Comment by jswelker

There are certain advantages to having separate academic and vocational tracks, but that tends to lock out late bloomers. Quite a few of prominent US scientists and business leaders didn't have good grades going into secondary school.

Job training is a lot more than learning how to use equipment. It's about showing up on time, dealing with coworkers and being a productive member of a team. That's best learned on the job and is a big reason people don't like new grads. Its like going out on a date with someone that has never had a girlfriend. Let someone else break them in and screen them.

Higher ed unfortunately almost desocializes a lot of people. They live in a bubble and become insufferable obsessed with politics and social issues that are disruptive and inappropriate in the workplace

economies and national policies are complex. only the most straightforward things, like ending patriarchy, wars and modifying interest rates, have firm evidence of causing this or that thing on a national scale. nobody knows if so and so nuanced educational policy really matters in an intellectually honest way.

This [1] is a graph of educational attainment in the US. And the percent of people into the 60s who had a college degree was in the single digits, with it being near zero in times past. It then started ramping up extremely quickly. The main thing that changed is a lot more jobs started requiring degrees around that time.

If people were genuinely pursuing college for self betterment, then you'd think the numbers would have been dramatically higher in the past, especially back in the day when you could comfortably afford college even on just a part time job. The increase in enrollment also came right alongside sharp increases in cost.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_...

The problem is there isn’t an alternative for people who want one. I’m self educated and self employed, and yet I’m forced to pay for healthcare I don’t need, and compete against those with the pedigree of an Ivy League.

My issue is these things boil down to class. There should be a legitimate, high quality alternative for those who can’t afford it.

I agree with you in spirit but most people in the US look at college like job training. It’s literally advertised as job training on TV, buses and billboards. Teachers, parents, and media have long been seen as “the way” to get a job.

One of the most disappointing things about college was how little people cared about the liberal arts aspect, where humanities courses were an annoying box to tick.

Schools typically have no space to squeeze it in. Here is a typical pathway for a CS student: https://catalog.njit.edu/undergraduate/computing-sciences/co...

A 4 year cs degree dumps you into heavy math, physics, and intro CS + Data structures in your first year to weed people out who cant cut it.

Second year teaches fundamentals of CS (discrete math, concept of languages, understanding algorithms at least at a basic level).

Third year is filled with more practical fundamentals (OS, DB, computer architecture + field specific courses the student wants).

Finally the fourth year pieces everything together with more advanced versions of prior topics (algorithms for example) + repeated practical applications of all the concepts from years 1-3 to hopefully put the student on at least an 'ok' footing post graduation.

I guess you can try to make the first lecture or two in CS101 about the history but most students don't even know if they want to pursue this journey. Would talking about Alan Turing's history really be appropriate in that class? I don't know really.

> I really wish the computer science degrees and even online courses spent like 30 mins on the history of computer science.

Completely agree here. This would fall under the umbrella of liberal arts, which a lot of CS-only folks seem to find little to no value in.

Most concepts in computer science--especially when it comes to programming--are fairly easy to learn if you're good at learning. Reading something and understanding it to the point that you can write a proper college level essay about it trains that muscle, which is a different skill than rote memorization.

How has the existence of the computing industry depended on baristas with Women's Studies degrees?

Because the history I know has it being 99% created by men with engineering skills doing paid work for large corporations.

> I really wish the computer science degrees and even online courses spent like 30 mins on the history of computer science.

The uni I went to did, in multiple classes, to the point where you could almost predict the "war story" you were about to be told :D

Perhaps the people teaching thec purses don't feel qualified to talk about the history?

I taught university-level computer science and I'm not a historian by any stretch of the imagination. I know something about the history and might mention things in passing but I don't think I could legitimately teach it to other people!

Right, the federal tax code is structured to give advantages to employer sponsored health plans. But it doesn't have to be that way. A better approach would be to eliminate those plans and force everyone to purchase individual or family plans through state ACA marketplaces using pre-tax dollars.

> Healthcare costs, and hence health insurance premiums, are the same with or without an employer intermediary.

If you read the fine print of a health "insurance" plan at a large company, you might discover healthcare costs are directly covered by the employer and the insurance company just administers the plan according to "set rules".

In practice, this operates as blame as a service.

The employer pays a large portion of the employee premiums. As a result the employee is further indentured to the employer because they cannot leave without depriving themselves and family of health care. And it further obfuscates the actual cost of health care. And then the tax code makes this bizarre setup the privileged happy path.

> Healthcare costs [...] The only difference is with an employer intermediary, [...]

That's missing the biggest problem, which is that the employer gets a free chance to extort the employee in all sorts of illegal ways lest they be cut off and die.

