A long time ago, those in charge realized that so long as every employer treated the people who do actual work like shit, they wouldn't quit to go somewhere else when you treated them like shit. The other guy treats his employees just as badly (or worse). Wages have been flat across all sectors for 40 years, while productivity has steadily improved. Executives buy million dollar vacation homes while the workers that make that possible struggle to pay for 2 bedroom homes in shitty neighborhoods. The truth is, that hard work doesn't get you anything other than more hard work. The trick is to make money off others' hard work.
The American Dream used to be "work hard, make good decisions, and you'll get ahead and give your children advantages you didn't have." Now, it's "Get other people to work hard and take the lion's share of profits for yourself, fuck them." Yet another manifestation of the prevailing "I've got mine, fuck you" attitude that is destroying our country.
When you're sitting in Rocks for Jocks 101 with 600 of your closest friends, you're a number. There is no other option than to teach by rote, because any sort of student engagement is pretty much impossible. "So don't take that class", I hear you saying. There are these things called "general education requirements", which serve no purpose other than to milk you for tuition money for 3 or 4 semesters taking classes you have no interest in but cannot opt out of. Since neither you nor anyone else can opt out of the class, the classes are huge.
By the time you actually get to classes relating to your major, you'll be instructed by completely disinterested graduate students who see you as an impediment to their working on their thesis. They teach you what's on the syllabus, and trust me, critical thinking isn't on there.
Since I've graduated, I found that my degree from a state university was pretty much not worth the paper it's printed on, in terms of impressing future employers enough to actually call you. The joke was "Diplomas - Please Take One" written above the toilet paper in the bathrooms. In hindsight, I think it might have been a better move to not go; the degree is a stain on my resume. The fact that the school now has "open enrollment" (read: if you have a pulse and a checkbook, you're accepted) makes this worse. Thanks, guys, glad my (genuine) hard work paid off.
I now work in a completely different field than my degree. My B.S. basically qualifies me for low-level service jobs at companies in my field. Had I studied something more useful, I'd probably be 10 years further along in my career than I am now. My son is going to study something useful, dammit, if he wants to do something useless like 'Communications' or 'Russian Literature" or "Fashion Marketing" (no kidding, that was a major at my university) he can pay for it his damn self. And when he moves back in with us after a year of not being able to find a job, I'll say "I told you so."
Are your numbers strictly tuition, or tuition/room/board/fees? Where I went to school, you have no choice but to pay room and board for the first two years. Oddly enough, it takes two years to establish residency in this state. Funny how that rule prevents anyone from getting in-state tuition, even though they spend 4 years living in this state...
If you went by strictly tuition, then where I went to school, the tuition is ~$900 per semester. Everything else is (mandatory) fees and room/board. There was a program a while back that rewarded students who performed well on state standardized testing with 'free tuition' to any state college/university. That's great, except now you have to come up with the other $23,000 to actually go there. And it's even worse than that; tuition is not retained on the campus, it's paid into the state general fund. The state government then decides how much it's going to give back to the university, and as you've probably guessed, it's not all of it. So, realistically, the state only loses like $800 a year or so by waiving 'tuition' to the well-performing students.
In looking at the numbers just now, it looks like they've started charging students in Engineering disciplines and Honors students more than everyone else. Yes, let's reward the student who wants to study something useful like Engineering or wants to distinguish themselves from their peers with "with Honors" after their degree with higher tuition! Captive audience and all that. (Incidentally, had I been in the Honors program, I would have graduated summa cum laude. But, since I didn't do the extra classes or pick the 'special' Honors study groups, I only got 'cum laude'.)
Instead, maybe they should get a degree and use their new found skills and insight into the system to help reform it and make it better for everyone.
A noble sentiment, but it's got a fatal flaw: College does not teach you marketable, useful job skills. It teaches you how to show up in class, pay attention, memorize useless shit then immediately forget it once you've passed the test, and how much you can drink before you die of alcohol poisoning. If college was about learning job skills, Communications and English majors would not exist; those students can get degrees if they have a pulse. No, the big business / higher education cartel wants you to be an unquestioning drone, enslaved by obscene student loan debt and cowed by the threat of being fired if you step out of line. Employees who have had their souls crushed don't complain when you treat them like shit.
