> One of the really striking findings of the study was, that you would in some sense really rather know where somebody went to college rather than how much money their parents make, if you wanted to guess how much money they were going to make in the future
At the bottom of the study you see education is the most important factor in career success for your first job. About 7x more accurate than parent's income.
To elaborate: if, hypothetically, one's parent's income was a huge determining factor in one's education, and in turn one's education was the only relevant factor to one's income, then there would be a 100% correlation between one's education and one's income, and a statistically much smaller one between one's parent's income and one's education.
Although we see that strong correlation between education and income, we should evaluate the previous step through analyzing the correlation of parent's income to your education, not the correlation of parent's income to your income as that would be more indirect.
A young teenager understands correlation and causation
If a study gets this wrong (it might happen) please explain how it has?
Or please explain or say how the study didn't try and differentiate?
Else OP is just producing spam. Studies obviously account for it. The default is something so very simple is looked at. It's up to OP to explain why the obvious isn't correct.
Besides you care about causation then a parents income is not really a changeable variable. People can chose to study further (Or helped to study further) or chose to study less. What's important is not a parents income, which lucky isn't anyway.
I got my BSCS from this school, and landed a great gig within a month of graduation. As a "re-entry" student on a tight budget (30 year-old working food service), I met many others who were similarly driven to build the skillsets and relationships to launch their careers as efficiently as possible.
Anecdotally, I will say these factors likely boost the effectiveness of this particular campus:
1. Smart, capable students have the "inferiority complex" of being surrounded by CalTech, USC, UCLA. They know they need to push harder to have equal footing when stepping into the industry.
2. Several of the industries represented in Los Angeles are more interested in loyal, hard-working candidates than prestigious/elite geniuses. I have talked with many representatives from companies partnering with CSULA on student projects who have expressed this.
3. Students I met were generally more interested in launching their careers than in pursuing the quintessential "college life", e.g. parties, campus societies
4. Specifically for STEM students: the Los Angeles tech scene has deep roots with the aerospace industry, as well as a lot of companies doing real tech work without the flair of typical SV/NYC companies. I had instructors who work (or have worked) at NASA JPL, AT&T, Boeing, Western Digital, and in medical research at USC/UCLA.
Absolutely. I've personally experienced a workplace where the managers preferred hiring from the lesser respected university in the area, because they were able to undercut even more on salaries.
Eh... maybe. But that is only an initial hire effect. Once you get into a big company, there is a salary band for each pay grade, so things even out if there is meritocracy.
Years ago, when I lived in the upper Midwest, I had fellow manager tell me he liked to hire engineers that grew up on dairy farms. "They know that they have to show up every day. They know that a certain amount of st comes along with every job, even great ones, so you might as well just spend a few minutes with a shovel and get it out of the way. They know the work doesn't get done by somebody else if they don't do it."
As a manager I've had the experience myself of convincing kids from fancy schools that, yes, I really do expect them to contribute to the less fun assignments, too. Only once did that not have a good outcome -- but that guy had other issues, too.
Sometimes it does. In my experience, starting salary is an albatross around your neck. I was by far our best performer but was compensated the same as everyone else in my position after years of excellent work, which my coworkers and supervisors would corroborate.
That’s part of why I’m earning a PhD.
People need confidence, entitlement, or experience to ask for their worth. Employers know this. Companies brag about taking advantage of information asymmetry to pay us less and we applaud them for it?
No, people need multiple offers to compete for their worth. If you let one company tell you how much you're worth, then that is on you. Learning to sell yourself is also a skill, so unless employers are colluding (which I know does happen, and am not excusing), then there isn't anything insidious about paying less for people without brand name reputations.
It's the same as buying anything brand name, you're paying for the (presumed) higher probability of higher quality or reduced chance of failure.
Transparency of salaries would be a boon to the general public, but we have such a huge social stigma against discussing pay, that employers can take advantage of this, however that's not the employer's fault.
Students from elite schools have better leverage. All the big tech companies come to their university such as Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, etc.. etc. for career fairs and on-campus recruiting. So those students are more likely to have multiple offers across those big names.
