Don't Stay in School
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@coliver said in Don't Stay in School:
@Dashrender said in Don't Stay in School:
What life skills are you talking about? How to work queries on Google to find answer? How to balance a checkbook? A skill that is clearly missing from middle ages folks is how to actually use the internet, but I don't think most kids suffer this problem.
My peers, the ones that I graduated high school with and then went on to work with in IT (several of them were sales and accounting people at my last position) couldn't use Google or the internet for anything but checking sports scores and finding customers. None of them could use Google to troubleshoot even the most basic computer problems. Granted that's why I was hired but still, how to use Microsoft Word should be a reasonable thing to expect from a 25-30 year old.
Or, you know, from a ten year old. That's not a high school skill, never was. Word processing is something you should be learning very, very young. That's not learning about computers, that's just basic literacy.
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Got to talk to some Kosovo locals about education in Kosovo and they were even commenting on how bad the American educations standards are... and they are one of the two poorest countries in Europe (along with Moldova) with a per capita GDP as low as 1/10th that of the US. If they aren't impressed, we should be appalled.
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@scottalanmiller said in Don't Stay in School:
Got to talk to some Kosovo locals about education in Kosovo and they were even commenting on how bad the American educations standards are
How do they know?
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@Carnival-Boy said in Don't Stay in School:
@scottalanmiller said in Don't Stay in School:
Got to talk to some Kosovo locals about education in Kosovo and they were even commenting on how bad the American educations standards are
How do they know?
They have both worked and were educated in the US in addition to Kosovo. She is a university classmate of mine. We both did our graduate work in Rochester, NY.
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@scottalanmiller said in Don't Stay in School:
@Carnival-Boy said in Don't Stay in School:
@scottalanmiller said in Don't Stay in School:
Got to talk to some Kosovo locals about education in Kosovo and they were even commenting on how bad the American educations standards are
How do they know?
They have both worked and were educated in the US in addition to Kosovo. She is a university classmate of mine. We both did our graduate work in Rochester, NY.
Yes my exwife also homeschools as well, everyone in the world pretty much knows American education is terrible, though do realise that higher education often has a lot of sway, but that's a different story.
By the way, let me take this opportunity to spam my thread on homeschooling resources:
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@tonyshowoff said in Don't Stay in School:
@scottalanmiller said in Don't Stay in School:
@Carnival-Boy said in Don't Stay in School:
@scottalanmiller said in Don't Stay in School:
Got to talk to some Kosovo locals about education in Kosovo and they were even commenting on how bad the American educations standards are
How do they know?
They have both worked and were educated in the US in addition to Kosovo. She is a university classmate of mine. We both did our graduate work in Rochester, NY.
Yes my exwife also homeschools as well, everyone in the world pretty much knows American education is terrible, though do realise that higher education often has a lot of sway, but that's a different story.
By the way, let me take this opportunity to spam my thread on homeschooling resources:
In Kosovo they were discussing how US universities just sell PhD's without needing you to do any work and how it is to the point that having an American PhD is a red flag for corruption over here now. Some people got caught in high level politics with fake degrees from the US.
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I know I'm asking for it by asking this, but here goes.
Scott is that American's getting PhDs from those schools or non-American's just buying PhDs? And what kind of PhDs?
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@Dashrender said in Don't Stay in School:
I know I'm asking for it by asking this, but here goes.
Scott is that American's getting PhDs from those schools or non-American's just buying PhDs? And what kind of PhDs?
What's the difference? If American universities sell PhD's, it's American education that sets the low bar for itself. The quality of education is only as high as the lowest bar that they certify for that education.
No idea what kind of PhD, any I'm sure.
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I love how you always generalize and insinuate that the entire system is shit, simply because of your hatred of the education system.
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@scottalanmiller said in Don't Stay in School:
@Dashrender said in Don't Stay in School:
I know I'm asking for it by asking this, but here goes.
Scott is that American's getting PhDs from those schools or non-American's just buying PhDs? And what kind of PhDs?
What's the difference? If American universities sell PhD's, it's American education that sets the low bar for itself. The quality of education is only as high as the lowest bar that they certify for that education.
No idea what kind of PhD, any I'm sure.
While I agree that the low bar is bad for the sake of being bad - but I also wonder is it Europeans/Middle Easterns, etc that are bribing their way to PhDs (something of course that the universities shouldn't be allowing), but that those non Americans are even asking for - asking to bribe their way instead of earning it.
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@JaredBusch said in Don't Stay in School:
I love how you always generalize and insinuate that the entire system is shit, simply because of your hatred of the education system.
How did I generalize? The university's reputational value is based on what it values its degrees at. If person X can just buy a degree, the degree represents zero value. If someone else gets that degree, no matter what they did to get it, the value of the degree itself remains zero. The degree doesn't represent any learning or standards.
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@scottalanmiller said in Don't Stay in School:
@JaredBusch said in Don't Stay in School:
I love how you always generalize and insinuate that the entire system is shit, simply because of your hatred of the education system.
How did I generalize? The university's reputational value is based on what it values its degrees at. If person X can just buy a degree, the degree represents zero value. If someone else gets that degree, no matter what they did to get it, the value of the degree itself remains zero. The degree doesn't represent any learning or standards.
