Topic: Tertiary/Higher Education (Read 4864 times)

Don't worry about Spanish books. Just torrent Rosetta Stone with a Spanish language add-on, and you'll get way more than you would get from Spanish I, in way less time.

I had to withdraw from my Spanish I class because of the lab; they required 250$ for the spanish books, which came with a code, which was a one-time use thing so I could use the online course materials, which were required to even get a passing grade in the class.  Usually, I skip out on the book because my classes never use them but once or twice, and I'd bet this class would be no different.  But, for some odd money-influenced reason, I couldn't get by without participating in the lab.

This was the same rap for my algebra/trig classes, too; they all require an expensive online lab thing which, if you do not participate, cannot hope to get a passing grade in the class.  In other words, student extortion.  The books were one thing; I do just fine without the books and still make good grades, even though they all tell you to get the book.  This is beyond that; it's turned into force.  Pay the extra fee or no chance to pass.  The only reason I had to stop this time, as opposed to my Math courses, is that this is really more of an elective for me; I just have a genuine interest in Spanish and figured 5 weeks of it would get me started off.  However, I don't actually have the money to pay for the lab (3/4ths of this class was paid for by scholarship money I'd won in an art contest), and so dropped both this and the 2nd Spanish course I would take in July.

Anyway, I'm gonna learn Spanish on my own.  Seeing as how learning a language is like learning how to do anything, I may as well study on my own, as that's what I would've been doing most of the time even with a class.  So now I must devise a strategy to learning Spanish, which I believe will revolve around grabbing Spanish literature and reading it, alongside a Spanish/English dict of some sort (probably got one in the App Store)  As my parents speak conversational Spanish (I don't think they can write academic essays in Spanish, but probably couldn't in English either,) I should be all right.

Any Spanish speakers recommend good books?  I'm probably going to pick up El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha.  I should also probably expose myself to more Spanish; there's plenty of Wikipedia articles in Spanish, and so I'd limit myself to those as opposed to their English counterparts, and keep trying until I understand what it means.  I've taken a look at Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone, and I hear the former is better, so I might also try that.

Seconded.


It is perpetually shocking to me that people will spend $40,000 and 4 years of their life in order to put a single line on their resume that many employers won't care about or won't even verify.

I've heard stories of someone bullshitting on their resume/interview that they had a Masters degree. It was never verified, they were hired, and they learned everything they needed to know in less than 6 months on the job.

This is one of the best threads I've seen. So many decent intellectual conversations going on ^^

I'm a second year IT student in Australia. The only problem with this is that the university I'm attending doesn't offer the courses that I'm interested in (information security). In my city, there isn't a great need for IT folk in general, let alone people that specialise in security. If I didn't enjoy my classes so much, I'd think it was an incredible waste of time. So I'm just waiting it out and studying the security side of things in my spare time.

The real crux is employers looking for or accepting something that isn't a degree from an accredited school.  I think that's the biggest barrier to higher educational choice.

Bump, absolutely love hearing peoples opinion on this matter

How about a community centered around a specific business (like a guild) that members subscribe to, which provides education to the member's children in hopes that those kids will grow up and work for that business. The quality of education this guild provides will directly affect how well it can compete against other guilds.

One thing I've learned in life, business, and politics, is it's all about incentives. You get your incentives aligned right, and everything will be OK. If you don't, or depend on the wrong ones (like altruism), things will go bad, eventually, guaranteed.

That's a good point about this unfortunate trend. Perhaps it will be tougher to convince people otherwise than I first anticipated, but I still believe it will be a shorter-term resolution than full blown education reform. While there is a dire need for reform, it will definitely take some time and there will need to be an interim solution IMO.

Barnacle_Ed, one problem with that: University A will be making much higher profits, and thus will have a much bigger marketing fund, which it will use to convince Joe and Jane that they need to go to their university and buy their degrees. Current example of such travesty are Phoenix and Streyer universities.

I'm going to play devil's advocate for a minute here: What if, rather than attempt to reform the whole rotten education system (which will take an enormous amount of time, money, and effort), we educate students on how to pick a cost-effective school and field of study?


