
Career opportunities - smacktoward
http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2015/12/career-opportunities-2
======
kfk
So the past week and half I have been on holidays back in Italy (I live in
Germany). At least here, in the South, your status still greatly depends on 1)
if you managed to raise a family (single 40 years old ultra rich Corporate
managers don't get much credit); 2) if you have a good network of friends (and
people here don't look down at blue collars). My father was a blue collar
worker and he gets a lot of respect for doing well 1 and 2.

While this is not ideal (I think 1 and 2 are part of the reasons many Italian
lack the ambition Americans have), it's a very good way to live a very decent
life as an individual. At a macro level I believe pushing on 1 and 2 will kill
your economy, on a micro level (aka if I was a shrink), I would strongly
advise them.

P.s. of course, 1 and 2 work well in a world where you have USA, where people
do kill themselves to deliver loads of innovation to the whole planet (see:
internet, space exploration, etc.).

P.p.s. of course USA works well because it attracted talent across the world
to deliver loads of innovation (see: immigrants)

~~~
n3on_net
" At least here, in the South, your status still greatly depends on 1) if you
managed to raise a family (single 40 years old ultra rich Corporate managers
don't get much credit); 2) if you have a good network of friends (and people
here don't look down at blue collars). "

A little bit offtopic:

Well, Italy is economically not at the top and South Italy even much worse.
So, I just wonder if this is a healthy attitute.

Even on micro level: If you don't have ambitions besides friends/family, this
is very sad. At least I couldn't imagine living like that.

There was an interesting quote from Max Levchin, can't find it, will edit
later. It was something like this: "Interviewer: Why do you keep founding
companies/push yourself? Levchin: Well, you sleep 8 hours a day. Then you play
2 hours with your children, spend 1 hour with your wife. Wtf do you do the
remaining 13 hours?" This is actually a nice summary.

And this is the similar reason why people are defined by their education. It's
just a small amount of years that elivate your value. It will be strange to
miss the opportunity without a very good reason.

~~~
kbart
_" Well, you sleep 8 hours a day. Then you play 2 hours with your children,
spend 1 hour with your wife. Wtf do you do the remaining 13 hours?"_

8 hours sleep, 2 hours with children, 1 hour with wife, 10 hours doing work
and commuting to support them? 3 hours extra to exercise, doing various
errands, and maybe more quality time with your wife. Not that I don't
understand what original quote meant to say, but you operate a little
different when don't have a shitload of money.

------
drewrv
> Anyone who argues that the key to “economic opportunity,” aka a decent job,
> is to have a college degree is in effect arguing that it’s OK for a large
> majority of Americans not to have a decent job.

I agree if we're talking about a four year degree, but a trade school is a
great option for someone "not suited" towards academics.

------
crabasa
Meta comment, but it's amazing to me how frequently articles about the
cost/value of higher education hit the front page of HN. I wonder what the
fascination is?

~~~
toufique
Higher education is starting to feel very hackable.

Cost is substantially increasing.

Benefit is stagnating or decreasing.

Cost of substitutes is exponentially decreasing.

It's ripe for disruption, hence my fascination.

~~~
ap22213
Higher education has been ripe for disruption since the 90s, but that
disruption hasn't happened.

A lot of the ideas that are currently being floated around in the online space
are pretty well-worn. In fact, I've seen very little progress in this space,
compared to other industries. Not much has changed aside from self-driven
'autodidact learning'. And, that's kind of mind-boggling considering the
supply and demand curves. There's huge inelastic demand for higher education
and very limited supply (capacity).

