Just How Hard is University to Overcome
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@penguinwrangler said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
So the chance someone with a college degree becomes a billionaire is 0.000003951219512195121951219512195122
Right, and the chances of someone without a college degree to become a billionaire is even less.
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When it comes right down to it, I think those of us that know what we know have to talk to young people facing that decision and show them an alternative to what the college institution is going to show them. We have to tell the student to look at the decision like an investment and justify the decision that way.
Encourage them to read books like Rich Dad, Poor Dad and think about investments instead of just listening to the mantra that if you go to college you'll earn more money.
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@mike-davis said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
Rich Dad, Poor Dad
Not really that great of a book, beyond arguing people should pay attention to cashflow, and invest in things that earn interest. Kiyosaki is a fraud. Idiot was preaching to buy Gold in 2015 and get out of the market. His obsession with slumlord rental properties is just a step above "flip this house" scaminars.
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@tim_g Billionaires are outliers. Using them as a straw-man for college success or not vs. actual data is.... well a bad idea.
I'd also point out that some of the tech ones (Gates, Jobs) still went to college, and built their initial network there. Maybe they didn't need to graduate, but the first 2 years of classes (and more importantly) connections got them where they are now.
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@storageninja said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
Billionaires are outliers. Using them as a straw-man for college success or not vs. actual data is.... well a bad idea
I'm doing nothing more than stating a simple fact based on a statistical number.
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@mike-davis said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
and think about investments instead of just listening to the mantra that if you go to college you'll earn more money.
If you want kids to think about investments some advise....
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Against the Gods. https://www.amazon.com/Against-Gods-Remarkable-Story-Risk/dp/0471295639
Teaches them Risk, and why humans are terrible at it. -
Freakanomics. Applied statistics. (Also a fun read)
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A random walk down Wall Street. - Good overview of why as a retail investor what your place in the world is.
Listen:
Planet money (NPR) Good podcast on all things money, finance, stats.
Freakanomics podcast - good fun trivial around stats.Subscriptions:
Read the WSJ. https://www.wsj.com/ Well worth the subscription. I started reading USA today in first grade, but I moved onto the WSJ for biz coverage, and CSM for current events.
The Economist. Gives them a good neo liberal view of global economics with some realpolitik mixed in.
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None of these rants even address the fact you go to university to get an education, not to learn by yourself in a vacuum.
Go read a book youve never read before, perhaps a classic. Read it by yourself without doing any research on the author or his/her motivations or the time in which the book was written. Then after reading it, go find someone who knows literature and tell that person what you think of the book. Guaranteed they find your opinion of the book naive and uninformed.There is real value in getting contextual information from people who know what they are talking about.
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@momurda I'm all for college as a means of education. That's kind of the original intent. However modern colleges are "career" oriented. Find someone today that thinks liberal arts and sciences are important in a collegiate education. They are rare, colleges today are almost always about the "job" at the end of the degree and not the education you get... getting there.
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@momurda said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
None of these rants even address the fact you go to university to get an education, not to learn by yourself in a vacuum.
Go read a book youve never read before, perhaps a classic. Read it by yourself without doing any research on the author or his/her motivations or the time in which the book was written. Then after reading it, go find someone who knows literature and tell that person what you think of the book. Guaranteed they find your opinion of the book naive and uninformed.There is real value in getting contextual information from people who know what they are talking about.
University isn't some magical provider of context, though. In fact, university has a track record of getting that context wrong. Not always, for sure. But why do you perceive reading a book at home as being without context and reading one in college has having context? No one is questioning the value of that context, but I can get all that context, faster, and more accurately on my own that I can in a college classroom.
So assuming that I will read the book and have the context, and do it more quickly without someone to spoonfeed it to me... where is the college value? All it does is make me read more slowly, spend time getting to and from a classroom, spend time learning how to present the book in a way that makes an arbitrary professor happy, and spend money to do it instead of just getting the context and reading the book and getting the learning as quickly and efficiently as possible.
