Note: This Educational Reform series was inspired by Charles Murray's Real Education.
This is part four of four in my Educational Reform Series. Here are parts one, two, and three.
This post deals with the marketplace and its relation to the education.
Pervasiveness of credentialism: In a previous post, I discussed how employers use college degrees as the primary means of vetting potential employees. Such a situation unduly hinders the poor and unconnected, but qualified, members of society. Credentialism hinges primarily on the prestige associated with the given college degree. It bestows upon its recipient instant credibility, whether or not that impression is warranted. Unfortunately, this insistence on name recognition subjugates the individual to his group (namely, his collegiate peers). The marketplace likes flashy and obvious indicators of prestige and, in upper class America, the predominant factor of this prestige is the right college degree.
Irrelevance of college degree in real world occupations: While the educational system continually reminds us that education is a requirement of successful people, real world jobs have only a tenuous connection to classroom instruction. Ignoring the numerous counterexamples of autodidacts, one must only look at the daily tasks of salespeople, secretaries, business executives, real estate agents, journalists, and store managers to see the absurdity of stating one needs four years to qualify for these positions. College instruction is often tangential to real world job duties and if necessary, it provides only a rudimentary foundation for future work. In many cases, college work will do almost nothing to prepare a worker, such as teachers who study abstruse sociological theory in order to handle 30 rambunctious nine year-olds.
In my last article in this series, 'Dr. D' claimed engineering instruction actually had relevance for real world experiences. I ask any engineers out there how many times they used a boundary layer approximation of Navier Stokes equations to model fluid flow, used Laplace transform to find a system's time evolution, drew a free body diagram and solved it using statics, or found the eigenvalues of a heat conduction equation. The actual, hands-on mathematics of these problems is stressed in engineering curriculum, but only the qualitative knowledge of such topics are important. Real world engineering (and other sciences) is dominated by black-box computational tools and demands only an unlearnable intuition of how stuff works, not how well one can draw a phasor diagram.
Advice for Recent Graduates: I've spent a lot of time denigrating higher education, depicting it as a useless ploy perpetuated by HBD denialists. And while I'd love to see a society where individual, objective merit triumphs, we don't live in that utopia. One must recognize that the same HBD denialists exhorting everyone to attend college are the ones responsible for hiring you when you graduate. You may be brilliant and self-taught, but only Facebook-type entrepreneurs can survive in the white-collar marketplace without a college degree. There's no use railing against an unfair system; you can't win. So my advice: You have to play by the rules and go to college (and the more elite, the better)!
10 comments:
"... but only the qualitative knowledge of such topics are important. Real world engineering (and other sciences) is dominated by black-box computational tools and demands only an unlearnable intuition of how stuff works, not how well one can draw a phasor diagram."
Not that it isn't already obvious from your other writings, but your IQ is clearly quite limited. I urge you to stop writing this blog immediately -- it can only appeal to other members of the idiocracy.
OK so tell me sir:
When was the last time you used Laplace transform in your work? When was the last time you set up the standard wave equation to model something, then solved it without numerical tools and it actually gave an accurate approximation of the system?
I guess I'm to presume that Boeing uses Bernoulli's equation and conservation of mass equations to design their airplanes.
This is what leftists like you do: Well, you're dumb too! Haha, dummy!!
Go tutor some inner city kids.
We have post graduation merit based selection. The Bar Exam is one, so are the medical specialty exams. Actuarial exams etc. You cannot work in these fields (except as an assistant making 1/4 the salary) unless you pass which makes me think they can't be too easy. The exams have a low passing rate. My friend is a pathologist and said that the pathology specialty exam has a 40% pass rate on the first try.
These exams protect the public from incompetent professionals. It is important to make sure the standards are maintained.
It would be interesting to see the historic trends of how many people are enrolled in college programs in these fields which require professional exams.
As for going to a better college, that is probably important because recruiters are more likely to seek and hire graduates from better colleges. They also seem to get a continuing prestige advantage in retention. I know many people who have worked at a certain major multinational company. The employees from the better schools managed to stay employed. All the employees that came from lower level state colleges were eventually laid off, except one who quit after being given an insulting salary raise and no promotion. Which leads to a funny story. After a while, they realized she was really good employee and sent a recruiter to get her to work contract and train a replacement. This was 15 years ago. The recruiter asked her if she wanted the job and she said, no. Then the recruiter asked how much for her to consider it. She said, $160 an hour. The recruiter asked if she was joking and she just said that she didn't want the job, but for $160 an hour she would consider it. She ended up getting $120/hour and could work the hours of her choosing. While this story is amusing, the employees who were actually retained have their pensions and benefits etc. So they are really better off.
