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Menendez pleads not guilty to bribery charges as more Democrats call for his resignation
Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey and his wife pleaded not guilty to federal bribery charges at their arraignment Wednesday in New York. Menendez's arraignment comes amid growing calls for his resignation from several members of his own party. CBS News congressional correspondent Nikole Killion has...
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A bachelor's degree in a "useful" field (by "useful" I mean something that is not ultra-specialized like linguistics, but something like a STEM field for which there are gazillions of jobs out there) is, at the very least, a failsafe system guaranteeing that you can always find a decent job and provide for yourself if you want to. A computer science or an engineering degree from virtually any accredited school anywhere in the world will get you pretty far already.
Of course, if you do not have many aspirations and are okay with getting by by doing some boring generic office or manual labor work, while getting paid enough to live somewhat decently, then you can just become a secretary in some random company straight out of the high school, or work on your uncle's farm... But I would hope that most people have higher expectations from life, like to use their brain a little bit more, and want to learn something about how the world works.
In many places that education, sadly, comes with a lot of unnecessary ideological baggage (garbage?). An essential skill that one should develop as early as in elementary school is to filter out this nonsense and to grab the diamond underneath it. If you can get a degree in computer science at Princeton, but have to endure a couple of rubbish ideological courses and a few events in which you are prompted to "check your privilege" - then go for the degree and laugh at these courses and events.
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I honestly have no idea how most people can possibly get into a high-profit field without receiving specialized education.
You describe the very reason why economicly people pay by addition of cost increased national debt and not any factual given gains by exposure to a larger economy, lower costs. An economy does not actual grow by means of a expressed by a mathematical exponent, it scaled size. The scale of expantion held is a mask placed over an economy which is by scale then only visibly lager without zero addtional costs for each layer of mask adds laters of new costs.
The question of the hour MayCaesar is are higher education institutions and those who work there, those who pay and those who are paid given immunity to such laws as the RICO Act?
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1. "Prove that you passed high school"
A college degree doesn't only prove that you passed high school. It proves you passed college. This is a standard higher than so an employer can rightfully expect a higher quality of worker when employing people with degrees over diplomas.
Also, college work is more similar to office work than homework. It indicates the a higher level of responsability and maturity as the college graduate has already proven they were able to complete assignments, attend lectures, pass exams without any teacher/supervisor.
2. Unpaid internships.
The type of work that would usually take interns is the type with a high level of onboarding and custom knowledge before a person can become useful in a company. An internship is usually a few months becuase the company derives very little benefit benefit from the graduate until a few months where they can independently work.
Junior doctors, lawyers, accountatants, or any profession are all highly regarded professions but will typically get paid a very low rate when they first graduate because the benefit to a company is minimal until they have been 'trained in'.
3. Entering the job market immediatly
This is great if the job is what the person already knew what they wanted to do. Unfortunatly, most highschool graduates do not usually know this. To start working in one area means that the person becomes locked into that field as people get less willing to leave a field with the more time spent in it. The benefit of college education is that it will hopefully expose you to more areas so that making an incorrect/inefficient decisions can be better avoided.
Employers are looking for a candidate who will derive the most benefit to that company without that person leaving. A person without specialist education in their area will always be limited in what they can do because they will always be limited by their own expereience rather than the general challenge that a university is supposed to provide in that area.
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I have a problem in understanding if you mean how valuable is advanced education or have valuable is college job training. There is a level of confusion as a college education for all intent on a United State Right held at the Constitutional level is simply priceless. However, these institutions do not hold states if the union on Constitutional right if fact as truth they impose breaks of states of the union for individual self-gain. The problem here is that the institutions themselves may be Unconstitutional and are politically motivated in place of constitutional motivated as an incentive to identify student value in learning. The ability to hold a job are not clear indicators of a value someone may take home from education institutions as there are many risks that come with working conditions and job descriptions that do not attach to learning and logistical memorizing.
