I also think that for anyone going into a hard science a community college is likely to be much less helpful than a four year college. Community college don't have research labs. I started doing research the second semester of my freshman year and met all the different professors in my degree program in the first two years so that I could start doing research after my sophomore year and continue to work in the same lab until I graduated and I ended up getting published on two papers. You can't do that if you don't get to the school with research labs until your junior year.
My local CC site has a bio lab that is used for a few classes. There is at least one site for them with a chemistry lab, and one runs astronomy labs as well. They exist, but i'm betting we're an exception.
I think you and I are talking about different types of labs. The labs I am referring to are not for classes. They are research labs run by professors and research faculty where PhD students and post-docs train and that take on one or two undergraduates at a time to do some of the experiments.
Do most CC not even have labs for classes? I didn't realize that and I surprised that any school would accept transfer credit for a biology or chemistry class without a lab. My school required lab for physics as well, but you could take it separately so you weren't completely screwed if you had taken the physics class and still needed the lab.
The same distinctions that you guys are talking about for humanities are also present in hard sciences. Basically all schools have a biology and a physics department. But some schools are going to have professors doing research in planetary astronomy and others will have guaranteed satellite time and be doing significant stellar astronomy. Some schools are going to have virology focused microbiology programs, while others will have more people studying bacteria and other schools will have really really awesome arbovirus people or parisitology people. It doesn't matter how prestigious a program/school is, it won't help your career if you go to a school where all the professors (or the vast majority) are virologists if you want to be a bacteriologist.
Animal Crossing: City Folk Lissa in Filmore 3179-9580-0076
Another thing to keep in mind with faculty while looking at grad progams is to see how many are tenured (i/e associate or capital "P" Professors) and how many are only assistants, where tenure has yet to come into the picture. If the professors that you're interested in working with at any given program don't have tenure, it's not the smartest investment to bank on them if you're trying to work for a phd. Six to eight years is a long time to consider more schooling and you want to make sure there's at least one professor with related interests at a department who is in it for the long haul. Chances are a grad program may not even let an assistant take on students to direct, regardless of how reputable they are or the program overall is.
Yeah, it's mostly silly to talk about schools when it's specific departments that are good or bad.
Yes and no. Many schools with less impressive reputations overall will nonetheless have some really top notch departments. For instance, NYU, Rutgers, and Pittsburgh are all currently ranked higher than Berkeley, Stanford, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton at philosophy (although there may be some movement in the rankings due out later this year). But at the same time, many people entering college do not know what they want to do (or think they want to do something they actually do not). So if one chose Rutgers over Yale on the basis that Rutgers has a better philosophy department, that is probably a mistake. Yale has a better everything-else department, so you're in much better shape there if you later change your mind (this is not a slight to Rutgers; Yale is just an excellent school).
The sentiment that expensive schools aren't as good pops up for two reasons: 1) lower level courses are the same pretty much everywhere and what you take from them depends mostly on your motivation and the motivation of the professor, and 2) even expensive schools have middling-to-bad departments.
Lower level courses aren't as variable as higher level courses, it's true--although even there I would expect significant differences based on both the faculty teaching and on said faculty's expectations of the students. But whatever you major in, you will presumably have to take some higher level classes. If you want to go on to do specialized work in a field, you definitely will have to take such classes. There are doors that will be closed to you--and not just on the basis of snobbery or networking--if you're unable to take higher level classes in your area of interest because they aren't offered, or if the literature you read in those classes is badly out of date because there's no professor at your school who has that as an area of concentration, or the professor who does have that AOC stopped reading and publishing some time in the 70s.
These concerns are most highly relevant if one wants to go on in a fairly specialized way in their discipline--through academia, government research, industry, or whatever. So they may not present decisive factors to people who are not interested in that sort of specialization. It is surely not important to everyone to take a class in two-dimensional modal semantics, or to have access to a professor who could advise an honors thesis on that subject. But, what I am trying to say, is that these concerns do exist, and furthermore, they are concerns about the quality of the education. There are reasons directly related to the quality of the education, and not merely to networking or the old boys' club, which point one towards the big-name research universities.
I don't even take that category--'big-name research university'--to be equivalent to, say, 'Ivy League.' CalTech and CMU are probably as good or better than any Ivy League school if one wants to be on the bleeding edge of new research in engineering, computer science, or robotics. My point is not to draw a halo around the already-sainted schools of our culture, though, of course, they do generally have the money and social capital to draw very good faculty and thus offer very good courses. My point is just that there are real concerns about faculty quality and research profile which discriminate among schools: they're very much not all basically interchangeable.
I agree, and this doesn't even take into account the difference in the quality and motivation of the average student. This idea probably raises hackles among some posters here, but there really is no comparison between the average student at a top school and the average student at a community college. Environment matters. The benefits of putting extremely motivated, intelligent people in close proximity are significant.
A PhD in the humanities, imho, is intended for those who wish to advance the academy, generally through research, publishing, and teaching. If you would rather apply your skills to the other pursuits, power to you. However, schools have no reason to admit you if you are going to use their investment of human and financial capital elsewhere. While it is certainly fine to have projects outside of academics once you are an established professor and scholar, the bulk of a humanities PhD's work should benefit of the academy.
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
I agree, and this doesn't even take into account the difference in the quality and motivation of the average student. This idea probably raises hackles among some posters here, but there really is no comparison between the average student at a top school and the average student at a community college. Environment matters. The benefits of putting extremely motivated, intelligent people in close proximity are significant.
This is also true, and can be quite important for more 'go with the flow' types. It certainly helped me in undergraduate that 'the flow,' including all my friends, were pretty intensely ambitious and academically motivated. It may be less important for more independently motivated types, but I'd imagine they are relatively less common (though, of course, quite admirable).
