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FLIPADELPHIA posted:Couple of days old but the White House has apparently ordered the one year embargo on publicly funded research projects to be lifted. I'm not an expert in this area but critics of the move are saying the subscription fees generated by this one year embargo fund things like "society activities" so yeah, sounds like another good policy outcome doing away with an open grift. If you wish to have a private circle-jerk, then you may do so without the use of public funds. Completely fair, I'd say.
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Aug 29, 2022 23:21
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"bbbbut what about our subscription fees?" is like the least sympathy generating appeal I've ever heard, regardless of merit or topic.
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Aug 29, 2022 23:29
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some plague rats posted:You're going to have to be more specific. In the broad sense, anyone who considers themselves on the left is going to support trade schools, they're extremely necessary to maintain a functioning society and there are a lot of people who aren't cut out for academics, and as such trade schools should be readily available and free. That's just the broadest possible strokes though, what specifically do you want to know? I personally don't like the language of "cut out for academics" as it implies a failing on the part of people doing trades, as if they aren't smart enough/can't hack it. Minor quibble, I know.
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Aug 29, 2022 23:58
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Jaxyon posted:I personally don't like the language of "cut out for academics" as it implies a failing on the part of people doing trades, as if they aren't smart enough/can't hack it. Minor quibble, I know. Oh yeah absolutely not intended in a derogatory sense. I didn't finish high school and now I'm in trade working for the power board and couldn't be happier with it so I was speaking from experience, I should have been clearer about that so it didn't sound all high-handed. Some of us just do not benefit at all from academics and it's important to acknowledge that and support alternate means of succeeding in life rather than being like "okay what if we made it easier for everyone to go to college".
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Aug 30, 2022 00:10
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some plague rats posted:Oh yeah absolutely not intended in a derogatory sense. I didn't finish high school and now I'm in trade working for the power board and couldn't be happier with it so I was speaking from experience, I should have been clearer about that so it didn't sound all high-handed. Some of us just do not benefit at all from academics and it's important to acknowledge that and support alternate means of succeeding in life rather than being like "okay what if we made it easier for everyone to go to college". 100% agreed and I spend many of my day asking myself why I didn't become a plumber.
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Aug 30, 2022 00:26
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So is Gavin McInnes in Guantanamo or what?
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Aug 30, 2022 00:58
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Jaxyon posted:100% agreed and I spend many of my day asking myself why I didn't become a plumber. I've learned not to talk specifics about my job to any of my friends who stayed in academics past high school because as soon as you say the words "double time over 40 hours" they develop a thousand yard stare and start shaking Snowy posted:So is Gavin McInnes in Guantanamo or what? Would they tell us if he was? I choose to believe
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Aug 30, 2022 01:10
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Is he even actually being held somewhere
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Aug 30, 2022 01:20
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some plague rats posted:Oh yeah absolutely not intended in a derogatory sense. I didn't finish high school and now I'm in trade working for the power board and couldn't be happier with it so I was speaking from experience, I should have been clearer about that so it didn't sound all high-handed. Some of us just do not benefit at all from academics and it's important to acknowledge that and support alternate means of succeeding in life rather than being like "okay what if we made it easier for everyone to go to college". My mother in law spent two decades trying to get a path for students into the trades in high school in the county I grew up in. Totally failed as all the district higher ups were college college college folks. She was a grant writer that could bring the money too.
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Aug 30, 2022 01:28
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Kavros posted:Is he even actually being held somewhere It's supposedly just a prank
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Aug 30, 2022 01:35
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On the subject of education and college I went to Art School, which was mostly a waste of money overall, but it was clear from a young age that this was wha tI was GOOD AT. I was a decent writer as well. I enrolled for a semester at a University as an art major and had to take calculus and computer programming classes that siply were not in my wheelhouse. I'm not sure why the American education system insists that every student necessarily be good at everything. I read an essay by someone a good while ago that compared to the animal kingdom. We ask the rabbit to pull as much weight as the horse. For the snake to study the art of flying along side Eagles. For the cat to take swimming classes with the fish. Or something to that effect anyway and it made sense to me. I KNEW that an art degree would mean I would make less money in my career but I ALSO knew that was where my talent was and also I had the audacity to want to enjoy my work to the extent it was possible. Near as I can tell, if education is solely designed to put us into the workforce, than 90% of us should just study economics and marketing and become salespeople. So much of what we do simply boils down commodities. I get sales jobs offers all the time when I'm job hunting and NOTHING on my resume suggests in the slightest that I'd be good at it. I'm starting to think that "knowing how to fix and build poo poo" is going to become increasingly valuable moving forward.
