on average, a professor will produce about 25 PhDs, after which there will be one empty position due to the professor retiring, and one new position due to a larger need for professors. Two spots for 25 people is not a good bet, if you do a PhD program will the goal of becoming a professor.
Balgair 4y ago
> or the academic pyramid becomes populated with only those with burnable wealth. I've got bad news, it already largely is like that. Maybe not via the person themself, but typically by their spouse then.
86J8oyZv 4y ago
The most sensible option is that we remove academic credentials from job qualifications entirely. We’ve increasingly introduced non-credentialed ways to learn, and we have non-credentialed ways to determine what a candidate can do. So why are academic credentials related to our job applications at all? Why continue to enforce the whole miserable, class-hierarchy-reinforcing, metriculative education system at all? The most straightforward option we have is to fund true public education, without credentials or metriculation. Simple, public class-by-class grades and recommended tests would suffice, and could be done with nothing more than HTTPS servers and .edu domains. We have no need for all the other cruft keeping people uneducated.

DeathArrow 4y ago

You can do a BS and work in the industry. Nobody forces you to get a job in the academia.

Avicebron 4y ago
I think in the example case she was trying to get a job in the teaching industry, not necessarily teaching ed students in academia. At least that was my read on it.
polygamous_bat 4y ago
_Someone_ needs to get jobs in the academia, otherwise after a generation we will not have anyone to train and offer those BS degrees. Or should we only allow those with plenty of capital to pursue academia?
- Balgair 4y ago
  Oh, um, many classes are taught by adjuncts and grad students now. PIs don't teach anymore, it's seen as a punishment for failure to get grant money.
lapcat 4y ago
> You can do a BS and work in the industry. There's no philosophy industry.
- mecsred 4y ago
  Which is one of the reasons sane people suggest not getting a philosophy degree.
  - memen 4y ago
    One studies because of curiosity, not because of money.
    - DeathArrow 4y ago

bioemerl 4y ago

> now where's my reward I was promised?" These people deserve more without question, but at the end of the day if this is their reaction they didn't look forward far enough. It's a slightly less bad decision than people who decide to try to become professional athletes. You're subjecting yourself to getting treated like absolute shit for a half a chance at a mediocre job. I do not understand why anyone would ever choose to be an acedemic, at least one at any institution that has this sort of crazy imbalances of applicants and positions, because whenever that happens you don't get in on skill, you almost always get in based on some form of nepotism or politics, and that culture slowly destroys all organizations it's involved with.

lapcat 4y ago
> It's a slightly less bad decision than people who decide to try to become professional athletes. Tell that to the professional athletes. > at least one at any institution that has this sort of crazy imbalances of applicants and positions Every institution has that imbalance. That's not particularly relevant, because grad students don't typically get jobs at their alma mater.
- filoleg 4y ago
  >> It's a slightly less bad decision than people who decide to try to become professional athletes. > Tell that to the professional athletes. I think the point they were trying to make is that you should talk not to professional athletes, but to those who tried to become one. Those who became professional athletes is just a tiny subset of those who tried. And within that, there is an even smaller subset of those who actually made it worth it for them (in terms of career earnings, getting out without debilitating lifelong injuries, etc.). In a similar vein, you shouldn't be talking to Brad Pitt as a way to gauge your decision to become an actor, you should be talking to someone a bit more representative of the pool of those who tried to become actors (aka those who failed to get there, which is the vast majority).
  - lapcat 4y ago
    It's not a question of advice. Of course take a wide variety of advice. The question is whether it's a "bad decision" to pursue a highly competitive field, despite knowing the odds are against you, if you think you might have the talent to make it. I'm not convinced that it's a bad decision. Risky? Yes. Bad? That's debatable. Did Brad Pitt make a bad decision? According to the logic that a big risk is never worth it, then he made a bad decision. But I don't agree with that. And I don't agree that failed actors necessarily made a bad decision either. As I stated in another comment, there is no safe, guaranteed path in life. It's risk all the way down. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35196444 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35196444 Should nobody ever become an actor? Nobody an athlete? Nobody a philosopher? Or are you going to say, only those kids born into wealth? In other words, non-wealthy kids don't ever get to have any ambition?

dralley 4y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26414881 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26414881