I agree, and this doesn't even take into account the difference in the quality and motivation of the average student. This idea probably raises hackles among some posters here, but there really is no comparison between the average student at a top school and the average student at a community college. Environment matters. The benefits of putting extremely motivated, intelligent people in close proximity are significant.
This is also true, and can be quite important for more 'go with the flow' types. It certainly helped me in undergraduate that 'the flow,' including all my friends, were pretty intensely ambitious and academically motivated. It may be less important for more independently motivated types, but I'd imagine they are relatively less common (though, of course, quite admirable).
I'll 3rd this. Just the opposite is true too, it's difficult (for some, me included) to stay motivated when your roommate(s) and/or friends tend to blow off class or assignments to go do X and want you to come as well. It's peer pressure either negative or positive and it's great if you're self motivated throughout your 4 years of college and your first taste of freedom and can resist the temptation to "go with the flow", but many can't.
I know I let it effect me and I regret it even though I DID graduate. I'm 4 years out of college in my late 20s at the same job I got right after graduation from a tiny state university and my wife and I do fine making in the 6 figures combined income. I could probably make more but I like where I work and (again) don't have the self motivation or discipline to push myself and get maybe 6 figures on just my income alone.
I agree, and this doesn't even take into account the difference in the quality and motivation of the average student. This idea probably raises hackles among some posters here, but there really is no comparison between the average student at a top school and the average student at a community college. Environment matters. The benefits of putting extremely motivated, intelligent people in close proximity are significant.
I can see the CC route saving people some money, but I imagine the vast majority of people who start at a CC go on to a public college in their home state. The number of people who start at a CC and then go on to a top university are probably vanishingly small.
CC's are a route for the more marginal students coming out of high school. They can lead to academic success down the road, but that's heavily based on the student's own academic habits.
Aetian Jupiter - 41 Gunslinger - The Old Republic
Rigorous Scholarship
I agree, and this doesn't even take into account the difference in the quality and motivation of the average student. This idea probably raises hackles among some posters here, but there really is no comparison between the average student at a top school and the average student at a community college. Environment matters. The benefits of putting extremely motivated, intelligent people in close proximity are significant.
I can see the CC route saving people some money, but I imagine the vast majority of people who start at a CC go on to a public college in their home state. The number of people who start at a CC and then go on to a top university are probably vanishingly small.
CC's are a route for the more marginal students coming out of high school. They can lead to academic success down the road, but that's heavily based on the student's own academic habits.
I agree it's unlikely someone would start at a CC and then transfer into an Ivy or go there for grad school. The question is though, is that justified or is it just a bias? Is it that people who go to CCs have an inferior education and just aren't good enough for a prestigious school, or do the prestigious schools just automatically reject someone who went to a CC, without even thinking about it?
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KetarCome on upstairswe're having a partyRegistered Userregular
I agree, and this doesn't even take into account the difference in the quality and motivation of the average student. This idea probably raises hackles among some posters here, but there really is no comparison between the average student at a top school and the average student at a community college. Environment matters. The benefits of putting extremely motivated, intelligent people in close proximity are significant.
I can see the CC route saving people some money, but I imagine the vast majority of people who start at a CC go on to a public college in their home state. The number of people who start at a CC and then go on to a top university are probably vanishingly small.
CC's are a route for the more marginal students coming out of high school. They can lead to academic success down the road, but that's heavily based on the student's own academic habits.
I agree it's unlikely someone would start at a CC and then transfer into an Ivy or go there for grad school. The question is though, is that justified or is it just a bias? Is it that people who go to CCs have an inferior education and just aren't good enough for a prestigious school, or do the prestigious schools just automatically reject someone who went to a CC, without even thinking about it?
I went to a top 5-10 school, and I knew a number of students who transferred in from CCs. I also spent some time tutoring at one of the stronger CCs in the Chicago area later, and got to know a few more students who managed to transfer to some of the top schools in the midwest. Anecdotal and all, but I can still be sure that prestigious schools do not automatically reject someone who went to a CC.
I agree it's unlikely someone would start at a CC and then transfer into an Ivy or go there for grad school. The question is though, is that justified or is it just a bias? Is it that people who go to CCs have an inferior education and just aren't good enough for a prestigious school, or do the prestigious schools just automatically reject someone who went to a CC, without even thinking about it?
At the end of high school, the people who can get into top schools aren't generally even considering CC. It's just not on their radar. If you've got an acceptance from a top-tier school, you're just not going to roll the dice and hope that there will still be a spot for you at that school after 2 years of CC.
Getting in as a transfer student is always risky, regardless of where you're coming from. Most students (and their parents) will take the sure thing of an acceptance right out of high school, rather than risking everything.
It's mostly a matter of self-selection. But that self-selection means that the better students don't even consider CC, so CC's tend to be filled with, at best, students that are mediocre-to-average.
Aetian Jupiter - 41 Gunslinger - The Old Republic
Rigorous Scholarship
I agree, and this doesn't even take into account the difference in the quality and motivation of the average student. This idea probably raises hackles among some posters here, but there really is no comparison between the average student at a top school and the average student at a community college. Environment matters. The benefits of putting extremely motivated, intelligent people in close proximity are significant.
I can see the CC route saving people some money, but I imagine the vast majority of people who start at a CC go on to a public college in their home state. The number of people who start at a CC and then go on to a top university are probably vanishingly small.
CC's are a route for the more marginal students coming out of high school. They can lead to academic success down the road, but that's heavily based on the student's own academic habits.
