The Higher Education Thread: Justify Poor Life Choices

kegkilla said:

The term "accountant" is very vague and means almost nothing. You could be a bookkeeper making $30K a year and call yourself an accountant, or you could be a controller making $300K.

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Same for nurses, n'est-ce pas?

What's the effort-to-pay ratio difference then?

You're mixing up a LPN versus a RN. Two different things. Not to mention, CRNA is probably going to be the highest salaried position you can be as a RN. Base pay out of school CRNA = 200k.

yerm said:

1) Have them require job-appropriate skills to complete and teach general skills rather than pure feelings. Like I said earlier, things like being in class and turning in assignments on time, even if the assignment is about "bs" material. The programs themselves can be made to involve useful problem-solving skills. A good deal of issue here is that these classes are doing "reflective" assignments on reading rather than objective-based tasks. Are you reading Hamlet and giving your useless opinion, or are you dissecting the language and answering about statistics and metrics that went into it?

My school had a professor take shit for assigning Twilight as one of the books, but I found out it involved requiring students to make comparisons between Twilight and 4 other texts about sentence length, word choices, adjective usage, etc. The assignment looked BRUTAL. This was an overarching tasks spanning the semester by taking "popular" books and applying measurable analysis. The shame here was that most students just dodged this teacher in favor of the other options - my elective English course allowed shit like answering your fucking phone mid-class and the teacher saying "life comes first" and other horse shit. There are right and wrong ways.

2) I am not entirely sure that you can. You can at least put them in that direction though - as said above. You can make all of these majors require doing tasks, answering questions, and for most doing extensive research. I don't think it'll mean reaching Quantum Mechanics but that's kinda how life works, some things simply are more difficult. In a reasonable setting you should have the baseline moved up in their direction, where every major requires doing a sufficient amount of actual work, even if it's borderline impossible to make them all equally as difficult.

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But what "job appropriate" and "general skills" could one apply to a gender studies or cultural anthropology class that would still be in line with the actual subject matter?

In your example of Twilight, your teacher may have introduced an assignment focused on making quantitative comparisons between books, but in actuality at a post secondary level in English these types of exercises are not the way to teach English.. A more suitable assignment would be to compare commons themes within the books, foreshadowing, etc.. The quantitative assignment you mention is probably more brutal in the sense that it depends on accuracy and analysis, but that's not what English is about.

You're basically saying teach these subjects in a way that teaches things like attention to detail, repetition, and quantitative analysis-- but the very nature of these subjects exclude those forms of teaching.

In my experience you've got three tiers of university education in terms of difficulty:

1) STEM courses: Difficult. Labs in addition to classes. Memorization as well as learning. Long study hours with abstract content. Big mid-terms/finals requiring tons of studying and time management. Last minute cramming= fail. Teaches you discipline, accuracy, responsibility, and problem solving. Doesn't teach you how to think outside the box and leaves you an ignoramus about the world on matters unrelated to science. INT instead of Wisdom here.

2) Real Social Sciences like English, History, Poli-Sci, etc: Easier than Stem. No labs. More learning and less memorization. Study hours can be long, but the content is easier to digest than Stem. Mid/Terms finals. Last minute cramming=pass if you've read the material. Teaches you some of the same life skills as STEM, minus problem solving and attention to detail. Teaches you to think outside the box and a better understanding of the world, but doesn't really teach you how to do anything specific. Wis instead of INT.

3) Bullshit courses like painting, anthropology, gender studies: Easiest courses. No labs. Some memorization with little learning of worth. Short study hours and not much content. Some don't even have finals, just a "portfolio" to submit. No need to cram, because there aren't that many tests.. Teaches you nothing of practical use..

Is this still news? ITT Technical Institute has closed its doors -

News Releases

"It is with profound regret that we must report that ITT Educational Services, Inc. will discontinue academic operations at all of its ITT Technical Institutes permanently after approximately 50 years of continuous service. With what we believe is a complete disregard by the U.S. Department of Education for due process to the company, hundreds of thousands of current students and alumni and more than 8,000 employees will be negatively affected.

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tombstone_bye.gif

ZyyzYzzy said:

Most people truly don't realize how much of the biological sciences is just tweaking the recipe...a lot of times. Or hoping that this time your transfection/whatever was just more efficient for reasons like new reagents.

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It's mindnumbing trial and error. I had to get a new assay working that there wasn't a great model for in our lab and I didn't have techs or others with an experience to call upon. It was almost 2 years of my life getting it to work reasonably well with repeatable results. Produced 4-5 results that led us in a different direction... published a paper and I was finishing up my thesis work 3 months later. 2 years of my life spent getting a single figure in a scientific journal. The entire article has been referenced a dozen times or so (last I checked). The lab has never even gone back to the model since. Really turned me off to bench science altogether. I respect people who can look at such a granular level for their whole lives studying a single glycoprotein.... but it wasn't for me and I knew it pretty quickly. Finished the program out of stubbornness.

Most of my classmates are medical/scientific writers, teach at universities, pharma middle management, got out of science, etc. I think there were 15 or so in our Year One program. 5 didn't finish. Maybe 2-3 are doing actual lab science still.

Mario Speedwagon said:

Open link. See one item per page slideshow. Close link.

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Whoever makes articles into 20 page slideshows needs higher education in "How to be Hit in The Face With a Baseball Bat, Repeatedly 101".

This is one of the most annoying trends ever.

Could use perspective of college educated folk due to the lack of their existence in my personal life, after moving back to my home rust belt region (Mid-Michigan) I quickly discovered the only in demand and decent salary positions were medical field related.

