View Full Version : College sure isn't what I remember
Aloha_Shooter
12-05-2016, 17:28
When I went to college, dorms were ... dorms, not hotel rooms. If you wanted to exercise, you could go to the gym for free weights or run on the street ala "Rocky" (which had its own inspiration given this was Philadelphia in the mid-80s) instead of climbing walls and spas.
To help kids handle the pressure of exams, they had "Primal Scream Night" a couple days before the first exams where kids had a half hour to let loose with their frustrations. Apparently today's kids need a whole lot more: http://heatst.com/culture-wars/miniature-horses-and-bubble-walls-outrageous-new-ways-college-students-handle-final-exam-stress/
I hope to God taxpayer grants and funds aren't being used for this crap. Therapy dogs? Therapy horses? Coloring books and play dough? Seriously? Don't even get me started on the scratch-and-sniff bookmarks, zen gardens, or stuffed animals. WTF? Have we become an entire nation of pajama boys? Wait, don't answer that, Obama won re-election in 2012, of course we have.
I just got back from a vacation in New Zealand. College kids there in 2011 got to go help dig out Christchurch. I mean, really dig out -- even today the center of the city looks like a mixture of a war zone and modern city with whole blocks razed to the ground and new structures in various stages of rebuilding. They had a mini-army raised from college and high school students who just went to work at recovering from REAL stress. This year, they're going to get to go help dig out Kaikoura while American college kids make pretzel wands and build Hogwarts from Legos.
[facepalm]
Is therre anything that is not different today than it was in our youth?
No offense, but students thesedays are living an easy academic life.
They rely more on matcad, and pc more than before. Prerequisite for majors are much weaker than when I was a student in under and grad courses.
Only thing I feel real bad is the tuition.
The current administration is working to figure out how to forgive 108B in student loans to dump on us, the taxpayers, so yes, there is a chance you are paying for all that tomfluffery.
Re: relying on PCs and Mathcad, if I'm paying [not cheap amounts of money] for a college degree, I would expect to learn higher-level thought processes than how to manually calculate something a computer can do in 0.1 seconds. In the real world, nobody gives a **** if you can manually compute a Fourier transform.
I agree that most people are quite soft these days however when it comes to academics I believe today is much harder. When I was in high school due to the lack of the internet being as widespread as it is now, research papers and really most things were much easier in my
opinion. Now in the internet age the requirement for research in some classes are quite unrealistic.
BushMasterBoy
12-05-2016, 19:50
When I went to college, we marched in the snow to classes. Denver gets really cold at midnight in the winter.
.455_Hunter
12-05-2016, 20:16
When I was in school (mid to late '90s), the shooting club would host the "Dead Day Range Trip" before finals each semester. We would pay the range fees at either Cherry Creek or Mile High in Erie (now houses), buy some ammo, and let students shoot various personal and school owned firearms. Good times!
I agree that most people are quite soft these days however when it comes to academics I believe today is much harder. When I was in high school due to the lack of the internet being as widespread as it is now, research papers and really most things were much easier in my
opinion. Now in the internet age the requirement for research in some classes are quite unrealistic.
Agreed. I've only been out less than a decade but while I do believe students and people in general are being brought up as emotionally weak, the shear amount of knowledge being taken in is actually more than before, it's just made easier via technology. They also focus on being a little more well rounded than in the past, and while I think that's all a waste of time, the fact is you have to cram knowledge in there that you'll never even use.
The interesting thing I see as someone who hires people is that since nearly everyone gets a degree these days, it's not the academics that set people apart, it's the social skills and how much you are involved with outside of school that separates the cream of the crop. I see a lot of great students get denied jobs because they lack good social skills. I don't think that was as much of a concern a few decades ago.
funkymonkey1111
12-05-2016, 21:19
i took a cross country ski lesson yesterday at snow mountain ranch. the instructors were the cross country coaches from the University of Wyoming. In splitting the group up, the coach asked for those of us that "identified" as beginners to stand here, and those of us that "identified" as an intermediate to stand there.