I agree it's unlikely someone would start at a CC and then transfer into an Ivy or go there for grad school. The question is though, is that justified or is it just a bias? Is it that people who go to CCs have an inferior education and just aren't good enough for a prestigious school, or do the prestigious schools just automatically reject someone who went to a CC, without even thinking about it?
I went to a top 5-10 school, and I knew a number of students who transferred in from CCs. I also spent some time tutoring at one of the stronger CCs in the Chicago area later, and got to know a few more students who managed to transfer to some of the top schools in the midwest. Anecdotal and all, but I can still be sure that prestigious schools do not automatically reject someone who went to a CC.
I'm not quite sure how it works, and I'm waiting to hear on my own transfer so I guess I'll find out, but I think it's tied to GPA (I'm at 3.8 so it shouldn't hopefully be a problem here), then again I'm transferring to UW not Harvard. Generally speaking, if you can swing it, a CC is a way cheaper way to spend your first 2 years
Mostly I think were jut very unclear on what the goal of education is. higher test scores? better workers? improved citizens? Until we know the goal, we can't really say whats a success.
We can't even figure out what the goal of our country is.
Half our political spectrum seems to think the goal of us, as a nation, is "lower taxes"
It's too bad the conservatives don't have a functioning arts and entertainment arm. I'd honestly love to see the movie version of the conservative dream society.
I did NVCC which is actually a pretty damn good one. All the state Schools in VA auto accept you if you graduate with a 2.8 gpa (may vary) and the most common school people go to after is George Mason University. The two are closely affiliated and even share some of the same staff so this is really a no brainer. However UMD, Georgetown, George Washington, and pretty much every other school in the area also has an agreement with them where, provided that your GPA is good enough, they will auto accept you into the proper program to move from your associates to your bachelors. NVCC will even make sure you take the proper electives for your target school as, in my instance, Georgetown, George Washington, and George Mason all had slightly different requirements about some electives I had to take and more importantly Java vs C++ as a programing elective.
Furthermore NVCC will let VA highschool students take college courses there for college credit. Provided the college you go to is NVCC or one of the schools that auto accepts the transfers those credits count as well.
The student quality is actually pretty much the same as the 4 years I've spent time at. In that (and this is important) it can vary wildly. NVCC has some nitwits in it, so does Georgetown though. However in general the CC was full of immigrant students who's families could not afford a 4 year school and this was their chance (and this can vary wildly in how serious they are) or older people who decided for work related reasons to get their degree later in life. Given the make up of Virginia there are also a fucking ton of veterans like me who were trying to get the most bang for the buck out of their GI Bill, in which case two semesters at a CC goes a lot farther.
They have science labs and the teachers I had taught at Mason during the day and did night courses at NVCC or day courses on the day off, so there is no difference in staff if you transfer.
Of course, your millage may vary depending on your CC, Northern VA is known for it's quality education program and people here are always willing to sign on for "more taxes and more school" so any sort of state school here is pretty ok at minimum.
Mostly I think were jut very unclear on what the goal of education is. higher test scores? better workers? improved citizens? Until we know the goal, we can't really say whats a success.
We can't even figure out what the goal of our country is.
Half our political spectrum seems to think the goal of us, as a nation, is "lower taxes"
It's too bad the conservatives don't have a functioning arts and entertainment arm. I'd honestly love to see the movie version of the conservative dream society.
He, like many uber-liberals seems to think it's a crime that every kid can't afford to go to college and that the loaning companies charge exorbitant interest to the poor kids who just want a decent education.
This assumes that we all agree that every kid needs college, and worse that every college actually provides you with a practical education. No one ever questions these unproven assumptions, which I find astonishing.
Why does nobody do a documentary about how colleges are dishonest, charge way too much tuition and don't teach you anything useful?
I'm not talking about every college. There surely must be some practical ones - trade schools that teach plumbing, electricity or carpentry. Universities that teach math, science, medicine and technology. You can't learn those things on your own. You need experts from their fields to share their knowledge with you.
But do we really need kids to spend 4 years learning such subjective vagaries as "humanities" and "Liberal arts". Think of all the money wasted on this stuff, and all the time being stolen from the kids and the economy. This is a time when the average person has the most energy and optimism and could be spending their time doing and learning something productive. Instead they are sitting asleep at their desks learning about how the white man is the most evil of all races and that all knowledge is vague and subjective, and that you should spend all your time arguing against the man, but never accomplish anything tangible.
"If you divide the whole world into just enemies and friends, you'll end up destroying everything" --Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind
Oh man that's so thoughtful and incisive. It's as though he only considers things he personally understands or values worthy of note.
What a unique position to take! I never thought of it that way. Why doesn't every person only receive an education I deem worthwhile?
Fuck, why are children taught writing beyond the 8th grade? Writing didn't build any bridges.
Well I guess I'm more down with his point that as an employer of animation students, it tees him off that animation schools never, ever send thier students out with the skills they actually need to get jobs. And animation degress can be insanely expensive. (I probably should have quoted that part)
It's similar in other areas... you're given a certain amount of knowledge about things, but you aren't actually given the skills you would need to get a job in the area your degree implies.
Cambiata on
"If you divide the whole world into just enemies and friends, you'll end up destroying everything" --Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind
Well I guess I'm more down with his point that as an employer of animation students, it tees him off that animation schools never, ever send thier students out with the skills they actually need to get jobs.
I'm pretty sure animation teachers don't have the power to issue Korean citizenship. Other than that, there's not much they're going to do that will get people jobs in professional animation.