Re:Did Zuckerberg ever have to get past HR?
on
Just Say No To College
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Let's be honest, the skyrocketing cost of college and debt are very real issues, but a $200,000 bill for a bachelor's degree is extremely rare. Your average state university might be a quarter of that, and the cost can go even lower if one starts at a community or junior college and transfers in.
The state university I graduated from is now close to $25,000 / year. For IN-STATE residents. And that doesn't include books or any specific lab fees. Now, I might be a product of public higher education, but my math says 4 years of that is $100,000, which is significantly more than a quarter of $200,000. (If you're out-of-state, it's closer to $37,000 per year.) For a degree that is more of a stain on your resume than an asset, I might add. After all, if you had any brains, you wouldn't have had to go to that aggie school out there.
You can't ignore a statistic like that, and a large part of the reason why is that HR departments and Recruiters are in the habit of asking for a BA by default and will automatically trash a resume that lacks it, despite how good one's skills may be.
Skills don't enter that equation at all. Introducing the concept of 'skills' divorced from a degree introduces thought into the equation. Thinking is hard. And, since HR is usually staffed by morons, or so overworked that they aren't physically able to evaluate each resume they receive, they use the lack of degree as a filter to narrow things down.
Anyway, companies don't really care about your skills or education. They look for weaknesses that they can exploit when they're evaluating someone for a job. By exploiting the weaknesses (like, for example, if someone has a family to feed and/or provide health insurance for) they can keep salaries down, which improves the bottom line. It's not about your skills (which nobody but your hiring manager gives a shit about, and that's the reason why they rarely have input in the hiring decision - they want 'good', not 'cheap'), it's about how cheaply they can get you.
"Gee, Bank of America, I'm sorry I don't have a job and can't pay my mortgage, but you'll be happy to know that I turned down a gig on principle!"
Yeah, see how far that gets you. Not to mention, if you're collecting unemployment benefits and you turn down a job, you disqualify yourself from any further benefits.
Then there's the whole "US health insurance industry" problem, where getting cancer while not insured is fatal to either yourself or your entire economic identity. Most people don't have any choice but to get health insurance through their employer and, thanks to the for-profit health insurance industry, paying for your care out-of-pocket will cost you everything you own.
Yeah, you'll be taking what we offer and you'll like it. If you don't like the language in the employment agreement, I'm sure we'll find someone that does.
Unlikely. As with everything in modern American public education (well, anything in a major American organization, public or otherwise), decisions are made based on how little something costs RIGHT NOW as opposed to how much it will cost in the long run, and any attempt to build infrastructure to support a new initiative is met with "that's so much money, we'll just cross that bridge when we come to it if it's a problem." Handing out tens of thousands of Windows-based laptops (especially with Redmond's subsidy for OS cost) may be cheaper up-front, but bringing in that many laptops requires substantial infrastructure to handle the 'side benefits' of Windows, namely the need for strong antivirus solutions and the most restrictive group policies that are possible that still allow the students to log into their laptops. I can guarantee you that at one point as this program was being developed the following conversation, or one very much like it, happened:
Tech: "We need to take security measure X, because Y." Suit: "How likely is Y to happen?" Tech: "Hard to say, exactly, but it's possible, so we should do X. It will require additional effort Z, but it's a fair trade." Suit: "And how much will Z cost us?" Tech: "Well, it will probably generate additional help desk traffic." Suit: "Work around it, help desk traffic costs money." Tech: "If we do that, and Y happens, the entire network could be trashed and we'll have to hire (expensive) additional staff to fix things, and we could potentially be down for weeks or months." Suit: "Ehh, that'll probably never happen. Do the workaround."
I'm guessing in this case the students were required to have privileged accounts on their laptops because of shitty software that doesn't install correctly in userland.
No, your best bet is to publicly humiliate him, and there's a million ways to do that. Your way is the coward's way. I don't want to merely survive bullying. I want him to learn a lesson in humility that he'll never forget or get over, so he'll never want to bully anyone else in the future.
And then he brings a gun to school and shoots you dead.
