Just How Hard is University to Overcome
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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.
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Anyone working in education, at least in the public space (anyone going to private schools gets what is coming to them), should be doing so for the good of the students, not for themselves. That's not to say that they should not get paid, but it should be a job done with a singular goal - helping the students, not using the students for personal gain. This isn't a normal job. Students are in a position to be taken advantage of by the system and are regularly.
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@scottalanmiller 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.
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.
Pretty much yes. Income stipulations don't make a lot of sense, I know they did it to make it past the assembly. IIRC they are planning on removing that stipulation in the next 5 years.
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I'm among those who started down the "Higher Education" path at the unyielding behest of my parents (especially my dad) who demanded that either I pay rent, or go to college and I would not be charged rent. So I went to junior college, because unfortunately, while reaping the immense benefits of being home-schooled from Kindergarten all the way through completing High School, there's very minimal support for the transition into College that all public high schools and basically all private high schools have dedicated staff for.
I started off majoring in Accounting, because accountants make good money and would be a totally certain necessity for my career right? Well, Accounting bored me practically to tears, so naturally once I finished my courses in Accounting, I changed majors lol. Since I've always loved math, Accounting actually suited me well enough.. but the actual work of accounting just chilled my soul and tore all excitement from me to do it for decades as a career. So I switched to business management, because I was already managing full time at my job in the real world in the meantime, struggling to work full time and go to college full time simultaneously.
Just shy of two years into that field, I came to the frustrating realization that there will almost always be some shmuck higher on the totem pole that will cause me problems and make things difficult for me. The thought of surpassing them all was statistically improbable, I already knew that. Not that it couldn't be done, but how long would it take for me to do so, and would how much better it would be if and when I finally made it to the top be worth how much it would likely suck until I got there? I decided that going exclusively into management was going to drive me kind of crazy, but thankfully I was working in management as high-volume bench IT, doing ungodly amounts of consumer support and service... and I loved it! So my journey into IT began , switching to studying basically every IT related course I could.
About a year and a half into that, and 2/3 of the way through the CCNA courses being provided at the institution I had been attending (I would finish the courses with my CCNA), I realized that Networking wasn't really my thing either, but I loved Systems.. I loved Virtualization (this was the mid/late 2000s btw), I loved security, and I loved being able to put it all together myself. Since I couldn't afford anything to build a home lab, I actually sold people my pet projects at Circuit City for a while when the idea of a Computer-controlled Home Theater didn't exist in the mainstream yet. There was no Roku, Facebook was only just a new startup with Myspace still being the dominant social media, YouTube wasn't owned by Google, streaming was still a novel idea, and Blu-Ray was ultra-high tech and still a new, groundbreaking quality technology for home use, 40" was still considered your average big-screen, and 1080P TVs still cost no less than $1500. I was the guy who sold a couple a $40,000 home entertainment and computer solution as their retirement gift to one another. Nobody any of us had ever heard of had ever setup anything like that before.. but I created the solution and sold it, we put it together, we made it work, and we gave them what most people waited more than half a decade to get. The guy found me at my next job some years later, basically doing the same thing as I was when I sold him his solution but with less official management responsibilities, and thanked me for getting them what they got. It was still better than everything else available, and what I sold him years ago was still working pretty much exactly how we set it up.
I didn't learn to sell from College, I actually learned while working and attending college, that I could do a lot more and learn a lot more working than at college. I'm sure Scott would agree that that's probably not uncommon. I was attending a community college where ALL of the faculty teaching anything IT related were industry veterans with around 7-10 years minimum experience in IT, so they weren't career academicians. I'll never forget the Cisco instructor I had who would constantly be saying "the book says X, but this is what you actually need to know". Also, she had a surprisingly heavy piece of foam painted like a brick that she threw at inattentive students... it was awesome, but I digress, lol. I was paying out of pocket, and even with the obnoxiously cheap CC rates I was paying (think about 2K/semester), I still ended up realizing that it wasn't worthwhile. Had I realized before it was too late that my extremely desirable ACT score could have taken me to any college in America for free, things might have gone differently for me... but it didn't, and I'm frankly not upset that it didn't.
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@tirendir said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
I'm among those who started down the "Higher Education" path at the unyielding behest of my parents (especially my dad) who demanded that either I pay rent, or go to college and I would not be charged rent. So I went to junior college, because unfortunately, while reaping the immense benefits of being home-schooled from Kindergarten all the way through completing High School, there's very minimal support for the transition into College that all public high schools and basically all private high schools have dedicated staff for.