I don't know about everybody else, but my undergraduate program focused very highly on problem solving and critical thinking sorts of things. I found these skills to be very useful things to have developed, especially when the job I got after graduation didn't really have a whole lot to do with my degree. I eventually got tired of not doing what I went to school for and am now working on finishing my Ph.D., and am going to be far more dedicated to getting a job related to what I have studied than I was when I graduated with my bachelor's degree.
Education is definitely expensive, and having interacted with undergraduates a decade apart, I'm convinced that some students end up in college with no plan and no goal, which greatly hurts your chances of getting anything useful out of your studies. Society needs to do a better job of honestly explaining the costs and benefits of all the various paths forward after high school. There are absolutely people who are not suited for the four year college experience immediately after high school (or in some cases, ever), and there is no shame in choosing a different path. We need to stop trying to push everybody into the same path, honestly.
Humanities bashing is fine, we need far more of it. Paying to create scientists and the like is extremely important. Creating tons of debt which helps artificially inflate the cost of college so everyone can go off and get a business, english, psy degree that doesn't really translate into much is a complete waste of cash and has already helped fuck up the job market to the point of "4 year degree to be coffee bitch or GTFO".
Once again DigitalID completely misses the point at hand (just like John Kricfalusi!)
Also a reminder that whenever the animator of Ren & Stimpy opens his mouth about any subject other than his show, including animation related things, he comes off as your classic "hurf durf things aren't the way they used to be," pessimist grandpa. He is not someone to be taken seriously about the state of higher education.
CptKemzik on
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zepherinRussian warship, go fuck yourselfRegistered Userregular
Everyone seems to be getting down on humanities degrees, but people with humanities degrees get jobs over high school diplomas. They get paid higher and really as long as the amount they paid is less than 300k they are likely to come out ahead. Do they teach people anything useful? Yes, all knowledge is useful and spending an extra 4 years learning is an important task. Does knowing the history behind the Treaty of Lausanne help you find a job? Most likely no, but knowing how to learn and showing you can acquire that knowledge will. A college degree says that a person can stick with something for 4 years.
If we want to encourage STEM degrees, then we as a country need to get on the ball in terms of inspiring people.
You don't get more rocket scientists by grounding manned space flight at NASA and having nothing on the block to replace it. I once worked with engineers at a major corporation. Their jobs mainly consisted of making products cheaper, and that's about it. These were some demoralized guys when you got them talking about their actual work. It's all about the politics of cheap production and cheaper materials (quality is always taking a hit, but the bean counters don't give a shit.)
I mean, let's be honest. The United States has a HATE ON for the sciences in general. Evolution is just a theory, climate change is debatable, stem cell research is bad, government shouldn't fund research or tech start ups unless its applications can kill people, shipping IT work to India, etc etc.
By the time it's someone's sophomore year in college, it's generally too late to inspire them to the sciences. Contrary to what many younger people on forums seem to think, a STEM degree is not a ticket to the 1%. In fact, many CEOs are humanities graduates. It's not what you know, it's who you know, and that has never been more true than now.
Hell, 20 years ago you had to know people to get a great job making bank. These days you have to know people to get a job, period. At this point, you kind of question the validity of the degree at all as anything other than a social mechanism.
If we want to encourage STEM degrees, then we as a country need to get on the ball in terms of inspiring people.
You don't get more rocket scientists by grounding manned space flight at NASA and having nothing on the block to replace it. I once worked with engineers at a major corporation. Their jobs mainly consisted of making products cheaper, and that's about it. These were some demoralized guys when you got them talking about their actual work. It's all about the politics of cheap production and cheaper materials (quality is always taking a hit, but the bean counters don't give a shit.)
Yeah, no kidding. A lot of people will just go wherever the jobs are. If you want more people getting STEM degrees, then make more STEM jobs. Right now, a huge percentage of ivy league students go into finance, because that's where the money is.
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
If we want to encourage STEM degrees, then we as a country need to get on the ball in terms of inspiring people.
You don't get more rocket scientists by grounding manned space flight at NASA and having nothing on the block to replace it. I once worked with engineers at a major corporation. Their jobs mainly consisted of making products cheaper, and that's about it. These were some demoralized guys when you got them talking about their actual work. It's all about the politics of cheap production and cheaper materials (quality is always taking a hit, but the bean counters don't give a shit.)
Yeah, no kidding. A lot of people will just go wherever the jobs are. If you want more people getting STEM degrees, then make more STEM jobs. Right now, a huge percentage of ivy league students go into finance, because that's where the money is.
Well of course. People aren't generally stupid.
There's an intangible and shifting formula that just about everyone uses when determining the value of higher education that generally says that the value of Degree X is directly proportional to Total Experience Cost X and Ruminative Potential Y.
A liberal arts, fine arts, or humanities degree isn't necessarily useless and dooming if you can pick one up for $15-30k. It's the fact that a "good" arts school generally runs you $100-150k while offering you a typical salary of $20-30k a year in return that just breaks people.
Everyone seems to be getting down on humanities degrees, but people with humanities degrees get jobs over high school diplomas. They get paid higher and really as long as the amount they paid is less than 300k they are likely to come out ahead. Do they teach people anything useful? Yes, all knowledge is useful and spending an extra 4 years learning is an important task. Does knowing the history behind the Treaty of Lausanne help you find a job? Most likely no, but knowing how to learn and showing you can acquire that knowledge will. A college degree says that a person can stick with something for 4 years.
Many things show people can stick with a job for 4 years. But driving up school prices via constant student loans for worthless humanities nonsense is part of the reason you have to have a degree for a job now. This hasn't helped anybody other than banks and schools make $$$. Which if your goal is free money for banks and schools, sure, encourage humanities, might as well encourage credit card ownership for all the good it does though.
