my education didn’t help me at all in the actuarial profession. it was a gateway and nothing else.
i don’t know why less than 60% of people don’t graduate in 6 years. was the reason being college was too hard? cause i found college to be easier than high school.
I have no knowledge about how complicated it is to ensure a bridge is designed safely. Maybe a cursory knowledge suffices, maybe not.
College for the most part doesn’t prepare anyone for any profession, it gives you a hint of what’s to come, alongside a bunch of irrelevant courses. For something as serious as a bridge, I’m not taking a chance with my life like that since I have no idea what goes into designing a bridge. I assume it’s complicated since bridge occasionally still crack and collapse even if built professionally.
Eh. Just because your intellect is enough that you find typical coursework easy doesn’t mean the median person doesn’t find it challenging.
People on this board are likely at minimum 95th percentile in academic aptitude. It’s a very skewed distribution. And the random you know who only got C’s and D’s who still had a successful career likely was choosing to get Cs and D(or choosing to do other things that led to the poor grades) and was by no means “average.”
What’d you study? I found my upper level economics classes to be quite useful. I wouldn’t say I directly use a lot of the applications we learned, but learning how to think critically and analyze data was pretty fundamental.
And then a lot of the math and stats classes I took gave me the foundation to do well on exams.
I did take this Islamic History course that is probably the one I use the least, but that’s liberal arts for you.
that’s even worse. If, as you say, I’m in the 95th, and college was a breeze, and I still feel like college is worthless, imagine how capable someone who just parties through college is
I majored in math, and it was slightly more useless than my poetry classes.
You could have just looked at my standardized math scores when I was 6 and said, “yeah, this kid’s smart enough to actudonk later, here’s an FSA.”
there are jobs you can BS your way through. Building a bridge isn’t like that though. People can die. And I doubt you’d risk human lives on your economics aptitude
math and computer applications.
tbh, my college wasn’t that good and i’d go elsewhere if i was going to do it again.
but then again, i would go a step further and claim that ASA isn’t helpful on the job either beyond what is already on the EA exams, so if my profession doesn’t even have a valuable credential then i’m not sure that i can claim that college was completely necessary anywhere i’d have gone. the EA exams are useful. however for a very motivated person who somehow didn’t pass them they can be just as qualified. i know of at least a handful who couldn’t hack exams, but are qualified on the job, and my company has promoted them to VP levels despite not having exams.
i don’t think i’m 95th percentile. you don’t need to be 95th percentile to pass these exams. you need to be persistent…or a sucker really.
What were your math SATs?
True. My statement was focused strictly on the “too dumb to get a bachelors degree” aspect.
When evaluating someone’s qualifications, I’d treat “took more than 4 years to get a degree because I didn’t want to get buried in debt” completely different from “so dumb as to be unable to get a BA/BS”.
And then you have the folks who didn’t get a college degree because they didn’t perceive a benefit from the cost involved in obtaining one. While that is probably an accurate assessment for many people in non-academic fields, I wouldn’t be surprised that many/most of the folks who would use this to justify not having a college degree are actually idiots unaware of their idiocy.
I’m always skeptical of claims like this.
This is because i think it’s very difficult for a person to remember “how” they thought before learning something.
For example, i have a hard time imagining how calculus could ever be hard. Did I really need to take a whole class on that? I think I probably did, or at least it helped a whole lot.
i have yet to use calculus on the job as an actuary. what i learned for math in college gave me the bare minimum basics, but i had to take supplemental review classes to actually learn what’s on the exams because my college just wasn’t that great there. for many of the exams i learned on my own with the help of review manuals, not college.
FAP was a joke though and a disgrace to the profession and the pensions stuff they had on it was just flat out wrong and outdated.
good for a normie, not impressive for an actuary.
Clearly you underestimate my willingness to risk human lives…
i’m not claiming anyone can pass actuarial exams. just saying i don’t think passing them means you’re necessarily in the top 5% in terms of intelligence.
outside of the super brilliant people, passing these exams requires work, and some naturally smart people don’t want to put in the work required.
This is a good point about an important problem and I think we can take it a step further by pointing out the sophistry and failed policy measures enacted to supposedly alleviate it. Back in 2010, the existing presidential administration touted a 10-year “North Star” goal to increase college degree attainment by roughly 50%. Part of this plan was emphasizing the importance of college degree attainment and expanding financial aid eligibility (teh Reach Higher Initiative).
In many ways, these policies have been disastrous by saddling young Americans with onerous levels of student debt, and disproportionately affecting poor and minority students for the reasons you mentioned. Some racial gaps in student debt have exploded since these policies were implemented.
It should be a lesson in being reasonably skeptical about politicians plans to “solve” various problems.
for privileged people of course college is a breeze. They get tons of support from their parents and peers. And like all privileges, you don’t know it until you lose it