Example. John Doe goes to private university A and pays $60k for annual tuition. John majors in Philosophy or Art History or one of the countless other degrees with unemployment rates hovering around 10%. Perhaps one of his friends convinced him it would be an "easy way to meet girls" or he changed after he decided a different major was "too hard" or who knows what? The point is: John is coughing up $60,000 per year to screw himself over. Which is one hell of an opportunity cost. In this case, college does more harm than good, since John's best-case scenario is to try and graduate in as little time as possible (unlikely if he's too busy chasing women and partying at frats) and hopefully snag whatever position he can. Even if it's waiting tables.


Consider another example though. Jane Doe goes to state university B and pays $10k for annual tuition. Jane majors in some kind of STEM major in high demand - maybe Computer Science since there are an enormous number of unfulfilled computing jobs in the US alone and she genuinely enjoys it. Sure, the coursework is challenging, but she knows she'll easily be making at least $60k plus benefits once she graduates. And that a college degree in CS gives you a huge leg up over those without a degree (in general). In this case, Jane stands to benefit greatly from her college education; rather than being saddled with over $200k in debt like the hapless John, Jane could pay off any student loans in a few years at maximum.



I'm hardly trying to argue that the higher education system is flawless; it's a massive mess that's screwing record numbers of honest people over and the whole system needs to be re-worked. But that will take time. We can instead immediately see results by helping high school students (and early college students) decide on a major that will help them in life, rather than leave them stuck with a massive loan and no career prospects at graduation. What if someone told John to start at a community college before the private university in order to find a major he actually liked first? Or if he bothered to check his potential salary after graduation for his current major? He just might change his mind and put his nose to the grindstone after such talks.






TL;DR: School is insanely expensive, but taking out $200k+ in loans to get a major that leaves you 0 career options is frankly stupid. The university did not "make" you take out loans...you decided to do that on your own. We should focus on helping high school students pick majors that are actually worth half a damn in addition to reforming the higher education system.

Real education:
http://youtu.be/xmpYnxlEh0c

English speaking countries, at least England and Australia which I have personal knowledge of, are very much like the US.   I would say half of my primary/high school experience was a complete waste of time.  I picked up the easy stuff fast but was always held back waiting for the rest to catch up.  It's a silly system.   Very much geared towards socialist ideals.  Equality.  Everybody gets an equally bad education.  Universities are better but many people have had their brains fried before they get there and there is a lot to overcome.

If you compare a 10th grade student from USSR (now Russia, Ukraine, and other old Soviet Block countries) to a 10th grade student from USA, you'll clearly see that the USA one is extremely undereducated. The reason is that they teach a lot more things much earlier in USSR than USA. I left after finishing 3rd grade, but we had already started foreign language classes, introductory biology (including speciation and evolution), and just finished introduction to algebra and exponents (Italy is even crazier, since beginning of 4th grade we had math problems like  y = √(5x^2 + y - 10)/(2x + 4y)   y = 5x^2 + 7xy - 2y^2, simplify and solve for y, which I needed mom's help to tutor me). By the time you are in 10th grade, you already had advanced math, calculus, and physics. By the time you graduate from high school, you are pretty much already college educated for all the basic stuff. So when kids in USSR go to a university, they go to specialized schools. We have universities that specialize in chemistry, or physics, or engineering, or computers, or even farming. And when there, that's all you learn about. Here in USA, by the time you graduate high school, you only know comparatively very basic levels of all those subjects, so when you go to a university, you pick a concentration/degree, but still have to take all the other requirement classes, which in USSR you would have learned in school. At the end, by the time you graduate with a bachelor's degree, your education level has caught up to those in USSR, and both people should be about even. So the main difference is that in USA we, I guess, try to spare our kids from having too brutal of school (I was pulling all nighters studying for exams since 3rd grade), but conversely, in USSR, after they are done with school, students can pick something (since they know all the fields) and actually pursue only what they want. At the same time they can sound like NOT idiots when participating in discussions and conversations, having been exposed to a lot of knowledge.    
The other big difference between USA and practically every other country's school I've looked at is that the students you start with in 1st grade are the same ones you stick with at least until 10th. We didn't move classes, the teachers came to us (unless we went to a laboratory). As a result, everyone knew each other well, and were all a part of a team that would compete against other classes, including forcing the stragglers to keep up. Here I barely knew any of my classmates, thanks to the constant moving around every year, and every class period. I don't know what kind of effect this team/comradery building has, but it's definitely significant.

