9 ms·

> I should hope that the purpose of a class writing exercise is not to create an artifact of text but force the student to think I'm there for the degree. If I

> I should hope that the purpose of a class writing exercise is not to create an artifact of text but force the student to think I'm there for the degree. If I wanted to learn and engage with material, I could save $60,000 and do that online for free, probably more efficiently. The purpose of a class writing exercise is to get the university to give me the degree, which I cannot do by actually learning the material (and which, for classes I care about, I may have already done without those exercises), but can only do by going through the hoops that professors set up and paying the massive tuition cost. If there were a different system where I could just actually learn something (which probably wouldn't be through the inefficient and antiquated university system) and then get a valid certificate of employability for having actually learned it, that would be great. Unfortunately, however, as long as university professors are gatekeepers of the coveted certificate of employability, they're going to keep dealing with this incentive issue.

jrmg 1y ago
The work this degree will credential you for is so is so disconnected from the areas of study in your degree program - presumably in the same field as the job - that the majority of the things you might learn would not be valuable? I can’t imagine this in my own life. I use concrete things and ways of thinking and working I learned in my CS degree _all the time_.
- mplanchard 1y ago
  Heck my degree was in biochemistry, and now I’m a programmer, but I still feel like I am constantly using skills I developed in school. The scientific method and good test design transcend all sciences.
  - gopher_space 1y ago
    Same deal, went back for an Anthro degree but jumped back into programming when Ted Cruz killed research. I use that degree every day of my life.
- schwartzworld 1y ago
  I honestly don’t know anybody who does what they went to undergrad for, unless that undergrad was preparation for a higher credential (premed/prelaw).
efavdb 1y ago
If this attitude prevails I would think the value of degrees will quickly diminish.
- ebiester 1y ago
  This seems to be the general feeling of students right now. Academia put itself as a gateway and barrier to the middle class. Why would we be surprised when people with no interest in anything but the goal are not enthralled by the process?
  - bumby 1y ago
    Academia clearly lost their monopoly on information. Since their last moat is a monopoly on credentials, I expect them to defend it intensely. We could make it less meaningful if employers weren’t so keen on using credentials as their own gateway. That may have more of a chance of happening if the OPs perspective becomes more prevalent and the credential becomes an increasingly worse signal for meaningful skills.
    - geysersam 1y ago
      In what way does academia have monopoly on credentials? You can start issuing your own credentials tomorrow.
      - sigmaisaletter 1y ago
        I don't know where you live, but in the "developed" parts of the world this is illegal. There will either be some government agency or some council of credential-giving institutions and they will give you a license to issue degrees, or most likely they will not give it to you.
        zmgsabst 1y ago
        In the US, you can just make up degrees — but you have to be honest that you’re unaccredited. Accreditation is regulated by NGOs who need government approval and without that you cant received financial aid (or participate in some programs) — but you can hand out pieces of paper for completing your program. https://www.ed.gov/laws-and-policy/higher-education-laws-and-policy/college-accreditation/overview-of-accreditation-united-states https://www.ed.gov/laws-and-policy/higher-education-laws-and...
johnea 1y ago
[flagged]
- grakasja 1y ago
  [dead]
palata 1y ago
> I'm there for the degree. If I wanted to learn and engage with material, I could save $60,000 I would argue that if it costs $60,000, both your education system and the recruitment in those companies that require this degree are broken. It's not the case in all countries though. Not that it is your fault, just stating the obvious.
- chongli 1y ago
  It is broken. For every coveted job there are thousands of applicants. Employers will accept any signal that reliably predicts a modicum of intelligence, conscientiousness, and agreeability. University degrees cover all three. But that's just the job market. The other elephants in the room are inflation and the housing market. People who don't have top-notch jobs (that require degrees) can't afford to buy a house. They can hardly afford rent. Cities don't want to build more housing because that will undermine the equity growth of homeowners. We are a society of ladder-pullers.
  - godelski 1y ago
    > We are a society of ladder-pullers. I don't disagree, but often we complain about people pulling up ladders and when faced with the same decision we follow suit. Ultimately we can't change this behavior if no one is willing to defect from "conventional wisdom"
    - lmm 1y ago
      We can't fix the problem by making better choices as individuals, and exhorting people to do so saps energy and distracts. The system interprets integrity as damage and routes around it.
      - godelski 1y ago
        > We can't fix the problem by making better choices as individuals That's wildly inaccurate. Your logic necessitates that "the system" is not composed of individuals. The problem itself was created through individual actions...
lurking_swe 1y ago
That’s a disingenuous argument. You don’t know what you don’t know. Literally. A completely self guided high school graduate following random online materials will not learn nearly as much on their own. Or they will go down rabbit holes and waste countless hours, and not having an expert unblock you or guide you down the right path would waste a lot of time. Further, some high school graduates (like myself at the time) literally don’t know HOW to learn on their own. I thought I did but college humbled me, made me realize that suddenly i’m in the drivers seat and my teachers won’t be spoon feeding me knowledge step by step. it’s a really big shift. If you were the perfect high school graduate, then congrats, you’re like the 0.01%! And you should be proud (no sarcasm). This doesn’t describe society at large though. For the very few that are extremely motivated and know exactly what job they want, i do think we need something in between self guided and college? No BS - strictly focusing on job training. Like a boot camp, but one that’s not a scam haha. The other aspect of college you ignore is, it is a way to build a network prior to entering the workforce. It’s also one of the best times to date, but that’s another story. Completely agree that the cost of college in the US is ridiculous though.
- bumby 1y ago
  >The other aspect of college you ignore is, it is a way to build a network prior to entering the workforce. I don’t know how generalizable this is. I remember reading a few studies trying to assess if Ivy League education was really more valuable that a state school. The result (IIRC) was that it only matters for students who came from the lowest economic strata; the authors presumed it was due to the network effect. But that also means the network effect was negligible for the majority of students.