Wage theft is perhaps the biggest-value type of crime every year (sources disagree, but it's certainly higher than many), and that's only one kind of illegal thing employers do when they have all the leverage.

The intermediary in healthcare makes a significant difference, as, by going through employers and using insurance, the US market is quite fragmented, and there is minimal alignment pushing prices down. The US healthcare provider doesn't get more business by providing a better cost/benefit ratio: It's easier to splurge, and get business via an expensive, comfortable-ish service.

When one then compares US facilities to foreign ones, it's trivially easy to see that many parts of the system just look different, which comes from the perverse incentives of going through employers that aren't big enough to actually push down on providers' prices at all. Both truly private, low insurance systems and universal healthcare systems end up having much better incentives, and therefore lower prices, regardless of who is paying for them.

We get something similar when you compare US universities to those in Continental Europe. It's clear that over there, the finishing school component is so vestigial as to be practically invisible, whole the focus is a filtering mechanism that attempts to teach something. Go look at, say, Spain's universities and see how many open electives are there, or how many university-wide general requirements exist (0). Each degree is basically an independent unit, and chances are you'll never visit a building from a different school. Undeclared majors? Nope. Significant number of students living on campus? Nope. Sports teams, offering scholarships? Nothing of the sort. This also leads to much lower prices to the school itself, regardless of whether it's all paid by taxes or students.

> Job training didn’t get shoehorned, a cheap filtering mechanism for people worth betting on to be a good hire got shoehorned

While it may not be optimal, there is plenty of training/learning that happens in colleges.

This one case isn't the full story, but I firmly believe that it is a big deal.

See https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/401/424/ for the case.

The problem is that any hiring test that blacks and whites pass at different rates, is presumed racist. Never mind that the real issue might be that the blacks went to worse schools and received a worse education. Never mind that there is a big body of research showing that ability tests are a more effective way to hire good employees than interviews. If the ratio of blacks to whites hired is different than the ratio that apply, you are presumed to be racist and in violation of the Civil Rights Act.

So a company that needs to hire literate people can no longer, as used to be standard, allow high school students to apply and give them a literacy test. But they can require college.

Therefore college has become a job requirement for a plethora of jobs whose actual requirement is "literate". Jobs that people used to be able to do out of high school, and jobs that could still be done by plenty of high school graduates. That this has become so ubiquitous lead to an increased demand for college. Which is one of the factors driving tuition up.

(My suspicion is that an ability test would lead to a less racist outcome than requiring college. Why? Because minority families struggle more to afford college.)

The courts never banned all entrance exams. Many employers still have entrance exams.

It started during WW II when the US government put wage and price controls in place so that companies could not compete for employees by offering higher wages. So they competed for employees instead by offering employer-paid healthcare as a benefit. Then after the war, when the wage and price controls were repealed, the employer-paid healthcare system, instead of going away, kept getting more elaborate.

Yes it is true and is sort of the subject of my original post. One of those things I learned in college ironically and is now background knowledge I can't source.

Sure sounds like a good descriptor for the US healthcare system at least. The hospitals will still be operating and collecting government payments even when most people don't have healthcare. Bunch of empty rooms with beeping hardware everywhere. Meanwhile a bunch of sick and dying people outside the hospitals that are too poor to actually go into them.

Very apt metaphor for the current situation.

Obligatory uwaterloo plug. I didn't even end up graduating after 3 years of compsci but still ended up with almost two years of work experience. Colleagues in my early career were still paying down student debt while I had already paid for tuition out of pocket, not with tax dollars.

Funny too, because I had a philosophy professor there who talked about how the university is not a vocational school, but a place one goes to enrich the mind and become a more worldly citizen.

If you've ever attended a German public university you would realize that they strongly operate on Darwinist principles with every incentive to kick students out with hard exams because the students aren't a direct source of funding.

During my bachelor degree the average exam had a 30% failure rate and the first semester exams almost 55%. If you fail an exam three times in a row, you're not even allowed to shop around universities, because you're banned from studying that degree for life. Instead, you're forced to find a similar degree that doesn't have course overlap on the exams you failed, which means you can only transfer some of your credits to the new degree. It's do or die.

The EU is aggressively neoliberal or liberal-conservative, and that is the reason universities have begun to be more expensive. It's related to austerity, privatization, the aggressive revision of tax codes, and New Public Management.

The left has not been popular in the EU since the 70s, which is why this development has gotten increasingly aggresive in the last few decades. You cannot seriously suggest that the EU has moved left in any meaningful way. The EU commission is currently trying to implement that every new regulation can only pass once an old regulation can be removed. It's a neoliberal dream, where the amount of regulation can only go down, and public funds are allocated to private companies more and more.

This is especially true for universities, where public funding programs for research has begun to be funneled to startups instead of research groups.