I have no idea what the situation is like in the United States, but in Canada, this "abandoning" (ahem) is a direct function of eroding performance of boys that starts right in elementary school and continues right through high school. This leads to obviously fewer male university students. The trend is clear and has been going on for two decades.
Pointing this out, especially in terms of arguing that targeted interventions for boys may be in order or that the education system in some way may be suboptimal for them, is an absolute political no go zone though. It's not a discussion that can currently be had.
Here is your chance to talk about it, these discussions are permitted on HN. How do we know it's really happening and what can we do about it? Let me throw out a few takes to stir things up.
- Maybe girls are naturally better at sitting still, and have always had an advantage in learning spelling and times tables that was not revealed until recently because the system was biased against them.
- Maybe a change in amounts of permitted physical activity has negatively impacted the ability to focus in anyone with a natural propensity to exercise, showing up in hyperactive kids and of course anyone with a lot of testosterone... or prenatal testosterone exposure, or whatever makes boys more likely to run around the playground hitting each other with sticks (I'm not an endocrinologist if you can't tell), in their systems.
- Maybe all we accomplished in the 1980s was replacing sexism type A with sexism type B.
- Maybe the performance gap is due to some kind of measurement error, like not comparing the performance of boys and girls at the same task. Maybe boys, due to (I'm just making stuff up here) being pushed towards math and science even if they don't want to do it, end up in more difficult classes and get lower grades in spite of equal ability.
The only thing I really know is that there's not an IQ difference between genders and the innate capacity of both groups, preferences, attention span, etc. notwithstanding, is about equal.
"The only thing I really know is that there's not an IQ difference between genders and the innate capacity of both groups, preferences, attention span, etc. notwithstanding, is about equal."
This doesn't seem to be completely true. The averages are nearly identical, but the variability is quite different. Most studies will show that males have a wider bell curve than females on nearly every task (Math, Reading Comprehension, etc.).
Having this kind discussion would be good even through it is likely to tread ground that people might not want to think about.
One researched explanation is gender bias in how teachers grade student performance. Studies done over standardized test has demonstrated gains for boys when grading is done gender-blind. There has also been studies done that looked at the gender of the teacher which shown favoritism towards the teachers own gender. One explanation for that is that empathy is easier along race and gender lines which then impact grading to be more harsher towards the out group.
The one thing I would not look too much at is hormones of either girls or boys as it has a long history of being abused, over valued and miss-interpreted. Estrogens does not cause girls to become emotional unstable nor does testosterone cause boys to be become wild beasts. The biggest effect they have generally is to regulate behavior towards social status, which if its not obvious has a big dose of culture attached to it.
Once a particular identity is designated as "privileged", it becomes untenable in political circles to acknowledge problems that uniquely face them, or propose solutions to those problems which can't be acknowledged.
How would we generate the identical cog factory workers that 1921 requires if we customize education?
The problem with education in the USA is its even more backwards focused than what happens with military strategy. "Better education" in the USA means optimizing for your great grandparents experience. If thats the opposite of modern reality, well, too bad, it'll filter for kids that are flexible and open minded, which ironically is pretty useful in the modern world.
Canadian here. Is it a no-go zone? Because discussing targeted measures to help underperforming groups is very widespread and those programs exist. They also tend to be maligned and denounced with arguments like railing against equality of outcomes, vs equality of opportunity. I also can't help but notice that these arguments are usually made by the exact same people as the ones who complain about boys falling behind.
That is to say, I don't see Pierre Poilievre types advocating for things like TDSB's Afrocentric Alternative Schools.
I can't get into too much detail because I've been historically involved in this research and I'd rather not have my identity public on HN.
I do have to say that I was more than a little surprised that this would be such a controversial subject given the rather obvious patterns observed. But it very much was, and it still is.
Frankly, this experience was not positive for me, since it showed me how politically charged these things are, something which makes no sense to me. I mean, even your comment strays off right into who-is-making-the-argument, rather than whether it might be a problem that half of the school kids are falling further and further behind. I know that if I had boys entering school, this would concern me, but it's hardly even acknowledged.
First, depends on definition of "College" and "University" that differs from country to country.
But overall, value of University education to improve your employability and skillset I think is being questioned by both employers and employees.
1. Some "Blue Collar" skills may withstand the test of automation better than many "White Collar" skills - e.g. I anticipate needing an electrician, contractor, plumber for the next few decades; but hopefully accountant, lawyer, travel agent etc less and less.
2. For "White Collar" skills, well... I went to ComSci university and it's not that it brought no value - but given the time, money, effort and commitment, it was very very low value proposition. I spent more time satisfying bureaucratic obligations and navigating the needlessly complex machinery than actually learning. (note I wasn't the one going to university for some "Party / Social Experience" - I found many better, more flexible methods than that:).