Yes digitalID it's those pesky humanities departments ruining everything! It can't be university administrations treating their presidents and executives like big bank CEO's where they get paid ridiculous salaries, and college sports demanding more and more money, and states deciding to subsidize/invest less in their public institutions. No, it's definitely professors and students who are studying something that you don't like that are forcing people to pay more money for college.
Seriously that is the most silly goosley dense criticism i've ever seen of the field, and ive heard plenty.
Everyone seems to be getting down on humanities degrees, but people with humanities degrees get jobs over high school diplomas. They get paid higher and really as long as the amount they paid is less than 300k they are likely to come out ahead. Do they teach people anything useful? Yes, all knowledge is useful and spending an extra 4 years learning is an important task. Does knowing the history behind the Treaty of Lausanne help you find a job? Most likely no, but knowing how to learn and showing you can acquire that knowledge will. A college degree says that a person can stick with something for 4 years.
Many things show people can stick with a job for 4 years. But driving up school prices via constant student loans for worthless humanities nonsense is part of the reason you have to have a degree for a job now. This hasn't helped anybody other than banks and schools make $$$. Which if your goal is free money for banks and schools, sure, encourage humanities, might as well encourage credit card ownership for all the good it does though.
If you think the humanities are worthless, then you lack insight and creativity. Learning about history, anthropology, sociology, etc. is incredibly valuable. It may not teach you what to think, but it teaches you HOW to think, a far more valuable skill.
If we want to encourage STEM degrees, then we as a country need to get on the ball in terms of inspiring people.
You don't get more rocket scientists by grounding manned space flight at NASA and having nothing on the block to replace it. I once worked with engineers at a major corporation. Their jobs mainly consisted of making products cheaper, and that's about it. These were some demoralized guys when you got them talking about their actual work. It's all about the politics of cheap production and cheaper materials (quality is always taking a hit, but the bean counters don't give a shit.)
Yeah, no kidding. A lot of people will just go wherever the jobs are. If you want more people getting STEM degrees, then make more STEM jobs. Right now, a huge percentage of ivy league students go into finance, because that's where the money is.
Well of course. People aren't generally stupid.
There's an intangible and shifting formula that just about everyone uses when determining the value of higher education that generally says that the value of Degree X is directly proportional to Total Experience Cost X and Ruminative Potential Y.
A liberal arts, fine arts, or humanities degree isn't necessarily useless and dooming if you can pick one up for $15-30k. It's the fact that a "good" arts school generally runs you $100-150k while offering you a typical salary of $20-30k a year in return that just breaks people.
Well, it's a bit tougher than that, because there's such a huge variance in the jobs that people get with humanities degrees. Some people do manage to land jobs as corporate execs with them. Others get low paying jobs that make up for it in other ways, like getting the chance to teach kids. But yeah, if you go 100k in debt and then get stuck as an office bitch for $20k a year... that's not good.
Everyone seems to be getting down on humanities degrees, but people with humanities degrees get jobs over high school diplomas. They get paid higher and really as long as the amount they paid is less than 300k they are likely to come out ahead. Do they teach people anything useful? Yes, all knowledge is useful and spending an extra 4 years learning is an important task. Does knowing the history behind the Treaty of Lausanne help you find a job? Most likely no, but knowing how to learn and showing you can acquire that knowledge will. A college degree says that a person can stick with something for 4 years.
Many things show people can stick with a job for 4 years. But driving up school prices via constant student loans for worthless humanities nonsense is part of the reason you have to have a degree for a job now. This hasn't helped anybody other than banks and schools make $$$. Which if your goal is free money for banks and schools, sure, encourage humanities, might as well encourage credit card ownership for all the good it does though.
If you think the humanities are worthless, then you lack insight and creativity. Learning about history, anthropology, sociology, etc. is incredibly valuable. It may not teach you what to think, but it teaches you HOW to think, a far more valuable skill.
I know you mean well, but stuff like this drives me up a wall. I knew how to think long before I went to college, thank you.
Oh and also never mind business administration colleges demanding huge sums of money from their institutions for faculty, buildings, etc. because they can afford to have the network of business people to petition for them. Which subsequently results in colleges being transformed into a sort of 4-year job training camp for finance companies.
-Sanstodo, if i'm betting dollars to donuts, isn't saying how to think in a general way, but in an advanced way, which can come to certain people naturally, but I know for a fact that what you do in primary/secondary education does not prepare you for the kind of inquiry that higher ed can provide in any field. Also there are a good amount of people going to college who are studying certain things because it allows them to just be spoonfed everything and they don't have to stick their neck out and take risks when it comes to learning.
The reason humanities get such a bum rap is probably because those are the departments kids pursuing a highschool++ degree often wind up in. Kids with no plan don't tend to find themselves in the Chemical Engineering department, or Architecture, or Nursing. They wind up in <inserttopic> Studies. Or Business, to be fair.
Also, many major college sports programs are self supporting, or nearly so (across all sports) . And presidents' salaries are a drop in the bucket compared to the overall budget. It really is more an issue of slashed state funding, and perhaps a tendency for private schools to raise rates alongside public.
Everyone seems to be getting down on humanities degrees, but people with humanities degrees get jobs over high school diplomas. They get paid higher and really as long as the amount they paid is less than 300k they are likely to come out ahead. Do they teach people anything useful? Yes, all knowledge is useful and spending an extra 4 years learning is an important task. Does knowing the history behind the Treaty of Lausanne help you find a job? Most likely no, but knowing how to learn and showing you can acquire that knowledge will. A college degree says that a person can stick with something for 4 years.
Many things show people can stick with a job for 4 years. But driving up school prices via constant student loans for worthless humanities nonsense is part of the reason you have to have a degree for a job now. This hasn't helped anybody other than banks and schools make $$$. Which if your goal is free money for banks and schools, sure, encourage humanities, might as well encourage credit card ownership for all the good it does though.