What is the standardized value of political negotiation experience in schools relating to the speed of limited states of the union in written law over United State Constitutional Right directing not speed but best qualities of states of the identical connections of politics, law, and with future values of self worth as a question. A way to look at that statement in a simpler way is to aslk what influence does National Debt play in describing a value of higher education publcly?
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Here is a irony.
"The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article."
14th Amendment, Section 5.
The value in college education is measured in the clear understanding that section V of the IVX Amendment does not state that Congress shall have legal powers to enforce, by appropriate legislation. It states only appropriate legislation in illegal actions. Meaning it is malpractice of law which replaces political impeachment by the new state of the American Constitutional union since the IVX Amendment. Spending in the form of budget credit as national debt has been promised under condition of American independence form natural resources for its energy. the fact is America must now pay for foreign materials for batteries making America's foreign energy dependencies twice as big and not smaller or independent.
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I have met some people without college degrees who succeeded in life, but I have met orders of magnitude more who were forever stuck working as beach attendants or ice cream truck workers. No matter how special one thinks they are, the odds are not in their favor - and, in addition, people have the affinity to think of themselves as far more special than they actually are. In 99% cases thinking that you are an outlier only implies that you have a poor ability to self-reflect.
If someone went to a bogus school selling fake degrees (of which there are not many in the Western world, at least, where the government routinely discredits such schools), then their mistake was going to the wrong school, not going to a school. The evidence that without any degrees their outcome would be significantly better is slim, to put it generously.
You do not seem to understand the idea of an internship. What it gives you is education and experience of working in a real company, valuable connections and prospects of being employed at that company. In many cases it makes sense to do it for free if what you get from that is valuable enough. It is similar to how in the Medieval Europe kids would often do apprenticeships where they would not get paid, but got to learn the craft from masters, so later they would become paid assistants, and later still, masters themselves.
Someone who has earned or is about to earn a quality degree certainly will have better options than that. But someone who is struggling to enter the job market and wants to immediately start working at a high-paid position, rather than spend a few years working their way up there, might strongly benefit from such an opportunity.
A good degree is not a magical pill: you do not suddenly start getting 100 phone calls a day from top company CEOs begging you on their knees to go work for them. But it certainly gets you far compared to where you were when you just started college.
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I can't tell if you're being genuine. But I am enjoying this so let's continue.
Degrees
If I accept your point that a highschool degree is an inaccurate degree of a persons ability but a college degree displays that you genuinely were at the level to pass secondary education. Surely this shows the value of having a college degree even more. You genuinely have the ability to pass both standards academic standard.
If an employer has the option of picking a college graduate who is almost certainly literate and numerate or a high school graduate where this is uncertain then this heavily favours the benefits of college education.
You mention also mention that going to college results in making them stupider. Is this a contradiction when a college degree verifies the intelligence of a person who did not go?
I'm not sure what you meant by “racist verification”. Do you mean that college degrees verify that high school material is racist? Apologies, I'm not following. How does a qualification prove the supremacy/inferiority of a secondary level material?
Internships
Students are willing to work for the initial experience in their desired profession. One of the hardest part of any career is getting your foot in the door.
The article you cited was from 2012 which was in the middle of the biggest recession in one hundred years, where many professions suffered serious contractions in the work available on professionals which pushed most of the pressure downwards onto the least experienced in the professions i.e. the students.
We are currently in a labour shortage, https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/12/us-economy-supply-shortages-housing-labor-goods-services/672564/, which reverses this trend and moves pressure off the students to take unpaid internships as paid work in their chosen fields is now more abundant.
But to your question “Why are students willing to work for free”? Because the relevant work experience in their desired field is more important to them than the short term benefit of little experience but immediate pay. Getting experience at a lower level for a minimal or no pay is more beneficial to them in the long run than working a paid lowest level job. A student nurse , gets far more benefit working in the wards and with patients for a year than a hostpital orderly would for that same time period.
From my own experience, the only companies (typically small 10-20 person firms) who do not offer employment post internship usually make this clear prior to taking any interns. This is only anecdotal but I have never encountered in the real world, a company who expected interns to do janitorial work.
