The original idea behind school isn’t to educate the masses. Why would a factory worker need to know calculus and Shakespeare? He needs to read the clock and timetables, be on time, wake up in the morning early enough to be punctual, …
Likewise higher education isn’t about the thinks you learn. It is about learning methods to learn. If you can learn the nitrogen cycle, you can learn our scrum statuses. If you can hand in your homework in time, you can keep our deadlines.
This isn’t to say the system is good, but it helps to understand it when you want to criticize it.
But learning to critically question statements and judging them yourself (which requires some knowledge, for example you can’t question anti-vaxxers when you don’t know anything about how vaccines work) instead of simply believing them is extremely important in a democracy.
Judging sources for the information requires way less knowledge. To continue your analogy, for most people it’s obvious to take your medical advice from your family doctor instead of that crazy aunt in Facebook
While you’d generally believe that to be true it can be hard for people with no knowledge who aren’t the brightest to see through statements like “doctors just are part of the wealthy smart people society who aim to keep us down”.
Never underestimate human stupidity.
I have watched YouTube videos of smart people reading a smart book that basically said that our education system has the focus on learning facts which gives us a submissive attitude. It gives us a feeling of passivity, of the silent observer.
That said, I realize that the system is getting better in the sense that it tries to evoke curiosity and makes kids to explorers instead of observers if that makes sense. Also, as someone who got interested in history only after school, I know that basic knowledge is important and bad if missing. Than again, why didn’t school make me want to know stuff.
Cant you find out the answer for these questions with a series of short tests?
I once applied for a job at IBM and instead of an initial interview they sent me a series of interactive tests to check my skills. I ended up moving to another country and didn’t follow through, but still liked this approach.
Also in the EU I can see lots of job listings are using now a system where you either have a certain type of education/degree or a certain previous experience to be eligible to apply.
Still you need to have knowledge of the specific field, but technically if you started at the bottom with an entry level low skill job you can get higher with experience alone and without a university degree.
Can they? Yes. Absolutely. 100%.
A local factory likes people with college degrees, any degree, no matter what college or course, but also offer tests twice a year in large groups for exactly the reason that plenty y of people are qualified, and can do everything they need, but never went to college.
Will they? Probably not unless it’s a niche employer. Why bother going through the extra effort when you can just say “degrees only” and turn your nose up at anyone without one?
I guess 5 rounds of 90 minutes long multi-stage interview process is much more efficient, where people selling an idealised version of themselves in imaginary scenarios.
Also talking to HR/recruitment department, who has no idea of the actual job is a great way to find the right candidate.
…its ridiculous
A college degree ahows you can complete a series of seemingly-unrelated tasks (courses) across multiple phases (semesters), to finish a major project (degree).
It means you finish what you start and have an eye on the future instead of the present.
Your answer sounds like it was lifted from a LinkedIn motivational post.
College favours the rich, who can afford it and I don’t think people with higher education are better at planning their future.
Lots of people are forced through college by their parents, often backed up with money and safety nets of security - if they fail the first time they just throw more money at it and try again.
I’ve grown rather cynical of corp-speak lately, and I’ve heard this line before.
Whether said overtly or not, at least nowadays I’d be willing to bet a degree is used as a positive indicator that the candidate is likely in debt, will do anything for a job, and therefore will stick around and put up with almost anything for less wages, because they lack leverage.
They’re therefore cheaper to hire than an independent individual that might exercise their freedom to leave if they’re not treated with respect.
This might also explain why folks with high level degrees are constantly called “overqualified” and ghosted.
The original idea behind school isn’t to educate the masses. Why would a factory worker need to know calculus and Shakespeare? He needs to read the clock and timetables, be on time, wake up in the morning early enough to be punctual, …
In certain country reading clock and timetables was deemed not enough for factory worker.
Ah, Elementary through Highschool teaches you to be an employee.
Higher education is being sold dreams and taking on debt to learn to be a better employee. Sounds about right.
I teach myself new complex skills all the time, but I imagine I’m still written off a ton because I didn’t pay for at least the four year license to learn to learn. Lol
(I want to emphasize I’m being playfully sarcastic about our clown world society and not attacking you, you are very correct about needing to understand before one critiques!)
Well that’s about the system in the USA or some third world countries. Locking higher education behind a paywall only helps to keep the population uneducated, combine that with no focus on critical thinking in school and you get a population that’s easy to control and to polarise.
Of course politicians like Trump (or pseudo-democracies or straight up autocratic regimes in third world countries) really benefit from an easily-convinced population that’s not questioning them too much, so, given how strong the republicans currently are, that sadly probably won’t change anytime soon.
At some point they’ll realise that they need free or at least very affordable education to stay internationally competitive…
Agreed with every word.
On a national level we’re reaping the tainted harvest wrought by years of cultivating an uneducated populace.
They make for great desperate-workers, emotionally swayed voters, readily-motivated armed forces, and well-trained consumers, but making higher education an increasingly lofty privilege while also undermining it at every turn for politics is totally coming back to bite us.
Instead of being seen as the wealth of our nation, people are seen as another commodity product for corporations to buy and sell. (Readily evident at the defunding and disrespect towards arts and social sciences.)
Now when there’s a “shortage” of educated workers, they just import them from wherever’s cheapest.