EDIT: Sorry for the long post.


Not at all. I just believe that education you paid for can be of higher quality, and can teach you what you want to learn, way faster than trying to learn something on your own. This really applies to anything out there: hiring skilled experts to do something is usually better than doing something yourself (You ever read "Rich Dad, Poor Dad"?)



That man has very likely spent years learning about all the things leading up to his discovery of electricity. Very likely at a place of higher learning along with other students as well. Science very rarely happens by self-educated types in their own garages (For a good example of that kind of science, search for over-unity or perpetual motion on YouTube). As for why he became brilliant? In part interest and motivation (maybe the farmer just didn't want anything more), and in part just because his brain was more suited to it. Some people process math and physics concepts better. Some visualize things and have a better grasp of art, music, and language. It has little to do with upbringing though. I would guess it has more do to with genes.


The bolded part is a redundant statement that can be applied to everything, and is quite objective. E.g. A tall building is tall because the buildings around it are shorter. It's not just my opinion that this building is tall, nor my opinion that that person is smart. I don't think relativity is subjective. As for the rest, maybe I'm biased in all this. I come from a family of some pretty smart people (Google Tsiolkovsky and Tozoni). Both of my parents went to a Soviet Union public school, yet both were always at the top of their class (my mom is one of those who has gotten a B maybe once in her lifetime). All the other kids were going to the same schools, yet why is she the one who simply "got it" and was able to get to the top while putting in the same amount of work as everyone else? It can't be her upbringing, since her parents rather neglected her. I didn't have good grades in high school, mainly because I almost never did any homework and was often late turning in projects, but that was mostly due to depression issues at the time (the whole in-the-closet gay thing, plus feeling like an adult surrounded by a bunch of immature children). However, I've typically gotten A's and B's on exams despite never studying for them. Most of the time I passed them by just deducing what the answer to a given question was right on the spot, even if I didn't know how to solve the problem before. This while other students around me struggled, and most got B's or C's. (Craziest thing I've done was learn the entire 107 character Japanese Hiragana alphabet, from scratch, 2 hours before the exam, because I kept putting it off, and still got 100% on it.) I don't know why exactly I can do the things I can and why others have trouble with them. I know I have a very high IQ, and psychologists say that that's something that can't really be learned or changed, so I believe them that this is the reason. And, as I've said, I have dealt with a lot of different people out there. Sometimes it's just frustrating how they seem to have such difficulty grasping a concept I'm trying to explain to them, which to me seems so simple. It's not laziness, they just can't process or understand it easily. I.e. some people are just dumb, and not even because they are too lazy to learn to understand something; they just can't do it.



You do need a foundation of facts, or at least "facts," before you can start doing that. As I said, you can't answer the questions if you don't know what the questions are. And that's what schools and universities are SUPPOSED to teach and encourage.


Actually, my grandfather Oleg Tozoni, though not Einstein, is an excellent example for this. He finished public high school in USSR. He and his whole family was on a Soviet blacklist because of the whole "royal family" thing, and thus he was in hiding when he was about the age to be in a university. So, he learned how to forge university certificates, and would "transfer" to a new university from the old one for a semester or two. There he would take a few classes, and once he saw that the KGB were catching up to him, he would run, leaving at night or as soon as possible, forge a new university certificate claiming to be from his old one, and transfer to a new university at the new place he picked to hide. This way he continued to take classes, despite it being a very difficult thing to fight for. Eventually he graduated with a bachelors, then a masters. By the time USSR caught up to him, he was already working somewhere, and they realized he would be much more valuable working for them than dead. So they hired (forced) him to work at their research labs. He continued to take classes, earning a few PhD's and a post-doctorate (I don't think we have that degree level in USA), and helped teach physics at various universities. Eventually he went from learning from school and others to learning on his own (a Doctorate degree actually requires that you discover and add something to the body of knowledge that no one else knew before. You can't just get it by passing tests). Then he made more discoveries, deduced more physics formulas, published books, became the head of the Kiev Polytechnical Institute (think chief engineer at DARPA) and once moving to USA, spent 15 years inventing a magnetic levitation system the concept of which was long abandoned as being "impossible." He was a genius, and note, he did all these inventions and discoveries after a lifetime of study, not by tinkering in a garage after reading some books. If you look through the biographies of other scientists we call "genius," you'll likely find that they had a similar path of vast amounts of study at university to get to where they are. If he didn't go to a university, I imagine he would have done self-study, and would have been either a really smart employee somewhere, or a low-level inventor whom no one relly knows of or takes seriously (maybe only post-mortem, like Tsiolkovsky). He wouldn't have been the top scientist in all of USSR, that's for sure.
As for why other people aren't brilliant? They had the exact same opportunities to learn as my grandfather. Better even. But they just couldn't cut it. The material was too difficult, they couldn't wrap their minds around it, and they abandoned the field. In my business finance undergrad degree, we started with 3 class-fulls of people pursuing the degree, and the final exam of the final class only had about 12 of us left.



