Just How Hard is University to Overcome
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I've gone through this thread, and other than agreeing with a lot of it and learning how much I want to watch @scottalanmiller and @Dashrender sit in front of a camera and discuss just about anything, I have some fundamental questions on the topic and comments in general:
- Can we really assume working in IT without a degree is as viable as it was before? My thoughts are "yes and no" since it is so much simpler to start a small business than it's ever been before with IT, but what about simply "getting a job"?
- I cannot and will not equate the assumption that you are out of the working world or wasting your time while in college. Maybe partying was or is a common occurrence in some or many experiences, but it was not mine. I have never done college without working at least 30 hours a week and often 40 to 50. Ironically, I think I would've gotten more out of college had I been able to go full time.
- I had the experience of being 20+ years old when starting college, and working 2 and 3 jobs before that knowing I couldn't break that cycle. I went to university and I did. I can't say it's because of university specifically, but I do think there is an intangibility to going beyond HS and then into a career. You have to go to HS. You choose to go to College/University. When you get out you are motivated to make something of that. You might be the person that is motivated to do that out of HS, but more generally you are really motivated to do it when you get out of college because you chose to do it, and many employers see that value, in my experience and opinion.
Now, full disclosure I'm a college professor at the CC level. I'm not promoting this opinion out of any sort of CYA or job-security mentality, I assure you. Also, when it comes to the financial and time costs for college, those are very real, and the source of where I agree with a lot of what I'm reading here. I think the elements beyond money and time have to be accounted for (pun intended). There are intangible benefits to the College/University experience that matter. To put it in academic terms, they are qualitative and not quantitative. I could go on, but in the interest of the time value it takes to read this...
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@worden2 said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
I've gone through this thread, and other than agreeing with a lot of it and learning how much I want to watch @scottalanmiller and @Dashrender sit in front of a camera and discuss just about anything, I have some fundamental questions on the topic and comments in general:
- Can we really assume working in IT without a degree is as viable as it was before? My thoughts are "yes and no" since it is so much simpler to start a small business than it's ever been before with IT, but what about simply "getting a job"?
- I cannot and will not equate the assumption that you are out of the working world or wasting your time while in college. Maybe partying was or is a common occurrence in some or many experiences, but it was not mine. I have never done college without working at least 30 hours a week and often 40 to 50. Ironically, I think I would've gotten more out of college had I been able to go full time.
- I had the experience of being 20+ years old when starting college, and working 2 and 3 jobs before that knowing I couldn't break that cycle. I went to university and I did. I can't say it's because of university specifically, but I do think there is an intangibility to going beyond HS and then into a career. You have to go to HS. You choose to go to College/University. When you get out you are motivated to make something of that. You might be the person that is motivated to do that out of HS, but more generally you are really motivated to do it when you get out of college because you chose to do it, and many employers see that value, in my experience and opinion.
Now, full disclosure I'm a college professor at the CC level. I'm not promoting this opinion out of any sort of CYA or job-security mentality, I assure you. Also, when it comes to the financial and time costs for college, those are very real, and the source of where I agree with a lot of what I'm reading here. I think the elements beyond money and time have to be accounted for (pun intended). There are intangible benefits to the College/University experience that matter. To put it in academic terms, they are qualitative and not quantitative. I could go on, but in the interest of the time value it takes to read this...
So is my wife and she completely does not accept Scott's premise. It used to lead to fights but now we just don't talk about it.
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@dashrender For me personally, it's almost stressful, because as an IT educator I straddle both realities. As for your last point, my wife and I just had our 20th anniversary, btw. I know of what you speak, but do not speak of it!
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@worden2 said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
@dashrender For me personally, it's almost stressful, because as an IT educator I straddle both realities. As for your last point, my wife and I just had our 20th anniversary, btw. I know of what you speak, but do not speak of it!
20 years, nice. I've been married for 16, together for 23.
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@coliver said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
@quixoticjeremy said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
@coliver said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
@scottalanmiller said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
@penguinwrangler said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
In Missouri, we have what is called the A+ program. HS kids go through a program and have to meet certain requirements. Once they do, their first two years of college at a community college is free. My kids are doing this.
SUNY (State University of NY) is all free now, except for the extremely wealthy, I'm told. It is a new program, so I know basically nothing about it. And SUNY is one of the top college names in the world.
It's free for the low end of the income bracket. There are a number of stipulation that go along with the excelsior scholarship.
Actually as someone who lives here, it's not just simply the low end, it is a large portion of the populace that seems to be receiving it. Quite a few of my friends have gone back to or are attending college purely because of this program, none of them being exceedingly poor.