That's college-speak for you. There's no shame involved in calling yourself a beginning cross country skier. or, that you have skied and wanted some more advanced tips. either you're a beginner, or you're not. There's no "identification" of this fact. what's next, if you're a beginner, but "identify" as a world class skier, they'll tailor a lesson to you?
Great-Kazoo
12-05-2016, 22:04
Is therre anything that is not different today than it was in our youth?
Spelling ?
Aloha_Shooter
12-05-2016, 22:48
Re: relying on PCs and Mathcad, if I'm paying [not cheap amounts of money] for a college degree, I would expect to learn higher-level thought processes than how to manually calculate something a computer can do in 0.1 seconds. In the real world, nobody gives a **** if you can manually compute a Fourier transform.
Yes and no. I don't expect someone to calculate a Fourier transform manually but I want the to know the material well enough to recognize when the numbers coming out of the programs don't make sense. I see too many junior engineers these days that just trust outputs directly because it came from the computer. The process of actually doing the work yourself conveys learning and helps you understand when to trust your tools and understand their limitations.
Agreed. I've only been out less than a decade but while I do believe students and people in general are being brought up as emotionally weak, the shear amount of knowledge being taken in is actually more than before, it's just made easier via technology. They also focus on being a little more well rounded than in the past, and while I think that's all a waste of time, the fact is you have to cram knowledge in there that you'll never even use.
The interesting thing I see as someone who hires people is that since nearly everyone gets a degree these days, it's not the academics that set people apart, it's the social skills and how much you are involved with outside of school that separates the cream of the crop. I see a lot of great students get denied jobs because they lack good social skills. I don't think that was as much of a concern a few decades ago.
i was lucky enough to be able to switch careers to software development and you wouldn't believe how much emphasis is put on "being able to talk to other people". It's quite weird to be honest but people in my field struggle with this.
i took a cross country ski lesson yesterday at snow mountain ranch. the instructors were the cross country coaches from the University of Wyoming. In splitting the group up, the coach asked for those of us that "identified" as beginners to stand here, and those of us that "identified" as an intermediate to stand there.
That's college-speak for you. There's no shame involved in calling yourself a beginning cross country skier. or, that you have skied and wanted some more advanced tips. either you're a beginner, or you're not. There's no "identification" of this fact. what's next, if you're a beginner, but "identify" as a world class skier, they'll tailor a lesson to you?
There's actually no shame in anything anymore and I believe that stems a lot of the other societal problems these days.
Yes and no. I don't expect someone to calculate a Fourier transform manually but I want the to know the material well enough to recognize when the numbers coming out of the programs don't make sense. I see too many junior engineers these days that just trust outputs directly because it came from the computer. The process of actually doing the work yourself conveys learning and helps you understand when to trust your tools and understand their limitations.
The problem that I had in the engineering program hat I used to attend was that it was so disconnected from industry. Learning hand calculations are good to a point, but we never learned how to do it any other way. It's hard to teach to people going into industry when most professors are career students. I have other college gripes but that's a big one to me.
Jeffrey Lebowski
12-06-2016, 06:43
If we didn't coddle them into such weak and sensitive snowflakes, how else would we have millennials to bemoan in the workforce?
Always fun when the generational factory makes fun of its own bad products. Whatever happened to pride in workmanship, Baby-Boomer generation? Aren't you happy with the result of your laissez-faire approach to life? What's wrong with moving away from the Classical Liberal Arts to liberalism and "art"? From the Trivium to triviality? From the parallel circuits of the Quadrivium to the convergence of ways L, G, B, T into the "born this way" loop (cue repetitive, thumping bass track)? You wanted to normalize deviance and then complain when deviance is normal. Reality dictates that it cannot be had both ways.
From Fr. Leonard Feeney's Magazine The Point, July 1952:
THOUGHTS TO ADD TO A HARVARD COMMENCEMENT
On June 19, Harvard College held its annual commencement exercises. On that day, the graduating class of 1952, having been presented with diplomas in testimony of four years of faithful discipleship, was spewed out into the world, to put into practice the lessons it had learned at Harvard.