If you think the humanities are worthless, then you lack insight and creativity. Learning about history, anthropology, sociology, etc. is incredibly valuable. It may not teach you what to think, but it teaches you HOW to think, a far more valuable skill.
I know you mean well, but stuff like this drives me up a wall. I knew how to think long before I went to college, thank you.
Then you can read that as "It improves your ability to think, a far more valuable skill," although as someone who works with undergraduates, the original statement is probably closer to the truth for most students.
. And presidents' salaries are a drop in the bucket compared to the overall budget. It really is more an issue of slashed state funding, and perhaps a tendency for private schools to raise rates alongside public.
I'll admit to not knowing too much about college sports other than that UCONN's teams eat up a LOT of scholarship money, and probably tuition as well, for the construction of certain facilities, but do you really want to say that about presidents? The most recent president of my alma mater had to step down this summer because of a personal issue that got blown up into public controversey. He was being paid AT LEAST over 200k a year, and refused to reside in the presidential house, and instead had a huge mansion constructed on the tuition-payer's dime. When he stepped down he got a severance package of near 578,000 dollars over 17 MONTHS, and he gets to go back and teach english afterwards to the tune of 200,000. If you're telling me that's not jacking up tuition for people in some way then i'll eat my hat. Nevermind all of the construction projects he started in the past 2-3 years since i attended.
The reason humanities get such a bum rap is probably because those are the departments kids pursuing a highschool++ degree often wind up in. Kids with no plan don't tend to find themselves in the Chemical Engineering department, or Architecture, or Nursing. They wind up in <inserttopic> Studies. Or Business, to be fair.
Actually, nursing is a big draw to people because the demand is there and it's a relatively easy field to get into.
The reason humanities get such a bum rap is probably because those are the departments kids pursuing a highschool++ degree often wind up in. Kids with no plan don't tend to find themselves in the Chemical Engineering department, or Architecture, or Nursing. They wind up in <inserttopic> Studies. Or Business, to be fair.
Also, many major college sports programs are self supporting, or nearly so (across all sports) . And presidents' salaries are a drop in the bucket compared to the overall budget. It really is more an issue of slashed state funding, and perhaps a tendency for private schools to raise rates alongside public.
There's actually been massive administrative growth in Universities too.
I also find the Humanities bashing kinda odd. Sure you get alot of "I don't know what I wanna do" types in there, but it's still not a bad economic descision for many people. Plus, there's tons of people who've no idea what they wanna do in sciences. You should ask around. Most science students have as little idea what they wanna do with their lives. They just happen to also be good at math.
And mostly, anything in the sciences isn't much more "job training" then anything else you can take. It's just focused on different skills. Everything you learn in a science class is also highly theoretical. You will still need oodles of job training. They are just teaching you how to think and familiarizing you with the material somewhat. The same way the humanities teach you to do things like "write well" and "read critically" and "think logically" and the like.
The reason humanities get such a bum rap is probably because those are the departments kids pursuing a highschool++ degree often wind up in. Kids with no plan don't tend to find themselves in the Chemical Engineering department, or Architecture, or Nursing. They wind up in <inserttopic> Studies. Or Business, to be fair.
Also, many major college sports programs are self supporting, or nearly so (across all sports) . And presidents' salaries are a drop in the bucket compared to the overall budget. It really is more an issue of slashed state funding, and perhaps a tendency for private schools to raise rates alongside public.
There's actually been massive administrative growth in Universities too.
I also find the Humanities bashing kinda odd. Sure you get alot of "I don't know what I wanna do" types in there, but it's still not a bad economic descision for many people. Plus, there's tons of people who've no idea what they wanna do in sciences. You should ask around. Most science students have as little idea what they wanna do with their lives. They just happen to also be good at math.
And mostly, anything in the sciences isn't much more "job training" then anything else you can take. It's just focused on different skills. Everything you learn in a science class is also highly theoretical. You will still need oodles of job training. They are just teaching you how to think and familiarizing you with the material somewhat. The same way the humanities teach you to do things like "write well" and "read critically" and "think logically" and the like.
It's the lemming mentality, sadly. America has been defunding the arts at the primary levels for decades, and now we've got a crop of people going through college who haven't been adequately exposed to it. To them, the arts are foreign and way out of their area of expertise. So, out comes the small minded derision.
$200k over 40k students is $5. Per year, not semester.
Even a million dollars yearly is pretty negligible when spread across all students. Presidents' salaries (and benefits) make for easy hurgle burgling, but overall they're the foreign aid of the college world.
So, since I'm one of those unwashed humanities peasants, is the current academic full-court press for STEM majors based on current or near-future unmet employment needs (like the recent push for nurses) or is based more on some vague concept that since science and technology have replaced manufacturing in the US economy that pumping out more STEM graduates will magically inflate the economy?
I'm just wondering where, exactly, a surge of math majors are going to get jobs.
Posts
I think you and I are talking about different types of labs. The labs I am referring to are not for classes. They are research labs run by professors and research faculty where PhD students and post-docs train and that take on one or two undergraduates at a time to do some of the experiments.
Do most CC not even have labs for classes? I didn't realize that and I surprised that any school would accept transfer credit for a biology or chemistry class without a lab. My school required lab for physics as well, but you could take it separately so you weren't completely screwed if you had taken the physics class and still needed the lab.