  - tcmart14 1y ago
    I used to work for a guy who had his engineering degree from Harvard. I was out of the Navy, got a job but also had a GI bill and was looking to go to school for engineering while working full time. I asked him his advise. Pretty much he said is to go to a state school. The only real benefit, at least for engineering from Ivy League, is the network, which can make getting the first job easier. Otherwise the course work is the pretty much the same.
godelski 1y ago
> I'm there for the degree Would you hire someone without a degree? When you're in a position to hire or influence hiring, will you consider those without degrees? I ask because I hear this sentiment a lot but we still have a system becoming more reliant on degrees. The universities may be the gatekeepers of those degrees but they're not the ones gatekeeping the jobs. They have no influence there. They were not the ones who decided degree = credentials. I ask because many people eventually grow in their jobs to a point where they have significant influence over hiring. So when that time comes will you perpetuate the system you criticize or push against it? Truthfully, this is a thing that can be done with little to no risk to your own employment.
- hnfong 1y ago
  Speaking personally, yes, very much so. I see your point, but the issue is that it's quite futile to shame students for playing the game that people in the industry has set up. It doesn't help that in the past, college degrees were in fact more relevant than today, especially before the era of the internet and wikipedia, so if older people who are currently in charge of hiring aren't aware of these changes, they might just apply their outdated personal experience and just assume college degrees hold the same weight as they did in the past. I'm pretty certain when kids these days eventually become responsible for hiring decisions, they probably will handle things differently since their experiences are different.
  - godelski 1y ago
    I do appreciate that you do that! People making change is the only way change can happen. But I think the second part is amiss. I do agree that educators (being one) need to recognize the reality of the environment. But I think you also can't ignore that the reason the degrees are used to signal qualification is because the degree is intended to signal that some knowledge is held by a specific person. Yes, things have changed. It did used to be that interviews were much shorter, with a degree being a strong signal (at minimum, it is a signal that someone can sufficiently follow directions and manage their time). Should that mean those tasked with ensuring a student gets their education does not get their education? I get your point, but I think it is barking up the wrong tree. Asking academia to change only furthers the problem as it lets employers shift blame. It is like getting upset at a minimum wage worker for increased prices due to tariffs. The really weird thing is we're now in this bizarroland setting where employers will filter for degree and then spend months and a lot of time and money putting candidates through testing rounds. Making them do tons of leetcode and other things to evaluate their performance. Where the candidates spend months studying to pass the interviews. And the complaints here are probably more apt, about how the material they need to study is not significantly relevant to the skills needed for a job[0]. Worse, it doesn't seem to be achieving the results it is setting out to seek. As they say about the stock market "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent". My point is that some academics are making classes easier. Grade inflation is a measurable phenomena and it sure got worse with Covid. My point is that employers are acting irrationally. [0] I'll give an example. I had an interview a few weeks ago and we had run a bit longer than expected prior to getting to the coding portion of the interview and where their coding software crashed a few times, giving us 10 minutes to do what was expected to be 30. Finally coding, the program crashed and I said "I don't use a lot of Juypter Notebooks, does the kernel crash when OOM?" I'm explaining my thought process aloud and frankly, I'd never hit this on the job. No answer. I quickly scroll through logs, say "I'm going to guess that's the issue, I'd normally guess and if wrong google it". Yes, it was the right answer. But there was no reason to do this, especially with me guessing right. This wasn't some dinky startup, it was a multi-trillion dollar company...
SpicyLemonZest 1y ago
The purpose of the writing exercise is to produce a positive correlation between the possession of a degree and the skills that high-paying white collar jobs value. I don't blame students for not knowing that, or for not having the outside perspective to care. But positive signals of job competence are hard to come by, employers don't just blindly accept them despite what people like to say, and it's going to suck for new graduates if this one is eliminated.
const_cast 1y ago
> I could save $60,000 and do that online for free, probably more efficiently. Not to burst yours or anyone else's bubble, but no, probably not. The hard part of learning isn't access to content, it's discipline and dedication. School provides structure, goals, timelines, and deliverables. The value of this cannot be understated. I've heard from many people how they're going to learn programming online and then get a job as a developer. Almost all of them fail.
- jampekka 1y ago
  I'm teaching faculty at a university and, at least where it comes to lecture courses, I don't find this a bubble. There are definitely plenty of students who would do just fine, if not even better, without the external discipline and structure. And even more those who could do it with something like a MOOC or just a posted curriculum. And to be able to work without an external discipline is IMHO one of the main learning goals of university, and a decent rationale for why a university degree is taken as a signal for recruitment. I learned programming online and got jobs as a developer (I did later study CS at a university though). In my experience the best developers are those who taught themselves. Admittedly this may have been more the case for my older generation where formal education for programming wasn't that great nor widely available.
  - const_cast 1y ago
    Those students do exist, but there are an exceedingly small minority. Of course, they won't tell you this, because everyone likes to believe they're self-motivated. Most people just aren't. The simple question to ask is, when you go home, what do you do? If the answer is learn how to sew or work on your project car you've had for 10 months, you can probably learn on your own. If your answer is watch TV, play video games, go on a walk - then you can't, and you should go to university. Some people have told me this question is unfair. I mean, they're so tired from work, of course they want to relax. Well, guess what - your life doesn't stop if you're learning how to code on your own or whatever. If that's all it takes for you to not do it, then you don't have what it takes. How often are people picking up new and complex skills that takes years to get the hang of? Almost never. So there you go, most people require a formal, structured education to pull that off.

