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links 🏴
@links
Hot take: Educational institutions should NOT pursue meritocracy and excellence. They should pursue furthering humanity’s collective knowledge.
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justin.ahn.eth
@ahn.eth
so then who gets to/should go to college?
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links 🏴
@links
People who want to learn new things. The real answer is more nuanced - there was a distinction in the past that universities were for cutting edge research and colleges are for practical knowledge (ie go to college to get a job), but these distinctions have ceased to exist. Getting a job has outcompeted furthering knowledge. So every higher education institution’s main value is to help students get jobs. This has some terrible downstream effects, including making higher education essentially mandatory if you want to make money and pushing our youth into only specific kinds of jobs.
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justin.ahn.eth
@ahn.eth
so should anyone who "wants to learn new things" be admitted to a college without any kind of qualifications or credentialism? and then what should that cost and who foots the bill? personally do think that the institutionalization of higher education as a necessity for "white collar" jobs should be dismantled, for sure. but also do think that people should have the agency to understand, especially in this day and age, that you can simply just do things
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wylin
@wylin
i gotta disagree to an extent in college as the barrier white collar jobs i’m particularly thinking of the field of architecture. it used to be that the requirement for licensure was a degree + experience + passing tests, or you could just get a job under a licensed architect and gain experience + pass tests the apprenticeship pathway was removed, and the field (+ humanity) has suffered as a result it used to be common for young, intelligent men to transition from being a blue collar construction worker to an architect’s apprentice. the practical experience of actually building things & reading blueprints in the field gave a perspective that architects simply don’t have anymore enshittification by distance from the actual thing & no application of theory by the practitioners
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justin.ahn.eth
@ahn.eth
started out my career in financial services and would say there's similar "enshittification" in terms of managerial accounting each industry and even company will have its own quirks and best practices, which are naturally understood with experience; but big firms seem to prefer to take the one size fits all approach of hiring relatively cheaper b school undergrad kids leading to bad insights and poorer services for clients feels like we're going to lose expertise and knowledge in a lot of things soon
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links 🏴
@links
One could say the same about programming. In the 00’s it was seen there was demand for trained programmers, and colleges took note and started offering more programming classes. I taught some of these classes and they were brutal job factories. 95% of students were never going to get “good” at programming in these classes because they were attracted by job prospects only. They argued over every grade and made my life as a professor hard so I didn’t teach again. The same people enlisted in 16-week boot camps. The industry has suffered as a result and honestly most of these people could be replaced by Ai, so…are we better off?
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