I've had good college classes that taught literature in context and it was a good experience. Not as good as if I had done it on my own, but it was good. But I get that context with every book I read already. I always research the authors, the history, etc. That's just a normal part of reading. Same as I do with other forms of literature.
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@coliver said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
@momurda I'm all for college as a means of education. That's kind of the original intent. However modern colleges are "career" oriented. Find someone today that thinks liberal arts and sciences are important in a collegiate education. They are rare, colleges today are almost always about the "job" at the end of the degree and not the education you get... getting there.
Even those liberal pieces, you can teach all of that to yourself. Certainly colleges are way better at that stuff than career stuff since the entire collegiate experience is built around teaching those parts. In theory the one value of college is putting a bunch of other learners at the same level together in a classroom to encourage discussion. Unfortunately, this is only of value to the middle of the road students. Those that are not very good fail to participate. Those that are above average end up being nothing more than unpaid professors doing lecturing without getting the peer discussions.
The problem there is that as the college system starts to become a substitute high school accepting students younger and younger (they take college freshman regularly at 15 in Texas now), and do high school classes in college (students can basically go right from freshman year of HS directly to college without taking HS classes so they are in college without any HS level background) and encourage larger and larger percentages of the population to attend college (so instead of the elite being the only ones there, now all the random kids who were problems in HS are still there) the middle of the road student is now no longer of much value to discuss ideas with making the whole situation worse and worse.
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@scottalanmiller
No idea what substitute high school means. Unless colleges have dramatically lowered their requirements in the last 20 years and are teaching HS level courses since i was enrolled.
The value I am talking about is not money. The thinking that all must be measured with dollars and anything that doesnt lead directly to more dollars or you saving dollars is worthless--is wrong.
Thinking like that can(did) lead an entire generation astray into condoning the behavior of and empowering people like Donald Trump/Carl Icahn(two easy examples) instead of ostracizing or imprisoning them. -
@momurda said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
@scottalanmiller
No idea what substitute high school means. Unless colleges have dramatically lowered their requirements in the last 20 years and are teaching HS level courses since i was enrolled.That's exactly what they have done. You can now, at least in Texas, opt for college instead of high school. You no longer have to complete the high school workloads before going on to college. So you literally have classes with kids who haven't done high school yet and are high school age taken college classes.
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@momurda said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
The value I am talking about is not money. The thinking that all must be measured with dollars and anything that doesnt lead directly to more dollars or you saving dollars is worthless--is wrong.
That's fine. But what is the value? There are two generally accepted values that universities should provide: either education for education's sake; or education for the economy's sake. My point above about education is that university stands in the way of education rather then enabling it. Centuries ago, universities were bastions of secret knowledge kept carefully out of the public's hands so that universities could sell it. Today, universities have no such secret store of knowledge and have nothing to offer normal learners. Someone seeking education can get the same resources on their own, faster, cheaper, and with more quality than they can get through the education system.
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Student loan watchdog: US 'turned its back' on students - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-45323773
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Saw this on a job requirement today.
Education Requirement(s): Bachelor’s Degree with 6+ years OR Master’s Degree with 4+ years OR 8+ years applicable business experienceSo if you assume that you started trying to work in the industry as soon as you graduated from high school and that you graduated at 18 (doesn't actually matter the age, the difference is the same)...
Bachelor degree would require you to be 18 + 6 + 4 (minimum reasonable for a BS degree) = 28
Master's degree would require you to be 18 + 4 + 6 (minimum reasonable for an MS degree) = 28
High School only would require you to be 18 + 8 = 26So a two year penalty if you managed to do college at the assumed speed. If you took a more average amount of time to get through school, then the college path hurts even more.
So even if the HS only grad wasn't paid at all for eight years and only did volunteer work, they'd still potential have a two year leap on the college grads, even if their college was free. But assuming that the one was paid to work those years, and the others paid for schooling, the gap becomes enormous.
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