A large part of this class of ’52, like all Harvard classes, will end up as alcoholics, drug-addicts, and suicides; but another large part, to some extent overlapping the first, will end up in the most influential positions in the country: as the officials and policy-makers in our government, as the writers of our books, and the editors of our newspapers, as the teachers of our children. All of these Harvard graduates, whoever and wherever they may be, can be relied upon to have this in common: they will all think, feel and act according to the prescribed Harvard pattern, which they will attempt to impose upon the rest of the world.
Harvard makes a great commotion about how it encourages freedom of opinions; and while it is true that Harvard allows its students the kind of freedom in choosing their intellectual diet that a farmer allows his hogs, still, no matter what variety of swill a student may feed his mind on during his four years, he comes out unmistakably branded with the same mark as every other Harvard student.
The reason for this is that Harvard is fundamentally mediocre. The only thing that distinguishes it from the rest of mediocrity is the influence it commands by reason of its wealth, power, and prestige. It is mediocrity organized and made effective. But it is mediocrity nonetheless. That is Harvard’s milieu, its climate, and it cannot get away from it. For the doctrines that Harvard has committed itself to teach are the doctrines that mediocrity has made and that it thrives on.
Whatever might lift a man out of the class of the mediocre Harvard teaches its students to avoid, by making it appear ridiculous or unimportant. It teaches them to be suspicious of greatness, fearful of courage, scornful of holiness. It teaches its students to revel in their second-rateness; it teaches them to be smug, complacent, and self-satisfied. It pretends to foster individuality, but the individuality of Harvard is the same in every individual. If a boy were ever to realize himself as a person, unique and to endure forever, he might revolt against this mediocrity, and so Harvard teaches him his insignificance. It tells him he is in existence by sheerest chance, helplessly determined by his environment, a descendant of apes, one of billions who have lived over billions of years on an unimportant planet of an unimportant universe, a structure of atoms accidentally gotten together, likely to be destroyed at any moment by the explosion of other atoms, and then to be gone forever.
Harvard is just as cheap and vulgar as any daily tabloid. It has a more refined vocabulary, but its interests are exactly the same. What the newspaper presents as a sensational bit of scandal, Harvard presents as a case history in psychology. As for Harvard’s pretenses to culture, they are as fraudulent as Hollywood’s. Harvard will teach its students to laugh at American millionaires who import castles from Italy in which to have their cocktail parties, or who hang Renaissance paintings on their walls to give their homes an air of refinement. But Harvard itself will import anything it has read about in history, in an effort to give the place a tone, and is blissfully unaware, as only an American bourgeois can be, of the grotesque contrasts that result. For instance, Soldier’s Field, where the Harvard band forms itself into big H’s while blaring “Wintergreen for President” and where the Harvard football team gets trounced by Yale, is modeled on the Roman Colosseum, where Christians once were martyred for their Faith.
The courses at Harvard, which the students refer to familiarly as ec, gov, phil, lit, etc., present either a hopelessly superficial survey of some subject, or else encourage the student to blind, intense specialization. “Sorry, that’s not my field,” is a frequently heard Harvard expression, offered as excuse for anything from not knowing the chemical structure of coal to not knowing that God has become man. The Harvard faculty includes such men as Pitirim Sorokin, a mad Russian who periodically, and in scarcely understandable English, assails the rest of the faculty and the world in general for their failure to adopt his sociological theories. Ernest Hooton is another Harvard teacher who receives great kudos. He is a somewhat simian anthropologist who, to amuse his friends, named his son Newton. Hooton’s task is to convince his students that all men originally descended from creatures like himself.
Probably the most representative of all Harvard teachers is the late F. O. Matthiessen, who was professor of History and Literature. He exemplified perfectly the kind of man Harvard likes to boast of and to hold up to its students for their admiration and imitation: he was literate, liberal, agnostic, and successful. But one night he took a room in a Boston hotel, wrote a note telling of his pique at the state of the world, and then stepped from his twelfth floor window.
