The column seems to be entirely from the point of view of an employer looking to screen potential employees. Like it or not, college is about more than job training. For a lot of people the social life is a big part of it, the first part of life away from parents, but still with some security, and about intellectual exploration (answering the question - what exactly do I want to be when I grow up?). Perhaps none of that is worth the lost time, but when I see it in the WSJ, my initial reaction is that it's another right wing wacko who sees college as just too many liberals with too much influence.
And he puts too much faith in certification tests as "classless", in my opinion. I used to do test prep, and like most things, the people who have the money and the time to train for the certifications have an advantage.
It's written from that perspective because college degrees are used as a proxy for job training, and most people pursue them so they can get a better job, which makes the system broken. The other benefits of the college experience don't require college anyway, and are cost-prohibitive to a lot of people.
I don't think he was arguing that nobody should do 4 years of college. Just that employers need a better vetting system.
We need to stop fooling ourselves and just flat-out have masters and apprenticeship. When the system in schools and in companies works, it boils down to this anyhow. (I'm not including prodigies that you couldn't keep from learning no matter what you did. I'm talking about those talents that wouldn't flower if they didn't fall into the right circumstance to reach their full potential.)
No, we don't. I don't want some guild or certification authority telling me I can't program for a living until I've done 2 years of "journeyman" programming and passed my licensing exams.
I'm having trouble finding it right now, but there was a good argument posted here a while back for requiring a certification proving that programmers know how to write secure code. The analogy was that the market can already sort out good chefs from bad chefs, but that there should be a basic certification to prove that you understand food safety.
The difference is that all chefs can make people sick with poor food safety, yet the vast majority of programmers are working on things where security really doesn't matter.
If we had mandatory security certifications, Reddit wouldn't exist. Nor, for that matter, would Windows. And while many of us would probably rejoice at that, I think a lot of people would be pretty pissed off if they had to use OpenBSD.
BTW, I interned at a company that does avionics/medical devices/financial software. Those industries do have strong regulations, like mandatory code reviews and traceability matrices. And that's great for what they do, but I'd hate to see the same standards applied to your Web 2.0 social bookmarking site.
The thing is, the market only sorts out egregious programmers.
The security certification is a wonderful idea! I think that would be a great place to start. (And end, perhaps.) The test for this could be entirely empirical. An applicant could be required to place $1000 in escrow, and implement a web application on the guild's servers. They would be required to add certain features. During the test, anyone would be welcome to try and hack the website. If anyone can prove that they are successful, they get the $1000. If the features all get implemented with no hacking, then the applicant gets their money back, minus the fee.
Although I did laugh, I have to ask if this was this a joke? So $1000 or $100 is what you pay (depending on if you fail or succeed)? Aside from the monetary figures you mentioned, sure it sounds like a great idea for a staffing business.
This is silly. Programming, networking, etc certifications exist: big companies like MSFT give them out if you jump through all the hoops and prove your high skillz. Fortunately for us crappy programmers on the web, companies that give a shit about those certifications care about hiring people with them, and companies that don't, don't. Yay for free markets!
More words in my mouth. In many cases, the market settles for something that just shows the hiring manager dotted their I's. (A hoop-jumping exercise that feeds another hoop-jumping exercise.) If there were certifications based on actual results in practice, this would be beneficial on many levels. It would be a way to disseminate good practices, and it would be a more direct indicator of the ability to produce results.
In other words: the market does do something, but someone could do even better.
We don't? I've been in a lot of different programming shops as a consultant, mostly in large organizations, and let me tell you -- I don't think a lot of the people out there who are programming really should be. I've had to be the hero far too many times for shops where someone didn't realize doing something was O(n^2) and doing it another way was O(n).
The industry doesn't need to the government to penalize non-guild programmers to benefit from a guild. All the guild has to do is to show that it is effective in producing competent, knowledgeable programmers. I suspect that things like employment at Microsoft have filled this niche. (Sub-optimally.) An organization that is designed to fulfill this particular purpose would be much better at its function and more robust.
A majority of US drivers think they are above average. I have met very few under-qualified programmers who realized it.
I don't know, I can see the education model being useful. I'd rather not have to submit to a guild or union (unlike some friends of mine,) but I can see the value of serving time in a real programming shop with experience and competent (hopefully) individuals as part of one's education. Of course, I think this is called an 'internship' these days.
Is that what Murray is advocating? The article I read suggested that using standardized tests would be a cheaper alternative than college -- but if you'd prefer four years of paying and not working to two years of getting paid to learn, you can at least enjoy the status quo.
Too many conclusions jumped to. Though guilds have had legal backing like this historically, I don't think you need that to have some form of benefit from a "programmer's guild."
I think you could base it entirely on empirical results -- successful programming projects being the sole measure of value.
Come to think of it, Open Source projects somewhat fill this role.
"...bachelor's degree tells an employer nothing except that the applicant has a certain amount of intellectual ability and perseverance. Even a degree in a vocational major like business administration can mean anything from a solid base of knowledge to four years of barely remembered gut courses."
