The Higher Education Thread: Justify Poor Life Choices

Mist

Mist

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Cad said:
Are you really talking down about doctors now?
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I'm absolutely not. Ability to work hard is way more economically valuable than intelligence in the vast majority of cases.
 
yerm

yerm

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Frenzied Wombat said:
1) How does one make things like Gender Studies and Cultural Anthropology useful in the "real world"?
2) How do you plan on making the above courses as difficult as Organic Chemistry III and Quantum Mechanics?

I did my major in Biochem. My electives were always in English, History, or Psychology, and basically always represented my "Free A". Even a 300 level English course couldn't challenge the difficulty level of say Organic Chemistry I. At *best* some (like English/History) could compete on time spent studying purely because of their heavy reading requirements, but reading 20th century classics is practically relaxing in comparison to reading about Krebb's citric acid cycle..

There's a reason why science courses are harder than gender studies or anthropology, and that's because they're useful lol.. Don't know how we can change that.
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1) Have them require job-appropriate skills to complete and teach general skills rather than pure feelings. Like I said earlier, things like being in class and turning in assignments on time, even if the assignment is about "bs" material. The programs themselves can be made to involve useful problem-solving skills. A good deal of issue here is that these classes are doing "reflective" assignments on reading rather than objective-based tasks. Are you reading Hamlet and giving your useless opinion, or are you dissecting the language and answering about statistics and metrics that went into it?

My school had a professor take shit for assigning Twilight as one of the books, but I found out it involved requiring students to make comparisons between Twilight and 4 other texts about sentence length, word choices, adjective usage, etc. The assignment looked BRUTAL. This was an overarching tasks spanning the semester by taking "popular" books and applying measurable analysis. The shame here was that most students just dodged this teacher in favor of the other options - my elective English course allowed shit like answering your fucking phone mid-class and the teacher saying "life comes first" and other horse shit. There are right and wrong ways.

2) I am not entirely sure that you can. You can at least put them in that direction though - as said above. You can make all of these majors require doing tasks, answering questions, and for most doing extensive research. I don't think it'll mean reaching Quantum Mechanics but that's kinda how life works, some things simply are more difficult. In a reasonable setting you should have the baseline moved up in their direction, where every major requires doing a sufficient amount of actual work, even if it's borderline impossible to make them all equally as difficult.
 
Heylel

Heylel

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Cad said:
I think one thing we can all agree on is that college is way too fucking expensive right now for what you get.
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God yes. I completed my grad degree 06-08, and the cost increase in less than a decade from then has been outrageous.
 
ZyyzYzzy

ZyyzYzzy

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Cad said:
You just have to pick carefully. Those Dallas magnets are great... but something like 158k kids go to Dallas ISD schools and maybe 250 get into those magnet schools per year. It's stupid as shit. You have to question whether you can afford to live in DISD and send your kids to private school if they don't get in the magnets.

Also those townview magnets are downtown and nobody lives downtown or anywhere near it. Most people who get their kids into magnet schools end up shuttling the little bastards to school every day, and then shuttling them all over creation to see their friends since their friends will be all over.

I prefer to pony up and buy a house in HPISD, a small district in the middle of dallas that is economically segregated from Dallas, and is #6 on the list of the best school districts in the US: Here are the 20 best school districts in the U.S.

All the kids are neighborhood kids that my kids can walk to, they walk to school, etc.

You'll be surprised when your kids start school how much your quality of life is affected by what school your kids go to, where that school is and where the kids that go to school with your kids live.
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Yea, we bought where there were good public schools, though may still do private route. Undecided. We are in an aflfuent area, but that also means the area that we are in was expanded to bring in more students because so many people do private.
 
Mist

Mist

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ZyyzYzzy said:
Citation? Maybe useless call center employees were.
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The fact of the matter is, this shitty call-center job pays a lot more than either of my previous two jobs in the higher education system. It just requires me to work 60-70 hour weeks to do it.

This shitty call-center job also requires a college degree and/or industry certs, even though no college degree, heck, no textbook you can even buy, will teach you how to Avaya any better.
 