Not going to university is not necessarily the same thing as not wanting to learn and educate and acquire skills. And there is a whole spectrum today between free online education (random Youtube videos, manuals, free university courses etc), bootcamps, practically oriented post-secondary education, and then university.
Bottom line: I have two young kids, I want them to succeed, and I want them to be educated - and I don't know if traditional university is something I will encourage them to consider 10 years from now.
I honestly don't know however how that translates into a gender gap discussed in the article though; and article doesn't really provide a satisfying answer either :-/
I'm surprised to hear about comp sci students who feel their experience was low value, especially on this website, where you presumably work in the industry.
While I picked up very few resume bullet point skills from college, I tend to find that having a comp sci background raises my game. Training in algorithms, complexity, plt and networking has given me a solid footing through my career that lets me tackle the hardest parts of the job. Stack overflow and youtube mostly help with the easy stuff.
My take here is that it is too easy to look back on what was learned in college and what you use today in comparison to it's source and conclude you've picked up way more on the job and use comparatively little from the formal education. Therefore the value is low.
Could you likely have learned everything that you got from your degree on your own while cutting out some of the less practical parts? Almost definitely. Would the person who isn't looking back with 20/20 hindsight know what to cut? I think that is less likely. Would a person without the formal structure of a degree actually gone out and learned all those same things with the same commitment? Some might be able to, but I suspect most would lose interest.
Sure your career might have ended up never touching a single networking component that you learned about in school. But maybe you loved that part and if left to your own devices would have forsaken other parts of the education to just deep dive on it. Would that be fine? Maybe. Or maybe you quite like working in the role that you find yourself in. A role that you might have shut the door to very early on without some structure.
So I think a mix of hindsight and overestimating a person's ability to just stick with a rigorous learning process that can take months and months (or years) without the benefits of peers, teachers, structure, and accountability leads to this belief.
I should mention though that as we are speaking about "value", the ROI on college in America is pretty rough. Even with all those benefits laid out, it is hard to make it too rosey in the face of a hundred thousand dollars of potential debt. Extra so due to the fact that you can acquire a portion of that debt and not even come out the other side with a degree.
>>I'm surprised to hear about comp sci students who feel their experience was low value
I guess I could be more explicit; I meant to say that, for 5 years of my life invested, for X amount of money invested, for the effort and work and given my inherent and specific desire to learn, it was an extremely inefficient method of learning. All throughout my years, I always had the feeling that learning was not the primary priority for most of the students, teaching was not the primary priority for most of the professors, and instilling knowledge was not the primary priority for most of the staff.
They tell me that this changes post-grad; I cannot speak for that. But I've attended University of Manitoba and University of Toronto, and that was my personal experience. It is shared by several of my best friends who are also in the IT industry (I was a sysadmin, one is Java developer, one is a VMWare architect - all boring Enterprise Stuff compared to HN interests, but still a good cross section)
I enjoyed all the learning and knowledge that I gained in university and put high value on it! I think we agree on that 100%.
But I guess what I'm calling for is a reform (which I think is very much happening:) to increase the efficiency and focus on that learning and knowledge.
I took classes in CompSci, Math, and Linguistics; the first two being major, and the latter being a minor.
Most of the CompSci classes I took were completly useless. The only exceptions being Operating Systems and Compilers. Most of the CS classes I took were complete jokes.
In contrast, every Math and Ling class I took was very educational.
yeah I'm very thankful I got to be in college for CS. I can't imagine learning all the deep weeds in algo, network and security in a bootcamp or youtube - way too shallow and unstructured. like how could you possibly learn all the things I learned but in 10% of the time
It’s also one of the most transferable skills you can have. Most everywhere you work will have a bureaucracy to navigate and checkboxes to figure out how to check.
The Computer Science experience in university is just so different compared to the other engineering disciplines. The incoming students have such widely different starting points in terms of skill, ability, and familiarity. In my class I had people who could basically program as a full time job. A security guru who embodied the 'hackerman' stereotype. And of course, people who had literally only made "hello world" websites in Netscape Composer. I personally had done some programming in BASIC and Java but was by no means comfortable with OOP.
It is so difficult to design a curriculum that accommodates such a wide range of experience. One of my professors told me that he shares the same challenges as some of the Arts teachers. Because, they too, get students who run the gamut from amateur to masters-level. And some of those painters or musicians are better than the professors themselves.
One of the ways to accommodate this is to teach a lot more about theory. Things you would not learn if you had taught yourself. The upside is that you are more likely to teach all the students something new. The downside is some of the students think the theoretical stuff is not valuable because they won't get to apply it very often. I for instance, know about Big-O but in practical terms I know I shouldn't nest loops and let some standard library implement a nlog(n) sort for me.
In your 2nd point you state "I spent more time satisfying bureaucratic obligations and navigating the needlessly complex machinery than actually learning.", I also felt this way. However, now I would make an argument that it actually gets you ready for the real world. Being a programmer is a lot more than just programming skills. To be successful you need to be able to talk to business people, go through red tape and processes, it is highly unlikely you will just "code".