jrmg 1y ago

The work this degree will credential you for is so is so disconnected from the areas of study in your degree program - presumably in the same field as the job - that the majority of the things you might learn would not be valuable? I can’t imagine this in my own life. I use concrete things and ways of thinking and working I learned in my CS degree _all the time_.

mplanchard 1y ago
Heck my degree was in biochemistry, and now I’m a programmer, but I still feel like I am constantly using skills I developed in school. The scientific method and good test design transcend all sciences.
- gopher_space 1y ago
  Same deal, went back for an Anthro degree but jumped back into programming when Ted Cruz killed research. I use that degree every day of my life.
schwartzworld 1y ago
I honestly don’t know anybody who does what they went to undergrad for, unless that undergrad was preparation for a higher credential (premed/prelaw).

efavdb 1y ago

If this attitude prevails I would think the value of degrees will quickly diminish.

ebiester 1y ago
This seems to be the general feeling of students right now. Academia put itself as a gateway and barrier to the middle class. Why would we be surprised when people with no interest in anything but the goal are not enthralled by the process?
- bumby 1y ago
  Academia clearly lost their monopoly on information. Since their last moat is a monopoly on credentials, I expect them to defend it intensely. We could make it less meaningful if employers weren’t so keen on using credentials as their own gateway. That may have more of a chance of happening if the OPs perspective becomes more prevalent and the credential becomes an increasingly worse signal for meaningful skills.
  - geysersam 1y ago
    In what way does academia have monopoly on credentials? You can start issuing your own credentials tomorrow.
    - sigmaisaletter 1y ago
      I don't know where you live, but in the "developed" parts of the world this is illegal. There will either be some government agency or some council of credential-giving institutions and they will give you a license to issue degrees, or most likely they will not give it to you.
      - zmgsabst 1y ago
        In the US, you can just make up degrees — but you have to be honest that you’re unaccredited. Accreditation is regulated by NGOs who need government approval and without that you cant received financial aid (or participate in some programs) — but you can hand out pieces of paper for completing your program. https://www.ed.gov/laws-and-policy/higher-education-laws-and-policy/college-accreditation/overview-of-accreditation-united-states https://www.ed.gov/laws-and-policy/higher-education-laws-and...