They hold back the kids that excel because they're too underfunded to do anything other than hope to educate the lowest common denominator. As long as we see public education as a burden and a money sink, and not the asset that it is, this will be the case. Think about it: You're a teacher with 50 kids in your class due to budget cuts (demanded by senior citizens who would be perfectly happy if there were no schools at all, so long as their palatial senior centers are maintained) and 45 of them are typical dumb-as-bricks Americans. If you teach to the level of the 5 students who are genuinely talented, everyone else fails because they don't have the ability that the smart kids have. If 45 of your students fail the course you're teaching, you get labeled as a "bad teacher" and everyone who thinks the solution to the education problem is to fire more teachers will be screaming for your head. So, you dumb the class down to the point where only a few students fail, and even then, you get static from the parents who expect you to do their job for them.
Sometimes, you ACs really piss me off. So, you agree that the smart kids in the summary were doing the smart thing in submitting to bullies, lying low, trying to hide their ability?
Some people don't like getting their faces flushed down the toilet every day. No, it's not right, but it happens. Your best bet is to shut your mouth, get good grades, and get the fuck out of Dodge.
I wouldn't call that ironic. Just because you've graduated from high school/college doesn't mean you won't run into bullies anymore. We have a few of them in positions of power where I work; they know their skills are outdated and the only reason they don't get canned is because 1) They have a "C" in their title, and 2) they have institutional knowledge that they have deliberately not shared.
Your definition of a "drubbing" and mine must be different:
The president won over 300 electoral votes, and won the popular vote by 3 million votes; The GOP won ONE of the swing states; The GOP lost EVERY contested Senate seat; Gay marriage referenda passed for the first time ever in multiple states..
I could go on, but you see what I'm saying. You do have a point, however, about the "much of the same" sentiment. I'm looking at that as better than the alternative.
#1, if you can't find someplace to talk about firearms with like-minded people, you're not looking very hard. Last I checked, the NRA was still a thing.
#2, Your right to put up a big ugly tower on your house ends at the rights of your neighbors to not have their property values driven down from an arbitrary desire of their neighbors. I'm sure you can find someplace to live where there are no such restrictions.
#3, again, I don't think you're trying very hard. There's this thing called "the Internet", which I hear they have on computers now. What venues are you talking about?
Slashdot Mirror
A long time ago, those in charge realized that so long as every employer treated the people who do actual work like shit, they wouldn't quit to go somewhere else when you treated them like shit. The other guy treats his employees just as badly (or worse). Wages have been flat across all sectors for 40 years, while productivity has steadily improved. Executives buy million dollar vacation homes while the workers that make that possible struggle to pay for 2 bedroom homes in shitty neighborhoods. The truth is, that hard work doesn't get you anything other than more hard work. The trick is to make money off others' hard work.
The American Dream used to be "work hard, make good decisions, and you'll get ahead and give your children advantages you didn't have." Now, it's "Get other people to work hard and take the lion's share of profits for yourself, fuck them." Yet another manifestation of the prevailing "I've got mine, fuck you" attitude that is destroying our country.
BS cum laude, with departmental honors.
When you're sitting in Rocks for Jocks 101 with 600 of your closest friends, you're a number. There is no other option than to teach by rote, because any sort of student engagement is pretty much impossible. "So don't take that class", I hear you saying. There are these things called "general education requirements", which serve no purpose other than to milk you for tuition money for 3 or 4 semesters taking classes you have no interest in but cannot opt out of. Since neither you nor anyone else can opt out of the class, the classes are huge.
By the time you actually get to classes relating to your major, you'll be instructed by completely disinterested graduate students who see you as an impediment to their working on their thesis. They teach you what's on the syllabus, and trust me, critical thinking isn't on there.
Since I've graduated, I found that my degree from a state university was pretty much not worth the paper it's printed on, in terms of impressing future employers enough to actually call you. The joke was "Diplomas - Please Take One" written above the toilet paper in the bathrooms. In hindsight, I think it might have been a better move to not go; the degree is a stain on my resume. The fact that the school now has "open enrollment" (read: if you have a pulse and a checkbook, you're accepted) makes this worse. Thanks, guys, glad my (genuine) hard work paid off.
