Why not?
What proportion of women tend to date men who earn less than them, are shorter than them, have a lesser degree than them? Not a very big one, and men know it, so they steer clear of those women.
Similarly, most men prefer to date women shorter than them, who earn less than them, etc. Why? I'd guess because most men like to feel like they're providers and protectors, and most women like to feel provided and protected for by their partner.
If men were free to chase whatever professional growth they wanted and women just had to stuff it because they would be avoided by men if they were "over-qualified" according to you, then that's a dynamic I cannot wait to see completely obliterated. I'm not saying only one partner being a provider or sole breadwinner is a bad thing, but it absolutely does not need to be the only role possible. These men you and GP talk about need to figure out what else they can bring to the table in a relationship, because the ability to put food on the table is hardly the only "desirable" thing people see in a partner, and it doesn't seem like a great thing to tie your self-worth to.
I don't know if this is true, but it seems to pop up in several areas.
This tends to be after the wave of early risk takers made it such.
Example: We're seeing more % women entering the crypto space every year.
[Update]
It's not the post I have been thinking of, but there is a line there
https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/01/no_self-respecting_w...
"[...] but you should wonder: when more women enter a field, it means less men did, and if the men stopped going there, where did they go? Why did they leave? I assume they aren't home with the kids, right?
I don't want to be cynical, but boy oh boy is it hard not to observe that at the very moment in our history when we have the most women in the Senate, Congress is perceived to be pathetic, bickering, easily manipulated and powerless [..] if some field keeps the trappings of power but loses actual power, women enter it in droves and men abandon it like the Roanoke Colony. Again we must ask the question: if power seeking men aren't running for Senate, where did they go?"
If you read the article, I recommend at least the free preview from Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Boy-Crisis-Boys-Struggling-About/dp/1...
First review the blatant, widespread corruption in Chinese academia, before you consider fully accepting the value of education in China
"In 2015, for instance, Britain-based publisher BioMed Central retracted 43 articles, including 41 from China. Later in the same year, Germany’s Springer retracted 64 papers, nearly all from Chinese scholars, while the Dutch publishing company Elsevier retracted nine medical science articles written by Chinese researchers.
"In what is said to be the largest single-incident retraction of journal publications in history, Springer Nature in 2017 retracted 107 articles in Tumor Biology published between 2012 and 2016, all of them authored by Chinese scholars from universities in Shanghai."
https://wenr.wes.org/2018/04/the-economy-of-fraud-in-academi...
2 year associate degrees from community college are very affordable and cover the general education. Even those going into other work could afford that and their employer could offer assistance if not. If for example, the cost of a 2 year associates degree was $5,000- $10,000. That would make college affordable, but we as a society would have to recognize that as more than it currently is recognized for.
The 4 year degree is meaningless now. It doesn't even translate to a useable skill most the time, but it's become the bare minimum.
Then if certificates of specific skills...say "certificate of statistics" which could just be 3-5 classes on statistics were added for those who could afford it, that would bring down the cost.
The idea of "going to college" and moving on campus is not an economical decision most 20 years old are prepared enough to understand. There appears to be too many people losing from that bet.
And I've done well for myself. I hear college graduates earn more over their lifetimes but anecdotally I don't see it. Financially I'm doing better than almost every person I know that went, the vast majority of my peers who went have a negative net worth due to student debt and own no property, so the bar is low, but I'm doing fantastic. I think the truth is, when credentials aren't rare, how well you do is more based on your mind and some quality you have than on credentials.
I'd be curious what the numbers looked like when controlling for all the other variables which influence someone's income.
But social stigma stemms from everything from dating to parents to friends etc if one does not complete a 4-year degree.
Most tech firms are lifitng the requirement for such a degree as in tech if you can do the work you can do the work and can (I'd say should) be hired. (In a sense, most coding/programming work is blue collar in that sense -- you don't need rocket science to center a div ;)
Interesting. Maybe guys who are not super-interested scientifically in a subject realize that it becomes a waste of time. Even their academically inclined peers will struggle since there arent nearly enough academic prospects for the number of Phd graduates. Then also these men grew up watching youtube stars etc. making it big without formal education.
Maybe these men should be encouraged to get their education in europe. Credentialism of Ivy Leagues is becoming increasingly irrelevant, but the academic environment is still stimulating and not hostile to either men or women.
That said, I think university doesn't count as much as it did before. At least in softwareworld you can make it without a degree just fine. You have disadvantages for some higher positions in large companies. But who wants to do that job anyway? It seems rather unattractive today.
Does this lead to many more unmarried people like Japan?
Clearly, this is not the case with paid education in US, UK and some other developed countries.
>>> “Is there a thumb on the scale for boys? Absolutely,” said Jennifer Delahunty, a college enrollment consultant
And many aren't even putting in the proper diligence:
>>> "Ms. Gereghty said she found that girls more closely attended to their college applications than boys, for instance making sure transcripts are delivered."
It’s part gatekeeping and part wishful thinking.
1) There's a point to education. Decide what you're going to do and then prepare for it. Most likely you will need to get a job that either does something for someone because it's specialized, do something for someone because it's boring, or you will entertain people. If you want to be an electrician, great, line that up and get on with it. We need electricians. Going to college isn't a goal. It's a strategy to get to a goal, but that's not what we tell kids. We tell them it's the goal. If you want to go to college because you want to work as a civil engineer - awesome - we need civil engineers. Going to college to study civil engineering isn't the goal - working as a civil engineer is the goal. Many jobs, like licensed Civil Engineer, oncologist, or attorney from YouTube videos (even if you read all the comments), require education ** as a strategy to get the job **. Other jobs require you work for a licensed practitioner. Some require a mix of the two (e.g. CPA or Welder).
2) I see too many men have extended adolescences into their 40's. If you want to man up, here's the list: 1) take care of the kids, 2) take care of the spouse, 3) take care of your job, 4) take care of your house, 5) your community, and somewhere along 8, 9 or 10 is 'spend Saturday on the phone with you college buddies from 2007, on your fantasy draft.' If you're childless an unmarried, the list is 1) take care of your job, take care of your house, 3) take care of your community. I see too many guys with the list that focuses on fun. Many of them are unmarried. Mammals are expected to invest in their children. Men who show no ability to invest in anything besides themselves are probably signaling they are poor choices as mates. This is not to say they can't get laid, but are probably not messaging well as a long term bet. I suspect they over-compensate for their poor signaling by signaling hyper masculinity. They buy trucks they don't need, spend too much time at the gym, or engage in high-risk activities.
3) The better the job, the farther it is away from being automated. No one runs to a room to look up your records at the DMV any more - we've automated those clerks away through computers. Call centers are largely automated - thanks to computers. Bus and truck drivers will eventually be automated away - thanks to computers. If your job can be done by anyone with a few hours or days of training, chances are it will be automated away. This includes programmers, as well. Companies like Square will chip away at the market from the bottom up and hyper-scalers from the top down. Developers with the depth of knowledge (usually obtained by getting degrees and often advanced degrees) are better off than going through a boot camp to put buttons on a page. Whatever your field, make sure you are able to do something that automating it away would be impractical.
4) Some skills and jobs are more valuable than others. If you want to be a music producer or DJ, awesome. You be you. Just realize that unless you're better than 99.999% of the other wannabe music producers, DJs, indie game developers, founders with a 'great idea,' or whatever it is, you will make little money. If you want to be a successful book keeper, it's nowhere near as hard and requires only a little more preparation. While people may stream your latest mix on as free wall paper music, they will pay you good money to maintain their financial records and any related filings with the US Treasury or state agencies. That's not saying music is worthless, but it does say the average book keeper is more valuable to most people than the average musician. You're more likely to pay off that degree you got in Empathy Studies as a book keeper than DJ.
What does all this have to do with the article? 1) people are becoming disillusioned with education for the wrong reason. They think that being smart and learned is just a con because they (or someone they know) got an education in a random major and is struggling. 2) Growing up asks how you can be of service rather than how someone can serve you - and I see a lot of men not growing up. Signaling you're a grownup will generally improve your fit and function in a society where people expect grownups. 3) Easy jobs disappear easily - you need to have enough investment in your skill, trade, or business that you provide more value than a shell script. 4) No one cares about your shitty music except maybe your girlfriend (she's lying) and your mother (also lying). Even if you're an entrepreneur, you're filling a need for someone else so think about the utility and value of what you're doing.
That's it. That's all there is to it.
#MeToo Is Making Colleges Teach Toxic Masculinity 101
https://www.thedailybeast.com/metoo-is-making-colleges-teach...
Toxic Masculinity and Higher Education
https://www.higheredjobs.com/Articles/articleDisplay.cfm?ID=...
And so on. A quick search turns up 1000's of such links
There is a Wikipedia page on toxic masculinity, but not one on toxic femininity (it redirects to "Internalised sexism"). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internalized_sexism#%22Toxic...
I much the same way that “unusually large microbe” does not imply that microbes are generally unusually large.
The “‘toxic masculinity’ means masculinity is uniformly toxic” thing is a reading so tendentious as to be incompatible with good faith.
I agree it was never intended to, but the reality is different. It should be dumped and a new term used.
That's funny, really. I always only ever encounter it used by people who smear any and all masculinity as "toxic".
Do you have a link to a place "toxic masculinity" is used to describe a minority subset of the male population?
If there wasn't at least a little bit of complicity in it being interpreted as a general diss on masculinity, the term would never have caught on, or a different term would have been chosen in the first place. In the face of repeated misunderstandings, people using the term would pick a new one. They haven't done that. Why? It seems to me that they are quite happy to be "misunderstood" 95% of the time.
The gender swapped equivalent seems to be "internalised misogyny". Do you think I could get away with calling it "toxic femininity" instead? Nobody would let that pass. Do you think I could get away with calling any obviously bad behaviour associated with femininity, "toxic femininity", at all? I don't think I could.
It's widely considered by men to be an insulting term, and if people who use it don't want to insult people, they should pick another one. They don't though, which is telling.
It has led to an atmosphere of intellectual immaturity and victim-mentality-agrandizement. Universities now feel more like a coddled highschool experience than adulthood.
Don't expect intelligent, strong-minded, strong-willed men to accept such silly, degenerate distractions from the supposed goal of these universities (to provide "education", skills, network, etc.).
Of course this does not mean that these traits are somehow exclusive to or owned by Masculinity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masculinity
Much of that sounds positive to me. I think the toxicity primarily comes from people caring primarily about appearance. For example by trying to avoid being seen as weak or by trying to appear strong relative to other people by making them appear to be weak.
Sounds like you've managed to get yourself living in quite the bubble/echo chamber. Go explore the world dude.
Anyone who actually knows what adjectives are and how they work believes this.
Or people familiar enough with the substance of the discussion to know it includes discussion of what healthy masculinity is. Here's an easy-to-digest example:
https://ifunny.co/picture/if-you-ever-find-yourself-confused...
> Do you think I could get away with calling it "toxic femininity" instead? Nobody would let that pass.
Oh, yes. Nobody would dare talk use the phrase toxic femininity. /s
https://www.news18.com/news/buzz/women-vs-women-toxic-femini...
https://thoughtcatalog.com/january-nelson/2020/07/15-example...
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sex-sexuality-and-ro...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/drnancydoyle/2021/07/13/we-need...
https://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanschocket2/toxic-femininity-exam...
https://www.yesweekly.com/opinion/toxic-femininity-the-under...
If you really think that femininity doesn't come under the microscope, then one can only assume you have no substantial familiarity with feminism.
Even assuming that's true, it doesn't follow that every literal interpretation should be or is understood as pejorative, which leads to the question of why this one should be understood that way.
Given that toxic masculinity has specific definitions and specific criticisms to offer that distinguish critically targeted behavior AND also has associated discussion affirming desirable masculine behavior, it makes much more sense to treat it as a specific technique than a general attack on masculinity.
Unless, of course, you think that things like bullying or other forms of social violence for the purpose of establishing personal dominance or personal entertainment is part and parcel with masculinity. Which sounds kindof, I don't know... poisonous or something to me.
I think people certainly use the phrase "toxic femininity", but such examples are from the long-tail.
In institutions, it is no-where near as discussed as much as "toxic masculinity", and probably discussing it would be be frowned upon.
You can see mentions of "toxic masculinity" amongst United Nations literature, for example, which can't be said for "toxic femininity". For example, the expectation of being the breadwinner of the family is said to be one of the things that is "rooted in a patriarchal culture, creat[ing] toxic masculinity". [1]
What isn't said, is that the expectation to become a competent man who is tries to support his family can also be a positive example of masculinity (and indeed is desirable to women), in addition to being the traditional one.
If this expectation is cast only being a "toxic" one, then that is a confusing message for young men, and leaves them without what was one of the traditional motivation for going to college, and improving yourself, so that you can get a good job and better shoulder responsibility when you want to start a family.
[1] https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/stories/2019/2/compilation-b...
Gender norms that are criticised by feminists are in real life frequently re-enforced by women for example. Even feminists like much of the political left are also fragmented and have differing opinions. This lack of a consensus combined with an expectation to behave in a specific way and a group that can be somewhat trigger happy in going from "statistically this group of people is privileged" to "this person from this group is privileged" is I think deeply problematic and challenging to navigate as a men. I also think it's incredibly stupid from political standpoint.
Unfortunately it's difficult to engage in such discussions in a constructive way because they are very attractive to people who see feminists as an enemy.
Forbes and Psychology Today are long-tail low-relevance now?
> What isn't said, is that the expectation to become a competent man who is tries to support his family can also be a positive example of masculinity
Something along these lines is said in many substantial discussions of masculinity (including the one I pointed to in GP). You want other examples?
https://umatter.princeton.edu/respect-matters/healthy-mascul...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2mzxeViCko
https://www.buzzfeed.com/sydrobinson1/examples-of-positive-m...
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/05/becoming-...
Nobody is attacking competence as toxic, or support of family as toxic.
What is actually critiqued is a normalization of social violence, commenting on bullying or assault with "oh, boys will be boys," dismissal of feelings with "walk it off," the idea that real men don't go to therapy or turn to people for emotional help, etc etc.
One can only think of that as a general attack on masculinity if... that's what you think masculinity is. Which sounds bona fide toxic to me.
One area I do think is interesting, is the issue of uncollected child maintenance payments (at least in the UK). [1] This has not had a campaign behind it, in the same way as the "Gender pay gap" has had, yet just also affects the material circumstances of many women.
I imagine it could be one issue where there might be agreement on, between those who lean towards "traditional gender roles" and some feminist organisations.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/16/silenc...
The publications are not, their discussion of "toxic femininity" is. Discussions of "toxic masculinity" have long been the hegemony.
> Nobody is attacking competence as toxic
I see this happening a lot. Particularly, that men who are in positions of power (might own their own company, or run other companies) have only reached where they are, because they benefit from a corrupt patriarchy, not because of their competency and willingness to work.
> What is actually critiqued is a normalization of social violence, commenting on bullying or assault with "oh, boys will be boys," dismissal of feelings with "walk it off," the idea that real men don't go to therapy or turn to people for emotional help, etc etc.
Why is this called "toxic masculinity"? To flip it around, could you imagine "toxic femininity" being used to a describe a woman not wanting to pursue engineering because she thinks it isn't what women typically are seen to do? Why would you say it is "toxic masculinity" when a man doesn't want to talk about his feelings, because it isn't what men typically are seen to do?
The critique is accompanied with the idea that masculinity is itself a social construct, and if only boys/men could be freed from this social construct, then they will be free from "toxic" aspects of masculinity.
However arguably this isn't the case, and leads you to worse outcomes for men and boys. For example, to "stop bullying" a headteacher in the UK banned (typically boys) from playing football at break times. [1] I don't believe masculinity is entirely a social construct, and here boys are being deprived of ways to positively express their masculinity, through competition and team building. I also think there is a difference in how men and women typically bond, with men tending to bond more through activities.
Male bonding through shared activities is something that has declined a lot in the US (see the book "Bowling Alone"). If men are finding it more difficult today dealing with emotional issues, the answer may not be that they need to deal with their "toxic masculinity" by "speaking more", but they are actually suffering from their lack of ability to identify with other men through shared activities.
It isn't, in other words, their own fault, but rather a shift in society, which in this individual example, would rather ban a game that involves competition and winners, in case there are losers, or exclusion. "Toxic masculinity" isn't therefore the issue, rather it would be a lack of ability to express masculinity.