The same distinctions that you guys are talking about for humanities are also present in hard sciences. Basically all schools have a biology and a physics department. But some schools are going to have professors doing research in planetary astronomy and others will have guaranteed satellite time and be doing significant stellar astronomy. Some schools are going to have virology focused microbiology programs, while others will have more people studying bacteria and other schools will have really really awesome arbovirus people or parisitology people. It doesn't matter how prestigious a program/school is, it won't help your career if you go to a school where all the professors (or the vast majority) are virologists if you want to be a bacteriologist.
I agree, and this doesn't even take into account the difference in the quality and motivation of the average student. This idea probably raises hackles among some posters here, but there really is no comparison between the average student at a top school and the average student at a community college. Environment matters. The benefits of putting extremely motivated, intelligent people in close proximity are significant.
@CptKemzik:
This is also true, and can be quite important for more 'go with the flow' types. It certainly helped me in undergraduate that 'the flow,' including all my friends, were pretty intensely ambitious and academically motivated. It may be less important for more independently motivated types, but I'd imagine they are relatively less common (though, of course, quite admirable).
I'll 3rd this. Just the opposite is true too, it's difficult (for some, me included) to stay motivated when your roommate(s) and/or friends tend to blow off class or assignments to go do X and want you to come as well. It's peer pressure either negative or positive and it's great if you're self motivated throughout your 4 years of college and your first taste of freedom and can resist the temptation to "go with the flow", but many can't.
I know I let it effect me and I regret it even though I DID graduate. I'm 4 years out of college in my late 20s at the same job I got right after graduation from a tiny state university and my wife and I do fine making in the 6 figures combined income. I could probably make more but I like where I work and (again) don't have the self motivation or discipline to push myself and get maybe 6 figures on just my income alone.
CC's are a route for the more marginal students coming out of high school. They can lead to academic success down the road, but that's heavily based on the student's own academic habits.
Rigorous Scholarship
I agree it's unlikely someone would start at a CC and then transfer into an Ivy or go there for grad school. The question is though, is that justified or is it just a bias? Is it that people who go to CCs have an inferior education and just aren't good enough for a prestigious school, or do the prestigious schools just automatically reject someone who went to a CC, without even thinking about it?
I went to a top 5-10 school, and I knew a number of students who transferred in from CCs. I also spent some time tutoring at one of the stronger CCs in the Chicago area later, and got to know a few more students who managed to transfer to some of the top schools in the midwest. Anecdotal and all, but I can still be sure that prestigious schools do not automatically reject someone who went to a CC.
Getting in as a transfer student is always risky, regardless of where you're coming from. Most students (and their parents) will take the sure thing of an acceptance right out of high school, rather than risking everything.
It's mostly a matter of self-selection. But that self-selection means that the better students don't even consider CC, so CC's tend to be filled with, at best, students that are mediocre-to-average.
Rigorous Scholarship
I'm not quite sure how it works, and I'm waiting to hear on my own transfer so I guess I'll find out, but I think it's tied to GPA (I'm at 3.8 so it shouldn't hopefully be a problem here), then again I'm transferring to UW not Harvard. Generally speaking, if you can swing it, a CC is a way cheaper way to spend your first 2 years
I did NVCC which is actually a pretty damn good one. All the state Schools in VA auto accept you if you graduate with a 2.8 gpa (may vary) and the most common school people go to after is George Mason University. The two are closely affiliated and even share some of the same staff so this is really a no brainer. However UMD, Georgetown, George Washington, and pretty much every other school in the area also has an agreement with them where, provided that your GPA is good enough, they will auto accept you into the proper program to move from your associates to your bachelors. NVCC will even make sure you take the proper electives for your target school as, in my instance, Georgetown, George Washington, and George Mason all had slightly different requirements about some electives I had to take and more importantly Java vs C++ as a programing elective.
Furthermore NVCC will let VA highschool students take college courses there for college credit. Provided the college you go to is NVCC or one of the schools that auto accepts the transfers those credits count as well.
The student quality is actually pretty much the same as the 4 years I've spent time at. In that (and this is important) it can vary wildly. NVCC has some nitwits in it, so does Georgetown though. However in general the CC was full of immigrant students who's families could not afford a 4 year school and this was their chance (and this can vary wildly in how serious they are) or older people who decided for work related reasons to get their degree later in life. Given the make up of Virginia there are also a fucking ton of veterans like me who were trying to get the most bang for the buck out of their GI Bill, in which case two semesters at a CC goes a lot farther.
They have science labs and the teachers I had taught at Mason during the day and did night courses at NVCC or day courses on the day off, so there is no difference in staff if you transfer.
Of course, your millage may vary depending on your CC, Northern VA is known for it's quality education program and people here are always willing to sign on for "more taxes and more school" so any sort of state school here is pretty ok at minimum.
My god, it's full of bootstraps!
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2009/10/michael-moores-capitalism-review.html
(this is a review of the film Capitalism, but he does spend much of the post talking about colleges)
What a unique position to take! I never thought of it that way. Why doesn't every person only receive an education I deem worthwhile?
Fuck, why are children taught writing beyond the 8th grade? Writing didn't build any bridges.
Well I guess I'm more down with his point that as an employer of animation students, it tees him off that animation schools never, ever send thier students out with the skills they actually need to get jobs. And animation degress can be insanely expensive. (I probably should have quoted that part)
It's similar in other areas... you're given a certain amount of knowledge about things, but you aren't actually given the skills you would need to get a job in the area your degree implies.
I'm pretty sure animation teachers don't have the power to issue Korean citizenship. Other than that, there's not much they're going to do that will get people jobs in professional animation.
