It does seem like the drop out rate (and debt associated with non-degrees) is high enough that the current model isn't working. My concern is that replacing it with less education hurts more. The Vocational Education trend seems like it's on the right track. It would also be good to copy the German apprenticeship model.
" More Americans attend college today than ever before: this year, 42% of young people 18 to 24 years old."
This is why education costs so much nowadays and the product is so poor. Everyone has the right to pursue learning. But, these folks aren't owed anything because they've sat through enough classes to earn a BA.
I don't understand how putting more students through college increases the cost per student, in normal industries more business generally means reduced costs.
High demand almost always means higher prices unless the supply is increased proportionally. That's different from what I think you are saying which is as a product is easier to produce, it's price goes down.
As the upper limits of cost are reached, people will explore every avenue for obtaining funds for paying for what they demand, including borrowing from their own future (mortgage), pooling money for odds-based distribution (insurance), and confiscating money from others just this side of being theft (tax-funded subsidies). When you run out of other people's money, you find something else suitable to spend the limited funds on.
A lot of kids are attending college because it's a status symbol for their parents, and I think it's been that way since the 90s. I remember being in high school and hearing about my friends getting in big fights with their parents because they did not want to go to college, which of course was unacceptable in white upper middle class suburbia.
What we have is not college for all, not even close. We have capitalistic college education; where it costs as much as the market will bear, and the ability of the market is distorted by massive student loans which kids are told they have to get as it is an investment into their future.
College for all would be if college was free to every high school graduate, and costs were kept down by universities being run like places of learning and not capitalistic enterprises focused on football tickets and massive stadiums.
I think by "college for all" they mean a model where everyone needs a college degree to have a chance in the job market. I didn't read it as "everyone goes to college" but rather "everyone must go to college."
I agree with you in principle, but please choose another target other than football tickets and massive stadiums. Most massive stadiums are filled with paying customers whose money is then used to fund all the other athletics programs that don't charge money because too few people would actually pay to watch them.
College-for-all accomplishes two things: commoditization and (failed) attempts at one-size-fits-all education.
Simply put, not everybody is equipped to handle an academic education (in fact, a small minority truly are). At the same time, the vast majority of work being done today in the US in almost any field (including the majority of software development) really ought not be considered "academic" work--it's essentially vocational already. One doesn't need--and shouldn't be required to have--a college degree to be employable in a web app shop or for most development (or other) roles.
The following may be an unpopular sentiment, but I truly believe that the focus on "college-for-all" just frustrates people who are talented in ways that are not academically inclined and, frankly, consumes resources unfairly for those who are. All parties are worse off for it.
What we need is less focus on conflating "academic education" with "education", and the result of that is less focus on "college-for-all."
"Meanwhile, companies in a range of sectors — manufacturing, construction, healthcare and other STEM fields — report severe skilled labor shortages."
Construction and manufacturing have severe labor shortages? I'd love to see a source for that claim. In my neck of the woods, they still haven't recovered from the recession.
They have skilled labor shortages at the prices they're willing to pay. Every time you hear an employer claim they can't find someone for a position, inquire about the salary they're offering.
This type of bullshit seems to be widely believed on HN.
I work in the engineering department of a software company and I'm closely involved with recruitment and interviews. I'll tell you this: the vast majority of people (over 95%) we turn down are unqualified, period. Meaning, we wouldn't hire them even at half the salary level advertised for the position. It has nothing whatsoever to do with what we're willing to pay - our salaries are actually very generous and we aren't afraid to pay someone what they are actually worth. The problem is we can't actually find people like that. So yes, from our perspective (250+ person tech company in SoCal), the talent shortage is very, very real.
>>So why not train them yourselves? Why do they have to be the complete package upfront?
I didn't say they have to be the complete package upfront. We actually do have comprehensive training programs for new hires, most of which were designed by me. The problem is that people need a certain mix of base level skills and character traits to succeed and excel. Most people we interview don't have those, which means they are unqualified.
"Unqualified" by what standard? What makes you think your standards are appropriate for the positions you're offering? And what makes you think your salaries are "very generous?" Lot's of companies think their salary/benefits packages are "very generous" when they're anything but. Without context your post is a giant meaningless assertion.
Software developers aren't (typically) stupid. They have a reasonable idea of the value they provide the company. My estimation is that almost every company under-compensates their engineering staff. I doubt yours is an exception.
>>"Unqualified" by what standard? What makes you think your standards are appropriate for the positions you're offering?
Because we do very rigorous analysis of why successful employees are actually successful. We know what it takes to perform well at each job function.
>>And what makes you think your salaries are "very generous?" Lot's of companies think their salary/benefits packages are "very generous" when they're anything but. Without context your post is a giant meaningless assertion.
Lots of websites aggregate salaries by position and geographic region, so we know the numbers. We also have very good benefits. For instance, our 401k program is a dollar-for-dollar match up to 15% of salary, which is extremely rare.
What I've seen is supposedly-experienced programmers who can't write FizzBuzz, or claim database experience but don't know why a cross-join is bad or what it is, or who claim to be experts at $TOOL but can only recite a handful of memorized answers and just pick whichever sounds closest to the question.
Software developers (supposedly) aren't stupid. Applicants for software development positions on the other hand...
I'll admit, I had to look up what a cross join was, despite being quite familiar with the subject once I understood the terminology. I'm sure you apply much more rigour to your hiring process, but at the same time, it is difficult to know who is throwing out great candidates (I'm not suggesting I am one) over silly little things like this. How do we know if people are hard to find because people are actually hard to find, or people doing the hiring are terrible at their job?
How do we know if people are hard to find because people are actually hard to find, or people doing the hiring are terrible at their job?
Partly both, but also missing a qualified applicant often costs far less than making a bad hire.
The ratio of decent hires to bad hires needs to be as high as possible. In comparison, the percentage of qualified applicants thrown out almost doesn't matter (unless it gets to something truly absurd like 90%). (Really it does matter, just not compared to making bad hires. Interviews and delays are still expensive, just less so than failing to get new employees up to speed.)
Interviewers that make bad hires are terrible. Interviewers that turn away good hires are merely bad.
In the presence of a shortage, the value of an employee approaches infinity. I expect that you are really constrained by the amount of money your company can afford, else you'd just walk over to Google/Facebook/Microsoft/whoever and walk out with their best employees in hand. Almost nobody is going to turn down a multi-million dollar offer, if it even takes that much.
I'm not sure I was trying to prove that there isn't a shortage, rather if you're only offering a "generous" rate and not the rate that actually attracts people, then you are not really playing in the market.
With that said, what is a shortage? Is there a shortage of Ferraris because I cannot afford one, or am I just too poor to consider owning one? Is there a shortage of developers until every developer is working for minimum wage so that the poorest of poor companies can afford them too?
You're omitting the likelihood that your applicant pool is tainted by compensation that's not inline with what your desired candidates want. (Note: this is not the same as what comp firms tell you is the 85th percentile or whatever.) (I know, you're "generous" for the market, which also claims a talent shortage and may have the same problem.)
But...approaching the edge case, do you think you would see more qualified candidates in your applicant pool if you advertised & offered a $1m/year package for the positions? Have you tried advertising the positions at double (or triple) the compensation to see if that changes matters? If you didn't test this, how do you know that the applicant pool has nothing to do with what you're willing to pay?
I'm here in Atlanta, and I can cite examples of people leaving for SF because their expected compensation goes up by a triple-digit percentage (sigh, candidates ignore costs but that's a different story). This effect changes the applicant pool in SF, perhaps boosting comp by 100%+ would work for your company locally? Certainly poaching talented employees gets easier when you offer a raise of $100k to join your firm.
Put another way: why would employment be different from other supply/demand markets where price matters, even if the price being asked is potentially distasteful to the buyer (see TSLA, AMZN, TWTR, FB, NYC apartments, or the flavor of your choice)?
To me this could also be prima facie evidence of possibilities outside of the one you listed.