Whereas the no-name university need to hope their resumes stick out from 1000s on the job portal. So they have an even harder time just getting one of those "top" offers
I think you hit the nail on the head with a lot of your points. In particular:
>> 1. Smart, capable students have the "inferiority complex" of being surrounded by CalTech, USC, UCLA. They know they need to push harder to have equal footing when stepping into the industry.
I just ended my graduate studies at a UC school and had some miscellaneous encounters with CSU students, both undergrad and graduate. I found that for the most part they were just as capable as many UC students, but what set many of them apart was their maturity. This may be because many of them came from unconventional backgrounds, they were either lucky to be attending college or were attending college later on in life. At the same time, a lot of them felt like UC was a more legitimate college, or that they were somehow less intelligent because they were going to a state school.
As a highschooler hearing back from UCs and CSUs at the moment, this is true from the start. The UCs are magnitudes harder to get in to vs the CSUs, and are therefore more prestigious.
However, that does depend on the CSU. Cal Poly is highly regarded (engineering-wise), while UC Merced or Riverside are often held at a "lower tier".
Anecdotally, a lot of people hold Chico at the bottom, and Berkeley/Cal at the top of CA public schools.
I don't think this is unique to the LA area or even California and is a common misconception when people apply to colleges. As a high school or returning student you are told that some schools are better than others, and that might true from an entry standpoint. But, in most cases (except for ivy league or a Cal Tech, MIT) an employer is going to value your technical and interpersonal skills 1000x more than where you went to school.
I think more people that go to Ivies are hard workers then have so much natural ability that it doesn't require much work. Nowadays you have to be doing multiple extra curricular activities and qualifying for summer programs, etc.
People at ivies mostly just had a lucky background (if you look at the statistics based on income). I really doubt they work any harder. Even side by side you're not really comparing apples to oranges if you compare the amount of work a low income person has to do to get into an ivy and the typical high income ivy kid.
Eh - I could see that but there are people with lucky backgrounds at state schools as well. Most of the folks I know at elite schools grew up in very similar circumstances to myself.
other than like, the children of international royalty and whatnot, you just can't get into an Ivy League school without working really hard one way or another.
rich kids might go to less-prestigious private schools, but they're not getting into the Ivy League without working hard at something.
This is essentially what I was trying to get at. I think people have many misconceptions when it comes to different tiers of education, it might be a topic worth some research.
As someone who went to an Ivy, I don’t think so. There are lots of hard workers, especially international students from poorer areas, but there are also tons of rich kids (international and domestic) that get in because their families could afford to send them to Africa / have them be taught horse-riding. In fact, extra-curricular activities are to me to very strongly associated with middle class / upper class families.
Even the not rich kids often have had very supportive families. The vast majority of students don’t take college classes in high school / decide to compete in olympiads by themselves. At the least it takes a supportive teacher or more likely a supportive parent to suggest the idea—most kids in most neighborhoods aren’t even aware of the existence of such programs.
> I think more people that go to Ivies are hard workers then have so much natural ability that it doesn't require much work.
Or not. I've been told by someone teaching introductory courses at an ivy, that a major challenge they face is that their students have had such good teachers, presenting ("spoon feeding") information so clearly, that their students now have neither the skills, nor the inclination, to wrestle with a body of knowledge and extract understanding.
If you want to get into an elite college, there are a "series of steps and little quirks" which will help you. Upper-middle class families can afford to put their kids in SAT/ACT tutoring to push their scores into the upper percentiles. They can also put their kids into summer math/science programs to help them test-out of the regular track at school and bolster their college apps.
Even for parents who don't make a whole lot of money but still went to college can give powerful guidance to their children. They know what colleges are "looking for" since they've already been through the process. They know what awards to collect and extracurricular/leadership opportunities to improve their chances. Plus they can tutor their own kids, which disadvantaged/immigrants parents will struggle with.
>I got my BSCS from this school, and landed a great gig within a month of graduation. As a "re-entry" student on a tight budget (30 year-old working food service), I met many others who were similarly driven to build the skillsets and relationships to launch their careers as efficiently as possible.
As someone working their way through the California public school system in a similar situation, I've hit a roadblock with the math classes. Having no background in even basic high school math has killed me, failing pre-calculus twice now. Any tips?
