Since I don't have kids, and am 20 years post college, Does STEAM
replace STEM? You only have to choose 1 of the letters? I thought they
were all supposed to work in conjunction. I went to a small liberal
arts school, and I wouldn't be the person that I am now without having
some of the Arts training that I did. Physics and CS were my majors, but
I also could have had a minor in music pretty easy. I'm way more
rounded than kids that went to a large college where they only took
degree specific classes.
I know a story of a person that did a 3 years at a small LA college,
then 2 Years at a large university, to get a BS and an EE degree. When
he was at the university, other kids in engineering who were juniors and
seniors, couldn't even spell check a paper, or complete sentences. He
had a good side business proof reading their work (This was before word
processors did all that for you)
I recently told a parent of a kid soon to graduate high school, that
they should look at sending the not-straight-A-and-Unkonwn-Career-path
kid into a trade instead of college. The was the WRONG answer for a
suburban Chicago parent to hear.
On 7/5/2024 6:24 PM, Steve Jones wrote:
I think im one of the only conservatives that is pro free higher
education. More as an investment than as an expense
remove all liberal arts, STEM, not STEAM only (you want an art history
degree, you can pay for it), 1:1 community service requirement per
classroom instruction hour, manual labor or degree related community
service only, 90% mandatory score, 95% mandatory attendance, 100
percent drug and alcohol abstinence during the school year, tested
biweekly. Zero criminal tolerance. You pay on the loan until youve
completed the mandatory community service and repay all deferments
from that time period. Then each year you maintain full time
employment, 10 percent is waived for 10 years. but that would actually
require something, so of course it would be too unfair.
On Thu, Jul 4, 2024 at 12:52 PM Forrest Christian (List Account)
<li...@packetflux.com> wrote:
I feel that it's time for college to go through a major revision.
First, I lean quite strongly toward the Mike Rowe worldview in
that we need to quit telling our kids that they need a college
education to make it in this world. Right now if you're in one of
the blue collar trades you're far better off than a lot of the
people who have ms or bs degrees. There will always be a demand
for plumbers, electricians, mechanics, and so on.
On the college side, we need to adjust what we teach to provide
for a condensed program where you cut out most (but not all) of
the non-relevant programs. Yes, it's hard to learn certain trades
without college, but a degree in computer science shouldn't need a
lot of the liberal arts classes.
Finally, we need to reform the student loan program so that we
quit graduating students with degrees in underwater basketweaving
with 6 figure loan balances. Right now, lenders are able to loan
to anyone without risk and as such there is no incentive for
lenders or schools to ensure that the students will be able to
repay their loans from a typical job in the student's chosen
degree program. This has led to ballooning tuition and overall
school costs since there is no pressure to keep costs low.
On Thu, Jul 4, 2024, 10:36 AM <ch...@go-mtc.com> wrote:
With the risk of starting something, I thought I would inject
some observations:
I do watch Charley Kirk on YouTube for a quick fix of watching
him dissolve some of the woke ideology being spouted by young
college kids. For me it is like junk food for my worldview.
Can only take so much of it, like eating too many sweets. And
he can get a bit too alt-right for me at times.
Yesterday he was preaching something that I think he was
partially, perhaps mostly wrong about. He is a college
dropout and preaches that college is a scam and you would be
better off just learning to code and find an internship that
does not require a degree.
I think he is only partially right.
By and large, most BA programs are probably not worth the
money unless they go onto grad school. A BA in art history
doesn’t have much value when searching Indeed for a job. It
can however get you into law school.
And we all know that if you start and successfully run a WISP
you absolutely must be an autodidact. An autodidact with
ambition. Cannot pick up either of those at a college. And
do not need college to be a superior ISP or WISP. It does
however take a special type of person.
But there are a couple of areas where I know, from personal
experience, that you really benefit from formal education:
1) Computer Science – the part where you learn hardware
theory, operating system design, compiler design, advanced
data structures, OO methods etc. Really hard to pick up this
stuff by watching youtube videos. And really hard to get any
good at it unless you are forced to do homework and labs.
Understanding what happens with the hardware, the stack and OS
during a hardware interrupt is important and not so easy to
learn on your own. Try to write some DSP functions from
scratch on your own... or perhaps some machine code to hand
optimize a MCU routine. Much easier if you had a class on
assembly.
2) RF and antennas. Reflection coefficients and the
mastery of Smith charts. EM simulation software and
optimization. S11 and PCB stripline and microstrip layout.
Etc etc. Again, a good autodidact can teach themselves
anything. But I tried for years to master Smith charts and it
was not until college that I finally got to where I could use
them. Now-a-days the software does it all for you but you
still need to know.
3) To understand some of this stuff, like DSP etc, you also
need some upper level math, calculus and trig. Hard to do on
your own.
I also imagine that if you want to get into medical school,
classes on chemistry, biology etc are essential. All PE
programs will always need degreed engineers. So yeah Charley,
if you get a liberal arts degree, I would tend to agree with
you that your fathers money was probably wasted. But many of
the BS degrees are not a scam or waste.
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