Many companies have a minimum acceptance criteria of an accredited college degree with a certain grade level. They don't specify the college. So it does seems that companies are interested in hiring college students at average universities.
Ivory tower
As to your last point. If a Phd can't get work in the 'real world' but can in a university then again, this shows that having that college education is valuable.
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You do not seem to understand the idea of an internship. What it gives you is education and experience of working in a real company, valuable connections and prospects of being employed at that company. In many cases it makes sense to do it for free if what you get from that is valuable enough. It is similar to how in the Medieval Europe kids would often do apprenticeships where they would not get paid, but got to learn the craft from masters, so later they would become paid assistants, and later still, masters themselves.
Sorry, I know I critique you a lot but an intern that is not paid is still not working for free they are being tested by an independent source.
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Yasmeen Qureshi
Sarah Gross
Lisa Desai"
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The study found that investing in robots helps to boost the efficiency and quality of work, with the reduced costs often meaning that there are more jobs to go around for their human peers." Adi Gaskell
https://www.forbes.com/sites/adigaskell/2021/09/02/does-automation-result-in-more-jobs-being-created/?sh=433fe10c63d0
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You cannot do the actual job when it comes to jobs requiring advanced knowledge and expertise (which is the overwhelming majority of high-paying jobs on the market) until you have invested heavily into learning the stuff. You want to become a software engineer at Google with no education? Be my guest, try it. Go to the Microsoft offices in the DC and tell them, "Guys, I know nothing and can do nothing, but I am willing to do the actual job in order to gain knowledge and become an expert! Hire me, pretty please!"
That is what the interview process is for. As for only hiring from elite schools (Oxford University is not a part of the Ivy League, by the way), I have never heard of such practice, although there probably are insane employers somewhere doing that.
I know quite a few folks from Harvard and Princeton; in fact, my PhD advisor was a Harvard graduate. These schools rarely accept or produce buffoons, and it makes perfect sense to grant more credibility to the average graduate from there than to the average graduate of the Middle-Of-Nowhere College.
Thank you for the suggestion, but I am fairly sure that my sources are far more trustworthy than a wiki article.
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Unpaid internships should be allowed. While the initial pay may be low, imagine the benefit of an internship from K street in DC, near me. That 3 or 6 month investment can secure them a job, which it recently did for a member of my family, or it can give you the insights you need to get a really good job. I'm very libertarian on this and think employees and employers should be able to negotiate their own wages.
Know that many government internships will not only pay you but put you up in hotel for the summer.
The poor will always have more obstacles. In the mountains of Appalachia where I was born, the nearest community college is about an hour away. The idea of "equity" is a farce. My advice to every child in Appalachia is to toughen up and forego the safe spaces. Recognize that it will take you more effort than some others, but rather than whine about, recognize that by making those hard choices you will have a better outcome than those around you who didn't make that choice.
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the economist
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I was also talking specifically about STEM degrees, making it clear that there are many areas in which receiving education, in most cases, is pointless. 20% of all degrees in the UK leading to better financial outcomes? That is freaking awesome, considering that those degrees include ones in bogus disciplines. I will take those odds. If you look at the STEM degrees in general, I would guess that the number would be below 2%, although I do not have a hard data to back it up.
You keep citing random newspapers and Wiki articles. Let me cite a much harder source, something that researchers actually use in their work when making their claims:
https://www.bls.gov/emp/chart-unemployment-earnings-education.htm
Please explain how your view on the utility of higher education aligns with this data. Bear in mind that the thread is called "How valuable is a college education for most people?" We are not talking about your basement genius; we are talking about the average representative of the general population.
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No, your claims in different comments contradict each other, and, rather than explaining exactly how and why my argument is wrong, you just cite articles from newspapers. Had you received decent higher education and paid attention when going through the program(s), you would have learned that citing a source is only the beginning of a counter-argument, it is not a counter-argument. You were supposed to explain exactly in what way the 40% number is "flawed"; instead, you cited some source, and that was it.