I don't know what you mean by that


You do seem to be the intelligent type (Not just based on your writings, but your personality as well), so who knows. Maybe like other smart people, college just seems inadequate to you. To which I would say, try to get to a better college. Once you're done, though, try talking to some people who never even bothered to go. You'll eventually start to see that people are on different levels out there.


That's what high school is for. You are SUPPOSED to think critically about information in college. At least later on after the sudents have gotten over the "it's like more high school" phase. Sounds like you have a crappy college, too.


I didn't say think, I said learn. The skill of being able to force yourself to sit down for a few hours, completely engross yourself in your study material, and actually learn to retain what you have studied. Especially when it comes to tedious and boring material you may have no interest in, but which you may need. That's not a skill people just practice on their own  


I agree that schools have issues that need to be fixed (In USSR, for example, classes weren't adjusted down to compensate those who did bad. You were expected to keep up, period. And other students were expected to help the laggards keep up). But it really sounds like you ended up in a shitty college. Maybe you should research if there is anything better out there, and move there? By the way, I can tell you right now that an Associate's is completely worthless. If jobs are looking for degrees, they will be looking for a BS at least. If they are not, they'll be fine with high school. Your best options are to either go for a BS, or, depending on your skills, go to a specialty school. My friend got an associates in network engineering. It was worthless, and not something he wanted (his parents pushed him into it). Then he spent a year going to a specialist school that only taught truck engine repair, which is what he was interested in. No history, english, or other crap. Now he's happy doing what he likes, and earns a good living.


You may be right, I don't know. I still believe that people should get a foundation to start with, even if all they want to do is play video games all day. You won't know if you are into art, history, languages, math, computers, biology, chemistry, or whatever if you've never been exposed to it. Finance was not a subject in my school (or if it was, it wasn't a requirement), so I was never exposed to it, and didn't get to realize it was something I was interested in until I was 24, at which point I had to start pursuing that education from scratch. This does remind me that there's a fundamental difference in how kids are taught in USSR versus USA though (I don't know if Japan is similar)...

I tend to think that brains have a certain amount of processing power.  They may be oriented in slightly different directions but unless you are born with a brain defect then you have the potential to be reasonably intelligent.  Maybe not everyone can be a genius but the potential is there for most to be quite capable.

Unfortunately, a lot happens to a lot of people between birth and adulthood.   Abuse, a bad public education system, lack of resources, etc, etc and thus many people's brains are not allowed to naturally develop.  And that's where most dumb people come from imo.  They have some kind of mixture of that in their past.

Stop you're making me blush

I wager most people are made dumb; the rest are merely unfortunate.  I may be an optimist (I doubt it), but I believe most everyone is born relatively equal (give or take a few potential IQ points), and they are designed, from then on, to fail.

I'll just add this: some people are born dumb, some people are made dumb.

It's late, so I'll answer tomorrow. For now, I'll just say that you must be very young and inexperienced to claim that everyone is born like-minded, and there's no such thing as someone being born a genius. With experience, you'll learn that there are A LOT of REALLY REALLY REALLY dumb people out there, and it has nothing to do with whether they started thinking on their own or not. Some people are just slow, and some are complete morons. And that's not a subjective statement, when there are other people to compare them to.