"Unstructured games can sometimes lead to nasty comments, aggressive behaviour or children feeling left out, she added." [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-56568473
> bullying or other forms of social violence for the purpose of establishing personal dominance or personal entertainment is part and parcel with masculinity
For those who think neither of those has anything to do with masculinity, using the word masculinity to describe it would be wrong. One could be a bit colorful to call it a poisonous use of words, ie injecting an harmful substance into the language.
A few decades ago researchers looked at how language get used in conflicts, and they had a major discover. The most effective way to enable people to attack other people is to describe other human being as being less than human. Toxic waste. Insects. Poison. Garbage. Language that dehumanizing groups of people and dehumanizing their behavior is almost a requirement in order for human on human violence.
I’m not convinced that all those men need to go to college, but they clearly need something. They need to feel like they’re part of society. Nothing good can come of an entire generation that feels lost, without purpose, and unwanted.
This. We are seeing the results of what was reported in the book Boys Adrift.
My older son just graduated high school. He has no interest in college at the moment, and has shown a gift for working with his hands. He is currently doing a carpentry apprenticeship with an acquaintance that runs a renovation and design company. He loves the work, loves the people he works with[0], and comes home and wants to build more stuff. He's making pretty decent money as an 18 year old, and is part of something that very much embodied.
[0] His crew is run by Swedish woman who was trained as a metal worker, so it isn't just a bunch of dudes, which is also great.
Looking back a decade later, it would have been very beneficial if I didn't go to university but instead did an apprenticeship and developed from there, built up confidence and independence incrementally and forming my path iteratively.
Most of my friends and family actually went (are going) on such a path, from apprenticeship/trade-school to working and eventually advanced training or university later in life.
In Switzerland this model is widely appreciated and seems to be the default (I didn't look at numbers). Newly the (first) apprenticeship is called "Erstausbildung" (initial education), implying that it is the first of many steps in our education, revisited/expanded at later stages in life.
In many other (OECD) countries this seems not to be the case and college/university is regarded as the default or thing to aspire to for everyone. I personally don't agree with that notion and have become more and more convinced of a more continuous and flexible education that isn't necessarily tied to academics.
As a son of a blue collar mechanic, I am all for this; we need more tradespeople in the US, and I suspect he'll be well on his way to financial security at least as early if not earlier than my son (if he takes care of his finances).
I find it fascinating you needed to drop this comment in order to justify your son's work environment, implying that all male environments are inherently toxic. It's very rare to find people suggesting that an all female work environment is inherently bad.
It is a small world and I am 98% sure that your son has been in my house recently.
This is very perspective dependent. I’m a black college student now and every conversation with friends back home includes some mention of dropping out because it’s not for us as well. When you see people with equivalent resumes already coasting by in the job market because they could get their last names and LinkedIn photos past the screening and into an interview it’s hard to believe that’ll change post-graduation. And most of us are already in planning on entrepreneurship because we know we’re not what companies are looking for even with fancy CS degrees. It’s like if I’ll have to sell sneakers to make ends meet after college anyways I might as well drop out and use that money bootstrapping this inventory SaaS. Innovation out of desperation, I guess.
It’s no way to live. But I think we’re approaching an inflection point.
If someone's trying to talk you into quitting and giving up because no one wants you because you're black, well.. that doesn't sound like a good friend to me.
Don't get me wrong -- a few tech-billionaires dropped out of college, and apparently it worked out for some. So if you want to try that out, then that'd seem like a different issue. But dropping out because you're black sounds crazy.
All that said, if you want to feel out the waters, why not apply for an internship? Internships can be awesome! -- you can get experience and money while still being a student, plus it can be fun!
HR typically wants their diversity numbers up badly so if you're gay, a woman, and/or black they are already incredibly inclined to hire you, as long as you pass the interviews.
It's not a walk in the park, but you have this going for you and it's a big advantage imo.
I can only recommend that you have to base life decisions on your own experience, because it can differ dramatically.
I have an experience from which I have drawn some conclusions - I am an immigrant and many of my co-immigrants are convinced that the locals dislike them, they feel they are being treated unfairly, etc.
I was unable to square my experience with their's: surely they can't be imagining things, but at the same time I cannot be just magically lucky. Some of them are older generation, maybe things were different back then. Maybe, when they face difficulties they are more likely to attribute it to discrimination. Maybe some behavioural stereotyoes play a role - I don't know.
For a while I wanted to try a 'secret shopper' experiment, create two fake Linkedin profiles, identical except background- try applying for jobs with them. Never got round to it.
Why do you say that? Because I can tell you as an employee of a FAANG company that you are exactly what these companies are looking for. They’ve got serious diversity issues - especially among Black men (not assuming a gender here just facts) - and they are desperate to balance themselves out.
I mean that as an encouraging statement. You ARE who is being looked for. Be confident in that and use it to your advantage.
That is cultural transition & stereotype threat first-generation college attendees face, regardless of race.
> When you see people with equivalent resumes already coasting by in the job market because they could get their last names and LinkedIn photos past the screening and into an interview it’s hard to believe that’ll change post-graduation
If anything, they are probably getting introductions/doors opened for them by friends & family. It sounds like you are probably applying for some of the most competitive positions in the world, Google and many other places have less than 1% acceptance rate for interns. Harvard is an order of magnitude less selective. It sucks, but don't let struggling to get an internship get you down.
https://careers.google.com/jobs/results/132267679726609094-s...
>students who are a member of a group that is historically underrepresented in the technology industry will receive priority in the selection process. This group includes women, ethnic minorities and students with disabilities.
There are certainly black individuals who would pursue a career in tech, if not for the (perhaps earned) perception that tech is hostile towards black people. Things have changed, but the narrative hasn’t, and that is doing real damage.
I’m trying to say the same sort of thing applies to white men and college—just there being a perception of college campuses being hostile to them is going to prevent many of them from going. And people will be hurt by that, in one way or another.
> I’m a black college student now and every conversation
> with friends back home includes some mention of
> dropping out because it’s not for us as well.
And finally, what determines that college is not for the "us" your friend refers to? Culture? Post-graduation job prospects? At least from his perspective.
https://www.sba.gov/business-guide/grow-your-business/minori...
> we’re not what companies are looking for even with fancy CS degrees.
You are exactly what the federal government is looking for. US contract procurement has a significant racial spoils system within it.
Avoid this line of thinking. It may be true, or it may not be. You will probably never know. What I do know is this is an unhelpful and defeatist line of thinking. Instead prove the haters wrong.
As far as I can tell, Big Tech has terrible numbers for diversity and they are tripping over themselves trying to bring the numbers up. I really, truly believe that non-white, non-male candidates are not going to suffer if they can get the resume on the table.
Stay the course. Good things await.
But there's more because I just started college and going to finish it.
It's the only way to innovate imo.
taway1343@gmail.com
Just for what it's worth, I (not black, but from a different group that is not looked upon kindly by HR types) took the route of EEE Degree -> PhD (dropped out) -> Software Engineer at Relatively Elite company (not FAANG, but about as good as we have in Melbourne, AU) -> running eCommerce businesses from home (selling used video games on eBay as well as a USB oscilloscope I designed as a student, mostly through Amazon).
If you're smart and skilled, you can make an absolute killing doing something that stoners or less intelligent people do to "get by", and at the same time spend massive amounts of quality time with your (probably at this stage future) wife and kids.
If you want to have a chat about it, feel free to shoot us an email (see profile). But long story short, even if you're locked out of the traditional job market it doesn't mean you should give up on developing your skills or give up hope. Capitalism provides, man.
I had enough EE in college to change a light switch without burning the house down.
However, that book-learnin' fell apart when confronted with troubleshooting a strangely wired room, and I got very polite while asking him over to bail me out.
These fellows eschewing the ivory tower, where being of European extraction and bearing a Y-chromosome on the college campus is an indictment, are going to trade schools and will make fat piles of cash repairing plumbing.
Hopefully, they are gracious with all the Grievance Studies majors who are standing by to condescend in their direction.
On the other hand, electricians have weird gaps in their knowledge. If I ask them to do something slightly out of the ordinary, this becomes apparent. For example, none of them understand inductive coupling, or even know what it is. When I ask them to do certain things to avoid inductive coupling, they give me this indulgent smile, and do what I ask, although it's clear they don't understand why.
I eventually wound up doing the low voltage wiring myself, because I simply couldn't explain to them why you don't run low voltage wires through the same holes as the A/C wires. One of them tried to run a 12VDC wire in 25 feet of conduit with a 120VAC wire.
They also simply did not understand how generators worked, and botched up the wiring for mine.
It's the same with roofers. They have no idea what galvanic corrosion is, and will invariably use the wrong nails for anything metal.
After university I was well equiped to do freelancer work in my field and earned well.
I don't think this "you have to be hard or else you won't survive"-mentality in the US is very beneficial to its society as a whole. Ideally you want to live in a society where everybody is well educated, healthy, happy, friendly and so on. Maybe it is a naive idea, but I think this is more achievable if there is collective investment into those goals rather than internal economical warfare where everybody is a army of one, except for the big corporations who will happily milk a atomized, divided population.
Yet I am constantly amazed by how much some of you guys endure. I just wish you wouldn't have to.
Area, ethnic, cultural, gender, and group studies (I'm assuming "Grievance Studies" falls under this category), at least in the US, have been in steady decline since 2008, and even at their peak only accounted for 0.5% of majors (now just 0.3%). Even if you want to add in humanities in general that has gone from 3% to just above 2%
The idea that college campuses are ever more filled with people studying "useless" majors is a fiction. The largest areas of major concentration are business, biology, health professions, and engineering and all of these have been more or less growing for years.
There is this pervasive myth that most students in undergrad are having trouble transitioning to industry because they wasted their time studying their non-practical passion, but the data[0] clearly shows that the trends for the last decade have been increasing focus on career oriented practical majors.
[0] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_322.10.a...
That's not to condescend on electricians, they clearly have a useful skill. And being able to certify a house pays a good few hundred pounds a day, nothing to sniff at.
But if you're used to looking at physical models, learning a few conventions and adding another model won't be terribly difficult.
I think a lot of people are actually better off doing that kind of work. There's a tangible output that is much easier to connect to purposefulness than if your job is mainly in the ideas realm. A cousin of mine that I grew up with is a carpenter and seems to cheerful all the time, now that he knows what his thing is. I grew up with him and it wasn't always so.
> all the Grievance Studies majors
So you're polite to those you find useful and insulting to people majoring in something you presumably disagree with? And assuming they will all be condescending to a plumber or electrician for some reason?
Perhaps you don't have to look quite so far away if you're looking to reduce the amount of condescending happening in the room you're standing in?
I’m a registered nurse which is a weird hybrid of university-level knowledge (understanding pharm and patho) but also it is a physical trade (turning patients, providing personal cares, mental resilience). It has roots in being vocational with a push in the last 50 years to provide an academic background to turn it into a profession.
Floor nursing is the bread and butter of the profession, but it burns you quick. Older nurses, particularly in medical-surgical nursing, tend to take on less stressful 8 hour day shifts, end up as spinsters, or have a terrible home life that they’ve resigned into accepting.
I moved into a desk position in my mid 30s and can’t possibly imagine going back to the physicality of it all.
This feels very much like the "astronomy/telescope" argument.
I hate to have to mention this, but not all American men are white.
Its schrodingers privilege. the privilege was being so priveleged that you were pushed out of the traditional credentialing system.
I read somewhere that (ironocally) plumbing it the less likely thing to be "automated" via an AI or something.
Get in early. Get in a union. 25-30 years to retirement in most unions. You don't want to be 60, and still in construction.
The test is easy, but figure 1000-2000 guys are taking the test too, so you need to get most of the questions right to get in. An oral interview counts for 1/2 the hiring process.
Just say you love working with your hands--love unions, but understand the needs of the contractors too.
Remember it's construction. You're around guys all day long. It's brainless work, and you will never have to act cheery when the owner's spoiled kid comes to work.
I do not recommend non-union construction at all.
Then again---hide in school for a long time. I loved college. It was cheaper 25 years ago though, and not that fun, but much better than any job I've had.
Your interest will change as you age.
It's easier to think people are being misled than to think people are taking different decisions because their reality is actually different.
The bigger problem to me is that with such a high cost for university education, our future electricians won't have one. Whereas in Europe they very possibly might. I know which society I prefer to live in and it's not the one where people are less educated.
What narrative about uniform privilege? Can you give some sources?
I've also never heard privilege explained as making life "just easy". I've heard just for example that life can still be hard but your skin color is not one of the things making your life hard.
I'd be interested in reading these narratives that are so different from the narratives I've read about privilege.
It is. In France college is 400€ a year.
It is unsurprising less men are finishing college in the face of that culture.
While there’s going to be many causes, the aforementioned seem more important than a message of privilege.
Is it entirely false though? What benefit does a college degree in sociology does to a person (and even broader society) when the person will likely be in over 100k+ debt?
Men who fail to provide or "fit in" to their "role" in society become depressed, and then they kill themselves. :/
If you contrast to an attorney or doctor -- those firms/practices are extremely challenging to start and operate on your own. The salaries of your employees are high at best, marketing is extremely expensive, and insurance can wipe out a firm/practice.
Not withstanding restrictive licensing systems that require you to put in X years working crap jobs for crap pay under someone who already has the license to ensure that you've "paid enough dues" you're not gonna go around undercutting everyone once you get your license.
So this is a direct result of the move away from color blind policies, to race based policies.
> Keith E. Smith, a mental-health counselor and men’s outreach coordinator at the University of Vermont, said that when he started working at the school in 2006 he found that men were much more likely to face consequences for the trouble they caused under the influence of drugs and alcohol.
This is exactly what black students report as racism in school.
Seems like evidence that race based policies are just racist.
> In 2008, Mr. Smith proposed a men’s center to help male students succeed. The proposal drew criticism from women who asked, “Why would you give more resources to the most privileged group on campus,” he said. Funding wasn’t appropriated, he said, and the center was never built.
Obviously white men are not in fact privileged on university campuses.
“Female students in the U.S. benefit from a support system established decades ago, spanning a period when women struggled to gain a foothold on college campuses. There are more than 500 women’s centers at schools nationwide. Most centers host clubs and organizations that work to help female students succeed.”
Men are failing because it is the policy not to support them.
Observations (based on the figure alone):
1. White-Males had the lowest college-enrollment-rates across all categories. They got the lowest in the two lowest income-brackets; basically a three-way tie in the next income-bracket; and just a little higher than Hispanic-Males in the highest income-bracket.
2. Asians had the highest enrollment-rates across all income-brackets.
3. Asians were relatively constant in their enrollment-rates, regardless of income or gender, always above 70%. (Always above ~83%, if excluding the lowest income-bracket.) The gender-gap still leaned toward Asian-Females over Asian-Males, but not by much.
4. Blacks varied heavily by income. Blacks had pretty low enrollment-rates in the lowest income-bracket, but got some of the highest enrollment-rates in the higher income-brackets (after Asians).
5. Black-Females had an odd pattern-deviation: like Black-Males, their enrollment-rates increased dramatically with family-income, getting the highest non-Asian enrollment-rate by the second-highest income-bracket. But then, oddly, their enrollment-rate fell by ~8% from the second-highest to the highest income-bracket.
6. Hispanics were pretty consistent with Whites, especially for Males. For Females, Whites had higher rates in the lowest income-bracket, while Hispanics had somewhat higher rates in all other income-brackets.
7. Ignoring race, enrollment-rates increased significantly with family-income.
8. Ignoring race, enrollment-rates were much higher for Females than Males across all income-brackets.
https://scholar.harvard.edu/goldin/publications/homecoming-a...
>Once barriers to female careers were lowered and their access to higher education was expanded, two key factors may have played a role in the female college advantage: relatively greater economic benefits of college for females and relatively higher effort costs of college going and prepara- tion for males. (girls exceeded boys in secondary school performance and attainment)
End of the day if the loan can't be written off, if the loan is just handed out to 18 year olds and has almost no limit then the organization that asks for the loan will inevitably balloon out of all proportion and no longer be reflective at all of the value you get back for almost all cases.
I say that as someone who managed to actually pay off their student loan, dread to think how people who are late 30s, still renting and still with 5 figures of college debt feel.