Education shows you can work under many different individuals and satisfy their requirements and processes. You know how to jump over hoops and deal with a bureaucratic process. There is value in that.
I would agree with your general point that communication, understanding process & procedure, etc are useful skills for IT.
But that's not what I am talking about. And again, my overall problem with my university experience was inefficiency, which I can only ascribe to lack of care / focus as to actual education.
It's not like admin / bureaucracy existed and were paid/incentivized to teach me how to get around them and instill valuable theoretical or practical skills :). It was school of hard knocks, slow and painful and self-guided and frankly hateful; and I don't have to PAY to obtain that self-taught experience - I can be PAID to obtain it :). Or at least, I can pay to obtain it more efficiently, intuitively, with both better understanding and practical tips.
What you describe in the last sentence is a gate, and I to this day (20 years later) resent investing so much time, money and energy for a simple gate - sure "there's value in that", but it feels like Stockholm syndrome / rationalization of sunk cost trying to justify it; there are better, and let me say it again, more efficient ways to satisfy same goal.
Everybody's experience differs; there are people who enjoyed university and found it a rewarding experience. For myself, much as I love learning and CompSci, as much as I've thrived in IT and still enjoy learning, inasmuch as I now guide and coach my teams on precisely how to communicate to non-IT, look at goals, understand process etc - it was ultimately an extremely inefficient experience.
Nowadays, I take classes from vendors, community colleges, online, private instructors in IT and music and photography and whatever... short and long, surface and deep, and I love it all. "Here's money, give me KNOWLEDGE". Whereas, my personal university experience was far different.
> I spent more time satisfying bureaucratic obligations and navigating the needlessly complex machinery than actually learning.
You'd be surprised how much more valuable the skillset of navigating bureaucracy is to the skillset that a million websites are trying to teach you for free.
I'd argue it's still worthwhile for degrees like Computer Science if only because HR like candidates to have a degree. (Although this is slowly eroding and may change in the next decade or so)
But the value of less directly applicable degrees like the humanities, social sciences and arts has decreased a lot.
I think in the past simply having been to University, irrespective of the major, was a strong signal. Nowadays graduates are a dime-a-dozen so you'd better have a major that brings real value to your employer.
Plus a lot of the younger generations may have older family members who graduated from college yet have little to show for it.
I’m torn on CS degrees, because while a vast majority of what makes up the curriculum is made accessible to anyone with access to modern technology, but there are some bits of field that seem to require either a real world scenario or academic setting to learn.
But yeah, I don’t think most degrees don’t provide much value in terms of employment. Even a large chunk of the oh so coveted STEM (notably the S) are probably a crapshoot.
> I spent more time satisfying bureaucratic obligations and navigating the needlessly complex machinery
I tried going back to school recently, hitting a complete brick wall at every step as a “non-traditional non traditional” applicant. Based on my experience with that I’m convinced out higher education system in the US is nothing except those two things.
to me, universities havve to be very very cheap to be worth it, since most of bachelor level knowledge is now free on the internet. universities will still have value as children's first serious research institution, and personally I see that as a very good reason to send my future kids there. if they dont like it, no problem the financial hit should be minor; not to mention they will get to grow as a person in a somewhat professional setting.
universities can't keep charing exorbitant fees to give out a piece of irrelevant paper
> universities can't keep charing exorbitant fees to give out a piece of irrelevant paper
You've completely misunderstood the point of university and the piece of paper. The reasons to go to University ranked:
1. To signal to employers that you are the type of person who can solve difficult challenges with minimal oversight
2. To build your network
3. To learn
4. Social events
The piece of paper is far from irrelevant, it's your signal to employers that you're a successful person. MOOCs and bootcamps can't replace that. Employers don't like apprenticeships because once they're over the employees leave for greener pastures. Even if they confirm you're self trained via leetcode or whatever they still can't be sure that you're able to do the other stuff that a job entails.
Will this applicant unquestioningly jump thru arbitrary crazy and irrelevant hoops with no talking back about about the local dogma and complete subservience to their masters opinions? Do they owe a lot of school loans so they'll unquestioningly do anything for money? In some bad corporate environments, that is strongly desired for the individual contributors.
> since most of bachelor level knowledge is now free on the internet.
Most of the knowledge is out there sure, but the knowledge is hardly what’s important here.
Most well-paid white collar professions still require that credentials (and even poorly laid white-collar professions on that note)
I could spend a lifetime reading about engineering and following program curriculum to a point, but it’s unlikely I’d ever be hired in most engineering fields.
I believe that in the western world, specially in the countries that have free (or subsidized) universities there has been a lot of societal pressure that makes young people want to go to college but no idea why or for what.
