education is primarily a barrier to entry: true or false

i've watched that "Changing Paradigms" video before. iirc i agreed with a lot of its analysis but also tuned out when it got to the "what happens next" bit. i do think the question of "which has to change first, society or its education system" is a bit of a chicken and egg puzzle tho, if you happen to be a person who thinks either or both of those things needs to change.

of COURSE the engineers say that, they want to keep the plebes out! they "won" the game!

eh I don't think it's just self interest. if you wanna know how an HVAC system works, you kinda need to take a bunch of classes in HVAC systems, you know? When we hire graduates right out of school the first thing we look at is do they have coursework relevant to the industry - do they know how PV systems work, do they know how lighting systems work. Very practical, specific things. A lot of this can be learned on the job, but it's cheaper to hire someone who at least understands the basics!

I'd say the university system is designed to weed out those opposed to success through the Usual Channels.

you mean blacks and latinos?

yeah but you're talking about a technical certificate, shakey, not a university degree

no I'm talking about BS and MS degrees in engineering. these are degrees handed out by universities. technical certificates are different (and don't require degrees!)

I am a millennial and I grew up in an affluent Northern CA suburb and this (the thesis of the OP) has been the prevailing viewpoint among my parents, peers, counselors, etc. I bought into it, and I don't think it was necessarily helpful to legitimize my dwindling prospects and go to a community college with the dismissal of education as so much gatekeeping. Having gotten through college confident that education was something designed to maintain the class structure and thus no big deal, I now wish I had done it differently. It's really self defeatist for this to be the prevailing attitude without any sort of will or responsibility for reform to lessen the correlation between class and education, but maybe I am just deflecting myself from personal responsibility in saying that. Interesting thread question tho.

xpost are you talking about HVAC design or maintenance?

the engineers i know don't seem to do much in the way of detailed mathematical work tbph, software ppl i know even less, tbph, yet the maths components of their courses were by far the heaviest and toughest parts

xpost to shakey - i thought you meant you worked somewhere that did facilities work, ie electricians, HVAC repair guys, etc ... it sounds more like you're in the "civil engineering" end of things

i come down more on the "barrier to entry" side. stuff on the national curriculum in high school bears remarkably little relevance to stuff i need to know in my everyday life or career (even at the time i found this frustrating, esp w/r/t subjects i couldn't stand like chemistry), and university was such a disaster for me academically that the fact that i possess a degree on paper really is just a hoop i've just about climbed through rather than an indication of my knowledge or proficiency in a field. the lessons i've learnt in ~life~ have been infinitely more valuable - i'm never, ever surprised when i read about people succeeding in journalism without formal qualifications.

i don't think this is ideal but our educational system, even at its best, doesn't seem designed to help people maximise their potential within it.

I'd say the university system is designed to weed out those opposed to success through the Usual Channels.

you mean blacks and latinos?

you mean the New Majority?

i don't see how that's relevant

I agree with i_got_loaded: this is a horrible, short-sighted and frankly idiotic view of the function and value of traditional education.

the grounding in mathematics, science (chemistry & biology), history, language provided by basic high-school education is both hugely valuable and a decent general measure of willingness and ability to do hard cognitive work of the sort required to succeed in fields like law, engineering and medicine. of course there are outside factors that can impede/obscure or aid/enable that "willingness and ability", and these should be better addressed by an educational system that makes it its mission to provide a high quality of education to all americans. nevertheless, the basic approach is a good one, and it deserves respect, especially from the people who provide it.

I don't get your yuk. I teach at a university whose students consist mostly of Hispanics and blacks.

the grounding in mathematics, science (chemistry & biology), history, language provided by basic high-school education is both hugely valuable and a decent general measure of willingness and ability to do hard cognitive work of the sort required to succeed in fields like law, engineering and medicine. of course there are outside factors that can impede/obscure or aid/enable that "willingness and ability", and these should be better addressed by an educational system that makes it its mission to provide a high quality of education to all americans. nevertheless, the basic approach is a good one, and it deserves respect, especially from the people who provide it.

argument could be made that a properly managed apprenticeship in any given field could provide the same chance to show a general measure of willingness to do hard cognitive work that is more relevant and valuable in a given direction without handicapping many people with gradings in subjects that they have no interest in nor faculty.

any system setting out a framework allowing for education/training/improvement in a fair and equal manner deserves respect, not sure that this is limited to the current educational system as discussed.

robin hanson has a whole thing like this where he basically says that education is designed to teach students how to behave appropriately in professional society + suss out who is good at that kind of behavior and who is not.