(1) You're company maybe an undesirable place to work. In Fresno, CA there are couple self described big-name software firms that fancy themselves "local google". Only willing to hire the best and brightest as it were. But sadly for them, the best and brightest aren't cutting it for them. They verbatim claim the same thing you are now, good salaries, but no one coming in for an interview is worth it. The real truth is that the word has gotten out: their products stink, they treat their employees like children, and their competitive salaries are not that competitive in the larger market. The so called "best and brightest" just avoid their front door.
(1b) Just highlighting something in part 1. You are getting what you are paying for and that means you are not paying well.
(1c) Your other employees suck. I don't want to work at a place where people are rude or incapable or working in teams, or simply bad at their jobs. It makes my experience worse. Whenever an interview goes well, I always ask to meet the rest of the staff, if only just for a second. To see what they are like.
(2) Your interview process is flawed. Assuming (1) is provably untrue, then it might be time to take a good look at the interview process you are employing. I've been through so many interviews where it was clear that the (wo)man doing the interview was simply looking for someone to solve exactly one problem, or the name a specific function, or the input format for a function in a given language, or for me to suggest a specific solution(and no other), etc.
Worse still, the moment you cannot answer the question or suggest that a simple Google search would help produce a more ideal solution, or lord forbid simply suggest that an alternative solution might be better, there is this shift in perceived power. It almost seems like the interview process can be an adversarial means of verifying that the interviewer is indeed smarter than the interviewee. At this point during such "skills test" interviews, I politely tell the interviewer that I'm not the candidate they are looking for and conclude the interview.
(3) You haven't gotten the word out. How many people really know that your company is looking for someone (1, 10, 100)? Are you really getting the message out to the greater engineering community. Perhaps you are only reaching a single subset, and that subset is not skilled in what you are looking for.
I totally 100% agree with you-- there is a crazy shortage of qualified software and IT engineers.
The funny part is the only people who will agree with you are other hiring managers. Everyone else will say you aren't paying enough or some other excuse. They are never sifting through the resumes or sitting through the interviews.
If we ever stumble across a qualified candidate, we make it happen. We just can't find very many qualified candidates.
Labor shortages have this habit of producing wage spikes for the in-demand employees. Absent such spikes, I'm not sure I would take self-reporting as anything more than gossip or political speech.
I would like to see asked, of these people who can't find employees, is how much they've had to increase their salary offers to fill positions.
Because my anecdotal experience is that the people who can't fill positions are essentially looking for the higher-quality, more-modest-salary 'deals' that were more common in 2008/2009. And they're simply not in any hurry to hire anyone at all, so the disappearance of such deals results in continually-open-positions, rather than increased offers or decreased requirements.
I more or less agree with you, but would like to add into the big picture. This is where economic theory meets really... and falls short.
Salaries cannot be increased ad-infinitum. Even an extraordinary candidate's potential contribution can add so much value, since it is constrained by the way it fits in the business (and ultimately by the market for the product/service your team is helping to provide).
Requirements cannot be decreased arbitrarily either. The relationship between skill and value added is non linear, and may fall rapidly into the negatives below some threshold (it takes more time for a mentor to teach a rookie how to do things than to do things himself, borderline incompetent employees make costly mistakes, etc).
So, we are basically in a situation where a market cannot sustain itself (Paul Graham wrote about this in one of his essays, the example he used is how this same forces drove out the existance of butlers). So, in this sense, I believe shortages of labor are very real.
The experience of the dot com bubble suggests the general shape of how much salaries can increase and requirements decrease. [1]
As we're not remotely approaching either end of that envelope, I'm not too convinced that any hard limits are coming into play.
I mean, we're not talking about whether anyone can hire couriers to write web services for six figures. We're talking about whether employers are willing to hire people with 5 years of experience with Technology X at X% more than their last comparable hire, as opposed to waiting around for the posting-perfect-match outlier with the requested 10 years experience, but who'll accept essentially the same wage as that last 5-years-experience hire.
[1] Much of that might have been arguably unsustainable, but not all. And again, we're talking about degrees and trends: are offers going up at all? Are employers budging on requirements at all?
Master tradesmen are impossible to find. Skilled plumbers, electricians, HVAC people, welders, and some machinists make more than the average programmer and are always employed.
Also, the unemployment system is basically designed for them. If you work for someone and get laid off between projects, you still get paid. The other path is going out on your own.
At least in the trade unions by me, there were journeyman workers who were getting such little work that their unemployment lapsed.
It's gotten a good amount better, but the jobs still aren't steady enough for everyone to be employed full-time. Aside from data centers, there's not a ton of construction going on.
The boomers made it a big deal, I do web development with my BA and wish every day I had all that money back. I even tried to major in CS but couldn't follow my classes because the school had brought in Russian grad students who couldn't understand questions that were asked in class.
Perhaps, but what's definitely not working is the guaranteed loans from governments, which gives universities access to virtually unlimited funds. If the government wouldn't give loans for college, US tuitions would probably be 10x less, just like they are even in the most expensive universities in Europe or elsewhere.
I strongly disagree. In the Australian system everyone gets a higher education loan from the government(with interest locked to the inflation rate and repayment only required if and when taxable income passes a certain threshold), and yet our tuition rates are much lower than in the US.
For example, I just finished a Bachelors degree in a STEM field at a relatively middle of the road university and my total education debt comes out just short of $30k.
A discussion on an EconTalk podcast about trends in college education resonated with me. They discussed college as being an extended adolescence for many students: today many students treat it as an expensive way to find one's way in the world and learn about oneself whereas going back 20 or 30 years it was more about improving your employment prospects. They cited as evidence the doubling of psychology undergraduate degrees (nice for learning about oneself, but lacking a corresponding increase in jobs available) granted over a period where STEM degrees remained flat. A similar doubling in performing and visual arts degrees was another trend they contrasted to STEM degree popularity stagnation. The podcast is at http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2011/12/tabarrok_on_inn.htm...
It's a joke among engineers that you need to graduate from college so that you can start learning. My college experience (non-technical bachelors) was just a joke, period - high school 2.0. Still, I wouldn't have the good job I do now if I hadn't completed my degree.
We keep running into this problem where employers think college degrees are more valuable than they probably are. Part of that is impressed culturally, but more than anything we lack better methods of certification in most jobs. We need certification that matters, is widely accepted, and that employers actually trust. It has to be marketed well, and it has to actually produce graduates with up-to-date skills. It's not easy, especially in fields where curriculum must change yearly.
Underlying all of this is a larger, unavoidable change taking place: the disappearance of unskilled work. Computers and machines are slowly taking over every unskilled job, starting at the least skilled and moving upwards to things we used to think of as skilled labor. Taxi drivers and factory workers will hardly exist in 10 years. Construction workers will only supervise machines in our lifetimes. Unless you want to work in a low-paying retail job for the rest of your life, you need to get a degree so you can work your way up some corporate ladder - or so the thinking goes.
> It's a joke among engineers that you need to graduate from college so that you can start learning. My college experience (non-technical bachelors) was just a joke, period - high school 2.0. Still, I wouldn't have the good job I do now if I hadn't completed my degree.
Yes and yes I wasted the first two years in college learning High School 2.0 and the last 2 learning technical concepts that people used 5-10 years ago. XHTML, CGI and using tables for layouts to name a few.
I'm not sure why companies ever got away from the idea that they could avoid training employees? In Silicon Valley you see the same pool of startups competing for the same pool of Rails/Backbone.js developers all because they'd rather perceive to get a complete package up front.
This assumes that you can afford a senior DBA and have time to deal with a junior. And the senior has teaching skills. And so on. I'm not sure apprenticeship works in some industries.
I wonder if algorithmic hiring would improve this. That is companies using statistics to sort job applicants instead of just a human. Even on HN there has been discussion against this and people are scared of it but I think it would be an improvement over human biases.
The statistics would quickly show that people with minimal or no education do almost as good, and are willing to work for less, and so they just hire them instead. Or maybe see that people from "lesser" universities are just as good as those from more prestigious ones. Maybe certification agencies would compete on the basis of how well their certification actually correlates with employee performance. Schools or training agencies could compete on a similar basis.