I live just a few hours south of you and work in the system. It's a bit more far reaching then what I've said yes. It's a step in the right direction but it's baby step. It effects households under a combined income of $100,000. So it's generally low-mid to lower income. The nice thing for the state, and tax payers, is that it takes effect after all other grants take effect. It will only cover 6,470$ per semester... Which is really nice for us small and community schools.
That's pretty shitty that they consider combined income. So a single person making tons of money can go to school for free, but a couple with kids making really low income both working trying to make ends meet have to pay to go to school. Typical.
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@coliver said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
@quixoticjeremy said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
@coliver said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
@quixoticjeremy said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
@coliver said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
@scottalanmiller said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
@penguinwrangler said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
In Missouri, we have what is called the A+ program. HS kids go through a program and have to meet certain requirements. Once they do, their first two years of college at a community college is free. My kids are doing this.
SUNY (State University of NY) is all free now, except for the extremely wealthy, I'm told. It is a new program, so I know basically nothing about it. And SUNY is one of the top college names in the world.
It's free for the low end of the income bracket. There are a number of stipulation that go along with the excelsior scholarship.
Actually as someone who lives here, it's not just simply the low end, it is a large portion of the populace that seems to be receiving it. Quite a few of my friends have gone back to or are attending college purely because of this program, none of them being exceedingly poor.
I live just a few hours south of you and work in the system. It's a bit more far reaching then what I've said yes. It's a step in the right direction but it's baby step. It effects households under a combined income of $100,000. So it's generally low-mid to lower income. The nice thing for the state, and tax payers, is that it takes effect after all other grants take effect. It will only cover 6,470$ per semester... Which is really nice for us small and community schools.
Okay this makes sense as all of my friends live in that under 100k area lol.
Right. I live in the poorest county in NY and even here it's not hard for a two income home to be over the mark. It's still a great program for what it is and what it is trying to accomplish... But I don't think it went far enough.
Not at all.
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@worden2 said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
@scottalanmiller said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
So for reference, student loans, for those able to get them (many of us cannot so these are not realistic numbers, many students must use credit cards for this) run from 4.3% to 6.8%. That's the first step.
Actually, 8% is far more common on US Gov't loans, even when the mortgage and other markets were FAR below that. The mandated cap is 8%, and on repayment it stayed at the cap even when it didn't have to.
I was trying to be insanely conservative with the numbers to make sure that there was absolutely no way anyone could say that I was skewing it towards not going to university having an advantage. In the real world, I know it makes my case far more.
Eight percent though, wow.
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@worden2 said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
- Can we really assume working in IT without a degree is as viable as it was before? My thoughts are "yes and no" since it is so much simpler to start a small business than it's ever been before with IT, but what about simply "getting a job"?
As viable? No, it is insanely more viable. In the 1980s, getting into IT without a degree was essentially impossible because access to enterprise computer systems and knowledge about them and compilers and tooling and software was gated behind the "university paywall." This has gradually gone away over time and now we are so dramatically the other way that there has never been any time in history that skipping formal education for more in someone's favor. The idea that college has benefits to the career is a holdover from the "paywall" era and is repeated without being investigated.
I have no idea where the idea that "oh it was easy to not go to college long ago" comes from, but it's marketing and has no basis in truth. Not only do we now have the ability for absolutely anyone to educate themselves, we have more ability than ever to showcase our skills and talents and we have employers who understand the value of self education more than ever before. Every factor involved has gone in the same direction.
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@worden2 said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
- I cannot and will not equate the assumption that you are out of the working world or wasting your time while in college. Maybe partying was or is a common occurrence in some or many experiences, but it was not mine. I have never done college without working at least 30 hours a week and often 40 to 50.
I did the same, paid my way through college. But every hour spent in college was time spent neither gaining experience nor learning at an appropriate pace. That's one of the biggest problems with college courses - the pace is far too slow. We train students no only to require that they be hand fed their education (for an industry that absolutely requires the ability to education ourselves) and teaches students to learn at a very slow pace.
Someone working the same 30 - 50 hours a week, and teaching themselves at home should move at easily 400% the pace of college classes, while having more money.
Partying is only one problem. Leisurely learning, busy work, commuting, context switching between classes, etc. College is an inefficient learning system at best and actually gets in the way of learning at worst. In my experience, if someone is going to be successful in IT, they will have found college to have been an educational barrier.
For the record, I worked 50 hours a week and went to school at triple the full time rate to maximize my value of my educational dollar. I took it as seriously as it could be taken. And I couldn't make it make educational sense nor career sense.
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@worden2 said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
- I had the experience of being 20+ years old when starting college, and working 2 and 3 jobs before that knowing I couldn't break that cycle.