Cad

Cad

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Mario Speedwagon said:
Yeah that's the one your link landed on. That page design that seems so prevalent today just rustles me so fucking hard. I refuse to ever click through them.
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Don't even notice anything with adblock on, but having to click on every one is annoying.

But anyway, having that school district in close proximity to ... all the law firms in Dallas pretty much made it a no-brainer to decide where to live when my kids started school.

My older son is in 8th grade now and has never even seen a thug at school, much less been in a fight with one. I don't think he's been in a fight at school, ever. The kids are all "good kids" as far as I can tell.

It's like the goddamn twilight zone compared to whats going on out in the Dallas schools.
 
ZyyzYzzy

ZyyzYzzy

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Mist said:
When I was a professional tutor at the community college for 4 years, a large amount of my students were CNAs. Most were dumb as fucking shit. These dumbshits took up slots on the waiting list for the actual nursing program, slots that could have gone to people who had already completed 1 or more AS degrees while sitting on the waiting list. These dumbshits would drop out 1-2 semesters into the nursing program because actual nursing is actually fucking hard.

This is why I said 'the process needs to be better.' I meant the waiting list process. I should have been more specific.
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Ancedotal. Also lol. You sound like my worthless fucking sister. PhD in philosophy and complains about kids froced to take phil101 not giving a shit.
 
Cad

Cad

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ZyyzYzzy said:
Yea, we bought where there were good public schools, though may still do private route. Undecided. We are in an aflfuent area, but that also means the area that we are in was expanded to bring in more students because so many people do private.
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There are lots of places that are affluent areas, but their schools have attendance zones that also cover large pockets of apartment kids or even *gasp* project kids.

Let me tell you what happens. The parents of the middle of the road kids that feel their kids might fall in with a bad crowd... these are the helicopter parents that are most likely to pack up and go private, or move. One parent sees the others doing it and follows suit. The parents with top kids don't give a fuck, their kids will excel anywhere. But when it's their lily white angels and a big gap down to the apartment kids, they start to wonder, and they will eventually pull out too.

After X number of years, certain schools will be "no go" zones, and others will be AWESOME. Knowing which ones are the no-go are important, because you'll see some... housing bargains in those areas. There's nothing wrong with diverse schools with some apartment kids or whatever, but as soon as it reaches a critical mass you'll see a snowball effect where the affluent parents will pull out. Then you get a have and have-not situation where the parents who could barely afford the house in that area end up with their kids at the schools, and the living-below-their-means parents can insulate their kids from that.

I don't know too much about NoVa schools I have heard good things. Just telling you what happens. North Dallas is fabulously wealthy and 60-70% white but the public schools are 98% hispanic or black. Tell me how that happens.
 
Siliconemelons

Siliconemelons

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Higher Education is as jacked up as all other education that has goverments hand in it.

The cost of higher education has done exactly what everyone said would never happen because of goverement subsidized loans/fin aid etc. - its gone stupid high.

My generation was litterally the last generation that barely, maybe, somewhat, with a LOT OF WORK - could actually PAY for their college via working and paying for their education.

The way it used to work:

Work part time here and there during MS/HS and buy a cheap used car

Work better part time / full time jobs and pay for college

Get a decent job after college, rent and save $...

Have degree + job exp, get a better job and buy a home.


---- Go on and explain how litterally almost none of that can happen now days --- most of it has to do with those that didnt want to WORK during those phases wanted the reward and end result.
 
ZyyzYzzy

ZyyzYzzy

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Cad said:
There are lots of places that are affluent areas, but their schools have attendance zones that also cover large pockets of apartment kids or even *gasp* project kids.

Let me tell you what happens. The parents of the middle of the road kids that feel their kids might fall in with a bad crowd... these are the helicopter parents that are most likely to pack up and go private, or move. One parent sees the others doing it and follows suit. The parents with top kids don't give a fuck, their kids will excel anywhere. But when it's their lily white angels and a big gap down to the apartment kids, they start to wonder, and they will eventually pull out too.