A major benefit of college is a baseline of domain knowledge that will serve you in your professional career, but indeed, that’s also a major benefit of a technical program. The real disconnect is that college is also (or at least is supposed to be, or has traditionally been) a schooling in the liberal arts. Four years spent learning to think critically about society and culture as well as one's area of specialization, and to express oneself in the marketplace of ideas.
Which is just something many people don’t really care to do. And that’s fine. The problem is trying to get everyone interested in it, denying the fact that many lack interest and aptitude, and then diluting the experience for everyone while saddling the next generation with decades’ worth of debt.
Where the grandparent said "employers think college degrees are more valuable than they probably are," you've highlighted the disconnect between what employers think they're getting from a college grad (certain skills) and what colleges actually do (teach students to think, to learn, to read).
That's not High School 2.0. In fact, High School seems to be the right place for vocational training. It's the pinnacle of state-mandated schooling, and in fact includes vocational requirements. Some schools implement that as wood shop. Others focus so completely on teaching computer skills they become a "magnet school" for that one thing only.
Unskilled work is disappearing and simultaneously employers are demanding more unskilled laborers. The work is disappearing because it's cheaper to have a machine do it flawlessly. The employers don't want skilled labor...labor versus capital all over again.
For a while yet, it may be possible to become really skilled in computing and successfully straddle the divide: make enough money to be comfortable as a skilled laborer. But I think it would be wise for _colleges_ to cross-train all their Science/Engineering students in business.
Colleges (traditionally) focus on the whole person. A person with business skills, connections, and potential funding becomes the new bar for entry. I'm always thankful my professors took the time to do that last part: take us (a team of students) into the real world.
While I took mostly STEM classes in college, I did also take a couple accounting classes. If you don't know the basics of double entry bookkeeping and the jargon that goes with it, you're a bit crippled when working in any sort of business.
> Where the grandparent said "employers think college degrees are more valuable than they probably are," you've highlighted the disconnect between what employers think they're getting from a college grad (certain skills) and what colleges actually do (teach students to think, to learn, to read).
That's not High School 2.0. In fact, High School seems to be the right place for vocational training. It's the pinnacle of state-mandated schooling, and in fact includes vocational requirements. Some schools implement that as wood shop. Others focus so completely on teaching computer skills they become a "magnet school" for that one thing only.
I'd like to argue for the opposite. Since everyone goes to high school, it should be a place to teach people to think, learn and read (that's how it used to be in some European countries). This is where students could explore and find out what they like, as well as read as many books as they can.
After that, college should be for white-collar training. You really do need several years of focused learning on certain topics before jumping in (I don't think you can ever jump straight into medicine, building bridges or designing microprocessors without a few years of reading in advance).
I've always wondered about the reputed benefit of learning to think critically from a liberal arts education.
For example, with engineering, an airplane built from your design flies or does not. There's no pretending it flies when it doesn't. Reality cannot be fooled, so one is forced to learn to think critically.
But with liberal arts, the same person can argue both points of view with equal facility - how does one tell which is correct? What good is being able to criticize without a mechanism for determining the correct way? Or even a better way?
The liberal arts mechanism for ordering arguments is democracy!
The idea of liberal arts is that their study enables one to participate as a full-fledged member of society. Thinking critically about arguments that concern society requires not just checking the validity but also the soundness of an argument. I suppose you really need some understanding of culture and history to make up your mind about many issues of importance to the society in which you live.
In engineering, you learn to discern logical fallacies rather quickly. Insulting your computer (ad hom) won't fix bugs in your programs. Insults in issues of importance to society are the norm, even going to the highest levels.
As a lawyer friend told me once:
1. if justice is on your side, argue justice
2. if the law is on your side, argue the law
3. if neither the law nor justice is on your side, insult the other side
"When the facts are with you, pound the facts. When the law is with you, pound the law. When neither are with you, pound the table and scream like hell."
Most engineers don't work on projects with as straightforward outcomes as "flies" or "doesn't fly", even in college. Even if they did, not everything that falls in the "flies" category is equally good. Deciding which is the most good for a given application can often be as qualitative as you perceive liberal arts. Furthermore, there are many engineers who have made careers out of doing little more than "criticizing without a mechanism for determining the correct way".
To argue from the other side, the point of liberal arts isn't to make you argue both sides of an issue equally. And telling a good essay from a bad essay can often be easier than telling a good airplane design from a bad one.
(Full disclosure: I'm an engineer and I only took 2 semesters of humanities classes in college.)
As a computer programmer, this really hasn't been my experience. I did not get a degree in a computer related field (have a BA in Philosophy), but have had no problems getting a job. I just showed the work I did for personal projects, and landed a job in weeks. I have since hired many developers, and I only look at education experience if there is nothing else that shows they can do the work. I have hired many people who never went to college at all.
The odds are still against you. You will lose opportunities due to credentialism. The best bet is to become better than your peers and be in the top 5% of the talent pool. When you work with someone who really knows their shit, shadow them.
The better bet is to eventually go independent once you know you're more towards the top of the heap. Years ago, a McKinsey subsidiary ultimately ruled me out due to a lack of degree. Nowadays they're a customer and have no problem subcontracting me out, because "I run my own business" and a proven track record is just as sufficient as the degree they otherwise look for.
As a 31-year-old systems architect and software developer who dropped out of university: I realized that I had to choose between a degree I would enjoy that would be useless in getting me a job, and a degree that I would hate that would be useless in getting me a job. I wasn't cut out for EE or CS, and I didn't have the math marks to get in (and I didn't realize at the time that a lot of my problem was ADD-related). So… I left.
In the end, I lucked my way through a succession of jobs, due in part to the fact that my chosen career, systems admin, doesn't really have a university career path leading to it, so my personal experience was worth as much as anyone else's.
My recommendation: do lots of projects, contribute to open-source, put a bunch of personal projects up on github (and do them right; document them well and write good code), and apply to forward-thinking companies (startups, etc.). Show that you can do the work and no company worth their salt will care too much about how you learned it.
A lot of my friends from high school have part-time jobs / intern over the summer at the startups/companies from where around I used to live...
But I don't live there anymore. And I'm kind of hesitant to move back to Sunnyvale (It is the most boring, soul-sucking place on earth) so I guess that doesn't really count for anything.
I've seen, heard stories of, and worked with the self taught programmers out there with out the degree.
This is base on my experience, but most of them are bad. They lack vocabularies and such that when they try to convey what they're doing or what they want other people to do or hell just to communicate with the team it takes a fucking long time and in the end might not even get anything done. They also want to get shit done without thinking about any other possible solutions or the consequences of their chosen solution.
I've worked under one. From my imperfect memory, he basically ask to make the API to be as good as their competitor.
When I ask more questions to clarify it. The said programmer got frustrated and threw a tantrum. Eventually, I found out the asshole, who lack soft skills, just wanted a async call methods in the api from client to the server.
edit:
added most, because I'm sure there are a few exceptions out there.
That's the funny thing about anecdotes. You get to cherry-pick examples and make broad allegations from those cherry-picked examples. I'm a self-taught developer, and I've worked with plenty of "credentialed" developers that were either lazy as hell, having only gotten into software for the money, or were flat-out incompetent, again having only gotten into the industry for the money. That doesn't mean most folks with degrees are shit developers, it just means those ones were.
I think the real difference between the good developers and the bad is more a result of "passion" for the field. If your only care is about getting the job and the salary that comes with it, you may very well spend a lot of time and effort getting to that point, but you probably won't go beyond that. On the other hand, the guys on my team, myself included, are all passionate. Now that doesn't mean "slaves away for ungodly hours" or even that they spend their time working on side-projects. The common-denominator is that we very much enjoy the line of work. We try to be "craftsmen" and not just a desk-bound office rats. Some jobs allow you to get to a point where you just don't have to put forth much effort unless you actively try to be the best. Software development/engineering/<term du jour> is not one of those fields.
"is competance" or "has competence"? While it may be the best effort it surely is misguided. It's given people too much faith over the years in a system that is old and tired, dated and not meeting market demands (but aka opportunity for those working on a solution, yay!).