I know lots and lots of people who broke that cycle. What made you feel that you could not break it in your situation? What did you do as your educational alternatives? Did you do certs on your own? Build a home lab? Do volunteer work? Build a project portfolio? Make your own software? Start your own business?
This is where I always seem to find the breakdown. People normally, and I don't know yet in your case, compare the alternative to going to college to having done nothing. Had I done nothing, of course I would not have moved forward. But I dropped out of college, worked my butt off doing any work I could find, worked every job I could fit in my schedule, built a home lab, did every resume building exercise that I could and had zero issues moving forward at many times the pace of anyone I knew doing college for similar work.
That you didn't mention the educational pursuits that failed you, I'm guessing you didn't have any. That college is better than doing nothing at all is not in question. That college does not live up to what people should be doing instead of college in order to further their careers is the point.
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@worden2 said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
You have to go to HS. You choose to go to College/University. When you get out you are motivated to make something of that. You might be the person that is motivated to do that out of HS, but more generally you are really motivated to do it when you get out of college because you chose to do it, and many employers see that value, in my experience and opinion.
So here are my thoughts here...
- I want to hire motivated people. If someone isn't motivated naturally (e.g. out of high school) then they aren't someone I want to hire in IT and not someone I tend to see excel in IT. If they need to be pushed to try hard, IT is a really bad field for them. They will struggle anywhere, but IT more than most places.
- Maybe you were motivated coming out of college, but that's not the general experience. College is demotivational for most people. It's many years of "taking it easy" that encourages a sense of relaxation. Motivation is specifically something I see lacking from the majority of college graduates. Like someone coming back from a month long vacation, they are used to relaxing and don't normally have the work history or ethic that you hope for and require more effort to get going than their counterparts.
- The "chose to do it" thing makes no sense because the counterparts "chose to" teach themselves and get a jump on their careers. The thing that they "chose to do" is the more challenging and impressive. And the market bears this up with them getting jobs faster and more easily. When someone says they "proved themselves" in college I have to remind them that I went to college and know how easy college generally is (or at least can be.) It's life's biggest vacation and if they think that that was not taking the easy way out, then I'm fearful that they aren't mentally prepared for the world of work. They have their bar set way too low.
- What we often see from college grads is a sense of entitlement. They often feel superior while having done less work and generally being less prepared to do their jobs. But they expect more from doing the same as others.
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@worden2 said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
There are intangible benefits to the College/University experience that matter. To put it in academic terms, they are qualitative and not quantitative.
Absolutely and I totally recognize that. But what college grads often ignore is that there are intangible (qualitative) benefits to skipping college too and I feel that these generally outweigh the college benefits dramatically.
Benefits that I see in candidates that skip college:
- Critical thinking. They are far less likely to just follow the crowd and do whatever they are told to do. College takes the high school anti-critical thinking experience and carries it on for anther set of years. Just the act of going to college leans in this way, then there are the classes themselves. IT (and most fields) reward critical thinking and this is where college skippers shine. The act of doing an alternative to college shows a willingness to think critically and outside of the box and take the path less traveled. Anyone can "just go to college and do what is expected", that's the easy path in every sense, especially socially.
- Self learning. That someone can be spoon fed information and regurgitate it on a test if of zero use to me. That my staff can teach themselves and put knowledge to use is what I need. College skippers who are forced to teach themselves from books, articles, hands on labs, etc. have both practical experience and demonstrable proficiency in this. College grads might have this in spades, but have little to no way to have demonstrated it and far less opportunity to have honed it. There is no classroom in the workforce, college teaches people to learn in a non-sustainable mode.
- Motivation. They are naturally motivated and don't require artificial debt loads or cajoling to convince them that they need to work hard. They've been motivated all along and continue to be motivated.
- Under dog syndrome. College grads tend to feel entitled, like going to college means that they not deserve a good job and high pay that they've not earned yet. College skippers lack this and are often told that they are worthless, that they'll never get work or just about anything by people who've gone to college in an attempt to demotivate them. This actually makes all of their achievements seem so much better. A college grad who gets a job is just "doing what is expected" and it is not seen as a victory. But a college skipper getting a job is "proving everyone wrong" and it is a huge sense of accomplishment. It's amazing how much this is life long motivational. Conversely, someone with a college degree that can't get work feels like a failure in a way that their college skipper would not. Having a degree makes your career successes less dramatic and/or your failures more dramatic.