I went to private school and in mine, there was zero assistance for that (and a zero percent college attendance rate among both students AND teachers.) I had for two years one teacher than had a Associates degree, but that was it. Other than that, no teachers had been to college and no one went to any.
Public school gave me a lot of "help" transitioning to college. Mostly telling me I couldn't make it, pushing me to really bad schools... all kinds of things that made college harder from the very people that should have known more about it.
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@tirendir Yep, and all that training in things other than tech is what would give you the knowledge you really need to excel in the tech sector.
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@travisdh1 said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
@tirendir Yep, and all that training in things other than tech is what would give you the knowledge you really need to excel in the tech sector.
Exactly. That's what provides the context for understanding the tech and how that tech applies to the business.
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@scottalanmiller said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
party with it. But nothing makes them do that. If the question is "University vs. throwing money away" then clearly
You're ignoring that at some schools you could pretty much drink for free if you just made friends with that rich kid who would pay for the keg (or had a few friends in a frat but managed to avoid joining). You can party and go to college without incurring the burn rate for said parting.
On a more serious note, I've found an issue with your generalization based on averages. You are taking the national average. There is a massive difference in the economic outcome for the University of Chicago vs. for profit diploma mills.
Also at Tier 1 universities cost models get more weird in that if you are smart and poor you will often pay nothing (Baylor gives free tuition to national merit scholars and aggressive scholarships based on SAT scores) while if you are dumb and rich you get to pay "list" as well as have to take remedial courses to get rid of your provisional acceptance.
If you are poor, hard working, and go to a tier 1 university, your cost model is WILDLY different than if you are rich going to a tier 1, or middle income but dumb and going to a for profit diploma mill.
I can properly assess your argument, and find it's weakness because I took rhetoric, from a place that wasn't spelled kollege
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The other thing with these stats is that they include all majors. We have data that shows WIDE discrepancies between degrees.
You are lumping in people with Church Recreation Majors (Yes this is a major, and oddly the only person I know who has it, makes over 100K, although not doing anything related to the major).
Did I know people who were religion majors with 60K in private loans? Did I know people with creative dance masters who had 120K in debt? Sure!
If you narrow to the top 100 schools, the top 5 programs for income at each, and control for people with a SAT score under 1350 (or whatever the new damn scale is, but a top 20% score) and from a family who is middle class or lower, what is the outcome of college vs. non-college. I suspect you'll see a slightly different outcome with the numbers.
Am I cherry picking? Absolutely.
But my hypothesis is that there are wildly statistically different outcomes for dumb, rich, getting non-profitable degrees, at tier 3 schools, vs. non-rich, tier 1, top degree's who are intelligent.
Even throwing out the two that are more subjective (Dumb, and rich) I still suspect you'll see statistical significance that will overcome your gap.
Do I agree with your premise that too many people are going to college who shouldn't? Sure.
Do I agree with generalizations that it should be avoided? That may be a bit too harsh.
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@storageninja said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
@scottalanmiller said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
party with it. But nothing makes them do that. If the question is "University vs. throwing money away" then clearly
You're ignoring that at some schools you could pretty much drink for free if you just made friends with that rich kid who would pay for the keg (or had a few friends in a frat but managed to avoid joining). You can party and go to college without incurring the burn rate for said parting.
On a more serious note, I've found an issue with your generalization based on averages. You are taking the national average. There is a massive difference in the economic outcome for the University of Chicago vs. for profit diploma mills.
Also at Tier 1 universities cost models get more weird in that if you are smart and poor you will often pay nothing (Baylor gives free tuition to national merit scholars and aggressive scholarships based on SAT scores) while if you are dumb and rich you get to pay "list" as well as have to take remedial courses to get rid of your provisional acceptance.
If you are poor, hard working, and go to a tier 1 university, your cost model is WILDLY different than if you are rich going to a tier 1, or middle income but dumb and going to a for profit diploma mill.
I can properly assess your argument, and find it's weakness because I took rhetoric, from a place that wasn't spelled kollege
But you also have to remember that average is average. Yes, you can make college work out "a little better" by getting a free ride and going to a better school, in theory. But people who are able to do that also have that much more ability to do well skipping college. The two track together. Averages still tell the average story. The average outcome for the average person with the average cost. Are there outliers? Of course, but for normal people under the main part of the bell curve, it all applies.
Your theory only tells us what we already know - smart, well connected, resourceful people have better chances of success than do other people. We already know this. Does college help them? Other things that we know about average vs. average suggests that it does not. If anything, logically, college helps those farther from the top the most.