Find somebody on Craigslist for tutoring or reade the fine print of your degree requirements. Often there are semi-loopholes such as the ability to transfer in credits from outside courses that can help you figure out replacements.
Math tip: seek to understand wherever possible, not just learn a series of rules. Things that you can construct from first principles are almost by definition understood and learned at a deeper level. It may take longer that way at first, but it’s a shortcut in the end.
I was in a similar situation in college. What helped me was to do /every/ problem in the homework and check them -- many math books will provide answers to even or odd numbered questions. It sounds like a drag (and it was), but I also finally passed with a very good grade!
Also after you've done the homework, make sure you consult with your teacher about things that troubled you. Having battled your way through so many examples, you will be able to appreciate their explanation better than if you never tried them.
I also struggled with the level of mathematics my first year. I got a tutor - the school paid up to a certain number of hours and that set me straight (that, and doing homework before office hours and showing up to every available office hour).
Having no background in even basic high school math has killed me, failing pre-calculus twice now.
Perhaps you needed to start a little farther upstream, even if that means remedial math classes.
For anecdotes: I took the calculus sequence at a community college, and the teachers I had for (differential) Calculus I and (integral) Calculus II were among the best teachers I had at any level. The Calculus I teacher, the late Jack Minnick, was the best teacher I had in any discipline and at any level. He also published some math texts.
The key takeaway from both those instructors is that both had quizzes based on the homework material essentially every class, a methodology that pre-empted my tendency toward procrastination.
This view has helped me: math is a language, not a puzzle. I used to think, "If I can't figure this out from first principles, then I'm an idiot". So I would stare, and stare and stare at some thing and I wouldn't be able to figure it out. Which made me sad ;-)
After failing calculus once, I decided to go into physics (because, really I am an idiot), but I knew I needed to up my math game. I camped out in the library and saw a whole bunch of foreign students memorising stuff. Now, I used to scoff at this kind of behaviour, but I thought "I just failed calculus and now I want to go into physics", so what the heck -- nothing is crazier than that.
I sat down with a deck of index cards and I wrote a memorable name on one side and a theorem, lemma, equation, proof, etc on the back. I think I wrote something like 600 of them for my calculus class. And I memorised them -- all at once (because I'm an idiot).
But something wonderful happened after I memorised the cards. When I started to do example questions... I understood them... completely. The answers were blatantly obvious. All I had to do was write them down.
Well, very unfortunately, Physics was super hard (who'd have thunk it) and I still wasn't that great at math, so I switched to Computer Science. I was so intrigued by math, though, that I enrolled in every course I could fit in. Bizarrely, due to a miscalculation on my part, I accidentally graduated with a math degree and had to go back to convert it to a CS degree (like, I said, idiot).
Anyway, the point is that you can't speak without vocabulary. And even if you understand the vocabulary, you can't use it if you don't intuitively have a feeling for where it is appropriate. I later became a teacher of English as a Foreign Language and learned that language acquisition comes from repeated exposure to things that you comprehend.
If you memorise things, you won't acquire it, but it gives you a kind of super fast dictionary in your head that you can use to build comprehension. Then if you repeatedly expose yourself to natural language (problems in your text book, and especially proofs) you will acquire the language. After a while, it will just come naturally to you. However, the key is first memorising (see note) and then repeatedly exposing yourself to it over time.
Note - memorisation is not strictly necessary, but it saves a huge amount of time because either you have to keep looking things up that you don't understand (which is very tiring), or you have to expose yourself a billion times so that you understand it from context.
I highly recommend using spaced repetition software (Anki is great and perfect for this as it can handle LaTeX input) and work through your text book adding everything that could possibly fit on a card. Get creative about ways of breaking things down that don't fit on a card. Go through about 20 every day and review every single day. Do a couple of problems in your text book every day. At one point it will just "click" and everything will be obvious. It's kind of magical, really. I'm not saying you will be a math genius, but every casual undergraduate math course is doable by the average student, IMHO. Good Luck (even though you won't need it!)