I never finished my degree but instead I finished a ton of other projects, businesses and employment that has made me a ton of $$. And I would do it all over again for a fraction of that money because I go to bed at night (reluctantly) thinking about all the cool shit I get to build and program the next day.
Passion is abstract, excitement is visible. If one day you are looking to hire someone and they don't have the academia creds but do have the experience and are pumped up about your company, team, product or project then give them a shot, you wont be disappointed!
I'll take gross generalizations and stereotypes for $1000, alex.
Here's a thought: knowing and understanding concepts is more difficult than learning the lingo. Why not just, very respectfully and casually, insert the correct word into the discussion and help the guy pick this stuff up? It's called "teamwork" and it's really quite good at making work (and life) better.
I've worked with too many guys with EE and CE and CS degrees that just totally fall down on the job to believe that a degree is the silver bullet of ignorance that you're suggesting. I think in reality it's about individual drive and intellectual appetite. But that's just my own observation.
>> knowing and understanding concepts is more difficult than learning the lingo.
I don't believe knowing and understand goes hand in hand.
Computer Science have tons of vocab. If you get rid of all of them then you mind as well spend the whole day doing nothing but describing all the absract concepts.
The reason why we invent vocabulary is so we can ignore the lower nitty gritty details and talk on a higher level and focus on the problems we're trying to solve. I don't need to spend more than sentence or so to describe a singleton. I can just say hey I'm thinking that we should implementing a singleton because it's resource intensive.
Instead hey, let's ensure that there is only one instance of this class because we don't need more than one instance. Even in that sentence, Instance is also a vocab of CS.
>> to believe that a degree is the silver bullet of ignorance that you're suggesting.
I'm not suggesting that this is the silver bullet. But this is an indication that a person have some competent to at least get a degree.
> My college experience (non-technical bachelors) was just a joke
I'm sorry for you. My college experience was very valuable to me (not for the diploma, nobody cares about my diploma, least of all me). I learned a great deal about how to solve problems, how to figure out what was important, how to separate truth from crap, how to learn, and the confidence that I can do it.
Caltech's honor system has also been very formative for me and I've applied it since then with considerable success.
The more I hear about other peoples' college experiences, the more I appreciate how lucky I was to wind up at Caltech.
I went to Caltech and worked at the JPL prior to going to Google. I can't say my time at Caltech was particularly worthwhile in terms of what I gained.
This has been a problem here in California for a while now. Schools push kids into a college track, even though they are not going to be successful. This has caused the state universities and community colleges to take in larger amounts of students which stretches budgets and also has caused the graduation rates to decline. Many of these students would be better served by a vocational school, but it seems that there has been a stigma placed on students who don't want to go to a university.
College costs out of control? Only because states are cutting subsidies for higher education and forcing students to pay more.
That said, towards the end there are some good points. It could be argued that there's a public interest in promoting higher education because its necessary for a functional democracy. But if the public abandons this goal and higher education is only for job preparation, then why should the state be involved at all? In that case, state tuition subsidies are really corporate welfare.
Although on-the-job training and apprenticeships are more effective for many jobs, that would mean employers have to shoulder the cost rather than the state.
Tuition couldn't skyrocket if students had no means to pay it. The enabler in this situation, is the disconnect between the availability of financing and the product being financed.
You can't get a $60,000 loan for a $20,000 car, but you can absolutely rack up that much (or more) in college debt, for an education indistinguishable from one at a third of the cost.
With that kind of distortion in the market, why would anyone be surprised at rising tuition?
If your explanation were true, we should expect tuition to immediately shift to students when federal loans and grants became available in 1965.
But in fact, the data shows that state tuition subsidies for public 4-year colleges have declined slowly, except in the years following recessions when states cut their budgets. These years show much more dramatic declines. This is consistent with my hypothesis that state budget cuts are the primary driver of tuition increases.
It's possible that your point still holds, that the availability of federal loans made it easier for states to cut tuition subsidies. But that's a change in the politics of the issue, not a market distortion. Without federal aid, politicians would be more vulnerable to the charge that they're making college less accessible.
Federal loans have obviously not created a tuition bubble, for the simple reason that the cost of a public 4-year education (the price charged to states + students) is essentially unchanged over the last 25 years.
The story may be different for for-profit colleges. If you want to argue that there's a market distortion there, essentially that for-profit colleges are gouging students and the government, I could easily be persuaded. But since only 10% of students are enrolled in these schools, they're unlikely to be the main source of increasing student debt.
For those who aren't aware, this is an op-ed (meaning the newspaper doesn't stand behind any of the facts claimed) from a right-wing Koch brothers organization.
Several commenters have already noted that the fundamental "fact" here, that certain vocations are experiencing major shortages (the "skills mismatch" claim) is completely false, which it is. The Great Recession stretches across all job fields and locations in the United States and beyond.
Nutshell: this op-ed is from someone who hates broad-based education and wants to bring in a sort of reverse work-training system: you pay them for the privilege of working at various companies, and we call it modern vocational education.
What about college for those who want a career that demands a degree (realistically, not according to HR)? The discussion here should be about under what circumstances college is meaningful and appropriate, not whether author's world view. If the article is wrong, dispute it with sources.
Almost all careers are either certification-based or they create an arms race of education. When you have an arms race everyone has an incentive to get a degree but perhaps not everyone with said degree will get a job. Resources are wasted, but there isn't any incentive to stop the system from perpetuating itself. When you have a surplus of unemployed-educated people, why not hire over-educated workers? This reenforces the need for a degree.
Every time I see people saying "not everyone should go to college" during a non-economic-boom I wish they would start teaching game theory to high schoolers.
There are skill shortages, just look to any job that pays over $100k. Data Scientists, Web Developers, Oil Rig Workers, Underwater welders, etc. The problem is that they arn't easy skills to learn or they arn't comfortable tasks to do.
Is it a skills shortage or a won't-pay-market-value shortage? If more MBA's and the like start choosing silicon valley will Wall Street cry shortage or will they just raise the rates of pay and bonuses? If someone making 100k a year couldn't find a helicopter to buy they would be laughed out of the room if they suggested it was due to a shortage of helicopters rather then them not having enough money to buy. But companies who have every incentive to keep wages down are listened to and believed whenever they proclaim that there is a skills shortage, rather than people questioning whether they're paying enough.
It's supply and demand man. The reason I don't own a helicopter is precisely because there is a shortage. Anything with a free-floating price is in shortage. I would totally buy a helicopter if they were $10k or less.
My point is that there isn't this magical jobs fountain that people are holding back from the masses, it's that there are large portions of the population that lack skills that are in demand in the work force.
I'm not sure what you think the "market value" is that employers won't pay. I'd guess it's something reasonable like the minimum you'd have to pay to get all the skilled workers you need. Raise your pay offer slowly, gradually attracting more people, until you have the people you need, and that amount of pay is the market rate.
But what if that rate of pay is more than the new employees are worth to the company, so hiring them would not benefit the company at all? Then it's not a market rate, because market rate isn't just the outer edge of what one side finds acceptable. If both sides don't find the rate acceptable, there's no market rate.
If a "greedy" employer refuses to pay what it takes to hire all the people they need, while their enlightened competitor does pay what it takes to get the necessary additional labor, one of those employers will have higher profits than the other, and the one with lower profits will be pressured by their investors to become more like the other.
That has been going on for centuries, and the result is a "labor shortage" in some areas, meaning companies (that always face competition from other companies) can't get all the labor they want at existing rates and wouldn't benefit from additional labor at higher rates. The problem may well be gradually driving the company out of business, but still, raising their wages would just drive them out of business faster.
What I'm saying is if you can't find employees at the current wage you're paying and increasing the wage means the employee is no longer worth it than you have the right amount of employees and there is no shortage. Companies aren't entitled to employees or entitled to be in business. Just because you can't afford something doesn't mean there is a shortage. But companies who are in this situation complain that there is a shortage when really they just can't afford the employees. All I meant was that I was annoyed at the constant talk of 'shortages'.