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Aug 30, 2022 01:43
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Everything else aside, pretending like it's not still a gamble to predict what degree will be marketable in 4+ years and taking it as a given that this can be done doesn't seem like a good foundation to much. If we applied this backwards there'd be nothing but Divinity, Classics, estate management, and military officer academies offered. Like the thing with STEM being big right now is that one of the primary roles of technology in our economic mode is to put people out of work, and right now lots of time and money is being devoted to putting STEM people out of work.
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Aug 30, 2022 01:46
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Bar Ran Dun posted:My mother in law spent two decades trying to get a path for students into the trades in high school in the county I grew up in. Totally failed as all the district higher ups were college college college folks. Good on her for trying and that's so depressing that it failed out of dumbassed college-first provincialism, that sucks BiggerBoat posted:I read an essay by someone a good while ago that compared to the animal kingdom. We ask the rabbit to pull as much weight as the horse. For the snake to study the art of flying along side Eagles. For the cat to take swimming classes with the fish. Or something to that effect anyway and it made sense to me. That really is an excellent analogy
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Aug 30, 2022 01:49
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BiggerBoat posted:On the subject of education and college As a college professor myself, I’d argue that it’s not about asking the snake to fly alongside the eagles, but show the snake that there’s more to flying than just flapping wings, or show the cat enough about swimming that they could cross a small river, or make the rabbit humble enough to know that not anyone can just pull a weight behind them if they want. I might agree that calculus and computer science might be pushing that limit, but I’ve seen both kinds of courses work for non-majors in a productive way. It is contingent upon us academics to make that come through in the broad audience courses. There’s plenty working against that from the inside, whether that be the downplay of teaching relative to research or the push to have the right amount of students pass your course (from either direction). For what its worth, I do agree that the skilled trades are under-supported in the US. I think there should be the same kinds of governmental grants/loans available to people pursuing a trade as there are pursuing a degree.
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Aug 30, 2022 02:18
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Bar Ran Dun posted:My mother in law spent two decades trying to get a path for students into the trades in high school in the county I grew up in. Totally failed as all the district higher ups were college college college folks. Still the big problem is the boomers absolutely insisted for decades that college degrees absolutely equalled better job opportunities no matter what, of course right until they didn't and they suddenly turned around.
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Aug 30, 2022 02:36
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Still the big problem is the boomers absolutely insisted for decades that college degrees absolutely equalled better job opportunities no matter what, of course right until they didn't and they suddenly turned around. I love how the two biggest media figures pushing the "Don't get a useless degree" line, Bill Maher and Mike Rowe, were themselves English and Communications majors in university.
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Aug 30, 2022 02:49
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My high school has a very well developed vocational track that was funded/treated just about on par with the AP/Honors track, both due to enlightened leadership and also pragmatism; I'm from the most rural, poorest part of a very rural and poor state, after all. They also partnered with the state technical college for those on that track so graduates would be able to move on to higher-level certification of trade skills after high school, which served many of them quite well. It's a model I think would do wonders if expanded and give a much better post-high school path for many who know they aren't suited for traditional university for whatever reason but similarly know that they want/need higher technical education before entering the workforce.
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Aug 30, 2022 02:50
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nine-gear crow posted:I love how the two biggest media figures pushing the "Don't get a useless degree" line, Bill Maher and Mike Rowe, were themselves English and Communications majors in university.
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Aug 30, 2022 02:57
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Still the big problem is the boomers absolutely insisted for decades that college degrees absolutely equalled better job opportunities no matter what, of course right until they didn't and they suddenly turned around. Not only that, but that community college/ JUCO is just for idiots and people too stupid to immediately jump in for a 4 year degree and that you shouldn't do that no matter what unless you want to be surrounded by
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Aug 30, 2022 03:11
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weird vanilla posted:As a college professor myself, Well there's your problem!! World Famous W posted:media is magical in how it convinced so many people that mike rowe was a blue collar laborer It really is incredible how by just sheer force of media magic a show where the premise is that this dork goes around looking at manual jobs and saying "what... is this. How does it work" became a blue collar touchstone instead of the go-to example of a clueless mediaworld fancy lad
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Aug 30, 2022 03:20
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I take mild satisfaction in knowing Mike Rowe almost lost his loving mind at repeatedly ending up in the repetition of "job where you have to cram yourself in an unfathomably claustrophobic inhospitable space to clean it" for show after show
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Aug 30, 2022 03:51
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weird vanilla posted:As a college professor myself, I’d argue that it’s not about asking the snake to fly alongside the eagles, but show the snake that there’s more to flying than just flapping wings, or show the cat enough about swimming that they could cross a small river, or make the rabbit humble enough to know that not anyone can just pull a weight behind them if they want. I might agree that calculus and computer science might be pushing that limit, but I’ve seen both kinds of courses work for non-majors in a productive way. It is contingent upon us academics to make that come through in the broad audience courses. There’s plenty working against that from the inside, whether that be the downplay of teaching relative to research or the push to have the right amount of students pass your course (from either direction). Grants for trades education should be supported, too. My anecdote: as a postdoc, I not only made less per-hour than contemporaries whose job it was to build the building I was working in, but I took home less net pay. I learned this as a 28-year-old, talking to 23-year-olds working on my building. I think there are so many talented people who could work in trades, but don't because they perceive a barrier to entry. There really shouldn't be (I'm sure there is because Capitalism).