I got my start at Glendale Community College (number 4 on that list). From there, I went on to UCLA, NASA/JPL, and, now, Google. It has been quite the journey. I wasn’t born in the US, nor was I from a wealthy or educated family (at one point we were on foodstamps, but reached ‘middle’ class by the time I started high-school). Though, in comparison, my parent’s journey has been a much longer one, where they were born in a third world country as second class citizens—-into the life of subsistance farming in a remote village on land they did not own.
The “inferiority complex” is real until you get to your new destination, and realize the people at UCLA or JPL or Google aren’t very different from you. Furthermore, projects/institutions that you have put on a pedestal since childhood are a lot less “magical” once you have seen how the sausage is made.
I’ve met exceptional people from Cal State schools and people I wouldn’t hire from MIT. At this point, I find the school a person graduated from, for undergrad, to be a weak signal at best; and in many cases their grad school as well.
"...a lot less 'magical' once you have seen how the sausage is made."
I remember discovering this phenomenon too coming up from a underprivileged background (to use a common term). I had great appreciation for recognizing this phenomenon reading a forward to some homeschooling book. You might appreciate this blurb too...
"The Roman writer Tacitus said, "Omne ignotum, pro magnifico," which translates roughly, "Everything unknown is taken for wonderful."
Think about it. Somehow we humans have this complex to assume great ideal things when ignorant of them. I've been pondering this for the past 10 months or so.
I use to apply that to get ideas: Avoid learning how something works at first. Study outside factors. E.g. look at screenshots of an application. Try to imagine how it works. Only learn how it actually works after that.
I started doing that after realizing that I used to do this with software I saw in magazines as a child, and then get disappointed when I got the actual software: When you just look at the surface, it's easy to infer a lot of qualities that are not there, and be entirely unaware of the shortcomings.
My sister's a Yale Ph.D who has taught in the SUNY system and other public schools and has really gotten a lot of out teaching these student populations, and finds them far more impressive than Ivy League students. Hard working, many of them first-generation college students, often working full time jobs and supporting families, all with minimal complaints. They're paying their bills and they're expecting ROI on that tuition -- and put in the corresponding amount of work on their studies.
One thing I don't understand - if these universities are:
1. Running at a profit (growing endowments)
2. A path to the middle class
Why doesn't the government just roll the profits from the current pool of public uni's to new public uni's until prices start falling and demand is satisfied? Seems like it could only be good for society?
That sounds like it would destroy the incentive to do a good job in the first place (and the incentive to donate/make endowments to your alma matter, why bother when that money will just be taken away?). Instead, why don't these univiersities roll their own money into expansion?
Public universities are not profitable. Quite the opposite: tuition and fees cover only part of their operating costs; the rest comes from the government. In California, AFAIK, public universities don’t have endowments. Government funding of universities is seen as an investment in the state’s economy and in greater opportunity for all Californians. That’s the story at least.
Theoretically they should be self-sustaining on the large scale: education -> greater economic output -> higher tax revenue -> funding for education. Unfortunately that hasn’t really proven to be sustainable in California for a variety of reasons.
What I meant was profit/loss and other systems of accounting are meant to sum up the quantities within and the flows across the boundaries of a given system. If you externalize all of the profit and internalize all of the cost then of course it's going to look like a university loses money.
Didn't realize how close the UCs were to being essentially private universities these days. No wonder they're targeting higher percentages of out of state enrollments.
But still not as much as private ones. Even the highest, Berkeley and UCLA, have about 21-22% of OOS and international students. The remaining UCs have less than 20%.
That is misleading because they are counting their hospital’s revenue in the pie. That only matters if the hospitals are generating profits the rest of the university can use. Otherwise, the hospital is revenue coming in and costs being spent with no relation to the education arm of the system.
The hospital does account for ~33% of revenues[0], but the Med School and the Hospital also account for ~55% of total expenses[1] so it doesn't seem entirely unfair to include them in the revenue stream.
I have to agree. The first generation of immigrants are generally poor, but eager for their children to move up the ladder, and do everything they can to make that happen. It's often the main reason they came.
This was a good article and despite the location of CSLA a good look outside of the coastal elite education bubble.