Hope this trend continues, why throw away the down payment of a mortgage to an institution that has spent the past decade telling you they don't want you. If in 10 years I'm seeing headlines about colleges unable to stay open from low admissions I'll be smiling.
The moment that a serious, legitimate credential system appears, every average university will disappear overnight. We'll be left with an oligarch class that attends the top ±30 universities and everyone else getting a AmaGoogBook certificate of completion.
My brother tried several different educational paths, pushed by my parents. In the end he got a sort of burnout. After years now he is picking up some work, mainly helping elderly still living alone on any tasks (from computer related to doing groceries). He seems happy, finally.
My other brother hated all his schools, got bullied a lot, he specialized in agriculture in the end. Now he's a truck driver (with one of those super big ones), he likes it. He can still give nice advice on what to plant in my garden, so there's that.
I see that my son is also really interested in many things, but school is not so much "his thing". Sitting still, listening, it's not making him happy. If he has any aspiration of building a life without formal schooling I'd support it. There is so much to learn online. He can be an entrepreneur and we can help him get there. In fact, I'd enjoy it.
Who knows with the insane cost of education, this generation of men may end up self-taught, happy and (in the US important) debt free. Maybe we should worry about the people missing out on this opportunity?
My brother was a professional basketball player up until his mid-30s. I remember when he was about the same age as the males of the story, he was deciding between a four-year scholarship at an American college, or a four-year contract in the Australian professional league. The pitch from the college was that he could return to Australia in year five and earn x. The pitch from the local team was that he could earn x by year five, but have been earning for each of the first four years; the pro team offered university payments, car, and so on. Pros and cons either way.
He eventually got his degree studying remotely in the later years of his basketball career and transitioned to a desk job. There's always a sense of what might've been, but I think things worked out well enough.
Everyone who graduates knows this, and this is the quiet part most won't even say out loud to themselves, and so we hear it's for other reasons like knowledge, relationships, and the experience. We will deny it and even gaslight people over it, because it's our source of social power, but for young men who need the concept framed concretely, this is the real choice.
What these young men need to be told is: the way the world really works is, there are people who graduated, and people who didn't. The latter almost exclusively work for the former, and the former find each other so that they can assign them to manage the latter on their behalf. Further, the former work together to ensure that they do not work for the latter, or have any accountability to them. As an individual non-graduate, you will always be working against a literal conspiracy against you. The exceptions who appear to "break through" and succeed, mainly exist and have their stories promoted to preserve the invisibility of the ceiling and keep you running on hope.
Sure, you can make "six figures" (the stupidest euphemism for 100k that is the very bottom end salary of membership in the current elite) in a trades job, but what you will not have is opportunity. Salary means nothing if it is not supported by opportunity, autonomy, leverage into assets, and transferrable social status to your kids.
The result is predictable, where they're having their countries, political levers, cultures and opportunities taken from them because they didn't realize they needed defending.
If you have decided not to graduate, welcome to the underclass. They'll tell you that you do it to yourself, and you'll probably never understand.
5000 people applied for a single position and 15 of them were women. This was for a high paying tech job.
Those who manage to jump through all of the hoops don't realize that there is a secondary scam waiting for them: working for a wage without significant stock options while someone makes millions sitting around doing nothing off of their effort. We've had movies made about this for many years and still it's so strange how it's not acknowledged.
Also: who is friend or foe? The lines have blurred significantly, which is a driving force in WANTING to change things in the first place. There's even loss of solidarity between family members, next generations.
There's no incentive to try. If I were the same age as these young men, I wouldn't bother either.
I never felt like this kind of victim while in college (mid-2000s). I wonder if all colleges have changed or if society has changed. If it is society that has changed, maybe our colleges are simply reflecting the real-world change.
And it's not that I'm against such structures or groups on the basis of shared identity that you're born with, but I think it would be beneficial for those structures ( especially when they're company funded ) to have niches for those who don't fit niches.
What is 'merit' for?
If your answer is 'distinguishing between things of worth and things that are valueless' then there's a problem, and you are prematurely contextualizing. Briefly, you cannot be trusted to dictate the contexts of value for the whole world around you. You're missing far too much. And it matters. Not just morally, but practically.
Zillow has a number of houses for sale in Toledo for under $40k. Like, they need some work, but a real house, under 40k.
I think that guy is doing fine, he should just keep doing exactly what he's doing.
1) Enlist in the military. pay is sub-par, but your living expenses are well taken care of. picking a job that has a civilian equivalent is clutch here.. eg combat medic, electrician, plumber, various IT-related fields.
2) Skilled trades - eg plumber, electrician, HVAC-related. These pay from 50k to 150k depending on what type of work you do. The "high end" for example being a new-construction electrician, working for themselves, making $75/hr with overtime. All these fields have high job security - plumbing, electricity, and HVAC are not a 'fad', and are likely to increase in demand over time.
3) Own a "low tech" business, the sort you might already work for if you are a teenager. Eg...landscaping. You can make $15/hr running a weed eater, or with a small investment and some people skills - you can pay other people $15/hr to run a weed eater, and you run the business. This is more difficult than it seems on the surface (management and people skills), but it is not something you need a college education to succeed at.
4) Specialty/niche fields...these are more difficult to break into if you don't know someone already. Some examples are mosquito spraying(for a city), [water] well digging, or roadside assistance for a larger contract(like cell phone roadside assistance, AAA, or dealer contracts). These are easier to break into if you already know someone who owns that type of business, who will show you the ropes so you know what you are getting into.
This isn't an exhaustive list by any means, but hopefully someone finds it stimulating enough to come up with some ideas about work options that do not involve a mountain of student debt.
Seeing how many misinformation is going around and the people swallowing it, this seems more important than ever before.
From the article.
There are folks getting useless degrees and/or taking on too much debt, but getting a college degree on the whole is worthwhile.
What about just measuring the ROI of the degree? https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/13/your-money/college-degree...
"All of the largest programs in electrical and communications engineering, for instance, allowed most of their graduates to recoup their educational investment in five years or less. But many programs in some fields, like drama and dance, show no return on investment, the report found, meaning most of their graduates are earning less than a typical high school graduate."
So this study more or less backs claim that some degrees offer a positive ROI while others do not. As to whether or not a given degree is "worthwhile," I'd leave that as an exercise for the reader. :)
I think we can say it is in fact causal that on average a college degree earns more money than not having one just by this fact alone.
Going deep into debt for a credential that doesn't have a reasonably large future value is a huge mistake many are pushed into making.
If the class were gender-balanced the odds of that would be 1/512; I have no idea what it means ("girls are much more interested in using the library?") but I think it's significant.
If each arrival at the desk were an independent draw from the full class, then, sure, the chance of any given set of 9 arrivals having 9 women would be 1/512. (Though the chance of the sequence of 10 including 9 women and 1 man is 10/1024, or about 5 times more likely; by cherry-picking the set of arrivals to consider, you are añready making the set around you seem more unlikely than it is.)
Of course, if they were where independent the case, there’d also be a non-negligible case of a repeat in that set of arrivals; the fact that you chose a set in line at the same time demonstrates that they aren't a set of independent events. So the whole basis of your 1/512 even on the cherry-picked set is invalid.
There is zero significance to that observation.
- women more likely to study and solve logistical study problems together
- men more likely to pirate books
- men less likely to be out during normal hours
- men less likely to choose majors requiring library books
- and of course, higher college enrollment by women
I am not saying any of these were necessarily in play in your situation, but some probably are and colleges and employers should be thinking about them.
My former boss of the department learned enough chemistry through self-study. I heard Raspberry Pi was hiring guys to work as microchip design with little prior exposure.
In my worldview, everyone gets their GCSEs and goes and gets a job. OR, they follow a trade route, and attend a technical college (in the UK meaning of the word) to learn a skill. OR, the really brainy ones take an academic route, get their A levels, then head off to university to become part of the intellectual elite. I'm thinking 5% of the population here. OR, you get your A levels and then go into a polytechnic for a highly-skilled vocational job.
Polytechnics don't really exist anymore, they've all converted to universities.
Basically, we should all just return to an educational system that we had in the 70's. It was a system that wasn't broken, but we decided to "fix" it anyway.
1: https://www.act.org/content/dam/act/unsecured/documents/Info...
Tech likes to pretend credentials don’t matter, but that’s entirely not true.
Not surprising that enrollment is down when too many men think learning things is for nerds.
Source: am an American male
People can be really mean, especially when you aren't "smart". I had to read a lot about a lot of things just so I could go to lunch and participate in the chatter with coworkers.
But, not getting a degree never blocked me from getting great money or any position, I just had to work hard for it, always had to prove myself, earn trust. It's life on hard mode for sure, but not a blocker.
There are tons of high paying jobs available to people who learn trades, either in trade schools or on the job. Much of tech is like a trade - as a software engineer, I certainly have more in common with a car mechanic working on custom builds than I do with an accountant, lawyer, doctor or CEO. A lot of Americans were sold the false idea that college would help them know what they wanted to do, and make money. But it's not a magic beansprout you just ride up to the heights of society... definitely not when everyone else is doing it and everyone else is in debt. You have to actually be motivated. And if you're motivated... well it's kike George Carlin said about self help books: You went to the bookstore to go find a self help book, you're motivated, what do you need the book for?
You give three examples but only tie the last to the admissions issue. Could you expand on the others and how they might be relevant to this issue?
Men still have every opportunity a woman has. In addition, they are still recognized more for leading positions. They also dominate about every trade related job.
Yet, they are 'left without a purpose', when all they need it to do is do whatever they want.
People from working class rust belt towns in the UK, for example, can't just do what they want, since there are no opportunities. But they are told that they are privileged and can do what they want, and then people wonder why support for labour/leftism has plummeted in working class communities.
What "equal right" do you mean, that "equaled opportunities in the labor market and education"?
Also you seem to miss on the fact that men get worse grades in school (which some say is because of discrimination), which makes it harder for them to enter university.
Its just like the Ed loan program..
Many don't realize its a teaching goal tool, those that get that they need to form a business around their brand to pay off the loan win and those that do not lose and society loses.
We should not bet on society losing this time around such as the elites did in the US!
I doubt this has anything to do with it. What is the argument here? They hear this and believe it so they don't think they need school?
I grew up in a white, working class community, and in my experience nobody paid attention to liberals on Twitter calling them privelaged. Certainly not enough to decide not to go to college over it.
Like the claim that all those people that joined the extreme right wing groups because the "libs said they were Nazis so why not".
As a brown person I think the former is definitely still true. The latter is definitely not true, at least looking at the average white man's number of tinder matches compared to mine.
History is just that: history. A white male going to uni _right now_ hasn't really enjoyed those historical advantages; they were before their time.
Yes there are other advantages in the modern world to being a white male, but there are also equivalent disadvantages, too. Easier to get power...but if you're male nobody is there to defend you or help you. Help yourself, defend yourself _and_ others, be the breadwinner (otherwise you're useless) "man up".
And because men need the support. I suspect that a lot fewer men needed support in, say, 1950.
Why do more men need support than did in 1950? I think the first reason may be because of education. Our education system is failing in a way that it wasn't in 1950. (This may be too harsh. If, say, 10% of high school graduates went to college in 1950, and 50% do now, then that means that the top 10% then were more prepared for college than the top 50% are now. But apples-to-apples would be to ask whether the top 10% then were better prepared than the top 10% are now. I don't have a good feel for the answer to that question.)
My answer is that when men were the vast majority consumers of higher education the system was built to support them.
This accords with what the social justice people would say, and I think they are right about that.
What they are wrong about is that men today should be denied support that other groups have today because men in the 1950s had support that other groups in the 1950s did not have.
It is also worth noting that providing supports for men does not mean removing supports for other under represented groups.
Are Academics Disproportionately Gay? A new analysis suggests that's the case, and that academic work -- at once solitary and social in nature -- makes it particularly attractive to those who are not straight.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/01/26/study-suggest...
I guess it means what you mean by “succeed”. Going to college is and always has been a reliable way towards earning more money[0]. The issue isn’t that college doesn’t work, the issue is that it’s basically an asset bubble of sorts and the cost exceeded its value.
If huge chunks of future generations skip college because it’s unaffordable, that will be bad for us as a society. It would be much better to reduce the cost of college so that it’s more valuable for more people, rather than having younger generations opt out due to the high cost.
0 - Degree dependent, of course. Music degrees have been always poorly valued by the market.
If you look at some CS graduate making $200,000 a year and assume they'd have made $50,000 without the degree, college looks like an incredibly good investment.
On the other hand, if you look at someone paying $1000 per credit hour for online video lectures? I've seen online video at 1% that price being described as overpriced.
That last part about exceeding it's value contradicts the notion that it currently IS a reliable way toward earning more money. At least net more money.
IMHO a bunch of professors should be able to start their own "non-profit" college with minimal overhead. But I suppose a lot of them aren't really into teaching anyway. Maybe we need to separate education from funding their hobbies (research).
To do that, would be very helpful if the government stopped giving zero interest loans. This is resulting in costs skyrocketing.
You'd think so. But then again look at healthcare in the US.
At the same time, the "elites" do make sure their offspring does get a prestigious (signaling) college/university education. So baring big changes to how society is run, some things will be difficult to get to without a college education.
Has it be right since at least the 1990s though? There’s clear divergence between income and college costs in the USA, and it’s hard to see why, given everyone in the industry seems to be taking a part of the honey pot. Seriously, how did we arrive to “textbook for a semester are more expensive than tuition is in other counties”?
And to top that off, career "fit" has been marketed so hard to kids that no one wants to go into specialized trades, which will both almost definitely pay way better and be way more fulfilling than the random inside sales job that they land right out of school
There was this pervading "common sense" that if you didn't go to college, you weren't going to be able to attract the kind of spouse that you wanted, or that you would somehow be looked down on in the reproductive market. The smart ones figured out that this was actually a handy way to filter out superficial candidates.
Fast forward 25 years, and I see many middle-aged men who are dissatisfied with their corporate lives but haven't build any income potential in something other than corporate America, so they are stuck in jobs that are increasingly subject to the pressures of globalism, etc.
Not necessarily. Bad deals are generally taken due to deceptive marketing, something that drove a lot of the college applications over the last two generations. If deceptive marketing is still in play but one group, e.g. American men, is no longer being targeted...
The other part of this is kids and biological reality. Can't imagine doing a trade or physical job while pregnant. Even after birth it took my wife a solid year or more before she was physically back to "normal".
You don't need to go to college to be successful, but the data speaks for itself. College graduates have always, on average, earned more and enjoyed significantly lower unemployment. Even if that weren't the case, the fact that college-level jobs are easier on the body and people can generally do them well for 20+ years longer is a huge benefit.
I was raised by two blue collar people and my parents were big on college. My father worked as an electrician and even by the time I was 16, his body was starting to give out. He's basically unable to ply his trade at this point due to several complications related to his career, and works a near-minimum wage office job now. I'm sure he would gladly trade half a years salary when he was 18 to get an additional 20 high-earning working years.
I know classmates of mine (2008) who still have 20, 30, 40k in debt. Even some of the kids who came from a bit of family money still struggled for the better part of their 20's to pay everything back.
Because there is much more possible value in college than just the education.
Socializing is a huge part of it. College is a good place to learn how to make friends, date, network, etc.
It's also nearly free at many schools, so I don't envision the future you're describing ever happening. Most 18-22 year olds couldn't think of a better place to be than on a campus almost exclusively filled with people in their age group.
No one does it because we intuitively understand that there is no real value in doing so; the purpose such institutions serve is credentialing, not education.
(End paraphrase)
- Education
- Certification
- Network
I don't get that line of thinking:
1. Education isn't a passive lecture-consumption activity. A "world-class professor" who put a lecture on youtube is going to have exactly zero time to talk to you as a student.
2. There's probably not that much difference between the teaching ability of a "world-class professor" and your "average" good professor. That's especially true for undergrad subjects.
I think you're assuming a false equivalency, akin to "why have parents when you can watch videos made by the best parents in the world on television?" The tech version may have many similarities, but it's not equivalent.
That's what I spent a semester (total)... in the early 90's.
These days it is more like $5,000 a semester (per class)!
Because most employers will not even consider your application without a degree.
This guy was born for sales.
Perhaps unsurprisingly he also was terrible in college. Just did not work with his brain. He dropped out, worked some odd jobs, settled in to working a tree company, cutting down trees. Dangerous work to say the least.