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Aug 30, 2022 04:06
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BiggerBoat posted:I enrolled for a semester at a University as an art major and had to take calculus and computer programming classes that siply were not in my wheelhouse. I'm not sure why the American education system insists that every student necessarily be good at everything. Why tf are they making you take those classes? GenEd math shouldn’t go above college algebra unless your major truly requires calculus, and other Gen Ed classes should be things like basic biology, world history, art appreciation, etc. stuff designed to expand your knowledge and appreciation of the world at large. I do wonder how much of the talk both for and against GEs is determined by how well each person’s school handled them.
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Aug 30, 2022 04:12
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TheMadMilkman posted:Why tf are they making you take those classes? GenEd math shouldn’t go above college algebra unless your major truly requires calculus, and other Gen Ed classes should be things like basic biology, world history, art appreciation, etc. stuff designed to expand your knowledge and appreciation of the world at large.
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Aug 30, 2022 04:31
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Foxfire_ posted:Basic computer programming is also valuable for at least a superficial level of making computers not be magical boxes, plus is practically useful for pretty much all fields. ...what? What fields are you picturing when you say "all fields"? "All academic fields" you could maybe make the argument, but everything...?
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Aug 30, 2022 04:37
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I disagree. Calculus gives you an entirely new toolbox to use to quantify and describe the world and its relationships. What we need is to teach the fundamentals/concepts without people having to learn how to do complex/advanced problems. There's a lot of math concepts that are extremely useful to understand at the level of the first brain-dead simple problems and equations that they give you while introducing them.
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Aug 30, 2022 04:40
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Huge numbers of people aren't taking out significant amounts of debt to go to college for the experience of learning or for making themselves more well-rounded people. They're doing it because they've been told all their lives that that's what they need to do to get a good job. Education for its own sake has its merits, but that's not why so many people are taking out tens of thousands of dollars in debt. They're doing it to get good jobs. In a hypothetical future where college ceases to have any merit for getting a job, then we'd see a lot fewer people going to college, even if it were free.
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Aug 30, 2022 04:42
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Jarmak posted:I disagree. Calculus gives you an entirely new toolbox to use to quantify and describe the world and its relationships. Can you give an example of two of what you mean by this?
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Aug 30, 2022 04:42
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some plague rats posted:...what? What fields are you picturing when you say "all fields"? "All academic fields" you could maybe make the argument, but everything...? No like, all fields that involve using any sort of digital technology.
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Aug 30, 2022 04:42
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Veryslightlymad posted:Has anyone considered that maybe colleges are somewhat woefully constructed to teach much of anything? The “well roundedness” is just a grift to get students to pay for classes they’ll never need.
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Aug 30, 2022 04:47
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Jarmak posted:No like, all fields that involve using any sort of digital technology. That seems unlikely. Every job I do is plotted and recorded electronically etc, the whole grid is controlled and monitored digitally, I've never spend a single minute learning computer programming and can't imagine how that would be useful. If my ipad shits a brick, does it make more sense for me to try and fix it myself using some poo poo I learned a decade ago or to leave it to the people who actually studied computer programming and do it for a living? What's a better investment of my time?
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Aug 30, 2022 04:53
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some plague rats posted:...what? What fields are you picturing when you say "all fields"? "All academic fields" you could maybe make the argument, but everything...? What field doesn't involve some form of automation or computers these days? While there definitely computer programming classes that have poor focus for a broad group of students, there are ways of teaching the basic skills of programming in a way that makes quirks of hardware/software more relatable. Math is its own kettle of fish because of the poor way the K-12 curriculum is handled. One of my students' favorite assignments in the first year seminar courses I've taught is reading "A Mathematician's Lament" and getting to trash on the way they're taught math. After some examples and explanations in the paper, they then actually enjoy finishing up a math worksheet. https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf I hedged a bit on the 'calculus and programming for art students' from the original quote because, while it could be well done, I have definitely seen situations where that line wasn't well executed. I do think it is pushing right at that limit of broadly applicable/useful.