Harvard had considered Matthiessen’s brains one of its most valuable assets, and it was upset to find them splashed vulgarly across a Boston pavement. To cover up for this disgrace, Harvard organized an association that would give perpetual honor to Matthiessen’s name and his ideas. The ultimate comment, however, the summing-up of both Matthiessen and Harvard, was provided by John Ciardi, an Italian apostate in the Harvard English department. Asked for a statement by the Boston newspapers the morning after Matthiessen’s suicide leap, Ciardi, striking a literary pose, remarked, “At times like these, one finds oneself on the edge of things.”
Rucker61
12-06-2016, 09:14
Colleges are a for profit institution that mandate the student be indoctrinated "learn" about 95% frivolous information for every 5% relevant to their career, including by requiring a great multitude of useless and unrelated "required" courses, and institutionalizing a bunch of frivolous electives. E.g. "Star wars, the force and you", all at a cost of thousands per student per semester. The college system is entirely focused around one thing, and it isn't education. It's money, money, money, money, money, money, and money, under the guise of education. Certain people in the system are paid tremendously, or is it outrageously well. It wouldn't be necessary for tuition to have disproportionately climbed...
Many people are unable to graduate college not because of any difficulty, but rather because of the simplicity and the moronic requirements that are unrelated to their lifegoals. If I was hiring someone, I wouldn't give two shits if they completed all their general education credits. I'd MUCH prefer that they actually spend their whole 2 or 4 years, you know, becoming educated in ways that benefit the workforce. This is why for instance graduating attorneys actually have very little legal experience with a juris doctorate and simply subsidize the rest of their education on the backs of innocent clients - who suffer their mistakes absent any recourse. Shouldn't it be far more important for doctors to spend their time beneficially studying medicine, lawyers beneficially studying law, and nobody forced to choose between useless toilet flushing of cash such as "tattoos, body piercing and adornment", "kanye vs everybody", "the american vacation", etc. http://dailycaller.com/2015/08/21/the-daily-caller-proudly-presents-the-dumbest-college-courses-for-2015/
Sadly, the ones that control those institutions have considerable motivation to force people (or especially parents) to pay for more, and more, and more useless bullshit. If someone has an engineering degree, I want to know they are a good engineer. I'd pull my hair out if I knew they spent 1/3 of their time at college studying things like weed cultivation and kanye west. PS: Our gov't recently made it illegal to verify that someone went to college or ever graduated. So whats the point in getting a damn degree anymore?
This, coming from a guy who graduated from Harvard, with a degree in smart-assery. Prove me wrong, I dare you.
My undergrad is in math, with a minor in history. Combining that with a full time job and ROTC requirements there wasn't a whole lotta time for frivolous classes. The only one I remember was Music Appreciation, and that's because we needed one fine arts class to graduate.
Great-Kazoo
12-06-2016, 09:18
i was lucky enough to be able to switch careers to software development and you wouldn't believe how much emphasis is put on "being able to talk to other people". It's quite weird to be honest but people in my field struggle with this.
texting, twitter & FC are a serious problem when you have the latest generation raised on social media. Can they SM 1/2 dozen people in 2 minutes, sure. can they have a coherent verbal conversation with co-workers and or the entire dept. Some can, some cannot break the bubble and understand there's more to life than cell ph or tablet.
texting, twitter & FC are a serious problem when you have the latest generation raised on social media. Can they SM 1/2 dozen people in 2 minutes, sure. can they have a coherent verbal conversation with co-workers and or the entire dept. Some can, some cannot break the bubble and understand there's more to life than cell ph or tablet.
I think it's more that code monkeys are just weird.
babarsac
12-06-2016, 10:00
Can you believe I had to work during college to pay for it.
texting, twitter & FC are a serious problem when you have the latest generation raised on social media. Can they SM 1/2 dozen people in 2 minutes, sure. can they have a coherent verbal conversation with co-workers and or the entire dept. Some can, some cannot break the bubble and understand there's more to life than cell ph or tablet.