Education is definitely expensive, and having interacted with undergraduates a decade apart, I'm convinced that some students end up in college with no plan and no goal, which greatly hurts your chances of getting anything useful out of your studies. Society needs to do a better job of honestly explaining the costs and benefits of all the various paths forward after high school. There are absolutely people who are not suited for the four year college experience immediately after high school (or in some cases, ever), and there is no shame in choosing a different path. We need to stop trying to push everybody into the same path, honestly.
Also a reminder that whenever the animator of Ren & Stimpy opens his mouth about any subject other than his show, including animation related things, he comes off as your classic "hurf durf things aren't the way they used to be," pessimist grandpa. He is not someone to be taken seriously about the state of higher education.
You don't get more rocket scientists by grounding manned space flight at NASA and having nothing on the block to replace it. I once worked with engineers at a major corporation. Their jobs mainly consisted of making products cheaper, and that's about it. These were some demoralized guys when you got them talking about their actual work. It's all about the politics of cheap production and cheaper materials (quality is always taking a hit, but the bean counters don't give a shit.)
I mean, let's be honest. The United States has a HATE ON for the sciences in general. Evolution is just a theory, climate change is debatable, stem cell research is bad, government shouldn't fund research or tech start ups unless its applications can kill people, shipping IT work to India, etc etc.
By the time it's someone's sophomore year in college, it's generally too late to inspire them to the sciences. Contrary to what many younger people on forums seem to think, a STEM degree is not a ticket to the 1%. In fact, many CEOs are humanities graduates. It's not what you know, it's who you know, and that has never been more true than now.
Hell, 20 years ago you had to know people to get a great job making bank. These days you have to know people to get a job, period. At this point, you kind of question the validity of the degree at all as anything other than a social mechanism.
Well of course. People aren't generally stupid.
There's an intangible and shifting formula that just about everyone uses when determining the value of higher education that generally says that the value of Degree X is directly proportional to Total Experience Cost X and Ruminative Potential Y.
A liberal arts, fine arts, or humanities degree isn't necessarily useless and dooming if you can pick one up for $15-30k. It's the fact that a "good" arts school generally runs you $100-150k while offering you a typical salary of $20-30k a year in return that just breaks people.
Many things show people can stick with a job for 4 years. But driving up school prices via constant student loans for worthless humanities nonsense is part of the reason you have to have a degree for a job now. This hasn't helped anybody other than banks and schools make $$$. Which if your goal is free money for banks and schools, sure, encourage humanities, might as well encourage credit card ownership for all the good it does though.
Seriously that is the most silly goosley dense criticism i've ever seen of the field, and ive heard plenty.
If you think the humanities are worthless, then you lack insight and creativity. Learning about history, anthropology, sociology, etc. is incredibly valuable. It may not teach you what to think, but it teaches you HOW to think, a far more valuable skill.
Well, it's a bit tougher than that, because there's such a huge variance in the jobs that people get with humanities degrees. Some people do manage to land jobs as corporate execs with them. Others get low paying jobs that make up for it in other ways, like getting the chance to teach kids. But yeah, if you go 100k in debt and then get stuck as an office bitch for $20k a year... that's not good.
-Sanstodo, if i'm betting dollars to donuts, isn't saying how to think in a general way, but in an advanced way, which can come to certain people naturally, but I know for a fact that what you do in primary/secondary education does not prepare you for the kind of inquiry that higher ed can provide in any field. Also there are a good amount of people going to college who are studying certain things because it allows them to just be spoonfed everything and they don't have to stick their neck out and take risks when it comes to learning.
Also, many major college sports programs are self supporting, or nearly so (across all sports) . And presidents' salaries are a drop in the bucket compared to the overall budget. It really is more an issue of slashed state funding, and perhaps a tendency for private schools to raise rates alongside public.
Then you can read that as "It improves your ability to think, a far more valuable skill," although as someone who works with undergraduates, the original statement is probably closer to the truth for most students.
I'll admit to not knowing too much about college sports other than that UCONN's teams eat up a LOT of scholarship money, and probably tuition as well, for the construction of certain facilities, but do you really want to say that about presidents? The most recent president of my alma mater had to step down this summer because of a personal issue that got blown up into public controversey. He was being paid AT LEAST over 200k a year, and refused to reside in the presidential house, and instead had a huge mansion constructed on the tuition-payer's dime. When he stepped down he got a severance package of near 578,000 dollars over 17 MONTHS, and he gets to go back and teach english afterwards to the tune of 200,000. If you're telling me that's not jacking up tuition for people in some way then i'll eat my hat. Nevermind all of the construction projects he started in the past 2-3 years since i attended.
Actually, nursing is a big draw to people because the demand is there and it's a relatively easy field to get into.
There's actually been massive administrative growth in Universities too.
I also find the Humanities bashing kinda odd. Sure you get alot of "I don't know what I wanna do" types in there, but it's still not a bad economic descision for many people. Plus, there's tons of people who've no idea what they wanna do in sciences. You should ask around. Most science students have as little idea what they wanna do with their lives. They just happen to also be good at math.
And mostly, anything in the sciences isn't much more "job training" then anything else you can take. It's just focused on different skills. Everything you learn in a science class is also highly theoretical. You will still need oodles of job training. They are just teaching you how to think and familiarizing you with the material somewhat. The same way the humanities teach you to do things like "write well" and "read critically" and "think logically" and the like.
It's the lemming mentality, sadly. America has been defunding the arts at the primary levels for decades, and now we've got a crop of people going through college who haven't been adequately exposed to it. To them, the arts are foreign and way out of their area of expertise. So, out comes the small minded derision.
Even a million dollars yearly is pretty negligible when spread across all students. Presidents' salaries (and benefits) make for easy hurgle burgling, but overall they're the foreign aid of the college world.
I'm just wondering where, exactly, a surge of math majors are going to get jobs.