He finally went back to school and took like 2 classes a semester and graduated with whatever degree he could string together from the local college, and it took him ages, I think he spent 7 years total in undergrad. It was affordable because it was just some local state school.
2 months after graduation? He's a sales rep at a B2B software firm. A year later he's the top of his sales group. His potential is huge now, and that door was firmly shut to him before he graduated. College, for him, was just a piece of paper he needed, and his life took a dramatic turn when he got it.
There clearly seems to be a lot more knowledge in some countries about which jobs lead to high paying careers, and the U.S. still has an antiquated mindset about this.
I saw her again once in the lab, and I asked her why did you switch, she said, and I quote her exact words: "why would I sit and code all day when I've this a$$, pointing at her back."
I honestly didn't know what to say afterward. Our program had special scholarship for women, and we had only one woman (out of 30 or so) and that was more than 10 years ago.
The knowledge is there and completely trivial to obtain. Google "starting salaries for XXXX major".
Good programs exist in this space, but they're the exception (and no single person can possibly create a properly comprehensive survey without resorting to opinion polling).
Is your company paying a reasonable rate? I know a few people looking for entry level jobs in tech and they have trouble getting callbacks
Mirrors my experience though, and probably many in eg finance as well. There is a clear, well publicized path from degree -> money that any middle class+ guy can walk.
Sad the article doesn’t go into specifics though, it’s all just “degrees”.
Using a low estimate of 15% of CS degrees going to women, you'd get 750 women applying.
What are you doing to get so many women to give your company an immediate rejection and apply somewhere else?
High paying usually means senior, seniority is usually 5-10 years, so you would need 15% 10 years ago.
There were three in my cohort of ~35; and that was much more dense on that programme that was a (more CS-oriented) subset of the EE department's variants - something like 15 of 400 in first year, higher ratio (i.e. fewer female drop-outs/more doing MEng) by the end I think though. Only a few years ago.
And even then, your conclusion is only valid for a graduate entry role - for something more senior you'd need to at least look at grad rates further back, if not what happens to people once in industry. (We've also assumed 100% grads - or even male/female anyway - do apply to industry at all, vs. not, or something else, or staying in academia, etc. I expect that's roughly true though.)
Still, doesn't that story also point to a surplus of engineers?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/967826/number-bachelors-...
Women really really like to study subjects related to people - even "homeland security, law enforcement and firefighting" is more popular among women than computer science.
The funny thing is we also don't give a shit about credentials anymore. We just want work ethic followed loosely by experience.
Willingness to endure difficult things and learn is all we are really going for in a new hire these days.
What is amazing to me is all of the business leaders who still insist on upholding these arbitrary gatekeepers. You are leaving a ton of talent on the table.
I think the answer for many is to focus harder on the business value equation and to just let the people be free. Running a business like a power fantasy is not going to get you there. The more you try to control people the harder it will be to make money with them in the long term.
I know this is the thing in US and shouldn't surprise me but I'm based in central Europe and honestly the thought of this still feels so abstract to me. I'd love to have an option of choosing jobs that offer stock options.
This seems to characterise almost every single place I have worked for or interviewed at in different ways. I have interviewed at smaller businesses where the entire "management" team doesn't do anything, doesn't come into the office, and is just various family members of the original founder.
Then there are the larger businesses that have a network of people who all know each other and connected and occupy positions with "manager" in them, whose day consists of just telling people to do things that the person they are telling could figure out and do without their existence and better.
https://www.amazon.com/Aint-No-making-2nd-Second/dp/B002NAUW...
Might vary where you live, but my understanding is that the author of a piece is not usually the one picking images and writing the headline. There are some instances where the writer and photographer are the same, but that's not the case here.
It's a story about males who aren't in college, so why would they have photos of males in school? Stats about "people considering not going to college" is not as compelling as this story with stronger stats about what people are actually doing, IMO.
Plus that’s assuming your parents aren’t already old and can afford to feed and house you without seriously harming their own old age plans.
What can university truly offer an 18 year old who already knows what they want to do and is already doing it without an expensive education.
Wish I was that on track when I was 18 and he'll probably be ahead of his peers who went to college by the time they graduate.
You can break into music production without a degree, of course, but it's going to be a challenge in the middle of nowhere Minnesota.
The fact that they were able to buy things while living at home just drives the point home even more- he would not have the disposable income to make those purchases for many years if he decides to go to college.
I am not sure this is a smart move. It seems like he is hoping his music career pans out, but we aren't given a lot of insight into his talent level there.
If you can have a decent lifestyle in Ohio on 40k (big if, when you factor in retirement planning) you can still fundamentally never leave Ohio.
Sure, NYC/SF are super expensive, but almost every urban area is when compared to other smaller cities or rural areas.
The issue is that for a lot of people they can only find an ok job in the major urban area, but it's not enough to live there so they get stuck in the suburban wastelands with 45+ minute drives just to go work 8 hours.
They make enough to get by, but not enough to save and move out to a more desirable living situation in a smaller city or rural area without a secure job lined up.
Like $20 an hour is good in Toledo, but it's probably not what most people are making. That's probably a job you have to work up to for years. At $20 an hour in Toledo you very likely can have a higher quality of life then people making far more in the much larger metro areas. But at $10 an hour ($8.80/$7.25) in Toledo area you're probably worse off due to a lack of public support and opportunities for advancement.
Even more unfortunate is the widespread acceptance of the idea that you need to be successful to be happy/fulfilled.
And regarding repairs, I've been to houses that have decent photos online, but upon entering, they're clearly rotting out. It'd be cheaper to knock the house down and start again.
When I graduated with my degree in philosophy I went on to run a small climbing gym. I was able to jump into software development during the first internet bubble, where start-ups needed warm bodies who can learn quickly. Fortunately, I had scholarships and graduated with minimal debt. So...it all worked out pretty well. I'm not sure it's worth taking on crushing debt for that experience without a guarantee of a job.
That said, not every person is wired to go to college. There are plenty of trades that can foster the some sort of collegial experiences, if you find the right the person to train you. There are very thoughtful craftspeople out there.
I hear this line parroted all the time, and it just rings so hollow. I can't remember any optional classes that I took in undergrad.
I’m not so sure. Why do you need to pay someone to give you lists of books to read, rather than just buying and reading them yourself?
You don't. However, college isn't just a list of books to read, it also includes practical exercises and, most importantly, accountability mechanisms, and there is plenty of evidence that accountability mechanisms tend to improve performance.
The most interesting college classes I took tolerated non-majors reluctantly, if at all. The expectation was that people who were there to be "well-rounded humans" weren't going to take the course seriously.
You shouldn't go to college if you aren't going to be a serious student and you'll be a legitimate risk for dropping out. But if you are willing to commit yourself and get decent grades, you'll be in much better shape than most people with just a high school diploma.
Your advice is also sounds really out of touch with what various jobs pay. The average new college grad makes like 60k or so.
I can only speak to my workplace and team, but we pay product designers with very little experience around 90k a year. I have no licenses and am not a professional engineer, and I make several times that.
The issue is that far too many people are going into debt for college degrees and not getting the degrees. That's the biggest. The secondary issue is that college is becoming more and more expensive, but it is still paying off for the majority of bachelor degree holders.
Took on around 50k at around 5% interest. Wouldn't change a thing in the world about it. Easily paid it off over a few years.
What degree do you have??
Are most of them making a huge mistake? I guess it depends heavily in the credential(s), but I think there has to be a deeper reason for falling and unbalanced undergraduate enrollment amongst men.
Will it work today? Probably. There are few women in the trades. If you can get a cheap degree, it is likely better than no degree.
Engineering or bust just isn’t true.
You sure about that? Or is it that the majority of women don't see themselves unclogging toilets for a living? I have never seen it, but I would suspect list of female applications to plumbing or electrician school is very very short.
Few female applicants to trade schools is consistent with the original statement. If it is societally unacceptable for a woman to be a plumber then I would expect women to act as any rational agent and factor this in when planning their future career.
But like, given they require physical strength, it is hard to make a big deal about it.
Of course clearly when women were under-represented in college, that was due to misogyny. And now that they are over-represented, it's also due to misogyny. No matter what the facts are, the conclusion is the same.
There's a word for that.
It's a lot easier for men to find a decent paying job that doesn't require a college degree and where you won't get regularly harassed.
Most women just don't want to do that. I don't think it has much to do with acceptance. Women that want to become plumbers are few an far between.
There's this from the .uk perspective https://www.fixradio.co.uk/fix-feed/features/post/everybody-...
The companies that have to virtue-signal do so because you wouldn’t notice if they didn’t tell you. I’d prefer they skip that and hire who they want without the pretense, and if that’s not me, fine, but please be honest.
[PDF, French]: https://www.cdpdj.qc.ca/Publications/etude_testing_discrimin...
We did something like this! But we swapped slightly reworded resumes and the response ratio leaned even further in the white classmate’s favor. We just laughed, as if we couldn’t believe that what we half-joked about actually happened. I’m long past the point of being sad. I guess that’s life.
As to morality and practicality, merit as the optimal way to building hierarchy has worked practically. In terms of morality, what do you have that is better? And why/who says its better?
A good education can now be had on YouTube... I have spent the last year learning construction there and the quality of content is excellent. Years ago, I learned to program quite well using online courses and I am sure those have improved even further. I tried to learn diesel mechanics from a textbook That was the top rated in the field, it is shocking how terrible learning from a textbook is.
I am going to have my kids do a combination of apprenticeships and online learning.
Where/what do you teach? When I was doing math & cs - they (especially math) were more than a full time job. Rigor was pretty high - lots of kids failing, dropping out, or transferring schools out. I see this still happening with people I know in school now - mind you not as severe since they’re not in math.
You see this here on HN all the time, articles about "how we do hiring" that start out with "I would only hire someone who I'd want to get coffee with." Which, to me at least, makes it sound like the person is looking to hire friends/drinking buddies that also have technical skills, not employees. It's a signal that the person is looking for "their type of people."
It's so acceptable to hire this way that people feel comfortable opening publishing that, under their own name, as something they are proud of.
I'm not even black (but I am a woman, I grew up poor, and I'm on the older side) and constantly reading about hiring procedures like that makes me feel like I'm very much not welcome.
I hope some of the implicit stigma around older undergrads goes away too.
Not everyone is motivated or gifted enough at 18 to grind through 4 years while maximizing social interactions and general happiness.
I really do believe university education is very beneficial to most people but at different stages of their lives and one solution fits all is not good.
My experience sounds similar to yours. Though, when I tried to go back to school to dive in again, I found the 'system' was highly oriented towards parenting 18yo kids in all the worst ways imaginable. It was nauseating and unbearable being in that environment, and even going through the application/acceptance process (filling out pledges for conduct, right-thinking, etc). Much has changed with online learning, but I still feel the B&M universities are a very ill-fit for independently-minded adult learners.
Learning for people who have work experience is really different. We have context, clear goals and so on. Teaching other 'adult' students is really fun, because we get to figure out what suits them instead of trying to hit measurements predefined by some committee. Ultimately it is just about giving guidance and ideas, kind of like consulting to learn, what to learn and so on.
"Education is wasted on the young" - this was exactly my experience. I didn't know it then, but I first needed to build up confidence, make 'real' mistakes and learn from them. I was also completely unfit for the type of scheduled and predetermined learning that happens at universities. My mind wanders too much and I'm driven by answering my own questions that I feel matter or are interesting. Also a reason why I don't work in large/streamlined orgs.
Of course haha the name brand and few cool professors are keeping me at this point. But I never expected to go from the highest ranking/gpa/scores to having leaving academia even at the edge of the table.
> But dropping out because you're black sounds crazy.
It’s more like “if I can make X amount anyways today, why do it Y way when I’ll be behind anyways? Might as well gain the experience and be in the same position 4-5 years from now?” if that makes sense but I understand it sounding rash through text.
> why not apply for an internship?
It seems we all have the same issue of never getting responses online. It’s very odd considering we’ve done incredibly well when the interview is direct with the person hiring (as in this is the person that makes the final decision), but situations like that are limited.
The parent commentor stated that their cohort has seen evidence of systematic rejection of their resumes. It is a well-documented fact that this happens all the time for female-sounding, black-sounding etc names and pictures.
Suggesting that "no, it's probably just some missing fine tuning on your resume" doesn't really seem like the right response here...
I wore a fitness tracker then and now. I averaged about 10 km in a given shift, where as my daily total now is now closer to 5 or 6. However, now I have time and energy at the end of the day to do an actual physical activity instead of coming home like a limp noodle and taking the next day to recover.
Mentally, there is comradery that I absolutely miss. This is something really hard to explain unless you’re in it. When things got tough, the dark humour got us through. We took care of each others’ loved ones (at their family’s request). We demanded excellence from each other, and (rightfully) called out unsafe practice and supported staff as needed.
However, my home life suffered. It was fine at first as my partner is also a nurse so there was a mutual understanding. However, it started to wear on me when I had kids. I’d come home and my kids would be asleep/at school/daycare, so I’d have missed out on a day’s interaction. I realized that they’re only little once and no job in the world is worth missing out on them.
Here's one source that shows 10 years ago it would have been about 18%.
https://www.aps.org/programs/education/statistics/womenmajor...
These are well paying jobs, but they do require a certain amount of skills. A lot of kids are getting college degrees, but coming out without enough skills to land a lot of in-demand jobs.
As teenagers the whites have a pessimistic attitude about success but the blacks are more optimistic. Barriers to the success of both groups are looming.
The first edition of the book stops there: one is left with the feeling that the plight of the two groups is not that different (e.g. "systemic racism" is a real thing but doesn't seem salient when you are know "white people with black problems") Somehow, however, the blacks believe that "they can overcome".
In a follow-up study a decade later both groups are doing poorly, but the blacks in particular have had their hopes dashed by poverty, problems with the law, problems with work, etc.
Sure. They have never dipped as low as 15% which is why I used it as very safe and generous number. Here's one source.
https://www.aps.org/programs/education/statistics/womenmajor...
> if not what happens to people once in industry
Indeed. What happens to people after they get a job is a relevant factor. It would be interesting to see both dropout rates over a career lifetime and if senior level women in tech are concentrated in a group of companies known to be good to work at via the whisper network.
Even age is a factor. Most folks don't stick with their CS job until retirement age, although some are smart enough to save and retire before that age. Age discrimination is not exactly rare though.
I have no idea where I'd get that kind of data or if it even exists, but maybe someone else does.
Given that kind of data, an industry with a constant deficit of qualified senior level candidates would do well to improve that situation by figuring out how to reduce the dropouts.
> Yet the stakes are too high to ignore, she said. “If you care about our society, one, and, two, if you care about women, you have to care about the boys, too. If you have equally educated numbers of men and women that just makes a better society, and it makes it better for women.”
The possibility that it could be bad for men I guess is not a relevant consideration when evaluating the impact on society.
Now you can get a pretty decent education from watching lots of videos and an education that commensurate with one that you'd plunk down thousands of dollars for at a university or college.
Especially in the era of COVID where they would have you watch videos anyways during a period of lockdown.
So glad I'm not a student right now. I'd feel so ripped off.
I totally agree with your last paragraph.
The original article explicitly addresses this.
What makes you imagine anyone here is blaming people that don’t look like them for something?
Where are these complaining men? I see people critiquing policies. I think you are making up in your head that there are men on here complaining about their situation.
> definitely aren't blaming anyone, you're right, I took that too far.
Your sarcasm is causing you to dishonestly represent what others are saying.
> Seeing a lot of men write how they are super stoked women are finally getting some small advantages in academia.
They aren’t getting a small advantage. The advantage is huge across the entire educational spectrum now.
Nobody should be celebrating that any more than we should have been celebrating men having an advantage in the past.
The goal is for our systems to support everyone. Not to punish present day people based on arbitrary characteristics they share with people in the past.
If you're comparing it to unskilled labor, retail, customer service, or stuff like that, it's absolutely no contest you're still better off with the degree.
And yeah your last bit there seems like the typical HN "let's reinvent this thing that already exist but 'from first principles!!1' but forgetting all the reasons it exists in the state it does now." Public colleges have too much overhead but some of it is justified and necessary to ensure licensing, credentialing, etc.
I question even this. I live in an area of the US without a strong union culture, and known a lot of people in the trades and it doesn’t seem uncommon to see job postings for X apprentice starting at $13-$15 and hour. I could get close to that at a shitty gas station clerk job.