What do you mean by "degree inflation explaining my link"? The data clearly shows that the income in the population is unexceptionally positively correlated with the level of formal education attained. And your response to that data obtained through a rigorous data acquisition process with full compliance of the relevant predominant standards - is a Huffington Post article (that does not even reference the correlation in question) and... a forum thread?
Talking to you is just uninteresting. I reference hard data and describe the most obvious and immediate interpretation of it, and you reference newspaper articles and blog posts.
I have already explained that. The purpose of an internship is to acquire experience and learn new skills. It is not to make a living. You make a living by leveraging said experience and skills when applying for a job later on. This is literally what internships are made for and why they are separate from regular employment arrangements.
I need to pay $1,000 to spend a month at SpaceX, working with its software engineers, building a network and likely securing a future high-paid position there? If I were still an undergrad, I would yell at the top of my lungs: "Where, WHERE DO I SIGN UP?!!!"
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For Tough, things seem to have worked out just fine, despite his lack of a college credential. After he left McGill, in 1987, he landed a job at Harper’s magazine in New York City. He was 20.
“I felt like the thing that I had been looking for in college — cool intellectual discussions, work that mattered — I felt like I got that at Harper’s,” Tough told me."
https://hechingerreport.org/opinion-do-colleges-reinforce-or-reduce-inequality/
Conclusions, what does higher education really offer that cannot be replicated better somewhere else? Nothing in my opinion. The only exception is government mandated requirements. Even those seems like red tape. Students can learn to get better at tests as opposed to learning.
Critical thinking? No better off at skepchick or reading Richard Dawkin's the God Delusion. Employment, trade school and bootcamps. Knowledge the library. Making the world a better place, nope they make inequality worse. Cool intellectual discussions, nope woke ruined that. Yet, there is plenty of risk.
I conclude higher education is obsolete. Just like coal plants need to go and there is many many obsolete technologies like leaded gasoline. I leave with a few questions, did college ever do a great job? Was getting a bunch of young people together to drink and smoke pot ever a good idea?
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Owing these amounts at those ages is exceedingly rare. You seem to forget that the cost of the degree is strongly correlated with its marketability. Someone who has taken $200k to study mathematics at Princeton most likely will strongly out-earn someone who has taken $20k to study at a community college.
I would like to see some data in support of the implicit claim that the net cost of a STEM degree from a decent university is frequently negative. And we are only talking about purely money here, forgetting all the other benefits that quality education provides: networking opportunities, likelihood of finding a spouse, postponing of stress of looking for a job...
These do not even remotely compare to what you get out of a quality college/university program. You can go and be a plumber after a vocational school; is looking at other people's feces every day though your idea of a fulfilling career?
This I have never encountered personally. I honestly have no idea what happens to these kids; neither me nor any one of the hundreds college graduates I have known relatively closely have ever gotten to the point of even considering such an option.
I am waiting for the exciting story about you getting a job at NASA after reading Skeptical Science.
Again, this is incompatible with your earlier claims about the lack of utility of college programs. You have to decide which it is: "Colleges contribute to inequality by advantaging rich people", or "Colleges are useless".
These phenomena are concentrated at several crappy departments; in a STEM program you have nothing to worry about, aside from a nonsense training you might have to attend several times a year.
I have a lot of university friends who think critically and do not buy into the "woke" stuff. Realize that, whenever Jordan Peterson or Konstantin Kisin call out "woke-ism" at universities, they are not talking about every university and every program; they are talking about a small fringe that happens to leak into the rest of the society, but it is nowhere near as bad outside of its fringe territory as the excesses these individuals commonly bring up are.
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The "sunk cost fallacy" may, at best, explain why someone people who have already spent a few years in their program choose to finish it despite rationally believing that it is not in their best interest. It does not explain why people enroll in those programs to begin with since the sunk cost at that point in time is zero.