I understand your position, and I don't think your definition of "shortage" here is unreasonable. But shortage is a relative term--"short" relative to what?--and by some measures, there are real shortages in these situations. If we use corn instead of labor, for example, we might have a bad harvest one year, and the price of corn goes so high that it's not worth buying for certain products. The market still clamors for those products but isn't willing to pay what they would have to pay given the new price of corn. Your definition, if I understand it, would say that there is no shortage of corn; it's just more expensive than you can pay.
I'd still call it a shortage of corn, because I'm thinking of it relative to previous years, future expectations, the causes of the price change, etc. Rent control or earthquakes cause what many would consider a housing shortage, gov't price controls or bad weather create commodity shortages, and sufficiently generous welfare programs (you have to pay a lot more to make it worth working at all) or explosive increases in customer demand (not enough time for labor to learn new skills) can create labor shortages.
From the perspective of an employer, no longer being able to hire people at a wage that makes them worth hiring can be seen as a labor shortage, while from the perspective of a worker, no longer being able to get a job at a wage worth working for can be seen as a jobs shortage, but I agree with you that, especially if the changes are just the long-term evolution of the economy, there comes a point where it no longer makes sense to refer to something that will never come back as a "shortage".
Thanks for that link. VERY interesting. My impression, subject to change, is that there is a STEM shortage at the bottom (technicians) that rapidly diminishes as you head toward the top (PhDs), where there is a significant surplus.
I think we are short technicians, because so many people who would have been happy with two years of technical training and a basic, working class wage after graduation are instead herded into 4-yr bachelor's programs, where they end up dropping out with a few semesters of Nonsense Studies classes and a mountain of debt, qualifying them only for welfare or Walmart. By the time they realize they would have been much better off with a skilled technician job and a working class lifestyle, it's too late. I think if we changed our attitude toward skilled tradespeople, we would almost all be better off. Since we used to do this, and the Germans still do, it's an artificial shortage in my opinion.
On the other hand, I think we're overloaded with PhDs, because so many want the prestige, but the marginal value to an employer of additional specialized education in a specialty other than the job itself falls off so rapidly. Someone who did years of PhD work on turkey feathers is not much more valuable to a drug company than he was when he got his bachelors in biology. For many, the prestige of the PhD will have to be its own reward.
Yea I'd'd agree that trades jobs/technicians are probably experiencing a slight shortage due to the reasons you said. In Australia trades people can easily clear 100k.
are you ok with the vast amount of money and time currently wasted on higher education? do you think the four year degree is really the most appropriate form of training in most cases?
"...meaning the [normally liberal LA Times] doesn't stand behind any of the facts claimed."
"right-wing Koch brothers organization"
"from someone who hates broad-based education"
It doesn't seem to matter that these right-wing haters are praising an Obama program. It doesn't matter that these haters of broad-based education approve broadening education from the current one-size-fits-all college degree that leaves so many dropouts with a few semesters of useless film studies courses, no degree, no job skills, and enormous debt, to one that offers a much wider array of options for ending up with more value at less cost.
There are many skilled trades that offer much better career options than are available to most film studies dropouts, but there aren't many people getting the training needed to work in those trades, because they are all told that there is only one acceptable career preparation: a 4-year college degree in whatever studies.
Obama thinks this is a problem. The Manhattan Institute agrees and considers his program a step in the right direction.
Yet your main point seems to be a warning to us that, despite the usual reliability of the mainstream media, the source of this editorial is unexpectedly not one of the approved speakers of orthodox political doctrine, but is in fact a heretic, and we would be wise to cover our ears so as not to be deceived, and rely instead on your "nutshell" opinion.
We're not saving for our kids' college. The oldest is 16 years away, and we believe that college will either be totally unaffordable, or the bubble will have burst and won't exist in its current form.
We are focusing on our retirement instead, because we believe it's far better to take care of that and not become a burden on your kids just when they're trying to take care of their own families and retirements.
It's also far more valuable to teach your kids to save for their own college. A few years of odd jobs, paper delivery, whatever will make them appreciate that money isn't infinite. My parents didn't (and couldn't) afford to pay for my college, and thanks to that I knew that every year I stayed would be another ten grand in debt I would have to pay off. That led to me leaving university after a pointless year and going into the workforce. As I suspected, it was the best education-related decision I'd made.
That said, be careful. Student loans offices generally make the assumption that parents will contribute towards their kids' education; if the current status quo does remain at that point (and I hope it doesn't) they may find themselves unable to afford college because they'll be told that you'll be paying for half of it.
Grants for vocational programs are nice and all, but the damage has already been done. The huge expectation in the United States for every student to attend college - that has to be overcome for these things to be successful.
Slightly disappointed to not see the obvious arguments.
As a university drop out I may be biased but I do believe that 'education for all' is a horribly misguided premise which persists because of the practicality of cheap childcare it provides (!)
I believe that vocational education is pretty flawed too...
I fail to see the value in qualification X if everyone can get it. All qualifications seem to be an exercise in desire and discipline... and this is why it doesn't work. IMO.
It works fine for serious and competitive fields like medicine and dentistry, but for the vast majority of fields out there a degree isn't worth much at all.
I can, and maybe have, written your dissertation from your textbook with no lectures... and I will do just fine.
Smart guys will drop out and succeed because of the same reasons they drop out, not in spite of it... just a shame so many drop outs are probably dropping out because education is not for them - or possibly university or vocational education is not right for their entire field.
I see a lot of folks here talking about college education in economic terms. So, sure, the evidence is certainly mounting that we've mucked something up: tuition is stupidly high, graduation rates are low, people are dogging their way through college 'just because' et cetra. But nobody (around here, anyhow) seems to be speaking on higher education in terms of intrinsic value.
I'm talking about the way going to a university integrates you with a ton of strange, weird, different people. How there is a tremendous amount of information and culture that is absorbed, either by directly learning it or simply by osmosis. The 'by osmosis' thing might be a bit of an assertion, but I think that most people who've been to university can probably relate to the concept.
In my opinion that adds a lot of value to a society. I know these are not original ideas, and it wouldn't be nice to live in a highly educated society where absolutely nobody has work, but I wouldn't immediately discount the value that is added by sending the masses through university. As explained by numerous people here, this strategy is clearly broken as a method of certification and job training. Does that mean that we should do a 180 and reserve anything beyond vocational training for the Marxes, Shakespeares, and Feynmans? I think not. I'm not suggesting that people here are promoting that idea, just illustrating that moving in that direction might destroy a lot of value that's not as plainly seen as one's student loan balance (something I can certainly relate to...) or the national unemployment rate. Maybe I'm just being young and naive.
124 comments
[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 119 ms ] threadThis is why education costs so much nowadays and the product is so poor. Everyone has the right to pursue learning. But, these folks aren't owed anything because they've sat through enough classes to earn a BA.
What we have is not college for all, not even close. We have capitalistic college education; where it costs as much as the market will bear, and the ability of the market is distorted by massive student loans which kids are told they have to get as it is an investment into their future.
College for all would be if college was free to every high school graduate, and costs were kept down by universities being run like places of learning and not capitalistic enterprises focused on football tickets and massive stadiums.
What's not working is the college administrative model.
They should not be giving out these student loans so easily.
Simply put, not everybody is equipped to handle an academic education (in fact, a small minority truly are). At the same time, the vast majority of work being done today in the US in almost any field (including the majority of software development) really ought not be considered "academic" work--it's essentially vocational already. One doesn't need--and shouldn't be required to have--a college degree to be employable in a web app shop or for most development (or other) roles.
The following may be an unpopular sentiment, but I truly believe that the focus on "college-for-all" just frustrates people who are talented in ways that are not academically inclined and, frankly, consumes resources unfairly for those who are. All parties are worse off for it.
What we need is less focus on conflating "academic education" with "education", and the result of that is less focus on "college-for-all."
Construction and manufacturing have severe labor shortages? I'd love to see a source for that claim. In my neck of the woods, they still haven't recovered from the recession.