We had a temporary employee that was young (18). She chuckled that we didn't have a dual monitor set up yet she didn't know how to address an envelope or give directions to our location. Yeah...
One of my college buddies couldn't properly address an envelope to save his life. He once mailed his portion of the rent to himself. I was over at their place once and he asked me to check his envelope for correctness. At first I thought he was joking but then all of his other roommates told me all the stories of his previous failures.
The problem that I had in the engineering program hat I used to attend was that it was so disconnected from industry. Learning hand calculations are good to a point, but we never learned how to do it any other way.
You explained what I was trying to say much better than I did.
From Fr. Leonard Feeney's Magazine The Point, July 1952:
"But one night he took a room in a Boston hotel, wrote a note telling of his pique at the state of the world, and then stepped from his twelfth floor window."
Thanks for posting that. I quoted this passage because I love how the author turned that phrase. I feel like today a) nobody writes that well and b) even if they did, editors would change it for being "too flowery".
Speaking of people having no life skills, when I was in the dorms I did laundry for people who didn't know how. I don't remember what I charged but I think it was around $2-3 per load.
Martinjmpr
12-06-2016, 11:58
For some reason this seems appropriate:
http://i194.photobucket.com/albums/z256/ZappBranigan/Misc%20pictures/grandpa_simpson_yelling_at_cloud_zps2aa08039.jpg
Rucker61
12-06-2016, 14:08
For some reason this seems appropriate:
http://i194.photobucket.com/albums/z256/ZappBranigan/Misc%20pictures/grandpa_simpson_yelling_at_cloud_zps2aa08039.jpg
How'd you get that photo to post?
Speaking of people having no life skills, when I was in the dorms I did laundry for people who didn't know how. I don't remember what I charged but I think it was around $2-3 per load.
I worked in the school laundry for all four years of high school....some parents never seem to teach their children basic hygiene. [Shake]
Re: relying on PCs and Mathcad, if I'm paying [not cheap amounts of money] for a college degree, I would expect to learn higher-level thought processes than how to manually calculate something a computer can do in 0.1 seconds. In the real world, nobody gives a **** if you can manually compute a Fourier transform.
I hope that at some point you learn that understanding how to organize and manually calculate something a computer can do in 0.1 seconds IS learning higher-level thought processes. Regardless of if you have a technology degree or a professional degree, if you are in a factory, a lab, or a job site, you must know both these days to be at the top. I make a living telling other people where someone else screwed up and when it is design and engineering, it is almost always a young hotshot who thinks exactly the way mentioned in your quote...and people die because of many of those mistakes. YES, I do care if an engineer knows how to do the manual calculations. I care even more than they can do orders of magnitude approximations on the fly and that they know if a program output is consistent with what a limited parameter calculation would produce.
One of the things I have done professionally is to sit in on interviews for high level engineering positions, as a consultant for a professional head hunter who fills such positions. I always ask candidates to do order of magnitude calculations without any support. Those who can almost always get hired. Those who can't get a rejection letter.
If you want to be average, skip the manual stuff. If you want to be exceptional, it is required.
Colleges are a for profit institution that mandate the student be indoctrinated "learn" about 95% frivolous information for every 5% relevant to their career, including by requiring a great multitude of useless and unrelated "required" courses, and institutionalizing a bunch of frivolous electives. E.g. "Star wars, the force and you", all at a cost of thousands per student per semester. The college system is entirely focused around one thing, and it isn't education. It's money, money, money, money, money, money, and money, under the guise of education. Certain people in the system are paid tremendously, or is it outrageously well. It wouldn't be necessary for tuition to have disproportionately climbed...