So either the graduate is knowledgeable and the system did its job, or the graduate knows how to be a good member of a big bureaucratic organization and how to accomplish arbitrary things they're told to do.
Sounds like one more level of sorting, and the schools have done the job for big companies.
Agree. The causation (i.e. getting college degree makes you a much better employee because of specific knowledge learned) might be a myth but the correlation (people with at least passable intelligence/work ethic and the dedication and ability to do what they're told, which are the primary traits wanted by corporations, are more likely to get a college degree) is so strong that it still has a lot of value to employers, even if they don't fully understand why.
Yeah, but not all organizations just want "a good member of a big bureauratic organization." Some of them actually care about getting (or growing and keeping) high-performing individuals. It's just that people who work at companies like that don't do a lot of complaining online, so they're pretty invisible.
I find the whole "college is..." or "college is not..." to be a problematic mindset in itself. For example, why not develop social skills in high school? Many of the student leaders I know from college started as high school student leaders.
Now we're talking about "HS is..." or "HS is not..." or "HS sucks." Why wait until HS? Now we're talking about MS... then lower school. Then it's just your entire life as an individual.
I like the idea of a loose education system where there aren't Nth-grade, Xth-year students, but simply students who have proved themselves in a particular set of studies. For those with the time to study, take one year. For those without, take ten years. Then there won't be any of these ideas of what college should or should not do.
Many schools are moving towards this. You can take some HS courses in MS if you've demonstrated the motivation, and you can take college courses in HS as well.
Having just graduated college, I see it as the most valuable experience of my life. I've defined who I am and what I want to do in the past four years, and learned a ton about engineering on the side.
The problem with social skills, is that they're learned in a cultural/social context. For many, the desired quality and kind of context is only available in small doses (with a particular group) whose effect is diluted by the larger context which can only be corrected by moving somewhere else.
Like it or not, college is about more than job training. For a lot of people the social life is a big part of it, the first part of life away from parents, but still with some security, and about intellectual exploration
It's funny, but I got a whole lot more of that stuff after dropping out. Am I really going to learn more from a place where I don't pay the rent, buy stuff with a meal card, work fifteen hours per week but don't necessarily have to show up, and am surrounded by proto-alcoholics? If you can deduce the modern college experience from any sane set of first principles, I'd like to hear about it -- but it seems to me that Murray is right. If we didn't have college, and you tried to invent it, you'd be rightly denounced as a loon.
And he puts too much faith in certification tests as "classless", in my opinion. I used to do test prep, and like most things, the people who have the money and the time to train for the certifications have an advantage.
Murray has crunched the numbers rather than counting the anecdotes; studying for the SAT can raise scores a lot at first, but if you studied two hours per day for 150 days, your expected score increase would be seventy points. Murray cites this (http://eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordDetai...), which I haven't read. It would be a good plan to introduce your convictions to some data, so you can back up your assertion with something besides "I used to do test prep, and envy rich people too much to wonder what I can learn from them."
Perhaps none of that is worth the lost time, but when I see it in the WSJ, my initial reaction is that it's another right wing wacko who sees college as just too many liberals with too much influence.
You also might be happier if 1) you didn't assume that the newspaper that recently published a Barbara Ehrenreich piece (http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB121380066376984...) was irredeemably right-wing, and 2) if you considered the possibility that since college professors are overwhelmingly liberal (http://cellasreview.blogspot.com/2002_08_25_cellasreview_arc...) and nearly impossible to fire, they would consist of a greater than average number of liberals who do, indeed, have too much influence.
Was school really the important part, if different people get different results depending on what they do?
That part of my comment was addressing the idea that school prepares 18-22-year-olds for the real world. I think the real world prepares them a lot faster.
Yes, school is important. As someone who is going into their sixth year as a graduate student, I've given this some thought.
School is one of the few times when it's okay to just learn without also producing something of value. What I chose to learn was computer science and some math and physics. In grad school, I've learned a lot about high performance systems. While this knowledge and related skills are highly valued in the real world, very few real work entities would be willing to pay me to acquire it.
It's tough to learn this stuff on the side. You really need to devote years to learning to be useful. During that time, you're not producing much of value to the outside world. My PhD dissertation will not represent six years of effort; more like one or two. But it took four years of learning to be in the position that I could do that level of work in a year or two.
If you take a CS undergrad, some company somewhere can probably get use of them at their current skill level. But that company will have little interest in paying them to continue learning.
Regarding what you put out versus what you put in, that's true of everything.
School is one of the few times when it's okay to just learn without also producing something of value.
That is so weird to me. When I was in school, I spent about eight hours a day, five days a week learning stuff that had little practical application. And now that I work, I spend, oh, six hours a day seven days a week learning stuff with little practical application. Bizarrely, the fact that I'm neither paid nor graded for learning has not stopped me.
Maybe school is good for people who are unable to learn without those incentives, but I'm not sure how much of the population shares that problem. After all, for schools to have something useless to teach, they needed someone to get the ball rolling by learning that stuff before schools existed. So it's been possible in the past.