Now, one of the smartest decisions I made was going for the sort of equivalent of a trade school in my country, it's not a replacement of college but an alternative for what I believe americans call High School, so three years from fifteen to eighteen years old and I truly believe that the rest of the world would benefit massively from such a concept. I also believe we should stop viewing the preparation for university as universal and provide young people with a trade from the beginning.
(edit) thanks martzy13 for your comment about vocational schools, I didn't know about them
To be clear, that's an option in America as well. They're usually called a "Joint Vocational School" or a "Career Center", and they offer a variety of options.
For example the one I went to had:
* Public Safety to learn firefighting and Emergency Medical Services
* HVAC to learn a heating and cooling
* Building trades to learn electrical, carpentry, plumbing
* Software development
* Medical Assisting (a pre-nursing route)
* Cosmetology for hair stylists and makeup artists
* Engineering and Precision Machining Technologies
There are plenty of other options at that specific career center as well.
A lot of my peers 'looked down' on this choice, as they viewed the "college path" as the only option to be successful in America, and considered this an inferior education.
Yep. And, quite honestly, I think a large proportion of women going to college/university are going because they have been told to go, not because they believe it will help them reach any particular goals. Where are all of these university educated women ending up? Swathes of them end up in mediocre jobs like call centre operators or bullshit jobs at big finance companies and the like. It's a million miles from academia. Did they really all need 3 years of full-time education?
I think the numbers of men going to university is just closer to what is a sensible proportion.
> Did they really all need 3 years of full-time education?
Higher ed has become extremely top heavy with administration, and those people DO need the women to take those classes.
Consider: The more women whom graduate with K-12 degrees, the better of a job the executives and administrators at my state U system have done. They get incredibly high salaries, in fact. The problem is they've done such a great job that they produce twice as many qualified educated K-12 young teachers as the statewide market can absorb. So my favorite Denny's restaurant waitress has a K-12 education degree and is making more money off tips at Dennys than her competitors whom got a job in public schools, where the average career length is only 6 years so they're already onto their second careers, selling real estate or working with her at Dennys. But having a K12 education degree doesn't make her a better waitress, it just makes her poorer.
The microeconomic solution to her problem is if only the top 50% in her graduating class get hired, she should have worked harder to be in the ever shrinking fraction of successfully people. The macroeconomic solution is to stop sending two times too many girls to K12 degree granting schools, which will kill the careers of the executive management at those schools so thats sure as hell never happening.
So its the usual American thing where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The president of our stateside uni system gets a payraise from $700K to $750K because he did such a great job producing more K12 diplomas. Meanwhile the poor girl is worse off than her mother, financially, because she has enormous loans to get a vocational job ticket for a job field she never worked in.
I wholeheartedly agree with you, this is very frequent in my country where, about two thirds of the women I know do some kind of university career without actual job prospects because of some preconceived notion that it will give them an employment as soon they graduate. Most of them started around 2019 and now face an uncertain future because of the economical consequences of the pandemic affecting their parents, which are almost always their main source of economical support. The widespread rejection of regular, "not educated" jobs (I think you could say blue collar?) is creating this university diploma inflation effect that will probably pop in the next five to ten years
I also do believe that one of the main things that allow people to get into university is the support of middle class parents who wish their sons achieve anything in higher educaction because of a preconceived notion about the relationship between employability and a university diploma.
Sure! First of all, thanks for saying I am proficient in english, it's something I am a bit insecure and always try to hide that english is a second language to me. I also must clarify that I am extremely fortunate to have parents that were both polyglots so language learning was kind of a given in my household, specially english. Right now, I am working in my second year in a big consultancy firm doing nearshore web development for a big healthcare provider in the US. Although right now I am working as a tester, my school taught us how to do (nearly) fullstack development, so I have been rotating duties in my work, ranging from normal, run of the mill web dev to backend in nodeJS and a bit of cosmosDB. I did learn a lot of stuff for myself before going to trade school but I did learn the basics of working in a development team while doing my third year thesis, which simulates the design, production and release of a real world, fullstack application with an actual use case.
It's interesting to consider whether we are entering a period of time in which young men will "fail" at a higher rate than young women, but we will maintain early-age support structures that prioritize women over men because men continue to dominate in late-age power structures.
Simply they do not desire to become like the people they see in it, or the ones they see graduating.
> “That’s why we need both parties to offer a positive vision of college and a positive vision of masculinity. If male identity is seen, by some, as being at odds with education, that’s a problem for the whole country.”
The question should be, how did college repel young men? That's pretty obvious in the last decade and 90% of it barely merits an article.
However, the conseqeunce is likely a milennial middle class baby bust that is just building momentum as this cohort of women who graduated into professional careers ages out of child bearing years and the scramble for donors intensifies. Men who don't graduate are in effect mostly ineligible as partners for women who do, then other factors like poor fitness levels, choice paralysis, unsecured debt, housing bubbles, and lately a virus of political polarization are reducing the likelihood of durable matches for all involved.