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/08/school-isnt-about-learning.html

he has a ton of posts about it tho -- it's one of his big things

that's cool alfred, i was just pointing out that on a national level blacks and latinos are "weeded out" of higher education 20% more than other students and i was wondering if you thought it was because of their attitude toward jumping through hoops

the grounding in mathematics, science (chemistry & biology), history, language provided by basic high-school education is both hugely valuable and a decent general measure of willingness and ability to do hard cognitive work of the sort required to succeed in fields like law, engineering and medicine

^^ is this based on research or what?

the grounding in mathematics, science (chemistry & biology), history, language provided by basic high-school education is both hugely valuable and a decent general measure of willingness and ability to do hard cognitive work of the sort required to succeed in fields like law, engineering and medicine

valuable, maybe; a measure of ability to do cognitive work, definitely not. more like a measure of how important school grades were to a person when they were a teenager

IIRC the only variable that correlated to success in engineering classes at UC schools was your 9th grade algebra results

not whether you were in calculus or algebra ii as a senior, not what your SAT math score was, etc etc

here's some other relevant posts:
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/12/on-schools-function.html
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/11/true-believers-in-school.html
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/07/investing-in-school-signals.html

xpost to shakey - i thought you meant you worked somewhere that did facilities work, ie electricians, HVAC repair guys, etc ... it sounds more like you're in the "civil engineering" end of things

close - energy engineering. which sort of requires a combination of design and repair skills (ie you need to know how an optimally functioned system is designed, and also how to retrofit an existing poorly functioning system to function as best as possible)

many xp

you write a very strident paragraph contenderizer, but i'm not convinced it's any less ideological than the views i laid out in the OP

argument could be made that a properly managed apprenticeship in any given field could provide the same chance to show a general measure of willingness to do hard cognitive work that is more relevant and valuable in a given direction without handicapping many people with gradings in subjects that they have no interest in nor faculty.

yeah, wouldn't disagree w this at all.

i take a lot of issue with "the basic approach is a good one" but conty does like to go for bat for the tried and tested values of the 18th century so

course in an ideal world career guidance would be worth a fuck to a 16 yr old, or college wouldn't take place til you were 22 and had already learned IT basics anyway

dude, what could possibly be wrong with a system that asks you to take the most important exams of your life just as you're discovering alcohol and sex?

robin hanson has a whole thing like this where he basically says that education is designed to teach students how to behave appropriately in professional society + suss out who is good at that kind of behavior and who is not.

― Mordy, Wednesday, March 14, 2012 4:33 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah, left that part out, but it's obviously another part of what the contemporary educational system is designed to do, relative to professions like law, medicine and engineering: prepare people for the demands not only of the "professional" workplace, but for the sort of education that will specifically prepare them for that workplace. in part, high school is where you get to demonstrate that you're willing to apply yourself simply because that application is requested of you, and i'd argue that that, too, is hugely valuable.

I am seeing how students increasingly regard their education as a service commodity e.g. "I paid $600 for these credits and I better get a good grade." It doesn't help that my university has used gobbledygook like "results-oriented student excellence," like we're in charge of making good tacos or something. So, yes, I do see students who regard education as an annoyance to circumvent. To a degree I don't blame them.

apprenticeship is actually the model that a lot of education reformers like to use these days (one popular pedagogical approach is called cognitive apprenticeship)

i like the idea but i feel like its going to be even harder to provide that than a decent school aystem

It sucks to teach math, chemistry, history, and I dunno Virgil to students who regard college as the means by which to acquire a piece of paper that signifies "You're okay to start your own business."

dude, what could possibly be wrong with a system that asks you to take the most important exams of your life just as you're discovering alcohol and sex?

well sure, growing up is hard. we segue into "real life" just as we're losing our minds hormonally, figuring out who we are and want to be, and exploring a vast and dangerous world. the fact that this is true is not, however, the fault of the educational system.

I am seeing how students increasingly regard their education as a service commodity e.g. "I paid $600 for these credits and I better get a good grade."

happening a lot in the UK too now that students are paying the full cost of their degrees

dude, what could possibly be wrong with a system that asks you to take the most important exams of your life just as you're discovering alcohol and sex?

oh i fuckin wish i was, iirc, discovering parental committal & possibly taco fries

It sucks to teach math, chemistry, history, and I dunno Virgil to students who regard college as the means by which to acquire a piece of paper that signifies "You're okay to start your own business."

― Exile in lolville (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, 14 March 2012 23:45 (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it might do, yes, but from their POV it might suck to have to hear about these things and be graded on your interest in them when you know your career plans don't include them

I am seeing how students increasingly regard their education as a service commodity e.g. "I paid $600 for these credits and I better get a good grade."