- No Debt Panic. How many college grads are forced to take awful, low paying jobs because they are forced to pay back large debt loads quickly while their counterparts have more financial freedom to look for career positions or to take risks? I was, since I had no debt, more free to volunteer or take risky jobs or do big moves or take jobs paying in equity instead of cash. College turns up the risk factor and that lowers options.
- Experience at the best ages. You learn the most when you are young. So college skippers have more opportunity to mold themselves into high performance lifelong learners and hard workers at those ages.
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@dashrender said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
So is my wife and she completely does not accept Scott's premise. It used to lead to fights but now we just don't talk about it.
But has she ever produced a reason for it, or one with any substance?
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@worden2 said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
@dashrender For me personally, it's almost stressful, because as an IT educator I straddle both realities.
It's stressful for everyone in the industry. It's a major problem that we face. There is no simple solution for it as the issue is only a little bit in the hands of the universities. Bad programs, professors without experience, catering to vendor marketing and so forth could be fixed. But core problems cannot - collegiate education is facing a meltdown as the core factors that made the university system work for hundreds of years are breaking down. Colleges, for all professions, were valued for things that just don't make sense in today's world. Knowledge is no longer locked up inside the universities, professors are rarely the industry experts, universities can't afford to pay industry rates, students can and do learn faster on their own, workers have to self educate for a lifetime outside of the university support structure, traditional grading has been shown to be counterproductive, and so forth. The world has changed and we are at a point where the university system has not caught up yet, or even figured out what it is doing wrong.
IT is just the vanguard of this where it is more dramatic. But it is happening everywhere. Same thing could be said about being a chemist - you can learn chemistry, get lab experience at home, build a portfolio and such faster and cheaper without going to college. It's not as easy as IT, but even twenty years ago you could do everything at home better than at uni. But thirty years ago, not so much.
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@scottalanmiller said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
@worden2 said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
@scottalanmiller said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
So for reference, student loans, for those able to get them (many of us cannot so these are not realistic numbers, many students must use credit cards for this) run from 4.3% to 6.8%. That's the first step.
Actually, 8% is far more common on US Gov't loans, even when the mortgage and other markets were FAR below that. The mandated cap is 8%, and on repayment it stayed at the cap even when it didn't have to.
I was trying to be insanely conservative with the numbers to make sure that there was absolutely no way anyone could say that I was skewing it towards not going to university having an advantage. In the real world, I know it makes my case far more.
Eight percent though, wow.
It was really fun in the last 8 years watching interest rates near zero and yet NOTHING happened to the student loan rate. It was pegged at its maximum the entire time.
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@worden2 said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
@scottalanmiller said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
@worden2 said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
@scottalanmiller said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
So for reference, student loans, for those able to get them (many of us cannot so these are not realistic numbers, many students must use credit cards for this) run from 4.3% to 6.8%. That's the first step.
Actually, 8% is far more common on US Gov't loans, even when the mortgage and other markets were FAR below that. The mandated cap is 8%, and on repayment it stayed at the cap even when it didn't have to.
I was trying to be insanely conservative with the numbers to make sure that there was absolutely no way anyone could say that I was skewing it towards not going to university having an advantage. In the real world, I know it makes my case far more.
Eight percent though, wow.
It was really fun in the last 8 years watching interest rates near zero and yet NOTHING happened to the student loan rate. It was pegged at its maximum the entire time.
Yeah, taking advantage just a little bit there.
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I'm going to post another thread for you @worden2 that I think will be helpful in your endeavor to find ways to improve university quality.
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@scottalanmiller said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
I'm going to post another thread for you @worden2 that I think will be helpful in your endeavor to find ways to improve university quality.
I look forward to reading it
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@scottalanmiller said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
@dashrender said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
So is my wife and she completely does not accept Scott's premise. It used to lead to fights but now we just don't talk about it.
But has she ever produced a reason for it, or one with any substance?
No of course not. She simply sees it as an attack on her livelihood. FYI, She teaches math. (stats/algebra/some basic math at a community college)
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@dashrender said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
@scottalanmiller said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
@dashrender said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
So is my wife and she completely does not accept Scott's premise. It used to lead to fights but now we just don't talk about it.
But has she ever produced a reason for it, or one with any substance?
No of course not. She simply sees it as an attack on her livelihood. FYI, She teaches math. (stats/algebra/some basic math at a community college)
Right, and that's exactly what drives university value down - people seeing it as "their" livelihood and not a value to students. This is how I perceive the majority of professors, promoting taking advantage of children that didn't know better for person gain. If emotional response and entitlement to income without showing value to the students are the logic behind why college should exist, the point is made far better than I could make it. Not that math is a hard subject to justify kids learning, but if it had actual value, a math professor should have the easiest time of anyone showing how it does.
