Don't Stay in School
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@PSX_Defector said in Don't Stay in School:
@scottalanmiller said in Don't Stay in School:
The weight of the argument that US schools are shit is complete bullshit. Even if US education systems were as bad as you think, other countries are far, far, far worse.
Sure, some are, and they get recognized as such. No one takes India seriously. If "India is totally garbage as seen by an American" is your argument, I think you've made my case. Because in India, lots of people think that their accreditation or reputation is fine and would make the same arguments that you are making.
What I'm saying is that the US is headed in this direction and the response that I got outside of the US was exactly your response to India. You've demonstrated by point perfectly.
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@tonyshowoff said in Don't Stay in School:
@scottalanmiller said in Don't Stay in School:
In IT we know this process well because of the infamous certification boot camp issues of the early 2000s. In the 1990s, certifications carried a lot of value. They were hard to obtain and there was very little possibility that someone had cheated or whatever.
10 Spiceworks topics a day asking which certs to get rather than worrying about experience, with 500 responses from people equally inexperienced and uncertified telling them what to do. It's a plague. I got most of mine way back when.
This is a double edged sword.. no cert no job, no work history, no job..
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You've actually also made another very important point - inside the US there is this marketing and branding that "regional" accreditation is good and "national" is bad. Now I've never attended a non-regional accredited school but I can testify to the lax standards of the regional accreditation. But that's not the point, the point is that the terms are misleading, probably intentionally, because it serves to make viable excuses like we've seen here, but it's really a farce. The system is still centrally controlled and overseen by the government in the end, not regional authorities, they are just contractors doing part of the work so that the government can keep it at arm's length and act like the industry is self regulating or something. Americans often believe that the system is not nationalized simply because of the name.
This is, I'm sure, not known at all outside of the US and the system is simply seen as the US education system. The US is seen, generally, as a single market (which it actually is.) They would, I would expect, be aware of accredited (regional) and non-accredited (what you call national or neither) but would not really be aware of the differences in regions and simply see it as "US accredited", even if not vocalized, that's how it would be perceived. The nuances that we see internally would be lost. That's why people say "US University" not "Middle States Ac University." And they are actually more correct than not, since it is DoE accredited that is what they are interested in and care about and what they are referring to.
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@Dashrender said in Don't Stay in School:
This is a double edged sword.. no cert no job, no work history, no job..
I don't agree. Apart from people getting jobs without anything to back them up, which does happen a lot, even if every job ever required experience first (which isn't actually possible) there still remains paths for that...
The thing is is that it is never "work history", it is "experience." Experience is gained through projects, volunteering and interning. These paths are open to everyone without barriers. It is these things that level the playing field. I didn't get my first job because I was "lucky" or broke the rules, I got it because I had taken the time to build a portfolio, learn some skills and intern to demonstrate them.
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@scottalanmiller said in Don't Stay in School:
I'm not shocked or even too dismayed that people still ask about it. Certs still have "some" value, mostly because hard work from the certification authorities is helping them to make a come back by making braindumps useless. Boot camps, though, are so common that they are now almost all that there is, they are just an assumption with some certs and even mandatory (Vmware, I'm looking at you) with others (which is why I see Vmware certification as absolutely worthless and even possibly a negative.)
Of course, this exact boot camp process is now what everyone is complaining about high schools doing (and elementary) which "teaching to the test" being the high school very of boot camping. Memorize answers, understand nothing.
What dumbfounds me is how easy this is to fix - HUGE pool of test questions.
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@Dashrender said in Don't Stay in School:
What dumbfounds me is how easy this is to fix - HUGE pool of test questions.
Huge pools are harder than they sound. And they cause other issues.
For example, and not that these are impossible to fix but they are issues...
- The larger the pool the harder it is to generate meaningful questions.
- The larger the pool the more costly it is to write questions and moreso it is more costly to check them.
- The larger the pool the more likely that the questions and answers will be wrong.
- The larger the pool the more likely that the random selection of questions will drive scores rather than the ability to answer them.
- If every student doesn't get an identical test, is the test even remotely standardized (beyond format?)