^ a good attitude, imo. encourages the sort of work that's likely to result in success (i.e., good grades).

and financial success

well yr self-fulfilling prophecy came true

Panglossian!

it might do, yes, but from their POV it might suck to have to hear about these things and be graded on your interest in them when you know your career plans don't include them

oh yeah! We're finally seeing the results of "democratizing" the educational system. It's neither bad nor good imo. If "society" requires a college degree for most anything then we must become degree mills.

It sucks to teach math, chemistry, history, and I dunno Virgil to students who regard college as the means by which to acquire a piece of paper that signifies "You're okay to start your own business."

it's pretty sad that the idea of learning for learning's sake has such little purchase right now, because that's pretty much the only "utility" of many courses, at high school and above.

then again that doesn't apply across the board, making a 15-yr-old who dislikes chemistry and knows at that point that their adult life will not involve any of it sit through lessons is just going to alienate them from the system and reinforce the idea that they're just doing it for a piece of paper.

It sucks to teach math, chemistry, history, and I dunno Virgil to students who regard college as the means by which to acquire a piece of paper that signifies "You're okay to start your own business."

― Exile in lolville (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, 14 March 2012 23:45 (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it might do, yes, but from their POV it might suck to have to hear about these things and be graded on your interest in them when you know your career plans don't include them

― truth fromgbs (darraghmac), Wednesday, March 14, 2012 4:48 PM (21 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah, but if you know that your career plans do not require such things, in any way shape or form, and you are in a school that does require them, then the only real problem is that you've chosen the wrong school. i mean, basically the only thing you really need to start a business is a line of credit.

but when the school in question is high school ... ?

it's pretty sad that the idea of learning for learning's sake has such little purchase right now,

did it ever? Seriously! ILE is one of the few communities in which I've encountered people like me who used to read and write because they gave him pleasure.

i agree with noodle vague upthread (v. beautifully put). some rough thoughts: there is this idea that logic, reasoning, critical thinking and other side effects of learning math and science will serve someone just for being those skills, directly applied to life, but i think it's more about learning how to perform these skills in a setting, i.e., what takes precedence for success is how able someone is to meet and perform the requirements necessary to gain membership in a group. sometimes those requirements are "hard" rather than "soft" or whatever but i still think this is a big reason why secondary education and "the field" (knowledge/production/market work) exhibit so many disconnects, those two cultures require two different performance profiles, with different amounts of element overlap.

i think education culture, in the u.s. at least, has many tangled and contradictory aims and claims. the impulse contenderizer is spouting above for one. the idea that pure education is about a kind of personal liberation, which needs to be majorly questioned and sorted out because it ends up being a cover for a lot of hypocrisy.

lots of x-posts of course

yeah, but if you know that your career plans do not require such things, in any way shape or form, and you are in a school that does require them, then the only real problem is that you've chosen the wrong school. i mean, basically the only thing you really need to start a business is a line of cred

The subjects I mentioned are part of most colleges' core curriculum.

but when the school in question is high school ... ?

fair point, but i'm good with everybody having to learn to crawl, even if they're pretty damn sure that they have no intention of ever walking

baseball stats are pretty much just ratios, right? things like independence and covariance and sampling error and fat-tailed distributions and whatever don't figure in like they do once you dive into the "real" stuff. On the other hand, I do think we could make real stats more widely taught and accessible, and it would be very useful to people in all walks of life.

even the popular scientific press likes these "guys! power laws!" stories when often it turns out there aren't power laws involved at all, but other, less sexy distributions.

yeah but their desires are based on a misunderstanding of the nature of mathematics and my experience is based on many years of professional and personal engagement w the field

...their desire is for their kids to "get into good schools and have the choice of pursuing science & tech careers"

those two things are contradictory

― the late great, Friday, March 16, 2012 11:59 AM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

first line seems a bit presumptive, and i strongly disagree w the second. basically everyone i know that has a career in the sciences went to a "good school" (i.e., a high competitive one). and i know lots of people doing that kind of work.

My brother's finishing up his PhD in computer engineering and he got his undergrad at BYU-ID. The only people who are competing to get into there are Mormons who couldn't get into regular BYU.