The toughest nut to crack is the accreditation and pedigree issue. If you can
figure out how to get most (or even some) hiring managers (or grant-funding
bodies, or even moms and dads) to give more weight to credentials that aren't
the traditional diplomas, you'll be in a good spot.

~~~
toufique
I think higher "education" is certainly being disrupted, but higher
"accreditation" isn't yet. You're right on point.

------
sandworm101
If someone leaves highschool "not suited" for academics then their highschool
has failed them. No student should feel they are in any way 'not the type' for
higher education. No 16/17/18 year-old should be so pigeon-holed.

How many of these kids are making these decisions based on third-hand accounts
of what higher education actually entails, without even sitting in on a post-
highschool lecture? How many are told not to bother simply because they don't
look/act/sound the part?

Given the state of highschool education, the lack of basic literacy, nearly
everyone would do well to attend some sort of 'academic' post-secondary
education. Reading books, listening to lectures and writing about what you
have learned teaches the basic communication skills useful in every field.

~~~
Camillo
Many people are just not very smart.

------
xiaoma
I and most of my friends had a dislike for the general regimentation and
bullshit of university life. It definitely gets better as you meet more and
more like-minded people and there are some great aspects, but the system is
pretty ridiculous.

In school, people generally have to do the same thing everyone else does, they
have precise deadlines and get nothing for forging their own paths. In life,
having no unique experiences or skills is a path to ruin, one can never be
certain how long a window of opportunity will be open and finding one's own
path can lead to great satisfaction and well-being.

From an educational perspective, school is even worse. Many with literature
degrees can't write, business majors rarely build successful businesses,
foreign language majors often don't end up fluent in the language they study
for years on end, and even top sales reps or engineers often lack a related
degree. Spending all that time is only really worth it if a) it's required for
a license, b) you need access to equipment you couldn't otherwise get, e.g.
for the sciences, c) you just aren't capable of learning well on your own, or
d) you go to an elite institution where you can learn from the best in the
world.

90% of the value is just the credential to deal with narrow-minded people and
institutions who use it as a filter.

~~~
draw_down
This isn't about how you and your friends were too smart and unique for
university life. This is about people getting jobs.

~~~
xiaoma
There's no need to be rude.

I believe the article was about the rising costs to society that come from
expecting everyone to get their post-secondary education through formal
schooling to get a job. The truth is, a university really isn't a good fit for
a lot of people. It's painful both in terms of the many years it can take and
the massive financial burden.

One of my closest childhood friends has been buried in student debt for years
and is still taking part time classes while working a full-time job (which
often forces poor performance in the classes). But debt deferral doesn't last
long if you stop taking classes. Talk about poor alignment of incentives! Both
the initial decision to seek a degree and the expectation of one from so many
downright elitist gatekeepers ended up creating a vicious cycle of increasing
debt for a good person who has a great work ethic but poor study habits.

Statistics make it clear that this is far from uncommon. Perhaps some social
circles are insulated from the reality but facts are facts.

At most public universities, _only 19 percent of full-time students earn a
bachelor’s degree in four years_. [http://completecollege.org/wp-
content/uploads/2014/11/4-Year...](http://completecollege.org/wp-
content/uploads/2014/11/4-Year-Myth.pdf)

The system is broken and getting worse.

------
krisdol
So, many more students are attending college, median salaries for college
educated folks haven't budged, tuition is more heavily subsidized, and yet
college is many times more expensive. Hate to challenge hn libertarians but
something doesn't add up here. Where's the money going in that equation? Are
school administrators just vacuuming up all the extra money? Are professors
mostly less than high school educated?