I have a cousin he started as an electrician making $18 an hour as an apprentice. He started making six figures 4 years into the job. Granted he works quite a bit.
We could even collectively own it through our state government.
To be clear, I don’t buy that argument. Obviously those factors explain some of the difference, but I think most of the highest-paying jobs in STEM and many of the highest-paying jobs in other fields (e.g. business/finance) require skills that would be hard to reliably obtain without a college degree or something similar.
Specifically, to refer to an average of $1,000,000 as a specific effect size, without controlling for the fact that many people with only a high school diploma would not earn more even if they had a college degree, seems suspect.
The relevant question from the perspective of those doing the hiring is what is the probability a student from Arizona State is more competent than one from Harvard?
Replace competent with well connected and/or otherwise useful.
This is beside your point but HN is such a coastal bubble that I always feel the need to chime in with perspective when someone mentions my hometown.
You should have.
It’s not “world class professors” on YouTube that people are watching instead of their own university’s zoom classes. They’re not paying for zoom classes because they want to learn on campus.
They still want to go to college, they just don’t want to learn online.
But a well-paying trade like Electrician, especially commercial pays better than many degrees.
We need a bootcamp for schools, there is just too much of a bullshit moat around degrees IMHO.
Here is an example of a article with a different narrative called: Why Boys Are Failing in an Educational System Stacked Against Them (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-boys-are-failing-in-a_b_8...)
Note that the focus of blame here is on the education system and then look at the image. The person in frame is the teacher, representing the Educational System, and the boy. The article mentions both college rates and high school dropout rates.
You are right that its generally not the author of the written text that chose the image, through the words I would describe if I was being a more technical correct about it would be authors of the article since an article rarely if ever now days has a single author. There is the author/s of the text, the editor, the proof readers, layout design, image selection, and each participated in creation the collaborated created work.
After I quit university and before I found my eventual career path back in the 90s, a relevant picture would've been me stuffing around on the computer as that's largely what I did (writing a book, playing Hextris, typing up things for my dad, seeing what a modem could do, etc).
There are probably 512 people in this thread right now that have had that same experience you did but didn't reject the null hypothesis so they're not commenting.
I play the game of assessing the gender balance of groups a lot.
Some of it is wondering where society is going, some of it is just trying to avoid sausage parties. Trans people don't give me any trouble because they want to be assigned a certain gender, non-binaries might force me to learn the multinomial distribution but those seem to turn up at the 1/256 - 1/512 level if that.
I stopped going to Yoga classes in my ZIP code because they attract a lot of middle-aged and older men who, I think, are there to look at women without doing anything too strenuous.
Please read “why men earn more” by Warren Farrell or skim the table of contents for a list of some of the factors that influence earnings, such as working longer hours, in a different field, in unpleasant conditions, etc.
For fun, assume you can afford $1000/month in housing costs. With a 30yr mortgage and 20% interest rate. How expensive of a house can you afford? What if interst rates dropped to 10%? 5? 2.5?
Very strong correlation with home prices over the last 40 years.
You are complaining, right now, about how now women get a situational advantage. And we shouldn't celebrate that they are better represented in academia! No mas zepto, at this point you just need to get out in the world and see what life is like for others, quit worrying about how underprivileged you are.
Well, I did it :-) I did 2 or 3 years of philosophy courses at Sydney Uni. I mean, I just turned up. At the beginning of each semester I'd start doing every possible course, then just keep doing the ones I liked, with interesting/good/admirable lecturers, which turned out to be a lot, 2 or 3 times the amount of lectures weekly than if I'd been enrolled. Also was on their mailing list so also went to special visiting lectures, a regular discussion group, etc etc. No exam stress! I had such a great time. But yeah, most (non-university) people I mentioned it to laughed as if it was crazy.
Those students are much less likely to develop such a bond with some rando who just walked in off the street to check out what's going on. That person has zero investment in the experience other than expressed interest and would I'm certain be measurably less successful forming relationships with other students who could help their career in the future. They aren't in the same tribe.
It makes me sick to say it, but this can be even more important than the credentialing. There are multiple stories of students dropping out to start companies and still benefitting from their college peer network in ways that wouldn't happen for someone that wasn't actually a 'true peer'.
I think this is simply a biological tendency at the end of the day and don't see any easy way of changing it.
My father is/was an electrician and 2008 decimated the industry. He was de facto laid off and worked part time for the better part of three years after. Of course, today there's tons of work and no one to do it. Any young'uns who came in between like 2002-2008 didn't make it through the GFC and switched careers, and the old-timers who weathered the storm don't have enough juice left to work the insane hours.
HVAC Repair. It’s a pretty common trade out here. I have a number of family who’s done it at one point. There’s probably a pretty strong demand given how miserable I was when my AC died the other day. Annual median is $42,640
Insurance Claims Processors, which in the particular city I live in tends to be one of the big options for otherwise unskilled college graduates. Annual median: $43,570
Not that big of a difference, though I suppose you could argue the former has the slight advantage of not having as much educational debt burden, which probably exceeds that ~$1k difference.
However like the GP noted, a person in the latter position likely has better options late career.
It's a big ass cool world we have going on, and starting a family effectively ties you down from being able to explore it.
Good grief.
Women don't have the same financial expectations as men do. This is true even today, despite all the push for equal pay and equal rights. Often, that's prior to even getting into a relationship. If you seek an indication, ask a bunch of guys if they would settle for a girl still living at home and then ask the inverse, both groups aged in their 20s.
Given how men are increasingly "giving up on society" because of these standards being harder to achieve every day, GP's argument isn't that improbable at all.
You sound like you have some preconceived notion of you or your friends being wronged by women or something that I'm not going to be able to shake or have a reasonable discussion about.
I will however say, in words that may appease your ideology - it's honestly never been easier to get a banging hot girlfriend than in the current climate. You literally just have to not be completely fucking weird, have a hint of how to dress in something that compliments your figure, have the smallest standards of 21st century developed country hygiene, and one ever so slightly interesting hobby. Seriously, women will throw themselves at you.
But keep telling yourself what you want to think and reinforcing your views. I've honestly felt nothing but bad for women in STEM lately after an internship as a MechE in a fairly large and well known company. The older men acted fucking disgustingly towards the female interns, when all they're trying to do is make a career in STEM.
Nobody says you have to do that, but if some men and women want to do it, it will show up in the statistics.
Also even if you don't want a family and just want to explore the world alone, you don't need that much money. What exactly, do you want all the money for, that a high end career would give you? Also working 60 hour weeks would also prevent you from exploring the world, wouldn't it?
Does the same thinking carryover to the construction industry which is 97% male?
I met several great women developers in my career and I personally think the field will benefit a lot by having more diverse perspectives on the tools being created.
Why is the other one poster child for feminity? I met guys who dropped out of college, because they could not keep grades due to regular whole night gaming.
I met guys who switched out of CS, because they could not pass exams despite trying.
In both gender, you get some amount of irresponsible, disinterested, troublemakers or simply people with too many mental issues to finish any school.
But that incident stuck in my head because I expected many answers but not the one she gave! Anyway, it was a light hearted conversation not to be taken seriously.
The much higher salaries paid by the major US companies are so anomalous that they may as well be discarded in any comparisons.
Still nothing like the US though, and the cost of living is not much different than New York City IME.
You can call the investors kings and the workers are chasing the kings money.
This is the problem with assessing how valuable college is: you don't know how well off the person would've been if they had chosen not to go to college. You can't just compare all the people who went to college with all the people who didn't. You end up with a selection bias. You need to compare people who went to college with people who could've gone to college, but didn't.
Also, there might be (is) a difference between what's good for the individual and what's good for society.
I think this is absolutely the key. If you just look at some of the figures given in [0], and do some simple math, you find out that someone with a bachelor's degree makes just a hair more than $26k per year more than someone with only a high school diploma. Over the course of, say, 40 years working, that comes out to a hair over $1M difference in favor of the college grad. So, it would seem that even if a 4 year degree cost $200k (which, sadly, is not an insane estimate these days [1]), it still seems like a no-brainer.
But, that's as far as statistics can take us, I think, because, as you mentioned, we don't see what happens to people who choose not to go to college, but who could have successfully gotten a bachelor's degree. There's no literal way for us to ethically conduct that experiment.
If I were to speculate a bit, I might wonder if the answer lies in looking at children of college graduates and comparing those children who went to college vs those who didn't. I have no idea if such a study is available or not, unfortunately.
The other idea I have is that, although it pays off in the long run, maybe acquiring a significant amount of debt at a young age makes it harder to get by in the initial, post-college years harder. Considering the cost of housing and health care, this seems like a reasonable hypothesis, but I'd also like to see if there's research on that.
---
[0]: https://www.northeastern.edu/bachelors-completion/news/avera...
[1]: https://www.collegeavestudentloans.com/blog/estimating-the-t...
For men, [1] shows the median lifetime earnings for high school graduates is $882,300. The median lifetime earnings for men with a bachelor's degree is 1,517,200. The lowest field is Fine and Applied Arts at $843,900, which is lower than the median lifetime earnings for those with a high school education, up to the highest median field of engineering with earnings of $1,845,000.
For women, [1] shows median high school lifetime earnings of $458,900, median bachelor's earnings for all fields of $972,500, and lowest median bachelor's earnings of $652,100 (Fine and Applied Arts), and a highest of $1,169,100 (Business Administration). The interesting thing to note is for women there is only 1 of 18 field degree combinations (earnings are provided for bachelor's and associate's) where the woman's lifetime earnings decreases relative to a high school education alone (Fine and Applied Arts associates median earnings are $437,300). For men, 4 of 18 field degree combinations will result in lower lifetime earnings relative to high school education alone.
There is further analysis in [1] of the earnings percentiles by each field showing that men with a business degree earn the most at the 90 percentile. This holds for women with a business degree.
I don't see if this has been restricted to those whose highest education is a bachelor's degree or not, but there is also work that has shown increases in earnings by field for graduate or professional degrees [3]. It's possible that those earnings premiums have been captured in the reporting of [1], but [3] seems to come to the conclusion that most business, arts, and social sciences fields gain a large increase in salary for graduate or professional degrees.
Hopefully those familiar with similar analysis from the US could help to provide that information.
[1] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11-626-x/11-626-x2014040...
[2] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/150911/dq150...
[3] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/75-006-x/2018001/article...
They’re a litmus test to see if you’d likely be good for doing a job you don’t enjoy either. End of the day - work is work and they need history to show you can do more than the bare legal minimum of graduating high school.
If I get charged $100 to cross a toll bridge in my car to get to my job, I wouldn’t consider myself to have gotten a good deal, regardless of pay.
Even in markets that still pay well outside the valley like Boston, that level of compensation is still extremely limited and are < 1% of available positions most of which are quite senior.
But to your weak sauce point, some folks are just going to have a hard go at life, but is it easier being white through life, no matter what? Yea, for sure. No one says it's an easy life, but it is easier being light skinned.
> unwanted, depressed
I think there used to be some organizations that helped with that. Specifically white men. You know, the kind that would give them a purpose, make them feel wanted. You got a hood and everything.
I'm mixed so I can generally wriggle out of such accusations by playing the race card. The only situation I ever feel good about doing so are ones like this.
You feel sorry for young white men because they have to deal with politics? "Ferrari owners pay an unfair amount of car insurance."
I mean, in theory there could be acceptable ways to let a couple with babies have roommates. But the design problems alone seem too complicated to attempt, let alone the cultural problems.
Also, keep in mind that a young couple with kids might have only one income earner. And that couple is in the same apartment hunt with singles willing to share multi-tenant residences. Sometimes three or four of them!
Point being, "get roommates" doesn't scale over time or over the entire population.
No, just rent and share like a college student your whole life. That makes sense.
As for the cultural capital of the world? New York used to have a thriving art scene when it was cheap to live in. Now it just has an expensive art scene.
Why your personal story is pertinent here is beyond me, OP was talking about the person in the article.
It's not dramatic at all when we have 1.73[1] trillion in student loan debt, with an average of 39k each student.
Starting your professional career years in debt is the definition of crippling debt.
edit to add source
Starting your professional career in debt is nobody's definition of "crippling debt". Whether 39k is too much student loan debt really depends on what the expected future earning potential is for a given degree. A quick search turns up plenty of resources that can help somebody make decisions about how much student loan debt they can comfortably or safely take on. Here is a teacher's guide[1] (it's a PDF link) from the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau one could use as a starting point.
[1] https://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/documents/cfpb_building_...
If you go to college broke, and come out in debt, and are then in debt for years after (I don't know offhand the average) then yes that's crippling debt. When figured against future earnings and actual take-home profit, how will those numbers work out for someone like that? Chances are, not well. Not everyone can just 'learn to program' to get a cushy 120k+/yr job. Also some people with families take longer than 2 years just for an associates degree. This is really survivorship bias wkth N=1.
"The average Plumber salary in the United States is $58,659" - https://www.salary.com/research/salary/benchmark/plumber-sal...
"The national average salary for Human Resources is $65,314 per year in United States." - https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/human-resources-salary-SR...
"Forbes cited HR Manager as a “best paying job for women” in 2011, with over 70 percent of the profession dominated by females." - https://www.forbes.com/sites/theyec/2012/07/11/why-human-res...
"At the administrative level, 30 percent of human resources assistants had an associate degree as of 2013, 26 percent had a high school diploma and 21 percent had at least one year of college experience" - https://work.chron.com/education-requirements-human-resource...
Second, please keep your preconceived notions of me to yourself. They do not add to the discussion at all.
As for what's left worth responding to. Look up the rise of male sexlessness compared to female sexlessness if you seek further evidence of what's happening. The massive filtering and selection criteria happening in online dating. Considering your American-based view, surely you aren't blind to the increasing rates of gymgoers and even steroid use, and the men's grooming industry growing ever more. If anything, that doesn't signify a lack of men trying to maintain themselves, yet it still contradicts your idea of "just take a shower, go buy some clothes and get a girlfriend bro".
>But keep telling yourself what you want to think and reinforcing your views. I've honestly felt nothing but bad for women in STEM lately after an internship as a MechE in a fairly large and well known company.
As an aside, how can you in the same breath accuse me of wanting to form an echo chamber when you immediately cite your own anecdote as a reason to push your own view, despite the fact your anecdote does not invalidate the concerns of men at all? Surely you do not lack the capacity to feel for both the struggles of men and women, regardless of the cause? Men and women have their own troubles, and this incessant need to trivialize one over the other is exactly why we're not getting any further.
Academic corruption. They get kickbacks from the publishers for forcing these (always crap) textbooks on their students.
My wife had two of these every semester for her last two years of college.
Sorry, it is. I've worked in higher education and I've seen it happen. What other explanation do you have for the sales of these ludicrous "textbooks"?
I believe that norms shape behaviour, that is the extent of my claim.
As for your claim that higher class males avoid trades: yes of course. That is actually a great example of what I mean. People factor in social norms in their decision making, be it male or female.
If you read the article you’ll see that men do not have the same support that other groups have, and proposals to provide that support are rejected on the basis of history rather than present need.
The desire ‘not to help white men’ is explicitly mentioned.
Also, why are you making this about race? The basis of the article was about how men are not getting the support they need. Why do you keep bringing “white men” into it?
All we’re taking about is recognizing that there are support services provided to women which are not provided to men, and there is no reason that men shouldn’t also need such services.
These are simply facts stated in the article.
What have you got against men that makes you want to deny them the same services as women?
Is it your opinion that white men, or men in general are somehow less deserving than young women? Or perhaps you think young men are inherently superior to women and therefore don’t have the same needs.
It’s not clear which it is. Only you can tell us.
It's important that this is not about any absolute value, but about the sign of the correlation. The "blank slate" hypothesis would predict that the correlation is positive, i.e. the more gender equal a society, the more equal the distribution.
The opposite is actually the case, the correlation is negative.
This strongly suggests that the statistical differences in occupational preferences have an innate cause. That difference is moderated by societal influence, not caused by it. When societal pressure are lessened or removed, the innate differences manifest more strongly.
And of course, it needs to be stressed that these are statistical differences, not categorical ones, just like the outcomes are statistical and not categorical.
These are the three biggest countries (40% of the world population), and also the ones most represented in tech here in the USA, at least (because they are the biggest).