johnea 1y ago

[flagged]

grakasja 1y ago
[dead]

palata 1y ago

> I'm there for the degree. If I wanted to learn and engage with material, I could save $60,000 I would argue that if it costs $60,000, both your education system and the recruitment in those companies that require this degree are broken. It's not the case in all countries though. Not that it is your fault, just stating the obvious.

chongli 1y ago
It is broken. For every coveted job there are thousands of applicants. Employers will accept any signal that reliably predicts a modicum of intelligence, conscientiousness, and agreeability. University degrees cover all three. But that's just the job market. The other elephants in the room are inflation and the housing market. People who don't have top-notch jobs (that require degrees) can't afford to buy a house. They can hardly afford rent. Cities don't want to build more housing because that will undermine the equity growth of homeowners. We are a society of ladder-pullers.
- godelski 1y ago
  > We are a society of ladder-pullers. I don't disagree, but often we complain about people pulling up ladders and when faced with the same decision we follow suit. Ultimately we can't change this behavior if no one is willing to defect from "conventional wisdom"
  - lmm 1y ago
    We can't fix the problem by making better choices as individuals, and exhorting people to do so saps energy and distracts. The system interprets integrity as damage and routes around it.
    - godelski 1y ago
      > We can't fix the problem by making better choices as individuals That's wildly inaccurate. Your logic necessitates that "the system" is not composed of individuals. The problem itself was created through individual actions...

lurking_swe 1y ago

That’s a disingenuous argument. You don’t know what you don’t know. Literally. A completely self guided high school graduate following random online materials will not learn nearly as much on their own. Or they will go down rabbit holes and waste countless hours, and not having an expert unblock you or guide you down the right path would waste a lot of time. Further, some high school graduates (like myself at the time) literally don’t know HOW to learn on their own. I thought I did but college humbled me, made me realize that suddenly i’m in the drivers seat and my teachers won’t be spoon feeding me knowledge step by step. it’s a really big shift. If you were the perfect high school graduate, then congrats, you’re like the 0.01%! And you should be proud (no sarcasm). This doesn’t describe society at large though. For the very few that are extremely motivated and know exactly what job they want, i do think we need something in between self guided and college? No BS - strictly focusing on job training. Like a boot camp, but one that’s not a scam haha. The other aspect of college you ignore is, it is a way to build a network prior to entering the workforce. It’s also one of the best times to date, but that’s another story. Completely agree that the cost of college in the US is ridiculous though.

bumby 1y ago
>The other aspect of college you ignore is, it is a way to build a network prior to entering the workforce. I don’t know how generalizable this is. I remember reading a few studies trying to assess if Ivy League education was really more valuable that a state school. The result (IIRC) was that it only matters for students who came from the lowest economic strata; the authors presumed it was due to the network effect. But that also means the network effect was negligible for the majority of students.
- tcmart14 1y ago
  I used to work for a guy who had his engineering degree from Harvard. I was out of the Navy, got a job but also had a GI bill and was looking to go to school for engineering while working full time. I asked him his advise. Pretty much he said is to go to a state school. The only real benefit, at least for engineering from Ivy League, is the network, which can make getting the first job easier. Otherwise the course work is the pretty much the same.

godelski 1y ago

> I'm there for the degree Would you hire someone without a degree? When you're in a position to hire or influence hiring, will you consider those without degrees? I ask because I hear this sentiment a lot but we still have a system becoming more reliant on degrees. The universities may be the gatekeepers of those degrees but they're not the ones gatekeeping the jobs. They have no influence there. They were not the ones who decided degree = credentials. I ask because many people eventually grow in their jobs to a point where they have significant influence over hiring. So when that time comes will you perpetuate the system you criticize or push against it? Truthfully, this is a thing that can be done with little to no risk to your own employment.