I'm not sure if you understood me. If you're paid for your work, I assume you're also producing something.
School is the only time we're allowed to learn without also producing something. You can learn on the job, but there's an expectation that you will produce something as well. They're not paying you to learn for your sake, they're paying you to learn so you can produce something for them. This does not exist in school; everything you produce is only for pedagogical purposes.
I don't know why you brought up incentives; my point has nothing to do with them. My point has to do with time and money. Since you produce nothing of value in school, no one will pay you for it. So you're deferring income so that you can devote all of your time to learning - school is an investment.
I really don't understand you. I have a shelf full of computer science and math textbooks behind me, which I read even though 1) I do not need them for work, and 2) I am not currently in school. I don't produce anything of value by reading The Art of Computer Programming, but I am still 'allowed' to do it. Nobody is paying me or permitting me, even though the stuff I do is still for pedagogical purposes.
I assume that most of your day is still spent producing something, which you get paid for. In school, such time does not exist; it's all learning. I think you're focused on incentives, which is orthogonal to my point. Regardless of why you learn (ranging from for your own enrichment or for practical gain), having a few years set aside to do nothing but learn means you will learn more.
If you somehow have a job where you are allowed to do anything you want and produce nothing, then I'd like to know who you work for.
Surely you don't mean that you spend all of your time at school doing thins with no productive value. I assume that you were still able to complete basic chores, personal hygiene tasks, etc. I spend more time on non-learning tasks while I'm at work, but it is feasible to work hard for a while, stop to learn things, work hard for a while again, etc. You seem pretty smart, so it's surprising that you'd doubt your ability to ever save up enough money to take some time off from working.
The Wall Street Journal may or may not be irredeemably right-wing, but I'd bet on it. Also, looking at Murray's record on number-crunching, and I do mean The Bell Curve, betting on it to be anything more than BS with lipstick would be a losing proposition.
I don't understand your comment. Do you know who Barbara Ehrenreich is? If they are irredeemably right-wing, what is she doing on their editorial page?
Murray considers himself a libertarian; Ehrenreich is a socialist. Neither is strictly 'right-wing'.
And which errors from The Bell Curve are repeated in his column? I didn't spot any glaring mistakes, but perhaps I did not read as carefully as you did.
You said "Murray has crunched the numbers rather than counting the anecdotes" which may be true, but he crunched the numbers in The Bell Curve too.
Given The Bell Curve, none of his number-crunching statements are believable, without close scrutiny.
I do know who Barbara Ehrenreich is, and I agree much more with her than with Murray, but calling her a socialist is typical political name-calling.
Edit: changed "right-wing" in the last sentence to "political" as being more accurate and less political.
Okay, so because he made unspecified errors in a book he cowrote years ago, we should not believe what some other social scientists have researched. After all, Murray has cited them!
but calling her a socialist is typical political name-calling.
Apparently you don't 'know who Barbara Ehrenreich is':
She is a a member of the Democratic Socialist party. Her Wikipedia page mentions that she's a socialist before it mentions that she's a writer! Calling her a socialist is like calling Obama a Democrat -- a radical redefinition of name-calling, though it does please me that merely identifying someone as a member of a leftist party is considered grievously insulting.
I spent a year at college (freelancing at the same time to support myself) and it was a tremendous waste of time. I can say with certainty that I lost maturity being there, and left feeling stupider than when I entered in the fall.
You tell me which will teach an individual more: A sheltered, friendly environment with mostly privileged peers, or living independently? I chose the latter. I interviewed for a web design job before receiving my HS diploma, got the job, and started two days after graduation. A month later, I was out on my own, paying bills, taking care of myself. Now that was a learning experience.
For people who enter school for vocational reasons, the sports and parties and alcohol and Shakespeare classes and diversity training and dormitory life and extended vacations and other activities are completely distinct from getting vocational training...ie, they are a complete waste. The 10K+/per year expense is vastly more wasteful than any cert training...
> For a lot of people the social life is a big part of it
I think a little discussed reason college is such a big deal in America is because most communities are so socially and architecturally dysfunctional. Many colleges provide what a proper town/city is supposed to: public spaces and facilities, walkability, organizations with civic and social functions, etc. It's only because people graduate and go live in alienating suburban asteroid belts or in soulless political-machine big cities that they idealize college so much.
College isn't so great, it's just adult life in most of America sucks. But it's not like that every where.
p.s.
The oft repeated "college rounds people out" line desperately needs data. I think it's a load of bullshit.
Agreed. I think the problem is that towns and cities are run as democracies, where every faction tries to twist the government to do it's own special interest. Thus homeowners will put in place 1/4 acre per house zoning laws, developers will get rights to build big box stores, etc. No one looks out for the whole. A university's only goal is to maximize the satisfaction of its students in order to boost its own revenue. It does this amazingly well.
And he puts too much faith in certification tests as "classless", in my opinion. I used to do test prep, and like most things, the people who have the money and the time to train for the certifications have an advantage.