Oh, one other thing I would say about law schools, is that for a large law firm (and maybe for a certain kind of smaller one too) it's partly a marketing thing to hire from "top" law schools, you know, so you can say to Citigroup "The associates we have working on your deal graduated from Harvard, Stanford, Columbia" etc. That said, I don't completely discount using law school as a proxy for ability. It's hardly a perfect proxy, but when you have to do a lot of hiring at once you go with the easiest measure that gives you the best odds of getting someone good. Someone from Brooklyn Law School might be smarter and harder working than someone from Harvard, but the odds are better that the opposite is true and how the hell are you going to choose otherwise? Interviews are notoriously bad determinants, and anything else would be too time-consuming. So you hire 20 kids from Harvard and one from Brooklyn rather than the other way around or 50/50. Yes, a few of the Harvard kids will turn out to be entitled little shits who don't want to do any work, and the BLS kid who just missed the cut might have been the dark horse who would have headed up a practice group one day, but they're still using the best and most cost-effective methods they have of choosing.

basically everyone i know that has a career in the sciences went to a "good school" (i.e., a high competitive one)

many people i know who work in the sciences went to third or fourth tier schools (or even community colleges) for undergrad and elite schools for graduate school

in fact one guy i know who is now a prof at davis was a HS dropout who did not start at a community college until 23 or 24, when he got tired of getting high all day

things like independence and covariance and sampling error and fat-tailed distributions and whatever don't figure in like they do once you dive into the "real" stuff

in high school it's ratios, standard deviation and possibly chi-squared

which should go great w/ baseball, video games, etc

also contenderizer i don't think it's presumptuous at all

i don't presume to know what my parents want, i know what they want

i don't presume to understand the difference between "school mathematics" (based on memorizing and repeating procedures) and "real mathematics" (based on intuition, persistence, looking for patterns, approaching new questions, approximating, combining approaches, etc), i know the difference

i mean it may not be widely true but it is true where i work, and given that it's a large part of the national dialogue about what constitutes good math education (specific pieces of info vs specific skills vs specific practices and habits) i think it's probably true across many schools

http://www.math.utah.edu/~pa/newton.gif

newton wrote that

i can tell you that what parents want re: math is high SAT scores and good state test results

the fastest way to good results is to teach to a test (ask anyone who teaches or has taught an SAT prep course), memorizing shortcuts and learning tricks

the problem is when you get to college, you realize suddenly that you need to be able to "reason judiciously", something our students get very little preparation for, even the "elite" students

i have always thought this is why there are declining numbers of american students at every level of science and math education - fewer students finish science degrees than start them, even fewer get into graduate degrees, even fewer get into and finish post-doctoral studies, etc etc

also the other side is that in countries that routinely kick our ass on math and science tests, the students are actually asked to learn fewer things than in american schools and they learn them more slowly ... but somehow they kick our ass when those students come to american school

they are also generally going to cost more to train at the undergrad level, so universities have little reason to push people into the fields

cost more? why?

i'm not following what you're saying iatee

I teach in the humanities at a public uni & a few years back had a Vietnamese immigrant who struggled hard with written & oral English, didn't understand well the Western debates on monotheism, etc. She ended up kicking every other student's ass. The difference was partly that she actually came to office hours, unlike the others. But I don't really know what else it was: intrinsic smarts? work habits? I dunno, but it was eye opening.

science students require expenive labs, interaction w/ higher-paid faculty, humanities students require chalkboards and grad student teacher who you're paying 15k a year

xp

not math faculty

yeah I mean it's not true across the board but it's a partial explanation why there's not internal pressure to make science ed more accessible at any given university. it costs money and doesn't bring immediate benefits, unless your university is starting out w/ a surplus of science resources.

well they do generally charge lab fees for the labs

trying to find a breakdown, I remember reading it somewhere
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/sciencecareers/2012/01/university-of-f.html

http://www.today.ucla.edu/portal/ut/bottom-line-shows-humanities-really-155771.aspx

science research otoh can bring in defense $$$$$ (and also other industry $$$$) while good luck getting grants for your novel interpretation of milton.

yes, on the research level the opposite is true

My late father was a mechanical engineer by training, but it's amazing how the field hasn't changed. Sure, they use computers a lot more. My dad worked part-time up to the last month of his life, he adapted to the CAD programs just fine!

Engineers must maintain their math schools their entire life! My dad used to sit down at night with a math book! I envied him, people think math is hopelessly dry, it's interesting if you view it as an expression of spatial relationships! If you're into art or design or photography you might want to maintain some math skills.

My dad put a lot of pressure on me to learn math. It keeps your brain sharp and doesn't have any ideological bullshit in it. I like doing the odd math problem.

We had a math test in design school and I got a C! I got a high score on my math SAT but I hadn't practiced in a while.

Math and science don't discriminate based on background, but sometimes a student's social climate discourages them from learning math. i.e., if you struggle with math you are stupid! Conceptually, it is easier than philosophy or literature...doing the problems is difficult.

This seems quite salient here:

https://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/03/23-8

here's an interesting one

http://nyti.ms/MN6Q8s

i am pretty sure nobody really answers the final question in the comments but i didn't read all of them

post secondary education facilitated entry ime ; )