I work in the engineering department of a software company and I'm closely involved with recruitment and interviews. I'll tell you this: the vast majority of people (over 95%) we turn down are unqualified, period. Meaning, we wouldn't hire them even at half the salary level advertised for the position. It has nothing whatsoever to do with what we're willing to pay - our salaries are actually very generous and we aren't afraid to pay someone what they are actually worth. The problem is we can't actually find people like that. So yes, from our perspective (250+ person tech company in SoCal), the talent shortage is very, very real.
You get the liberty of guiding their education in a way that most benefits your company and they get to extend their skillsets. Sounds like a win-win.
I didn't say they have to be the complete package upfront. We actually do have comprehensive training programs for new hires, most of which were designed by me. The problem is that people need a certain mix of base level skills and character traits to succeed and excel. Most people we interview don't have those, which means they are unqualified.
Software developers aren't (typically) stupid. They have a reasonable idea of the value they provide the company. My estimation is that almost every company under-compensates their engineering staff. I doubt yours is an exception.
Because we do very rigorous analysis of why successful employees are actually successful. We know what it takes to perform well at each job function.
>>And what makes you think your salaries are "very generous?" Lot's of companies think their salary/benefits packages are "very generous" when they're anything but. Without context your post is a giant meaningless assertion.
Lots of websites aggregate salaries by position and geographic region, so we know the numbers. We also have very good benefits. For instance, our 401k program is a dollar-for-dollar match up to 15% of salary, which is extremely rare.
Software developers (supposedly) aren't stupid. Applicants for software development positions on the other hand...
Partly both, but also missing a qualified applicant often costs far less than making a bad hire.
The ratio of decent hires to bad hires needs to be as high as possible. In comparison, the percentage of qualified applicants thrown out almost doesn't matter (unless it gets to something truly absurd like 90%). (Really it does matter, just not compared to making bad hires. Interviews and delays are still expensive, just less so than failing to get new employees up to speed.)
Interviewers that make bad hires are terrible. Interviewers that turn away good hires are merely bad.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/25/magazine/skills-dont-pay-t...
Tell me, Ege, what salaries are advertised at the following URL? http://jobs.laserfiche.com/Jobs?dep=engineering
I can't find any.
With that said, what is a shortage? Is there a shortage of Ferraris because I cannot afford one, or am I just too poor to consider owning one? Is there a shortage of developers until every developer is working for minimum wage so that the poorest of poor companies can afford them too?
If demand gradually increases, both quantity and price will rise steadily.
If there is a shortage, price first rises sharply with little or no increase in quantity and then falls with a significant increase in quantity.
But...approaching the edge case, do you think you would see more qualified candidates in your applicant pool if you advertised & offered a $1m/year package for the positions? Have you tried advertising the positions at double (or triple) the compensation to see if that changes matters? If you didn't test this, how do you know that the applicant pool has nothing to do with what you're willing to pay?
I'm here in Atlanta, and I can cite examples of people leaving for SF because their expected compensation goes up by a triple-digit percentage (sigh, candidates ignore costs but that's a different story). This effect changes the applicant pool in SF, perhaps boosting comp by 100%+ would work for your company locally? Certainly poaching talented employees gets easier when you offer a raise of $100k to join your firm.
Put another way: why would employment be different from other supply/demand markets where price matters, even if the price being asked is potentially distasteful to the buyer (see TSLA, AMZN, TWTR, FB, NYC apartments, or the flavor of your choice)?
(1) You're company maybe an undesirable place to work. In Fresno, CA there are couple self described big-name software firms that fancy themselves "local google". Only willing to hire the best and brightest as it were. But sadly for them, the best and brightest aren't cutting it for them. They verbatim claim the same thing you are now, good salaries, but no one coming in for an interview is worth it. The real truth is that the word has gotten out: their products stink, they treat their employees like children, and their competitive salaries are not that competitive in the larger market. The so called "best and brightest" just avoid their front door.
(1b) Just highlighting something in part 1. You are getting what you are paying for and that means you are not paying well.
(1c) Your other employees suck. I don't want to work at a place where people are rude or incapable or working in teams, or simply bad at their jobs. It makes my experience worse. Whenever an interview goes well, I always ask to meet the rest of the staff, if only just for a second. To see what they are like.
(2) Your interview process is flawed. Assuming (1) is provably untrue, then it might be time to take a good look at the interview process you are employing. I've been through so many interviews where it was clear that the (wo)man doing the interview was simply looking for someone to solve exactly one problem, or the name a specific function, or the input format for a function in a given language, or for me to suggest a specific solution(and no other), etc.
Worse still, the moment you cannot answer the question or suggest that a simple Google search would help produce a more ideal solution, or lord forbid simply suggest that an alternative solution might be better, there is this shift in perceived power. It almost seems like the interview process can be an adversarial means of verifying that the interviewer is indeed smarter than the interviewee. At this point during such "skills test" interviews, I politely tell the interviewer that I'm not the candidate they are looking for and conclude the interview.
(3) You haven't gotten the word out. How many people really know that your company is looking for someone (1, 10, 100)? Are you really getting the message out to the greater engineering community. Perhaps you are only reaching a single subset, and that subset is not skilled in what you are looking for.
The funny part is the only people who will agree with you are other hiring managers. Everyone else will say you aren't paying enough or some other excuse. They are never sifting through the resumes or sitting through the interviews.
If we ever stumble across a qualified candidate, we make it happen. We just can't find very many qualified candidates.
I would like to see asked, of these people who can't find employees, is how much they've had to increase their salary offers to fill positions.
Because my anecdotal experience is that the people who can't fill positions are essentially looking for the higher-quality, more-modest-salary 'deals' that were more common in 2008/2009. And they're simply not in any hurry to hire anyone at all, so the disappearance of such deals results in continually-open-positions, rather than increased offers or decreased requirements.
Salaries cannot be increased ad-infinitum. Even an extraordinary candidate's potential contribution can add so much value, since it is constrained by the way it fits in the business (and ultimately by the market for the product/service your team is helping to provide).
Requirements cannot be decreased arbitrarily either. The relationship between skill and value added is non linear, and may fall rapidly into the negatives below some threshold (it takes more time for a mentor to teach a rookie how to do things than to do things himself, borderline incompetent employees make costly mistakes, etc).
So, we are basically in a situation where a market cannot sustain itself (Paul Graham wrote about this in one of his essays, the example he used is how this same forces drove out the existance of butlers). So, in this sense, I believe shortages of labor are very real.
As we're not remotely approaching either end of that envelope, I'm not too convinced that any hard limits are coming into play.
I mean, we're not talking about whether anyone can hire couriers to write web services for six figures. We're talking about whether employers are willing to hire people with 5 years of experience with Technology X at X% more than their last comparable hire, as opposed to waiting around for the posting-perfect-match outlier with the requested 10 years experience, but who'll accept essentially the same wage as that last 5-years-experience hire.
[1] Much of that might have been arguably unsustainable, but not all. And again, we're talking about degrees and trends: are offers going up at all? Are employers budging on requirements at all?
Also, the unemployment system is basically designed for them. If you work for someone and get laid off between projects, you still get paid. The other path is going out on your own.
It's gotten a good amount better, but the jobs still aren't steady enough for everyone to be employed full-time. Aside from data centers, there's not a ton of construction going on.
For example, I just finished a Bachelors degree in a STEM field at a relatively middle of the road university and my total education debt comes out just short of $30k.
We keep running into this problem where employers think college degrees are more valuable than they probably are. Part of that is impressed culturally, but more than anything we lack better methods of certification in most jobs. We need certification that matters, is widely accepted, and that employers actually trust. It has to be marketed well, and it has to actually produce graduates with up-to-date skills. It's not easy, especially in fields where curriculum must change yearly.
Underlying all of this is a larger, unavoidable change taking place: the disappearance of unskilled work. Computers and machines are slowly taking over every unskilled job, starting at the least skilled and moving upwards to things we used to think of as skilled labor. Taxi drivers and factory workers will hardly exist in 10 years. Construction workers will only supervise machines in our lifetimes. Unless you want to work in a low-paying retail job for the rest of your life, you need to get a degree so you can work your way up some corporate ladder - or so the thinking goes.