And for the "at best" part, no one enrolling in a college program expects to drop out. The drop-outs are those who have made drastic miscalculation at some point, and such people are not expected to be common. "Chances are slim" simply does not hold for the vast majority of the population.
I think you are getting it backwards: competition is facilitated by high, not low demand. And there is a reason STEM graduates are in high demand: because those programs actually make students develop highly valuable skills and ways of thinking. Your claims that this is some sort of a bubble are not backed up by any data I have looked at.
What do you think STEM graduates do at all those companies? Play Minesweeper all day long? If you looked at the workflow of a typical representative of this group, say, in the Silicon Valley or on Wall Street, you would not be so hasty to call it "propaganda".
This seems to just be lack of forecasting: people assume that the state of the market today is going to persist infinitely. This is precisely why it is important to constantly work on your skills and acquire new and up to date knowledge. Something that is much easier to do in a proper university program than at your home, reading random books and websites.
But I have been talking all this time specifically about the "proper" degrees. I agree that many of the degrees have very narrow utility, at best. A degree in French literature may be valuable if you are really passionate about French literature and want to dedicate your life to it, but otherwise it is just a way to have a 4 year long costly vacation with nothing to show for it.
I suppose, if you take all the earned college degrees in general, a significant fraction of them will not be very useful. But I doubt that that is true for most of them. Then again, I may be unfamiliar with the relative representation of various fields in education given that my personal experience is limited almost exclusively to the STEM fields.
Sure, if plumbing is the best way for you to secure a quality education, go for it! Granted, money alone does not guarantee your entry into Harvard, but it does get you far compared to where you could be without it.
It seems though more prudent to me to simply work hard for the last several years of your high school, get a lot of accomplishment and a high SAT score, and then either get a loan or a scholarship to study at a decent university. That is what I did back in my home country: having slacked through most of the high school, I worked my butt off for the last 1.5 years studying math, physics, computer science, etc. - and it paid off in the end. There is no reason someone in the US or anywhere else cannot do the same, other than them not taking their life seriously (and that, unfortunately, is probably uncurable).
I will allow myself a deviation from the conversation: I think that people on the West are too obsessed with so-called "mental health". Human beings are not supposed to be comfortable all the time: stress and frustration are inherent parts of life, and one needs to not run away from them or take a break from them, but learn to deal with them.
One thing Asian countries have over the West is that they understand that and do not coddle their youth. What, a college program is too hard? Well, tough luck: life can be hard in general. Better learn how to deal with it now, in a controlled environment, than later, when you have a career, a family, health issues and a host of other problems. Nobody will let you "take a mental health break" then.
The consequences of such difference are obvious. Where do you think all these yelling "woke" teenagers are coming from? They have been coddled by the adults and shielded from any emotional discomfort, so now they cannot handle even the minimum amount of stress without completely breaking down. And a university program that has them break through that is a boon, not a curse. The mechanical engineering program at the MIT is brutal; good! Having gone through that, you will never be a whiny little brat ever again.
It all starts in the head: if you believe that you are incapable of getting a high-paying job, then that is true. The opportunities are limitless, and the more ambitious and proactive you are, the faster the progress will be.
As for the critical thinking skills, you are not going to hone them by sitting at home and reading random websites. True critical thinking is developed and tasted in the fire of life. It is easy to be a critical thinker sitting at home and sipping wine; but if you bring the critical thinking developed in such an environment to, say, a complicated business project in a highly competitive environment, then it will fall apart quite quickly. The benefit of going through a tough university program is that you get to put your thinking against the harsh reality of logic, which will shape it into something worthwhile.
The world is full of ivory tower philosophers who believe themselves the most independent thinkers out there - and the abominations they have built when they put their thoughts to the test. Working on a real project the product of which is supposed to function in a certain way in this world is what builds a respectable thinker. It is no accident that every widely respected intellectual out there is not just a speaker, but a professional with a lot of accomplishments in various fields. Jordan Peterson or Richard Dawkins have not become who they are by reading Skeptical Science at home, you know.