The entire statement is a generalization against all university PhDs. If you wish to call out specific instances and provide proof, feel free. Otherwise you are mindlessly spewing shit that should not be paid attention to by rational, thinking people.
My personal opinion of the education system does not even matter in this case.
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@Dashrender said in Don't Stay in School:
@scottalanmiller said in Don't Stay in School:
@Dashrender said in Don't Stay in School:
I know I'm asking for it by asking this, but here goes.
Scott is that American's getting PhDs from those schools or non-American's just buying PhDs? And what kind of PhDs?
What's the difference? If American universities sell PhD's, it's American education that sets the low bar for itself. The quality of education is only as high as the lowest bar that they certify for that education.
No idea what kind of PhD, any I'm sure.
While I agree that the low bar is bad for the sake of being bad - but I also wonder is it Europeans/Middle Easterns, etc that are bribing their way to PhDs (something of course that the universities shouldn't be allowing), but that those non Americans are even asking for - asking to bribe their way instead of earning it.
Not sure what you mean. The universities commonly sell degrees (one Ivy League was well known for this and Garrison Keillor even wrote about it in one of his books), that it is mostly American or non-Americans taking advantage of the US' lack of oversight on degree programs ... I just don't understand what point you are trying to make. All that matters, as far as I can see it, is that the universities have sold their integrity out, sold the value of their degrees, for a one time injection of money.
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@JaredBusch said in Don't Stay in School:
@scottalanmiller said in Don't Stay in School:
@JaredBusch said in Don't Stay in School:
I love how you always generalize and insinuate that the entire system is shit, simply because of your hatred of the education system.
How did I generalize? The university's reputational value is based on what it values its degrees at. If person X can just buy a degree, the degree represents zero value. If someone else gets that degree, no matter what they did to get it, the value of the degree itself remains zero. The degree doesn't represent any learning or standards.
The entire statement is a generalization against all university PhDs. If you wish to call out specific instances and provide proof, feel free. Otherwise you are mindlessly spewing shit that should not be paid attention to by rational, thinking people.
My personal opinion of the education system does not even matter in this case.
The point is that the US oversight isn't checking up. Proof you can see from the quality of graduates, of course, nothing else is really proof. Universities can claim that life experience or whatever is enough... since there is no standard, proof doesn't exist. But what we do know, and what actually matters, is that the university system in the US has gained a reputation for doing this. The quality of the education, of course, shows this and I've seen it first hand - major US universities graduating people who don't even begin to know the material and shouldn't have even been in a college classroom let alone getting high end graduate degrees. But what really matters is that the reputation for it is there. Whether someone 100% buys a degree or just pays big money and sits through a class and isn't requires to be to any reasonable standard doesn't matter - the degree's value is based on reputation. So the pudding is the proverbial proof.
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I'm not saying that all universities, or even most, participate in degree selling (although one could argue that any lowering of standards is a form of this) but what is important is that if any accredited university(ies) do this, it lowers the bar for the system. It's the US accreditation process that loses its reputation.
That's why this is so significant and why "generalization" complaints don't apply. It's a single country's oversight, a single accreditation system - if anyone does it, the bar is lowered. To the outside world, even to the inside world, the value is that of the lowest option. It's not generalization. It's just market economics.
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The reason for this, of course, is that if you use degrees to show value then it's the degree itself that must carry that value. If you know (or just suspect) that a degree carries no academic rigour and can simply be a purchased piece of paper, the degree conveys no value. That someone might have worked hard for the degree is irrelevant because there is a reasonable possibility that they did no work at all.
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The only way to know if someone didn't "buy" a degree is to test them. If we test them, we've decided that the degree is worthless already and what matters is the test. So why even look for the degree in the first place if we have a test to determine if they know what we want them to know? Again, the degree drops to zero value.
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In IT we know this process well because of the infamous certification boot camp issues of the early 2000s. In the 1990s, certifications carried a lot of value. They were hard to obtain and there was very little possibility that someone had cheated or whatever.
By the early 2000s, braindumps of test answers and schools teaching basically nothing but test answers had become so common place that it wasn't just remotely possible, it was very reasonably possible that people had done this and, I'm pretty sure, at one point it was even very likely that someone had. Most of us had a lot of experience dealing with boot camp and brain dump certed people - they were useless and the IT field suffered heavily from this happening.
That's all that is going on here - the same processes going on in the universities. The mechanisms are a little different, but the basics are the same.... the old "assumed rigour" that gave degrees their assumed value is now unlikely enough to have happened that people are increasingly uncertain as to whether a degree conveys any meaning that we can trust.
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@scottalanmiller said in Don't Stay in School:
In IT we know this process well because of the infamous certification boot camp issues of the early 2000s. In the 1990s, certifications carried a lot of value. They were hard to obtain and there was very little possibility that someone had cheated or whatever.
10 Spiceworks topics a day asking which certs to get rather than worrying about experience, with 500 responses from people equally inexperienced and uncertified telling them what to do. It's a plague. I got most of mine way back when.