After X number of years, certain schools will be "no go" zones, and others will be AWESOME. Knowing which ones are the no-go are important, because you'll see some... housing bargains in those areas. There's nothing wrong with diverse schools with some apartment kids or whatever, but as soon as it reaches a critical mass you'll see a snowball effect where the affluent parents will pull out. Then you get a have and have-not situation where the parents who could barely afford the house in that area end up with their kids at the schools, and the living-below-their-means parents can insulate their kids from that.

I don't know too much about NoVa schools I have heard good things. Just telling you what happens. North Dallas is fabulously wealthy and 60-70% white but the public schools are 98% hispanic or black. Tell me how that happens.
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Ournarea has the best elementary school in Fairfax County currently, so we have some time before we decide to go private or not.

My wife grew up in the area and went to a low rated school high school, but smart kids were segregated and they had a ton of AP and extracurricular activites. Different high-school than ours, but still overall all the schools are very good if your child is intelligent
 
Ishad

Ishad

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Cad said:
There are lots of places that are affluent areas, but their schools have attendance zones that also cover large pockets of apartment kids or even *gasp* project kids.

Let me tell you what happens. The parents of the middle of the road kids that feel their kids might fall in with a bad crowd... these are the helicopter parents that are most likely to pack up and go private, or move. One parent sees the others doing it and follows suit. The parents with top kids don't give a fuck, their kids will excel anywhere. But when it's their lily white angels and a big gap down to the apartment kids, they start to wonder, and they will eventually pull out too.

After X number of years, certain schools will be "no go" zones, and others will be AWESOME. Knowing which ones are the no-go are important, because you'll see some... housing bargains in those areas. There's nothing wrong with diverse schools with some apartment kids or whatever, but as soon as it reaches a critical mass you'll see a snowball effect where the affluent parents will pull out. Then you get a have and have-not situation where the parents who could barely afford the house in that area end up with their kids at the schools, and the living-below-their-means parents can insulate their kids from that.

I don't know too much about NoVa schools I have heard good things. Just telling you what happens. North Dallas is fabulously wealthy and 60-70% white but the public schools are 98% hispanic or black. Tell me how that happens.
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I feel like a crazy person debating if I should actually send my kid to Plano public schools or spend a ton of cash on private.
 
Cad

Cad

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Ishad said:
I feel like a crazy person debating if I should actually send my kid to Plano public schools or spend a ton of cash on private.
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There aren't even any good privates up there, Greenhill is kinda close. I'd probably be fine with public school in Plano as long as you're in the central/west zone. There are a shit ton of different elementary/middle school combos up there and they are different, so it might depend where exactly you live. Some of them are overwhelmingly asian which might be a plus if you aren't a football/sports dad and instead want your kid to play violin and be good at math.
 
A

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I honestly think it depends on your field, tbh. If you aren't deciding on engineering, scientific/medical or law pathways, you're time and money could be spent better elsewhere, in my opinion.I'm in tech and I dropped out of college twice (1st semester at UMich and 3rd semester at BGSU) and don't regret it at all outside of missing the "experience". At the time, I couldn't see taking out 100k loans for an education and when I went to a cheaper school, everyone I met was a fucking idiot and I was in the Chem program so out I went. The only thing that ever held me back professionally was spending my 20's having a good time instead of trying to advance further.
 
Ishad

Ishad

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We're zoned Hightower, Frankford, Shepton, West. Pretty Asian, I think.

If we went private we would probably go full crazy and try and do st. Marks. I don't know, kid isn't even 2 yet.
 
Cad

Cad

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Ishad said:
We're zoned Hightower, Frankford, Shepton, West. Pretty Asian, I think.

If we went private we would probably go full crazy and try and do st. Marks. I don't know, kid isn't even 2 yet.
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Good luck, kid has to be extraordinary to get into st marks or hockaday. Their averages are off the charts. Also, if you continue to live in Plano the drive to take them to school each day will make you want to kill yourself.
 
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