I now work in a completely different field than my degree. My B.S. basically qualifies me for low-level service jobs at companies in my field. Had I studied something more useful, I'd probably be 10 years further along in my career than I am now. My son is going to study something useful, dammit, if he wants to do something useless like 'Communications' or 'Russian Literature" or "Fashion Marketing" (no kidding, that was a major at my university) he can pay for it his damn self. And when he moves back in with us after a year of not being able to find a job, I'll say "I told you so."
Are your numbers strictly tuition, or tuition/room/board/fees? Where I went to school, you have no choice but to pay room and board for the first two years. Oddly enough, it takes two years to establish residency in this state. Funny how that rule prevents anyone from getting in-state tuition, even though they spend 4 years living in this state...
If you went by strictly tuition, then where I went to school, the tuition is ~$900 per semester. Everything else is (mandatory) fees and room/board. There was a program a while back that rewarded students who performed well on state standardized testing with 'free tuition' to any state college/university. That's great, except now you have to come up with the other $23,000 to actually go there. And it's even worse than that; tuition is not retained on the campus, it's paid into the state general fund. The state government then decides how much it's going to give back to the university, and as you've probably guessed, it's not all of it. So, realistically, the state only loses like $800 a year or so by waiving 'tuition' to the well-performing students.
In looking at the numbers just now, it looks like they've started charging students in Engineering disciplines and Honors students more than everyone else. Yes, let's reward the student who wants to study something useful like Engineering or wants to distinguish themselves from their peers with "with Honors" after their degree with higher tuition! Captive audience and all that. (Incidentally, had I been in the Honors program, I would have graduated summa cum laude. But, since I didn't do the extra classes or pick the 'special' Honors study groups, I only got 'cum laude'.)
Yeah, but then you have to go to college in Texas or Tennessee. Pretty sure I'd rather starve.
How recent is your degree?
A noble sentiment, but it's got a fatal flaw: College does not teach you marketable, useful job skills. It teaches you how to show up in class, pay attention, memorize useless shit then immediately forget it once you've passed the test, and how much you can drink before you die of alcohol poisoning. If college was about learning job skills, Communications and English majors would not exist; those students can get degrees if they have a pulse. No, the big business / higher education cartel wants you to be an unquestioning drone, enslaved by obscene student loan debt and cowed by the threat of being fired if you step out of line. Employees who have had their souls crushed don't complain when you treat them like shit.
The state university I graduated from is now close to $25,000 / year. For IN-STATE residents. And that doesn't include books or any specific lab fees. Now, I might be a product of public higher education, but my math says 4 years of that is $100,000, which is significantly more than a quarter of $200,000. (If you're out-of-state, it's closer to $37,000 per year.) For a degree that is more of a stain on your resume than an asset, I might add. After all, if you had any brains, you wouldn't have had to go to that aggie school out there.
Skills don't enter that equation at all. Introducing the concept of 'skills' divorced from a degree introduces thought into the equation. Thinking is hard. And, since HR is usually staffed by morons, or so overworked that they aren't physically able to evaluate each resume they receive, they use the lack of degree as a filter to narrow things down.
Anyway, companies don't really care about your skills or education. They look for weaknesses that they can exploit when they're evaluating someone for a job. By exploiting the weaknesses (like, for example, if someone has a family to feed and/or provide health insurance for) they can keep salaries down, which improves the bottom line. It's not about your skills (which nobody but your hiring manager gives a shit about, and that's the reason why they rarely have input in the hiring decision - they want 'good', not 'cheap'), it's about how cheaply they can get you.
"Gee, Bank of America, I'm sorry I don't have a job and can't pay my mortgage, but you'll be happy to know that I turned down a gig on principle!"
Yeah, see how far that gets you. Not to mention, if you're collecting unemployment benefits and you turn down a job, you disqualify yourself from any further benefits.
Then there's the whole "US health insurance industry" problem, where getting cancer while not insured is fatal to either yourself or your entire economic identity. Most people don't have any choice but to get health insurance through their employer and, thanks to the for-profit health insurance industry, paying for your care out-of-pocket will cost you everything you own.
Yeah, you'll be taking what we offer and you'll like it. If you don't like the language in the employment agreement, I'm sure we'll find someone that does.