Far too often the focus is only on the elite students at the elite schools when its clear upward mobility, just in sheer quantity, is better created at less elite public institutions like the CUNY schools or the CSUs. Hell even the culture war aspects are overstated - the "campus free speech" pearl-clutching is based on the experiences of maybe 5-7 elite institutions, and the entirety of the "Asian discrimination in admissions" controversy is based entirely on the superiority of 3-5 elite schools.
Far more needs to be done to extend upward mobility to everyone in this country and that isn't going to happen by focusing energies entirely on the HYPSM.
CSU LA has had one of the most notable campus free speech problems. California's public universities try to discriminate by race but are hindered by Prop 209.
There's a reason why California has the CC/CSU/UC system split up. Each system and tackle different missions within public education.
The CC system works for adults with many weekend/night offerings and a huge emphasis on usable skills and trades. The CSU system is the budget/value offering to young adults with a good blend of trades/liberal arts with a focus on practical applications. Both of these systems are excellent for high volume upward mobility when they're functioning.
Then there's the UC system which serves as the halo product that's supposed to draw in or retain the best and brightest. This mostly serves to keep the middle class from leaving California, or when that fails, draw in upper-middle class from elsewhere.
Are California's "elite public institutions" doing less for upward mobility than the CC/CSU system? Probably, but that's not it's main mission. It's trying to preserve the existing middle class, which is arguably just as important as raising the lower class.
building on this. much of the gender discrimination argument happens at the same level. it’s usually white women from elite universities and privileged backgrounds at places like Google.
Glad to know there is a better way than Affirmative Action. I know AA does two things:
1. upper class non-white/non-Asian young adults took advantage of economically disadvantaged white/Asian students to enroll into good universities, shamelessly just because they have a better skin color.
2. these not so well-prepared AA students got into good universities because of their skin instead of their merit, unsurprisingly many of them can never graduate and thus have wasted resources for all. They could earn a decent life by going to the school that fit them the best, including the school mentioned here, plus so many others to choose from.
3. it divides Asians against other people of color. So white students can be admitted at lower GPAs and SAT scores than Asian students without upsetting them.
Privilege schemes set everyone against whichever groups are perceived to be getting better treatment. If you want to make a kid hated, treat him better than his friends for no reason...
You'll need to present a substantial study proving that extraordinary claim (that every other group gets better treatment in admissions across the whole of the US).
The actual evidence for that across the US is practically non-existent. I'm aware of a few infamous instances of argued bias in California, which has resulted in lawsuits.
Asians have the highest university attendance rate and the highest education attainment rate in the US.
There are lot of data where white students are admitted with lower scores than Asians on average. Without these handicaps, Asian Americans would have even higher rates. The exact same thing happened to Jewish students a generation ago. I thought everyone knew this?
"Writing in the New York Times, Harvard political theorist Yascha Mounk points out that Asian students must outperform their white peers by 140 SAT points to win admission to elite universities." [1]
"Today, according to a survey by The Harvard Crimson, Asian-American freshmen had higher SAT scores than any other ethnic group. It's not enough for them to be as good as everyone else: To get in, they have to be considerably better.
The problem seems to be that, in the absence of measures to limit their representation, there would just be too many Asian-Americans. So, from all outward appearances, Harvard has a quota to prevent that unwanted result." [2]
I had a privedged international education and taught at Berkeley and Chicago, but the hardest working student I ever knew was an undocumented refugee who started at CSLA and transferred to Northridge for his junior and senior years. To save bus fare, he slept in the bushes at Northridge. Last year he got his BS and found a good job. He supported himself through school as a sexworker. I'm in awe of his grit and endurance. We need schools that can accommodate hard-working students who succeed despite unconventional lives. And We need such people of remarkable courage and character to become leaders in corporate life. I'm proud to support the Cal State system with my taxes.
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[ 0.34 ms ] story [ 200 ms ] thread> One of the really striking findings of the study was, that you would in some sense really rather know where somebody went to college rather than how much money their parents make, if you wanted to guess how much money they were going to make in the future
At the bottom of the study you see education is the most important factor in career success for your first job. About 7x more accurate than parent's income.