And yes, there were proportionally quite many female engineers and computer scientists. I might guess that this perhaps was facilitated by prejudices/discrimination in the "more macho" fields of construction engineering and industrial engineering, so all the high school girls with good STEM results would go to math and computer science fields instead of all the programs with a focus on heavy industry - but even those had a decent proportion of female engineers.
We are talking about whole population segments that dream of one day making $75k. They know that tech pays well but have no idea how outlandish the pay is compared to their experiences and expectations. They think their counterpart is tech is making $10k more than them, when in fact they are probably making $50-100k more.
I will also say that for all this talk about how easy Blacks and women have it, I don't buy it, and I think people spinning tales about how "My company only hires Blacks and women" aren't involved in technical hiring. We are desperate for experienced talent and are under tremendous pressure to build an effective team. We don't have the luxury to be picky about demographics. And my team isn't unique: It's the same story from my peers both inside and outside my company. Likewise, the pipeline itself doesn't have very many women or Black candidates from what I can see, so even these people got automatic interviews I doubt it would change team demographics significantly. And finally: if this is indeed "segregation in reverse" (which it's not: it would just be segregation with the roles reversed), where are these tech companies where the majority of their engineers aren't White or Asian men?
Really? I understood that it was illegal to discriminate based on gender, race, etc in the US
When "positive discrimination" makes it before a judge, it usually gets stuck down.
This is an-ex Google engineer talking about one he saw and created a video about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pizXzR7ZQ8Q
Yea, but we got no problem getting to that door. Minorities might get pulled over and get a knee on the neck. Women might get assaulted on their way. Being a white dude, I'll get a taxi there, no problem. So if I have to try harder to get the position, pretty understandable, since I got the head start.
Not saying life is easy for anyone, saying it's so much easier being a white dude with a nice hair cut. You know I used to be so broke I had to "beg" for gas money at a gas station to get to my first day at a new job, first person I asked gave me a $20. Life. is. easier.
You've been reading too much news. That doesn't happen to normal people in real life. Blacks have a huge disadvantage of poor upbringing by their own family and community and women have a huge "disadvantage" of not wanting to be a computer programmer.
> normal people
Point exactly, when you say normal, you are thinking of white dude America. And yes, this does not happen to them.
The actual issue is they have to interview with people holding the same ignorant assumptions you do.
God forbid. Think of all the experiences you and your family will miss out on!
Lately all I want is to get as far away from people as possible. The internet has negated every advantage of these regions and of money broadly. You cannot buy a nuclear family.
Folks in Ohio still have trouble leaving Ohio.
And you can, to an extent, buy a nuclear family. Mail order brides still exist (and the arrangement can be beneficial for both parties). You can do this with the expectation of children, which you will pay for in the US. Alternatively, you can check adoption as plenty of agencies will make you feel like you are buying a child. (20k upwards, plus travel).
This snide irrelevant addition makes it look like you are indeed picking on Ohio...
My overall argument also includes other fine places such as Pittsburgh, Houston, and Cleveland (also in Ohio).
This is a snide remark, but it is absolutely a factor. I grew up in Michigan, and the number of people who never venture beyond their almost-entirely-white small town to see what other communities and cultures are like is a huge contributing factor to the amount of prejudice and judgmental nature that makes me never want to move back.
Seeing people different from you and different places is broadening and gives you a much better perspective to be able to understand the world. This is important in life as well as in your career.
my best friend had a complicated career trajectory that began with a music education degree, until he found out he hated teaching music to middle schoolers, then he decided to get a two-year online CS degree. this put him in a fair bit of debt as he comes from a very poor upbringing. he got married and moved to the D.C. area a couple years ago to work for a CRM shop there and while he loves the work, he hates the crime and bullshit of the Big City Life, and while he and his wife have gone from enjoying it to tolerating it, they're moving back here to South Dakota at the end of this year before they have children.
I wonder if, going forward, with the advent of remote work and the like, we're going to see less and less people who come from rural/suburban/otherwise sub-100k-population cities choosing to either move back to areas like those they grew up in (if not where they grew up specifically) instead of migrating to The Big City to Make It Big, for these exact reasons. there just doesn't seem to be much to gain from moving to The Big City anymore, if starting a family is your ultimate goal in life.
When you say you value a 'nuclear family', instead of just 'family', the distinction means things like 'I do not want my parents to have more than a minimal role in their grandchildren's lives' and 'my siblings and their children are to be kept separate from my children'. That's what the 'nuclear' part means!
Mom died and now Dad's dropping hints about moving into your furnished basement? Sorry, we're a nuclear family. Going halves with your sister on a duplex with her and her family living next to you and yours so all the cousins can grow up together? Absolutely not nuclear.
Major life regret? Thinking other countries didn't exist when I was at the age to enter college and taking on massive loans to pay exorbitant US tuition for a school that wasn't anything special when I could have found overseas options at a fraction of the cost.
Your sample size of five elite companies can't be taken as a serious attempt to describe the actual experience of black CS grads applying for jobs.
So that's 1.5% of all engineers. And that's being very generous. The real number is surely below 1%. No surprise that the most desirable companies hire the top 1%.
(Happy for someone to correct my numbers and the resulting percentage - it's based on a few Google searches).
Unless my numbers are way off, it's safe to say that over 99% of engineers in the world are not working at a FAANG. I stand by my claim that we should not be using what happens at FAANGs as reliable anecdotal evidence of the interview experience for most candidates.
Europeans often have this opinion but I don't think it's an accurate reading of the issue. The issue is not that Americans work too hard, it's that this hard work is no longer actually amounting to anything. In the past, you could pay for college by working summers at the local restaurant. Today the average debt is $30K and you still won't get a decent job.
The article (and others) just show that American men are starting to put their efforts into places that do reward them; namely, the trades and entrepreneurship.
I'm not denying that black sheep exist, I am denying a pervasive conspiracy of "big textbook" to the benefit of the professors.
Also, an easy solution to not everyone buying Kinko-printed spiral bound lecture notes easily comes to mind...
Good point. I did not intend to argue otherwise. To go into trade is not an irrational reaction on an individual level — quite the opposite in fact. What I did argue however, was that making it hard for people to get a higher education is not a good thing for a society. Not good in the short term, because educated societes will make more informed decisions, and at the same time not a sustainable strategy for any western society that wants to play any role in the next century.
Having an educated society should be in the national interest just like having public roads or drinkable water is.
> accurate reading of the issue. The issue is not that Americans work too hard, it's that this hard work is no longer actually amounting to anything.
That was the American dream. This is a nice model to keep big numbers of people playing the lottery and bear a ton of stress, because they have the hope that one day they might win and then everything will pay off.
But even of you are one of the few lucky ones that wins you still live in a society where 90% are struggling and crushed. There may be people that enjoy being on top while everybody else suffers, but I personally would prefer being middle class in a society where nobody is poor over being a billionaire in a society where everybody is crushed. Maybe this is empathy, but maybe it is also just egoistic: I like to walk through my city and not see suffering, I like to walk through my country without having to fear being robbed, shot or angrily screamed at. I simply prefer living in a healthy, happy society where people help each other over living in one where everybody has to kick down to stay on top.
Not that that any nation achieved that goal, but there are certainly observable differences in tone between the industrial nations.
As I said, the issue is that this hard work no longer results in progress. The system has become broken. This is easily observable via a bevy of statistical measures like inequality and college costs.
I think it leads to people drawing their distinctions, around who is superior and who is inferior, and then it leads to those people making an unnecessary logical jump and deciding that those inferior people need to be HURT or REMOVED… and we've seen all this before.
And they go from there to decide that anyone arguing, wishes to crown those inferior people as the kings, and hurt the superior ones, because that's the only way they can perceive anything anymore… and they just get hostile and paranoid we've seen all that before too.
I don't know how to convince them that seeking a civilized environment for all the people (without it being conditional on performance) produces the best societal result, through the widest possible range for SOME person of whatever description to excel.
It seems like there are a lot of people for whom, they're more than happy to throw away overall system performance because they're mad that anything lower-performing can even exist. They are PC builders so mad that RAM can't run as fast as L2 cache that they're all CPU and refuse to have any RAM installed. It's stark madness from my point of view.
Call it toxic or not, there's a male drive toward autonomy. Joining corporations that are run by HR just isn't as attractive.
That sounds...reasonable. I can't speak for the rest of Europe but a $30k student loan would be perfectly normal after a 4-5 year of study in Sweden.
Back of the envelope, $30k for 4 years is $625 a month and that is not much for just food and rent.
The numbers aren't great, but the majority of students finish with either zero debt or a very manageable amount of debt. There is a small fraction of students taking massive loans that skew the overall picture.
And bachelor degree holders continue to earn, on average, $1 million more than high school graduates over their career.
All that said, I agree college should be affordable without loans. Summer jobs, co-ops/internships, etc.
https://www.aplu.org/projects-and-initiatives/college-costs-...
Many young 20's somethings don't complete college, but end up with debt as well.
If the question is whether is a difficult for society to maintain college as a necessity for success, they should be included in the review.
OECD data seems to suggest so
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiar...
However, there should be a playground for innovation as well.
Europe makes it so damn hard to innovate because of it's many laws. Ambitious people inevitably move to the US.
(ignore the headline and go to the actual numbers)
Germany is much better at shunting people away from university who are not qualified to be there. Generally, they go to trade schools and apprenticeships.
So I don't have a problem with the MA, but the framing of "life is wonderful in Europe" is missing the fact that the only theoretical upside is you had less choice.
But if paying the full cost, there would be a choice where down one path there is more money because less resources were consumed, and one that would be roughly equivalent.
Thanks cap, there is always this one commenter who thinks we in europe don't understand how taxes work.
Edit: Of course, if you’re very well off and live somewhere that’s relatively stable, large gaps in equality might benefit you. That’s for a select few though.
If anything, a structure like this would facilitate and encourage visits from and to relatives. Seems like a much nicer life than a situation where both parents work.
On his way to a job interview? And also for many of your other darker skinned friends on their way to job interviews? And your female friends on their way to theirs? I'm not denying it happened in some isolated cases, but that it causes normal people to not get to "the door". It didn't even happen to normal people among your "dark-skinned" friends.
Again, with the normal, who are you talking about? People are complex, all people, normal is your perception of others, check yourself.
Then we got 8-bit microcomputers in every home, and operating a computer became a technical hobby, so ideally suited to boys.
The generation of boys growing up playing with computers, and girls not playing with computers, swamped any existing biases in the industry.
I wonder if the communist countries had the former phase, but because not so many homes had computers, not the latter.
The fact is that in the old days, there really was plenty of clerical work around computers that just disappeared. Like rewritting data to punched cards and swapping wheels with punched tapes. My grandmother worked in 'data-processing facility' in a communist country, the facility employed many women, but they were (from whay i heard) essentially clerical positions without much CS/EE knowledge.
I'm not arguing for or against '"Women don't really like this stuff"' - I'm just saying an example against it needs to be women liking this stuff, not merely doing this stuff.
https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2020/june/ibram-x-kendi-d...
I think it's pretty clear from the full text that he's not advocating for racism against past racists or their offspring (which, intentional or not, is what your use of the quote makes it sound like).
"Since the 1960s, racist power has commandeered the term “racial discrimination,” transforming the act of discriminating on the basis of race into an inherently racist act. But if racial discrimination is defined as treating, considering, or making a distinction in favor or against an individual based on that person’s race, then racial discrimination is not inherently racist. The defining question is whether the discrimination is creating equity or inequity."
The other thing is the idea that, for those of us growing up in various segments of society that are affected by the above, our very mechanism of thought was generated by this system, and that affects how we think about and perceive these systems (and everything else).
I believe he's simply advocating for being conscious of the above two facts, when examining these systems and reforming them (and of course when teaching the history of these systems). To ignore race and racism as if it never happened is to allow all of that ingrained racism to perpetuate (of systems and of thought). All of this sounds pretty reasonable to me, but that may be due to my particular experience.
That said - I'm no expert, I've only read the linked passage so far, though I've now ordered the book and will start reading it tonight. I'll refrain from commenting further here (I think we're pretty off-topic already). Thanks for the discussion!
Racial discrimination is inherently racist.
I can be in support of anti-systemic-racism actions that do not act on an individual level. I can support universal healthcare, higher income equality and whatnot, without the binary race worldview that Kendi puts out.
We tend to refer to "liberals" as people on the left but in general a liberal is anyone who is consistent with liberal beliefs which include a fair amount of "conservatism" as well. However, there's quite a few folks on the right that are as illiberal as the progressives are on the left.
So this guy gets to represent himself as a spokesman for the movement and nobody really wants to contradict it under their real name.
Everyone should get support! More support! Everyone. By focusing on men, you are stating it is MORE challenging for men. It is not. Men should get more support, so should everyone, but if we are handing out bread, men should be last to receive, as our plate is the fullest. Do you really think men have it worse? I don't, being a guy is super great, much easier, and complaining about it just makes you seem like you lack perspective. Only you can tell us.
If that was true, you’d be able to quote one.
> (except for the sarcasm, completely on point)
Can you explain what is behind your sarcasm?
> and you asked like 5 questions.
I did!
> Everyone should get support! More support! Everyone.
> By focusing on men,
The article we are discussion is focussed on men. That is why we are focusing on men.
> you are stating it is MORE challenging for men.
I think that’s just an assumption of yours. If you can find something I’ve said that implies that, you can quote it. And we can discuss it.
> Men should get more support, so should everyone, but if we are handing out bread, men should be last to receive, as our plate is the fullest.
Even if this were true, it’s not what we are discussing. The article states that men are not receiving the same level of support as everyone else.
You have not explained why that should be the case.
Are you a college age man?
> Do you really think men have it worse?
The article states that men have it worse in terms of support on campus.
> I don't,
You don’t think the article says this?
> being a guy is super great, much easier,
How do you know? Are you a college age man?
> and complaining about it just makes you seem like you lack perspective.
Who is complaining about being a man?
> Only you can tell us.
We are discussing the resources available to college students and I am arguing that men should receive the same supports as everyone else.
It’s still not clear what you are contributing with sarcastic and generic statements about men, or white men in particular.
Your points don’t seem relevant to the discussion of college, but to some more general ideas you have about how great it is to be a man.
I write on my phone while watching travel videos on youtube and drinking, quoting is a pain, you deserve a better conversation, but I'll do my best,(thats a lie).
Sarcasm is great, its meant to get people riled up, you should try it, makes these comments more entertaining while also exaggerating another's end goal to show where those ideals lead.
Regarding focusing on men, (each paragraph to your points), I read the article, (like three times now because I feel like we read different things), its an opinion piece, I am trying to tell you I disagree with the summation that men, and white men, (the article brings up race!), are at a disadvantage and don't have the same LEVEL of support. They get different support, like being white and/or male, which for real, I will not go over again why its so much easier/better to be male and/or white. (Higher paying job while you get through school!)
At this point you aren't stating much, just trying interview me or something, so I'll assume all I want.
The article is providing context as pertains only to college. Disregards that white men have better access to college prep classes, paid more while they go to school, less chance of hardships, (not saying there are no hardships but again white male life = easier life) I really don't care if less men are going to college, I didn't graduate, not the end of the world, still had it easier. And no, not college age, but if you are, I swear life is better when older.
(oi i am only half way through)
Yea, "in terms of" thats the point that gets me, like caring about that, with all the other advantages you get from being white and/or male, you need to made sure no one else can ever have a different advantage, especially one thats easy to get around and still get to where you want.
Again, it's an opinion piece article, I am pointing out I think it's disagreeable because its so shortsighted.
Now you point out it's an age thing, I mean, sleep easy on that point, you are right. I haven't been that age for 13 years. Still live and work with people of all ages, share stories, listen to their lives, try to do my best to figure out whats going on, empathize... But if you want to say its a secretive world I would only understand if I were you, please help me get it, pretty sure these threads can go as long as we want.
I mean, you are debating heavily to prove that men have it worse, "in terms of" whatever, I can take that another step and just say you are complaining. Could go further with sarcasm and take if further but you pointed out you are not a fan.
I get your argument, but I am pointing out that while you are saying "same" you literally mean men should have access to support that is reserved for different people that have different hardships, in order to try to make the playing field more level. You, (not saying you personally, but in case you go there), can't say we should have the same access to support in college while having much different obstacles in life.
And yea definitely not trying to contribute anything, button says "comment" or "reply", not contribute, you feel like my opinions are that lame or what?