- Not all topic categories can be treated this way. For example, important dates in history might include 100 possibly important dates. Increasing the pool would be dangerous.
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There is no perfect answer. The best answer I've ever seen is what SUNY Empire does... no testing. They believe that the entire process is pointless and they work around it. Tests mostly serve to prove who can take tests well, not what people know.
Example, I'm an awesome test taker. I have literally gotten certified on things I've never seen or used before just because I test so well that I can often socially engineer the test writer through analysing their test writing to understand what their thinking is making it often easy to answer questions when I don't know the answer at all, or have only common sense to guide me. Other people can know the material cold but cannot understand or handle testing and fall apart. Normal test processes don't test knowledge nearly as much as they appear to on the surface.
And that's before we look at the fact that anything that can be answered on a test is something that you can look up. We only test the "Googleable answers" and not the concepts, which are the important parts.
For example, we don't try to figure out if students understand the factors leading to or the dramatic world shift resulting from the defeat of the Spanish Armada, instead we ask for the useless fact of what year did it happen (1588, I remember from 24 years ago.)
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What is the work around they do?
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@Dashrender said in Don't Stay in School:
What is the work around they do?
Portfolios. You make a portfolio of your work that you have done in each class to demonstrate your understanding of the material. Might be project based, design based or whatever. Lots of options. But when you are done you have a portfolio to take to an employer and show "this is the stuff I covered and this is how you know that I know the material."
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I'd be interested to see an example of such a portfolio
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@Dashrender said in Don't Stay in School:
@tonyshowoff said in Don't Stay in School:
@scottalanmiller said in Don't Stay in School:
In IT we know this process well because of the infamous certification boot camp issues of the early 2000s. In the 1990s, certifications carried a lot of value. They were hard to obtain and there was very little possibility that someone had cheated or whatever.
10 Spiceworks topics a day asking which certs to get rather than worrying about experience, with 500 responses from people equally inexperienced and uncertified telling them what to do. It's a plague. I got most of mine way back when.
This is a double edged sword.. no cert no job, no work history, no job..
That's not true, I personally have hired, and most other IT managers / business owners I know of have hired plenty of people with only work experience, and also no experience for entry level. There are plenty of entry level IT jobs, things like computer repair in high schools or whatever, the pay is terrible, but you can start and move fast by changing jobs. Certifications typically aren't measured by anyone except HR now, unless they're specific for some purpose, like companies which require certs to buy certain products for some reason.
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The accreditation system itself is corrupt, the university I went to is not nationally accredited, only regionally accredited, it's Columbia University in New York, however because as @scottalanmiller brought up, the reality and how we view it are far different. I highly doubt if not for government research and projects, universities like Columbia, MIT, etc would be no more overseen than Phoenix or DeVry.
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Even in the big financial space, hiring straight from high school was acceptable, even for high end positions. I've never heard of the "can't get a job without experience" problem in real life. On SW it seems to be common and, of course, we all see it in mindless memes posted to Facebook, but everyone with a job, anywhere in the world has gotten past this barrier. It can't actually exist until we get to a point that we have a massive upsweep in unemployment making it momentarily possible.
I expect that people always said this, they just didn't have the Internet and cat memes to promote their disappointment in it.
My guess is that people who are unemployable or marginally employable complain about this and other related items like minimal wage increases a ton because it feels like a viable reason to them as to why they can't find work. But most of the time, not always, the issue is just that they aren't qualified, are not willing to do what it takes to be qualified and don't want to accept the jobs that they are eligible for.
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@dafyre said in Don't Stay in School:
@Dashrender said in Don't Stay in School:
@scottalanmiller said in Don't Stay in School:
@Dashrender said in Don't Stay in School:
I'll definitely agree that anything past probably 8th grade, and perhaps much less than that, are really needed by the common man.
Probably a mix. Few 8th graders are anywhere nearly prepared to talk politics. Things like geography and history are necessary for even basic functional citizenship (unless we remove democracy, then we don't have to educate every individual to all of these things - democracy comes at an incredible price.) Math needs to at least go to algebra. Science we go way, way too far. Computing we rarely even bother to introduce in any meaningful way. English lit... way too far.