Anon,
You remind me a community college student who once told me that they don't have actuaries anymore, because now it is all done on computers. LOL
That's an interesting posting. I'd argue that the problems go beyond the issue of the relevance of college work to real-world tasks. In the sciences, the material in many college textbooks is downright wrong, incorrect, either purely or in the sense that a superficially-covered topic in a textbook is so superficial as to have no basis in physiological or medical reality, essentially. When a textbook diagrams out glycolytic pathways, for example, one could stare at the diagram all day and learn nothing. Those types of diagrams and texts are so disconnected from reality as to be, for all practical purposes, wrong. I learned more or less nothing in college science classes, I'm sorry to say. The instructors were terrific, but it's just not possible to learn anything that way. Memorizing essentially-incorrect facts isn't the same thing as learning. But I guess there's nothing that can be done about it.
College instruction is often tangential to real world job duties and if necessary, it provides only a rudimentary foundation for future work.
Cue the usual SWPL blather about how college is not mere vocational training, but broadens one's intellectual horizons, exposes one to great minds of the past, gives one the essential (even if practically useless) liberal arts knowledge that every civilized person should have, blah blah blah.
As if all that nonsense is worth $50K a year for four years...
Q: When was the last time you used Laplace transform in your work?
A (F.r.): I work with Fourier transform instead, almost each day.
Q: When was the last time you set up the standard wave equation to model something, then solved it without numerical tools and it actually gave an accurate approximation of the system?
A (F.r.): Three days ago, and the whole previous life.
Love your posts, dear OneSTDV !
Your F.r.
Florida resident wrote:
"Q: When was the last time you used Laplace transform in your work?
A (F.r.): I work with Fourier transform instead, almost each day."
It is absolutely true that if you
work in signal processing, you had
better be good with a range of
transforms, Fourier, Gabor (exp
weighted Fourier), Haar, various
wavelets, etc.
While it is true that you need
to use numerical methods to solve
real world differential equations
problems, it is important to
understand how they work, and for
that, yeah, you learn the model
problems for the three basic kinds
of PDEs (elliptic, parabolic, and
hyperbolic).
Sure, most of us engineers never
need to use calculus at all, but I
sure am glad that it's part of my
mental "bag of tricks". I oppose
any attempt to dumb down math
requirements for engineers. If
anything, I'd say replace all core
humanities with MORE MATHS.
In the new "National Affairs" magazine, Murray writes:
"Intelligence and College"
CHARLES MURRAY
A four-year bachelor’s degree is increasingly an unavoidable prerequisite to well-paying work, yet it both demands too much and denotes too little to be a meaningful marker of a young person’s qualifications. We must rescue American higher education from the cult of the B.A.
- article by subscription only, unfortunately - http://www.nationalaffairs.com/authors/detail/charles-murray
Austria has figured this out long ago.
Höhere Technische Lehranstalt
These institutions are an important part of Austrian vocational education and unique within Europe. HTLs are specialising in engineering disciplines like, for example, civil engineering, electronics, electrical engineering, information technology, informatics, mechanical engineering, mechatronics and chemistry.
These institutions are teaching applied engineering without any of the proofs, theories and science behind it. There is also a related system not mentioned on Wikipedia called HBLA, which focuses on MBA-type education. (Accounting, business administration, etc.)
These schools form a middle layer between regular vocational training (car mechanics, carpentry, plumbing, secretarial work) and genuine university level.
From a hbd perspective I would estimate that the students are high in conscienceness with an average/slightly above average IQ.
Those who try college later on frequently struggle and quickly drop out because they can't handle the intellectual demands and are therefore looked down upon by college students and professors.
But graduates of these institutions are highly sought after in business because they know what they are getting.
Our contemporary politicians don't understand the greatness of this system. The OECD has told us after all that our college graduation rate of ~12% is too low.
-
Anonymous Austrian
Dear OneSTDV !
Not to detract the main audience of the discussion here,
this is a reference to a mathematical rant (and an HBD rant after it):
http://www.amazon.com/tag/science/forum/ref=cm_cd_et_md_pl?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=FxZ58KVEERYS5E&cdMsgNo=198&cdPage=8&cdSort=oldest&cdThread=Tx2QBE9KA2R6X9Z&cdMsgID=Mx1MESRHQR913QC#Mx1MESRHQR913QC
Your truly, Florida resident.
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