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SOTU: Community Colleges, Employers To Train Workers For High-Paying Coding Jobs
theodp writes: Coding got a couple of shout-outs from the White House in Tuesday's State of the Union Address. "Thanks to Vice President Biden's great work to update our job training system," said President Obama (YouTube), "we're connecting community colleges with local employers to train workers to fill high-paying jobs like coding, and nursing, and robotics." And among the so-called "boats" in the new "River of Content" that the White House social media folks came up with to enhance the State of the Union is a card intended to be shared on Twitter & Facebook which reads, "Let's teach more Americans to code. (Even the President is learning!)."
President Obama briefly addressed human spaceflight, saying, "I want Americans to win the race for the kinds of discoveries that unleash new jobs – converting sunlight into liquid fuel; creating revolutionary prosthetics, so that a veteran who gave his arms for his country can play catch with his kid; pushing out into the Solar System not just to visit, but to stay." He also called once more for action on climate change. Politifact has an annotated version of the transcript for more background information on Obama's statements, and FiveThirtyEight has a similar cheat sheet.
No, I don't believe it's an actual plan.
I just feel like I have to actually say something like this from time to time so that the words are out in the universe.
If I transmit, maybe someone will receive.
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
I don't disagree that it's a stepping stone. And that's good. I believe in continuous education.
I just don't like the simplistic promise from the President that the OP quotes. "[H]igh-paying jobs like coding" is the part that rankles me especially. It's an overly-simplistic view of the state of high-paying jobs. They're frequently inaccessible to most people for a variety of reasons, not the least of which being that a few community college courses are not the key to that door.
It gives the impression that a high-paying job is relatively easy to get, and that's just not true.
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
Suppose that's true, if you teach a million people medical coding, two will end up being doctors. And the rest end up unemployed because we only need a few thousand medical coding people. How is that good, to have 998,000 people waste their time (and your money)? Everyone would be much better off putting 1/100th the money into medical school scholarships - you end up with more doctors and nobody wasting their time, and you still have your money to spend on something useful.
Similarly, we need people who know systems architecture, comp sci, information security, electrical engineering, materials science - all of these disciplines are needed to build the systems of the future, and all pay well. Scholarships in these areas would be useful to the student and to the country. Teaching everyone a coding language doesn't advance anything they need or we need.
There are plenty of fields where a community college education is useful - welders, for example, earn more than code monkeys, starting with just a few weeks of schooling. In two years, they can get certified to do underwater welding, aerospace, etc - all of which pay much better than coding, because they are more useful than coding without understanding software systems design principles.
I teach Computer Information Systems at a community college, which includes some programming courses (C++, Java, JavaScript & PHP w/MySQL, etc.), and some non-programming courses on general computer use. When I teach a programming course, I teach it with the idea that the students I have need to be competent in order to succeed when they move on to a 4 year college. What ends up happening is about 1/3 will stop coming to class after about the first few weeks of school--just long enough to not have their Pell Grants and other financial taken away. Then they go off to party/play video games/whatever. About another 1/2 will struggle, complain that there's too much homework, that the homework is too hard, but they either don't post messages on the course message board, or they do it the evening before the homework's due. They also tend to skip class if they didn't get the homework done. Then about 1/6 excel in the course. They show up every time, do most of the homework, and try to assist other students who are struggling.
I've been teaching for 5 years now and this has been a consistent pattern. The first & last groups are typically composed of traditional students, and the middle one is mostly non-traditional students. I think the reason why NT students struggle so much is because they're shuttled into CS/CIS but have no technical background. They're told "go into computers, that's where all the jobs are", then they take the classes & struggle. I try to accommodate them as best I can, but there's only so much hand-holding you can do.
So basically from my anecdotal experience, you're going to be pissing away money on about 5/6ths of the students you're sending into the field. The number of successes may increase when this program kicks into gear, but that's not really going to be a good indication. "Why's that?" you ask. The answer is simple: There will be more smart students at community colleges who probably would have gone to a better 4-year school if community college wasn't "free".
I want to see everyone have as much success as possible, but the truth is, some students would be better suited for going straight into the job market rather than go to college. Most of the students in the lower 1/3 I mentioned previously either lack the intelligence, (but mostly) the maturity, or both.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Nonsense. If you train a million doctors the worse that could happen is that you have nearly a million paramedics, some trained to do many of the simple or relatively specialized tasks that doctors already farm out to their nurses and aides already. The result would be no excuse for such high health care costs and wages for doctors, since much of what they currently do could be done for far less by paramedics or even in some cases by robots or medical devices.
Lets end the nonsense that the status quo is the best we can do.
"Time to run screaming in the opposite direction."
Yeah, right into the hands of privatized education and diploma mills that are generating the most student debt.
That's the beauty of the President's plan. It asks for those who already are doing well to give something back so that deserving students can go to community college at virtually no cost.
I would rather see loopholes for "good will", "forward carry", "depletion allowances" and preferential tax credits for owning "rolling stock" eliminated, but since the GOP isn't going to do this, the only viable option is to ask those who make $500,000 per year to pay the same rates they did under Ronald Reagan.
Why should guys like Mitt Romney only get to pay 13% on his annual income in tax, while the rest of us pay 28% or more?
Why do so many advocate more tax breaks for Mitt Romney and less to educate average Americans?