To elaborate: if, hypothetically, one's parent's income was a huge determining factor in one's education, and in turn one's education was the only relevant factor to one's income, then there would be a 100% correlation between one's education and one's income, and a statistically much smaller one between one's parent's income and one's education.
Although we see that strong correlation between education and income, we should evaluate the previous step through analyzing the correlation of parent's income to your education, not the correlation of parent's income to your income as that would be more indirect.
Please correct me if I'm missing something.
A young teenager understands correlation and causation
If a study gets this wrong (it might happen) please explain how it has?
Or please explain or say how the study didn't try and differentiate?
Else OP is just producing spam. Studies obviously account for it. The default is something so very simple is looked at. It's up to OP to explain why the obvious isn't correct.
Besides you care about causation then a parents income is not really a changeable variable. People can chose to study further (Or helped to study further) or chose to study less. What's important is not a parents income, which lucky isn't anyway.
Anecdotally, I will say these factors likely boost the effectiveness of this particular campus:
1. Smart, capable students have the "inferiority complex" of being surrounded by CalTech, USC, UCLA. They know they need to push harder to have equal footing when stepping into the industry.
2. Several of the industries represented in Los Angeles are more interested in loyal, hard-working candidates than prestigious/elite geniuses. I have talked with many representatives from companies partnering with CSULA on student projects who have expressed this.
3. Students I met were generally more interested in launching their careers than in pursuing the quintessential "college life", e.g. parties, campus societies
4. Specifically for STEM students: the Los Angeles tech scene has deep roots with the aerospace industry, as well as a lot of companies doing real tech work without the flair of typical SV/NYC companies. I had instructors who work (or have worked) at NASA JPL, AT&T, Boeing, Western Digital, and in medical research at USC/UCLA.
Years ago, when I lived in the upper Midwest, I had fellow manager tell me he liked to hire engineers that grew up on dairy farms. "They know that they have to show up every day. They know that a certain amount of st comes along with every job, even great ones, so you might as well just spend a few minutes with a shovel and get it out of the way. They know the work doesn't get done by somebody else if they don't do it."
As a manager I've had the experience myself of convincing kids from fancy schools that, yes, I really do expect them to contribute to the less fun assignments, too. Only once did that not have a good outcome -- but that guy had other issues, too.
My starting salary in 1994 was (converting to USD), $18,000 by 2001 I was earning $84,000 (my last salary in the UK)
Starting salary doesn’t have to be a limitation, it is an uphill climb, but it’s not on your “permanent record”
Lots of people I've talked to at my school don't believe software engineers can make $160k-$200k TC out of undergrad.
It's the same as buying anything brand name, you're paying for the (presumed) higher probability of higher quality or reduced chance of failure.
Transparency of salaries would be a boon to the general public, but we have such a huge social stigma against discussing pay, that employers can take advantage of this, however that's not the employer's fault.
Whereas the no-name university need to hope their resumes stick out from 1000s on the job portal. So they have an even harder time just getting one of those "top" offers
>> 1. Smart, capable students have the "inferiority complex" of being surrounded by CalTech, USC, UCLA. They know they need to push harder to have equal footing when stepping into the industry.
I just ended my graduate studies at a UC school and had some miscellaneous encounters with CSU students, both undergrad and graduate. I found that for the most part they were just as capable as many UC students, but what set many of them apart was their maturity. This may be because many of them came from unconventional backgrounds, they were either lucky to be attending college or were attending college later on in life. At the same time, a lot of them felt like UC was a more legitimate college, or that they were somehow less intelligent because they were going to a state school.
However, that does depend on the CSU. Cal Poly is highly regarded (engineering-wise), while UC Merced or Riverside are often held at a "lower tier".
Anecdotally, a lot of people hold Chico at the bottom, and Berkeley/Cal at the top of CA public schools.
https://www.niche.com/colleges/search/top-party-schools/s/ca...
Your technical/interpersonal skills are definitely more important, but odds are you won't get a chance to demonstrate it.
rich kids might go to less-prestigious private schools, but they're not getting into the Ivy League without working hard at something.
Even the not rich kids often have had very supportive families. The vast majority of students don’t take college classes in high school / decide to compete in olympiads by themselves. At the least it takes a supportive teacher or more likely a supportive parent to suggest the idea—most kids in most neighborhoods aren’t even aware of the existence of such programs.