Many people are unable to graduate college not because of any difficulty, but rather because of the simplicity and the moronic requirements that are unrelated to their lifegoals. If I was hiring someone, I wouldn't give two shits if they completed all their general education credits. I'd MUCH prefer that they actually spend their whole 2 or 4 years, you know, becoming educated in ways that benefit the workforce. This is why for instance graduating attorneys actually have very little legal experience with a juris doctorate and simply subsidize the rest of their education on the backs of innocent clients - who suffer their mistakes absent any recourse. Shouldn't it be far more important for doctors to spend their time beneficially studying medicine, lawyers beneficially studying law, and nobody forced to choose between useless toilet flushing of cash such as "tattoos, body piercing and adornment", "kanye vs everybody", "the american vacation", etc. http://dailycaller.com/2015/08/21/the-daily-caller-proudly-presents-the-dumbest-college-courses-for-2015/
Sadly, the ones that control those institutions have considerable motivation to force people (or especially parents) to pay for more, and more, and more useless bullshit. If someone has an engineering degree, I want to know they are a good engineer. I'd pull my hair out if I knew they spent 1/3 of their time at college studying things like weed cultivation and kanye west. PS: Our gov't recently made it illegal to verify that someone went to college or ever graduated. So whats the point in getting a damn degree anymore?
This, coming from a guy who graduated from Harvard, with a degree in smart-assery. Prove me wrong, I dare you.
This couldn't be any closer to the absolute truth! Having started going back to school this year, I've learned that 90% of the "required" general education is complete malarkey. My wife, knowing more about higher-ed than I, informed me that the two online classes (supposed to be tailored to working professionals) I was taking were so-called "Gordon Rule" classes, that didn't really focus on learning and applying what was learned, but instead just had a crap-ton of writing involved. Well over 1/2 of the writing assignments that weren't the final paper were pretty much BS that I pulled out of my ass. Guess what? I still passed. It's not about learning, or even gaining tools to better your career or academic abilities, it's really all about the almighty green-backs. Shameful. "Being educated is not the same as being smart."
I agree that most people are quite soft these days however when it comes to academics I believe today is much harder. When I was in high school due to the lack of the internet being as widespread as it is now, research papers and really most things were much easier in my
opinion. Now in the internet age the requirement for research in some classes are quite unrealistic.
See the aforementioned bit- and I can attest- I got marked negatively because some of my sources (factual source material) weren't "Peer-reviewed scholarly articles." Who gives a flying f*** about scholarly articles that happened to have been "reviewed" by others? What about citing, appropriately, actual factual data? Who cares what professor Libtard McGee wrote about the migration of Caribou during summer months, what about the biologist who actually studied them? Guess his facts don't count because it's not a "scholarly" article. And they require 3-5 on two-page BS papers... Who has time to sift through all that? [rant-off]
This couldn't be any closer to the absolute truth! Having started going back to school this year, I've learned that 90% of the "required" general education is complete malarkey. My wife, knowing more about higher-ed than I, informed me that the two online classes (supposed to be tailored to working professionals) I was taking were so-called "Gordon Rule" classes, that didn't really focus on learning and applying what was learned, but instead just had a crap-ton of writing involved. Well over 1/2 of the writing assignments that weren't the final paper were pretty much BS that I pulled out of my ass. Guess what? I still passed. It's not about learning, or even gaining tools to better your career or academic abilities, it's really all about the almighty green-backs. Shameful. "Being educated is not the same as being smart."
See the aforementioned bit- and I can attest- I got marked negatively because some of my sources (factual source material) weren't "Peer-reviewed scholarly articles." Who gives a flying f*** about scholarly articles that happened to have been "reviewed" by others? What about citing, appropriately, actual factual data? Who cares what professor Libtard McGee wrote about the migration of Caribou during summer months, what about the biologist who actually studied them? Guess his facts don't count because it's not a "scholarly" article. And they require 3-5 on two-page BS papers... Who has time to sift through all that? [rant-off]
Your anecdotes are not peer reviewed. None of us were there. We cannot attest to the veracity of these statements. Please resubmit this post. (( suggest starting with Dr. Marty Nemko)
:D
Jeffrey Lebowski
12-06-2016, 18:00
The peer review process (and East Anglia scandal) is precisely why I'm not sold on climate change.
If you've ever published, you know this is seriously political, and my field is extremely non-controversial, non-political. In one case, I even got to suggest my peers, all of whom knew me or knew of me, and therefore knew I was of no threat or competition for grant funding. Your mentors are always toughest on you, but I was shocked at some of the comments, and in some cases by how far they missed the point. It was really eye opening.