There are more students in college because high school education does limit
your job opportunities, and wages for non-educated jobs have not only not
risen, but have fallen since the 1970s. Tuition may be more subsidized in the
number of dollars touched by the state, but education budgets often haven't
risen to meet demand and the only subsidies anyone's getting these days is
loans. Grants and scholarships from the state have shrunk and shrunk and
shrunk. A college education is more likely to lead to pulling you out of
poverty than a lack of one.

~~~
toyg
_> Are school administrators just vacuuming up all the extra money?_

Yes. There have been quite a few stories showing how admin in education is
booming. Also, growth in numbers requires growth in facilities, which are a
big money sink for most education institutions; you could argue a lot of this
extra money is actually going to the building sector (and again, admin
required for all these projects) as well as the constant churn that is IT
upgrades.

 _> Grants and scholarships from the state have shrunk and shrunk and shrunk.

The more the State pumps into loans (driven by student numbers, and carrying a
considerable management overhead), the less it has for direct subsidies. In a
situation where overall revenue from taxation is fixed or falling in real
terms, that makes sense and it does not contradict TFA.

_> A college education is more likely to lead to pulling you out of poverty
than a lack of one.*

I agree there, but it depends on what "pulling out of poverty" means. A degree
might help you get a job, but current trends mean that you might still end up
being poor -- just a working one.

Rather than enforcing class status through education tiers, a progressive
agenda should concentrate on restoring dignity to regular jobs. Sadly this is
seen as class warfare, whereas platitudes about getting everyone and his dog
into 4 years of subsidised drinking go down fine with all sectors of the
electorate.

------
Paul_S
At least in Europe there is and has been for years a chronic shortage of
tradesman (alleviated by migration). You will not earn as much as a doctor but
the jobs are there for those who want them. I think the complaints stem from
the fact that there are simply not that many labourer jobs (and that's a good
thing).

------
siscia
> "Yet anyone with working class relatives knows that some are simply not
> suited for higher education under any circumstances for a variety of
> reasons."

I consider myself extremely cynical and pragmatic, but I still have to found
somebody who wouldn't be able to do what I did in my university, arguably one
of the most challenging in my area.

Grated, a lot of people that I know wouldn't get what the professor is telling
them in the classroom, but in my opinion this is a problem with how education
is provided not with my folks being "simply not suited for higher education"

In my opinion if the only way to teach is to show prof of theorems with make
them feels real, either we don't really know what we are trying to teach or we
don't know how to teach.

~~~
pitt1980
"Tre, who was in a math support class of mine last year, had phenomenal
retention of any concrete fact he learned. Total inability to grasp abstract
concepts. Couldn’t estimate. Couldn’t isolate x. Couldn’t figure out what the
slope of a line was. I’d ask him things like “if you rolled a ball down this
line, which one would go faster?” and he’d struggle for minutes just to figure
out what I meant. If it wasn’t real, it didn’t exist. He got pretty good at
percentages without actually understanding them—but 20% was divide by 5, 25%
was divide by 4, 10% was divide by 10. He was motivated. Great kid, fantastic
athlete, failing algebra for the fourth time kept him off the his strongest
sports team his senior year and broke his heart. But he took up a second sport
and made the state finals. He seemed a bit slow in conversation, but nothing
that would mark him as really low intellect. He held a job, worked hard, was a
popular kid. There was no way he would be passing the test, and when I
communicated this to the AVP, she said, “He was not classified correctly, for
various reasons”—one of the reasons probably being that Tre is black. She
mentioned his tested IQ that his parents included in his file, and it was well
south of 90, but still much higher than 70.

Mohammed was in another of my math classes last year. Unlike Tre, does not
communicate his mental disability immediately. He talks quickly, cracks decent
jokes, likes people around, while Tre was happier off in a corner listening to
music. It took me a while to realize that Mohammed, who is neither black nor
Hispanic, wasn’t retaining any information at all. Once I did realize this, I
looked more closely at his IEP and saw he was a special day students with an
IQ in the mid-80s. Also an excellent athlete, but very different from Tre. No
fact grasp at all. He couldn’t remember what you told him five minutes ago,
much less yesterday. But he could solve a simple algebraic equation with a
calculator. He’d have to relearn it almost every day, but he had the ability
to abstract that Tre lacks. He very badly wanted to move on to the next math
class in the sequence, against the recommendation of his special ed adviser,
and nagged me constantly to support him in this quest. I was willing to help
him try, but his sport kept him out of the classroom a couple days a week for
nearly a month, and everything I’d managed to do to keep him not rolling
backwards was undone. So I passed him and talked him into an easier course."

[https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2013/10/31/noahpinion...](https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2013/10/31/noahpinion-
on-iq-or-maybe-just-no-knowledge/)