Or not. I've been told by someone teaching introductory courses at an ivy, that a major challenge they face is that their students have had such good teachers, presenting ("spoon feeding") information so clearly, that their students now have neither the skills, nor the inclination, to wrestle with a body of knowledge and extract understanding.
Even for parents who don't make a whole lot of money but still went to college can give powerful guidance to their children. They know what colleges are "looking for" since they've already been through the process. They know what awards to collect and extracurricular/leadership opportunities to improve their chances. Plus they can tutor their own kids, which disadvantaged/immigrants parents will struggle with.
As someone working their way through the California public school system in a similar situation, I've hit a roadblock with the math classes. Having no background in even basic high school math has killed me, failing pre-calculus twice now. Any tips?
YMMV
Also after you've done the homework, make sure you consult with your teacher about things that troubled you. Having battled your way through so many examples, you will be able to appreciate their explanation better than if you never tried them.
Good luck!
For anecdotes: I took the calculus sequence at a community college, and the teachers I had for (differential) Calculus I and (integral) Calculus II were among the best teachers I had at any level. The Calculus I teacher, the late Jack Minnick, was the best teacher I had in any discipline and at any level. He also published some math texts.
The key takeaway from both those instructors is that both had quizzes based on the homework material essentially every class, a methodology that pre-empted my tendency toward procrastination.
After failing calculus once, I decided to go into physics (because, really I am an idiot), but I knew I needed to up my math game. I camped out in the library and saw a whole bunch of foreign students memorising stuff. Now, I used to scoff at this kind of behaviour, but I thought "I just failed calculus and now I want to go into physics", so what the heck -- nothing is crazier than that.
I sat down with a deck of index cards and I wrote a memorable name on one side and a theorem, lemma, equation, proof, etc on the back. I think I wrote something like 600 of them for my calculus class. And I memorised them -- all at once (because I'm an idiot).
But something wonderful happened after I memorised the cards. When I started to do example questions... I understood them... completely. The answers were blatantly obvious. All I had to do was write them down.
Well, very unfortunately, Physics was super hard (who'd have thunk it) and I still wasn't that great at math, so I switched to Computer Science. I was so intrigued by math, though, that I enrolled in every course I could fit in. Bizarrely, due to a miscalculation on my part, I accidentally graduated with a math degree and had to go back to convert it to a CS degree (like, I said, idiot).
Anyway, the point is that you can't speak without vocabulary. And even if you understand the vocabulary, you can't use it if you don't intuitively have a feeling for where it is appropriate. I later became a teacher of English as a Foreign Language and learned that language acquisition comes from repeated exposure to things that you comprehend.
If you memorise things, you won't acquire it, but it gives you a kind of super fast dictionary in your head that you can use to build comprehension. Then if you repeatedly expose yourself to natural language (problems in your text book, and especially proofs) you will acquire the language. After a while, it will just come naturally to you. However, the key is first memorising (see note) and then repeatedly exposing yourself to it over time.
Note - memorisation is not strictly necessary, but it saves a huge amount of time because either you have to keep looking things up that you don't understand (which is very tiring), or you have to expose yourself a billion times so that you understand it from context.
I highly recommend using spaced repetition software (Anki is great and perfect for this as it can handle LaTeX input) and work through your text book adding everything that could possibly fit on a card. Get creative about ways of breaking things down that don't fit on a card. Go through about 20 every day and review every single day. Do a couple of problems in your text book every day. At one point it will just "click" and everything will be obvious. It's kind of magical, really. I'm not saying you will be a math genius, but every casual undergraduate math course is doable by the average student, IMHO. Good Luck (even though you won't need it!)
The “inferiority complex” is real until you get to your new destination, and realize the people at UCLA or JPL or Google aren’t very different from you. Furthermore, projects/institutions that you have put on a pedestal since childhood are a lot less “magical” once you have seen how the sausage is made.
I’ve met exceptional people from Cal State schools and people I wouldn’t hire from MIT. At this point, I find the school a person graduated from, for undergrad, to be a weak signal at best; and in many cases their grad school as well.