Why are you doing this for free?
Unlikely. As with everything in modern American public education (well, anything in a major American organization, public or otherwise), decisions are made based on how little something costs RIGHT NOW as opposed to how much it will cost in the long run, and any attempt to build infrastructure to support a new initiative is met with "that's so much money, we'll just cross that bridge when we come to it if it's a problem." Handing out tens of thousands of Windows-based laptops (especially with Redmond's subsidy for OS cost) may be cheaper up-front, but bringing in that many laptops requires substantial infrastructure to handle the 'side benefits' of Windows, namely the need for strong antivirus solutions and the most restrictive group policies that are possible that still allow the students to log into their laptops. I can guarantee you that at one point as this program was being developed the following conversation, or one very much like it, happened:
Tech: "We need to take security measure X, because Y."
Suit: "How likely is Y to happen?"
Tech: "Hard to say, exactly, but it's possible, so we should do X. It will require additional effort Z, but it's a fair trade."
Suit: "And how much will Z cost us?"
Tech: "Well, it will probably generate additional help desk traffic."
Suit: "Work around it, help desk traffic costs money."
Tech: "If we do that, and Y happens, the entire network could be trashed and we'll have to hire (expensive) additional staff to fix things, and we could potentially be down for weeks or months."
Suit: "Ehh, that'll probably never happen. Do the workaround."
I'm guessing in this case the students were required to have privileged accounts on their laptops because of shitty software that doesn't install correctly in userland.
This just in: Companies are cheap and want something for nothing, damn the logic. Also, the sky is blue, water is wet, etc.
And then he brings a gun to school and shoots you dead.
That costs money and therefore will not see the light of day in an American public education system, not in the current environment.
The solution is not to take your kid out of the public education system, the solution is to fix the goddamn system.
If your kid isn't getting an education, that's your fault. You get out of an education what you put into it.
They hold back the kids that excel because they're too underfunded to do anything other than hope to educate the lowest common denominator. As long as we see public education as a burden and a money sink, and not the asset that it is, this will be the case. Think about it: You're a teacher with 50 kids in your class due to budget cuts (demanded by senior citizens who would be perfectly happy if there were no schools at all, so long as their palatial senior centers are maintained) and 45 of them are typical dumb-as-bricks Americans. If you teach to the level of the 5 students who are genuinely talented, everyone else fails because they don't have the ability that the smart kids have. If 45 of your students fail the course you're teaching, you get labeled as a "bad teacher" and everyone who thinks the solution to the education problem is to fire more teachers will be screaming for your head. So, you dumb the class down to the point where only a few students fail, and even then, you get static from the parents who expect you to do their job for them.
Some people don't like getting their faces flushed down the toilet every day. No, it's not right, but it happens. Your best bet is to shut your mouth, get good grades, and get the fuck out of Dodge.
"I'm on the brute squad!"
I wouldn't call that ironic. Just because you've graduated from high school/college doesn't mean you won't run into bullies anymore. We have a few of them in positions of power where I work; they know their skills are outdated and the only reason they don't get canned is because 1) They have a "C" in their title, and 2) they have institutional knowledge that they have deliberately not shared.
I bet there are a bunch of things you wouldn't want your neighbors to put in their yards.
Your definition of a "drubbing" and mine must be different:
The president won over 300 electoral votes, and won the popular vote by 3 million votes;
The GOP won ONE of the swing states;
The GOP lost EVERY contested Senate seat;
Gay marriage referenda passed for the first time ever in multiple states..
I could go on, but you see what I'm saying. You do have a point, however, about the "much of the same" sentiment. I'm looking at that as better than the alternative.
Listen, man, just because YOU can't get laid...
#1, if you can't find someplace to talk about firearms with like-minded people, you're not looking very hard. Last I checked, the NRA was still a thing.
#2, Your right to put up a big ugly tower on your house ends at the rights of your neighbors to not have their property values driven down from an arbitrary desire of their neighbors. I'm sure you can find someplace to live where there are no such restrictions.
#3, again, I don't think you're trying very hard. There's this thing called "the Internet", which I hear they have on computers now. What venues are you talking about?
Yeah. You guys lost. Time to move on.