hnfong 1y ago
Speaking personally, yes, very much so. I see your point, but the issue is that it's quite futile to shame students for playing the game that people in the industry has set up. It doesn't help that in the past, college degrees were in fact more relevant than today, especially before the era of the internet and wikipedia, so if older people who are currently in charge of hiring aren't aware of these changes, they might just apply their outdated personal experience and just assume college degrees hold the same weight as they did in the past. I'm pretty certain when kids these days eventually become responsible for hiring decisions, they probably will handle things differently since their experiences are different.
- godelski 1y ago
  I do appreciate that you do that! People making change is the only way change can happen. But I think the second part is amiss. I do agree that educators (being one) need to recognize the reality of the environment. But I think you also can't ignore that the reason the degrees are used to signal qualification is because the degree is intended to signal that some knowledge is held by a specific person. Yes, things have changed. It did used to be that interviews were much shorter, with a degree being a strong signal (at minimum, it is a signal that someone can sufficiently follow directions and manage their time). Should that mean those tasked with ensuring a student gets their education does not get their education? I get your point, but I think it is barking up the wrong tree. Asking academia to change only furthers the problem as it lets employers shift blame. It is like getting upset at a minimum wage worker for increased prices due to tariffs. The really weird thing is we're now in this bizarroland setting where employers will filter for degree and then spend months and a lot of time and money putting candidates through testing rounds. Making them do tons of leetcode and other things to evaluate their performance. Where the candidates spend months studying to pass the interviews. And the complaints here are probably more apt, about how the material they need to study is not significantly relevant to the skills needed for a job[0]. Worse, it doesn't seem to be achieving the results it is setting out to seek. As they say about the stock market "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent". My point is that some academics are making classes easier. Grade inflation is a measurable phenomena and it sure got worse with Covid. My point is that employers are acting irrationally. [0] I'll give an example. I had an interview a few weeks ago and we had run a bit longer than expected prior to getting to the coding portion of the interview and where their coding software crashed a few times, giving us 10 minutes to do what was expected to be 30. Finally coding, the program crashed and I said "I don't use a lot of Juypter Notebooks, does the kernel crash when OOM?" I'm explaining my thought process aloud and frankly, I'd never hit this on the job. No answer. I quickly scroll through logs, say "I'm going to guess that's the issue, I'd normally guess and if wrong google it". Yes, it was the right answer. But there was no reason to do this, especially with me guessing right. This wasn't some dinky startup, it was a multi-trillion dollar company...

SpicyLemonZest 1y ago

The purpose of the writing exercise is to produce a positive correlation between the possession of a degree and the skills that high-paying white collar jobs value. I don't blame students for not knowing that, or for not having the outside perspective to care. But positive signals of job competence are hard to come by, employers don't just blindly accept them despite what people like to say, and it's going to suck for new graduates if this one is eliminated.

const_cast 1y ago

> I could save $60,000 and do that online for free, probably more efficiently. Not to burst yours or anyone else's bubble, but no, probably not. The hard part of learning isn't access to content, it's discipline and dedication. School provides structure, goals, timelines, and deliverables. The value of this cannot be understated. I've heard from many people how they're going to learn programming online and then get a job as a developer. Almost all of them fail.

jampekka 1y ago
I'm teaching faculty at a university and, at least where it comes to lecture courses, I don't find this a bubble. There are definitely plenty of students who would do just fine, if not even better, without the external discipline and structure. And even more those who could do it with something like a MOOC or just a posted curriculum. And to be able to work without an external discipline is IMHO one of the main learning goals of university, and a decent rationale for why a university degree is taken as a signal for recruitment. I learned programming online and got jobs as a developer (I did later study CS at a university though). In my experience the best developers are those who taught themselves. Admittedly this may have been more the case for my older generation where formal education for programming wasn't that great nor widely available.
- const_cast 1y ago
  Those students do exist, but there are an exceedingly small minority. Of course, they won't tell you this, because everyone likes to believe they're self-motivated. Most people just aren't. The simple question to ask is, when you go home, what do you do? If the answer is learn how to sew or work on your project car you've had for 10 months, you can probably learn on your own. If your answer is watch TV, play video games, go on a walk - then you can't, and you should go to university. Some people have told me this question is unfair. I mean, they're so tired from work, of course they want to relax. Well, guess what - your life doesn't stop if you're learning how to code on your own or whatever. If that's all it takes for you to not do it, then you don't have what it takes. How often are people picking up new and complex skills that takes years to get the hang of? Almost never. So there you go, most people require a formal, structured education to pull that off.