Coding in an explicit denial of word like “Trayvon Martin” is a clear political choice. If they want to be politically neutral they would avoid choosing politically charged word to block.
To use your metaphor, I think the more accurate description is that the food has decreased in quality and they increased the cost. The chef is resting on their laurels, maybe focused on other things. Maybe they spent a lot of money on a fancy renovation (dorms and gyms) with no impact to the actual food (education). Maybe they no longer shell out for the best staff and increasingly use lower priced employees (adjunct professors).
This actually happens all the time. It's hard to stay at the top and many Michelin star restaurants still close and go out of business.
I think that’s a small part of it, but it’s not how the critics usually frame it.
It’s almost always criticized because it costs more, doesn’t guarantee a good job, etc. and not because supposed educational standards have fallen. As if the people reading the NYPost were so invested in the quality of education at Berkeley…
I’d even bet that educational standards could be near zero, but as long as the degree guaranteed a high-paying job, those same people wouldn’t care at all about the education.
Not sure why anyone would be surprised by this. People may still accept that they need a college degree to get their desired job, but that doesn't mean the education is actually worth it.
Prices are up substantially. Grade inflation is out of control, demonstrating that people are paying for the credential more than the education. Masters degrees have become a way for international students to purchase a visa. No one is learning anything.
> but that doesn't mean the education is actually worth it.
I don't understand how we can have this conversation when the cost and quality of the product is so, so incredibly varied.
Some people loop in room and board with college costs, but you need to live somewhere even if you aren't in college. The two decisions aren't intrinsically intertwined. Being enrolled in a college might give you some options you wouldn't have otherwise, but if it's not a superior option to what you already have then you shouldn't take it. In other words college 'room and board' cost should either be ignored because it's the same price you'd pay elsewhere or it should be a net benefit if it's a subsidized, multi-tenant solution.
Meanwhile other's go to colleges that cost $10k a year for tuition and fee's, other's go to ones that run $40k+ per year. One college might focus on education and career prep/placement, another highlights their athletic teams and greek life parties.
I strongly disagree with this statement. The careful selection of words that results in elegant prose is one and the same with the thinking. Sure, there are many ideas worth prosing about, but those are just a premise until someone goes through the effort to intentionally shape words around the premise.
The open secret of the H1B program is that the credentials are fake. The system whitewashes candidates to provide the illusion of these credentials, but they are in fact no more qualified than an American candidate.
There is also no guarantee that the people you hire do not have criminal or psychological issues because these things are not checked or shared internationally. For example, a woman in my college got killed by a foreign PhD student because she rejected his romantic advances. I also find people can have high degrees of education on paper but hold beliefs that seem more aligned with people in the 50’s. I don’t want to work with people who think yelling and obeying the boss blindly is appropriate.
I used to travel for work. 100ish flight segments a year all over the country, typically carrying two laptops - corporate and client.
In one airport, I had a TSA agent yell at me that I'm not allowed to bring two laptops through precheck in my bag. That they had to go through separately. I complied but asked if that was this airport's policy because no other airport seemed to care. She swore up and down that this was national TSA policy and I should know better if I flew so much.
When I look at the TSA's success rates in audits, I tend to agree with the claim that it is more a government jobs program than a security agency.
And, to be clear, it's a crappy job. Get up ungodly early to travel to a work site in the middle of nowhere to shepherd thousands of jumpy/tired strangers* through arcane procedure (possibly in a language that they don't exactly have a firm grasp of) in the hopes of catching the one-in-a-million who has shown up specifically with the intent to kill you and as many other people as possible (or so your training says).
All while gaining basically no transferrable skills.
*Also, a significant portion of these strangers are headed to destinations and experiences you could never dream of affording or having the opportunity to access.
The workers do have a choice to not take it, so it's clearly not that crappy when weighed against the pay and job security (and free doohickies they "confiscate").
A stack is still not a domain. You could have domain expertise in building highly scaled distributed systems and still not call yourself a ____ programmer. The point is that your value lies more in knowing how to build for performance, consistency, reliability at scale and not in knowing where the semicolon goes.
I dunno even isolated to language specific aspects someone with no experience could hang themeselves. I use a ton of Go & Javascript, if you take a fundamental part of both languages, async operations and compare them they have radically different approaches. Even if I was skilled at distributed systems with deep JS knowledge I would lack the skills to audit Go code effectively. goroutines and channels require a bit different mental model than promises and callbacks. You could easily let the AI architect a mess that works.
That is why I would be hesitant to review complex Rust or some other code I have no experience in, sure the language has ways to handle things like async, garbage collection, etc. but I would just be assuming the AI is doing it right or even worse trying to steer it to handle it in a Javascript or Go manner.
Europe seems to have forgotten that influence is a function of power. The leaders in the article lament their ability to influence the US on policy, but what do they bring to the table to effect that influence? Military power? Economic power? Technical innovation? The only thing they have is a small amount of cultural power that they have used to shame and criticize while entirely relying on US protection.
The UK found this out the hard way after Brexit. When you go from sitting at the global table as Europe to being a relatively small island nation in the North Atlantic folks tend to negotiate with you differently.
I'm not defending the US here. The Iran War is a good example of my point as well. Iran reminded the world of their bargaining chip - the strait of hormuz - that the world had either forgotten about or undervalued.
I would like to see Europe have influence. I think it is good for the world. But no global power is going to give them that influence for free. They need to identify and exploit their competitive advantages. Cultural power is definitely one of those advantages, but wielding that power has actually lost them some of their influence in the US. Just like the US's use of military power also has consequences.
Europe isn't as bad as you might think. Though they may not be no.1 in military economic or innovation they are still quite strong.
Ukraine is an example - when that oval office thing happened Trump thought he could cut aid to Ukraine and force it to surrender with a cut of the spoils to the US/him but Europe took over and since then have probably been doing better - I note Russia's largest refinery 2500 km from Ukraine blew up last night.
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