American education is such a mess. First, it feels like the majority of American college students graduate from college after spending four years on material that makes them no more appealing to employers. Second, there seems to be a thick layer of insulation between market signals and students, so that students can't even figure out what they should be learning, even if they were motivated to do so.
Third, colleges seem to teach whatever garbage they feel like, slap a "major" label on it, and charge a ridiculous amount for it. As institutions you would be hard pressed to find more inefficient organizations in the economy. I can't for the life of me understand where all the money is going. It shouldn't cost $100,000 to turn a bright high school student into a programmer in four years. In some European countries they do a better job in two years, with one third the budget, even though labor costs are higher (see Sweden).
We have to face the fact that a lot of college lecturers are zero value-add to their pupils. This is a big problem underlying the salary issue that is hardly ever discussed. Moving outwards, many college programs are zero value add too ... outside the stamp of a degree which they confer. Which if you think about it, you could get cheaper abroad.
Only a matter of time before India or some Baltic state makes cheap degrees available to US citizenship holders at cut-rate prices. I don't think American employers care much where your degree is from ... at least for engineers ... so long as you have the right to work in America ... which a citizen would have.
I don't think American employers care much where your degree is from ... at least for engineers ... so long as you have the right to work in America ... which a citizen would have.
Sure they do. Try getting a job at Google without a degree from MIT/Stanford. The name is more important than even graduating, even "Harvard dropout" has a certain cachet.
> Try getting a job at Google without a degree from MIT/Stanford.
I know a lot of people working at Google who don't even have degrees. There are over 5,000 Engineers in Google's American HQ. Thinking that everyone of them works there purely because of the brand name of whatever college they went to seems to be a rather self-limiting belief.
Third, colleges seem to teach whatever garbage they feel like, slap a "major" label on it, and charge a ridiculous amount for it. As institutions you would be hard pressed to find more inefficient organizations in the economy. I can't for the life of me understand where all the money is going. It shouldn't cost $100,000 to turn a bright high school student into a programmer in four years. In some European countries they do a better job in two years, with one third the budget, even though labor costs are higher (see Sweden).
We have to face the fact that a lot of college lecturers are zero value-add to their pupils. This is a big problem underlying the salary issue that is hardly ever discussed. Moving outwards, many college programs are zero value add too ... outside the stamp of a degree which they confer. Which if you think about it, you could get cheaper abroad.
Only a matter of time before India or some Baltic state makes cheap degrees available to US citizenship holders at cut-rate prices. I don't think American employers care much where your degree is from ... at least for engineers ... so long as you have the right to work in America ... which a citizen would have.