Inequality does not imply negative outcomes for anyone. Me being highly-educated does not in any way harm someone who is not highly-educated - in fact, people like me are much more likely to contribute to creation of technology making low-educated people's lives better than they themselves. Who do you think, say, is going to cure uneducated farmer's cancer - other farmers, or scientists who have studied cancer for decades?
I honestly have no idea where this belief that college students are miserable comes from. I am not sure how to objectively measure "misery", but anecdotally college students I have studied with or taught have been some of the happiest and most successful people I have known.
If your point is that lowering the standards leads to worse outcomes for everyone in education, then I mostly agree with you, and that is one of my main complaints towards the US education system. This, however, is hardly caused by the influence of the "woke" people: it has been a very long trend of coddling people and emphasizing comfort over freedom and equality over achievement.
As for diversity, there are different types of diversity, and not all of them contribute positively to the environment. Say, at a computer science conference you want to have a diversity of countries represented as different countries have different predominant approaches to the field - but you do not want to have a high diversity of professions represented as a janitor or a professional runner will have little to contribute to the discussion.
In a computer science program students should be accepted based on their expected ability to digest the essential material and produce something as a consequence. They should not be accepted based on their wealth, or race, or disability status.
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Many Firms Expect New Graduates to Arrive Job-Ready From Day One"
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Lack of qualified job applicants exactly means like of knowledgeable and experienced professionals. It has nothing to do with entry-level jobs for which there is always abundance of applicants.
As for how exactly it manifests, I can explain it to you using my personal background. I have studied rigorous mathematics and (often considered a separate discipline, although it is highly debatable) statistics, as well as physics, both at universities and in research organizations. I often come across people in the industry and even academia who use the equations and techniques from these disciplines without really understanding them. "We need to do clustering? K-means is the way!" This is good enough for simple projects in which accuracy and efficiency is not important, and that is something many people can learn by just reading online articles and practicing at home. However, Microsoft, for instance, works on drivers, extremely low-level routines which have to be incredibly accurate and computationally efficient; sloppiness of this kind will not fly there. And what Microsoft leadership finds is that, when they interview the average applicant and ask him which algorithm he would implement here and why, he just spouts the latest algorithm he read about and cannot really explain why it is appropriate here.
People who understand the low-level technical underpinning of "skills" are few and far between, because understanding that requires years and years of rigorous studies of very abstract subjects. Such people graduate from reputable STEM programs, and you are going to have far more people like that drawing from the entire world, than just drawing from the US population (where you have, at most, 100 universities producing significant numbers of people of this caliber). The cap on the H1B visas in 2012 was 85,000 which is far too small, and adding extra 20,000 would barely change anything. As Bill Gates around the same time said, the cap should be completely removed, and I completely agree with him on this.
The H1B cap does not apply to non-profit, academic and governmental research organizations, which is why you see so many people from China, India or Russia working at universities and research labs, but so relatively few working at top private companies. What do you think of this discrepancy? Is it natural? Is it healthy? Is it a "myth" that boxes every F-1 PhD student into a research career regardless of their desires and of the employers' offers, or is it an irrational system based on the same reasoning as the one you are putting forth?
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Then, they either switch fields or become unemployed or underemployed. This has a lot to do with build versus buy. Employers don't want to train/build their employees. So, instead they attempt to buy and search and search effectively looking for a purple squirrel.
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However, Microsoft, for instance, works on drivers, extremely low-level routines which have to be incredibly accurate and computationally efficient; sloppiness of this kind will not fly there. And what Microsoft leadership finds is that, when they interview the average applicant and ask him which algorithm he would implement here and why, he just spouts the latest algorithm he read about and cannot really explain why it is appropriate here.
Can I get a educated guess with negative numbers and zero Pat? Y....
Low-level routines you mean hidden binary routines?