…And tons of our college funding still goes to the football teams. To entertain and profit off the uneducated masses.
Well that’s about the system in the USA or some third world countries.
And boy, are we feeling it. Infrastructure crumbling. Crime, unemployment, homelessness on the rise. Everybody is stupid. But check out our new super-carrier! /s
Man I wish I had some positive note to end this with but I’m just frustrated, and a lot of me wishes to just escape. Lol.
A factory worker seems like one of those jobs that doesnt require a college degree.
Considering public education began before the industrial revolution and factories, that seems a little suspect.
The same energy as “entry level job, 10 years of work experience needed”.
I had terrible imposter syndrome when I landed a sw dev job. I thought everyone could tell that I didn’t belong. I was / am self-taught. Everyone had CS degrees. I thought I was a fraud. I later recalibrated to realize that I’d earned it even harder without a degree. But I had to get that spot to be able to leverage my knowledge. There are probably people who know a lot more than me getting rejected because they don’t have the right credentials.
I never managed to land a job in the field but of the 4 interviews I ever got actually related to IT every single one mentioned that I was technically overqualified for these entry-level jobs despite never officially going to school or working in IT, one of them called and had the lead back-ens guy come and sit in since I was a potential fit for an entirely different and much higher up role
Of course that’s probably the reason I was never hired over other options (as well as why I didn’t get many interviews, who wants the guy with 0 education if the other 20 applicants do?) and so now every time I do IT work for home I just get super sad. It’s taking a lot of therapy to undo that and it’s not reeeeally working lol
25 years after graduation in CS I’m still waiting for the Pumping Lemma to have any relevance to my work as a dev.
Get a job in scientific computing then
Even stuff like simulation engines can make a grown man cry
I’m glad I don’t have to cry. I was just terrified initially that to do this kind of work you had to be really good at maths and stuff, but actually you’re just taking user input and putting it in a database, then getting it out later to show back to the user, fluffing stakeholders, and often rewriting the code you already did in a new framework or architecture that looks good on your resume.
Brother, recently i landed my first official job as system administrator (I’m still in university as EE), even though i know almost all things, i just don’t know nuances of how they adapted these technologies we know of in their specific case, and i am too felt terrible imposter syndrome
CS degrees, at least in my experience, prep you for a bunch of things that honestly don’t matter too much. Like, I don’t think knowing what P versus NP means really helps me at my job. I think learning to use build tools and frameworks rather than just the language itself would’ve been more useful.
The best professor I had in that regard at college was younger and also working at a “real” company while also teaching (I believe he was getting a master’s degree). He taught us about Spring and Maven and had us make a REST API. The only downside is that this course was about making GUIs and the majority of it was about Swing which nobody really uses. I have a feeling he added the other assignment because it was.more relevant to things most folks do with Java.
It’s because computer science degrees aren’t really programming degrees.
A computer science degree sets you up to be a scientist, most common dev jobs are just glorified Lego sets patching libraries together and constructing queries. There is skill, knowledge, and effort in those jobs, but they are fundamentally different.
Most common software dev jobs are closer to the end user than not.
Don’t think I’ve ever actually heard a company say “forget everything you learned in college”.
You don’t work where I work then.
Family-owned business. Realizes they’re behind-the-ball on technology and practices. Hires college-educated & outside people to make suggestions.
“Well none of that makes sense to us. Forget all that and do it our way.”
“That way is wrong.”
“Well it’s our business, we’ll do it how we want.”
Then they get all <surprised pikachu> when the talented people get burnt out and quit after a few weeks. Eventually it’s “well these kids just don’t want to work hard like we do.”
From what I understand it’s fairly common in engineering, but less of a forget everything you learned and more of a that’s all gonna be pretty much useless in the context of the specific job you’re doing so just pay attention to the training
Its not about learning, its about paying your dues to the church of capitalism
For the US, id certainly agree with you. College is free here and some employers require it (less and less though). A coworker once told me a degree shows you can be serious for one thing and see it through. It shows you are capable of achieving a goal.
I believe your coworker is right to some extent. Getting a degree is a lot of work. It demonstrates your ability to do work and get things done… Among other things.
Having any degree/post secondary diploma, generally says you have the ability to work on something without being forced into it. IMO, HS is generally expected and more or less forced on everyone, so it doesn’t really count.
While I believe that’s the motivation behind needing a degree to get a job, I also, personally, don’t agree with it. There’s plenty of hardworking people who never even considered college/uni after HS. Some of them are much more motivated and hardworking than the people I knew from my time in college.
I work in IT, and see degree requirements on all sorts of job postings. It’s bullshit, since there’s haven’t been IT centric degrees until very recently, outside of CS/development. Most of these jobs don’t require any programming whatsoever. They’ll be for helpdesk, system administration, networking, etc. Programming knowhow might help but it’s definitely not required. I don’t need Java, or C++, or Python, or any other language to know how to click buttons on dialogs in Windows.
Employers are inherently ableist. They discriminate against people who are unable to do the job. They also discriminate for reasons unrelated to job performance, but then measuring job performance is very difficult even when someone has been working at a company for years.
Note that in professional sports and in Hollywood it’s quite easy to measure performance. Accordingly, you see athletes and actors compensated in a way that’s much more in line with their job performance than other industries.