Yes and yes I wasted the first two years in college learning High School 2.0 and the last 2 learning technical concepts that people used 5-10 years ago. XHTML, CGI and using tables for layouts to name a few.
The apprenticeship model should be re-embraced.
Generally, you don't want your DBA discovering the 3rd normal form halfway through a project.
Of course, this, like many factors, is both a cause and an effect of this more fluid labor market.
The statistics would quickly show that people with minimal or no education do almost as good, and are willing to work for less, and so they just hire them instead. Or maybe see that people from "lesser" universities are just as good as those from more prestigious ones. Maybe certification agencies would compete on the basis of how well their certification actually correlates with employee performance. Schools or training agencies could compete on a similar basis.
Which is just something many people don’t really care to do. And that’s fine. The problem is trying to get everyone interested in it, denying the fact that many lack interest and aptitude, and then diluting the experience for everyone while saddling the next generation with decades’ worth of debt.
Where the grandparent said "employers think college degrees are more valuable than they probably are," you've highlighted the disconnect between what employers think they're getting from a college grad (certain skills) and what colleges actually do (teach students to think, to learn, to read).
That's not High School 2.0. In fact, High School seems to be the right place for vocational training. It's the pinnacle of state-mandated schooling, and in fact includes vocational requirements. Some schools implement that as wood shop. Others focus so completely on teaching computer skills they become a "magnet school" for that one thing only.
Unskilled work is disappearing and simultaneously employers are demanding more unskilled laborers. The work is disappearing because it's cheaper to have a machine do it flawlessly. The employers don't want skilled labor...labor versus capital all over again.
For a while yet, it may be possible to become really skilled in computing and successfully straddle the divide: make enough money to be comfortable as a skilled laborer. But I think it would be wise for _colleges_ to cross-train all their Science/Engineering students in business.
Colleges (traditionally) focus on the whole person. A person with business skills, connections, and potential funding becomes the new bar for entry. I'm always thankful my professors took the time to do that last part: take us (a team of students) into the real world.
I'd like to argue for the opposite. Since everyone goes to high school, it should be a place to teach people to think, learn and read (that's how it used to be in some European countries). This is where students could explore and find out what they like, as well as read as many books as they can.
After that, college should be for white-collar training. You really do need several years of focused learning on certain topics before jumping in (I don't think you can ever jump straight into medicine, building bridges or designing microprocessors without a few years of reading in advance).
For example, with engineering, an airplane built from your design flies or does not. There's no pretending it flies when it doesn't. Reality cannot be fooled, so one is forced to learn to think critically.
But with liberal arts, the same person can argue both points of view with equal facility - how does one tell which is correct? What good is being able to criticize without a mechanism for determining the correct way? Or even a better way?
The idea of liberal arts is that their study enables one to participate as a full-fledged member of society. Thinking critically about arguments that concern society requires not just checking the validity but also the soundness of an argument. I suppose you really need some understanding of culture and history to make up your mind about many issues of importance to the society in which you live.
In engineering, you learn to discern logical fallacies rather quickly. Insulting your computer (ad hom) won't fix bugs in your programs. Insults in issues of importance to society are the norm, even going to the highest levels.
As a lawyer friend told me once:
1. if justice is on your side, argue justice
2. if the law is on your side, argue the law
3. if neither the law nor justice is on your side, insult the other side
To argue from the other side, the point of liberal arts isn't to make you argue both sides of an issue equally. And telling a good essay from a bad essay can often be easier than telling a good airplane design from a bad one.
(Full disclosure: I'm an engineer and I only took 2 semesters of humanities classes in college.)
The odds are still against you. You will lose opportunities due to credentialism. The best bet is to become better than your peers and be in the top 5% of the talent pool. When you work with someone who really knows their shit, shadow them.
The better bet is to eventually go independent once you know you're more towards the top of the heap. Years ago, a McKinsey subsidiary ultimately ruled me out due to a lack of degree. Nowadays they're a customer and have no problem subcontracting me out, because "I run my own business" and a proven track record is just as sufficient as the degree they otherwise look for.
And it's even worse now.
In the end, I lucked my way through a succession of jobs, due in part to the fact that my chosen career, systems admin, doesn't really have a university career path leading to it, so my personal experience was worth as much as anyone else's.
My recommendation: do lots of projects, contribute to open-source, put a bunch of personal projects up on github (and do them right; document them well and write good code), and apply to forward-thinking companies (startups, etc.). Show that you can do the work and no company worth their salt will care too much about how you learned it.
I need to put a plug in for my alma mater: http://www.rit.edu/programs/networking-and-systems-administr...
A lot of my friends from high school have part-time jobs / intern over the summer at the startups/companies from where around I used to live...
But I don't live there anymore. And I'm kind of hesitant to move back to Sunnyvale (It is the most boring, soul-sucking place on earth) so I guess that doesn't really count for anything.
Meh.
This is base on my experience, but most of them are bad. They lack vocabularies and such that when they try to convey what they're doing or what they want other people to do or hell just to communicate with the team it takes a fucking long time and in the end might not even get anything done. They also want to get shit done without thinking about any other possible solutions or the consequences of their chosen solution.
I've worked under one. From my imperfect memory, he basically ask to make the API to be as good as their competitor.
When I ask more questions to clarify it. The said programmer got frustrated and threw a tantrum. Eventually, I found out the asshole, who lack soft skills, just wanted a async call methods in the api from client to the server.
edit: added most, because I'm sure there are a few exceptions out there.
I think the real difference between the good developers and the bad is more a result of "passion" for the field. If your only care is about getting the job and the salary that comes with it, you may very well spend a lot of time and effort getting to that point, but you probably won't go beyond that. On the other hand, the guys on my team, myself included, are all passionate. Now that doesn't mean "slaves away for ungodly hours" or even that they spend their time working on side-projects. The common-denominator is that we very much enjoy the line of work. We try to be "craftsmen" and not just a desk-bound office rats. Some jobs allow you to get to a point where you just don't have to put forth much effort unless you actively try to be the best. Software development/engineering/<term du jour> is not one of those fields.
The degree is the best effort so far in our society that shows that someone is competance in their field.
I never finished my degree but instead I finished a ton of other projects, businesses and employment that has made me a ton of $$. And I would do it all over again for a fraction of that money because I go to bed at night (reluctantly) thinking about all the cool shit I get to build and program the next day.
Passion is abstract, excitement is visible. If one day you are looking to hire someone and they don't have the academia creds but do have the experience and are pumped up about your company, team, product or project then give them a shot, you wont be disappointed!
Here's a thought: knowing and understanding concepts is more difficult than learning the lingo. Why not just, very respectfully and casually, insert the correct word into the discussion and help the guy pick this stuff up? It's called "teamwork" and it's really quite good at making work (and life) better.
I've worked with too many guys with EE and CE and CS degrees that just totally fall down on the job to believe that a degree is the silver bullet of ignorance that you're suggesting. I think in reality it's about individual drive and intellectual appetite. But that's just my own observation.
I don't believe knowing and understand goes hand in hand.
Computer Science have tons of vocab. If you get rid of all of them then you mind as well spend the whole day doing nothing but describing all the absract concepts.
The reason why we invent vocabulary is so we can ignore the lower nitty gritty details and talk on a higher level and focus on the problems we're trying to solve. I don't need to spend more than sentence or so to describe a singleton. I can just say hey I'm thinking that we should implementing a singleton because it's resource intensive.
Instead hey, let's ensure that there is only one instance of this class because we don't need more than one instance. Even in that sentence, Instance is also a vocab of CS.
>> to believe that a degree is the silver bullet of ignorance that you're suggesting.
I'm not suggesting that this is the silver bullet. But this is an indication that a person have some competent to at least get a degree.
I'm sorry for you. My college experience was very valuable to me (not for the diploma, nobody cares about my diploma, least of all me). I learned a great deal about how to solve problems, how to figure out what was important, how to separate truth from crap, how to learn, and the confidence that I can do it.