I would love to see Microsoft or IBM for that matter answer how any math equation in algebra can ever be accurate without understanding natural numbers as there are no principle of time or compass accurate without them. Incredibly B.S. accurate is approximated by complex extremely low-level routines stacked in binary not practical and precise mathematics. You even say so yourself.
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The math is B.S and needs a very high number of scientific fixed equations to maintain the idea of accuracy. Thus, a need for research career, as so that all institution can hide the connection to established justice it should share with such things as cigarettes and alcohol, engineering never requires warning stickers of danger like other products sold and placed into the consumer market. Though should have.
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I get it's the harsh truth, but it's in no way fair. My parents were able to major in english and comparative political history, earn a middling GPA, and still have a job within 3 months of graduation"
https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/5wwc2n/graduated_with_cs_degree_but_still_have_no_job_in/
I know this is reddit but it explain just how bad the situation is. The worst part is people think CS degree = job so they won't help you and blame the victim.
" Higher education is evolving into a caste system with separate and unequal tiers that take in students from different socio-economic backgrounds and leave them more unequal than when they first enrolled. " Suzanne Mettler
https://www.amazon.com/Degrees-Inequality-Politics-Education-Sabotaged/dp/0465044964/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1402679291&sr=8-1&keywords=DEGREES+OF+INEQUALITY+How+the+Politics+of+Higher+Education+Sabotaged+the+American+Dream
"support for higher education was thrown into a cage match with every other necessary public good." Peter Lunenfeld
https://www.salon.com/2014/07/05/ronald_reagan_stuck_it_to_millennials_a_college_debt_history_lesson_no_one_tells/
People want simple answer, oh its the students, or higher education, or even the employers. Yet, just like there is no one cause of disease there is not a single cause here. Causes of disease can be understood by the mnemonic VINDICATE.
"And sometimes more than one cause is involved: a traumatic injury gets infected."
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-one-true-cause-of-all-disease/
Others will say, hey quit your whining the job market is much better thus this is irrelevant. No, understanding history is important. There are people who still view Ronald Reagan as a hero. History helps us understand and solve the problems of the present.
I conclude that higher education is low value. The reasons are complex and there are multiple causes. From for profit-schools, degree mills, to government spending, politics, all the way to employers chasing purple squirrels while getting rid of entry level positions and job training.
Nothing to humiliate and cause despair like having a bachelors degree in one of the supposedly highest demand fields only to be rejected for a minimum wage job at McDonald's. In a future post I plan to post all the reasons.
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I do not think you would hire anyone with such an approach: nobody would go work in a company which champions such discrimination (illegal in the US, by the way). As for new graduates, they seem to be doing pretty well according to the BLS data: the fraction of unemployed people with a Bachelor's degree alone is 3.5% here, going down to 2.6% for Masters 1.5% for PhDs. Your premise is false, your explanation of that premise makes no sense, and your prescriptions change by the moment based on the latest article or reddit post you read.
It is interesting that you think that believing in god implies deep deficiency in critical thinking skills. Is that also something that you read on a reddit post? The data does not support your assertion. For instance, Godel, a mathematician that has proven probably the most counter-intuitive result in the history of mathematics (the Godel's incompleteness theorem which, in essence, states that no system of axioms can satisfy a set of basic properties a perfectly coherent mathematical system derived from which must have), was religious. If you believe that Godel was "so deficient in critical thinking skills that he still believed in God", then I would really-really like to see your amazing contributions to science trumping what Godel, Lafforgue or Venn have accomplished.
On a more serious note, not sure about you, but I would hire Godel and offer him the highest salary my company offers to anyone. You, on the other hand... well...
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From the market perspective, there is none: the price one is willing to pay for the product cannot exceed the expectation of the value said product has to them. Your argument seems to come down to "I do not value college education as much as those who pay for it"; in other words, you are merely expressing your personal preference and not that of "most people" which this thread is about.
Your point is hollow for calculus professors are a tiny minority of the professions colleges prepare people to take. There are many college programs that feature no calculus whatsoever. There are also many graduates who do not have to repay any student loans (I was one of such graduates).
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