I'd be less concerned with maintaining retroactive continuity on the college narrative and asking what is to be done, and instead, being prepared for handling the consequent bust this dynamic has set us all up for.
We have a student debt crisis. This means, categorically, many degrees proper are bad investments. To pass on a bad investment is smart. There exist good degrees but not everyone is fit for them. We could easily frame this as young women victimized by universities selling frivolous degrees at astonishing prices.
I speak not of education or the humanities in abstract but rather the degree proper; the piece of paper. An expensive document should be understood as a certification with concrete numerical price that can be compared to its effect on your earnings.
My advice to my daughter, who is working actively to become an artist, is very clear; stay far from college.
You said it better than I could. To pass on bad investments is smart, modern day universities charge an arm and a leg, and a bachelor's degree is not very useful.
Lawyers, Doctors, require at least 6-7 years of 10k-50k Per Year. That's a lot of dough. When you involve that much dough... greed, scams, and predatory behavior are inextricably bound. Greed and education should never mix, I think it's contradictory. Community colleges are where the real education happens, imo
"We could easily frame this as young women victimized by universities selling frivolous degrees at astonishing prices."
* Men accounted for 70% of the 1.5m decline in college enrollment last year
* Women have outpaced men in bachelor attainment since the 80s
* Women have been told to get college degrees in order to secure independence and freedom for decades
* Men were 57% of college enrolled students in 1970 but since Title XI passed barring gender discrimination, the rates have been getting more lopsided for women
* Girls outperform boys generally in high school and elementary long before college
* Blaming "the feminist dogma of the education system and the inherently distracting presence of girls in classrooms" is dubious
* A better explanation is that up to the 1970s, men could secure middle-class wages on blue-collar work, but afterwards, that labor demand dried up and these types of men are adrift, and marry less since they also don't attend church anymore, and so live 'haphazard' lives detached from traditional responsibilities
* This has the effect that young boys don't have stable male role models, as men are more likely to be incarcerated, and aren't present enough in early schooling as teachers or as fathers in low-income areas
* The college gender gap is also occuring in "France, Slovenia, Mexico, and Brazil".
* Perhaps a blend of biological and cultural differences are at play
* This will have broad implications for marriage rates, delayed marriage, delayed childbirth
* This may have the cultural implication that education be seen as a identified with effeminacy, barring more men still
* "The pivot point is in adolescence, and the foundation is laid in the early grades.” This gender gap is an economic story, a cultural story, a criminal-justice story, and a family-structure story that begins to unfold in elementary school. The attention-grabbing statistic that barely 40 percent of college grads are men seems to cry out for an immediate policy response. But rather than dial up male attendance one college-admissions department at a time, policy makers should think about the social forces that make the statistic inevitable."
Readit News
A generation of American men give up on college - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28436836 - Sept 2021 (776 comments)
Pointing this out, especially in terms of arguing that targeted interventions for boys may be in order or that the education system in some way may be suboptimal for them, is an absolute political no go zone though. It's not a discussion that can currently be had.
- Maybe girls are naturally better at sitting still, and have always had an advantage in learning spelling and times tables that was not revealed until recently because the system was biased against them.
- Maybe a change in amounts of permitted physical activity has negatively impacted the ability to focus in anyone with a natural propensity to exercise, showing up in hyperactive kids and of course anyone with a lot of testosterone... or prenatal testosterone exposure, or whatever makes boys more likely to run around the playground hitting each other with sticks (I'm not an endocrinologist if you can't tell), in their systems.
- Maybe all we accomplished in the 1980s was replacing sexism type A with sexism type B.
- Maybe the performance gap is due to some kind of measurement error, like not comparing the performance of boys and girls at the same task. Maybe boys, due to (I'm just making stuff up here) being pushed towards math and science even if they don't want to do it, end up in more difficult classes and get lower grades in spite of equal ability.
The only thing I really know is that there's not an IQ difference between genders and the innate capacity of both groups, preferences, attention span, etc. notwithstanding, is about equal.
This doesn't seem to be completely true. The averages are nearly identical, but the variability is quite different. Most studies will show that males have a wider bell curve than females on nearly every task (Math, Reading Comprehension, etc.).
One researched explanation is gender bias in how teachers grade student performance. Studies done over standardized test has demonstrated gains for boys when grading is done gender-blind. There has also been studies done that looked at the gender of the teacher which shown favoritism towards the teachers own gender. One explanation for that is that empathy is easier along race and gender lines which then impact grading to be more harsher towards the out group.
The one thing I would not look too much at is hormones of either girls or boys as it has a long history of being abused, over valued and miss-interpreted. Estrogens does not cause girls to become emotional unstable nor does testosterone cause boys to be become wild beasts. The biggest effect they have generally is to regulate behavior towards social status, which if its not obvious has a big dose of culture attached to it.
