Sure… again, if that is in fact the decision.
As I said once already and will repeat… I would not have wanted to finish college any faster than I did.
I do agree that you shouldn’t take less than a full load in order to work more hours at a McJob.
But I would not have wanted to take more than a full load and finish faster.
Sure. Sure. But is making less money ever worth the additional stress?
Nowadays, I consider working at McDonalds way too much stress for way too little money.
Why exactly did I ever think otherwise?
Why is that time/stress/exhaustion worth more money now than before?
I expect I’ll want my kid to work-- for the sake of the experience, or as a way to spend her time, etc.-- but it seems pretty obvious that my Actuarial job is a way better way of making money than my kid’s waitress job.
Which is of course why people here won’t think twice about sending their kids to college, while at the same time believe that college is not worth the money.
I liked all but one of my pre-college-graduation jobs. They were extremely low stress.
I did not like the fast food job much. It was ok if I was cashier and had my preferred closing job. But a closing job I disliked or doing something other than cashier… no bueno. I only had that job for maybe two months.
Loved working at the restaurant. Loved working the bell desk. Loved running the Calculus help sessions. Those jobs were way more fun than actuarying and if I could make actuary money doing them I probably would. Maybe not the restaurant job… that was physically demanding. And while 17-22 year old me could easily handle it, I’m not sure middle-aged me can.
I had an ok hotel job one summer and an ok retail job the following summer. Not sure if want to do those again. But I learned how to fold fitted sheets at the hotel job, so… bonus! And parts of that job were fun. It was a B&B and serving breakfast and talking to the guests was fun. Retail job I learned a lot about the products I was selling, which was useful.
Both summer jobs were in other cities and gave me the experience of living in those cities, which I enjoyed.
I wouldn’t want to give any of that up to enter full-time permanent work sooner.
(Should note for all my callousness here, I didn’t start my career until ~30)
I mean, if that’s your only alternative then some money is better than no money.
But… I got out of fast food pretty quickly. There were other minimum wage-ish jobs that were more enjoyable.
Ah, I had my first “real job” when I was 22. Might explain our different perspectives.
By 30 I owned a 2,000 square foot house in the suburbs and was dealing with solicitors asking me if my parents were home when I answered the door.
(To which I gave a lengthy reply explaining the time difference from the west coast to Ohio and accounted for my parents’ activities that night of the week - which did not vary in my reply based on the actual day of the week: Dad always had choir practice and Mom was always teaching a night class at Xavier University - and then supposed that Dad was probably home from choir practice but Mom probably wasn’t home from Xavier, but I would be happy to call them in Ohio to find out for sure.)
I can relate. I bailed on a graduate math program to switch to Actuarial Science. (That university had a formal program) I bombed (for me) the first test. I had spent the prior four years writing proofs. I wasn’t prepared for the “quickly get a number, write it down, and move on”. This in spite of the fact that I had been writing and giving tests like that for years.
No, I don’t think we have anything “established and reliable”. If I google “can you measure critical thinking” I get people who claim they have made a run at it. But, I don’t think any of them is “established” in the eyes of the educational community.
I got the same definition you did when I googled. I can say that I’ve used all those words in speaking or writing at some time in my life. I can’t say that putting so many generalized concepts in a single sentence really helps. We’ve disagreed (apparently) on whether engineering requires critical thinking, for example. I need lots of examples before I think I’d be on the same page as another person on what we’re trying to teach here
Unfortunately, those are the questions we really need to answer.
It seems to me that our current answer is: Give the educational establishment $100,000 to provide 18-22 year-olds a traditional liberal arts curriculum, with the expectation this makes them ‘critical thinkers’. Then kick them out at the end of four years and tell them they can be bartenders for the rest of their lives. Then, move on to the next batch and repeat. That doesn’t work for me. Let’s just make college “vocational training” for all the non-rich kids until someone comes up with a better idea.
Good topic. I don’t read the specialized educational publications so I don’t know if anybody is talking about it. I don’t see it in the general press I read.
Thinking about the general trend of this discussion, I’ve been too willing to go with the “critical thinking is probably the domain of some top tier” idea.
My thought on “critical thinking” is that I want every voter to be a critical thinker. I want everyone who says “I’m not going to just follow the ‘experts’ blindly. I’m going to do my own research on this vaccine thing.” to be a critical thinker. Some of my push for “there must be some way of teaching this other than osmosis in college classrooms” is because I’m looking for a way to push it down in the curriculum, not push it up.
Thanks. It’s been a long time since I looked at that thread.
wait for it…
I found this article from yesterday’s NY Times to be an interesting analysis of the value of US university education. Even has some probabilities….
US has a different view of the value of university education than many other Western countries.
(Article is gifted).
Here’s a study mentioned in the article:
The punchline:
This seems important:
When you take into account the significant number of students who start but don’t complete, there is a 78% chance that attending college will “pay off” if there are no costs.
But it is basically a coin flip if your annual costs are $50,000.
Also: I don’t see the sense in comparing the “average college grad” to the “average HS grad”.
Average college grads include outstanding students who never considered anything but a college degree. Average HS grads includes marginal students who would never consider college.
The real decision is for middling students, who did okay in HS but can only get accepted at non-competitive colleges. The comparison should be between people who were on the bubble and opted for college and those who were on the same bubble and opted for something else.
Too many go.
Too many don’t finish.
Too many end up at lesser colleges, which employers know about, and those graduates have a harder time getting jobs.
So, yeah, duh.
Need more blue-collar schools, and have the industries subsidize somehow.
I still prefer the “Northern Exposure” plot program.
lol damn that takes me back
I used to watch northern exposure back in the 90s in Canada.
Didn’t realise you also wacthed it down south.
Funny guy. You do know it was a CBS show, and that some Canada station was letting you watch it, right?
Anywho, the part where Joel has to pay off his “loan” by working in the middle of nowhere, while obvious comedy fodder, seems a great way to get people through college (need to make sure they will get through, though – not sure what some state like Alaska would make someone do if they didn’t make it through…King Crab catching, maybe).
You Americans, think you own everything!
“Lesser colleges” is sort of elitist. Maybe it depends on where you live and work. I work with a bunch of people who went to a local “lesser college” and/or a church related school. I would say we get the work done.
Most of them worked thru school too. I don’t think any of them would have a hard time getting any job they wanted.
Yes, I’ve made this point many times. The comparison should be (roughly) the bottom 10th percentile of college grads and the top 10th percentile of people with no college degree… those are the people on the bubble as you say.
Well I don’t know how DTNF would define “lesser colleges” but realistically it is a spectrum. A BA in Economics from Harvard University is simply not going to be viewed the same as a BA in Economics from University of Phoenix. And most of us went to colleges in between.
And I think we work in a field where your choice of college matters materially less than in most fields. The Harvard grad with 4 actuarial exams is a LOT closer to the University of Phoenix grad with the same 4 exams than history majors from those two schools would be when being considered for a museum job.
Neither of us has statistical information to back up our beliefs. The frustrating thing is that the federal government collects the data, at least for people who borrowed money.
They know the schools borrowers attended and degrees earned, if any. They also know after school earnings tied to individual borrowers. I can’t find a place where that is converted into useful nationwide information.