I remember discovering this phenomenon too coming up from a underprivileged background (to use a common term). I had great appreciation for recognizing this phenomenon reading a forward to some homeschooling book. You might appreciate this blurb too...
"The Roman writer Tacitus said, "Omne ignotum, pro magnifico," which translates roughly, "Everything unknown is taken for wonderful."
Think about it. Somehow we humans have this complex to assume great ideal things when ignorant of them. I've been pondering this for the past 10 months or so.
I started doing that after realizing that I used to do this with software I saw in magazines as a child, and then get disappointed when I got the actual software: When you just look at the surface, it's easy to infer a lot of qualities that are not there, and be entirely unaware of the shortcomings.
Why doesn't the government just roll the profits from the current pool of public uni's to new public uni's until prices start falling and demand is satisfied? Seems like it could only be good for society?
Theoretically they should be self-sustaining on the large scale: education -> greater economic output -> higher tax revenue -> funding for education. Unfortunately that hasn’t really proven to be sustainable in California for a variety of reasons.
- student tuition and fees, 10.8% - state educational appropriations, 7.2%
See page 37 of https://ucla.app.box.com/v/acct-pdf-AFR-15-16
0: https://ucla.app.box.com/v/acct-pdf-AFR-15-16 page 37
1: https://ucla.app.box.com/v/acct-pdf-AFR-15-16 page 28
Far too often the focus is only on the elite students at the elite schools when its clear upward mobility, just in sheer quantity, is better created at less elite public institutions like the CUNY schools or the CSUs. Hell even the culture war aspects are overstated - the "campus free speech" pearl-clutching is based on the experiences of maybe 5-7 elite institutions, and the entirety of the "Asian discrimination in admissions" controversy is based entirely on the superiority of 3-5 elite schools.
Far more needs to be done to extend upward mobility to everyone in this country and that isn't going to happen by focusing energies entirely on the HYPSM.
Relevant - https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/shut-up-about-harvard/
The CC system works for adults with many weekend/night offerings and a huge emphasis on usable skills and trades. The CSU system is the budget/value offering to young adults with a good blend of trades/liberal arts with a focus on practical applications. Both of these systems are excellent for high volume upward mobility when they're functioning.
Then there's the UC system which serves as the halo product that's supposed to draw in or retain the best and brightest. This mostly serves to keep the middle class from leaving California, or when that fails, draw in upper-middle class from elsewhere.
Are California's "elite public institutions" doing less for upward mobility than the CC/CSU system? Probably, but that's not it's main mission. It's trying to preserve the existing middle class, which is arguably just as important as raising the lower class.
They also provide a cheaper way to get the bulk of your first two years' credits in place before proceeding to a "four-year" university.
(I have degrees from both the CC and CSU systems.)
You may be thinking of California's not public community college system.
1. upper class non-white/non-Asian young adults took advantage of economically disadvantaged white/Asian students to enroll into good universities, shamelessly just because they have a better skin color.
2. these not so well-prepared AA students got into good universities because of their skin instead of their merit, unsurprisingly many of them can never graduate and thus have wasted resources for all. They could earn a decent life by going to the school that fit them the best, including the school mentioned here, plus so many others to choose from.
The actual evidence for that across the US is practically non-existent. I'm aware of a few infamous instances of argued bias in California, which has resulted in lawsuits.
Asians have the highest university attendance rate and the highest education attainment rate in the US.
"Writing in the New York Times, Harvard political theorist Yascha Mounk points out that Asian students must outperform their white peers by 140 SAT points to win admission to elite universities." [1]
"Today, according to a survey by The Harvard Crimson, Asian-American freshmen had higher SAT scores than any other ethnic group. It's not enough for them to be as good as everyone else: To get in, they have to be considerably better.
The problem seems to be that, in the absence of measures to limit their representation, there would just be too many Asian-Americans. So, from all outward appearances, Harvard has a quota to prevent that unwanted result." [2]
There are tons of results. [3]
[1]http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/10/the-asian-disa...
[2] http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chapman/ct-asians...
[3]https://www.google.com/search?q=asians+and+white+sat+scores&...