I'm now in a RN program and it's going well but and am I a retard for going with a degree that I really have no personal connection to? It's by far the safest and most reasonable for the community I live in.

Yeah, trying to contribute to the community I was raised in not being a shithole is an arguably naive sentiment I hold dearly

I think the whole earning 200k fresh out of the program is mostly fluky. It is really hard to plan and forsee that kind of shortage when you are making the decision on what to study. Most kids should be happy to come out and earn 35k with some growth prospects.

The medical industries entire boom in this country is Fed driven anyway, it is just another unsustainable bubble, like being a house flipper 15 years ago. It is also likely that many of the low level diagnostic roles are highly prone to computer automation and will only be protected as high salary/education requirement positions is the trade groups can exert enough power, but I think they will have some tremendous forces working against them in that regard.

Not that I think RNs and such will disappear in our lifetimes, but I do think some of the shortage driven salary spikes you see in many areas will be sharply corrected if the markets are allowed to function.

Also we shouldn't downplay location. If you like the outdoors etc living in some of those rust belt areas with a job catering to the elderly is a pretty good deal. You likely make far above the areas median income, have a nice house and generally low cost of living. Making six figures is very relative after all, your take home shrinks pretty fast if you are in a high tax state with insane property prices and rent.

Frenzied Wombat said:

But what "job appropriate" and "general skills" could one apply to a gender studies or cultural anthropology class that would still be in line with the actual subject matter?

In your example of Twilight, your teacher may have introduced an assignment focused on making quantitative comparisons between books, but in actuality at a post secondary level in English these types of exercises are not the way to teach English.. A more suitable assignment would be to compare commons themes within the books, foreshadowing, etc.. The quantitative assignment you mention is probably more brutal in the sense that it depends on accuracy and analysis, but that's not what English is about.

You're basically saying teach these subjects in a way that teaches things like attention to detail, repetition, and quantitative analysis-- but the very nature of these subjects exclude those forms of teaching.

In my experience you've got three tiers of university education in terms of difficulty:

1) STEM courses: Difficult. Labs in addition to classes. Memorization as well as learning. Long study hours with abstract content. Big mid-terms/finals requiring tons of studying and time management. Last minute cramming= fail. Teaches you discipline, accuracy, responsibility, and problem solving. Doesn't teach you how to think outside the box and leaves you an ignoramus about the world on matters unrelated to science. INT instead of Wisdom here.

2) Real Social Sciences like English, History, Poli-Sci, etc: Easier than Stem. No labs. More learning and less memorization. Study hours can be long, but the content is easier to digest than Stem. Mid/Terms finals. Last minute cramming=pass if you've read the material. Teaches you some of the same life skills as STEM, minus problem solving and attention to detail. Teaches you to think outside the box and a better understanding of the world, but doesn't really teach you how to do anything specific. Wis instead of INT.

3) Bullshit courses like painting, anthropology, gender studies: Easiest courses. No labs. Some memorization with little learning of worth. Short study hours and not much content. Some don't even have finals, just a "portfolio" to submit. No need to cram, because there aren't that many tests.. Teaches you nothing of practical use..

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You say that the very nature of the subject exclude those forms of teaching: why? The assignment very well COULD have been comparing themes and foreshadowing etc, I am going off decade old second hand account here for that example. The point wasn't the specifics, the point was to have these courses deliver the problem-solving aspects they currently lack. I see no reason why both approaches can't be taken concurrently; have parts done in abstract while also dropping in more specific "math-like" problem solving on your social sciences. Attention to detail is also more an issue of the bullshit level of relativity permitted here; while it probably won't ever reach lab-course levels, a good social science should still have it as a valuable tool (and many of my history classes did, some did not).

Meanwhile, I think we only slightly disagree on 1 and 2. The problem is of course 3. With these bullshit courses, I assert that they are only bullshit because they are being taught that way when I fail to see why these couldn't at least be held to the same standards as 2. Why is there no content? Because the subject matter doesn't allow it, or because the majors have evolved to not include it? I 100% believe it's the latter. First and foremost almost every one of these bullshit-laden majors has a glaring omission of statistics and statistical analysis that should be beaten into every part of their major. Next, women's studies often skip or gloss over history while anthropology students are (in my experience) shockingly ignorant of geography. These end up being 95% pseudo-philosophical bullshit with no wrong answers. Maybe they'll never make STEM, but they can at least be held to your category 2 level.

Painting is a whole other beast. Art school is its own level of scam bullshit. Even still, it IS possible to have solid course work there, but that's going to be the very few and far between courses that assign challenging projects rather than art history feels-based BS. The people who did art that I know were basically taking 3 or so total courses equal to one of these brutal lab-based sciences and then the rest (90%+) were gender studies level bullshit.

In both cases (gender studies etc and painting etc) a big issue is that people coming in know perfectly goddamn well they're diving into completely useless and inapplicable bullshit. They want it. They are deliberately avoiding a real major. If Gender Studies involved intense statistics and history learning up front, followed by rigorous projects with real grading (eg researching cause and effect properly, conducting surveys and correctly calculating error and bias), with actual work loads and potential for failure, I assume most of the dipshits would bail. Meanwhile, the purple hairs that actually cared would still take it, but in this case, they'd end up tumblr blogging with at least some semblance of background on the matters at hand. Sure, they'd probably still be authoritarian moral crusaders, but at least maybe they'd be zealots who know shit like how the wage gap actually works and acknowledge that obesity is unhealthy. Maybe.