Once a particular identity is designated as "privileged", it becomes untenable in political circles to acknowledge problems that uniquely face them, or propose solutions to those problems which can't be acknowledged.
It impacts predominately young white men.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/suicide/rates_1999_2017...
It's going to be part of our downfall if it hasn't already started happening.
Creating a seperate education system for each sex would likely create more problems than it solves.
The problem with education in the USA is its even more backwards focused than what happens with military strategy. "Better education" in the USA means optimizing for your great grandparents experience. If thats the opposite of modern reality, well, too bad, it'll filter for kids that are flexible and open minded, which ironically is pretty useful in the modern world.
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That is to say, I don't see Pierre Poilievre types advocating for things like TDSB's Afrocentric Alternative Schools.
I do have to say that I was more than a little surprised that this would be such a controversial subject given the rather obvious patterns observed. But it very much was, and it still is.
Frankly, this experience was not positive for me, since it showed me how politically charged these things are, something which makes no sense to me. I mean, even your comment strays off right into who-is-making-the-argument, rather than whether it might be a problem that half of the school kids are falling further and further behind. I know that if I had boys entering school, this would concern me, but it's hardly even acknowledged.
First, depends on definition of "College" and "University" that differs from country to country.
But overall, value of University education to improve your employability and skillset I think is being questioned by both employers and employees.
1. Some "Blue Collar" skills may withstand the test of automation better than many "White Collar" skills - e.g. I anticipate needing an electrician, contractor, plumber for the next few decades; but hopefully accountant, lawyer, travel agent etc less and less.
2. For "White Collar" skills, well... I went to ComSci university and it's not that it brought no value - but given the time, money, effort and commitment, it was very very low value proposition. I spent more time satisfying bureaucratic obligations and navigating the needlessly complex machinery than actually learning. (note I wasn't the one going to university for some "Party / Social Experience" - I found many better, more flexible methods than that:).
Not going to university is not necessarily the same thing as not wanting to learn and educate and acquire skills. And there is a whole spectrum today between free online education (random Youtube videos, manuals, free university courses etc), bootcamps, practically oriented post-secondary education, and then university.
Bottom line: I have two young kids, I want them to succeed, and I want them to be educated - and I don't know if traditional university is something I will encourage them to consider 10 years from now.
I honestly don't know however how that translates into a gender gap discussed in the article though; and article doesn't really provide a satisfying answer either :-/
While I picked up very few resume bullet point skills from college, I tend to find that having a comp sci background raises my game. Training in algorithms, complexity, plt and networking has given me a solid footing through my career that lets me tackle the hardest parts of the job. Stack overflow and youtube mostly help with the easy stuff.
Could you likely have learned everything that you got from your degree on your own while cutting out some of the less practical parts? Almost definitely. Would the person who isn't looking back with 20/20 hindsight know what to cut? I think that is less likely. Would a person without the formal structure of a degree actually gone out and learned all those same things with the same commitment? Some might be able to, but I suspect most would lose interest.
Sure your career might have ended up never touching a single networking component that you learned about in school. But maybe you loved that part and if left to your own devices would have forsaken other parts of the education to just deep dive on it. Would that be fine? Maybe. Or maybe you quite like working in the role that you find yourself in. A role that you might have shut the door to very early on without some structure.
So I think a mix of hindsight and overestimating a person's ability to just stick with a rigorous learning process that can take months and months (or years) without the benefits of peers, teachers, structure, and accountability leads to this belief.
I should mention though that as we are speaking about "value", the ROI on college in America is pretty rough. Even with all those benefits laid out, it is hard to make it too rosey in the face of a hundred thousand dollars of potential debt. Extra so due to the fact that you can acquire a portion of that debt and not even come out the other side with a degree.
I guess I could be more explicit; I meant to say that, for 5 years of my life invested, for X amount of money invested, for the effort and work and given my inherent and specific desire to learn, it was an extremely inefficient method of learning. All throughout my years, I always had the feeling that learning was not the primary priority for most of the students, teaching was not the primary priority for most of the professors, and instilling knowledge was not the primary priority for most of the staff.
They tell me that this changes post-grad; I cannot speak for that. But I've attended University of Manitoba and University of Toronto, and that was my personal experience. It is shared by several of my best friends who are also in the IT industry (I was a sysadmin, one is Java developer, one is a VMWare architect - all boring Enterprise Stuff compared to HN interests, but still a good cross section)
I enjoyed all the learning and knowledge that I gained in university and put high value on it! I think we agree on that 100%.
But I guess what I'm calling for is a reform (which I think is very much happening:) to increase the efficiency and focus on that learning and knowledge.
Most of the CompSci classes I took were completly useless. The only exceptions being Operating Systems and Compilers. Most of the CS classes I took were complete jokes.
