Over-Education: The Education Vaccination

Nocturne of Vladimir Jazz · May 14, 2010

Jamey Whistler said: ↑

shootER said: ↑

It happens because they can pay the green college grad much less than an experienced person, even if the experienced person has a college degree themselves.
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This is true. One question: In your opinion, do you think that this is kind of short sighted?

A company hires the green college grad who comes to work for the comparatively crappy wage and either 1) gathers experience which he or she will then take to some other company to secure a higher paying job (forcing the company to spend money on hiring and training again), or 2) because the grad is green, he or she makes mistakes which cost the company money to fix.

Of course, there is the third option which sees the grad rise through the ranks, gaining experience, seniority and higher salaries, making him or her ripe to be replaced because, on it's face, it seems like a good idea to spend less on some kid who's wet behind the ears (which puts you back to options 1 and 2).

Doesn't seem sensible to me.
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On this topic, I have noticed that many businesses are only accepting new grads at a low level, and promoting within. This I don't have much of a problem with, because generally that first position is an internship or something similar to it.

Asyncritus · May 14, 2010

Talkahuano said: ↑

I really think you just got stuck in a shit program for nursing. My university has mandatory clinical work included in its program. Of course, it's one of the best programs in the South-East, but still, all the nurses they graduate have had about a year of experience with actual nursing work. They have to do a whole summer of actual clinic work and they take several labs where they drive to different hospitals and help out.
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That certainly makes better sense. Here in France, training (whether at the high school or college level) involves much more on-site experience than it does in the States. I have a friend doing nurse's training right now, and he spends month after month in one service or another. A month in pediatrics, a month in an operating room, a month in emergency, a month in psychiatry, a month in a nursing home, a month in school nurse stations, and so on. He does a lot of very demanding classroom work, but also a lot of practical training.

That's the way almost everything works over here. Even in science, mathematics and engineering. You spend quite a few months in situations where you actually use what you learned, and thus learn how to use that knowledge. In my mind, it sure makes more sense than just spending your time in a classroom learning how to pass tests.

tafkats · May 15, 2010

Nocturne of Vladimir Jazz said: ↑

The Difference Between Social Etiquette and Political Correctedness
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Social etiquette is refraining from saying insensitive or hurtful things.

Political correctness is the hackneyed catchphrase people pull out when they want a way to feel morally superior for saying insensitive or hurtful things.

Muad Dib · May 15, 2010

Asyncritus said: ↑

Talkahuano said: ↑

I really think you just got stuck in a shit program for nursing. My university has mandatory clinical work included in its program. Of course, it's one of the best programs in the South-East, but still, all the nurses they graduate have had about a year of experience with actual nursing work. They have to do a whole summer of actual clinic work and they take several labs where they drive to different hospitals and help out.
Click to expand...

That certainly makes better sense. Here in France, training (whether at the high school or college level) involves much more on-site experience than it does in the States. I have a friend doing nurse's training right now, and he spends month after month in one service or another. A month in pediatrics, a month in an operating room, a month in emergency, a month in psychiatry, a month in a nursing home, a month in school nurse stations, and so on. He does a lot of very demanding classroom work, but also a lot of practical training.

That's the way almost everything works over here. Even in science, mathematics and engineering. You spend quite a few months in situations where you actually use what you learned, and thus learn how to use that knowledge. In my mind, it sure makes more sense than just spending your time in a classroom learning how to pass tests.

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We had clinical training and experience, but I think the old 3 year programs did much better.

Azure · May 15, 2010

There certainly is a huge problem with not offering on-site training to many graduates.

When I did my EMR class we spent maybe 5% of our time in the classroom and the other 95% in the 'field' doing mock trials. Our instructor loved the motto 'practice makes perfect' and he made us practice and practice again small things like forward jaw thrust until we perfected it.

Needless to say because of that approach I learned a LOT.

I have many friends that are going for their nursing degree, and they all complain about the lack of 'field' time. Its more or less like Maud said. Go to college to learn how to pass the tests. I'll take it one step further. You go to college to learn how to pass the tests so you can pass the test that gives you a worthless document about what your abilities are. Once you're done that you go and get a proper education and learn how to actually do your job.

When I worked for Vestas we had a guy on our crew that had some kind of engineering degree. It might even have been a BA. Not sure. Anyways he got his degree with an almost 4.0GPA, but always told us that once he got into the real world he couldn't function. The 'treat me nicely or I sue for discrimination' attitude at whatever school he went too didn't help at all when he got into the real world and the company that hired him expected results and he couldn't deliver with all the pressure that was on him and the people around him. So he quit. And the guy was smart as hell. We modified numerous things in the process of putting up a windmill based on things he taught us.

Hell, he might have been the smartest guy I knew. But his degree wasn't worth a damn in the real world.

Colleges and universities should be preparing kids for the real world more than they should be focusing on teaching them how to pass the exams. But, we are talking about the biggest pussified generation to date. As soon as the professor is a bit demanding kids go running back home to mommy and daddy and bitch about how hard their live is. Their parents in turn bitch to the school and professor has to make it easier to 'pass' the students.