And yea, tying in a lot of things, but all related and what your greater point of view may be.
I like you zepto, just trying to help with your perspective. Obviously, that was a lot to write from both of us.
Good to see you creepin in homes listening to black mothers not give enough praise to their kids, thats great research for the cause.
And then "helping them" with public assistance programs that have rules that are purpose built to incentivize familial instability.
I see getting hired as the last stage in the pipeline, with the first stages being your family, then your education and then employment.
The more things go wrong in the first stages, the less likely it is for one to succeed at getting to the top of the next stage.
If people from underprivileged families can only afford to go to the 50% best school in the state, then to the 75% best college, then by the time they enter the job search page, they won't be at the top of the list (again, on average).
I'll use myself as an example: I had the privilege of coding for entire weekends when I was young, while my peers had to work the land. This gave me a distinct advantage early on, which I capitalized on, so at an interview with a company I am more likely to get hired than if those same peers had hypothetically applied, again because it wouldn't make sense for a company to pass on the best candidate when they are all competing for talent, regardless of race, gender, height or other ways of splitting people into groups.
I think everyone agrees that the current situation when it comes to diversity in the workplace is not acceptable, and we should definitely fix it, but in my opinion, if companies are competing fairly for talent, then that part of the pipeline doesn't really need fixing. We can instead use it as a test to see if the attempts at fixing the earlier stages result in better numbers.
P.S. This a difficult subject and I don't intend to offend anyone. Despite my relative privilege above, compared to my peers in the US, I still grew up in a poor and underprivileged family and am behind my current peers both financially and socially, so it's a topic that hits home for me.
Truly qualified people on the margins are still getting shut out at every level, every age and stage. Mediocrity is still pushing the center ahead of everyone else. The fact that wsj/economist/HN has turned anti-woke doesn't change the facts.
How could that be? I was under the impression that a huge amount of new hires come in each year from fresh university graduates.
https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/minorities-who-whiten-job-resumes...
http://www-2.rotman.utoronto.ca/facbios/file/Whitening%20MS%...
It's a sort of interesting read but nothing too dramatic and whether it's evidence of racism is subject to interpretation. What isn't subject to interpretation is the claim that the study shows that "whitened" names increase callbacks. On the contrary whitening names has no effect on callbacks as indicated on page 31:
"Whitening the name only (versus not whitening at all) did not make a statistically significant difference for black applicants"
The actual study shows that removing racial indicators from experience is what results in a gap in callbacks. So someone who represents themselves as the leader of their campus' "Black Student Business Association" is less likely to get a call back than someone who represented themselves as the leader of their campus' "Student Business Association". They refer to the removal of racial indicators as whitening but I think that's prematurely jumping to conclusions. The name aspect is certainly a form of whitening, since black names are being changed to white names. But it's premature to refer to the removal of racial indicators and making the experience racially neutral as a form of whitening.
Other forms of experience that explicitly mention race result in less callbacks than when that same experience doesn't mention race. Whether this is racism or not can not be concluded strictly based off of the study's parameters. For example, if I were presented with one candidate who was in charge of the university's "Law Society" I would probably pick that person over someone who was in charge of that university's "Black Law Society", and I don't think I would be racist for doing so. I would consider being in charge of an organization that is open to all races or is independent of race as a more prestigious accomplishment than being in charge of an organization that is race specific.
To test whether I was racist in my decision making, I would need to pick someone who was not in charge of anything over someone who was in charge of the "Black Law Society", with all else being equal. The study did not do this comparison and unfortunately the study does not present the raw data so there's no way for me to do this analysis myself.
I could bicker about some of the methodological issues as well which are not exactly rigorous, as well as the fact that this study is not exactly pertinent to this conversation as they only looked at internships for jobs that are not technical in nature, with the bulk of them being sales and marketing, and customer service jobs, instead of engineering, computer science, law, or professional jobs.
Ultimately no study is going to be perfect but one should not read too much into many of these studies. They are not nearly as rigorous or definitive as one would expect and furthermore they don't tend to generalize.
Good catch, I had been thinking of another study which looked specifically at only changing names on resumes. That's:
Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination
https://www.nber.org/papers/w9873
In any event, its not a single study that's looked at this. Have a look at this meta-analysis of 24 studies
Imagine you having always bought tasty tomatoes from your local farm, and someone steps in to show you studies that determined that the generally tomatoes in the US are tasteless.
I'm also not arguing that tasty tomatoes are taking shelf space away from other fruit.
Aren't these are known to be extremely difficult interviews compared to most tech interviews? What percentage of candidates who apply get hired? I would imagine the numbers are quite low?
Given a list of chapters in a video course, and a list of user bookmarks, write a function that groups the bookmarks by chapter. Chapters and bookmarks are defined as millisecond offsets from 0 (the start of the video file).
I'd specify the data structures for junior devs and let the more senior people work those out.
Your average developer that gets hired can solve and unit test the solution in less than 35 minutes. Those who don't might be having an off day, or I didn't do a good job at explaining the problem and details, or they didn't ask the right questions or who knows. The point is, a thousand things can go wrong, but the problem itself isn't that difficult. A few loops and a hashmap gets you an acceptable solution.
This and the other problems in the interview question databases at FAANGs are typical of what's in the Cracking the Coding Interview book. Whether someone's ability to solve these types of problems quickly is indicative of their skill level is a hot topic of debate, but if one wants to join these companies, then hacking the process by learning to solve algorithm and data structure problems is acceptable and not a particularly complex process. It's high overhead for the candidate, but at the very least it proves that they can learn, and learning the custom tools and code quickly is about half the skillet required to be successful at a FAANG.
Have you considered that underrepresented candidates might not have the free time outside of university, family, and job responsibilities in order to compete with those whose families can support them to focus on only university and preparing for interviews?
If HR wants their diversity numbers up, maybe HR needs to consider having some diversity in the interview process itself? I wouldn't expect a cookie cutter process to result in much diversity of background or thought.
> Whether someone's ability to solve these types of problems quickly is indicative of their skill level is a hot topic of debate
One of the best interviewing tips I learned that has served me extremely well is to try disprove my impression of the candidate. It seems like this process entirely fails at that.
40 applications and 2 resume consultations later and no interview even offered. Meanwhile, some guy you run circles around in real world programming/business experience is 8 for 10. My white classmates noticed this before I did because I’ve just accepted it as part of life.
You're right, I always fail that interview question where they ask me what my sexual preference is and I say women... ...Seriously? you are just making stuff up now.
This kind of implies that they don't actually hire diversely or the issue wouldn't be so dire ...
Which is demonstrably true; they're not hiring from the general population they're hiring largely from universities, and you can look at those universities and see there's already an imbalance in demographics of the available job candidates.
Society functions THROUGH conflict and chaos. It's like brownian motion, noise in circuitry: if you're trying to define an ideology where there's no more conflict, the most direct way is to define an enemy and then rally everyone to destroy it. And that is said to work for a thousand years but actually blows up within ten, leaving enormous wreckage and shame.
Better to design the fault-tolerant system that runs through conflict and chaos.
What you are talking about is a war-based society, a fault-tolerant system, with lots of redundancy, that runs through conflict and chaos. The last two decades were an experiment in that one.
And it was specifically about hiring from HBU's vs other elite institutions, not about hiring black applicants in general which is how you described it.
You can't always unequivocally state that white people are privileged over non-whites in every circumstance. Obviously it's going to be true in many cases, but it can't always be just assumed.
One of the biggest issues with Kendi and similar works (of which there are many in the academic world) are they paint a false dichotomy and they frame themselves as the only legitimate response to historical racism, etc. That is, anti-racism is the only way to combat "white supremacy". It's illiberal in this regard (and in fact, the entire body of critical theory is not only skeptical to western liberalism but actively attacks it as "the tools of the oppressor") and I hope you find his remedies as totalitarian and insane as I do. For instance, I don't think a "Department of Anti-Racism" which is staffed by "formally trained anti-racists" and not appointed by elected officials with the authority to "clear" all local, state, and federal policies to ensure they are "anti-racist" is a good idea. And to be equipped with "disciplinary tools" to punish non-compliance...
https://www.politico.com/interactives/2019/how-to-fix-politi...
Flash forward and I start to rethink the decision. I want to go back now, but I’ve attempted multiple times to investigate it and the numbers never work. Because I didn’t play my HS years correctly, the bureaucracy will not let me in, regardless of the things I’ve accomplished in the years since. Additionally the price is just so prohibitive, combined with the fact that I would get next to no aid and even a standard State school would be ridiculously expensive. These are just a handful of the issues though. Let’s not even bring up how I would need a simultaneously drop out of the workforce, suddenly turning the financial burden into Tuition/Books/Fees + everything needed to survive.
I’m really convinced that universities in the US do not want non traditional students at all. Obviously there are some programs that target them, but are often limited. I.e. you have to be part of the right demographic, be limited in the areas you can study. A notable state university near me offers over a dozen online Bachelors programs, but not a single “useful” degree, they’re all BA’s in subjects that people in HN mock. Other seem to cobble together “made up” degrees, which are bachelors that don’t have a traditional or on-campus equivalent and seem to be not particularly useful for employment in attempt to scam poorer, non-credentialed people out of their money.
I could still probably go back, but since I can not hack my way out of the bureaucracy or financial cost, majority of the value proposition would be completely dead by the time o could manage it.
I don’t know where you live or what you want to study, but if you focus on taking the coursework you need it becomes a lot easier. I’d suggest calling admissions departments as well, not trying to piece everything together yourself online. Feel free to email me if you want to share more information and I can give more specific and better researched suggestions.
I mean, what is the goal of a good live? Extract as many resources from your surroundings as possible, kicking your competition down and then die in an slightly above average house? I want to live a good live and leave my environment in a better shape than I entered it in, because the two are not a contradiction.
This seems like a pretty good guiding principle in life.
Some publishers may incentivize using their particular textbook, but there isn't some vast conspiracy to jack up prices. The fact is textbooks are a niche product with a steep demand curve that can be paid for with subsidized loans, of course they're going to be ridiculously overpriced.
And while calculus might have some public domain works that are acceptable, most fields have advanced pretty far since 1925, which might I remind you was before the discovery of DNA, penicillin, plate tectonics, molecular orbital theory, the neutron, the invention of digital electronics, Keynesian economics, Hemingway's first novel, etc.
> ridiculously overpriced
Well, you admit it yourself.
And the books aren't even any good!
300 kids taking a course in a 90 day semester, 10 copies in a library, each kid gets 3 days per semester with the class textbook. Would you pay 25000 for that semester of education? Maybe some students can go halvsies on a copy but the number of copies of the book that you need is roughly equivalent to the number of students. And before you say "well why doesn't the library just buy more copies" remember who pays for the library to buy those copies.
The professors don't make the changes to the textbooks, the publishers do. Professors don't like it either, they have to update all of their materials every year to keep up with the changes too.
No one is denying textbooks are expensive, I'm denying the conspiracy theory that professors and publishers are all colluding to manipulate the market.
It is really not that hard, these professors often write or collaborate on the textbooks themselves so they're writing them anyway. If the textbook is needed for learning and not just a way to get some extra money then this would be standard practice.
As a corollary, only very few professors actually have their own textbook and thus don't make any money whatsoever from choosing a specific textbook.
Finally, why would you deny someone money for work they did, typically in their spare time? Who else do you think should give away their work for free? Musicians? Doctors? Carpenters? Bakers? Do you accept money for the work you do?
Personally, I prefer decade old textbooks, hardcover, beautifully typeset, clear diagrams and equations, black and white. Of course that doesn't exist for every field. But try to imagine the complaints you get from students for teaching from 'obsolete' textbooks that aren't even in four color print.
You aren’t exaggerating another’s “end”. You don’t actually know what that is.
You are simply being dishonest in your representation.
> At this point you aren't stating much, just trying interview me or something, so I'll assume all I want.
Lying about another person’s position is just that.
> Disregards that white men have better access to college prep classes, paid more while they go to school, less chance of hardships,
Even if true historically or when you went to college.
This is certainly not true of every white man today..
Whilst it’s certainly true that statistically Black people are less likely to have resources like college prep classes, that is a function of money. There are more poor white people than there are poor black people, even if statistically if you have black skin you are more likely to be poor.
There are also large numbers of rich and middle class black people who live in nice neighborhoods and have all the supports you mention.
That’s why it’s racist to base your discriminatory policies on race rather than actual hardship.
If you want to argue that people who have fewer resources should receive supports that others don’t, I will agree with you.
If you want to argue that being white means you have access to college prep, I think you are delusional.
> I didn't graduate, not the end of the world, still had it easier. And no, not college age, but if you are, I swear life is better when older.
You may have had it easier in your day, but as the article explains things have changed.
> I mean, you are debating heavily to prove that men have it worse, "in terms of" whatever, I can take that another step and just say you are complaining.
> you are debating heavily to prove that men have it worse
The article indicates that they do, at college. I’m not ‘arguing that’, I’m referencing it.
If you are claiming that I’m making a more general claim, then you are just misrepresenting me - I.e. you are intentionally lying about what I am saying.
> Could go further with sarcasm and take if further but you pointed out you are not a fan.
I’m not a fan because you are being at best fooling and at worst dishonest.
> I get your argument,
The evidence is that you don’t.
> but I am pointing out that while you are saying "same" you literally mean men should have access to support that is reserved for different people that have different hardships, in order to try to make the playing field more level.
I’m not arguing that some general “playing field” should be more level.
I am arguing that men are just people, and there is no reason they should receive less support in their education.
> You, (not saying you personally, but in case you go there), can't say we should have the same access to support in college while having much different obstacles in life.
Your position continues to embody racism and sexism
It seems like you are saying that men today should receive a worse educational experience than other people because men in the past like you had more advantages in life.
The problem is that this hurts those men who are less advantaged deliberately on the basis of their sex.
If there are advantages men as a category receive later in life, then those need to be addressed, but it’s reprehensible to use that as a justification for harming people’s educational experience.
You keep throwing around priveledge and advantage but I don't think you get it. Do women make less money than men, underrepresented in industries, way higher percentage of being victims of domestic abuse and sexual assault? But your argument, is always "some men", but we are talking about "in general". Huge difference between situational advantage and systematic disadvantage.
Calling me reprehensible, and you are all high and mighty about how mean sarcasm is hahaha. This whole thread, is you getting all bent out of shape because you think the white man isn't getting enough, just leave it at that. I hope one day you see how ridiculous that is.
Usually only at a very superficial level. Enough to comply with the law. And to be fair, some companies do have good intentions with a little extra effort and money put into diversity efforts.
A truly objective hiring process would take into account that Joe and Charley who both got the same results on the coding test are not equally qualified if Joe grew up poor, with parents who never graduated high school, paid his own way through university by working full-time, and along with raising a child as a single parent. While Charley comes from a wealthy family and focused only on studying and job interview prep. With his parents passing along some of their own higher education to him as needed, connecting him to their large network for job opportunities, etc.
Joe is obviously a better candidate. His starting line was far behind Charley's and yet he crossed the finish line at the same time. Joe would be a better candidate even if he passed the finish line a little after Charley. If you want a truly objective hiring process you need to look at starting lines, not just finish lines.
Most companies are doing almost the opposite and only looking at the finish line. They want to look only at the skills and exclude the actual person in a misguided effort to be objective.
All that really does it amplify existing societal bias and privilege by rewarding those who got the most breaks in life.
> this is such a difficult problem to solve.
Agreed. And it would be more expensive. Part of why the status quo is so hard to change. You've got to spend the money and do the work. Or take shortcuts and discriminate on one side or the other.
Maybe Charley had depression and anxiety and never made any friends while Joe is outgoing and did allowing him to form study groups easier. Maybe Charley's parents insisted he become a lawyer and he never touched code until college. Maybe Charley has a speech impediment, maybe he is ugly, maybe he is on the spectrum, maybe, maybe, maybe.
We are here to judge how someone can do the job, not go through their life history trying to judge how much harder or easier they had it than someone else.
Any objective evidence to support this? My experience has been the opposite - people care deeply about being objective, in order to make better hiring decisions.
You jumping in a old thread, and you expect me to believe it's because you want me to stop? sounds like to showed up late to the party and just sad everyone left, and you want me to jump back in to talk to you. How you doing?