In contrast, every Math and Ling class I took was very educational.
Arguably this was the most valuable learning I did as it's the most applicable to my current job. :)
It is so difficult to design a curriculum that accommodates such a wide range of experience. One of my professors told me that he shares the same challenges as some of the Arts teachers. Because, they too, get students who run the gamut from amateur to masters-level. And some of those painters or musicians are better than the professors themselves.
One of the ways to accommodate this is to teach a lot more about theory. Things you would not learn if you had taught yourself. The upside is that you are more likely to teach all the students something new. The downside is some of the students think the theoretical stuff is not valuable because they won't get to apply it very often. I for instance, know about Big-O but in practical terms I know I shouldn't nest loops and let some standard library implement a nlog(n) sort for me.
Education shows you can work under many different individuals and satisfy their requirements and processes. You know how to jump over hoops and deal with a bureaucratic process. There is value in that.
But that's not what I am talking about. And again, my overall problem with my university experience was inefficiency, which I can only ascribe to lack of care / focus as to actual education.
It's not like admin / bureaucracy existed and were paid/incentivized to teach me how to get around them and instill valuable theoretical or practical skills :). It was school of hard knocks, slow and painful and self-guided and frankly hateful; and I don't have to PAY to obtain that self-taught experience - I can be PAID to obtain it :). Or at least, I can pay to obtain it more efficiently, intuitively, with both better understanding and practical tips.
What you describe in the last sentence is a gate, and I to this day (20 years later) resent investing so much time, money and energy for a simple gate - sure "there's value in that", but it feels like Stockholm syndrome / rationalization of sunk cost trying to justify it; there are better, and let me say it again, more efficient ways to satisfy same goal.
Everybody's experience differs; there are people who enjoyed university and found it a rewarding experience. For myself, much as I love learning and CompSci, as much as I've thrived in IT and still enjoy learning, inasmuch as I now guide and coach my teams on precisely how to communicate to non-IT, look at goals, understand process etc - it was ultimately an extremely inefficient experience.
Nowadays, I take classes from vendors, community colleges, online, private instructors in IT and music and photography and whatever... short and long, surface and deep, and I love it all. "Here's money, give me KNOWLEDGE". Whereas, my personal university experience was far different.
You'd be surprised how much more valuable the skillset of navigating bureaucracy is to the skillset that a million websites are trying to teach you for free.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28543015
In short: it's not like university sets out to TEACH you how to navigate bureaucracy, and it's not like they necessarily succeed.
But the value of less directly applicable degrees like the humanities, social sciences and arts has decreased a lot.
I think in the past simply having been to University, irrespective of the major, was a strong signal. Nowadays graduates are a dime-a-dozen so you'd better have a major that brings real value to your employer.
Plus a lot of the younger generations may have older family members who graduated from college yet have little to show for it.
But yeah, I don’t think most degrees don’t provide much value in terms of employment. Even a large chunk of the oh so coveted STEM (notably the S) are probably a crapshoot.
I tried going back to school recently, hitting a complete brick wall at every step as a “non-traditional non traditional” applicant. Based on my experience with that I’m convinced out higher education system in the US is nothing except those two things.
universities can't keep charing exorbitant fees to give out a piece of irrelevant paper
You've completely misunderstood the point of university and the piece of paper. The reasons to go to University ranked:
1. To signal to employers that you are the type of person who can solve difficult challenges with minimal oversight
2. To build your network
3. To learn
4. Social events
The piece of paper is far from irrelevant, it's your signal to employers that you're a successful person. MOOCs and bootcamps can't replace that. Employers don't like apprenticeships because once they're over the employees leave for greener pastures. Even if they confirm you're self trained via leetcode or whatever they still can't be sure that you're able to do the other stuff that a job entails.
Their only purpose is authoritarian filtering.
Will this applicant unquestioningly jump thru arbitrary crazy and irrelevant hoops with no talking back about about the local dogma and complete subservience to their masters opinions? Do they owe a lot of school loans so they'll unquestioningly do anything for money? In some bad corporate environments, that is strongly desired for the individual contributors.
Most of the knowledge is out there sure, but the knowledge is hardly what’s important here.
Most well-paid white collar professions still require that credentials (and even poorly laid white-collar professions on that note)
I could spend a lifetime reading about engineering and following program curriculum to a point, but it’s unlikely I’d ever be hired in most engineering fields.
(edit) thanks martzy13 for your comment about vocational schools, I didn't know about them
For example the one I went to had:
* Public Safety to learn firefighting and Emergency Medical Services
* HVAC to learn a heating and cooling
* Building trades to learn electrical, carpentry, plumbing
* Software development
* Medical Assisting (a pre-nursing route)
* Cosmetology for hair stylists and makeup artists
* Engineering and Precision Machining Technologies
There are plenty of other options at that specific career center as well.