It was here where I finally truly gained an appreciation for what "publication bias" is. If something doesn't fit the narrative, it gets buried. So, when you do a meta-analysis, for example, you are at the mercy of published data, not necessarily all data or all known data. So, little surprise that climate data (or whatever the political flavor du jour is) shows what a narrative wants it to show. But that doesn't make it true.
This is also why some of my lesser-educated (but very "science enthusiastic") acquaintances make me roll my eyes at best or drive me nuts at worst when they start quoting "science." Even worse is when they say the science is "settled." No self-respecting scientist would ever say something like this.
To say that all college kids have it easy now is far from the truth. Source: I am still a college student going to CU for my masters while working full time with a family. There are a lot of feel good useless degrees, to which most of the criticism of this thread apply. They are just money makers for the school and crank out a bunch of fast food workers. But that is neither here nor there, those students made a dumb ass choice and will pay their $100k+ student loans as a server at a steak house. But many other fields are exploding, especially engineering. Think of the tech advancements of the last 10 years, now roll it all into the curriculum that already existed for the last 60 years. You still have to learn basic circuits to get how an iPhone works, but now you have a million other massively complex ideas to master before you can even begin to design one. This is the same for just about every field because the advancement has been so rapid that schools are struggling to keep up. They are fighting for money from big corporations that fund research, and they are barely cranking out enough students to meet the demand internally. A company will fund research for a specific purpose, the school gets a cut, and the faculty that wins the funding gets a bonus for heading up the research. The company and the school both own whatever the research comes up with, which can be a massive amount of money for successful products.
Billions upon billions are being dumped into constructing state of the art lab spaces to attract researchers that bring big money. Federal and local funding has been cut to most state schools since the financial crisis, and it still has not recovered. To fund this in the near term, tuition has risen 9%+ per year, and make a bunch of additional requirements for students to take that both cost money, and boost GPA's, keeping students in school. This also has the effect of killing the small schools that cannot spend the money to compete, which increases enrollment as students leave the small schools, and the cycle continues. The "easy stuff" that you see are just money makers that are being piled on top of an already demanding schedule.
In the long term, big schools will kill the small community and trade schools. To get a job in most high paying fields will require a degree from a big school. Students will need the high paying jobs to pay off the massive debt. And one day, a Democrat will pile the debt onto the tax payer, so the students will still have to pay their debt plus that of others. But you don't have to write a check every month for taxes, so that's better, right?
This is also why some of my lesser-educated (but very "science enthusiastic") acquaintances make me roll my eyes at best or drive me nuts at worst when they start quoting "science." Even worse is when they say the science is "settled." No self-respecting scientist would ever say something like this. Agreed.
Science, for the most part, are tools that man devised in an attempt to understand ourselves and the world around us. When I can use a math proof to prove you can not stop at a stop sign, then there is obviously a flaw in that "proof". Engineering is based on approximations to get close to the understanding we have of the 7 fundamental laws (3 in Physics and 4 in Thermodynamics) using math (which I have already asserted is flawed). At some point it all becomes circular. I agree, there is no such thing as "settled science"...until we pass to the other side and then some might find nothing, others that they were right and others that they were wrong...but no one on this side will ever really know. Enjoy your nightcap. :)
I do agree that there is a lot of fluff in many college curriculums, but I would argue that the general knowledge is higher, the ability to apply knowledge lower with millennials than say graduates from 20 years ago. Also that the whole system is rigged to exploit and extract $ when in most cases it is not justified. I paid for all of my education at School of Mines and University of Colorado...but when I see todays rates, not sure I would be able to in today's system.
hollohas
12-06-2016, 21:34
Only thing I feel real bad is the tuition.
Not me. The only reason it costs so much is because the money comes easily in the form of loans that have zero collateral. Loans are easy to get because we've been telling everyone for decades that college is a MUST for everyone and that's BS.