Truth be told, in my field the intro level textbooks are essentially indistinguishable, down to graphics and specific examples, and every publisher has one. Even if I got free samples for all of them (I don't), there is zero difference for the student. You look at the classics, maybe check out a new book, but in the end pick the one you're already familiar with because you don't have any time to waste.
But yeah, you won't get rich, but you will get a full bookshelf, so you'll be rich in knowledge ;)
Examples:
- Taxes/Pensions - if you just rely on your accountant then they'll do the bare minimum and you'll miss out
- Energy company - we're rolling out smart gas/elec meters in the UK. There is an old type (smets1) and a new type (smets2). You don't want to be stuck with the old type but the company had no idea which type they were installing. (I ended up with the old type)
- Lawyers - We're constantly having to chase ours and highlight things to them to make progress
- Doctors - If I haven't done my research then they invariably try to fob me off (maybe this is a UK nationalised healthcare thing)
I could go on but the crux is that the average professional does the bare minimum to move you along. I'm not old enough to say if it's always been like this but it has been my observation over my decade of adulthood. If it's a new thing then maybe it is partly to blame for the anti-vax and lack of faith in experts.
1) There's a race to the bottom with services in terms of pricing. For example, NHS GPs have strict time limits within which to provide a particular service. These time limits have reduced over the years and so individual doctors are capable of providing a better service but are can't given the constraints. People rarely are willing to pay more for a service unless they know that the quality level will be higher. With services, it is not clear that a higher price will translate to higher quality.
2) Most services are not chosen based on quality. They are chosen based on perception, brand, reviews, pricing and a whole host of other things. Often the most profitable services are the ones who can manipulate these variables best rather than the ones who actually provide a great service. If there is a sole accountant who is fantastic at accounting but poor at marketing and review collection then they are going to struggle and may end up joining a firm who constrains their time such that can only provide the minimum viable service.
E.g. if I have a new button that’s been sewn on a jacket, or have my house painted, I can easily see if the right button was used, or if spots were missed while painting. However if I take my car in for an oil change, I don’t really know if the right grade of oil and an OEM filter was used, nor do I really care to recheck my accountants work on my taxes (as long is it roughly pencils to what I expected).
In a culture obsessed with looking for exploitation opportunities at every corner, what do we expect? Everyone is running so "lean" and "efficiently" that anything beyond the lowest cost options can hinder you. Are you getting ROI, or diminishing returns and if you are getting diminishing returns, then that's now viewed as waste and a poor path to choose.
Capitalism has been great at motivating people to innovate and create but the current state of capitalistic systems, I say, isn't healthy for humanity. We need to acknowledge this and fix perverse incentive structures across the board (that doesn't mean destroying the system, simply fixing it). Much of what you're seeing these days used to be used in arguments for capitalistic systems against socialist systems--what really seems to have happened is that we've just traded who we want to give power to. Instead of those who tower over government systems in an authoritarian manner in socialist systems, we seek business leadership who... tower over us in an authoritarian manner.
One reason the US had been so fantastic is that we had a government and economic system that forced capitalistic ideals to compete with socialistic ideals. We had government services inspired by socialist systems that kept capitalistic drivers from going off the rails into too competitive of states with social safety nets to protect us. Meanwhile, to avoid the stagnant systems you see in prior socialist systems, we had capitalism provide incentives to motivate people to work, to do better for themselves and improve their lives and therefor those around them. Now, we seem to have mostly swept away socialist ideals (competition in policy simply isn't there anymore), capitalistic policy has won, and we're witnessing what unconstrained capitalism looks like. It's less value creation and more wealth extraction.
If you're a capital holder, it looks pretty good. My investments that I simply threw money at have grown beyond belief--without any sort of effort on my behalf--it's astounding to think how much money I earned doing nothing. It's an interesting situation because I still work and get paid fairly well, but when I look at my investment portfolio I can't help but think I'm cheating because asset growth well beyond inflation just appear in my accounts, meanwhile, at my day job, everything has grown more and more demanding without equal compensation.
It's an interesting time and I hope we course correct this nonsense before I get too old.
Personal story: moved into a EU country and tried to import my car tax-free as personal property. Went to a customs agency because apparently you don't talk to customs directly, you go through one of those. They had me collect all sorts of documents, which took me months before it became evident that this type of car cannot be imported tax-free in the first place.
The stress from expecting people to take their responsibilities seriously has cost me many meaningful interpersonal relationships, not to mention innumerable brain cells. On the other hand, the work to achieve more self-sufficiency is alienating in its own right, and, depending on starting conditions, can twist a person into an unlikable mess.
It's vicious cycles all the way down.
Iedereen doet maar wat ( Dutch )
Loosely translated : Everybody just fucks around, wether it is car mechanics, doctors or laywers.
Would love to hear a more canonical term for the phenomenon.
edit: And if it is absolutely critical it is done right? Do it yourself.
There is no doubt though that people do better work when supervised and knowing what questions to ask an expert helps sets expectations about what level of work you will settle for.
Information asymmetry is a real problem, particularly when people are selling information.
This is starting to push me in the direction of off grid/ sustainable living just to minimize these dependencies
I understand good vocational training (for example certified plumbers) in a country pays itself back very much.
A good university program teaches very few hard skills, but you learn to reason about your field essentially from first principles. On the other hand, to do a mechanical job, you really need just the job skills, and the connection to cause and effect is almost irrelevant.
This is typically why university education is held up as a better key to long term career prospects, because of the adaptability rather than rote memorization.
In real life I realize it's a lot more messy.
So I suspect it is not in the building codes. I don't think the codes say anything about about low voltage wires.
Not that vocational jobs are not important - clearly they add value and create employment.
BTW, if you ever see an EE with a card that has printed on it:
V = I*R
I = V/R
R = V/I
https://testguy.net/content/266-Ohm-s-Law-Watt-s-Law-Cheat-S...
A definite no-hire :-/
I had no idea there were EE's walking around who were rusty with basic electrical formulas.
The bigger issue is that there are tons of electricians that never went through apprenticeships and who never picked up and read a copy of the code (which has major changes every three years). The result is a lot of cargo cult installation which may or may not actually be correct.
Likewise with the machine shop a few jobs ago: although we weren’t a union shop, for some jobs we hired contractors in for the union members produced better work, especially for the safety critical stuff.
I have no experience with unions outside the skilled trades — certainly there are many horror stories.
So you built two homes, one with a well researched union labor group and one with a well researched contractor? Or is this just some BS elaboration based on comparing contractors you hired for small time shit with the big house job?
But to really get to your question: I started my 3-year home construction odyssey with a non-union contractor who had to be fired due to poor execution. The replacement was a union shop. That’s about as much A/B testing as one can get.
These are decades apart in time, too.
Maybe, they don't need to? These trades should have cheatsheets where they can check for certain scenarios - like the 2 described, and it would provide Do's and Don'ts?
The closer the low voltage wires are to the high voltage ones, and the longer the distance, the more hmmmmmmm they'll pick up.
The reason you don't mix low/high in the same raceway is because if exposed low/high voltage conductors come in contact with each other, the low voltage cable has a much higher chance of catching fire.
See also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_induction
The reason you don't mix low/high in the same raceway is because if exposed low/high voltage conductors come in contact with each other, the low voltage cable has a much higher chance of catching fire.
But like everything else it depends. Is the DC feeding something like a lightbulb or a fan? Then it probably won't matter.
Does the DC feed something that has a good low pass filter or is it an expensive AC cable with good shielding? Then it might also not matter.
None of the above should be considered be professional advice and it's probably a good rule of thumb to never mix wires like that.
The professor is giving a class, they're going to teach all of what is in the textbook, and for those who can't write it themselves and use ones written by other professors, they can give out that PDF, they don't have to write one.
I was simply responding to this:
> It's not like there is a cheap alternative that the professors can switch to. All new edition textbooks are expensive. They can't specify out of print editions because then you can't guarantee that your students can get access to them, and the textbook companies update the problems in the books just enough to make using a different edition from the one specified impractical.
in the parent comment. I'm pointing out that there is a cheap alternative. We have had digital documents for decades, there are ways to keep those documents up to date without rewriting the entire document, there is no excuse to have a publisher and distributor for educational companion text documents for students in classrooms. It is glaringly obvious that the status quo with textbooks is artificially maintained even though technologically there is absolutely no reason it has to be this way.
How is automatically deducting textbook cost from student tuition going to help with anything? If anything it will help maintain the status quo, because then it's even less transparent.
The alternative you propose is for professors who don't write their own books is to give other people's work (the original authors') away for free.
So your solution is that because it's easy to copy digital books, the 'problem is solved' by forcibly taking away the fruit of labor of some people at your convenience?
As I wrote elsewhere: if there were a cartel, college textbooks would vastly outprice textbooks for professionals (because they cannot be 'forced' to buy them) - that's not what I see in my field. Professional textbooks easily cost $200-$300. It's just a niche market.
When you see "buy one get one free" do you really believe the second one is free? Think before you toss what you think are gotchas out at people. Roll it into the cost of tuition. It's really not that hard to get, yet I'm saying it a second time.
It does solve lots of problems. Material cost, outlandish distribution, marketing and production cost, and it means the prices aren't externalized and the students know what they're paying for a course up front. Those are basically all the problems with the textbook market. It solves a couple of other problems too, digital documents can't be resold, doubly so if their cost is counted in tuition, so no need to stupidly re edit the document every year just to make sure last year's edition is worthless, only edit when there is an update in the field.
Speaking of which, the fact that they do that, edit books needlessly to prevent the previous year's book from being resellable at any value, is proof positive that textbooks are a racket. Professional textbooks are a different kind of hustle, it's like law dictionaries, they know the books are valuable to professionals so they charge large prices, this fact is not proof that the college textbook racket is not a racket run by a publishing cartel. Your reasoning is as weak as a limp dishrag on this one.
In the US, new faculty are judged by their research output and grant input and are still under the threat of losing their job if they don't make tenure after a few years. There is zero incentive to write a book on top of the 80hrs/wk that are put into the job already.
Also, in Germany, a university will absolutely buy textbooks in bulk for students to use, but that's a philosophical decision of how you want to run a society: if it's upheld as important that everyone can get (essentially) free access to top education, that's what you get. If education is treated like a business, you get something else.
https://generalatomic.com/teil1/B.html
Proper EEs don't need a cheat sheet for it.
Je doet maar wat ( You )
Ze doen maar wat ( They )
Just a simple name change on a resume can result in discrimination. Lots of it.
"On average, white applicants receive 36% more callbacks than equally qualified African Americans (95% confidence interval of 25–47% more), based on random-effects meta-analysis of data since 1989, representing a substantial degree of direct discrimination"
https://www.pnas.org/content/114/41/10870.full
> people care deeply about being objective, in order to make better hiring decisions.
They really don't. It costs a lot of money to care deeply. Most companies optimize for rejecting too many candidates, looking for red flags as a time saver. This has been common practice for decades. They do it because there are usually a lot of applicants, and it's a cheap way to reduce the numbers quickly.
But it's even worse now. It's has been codified into job candidate filtering software. "Applicant Tracking System software is used by 75% of US employers to help filter job candidates".
"If an applicant's work history has a gap of more than six months, the resume is automatically screened out"
That's the opposite of caring deeply about being objective for who is the best candidate. You are making decisions based on very superficial information.
It does seem objective at first. Because it is objectively looking at one factor and making a yes or no decision. But that's exactly what I meant when I said at only a superficial level. You aren't objectively screening for the best candidates. Instead you are objectively screening for a signal, and not even a good signal. You need to screen humans, not signals.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/automated-hiring-software-rejects-...
You are judging intention based on results. Those are not the same thing.
You said that they care deeply. You are doing a lot of psychological projection on a large group of diverse people. I proved the results are concerning. Prove they simultaneously care but have somehow managed to make no improvements in decades in the results. Lacking proof on your side, we'll have to judge based on results.
Also the shield needs a low impedance return path to be effective.
You missed the most important part of my point. Someone who crosses the finish line at the same time as someone else, but started from further back is almost always better at doing the job.
I already said it's very difficult to objectively measure. But any improvement in doing so will give you a competitive advantage in finding the best candidates.
The US military used to think successful soldiers with childhood trauma, had coping skills that protected them in deployment. When they ran the studies, they found they were completely wrong - people with childhood trauma, regardless of their military success, were multiple times (4-6x odds ratios) more likely to develop PTSD, (re-)start smoking, or misuse substances.
It's a neat narrative: go through hardship + come out the other side = better coping skills / more productivity. However, humans are complex and often fragile.
I accept the argument that a person who has experienced more hardships has accomplished more to reach that same point. That could be justified if your hiring principles are "who has earned this spot more". It doesn't necessary follow that their trajectory has a steeper slope from the point of hiring.
You've also created a strawman. I never mentioned childhood trauma or much at all of early life aside from growing up poor. Whatever trauma that may have caused certainly did not interfere with their accomplishments to date.
> The US military used to think successful soldiers with childhood trauma...
This is not war nor the battlefield. Let's see studies about people and their career success.
From bell hooks and Kimberle Crenshaw (intersectionality) into leading theories on feminist and racial thought - this is the progressive and academic left. It is the leading thought in every elite university. And you can't run away from it and say "us silent majority progressives...." - a progressive is either this or they aren't progressive by today's standard. It is a social force that is trying to get inside of everything it can, from unrelated academic scholarship (look at what's in modern STEM curricula) as well as corporate America and now elite high schools.
My advice is to choose Liberalism without identity politics and reject this school of thought as illiberal, totalitarian, and harmful.
(For what it's worth, the entire scholarship of critical theory isn't all awful. There's good things in there and the identification of many societal problems is probably right. However, it isn't unique to them and their solutions for these problems are awful and regressive.)
I identify as a cultural moderate for that reason. This stuff is all divorced from actual politics, economics or governing, it's purely cultural.
Really, from what I can see all of current progressivism is compatible with his approach.
The silent majority of people who would have called themselves progressives a decade ago are silent because they are silenced and called racists or just right-wing if they question the new orthodoxy.
Ergo, the people you are referring to as a silent majority are no longer included as progressives.
Making something a "human right" doesn't make it immune to the rules of scarcity. Expert services are scarce, which is why they cost more, even in socialist/communist countries. Communism is, after all, just state-owned capitalism. :) People still get rich in communist countries, experts still get outsized reward, it's just that the opportunities to get rich are constrained to the bureaucrats, and the outsized reward will either come from the system or be facilitated by a black market.
If you believe in the approach of Kendi and DiAngelo, they are the only game in town.
If you believe Kendi and DiAngelo’s approach is counterproductive then supporting modern progressives is acting against the very issues you care about.
You don’t have to make a choice of which foot to shoot yourself in. You can simply not fire.
There are plenty of more moderate political voices, even within the parties. You can support them and you can denounce the groups whose policies you dislike.
Modern progressives are only in the ‘game’ because people support them. If you don’t like what they represent, you can stop.
Are you saying that conservatives today are more likely to engage in "exploiting discrimination and inequality" than conservatives yesterday? Or what did you mean by "modern"?
P.S. Maxwell's Equations on a t-shirt are popular, I even sold one for a while.
2. The 3 versions of the formula are obvious to anyone who remembers high school freshman math. It's barely even algebra.
Carrying that cheat sheet signals you know neither electronics nor the most basic algebra.
Maxwell's Equations, however, get introduced in 2nd or 3rd year in college. You'll need a year (probably two) of calculus to even understand the notation. The equations unify the theories of electric fields and magnetic fields.
Only people who have studied Maxwell's Equations will even recognize them, so by putting them on a t-shirt you're signalling that you are an educated EE to other educated EEs. Other people won't even know what they are.
Edit: Ah, come on! That's one of my best jokes and I got downvoted?!
Besides, EEs usually cheat by assuming a sinusoidal solution anyway.
Physicists assume the pointless mass.
Why is that the implied option?
And no it doesn’t mean a vote for Trump. It means not supporting candidates that parrot this type of rhetoric and to not support causes/movements that are a part of it. FWIW Trump did ban critical race theory from being brought into federal offices and Biden quickly reinstated it under the guise of “learning to be nice to each other” - which it isn’t. Biden, in this case, I believe is a useful idiot for propagating their propaganda, mistaking it for harmless “diversity training”. There’s a big difference!
Prophets, or paranoid fools? Are we looking back and saying, gosh, we should have listened to them, that damn Jane Fonda ruined America.