A lot of my peers 'looked down' on this choice, as they viewed the "college path" as the only option to be successful in America, and considered this an inferior education.
Sort of. You're talking about college age, while the GP was talking about high school age.
edit: I'm wrong, this was for high school students. I did go to high school in America but I never knew about this.
I think the numbers of men going to university is just closer to what is a sensible proportion.
Higher ed has become extremely top heavy with administration, and those people DO need the women to take those classes.
Consider: The more women whom graduate with K-12 degrees, the better of a job the executives and administrators at my state U system have done. They get incredibly high salaries, in fact. The problem is they've done such a great job that they produce twice as many qualified educated K-12 young teachers as the statewide market can absorb. So my favorite Denny's restaurant waitress has a K-12 education degree and is making more money off tips at Dennys than her competitors whom got a job in public schools, where the average career length is only 6 years so they're already onto their second careers, selling real estate or working with her at Dennys. But having a K12 education degree doesn't make her a better waitress, it just makes her poorer.
The microeconomic solution to her problem is if only the top 50% in her graduating class get hired, she should have worked harder to be in the ever shrinking fraction of successfully people. The macroeconomic solution is to stop sending two times too many girls to K12 degree granting schools, which will kill the careers of the executive management at those schools so thats sure as hell never happening.
So its the usual American thing where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The president of our stateside uni system gets a payraise from $700K to $750K because he did such a great job producing more K12 diplomas. Meanwhile the poor girl is worse off than her mother, financially, because she has enormous loans to get a vocational job ticket for a job field she never worked in.
I also do believe that one of the main things that allow people to get into university is the support of middle class parents who wish their sons achieve anything in higher educaction because of a preconceived notion about the relationship between employability and a university diploma.
I wouldn’t normally expect someone who went to trade school from 15-18 to be so proficient in a foreign language(English) like you.
> “That’s why we need both parties to offer a positive vision of college and a positive vision of masculinity. If male identity is seen, by some, as being at odds with education, that’s a problem for the whole country.”
The question should be, how did college repel young men? That's pretty obvious in the last decade and 90% of it barely merits an article.
However, the conseqeunce is likely a milennial middle class baby bust that is just building momentum as this cohort of women who graduated into professional careers ages out of child bearing years and the scramble for donors intensifies. Men who don't graduate are in effect mostly ineligible as partners for women who do, then other factors like poor fitness levels, choice paralysis, unsecured debt, housing bubbles, and lately a virus of political polarization are reducing the likelihood of durable matches for all involved.
I'd be less concerned with maintaining retroactive continuity on the college narrative and asking what is to be done, and instead, being prepared for handling the consequent bust this dynamic has set us all up for.
I speak not of education or the humanities in abstract but rather the degree proper; the piece of paper. An expensive document should be understood as a certification with concrete numerical price that can be compared to its effect on your earnings.
My advice to my daughter, who is working actively to become an artist, is very clear; stay far from college.
Lawyers, Doctors, require at least 6-7 years of 10k-50k Per Year. That's a lot of dough. When you involve that much dough... greed, scams, and predatory behavior are inextricably bound. Greed and education should never mix, I think it's contradictory. Community colleges are where the real education happens, imo
"We could easily frame this as young women victimized by universities selling frivolous degrees at astonishing prices."
It's not just young women, it's young people bro
* Men accounted for 70% of the 1.5m decline in college enrollment last year * Women have outpaced men in bachelor attainment since the 80s
* Women have been told to get college degrees in order to secure independence and freedom for decades
* Men were 57% of college enrolled students in 1970 but since Title XI passed barring gender discrimination, the rates have been getting more lopsided for women
* Girls outperform boys generally in high school and elementary long before college
* Blaming "the feminist dogma of the education system and the inherently distracting presence of girls in classrooms" is dubious
* A better explanation is that up to the 1970s, men could secure middle-class wages on blue-collar work, but afterwards, that labor demand dried up and these types of men are adrift, and marry less since they also don't attend church anymore, and so live 'haphazard' lives detached from traditional responsibilities
* This has the effect that young boys don't have stable male role models, as men are more likely to be incarcerated, and aren't present enough in early schooling as teachers or as fathers in low-income areas
* The college gender gap is also occuring in "France, Slovenia, Mexico, and Brazil".
* Perhaps a blend of biological and cultural differences are at play
* This will have broad implications for marriage rates, delayed marriage, delayed childbirth
* This may have the cultural implication that education be seen as a identified with effeminacy, barring more men still
* "The pivot point is in adolescence, and the foundation is laid in the early grades.” This gender gap is an economic story, a cultural story, a criminal-justice story, and a family-structure story that begins to unfold in elementary school. The attention-grabbing statistic that barely 40 percent of college grads are men seems to cry out for an immediate policy response. But rather than dial up male attendance one college-admissions department at a time, policy makers should think about the social forces that make the statistic inevitable."