Many people are unable to graduate college not because of any difficulty, but rather because of the simplicity and the moronic requirements that are unrelated to their lifegoals. If I was hiring someone, I wouldn't give two shits if they completed all their general education credits. I'd MUCH prefer that they actually spend their whole 2 or 4 years, you know, becoming educated in ways that benefit the workforce....
Sadly, the ones that control those institutions have considerable motivation to force people (or especially parents) to pay for more, and more, and more useless bullshit. If someone has an engineering degree, I want to know they are a good engineer. I'd pull my hair out if I knew they spent 1/3 of their time at college studying things like weed cultivation and kanye west. PS: Our gov't recently made it illegal to verify that someone went to college or ever graduated. So whats the point in getting a damn degree anymore?
^This is exactly my situation. I tried to reduce the amount of BS classes as much as possible by majoring in engineering. I took only enough of them to get my advisor off my back until I passed all of my engineering courses. Once I had all my engineering courses done, I had a career job offer and I was out of there. I never finished the last 3 liberal arts "electives" I was required to take in order to get a degree. And I don't regret that one bit. I saw college as job training and nothing more. Once I had my training completed, I didn't see any point in spending any more money just to get a piece of paper to hang on my wall.
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hollohas
12-06-2016, 21:40
The problem that I had in the engineering program hat I used to attend was that it was so disconnected from industry. Learning hand calculations are good to a point, but we never learned how to do it any other way. It's hard to teach to people going into industry when most professors are career students. I have other college gripes but that's a big one to me.
My wife got an architectural degree. In 4 years, they never used CAD. It was not a required elective. Even at the time I thought that was insane. I was extremely proficient in CAD out of highschool yet college architectural students weren't required to learn it. They spent more time building paper models and making furniture out of recycled trash than learning to design buildings. It was so desiconnected from the real world, one that requires 7 or 8 VERY extensive tests after years and years of on the job to get a license.
hollohas
12-06-2016, 21:49
In the long term, big schools will kill the small community and trade schools.
Metro State is proving this wrong. It started tiny and limited. And now they are building a legit aerospace program.
Aloha_Shooter
12-07-2016, 00:16
The problem that I had in the engineering program hat I used to attend was that it was so disconnected from industry. Learning hand calculations are good to a point, but we never learned how to do it any other way. It's hard to teach to people going into industry when most professors are career students. I have other college gripes but that's a big one to me.
I agree about the disconnects from the Real World. I learned more about practical computer engineering from reading BYTE magazine than any of my classes. On the other hand, my classes gave me the theory basis and tools to evaluate things critically and analogize systems. I found I applied my degree work far more than I expected.
I hope that at some point you learn that understanding how to organize and manually calculate something a computer can do in 0.1 seconds IS learning higher-level thought processes. Regardless of if you have a technology degree or a professional degree, if you are in a factory, a lab, or a job site, you must know both these days to be at the top. I make a living telling other people where someone else screwed up and when it is design and engineering, it is almost always a young hotshot who thinks exactly the way mentioned in your quote...and people die because of many of those mistakes. YES, I do care if an engineer knows how to do the manual calculations. I care even more than they can do orders of magnitude approximations on the fly and that they know if a program output is consistent with what a limited parameter calculation would produce.
One of the things I have done professionally is to sit in on interviews for high level engineering positions, as a consultant for a professional head hunter who fills such positions. I always ask candidates to do order of magnitude calculations without any support. Those who can almost always get hired. Those who can't get a rejection letter.
If you want to be average, skip the manual stuff. If you want to be exceptional, it is required.
Agreed. I also make a very good living by pointing out where other engineers or PhDs make mistakes, often because they blindly trust the numbers they get from their programs. I also have to make ROM estimates on the spot quite frequently. I'm usually as close as I need to be on the spot without having to tell the senior leader that I need to go back to the lab and run a sim or looking lost without my laptop. If they want a precise answer, I'll ask for time to do the calculations properly but usually they just want to know what the ballpark figure is. Being able to provide a close enough answer immediately is often more valuable than getting a Matlab sim tomorrow.
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