I definitely understand where you are coming from - and I'll fully admit to my general lack of knowledge in history - but would dropping the general requirements for history really change much in the world we live in today?
History gives us good examples of things that have been tried and worked, or things that have tried and failed... In technology, government, business...
The issue is that, in the US, a lot of history is actually taught incorrectly, and is taught from a biased viewpoint that isn't really factually accurate, but is presenting the perception that is wanting to be imparted. I fully agree that "those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it", which is why we have candidates like Trump succeeding so well in the polls when he's very much a fascist. But we need to make sure that the history taught is being taught accurately, and not how people wanted it to be perceived, instead of what's the brutal reality.
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@scottalanmiller said in Don't Stay in School:
Even in the big financial space, hiring straight from high school was acceptable, even for high end positions. I've never heard of the "can't get a job without experience" problem in real life. On SW it seems to be common and, of course, we all see it in mindless memes posted to Facebook, but everyone with a job, anywhere in the world has gotten past this barrier. It can't actually exist until we get to a point that we have a massive upsweep in unemployment making it momentarily possible.
I expect that people always said this, they just didn't have the Internet and cat memes to promote their disappointment in it.
My guess is that people who are unemployable or marginally employable complain about this and other related items like minimal wage increases a ton because it feels like a viable reason to them as to why they can't find work. But most of the time, not always, the issue is just that they aren't qualified, are not willing to do what it takes to be qualified and don't want to accept the jobs that they are eligible for.
The problem is that a lot of folks don't know that they can intern or don't have local businesses that will let them intern when they are young enough to have the time to do it. As an adult, I could not afford to do any kind of intern jobs because I have bills to pay.
I got my foot in the professional world thanks to an intern-type program at my Highschool.
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@dafyre said in Don't Stay in School:
The problem is that a lot of folks don't know that they can intern or don't have local businesses that will let them intern when they are young enough to have the time to do it.
Agreed. That's why we need huge improvements in schools. How can anyone get hired as a teacher, guidance counsellor, etc. without knowing that there are internships?
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@dafyre said in Don't Stay in School:
As an adult, I could not afford to do any kind of intern jobs because I have bills to pay.
That logic, though, would rule out university FAR before it would rule out interning. Interning happens earlier, faster and at a fraction of the cost of university. So the things that make people wary of interning should make university out of the question.
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@DustinB3403 said in Don't Stay in School:
@Dashrender said in Don't Stay in School:
Learning how to research is probably a life skill most people should have - one that is rarely taught and when taught is poorly taught. I still consider myself a noob at it.
I think my google-magic has proven this a few times.
My Google-fu once found a copy of Act! 2000 installer files, etc, which the company was transitioning away from but still needed to install on the new PCs we were rolling out, with some Google-fu and Regex...I got very lucky but I managed to find it on a open file server somewhere on the internet, and it worked! My boss was so proud...LOL
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@scottalanmiller said in Don't Stay in School:
@dafyre said in Don't Stay in School:
As an adult, I could not afford to do any kind of intern jobs because I have bills to pay.
That logic, though, would rule out university FAR before it would rule out interning. Interning happens earlier, faster and at a fraction of the cost of university. So the things that make people wary of interning should make university out of the question.
I always wondered why interning isn't pushed harder in high schools. My conspiracy mindedness thinks that there is some monetary incentive for guidance counselors and teachers to push kids to going to college instead of looking at vocational or intern opportunities.
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@scottalanmiller said in Don't Stay in School:
@dafyre said in Don't Stay in School:
As an adult, I could not afford to do any kind of intern jobs because I have bills to pay.
That logic, though, would rule out university FAR before it would rule out interning. Interning happens earlier, faster and at a fraction of the cost of university. So the things that make people wary of interning should make university out of the question.
The difference is that a lot of folks can take classes at the university full time, and still work a full time or part-time job to pay for the university (assuming grants, scholarships, and financial aid make it not cost 25-50k per year out of pocket).
In that retrospect, I guess somebody could intern full time and work a second job to pay the bills.