Caltech's honor system has also been very formative for me and I've applied it since then with considerable success.
The more I hear about other peoples' college experiences, the more I appreciate how lucky I was to wind up at Caltech.
College costs out of control? Only because states are cutting subsidies for higher education and forcing students to pay more.
That said, towards the end there are some good points. It could be argued that there's a public interest in promoting higher education because its necessary for a functional democracy. But if the public abandons this goal and higher education is only for job preparation, then why should the state be involved at all? In that case, state tuition subsidies are really corporate welfare.
Although on-the-job training and apprenticeships are more effective for many jobs, that would mean employers have to shoulder the cost rather than the state.
"Oh it's true, but because of this stupid reason" != "falsehood".
You can't get a $60,000 loan for a $20,000 car, but you can absolutely rack up that much (or more) in college debt, for an education indistinguishable from one at a third of the cost.
With that kind of distortion in the market, why would anyone be surprised at rising tuition?
But in fact, the data shows that state tuition subsidies for public 4-year colleges have declined slowly, except in the years following recessions when states cut their budgets. These years show much more dramatic declines. This is consistent with my hypothesis that state budget cuts are the primary driver of tuition increases.
It's possible that your point still holds, that the availability of federal loans made it easier for states to cut tuition subsidies. But that's a change in the politics of the issue, not a market distortion. Without federal aid, politicians would be more vulnerable to the charge that they're making college less accessible.
Federal loans have obviously not created a tuition bubble, for the simple reason that the cost of a public 4-year education (the price charged to states + students) is essentially unchanged over the last 25 years.
The story may be different for for-profit colleges. If you want to argue that there's a market distortion there, essentially that for-profit colleges are gouging students and the government, I could easily be persuaded. But since only 10% of students are enrolled in these schools, they're unlikely to be the main source of increasing student debt.
Two words: administrative bloat!
Several commenters have already noted that the fundamental "fact" here, that certain vocations are experiencing major shortages (the "skills mismatch" claim) is completely false, which it is. The Great Recession stretches across all job fields and locations in the United States and beyond.
Nutshell: this op-ed is from someone who hates broad-based education and wants to bring in a sort of reverse work-training system: you pay them for the privilege of working at various companies, and we call it modern vocational education.
Every time I see people saying "not everyone should go to college" during a non-economic-boom I wish they would start teaching game theory to high schoolers.
My point is that there isn't this magical jobs fountain that people are holding back from the masses, it's that there are large portions of the population that lack skills that are in demand in the work force.
I don't see how this is a controversial opinion.
But what if that rate of pay is more than the new employees are worth to the company, so hiring them would not benefit the company at all? Then it's not a market rate, because market rate isn't just the outer edge of what one side finds acceptable. If both sides don't find the rate acceptable, there's no market rate.
If a "greedy" employer refuses to pay what it takes to hire all the people they need, while their enlightened competitor does pay what it takes to get the necessary additional labor, one of those employers will have higher profits than the other, and the one with lower profits will be pressured by their investors to become more like the other.
That has been going on for centuries, and the result is a "labor shortage" in some areas, meaning companies (that always face competition from other companies) can't get all the labor they want at existing rates and wouldn't benefit from additional labor at higher rates. The problem may well be gradually driving the company out of business, but still, raising their wages would just drive them out of business faster.
I'd still call it a shortage of corn, because I'm thinking of it relative to previous years, future expectations, the causes of the price change, etc. Rent control or earthquakes cause what many would consider a housing shortage, gov't price controls or bad weather create commodity shortages, and sufficiently generous welfare programs (you have to pay a lot more to make it worth working at all) or explosive increases in customer demand (not enough time for labor to learn new skills) can create labor shortages.
From the perspective of an employer, no longer being able to hire people at a wage that makes them worth hiring can be seen as a labor shortage, while from the perspective of a worker, no longer being able to get a job at a wage worth working for can be seen as a jobs shortage, but I agree with you that, especially if the changes are just the long-term evolution of the economy, there comes a point where it no longer makes sense to refer to something that will never come back as a "shortage".
I think we are short technicians, because so many people who would have been happy with two years of technical training and a basic, working class wage after graduation are instead herded into 4-yr bachelor's programs, where they end up dropping out with a few semesters of Nonsense Studies classes and a mountain of debt, qualifying them only for welfare or Walmart. By the time they realize they would have been much better off with a skilled technician job and a working class lifestyle, it's too late. I think if we changed our attitude toward skilled tradespeople, we would almost all be better off. Since we used to do this, and the Germans still do, it's an artificial shortage in my opinion.
On the other hand, I think we're overloaded with PhDs, because so many want the prestige, but the marginal value to an employer of additional specialized education in a specialty other than the job itself falls off so rapidly. Someone who did years of PhD work on turkey feathers is not much more valuable to a drug company than he was when he got his bachelors in biology. For many, the prestige of the PhD will have to be its own reward.
That's like bringing up George Soros whenever you read an op-ed by someone who once worked for the Brookings Institute.
"right-wing Koch brothers organization"
"from someone who hates broad-based education"
It doesn't seem to matter that these right-wing haters are praising an Obama program. It doesn't matter that these haters of broad-based education approve broadening education from the current one-size-fits-all college degree that leaves so many dropouts with a few semesters of useless film studies courses, no degree, no job skills, and enormous debt, to one that offers a much wider array of options for ending up with more value at less cost.
There are many skilled trades that offer much better career options than are available to most film studies dropouts, but there aren't many people getting the training needed to work in those trades, because they are all told that there is only one acceptable career preparation: a 4-year college degree in whatever studies.
Obama thinks this is a problem. The Manhattan Institute agrees and considers his program a step in the right direction.
Yet your main point seems to be a warning to us that, despite the usual reliability of the mainstream media, the source of this editorial is unexpectedly not one of the approved speakers of orthodox political doctrine, but is in fact a heretic, and we would be wise to cover our ears so as not to be deceived, and rely instead on your "nutshell" opinion.
We are focusing on our retirement instead, because we believe it's far better to take care of that and not become a burden on your kids just when they're trying to take care of their own families and retirements.
That said, be careful. Student loans offices generally make the assumption that parents will contribute towards their kids' education; if the current status quo does remain at that point (and I hope it doesn't) they may find themselves unable to afford college because they'll be told that you'll be paying for half of it.
As a university drop out I may be biased but I do believe that 'education for all' is a horribly misguided premise which persists because of the practicality of cheap childcare it provides (!)
I believe that vocational education is pretty flawed too...
I fail to see the value in qualification X if everyone can get it. All qualifications seem to be an exercise in desire and discipline... and this is why it doesn't work. IMO.
It works fine for serious and competitive fields like medicine and dentistry, but for the vast majority of fields out there a degree isn't worth much at all.
I can, and maybe have, written your dissertation from your textbook with no lectures... and I will do just fine.
Smart guys will drop out and succeed because of the same reasons they drop out, not in spite of it... just a shame so many drop outs are probably dropping out because education is not for them - or possibly university or vocational education is not right for their entire field.
I'm talking about the way going to a university integrates you with a ton of strange, weird, different people. How there is a tremendous amount of information and culture that is absorbed, either by directly learning it or simply by osmosis. The 'by osmosis' thing might be a bit of an assertion, but I think that most people who've been to university can probably relate to the concept.
In my opinion that adds a lot of value to a society. I know these are not original ideas, and it wouldn't be nice to live in a highly educated society where absolutely nobody has work, but I wouldn't immediately discount the value that is added by sending the masses through university. As explained by numerous people here, this strategy is clearly broken as a method of certification and job training. Does that mean that we should do a 180 and reserve anything beyond vocational training for the Marxes, Shakespeares, and Feynmans? I think not. I'm not suggesting that people here are promoting that idea, just illustrating that moving in that direction might destroy a lot of value that's not as plainly seen as one's student loan balance (something I can certainly relate to...) or the national unemployment rate. Maybe I'm just being young and naive.