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Aug 30, 2022 04:53
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Still the big problem is the boomers absolutely insisted for decades that college degrees absolutely equalled better job opportunities no matter what, of course right until they didn't and they suddenly turned around. It still pretty much is. For better or worse, having any college degree at all (regardless of major) translates into about $1.2 million more in lifetime earnings - even when controlling for all other factors.  It doesn't really need to be that way, but for such a long time there were many more people looking for a job than there were jobs. So, employers could just require a college degree for a secretary as a heuristic for "can this person stick something out for 4 years?" and assumed it = better than someone who didn't. For the first time since the 90's, there are more job openings than people, so that may change. But, there probably won't be forever. You can be very financially successful in a trade, but the vast majority of people without a degree aren't working in one of those jobs. The average income for someone without a college degree is ~$24k. In the same way that not everyone is cut out for college, not everyone is cut out to be a plumber or electrician. There's also not that many plumbing jobs without going into business on your own/being a contractor and a lot of people don't want to/don't know how to take that risk.
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Aug 30, 2022 05:00
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some plague rats posted:Can you give an example of two of what you mean by this? Almost any sort of physical science relies on calculus to describe its fundamental relationships, which is the knowledge we use to understand the world around us. Even the humanities benefit from a better understanding of probability and statistics concepts that are rooted in calculus.
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Aug 30, 2022 05:02
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some plague rats posted:That seems unlikely. Every job I do is plotted and recorded electronically etc, the whole grid is controlled and monitored digitally, I've never spend a single minute learning computer programming and can't imagine how that would be useful. If my ipad shits a brick, does it make more sense for me to try and fix it myself using some poo poo I learned a decade ago or to leave it to the people who actually studied computer programming and do it for a living? What's a better investment of my time? How is it plotted and controlled electronically? As in how is the digital system actually doing that? If you understand programming at a very basic level you have a better intuitive understanding of what is going on instead of it being a magic box.
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Aug 30, 2022 05:09
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some plague rats posted:That seems unlikely. Every job I do is plotted and recorded electronically etc, the whole grid is controlled and monitored digitally, I've never spend a single minute learning computer programming and can't imagine how that would be useful. If my ipad shits a brick, does it make more sense for me to try and fix it myself using some poo poo I learned a decade ago or to leave it to the people who actually studied computer programming and do it for a living? What's a better investment of my time? I feel like the logical aspects of computer programming can be a useful tool - basically knowing how to think like a computer can prove useful when debugging problems around technology, and I think like other more technical fields might just provide another means to approach and think about problems in general. I doubt programming is going to help you if your iPad shits a brick, but if some software at your job barfs and error or starts failing you might at least understand what the problem -shouldn't be- or otherwise have a better understanding of how to narrow down the problem. But to repeat, if any aspect is going to be useful long term, it's probably everything around the programming - problem solving and knowing how to find information.
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Aug 30, 2022 05:10
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Jarmak posted:How is it plotted and controlled electronically? As in how is the digital system actually doing that? If you understand programming at a very basic level you have a better intuitive understanding of what is going on instead of it being a magic box. I have no idea. Why do I need to know that? We have a whole department of people who studied computer programming in depth who make it work and fix it and I don't see how me being taught basic fiddling would be useful compared to having them do it. They don't need to know how to run lines or replace poles or clear trees or any part of my job, why would I need to know how to do theirs? This really does feel like a solution in search of a problem some plague rats fucked around with this message at 05:23 on Aug 30, 2022 |
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Aug 30, 2022 05:20
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Oxyclean posted:I feel like the logical aspects of computer programming can be a useful tool To add to this, experience with that kind of logical process/problem-solving has benefits outside of computers. If you have to develop any type of workflow, whether its managing documents, people, or tasks, the experience with low-level computer programming can help you notice inefficiencies that can be corrected or other improvements to a process to make it more robust.
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Aug 30, 2022 05:22
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some plague rats posted:I have no idea. Why do I need to know that? We have a whole department of people who studied computer programming in depth who make it work and fix it and I don't see how me being taught basic fiddling would be useful compared to having them do it. They don't need to know how to run lines or replace poles or clear trees or any part of my job, why would I need to know how to do theirs? You asked me how it would be useful for understanding the world around you. If you're not interested in doing that then of course it's not useful to you. And yeah having a basic understanding of how lines are run and polls are replaced would probably make the person programming a system to track those things more effective at their job.
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Aug 30, 2022 05:25
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Jarmak posted:You asked me how it would be useful for understanding the world around you. If you're not interested in doing that then of course it's not useful to you. I mean this started as a discussion of the usefulness of teaching basic programming to people, which I disputed and still dispute. It's not about some wider idea of "understanding the world around you" better through being able to touch computers slightly(???) It's a question of pure utility as I see it, so it looks like we're basically having two separate discussions that have gotten mixed in together.
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Aug 30, 2022 05:28
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