In the end it comes down to being accountable and honest about your abilities and a lot of kids don't admit that. Which is why you see so many fuckheads coming out of high-end and costly programs with BA and Phds and in the end they don't know a fucking thing.

Scott Hamilton Robert E Ron Paul Lee · May 16, 2010

I often feel bad that I don't have a degree (I'm pretty close).

Then I look at my financial picture compared to those that do.

Linkey
A Lament for the Class of 2010
New college graduates face a labor force that neither wants or needs them; a plum job interning at a street fair
A few weeks ago I ran into one of my son's oldest friends. He had attended an Ivy League school, studying drama and music, and was now back living at home. He is a smart, talented, enterprising young man and I have always liked him, in part because he engages with adults in a way many young men do not. (For example, he actually makes eye contact.) I asked him if he had found a job yet and he replied, a bit sheepishly, "Not exactly." He then explained that he was working as an intern at a street fair on the Lower East Side of New York City. An Ivy League education runs around $200,000, not counting meals and transportation. The internship paid about $250 a week. But presumably, it could lead to bigger things, like a full-time job at a street fair in New York. Even so, it did sound like my son's friend was ever so slightly underemployed.
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Associated Press Graduates from the class of 2009.

Over the next few weeks, hundreds of thousands of Millennials will graduate from institutions of higher learning. They will celebrate for several days, perhaps several weeks. Then they will enter a labor force that neither wants nor needs them. They will enter an economy where roughly 17% of people aged 20 through 24 do not have a job, and where two million college graduates are unemployed. They will enter a world where they will compete tooth and nail for jobs as waitresses, pizza delivery men, file clerks, bouncers, trainee busboys, assistant baristas, interns at bodegas.
They will console themselves with the thought that all this is but a speed bump on the road to success, that their inability to find work in a field that is even vaguely related to the discipline they trained in is only a fleeting setback. They may even spell this out in detail on their Facebook pages, perhaps accompanying it with a pithy quote like "When you're going through Hell, keep on going." They will do this right after they have finished deleting the summer-year-abroad photo where they're shaking hands with Hugo Chavez. In asserting that the sun will soon break through the clouds, they will be echoing what college grads told themselves last year, and the year before. This is only a temporary reversal. Surely, IBM or the State Department or Morgan Stanley will eventually respond to that glittering resume. After all, every company worth its salt needs a few Gender Studies majors! The sun'll come out tomorrow. Tomorrow. Tomorrow.
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Ray Bartkus

It's only a day away.
More sophisticated young people may already suspect otherwise. With the obvious exception of youngsters born during the Great Depression, no generation in American history faces more daunting obstacles. Economists theorize that this may be that very rarest of things—a generation that does not do as well financially as the generation that spawned it. Even the pasty-faced Pilgrim toddlers gamboling around Plymouth Rock in 1620 had better prospects than this one; at least the Massachusetts economy was still expanding back in the 17th century. And kids entering the work force after the Alamo or the Donner Pass Incident or the Crash of 1873 weren't saddled with the kind of debts kids tote around now. Back then, ordinary people didn't go to college. And back in those days, you could always pack up and move west, to California, let's say, where the streets were paved with gold. Now the streets aren't paved, period.
There are three formidable obstacles confronting college graduates today. One, the economy, though improving at a glacial pace, is still a wreck. There are no jobs, and the jobs that do exist aren't the kinds anyone in his right mind would have spent $100,000 to $200,000 to land. Two, nothing in most middle-class kids' lives has prepared them emotionally for the world they are about to enter. Three, the legacy costs that society has imposed on young people will be a millstone around their necks for decades. Who's going to pay for the health care bill? Gen Y. Who's going to pay off the federal deficit? Gen Y. Who's going to fund all those cops' and teachers' and firemen's pensions? Gen Y. Who's going to support Baby Boomers as they suck the Social Security System dry while wheezing around Tuscany? Gen Y.

Americans have never shrunk from adversity, so in the fullness of time young people may put on their game face, create new industries, discover fresh roads to affluence and solve the nation's vexing economic problems. But all that lies far in the future. The immediate problem is psychological: the sudden, shocking realization that work as it is constituted in the early 21st century is going to be hell. In the workplace, you don't get to pick your company. In the workplace, you do not get a trophy just for showing up. In the workplace, the boss gets to scream at you as a perk. Probably your first day on the job. Your boss, who doesn't have an iPad, isn't on Facebook, and doesn't know how to text. Your boss, who doesn't particularly care for Lady Gaga. Your boss, who probably has a night-school degree.
Young people can be forgiven for thinking that the portrayal of the working world in comedies like "The Office" and "Office Space" is completely over the top. Now they're going to find out otherwise. Reality is a mean trick that grown-ups play on the young. Companies really do schedule annual outings where everybody is required to see "Jersey Boys." Managers really do give motivational speeches with lines like, "If we can't enhance value for our shareholders, why on Earth are we here?" Young people really do have to work all day in offices where the plaintive voice in the tinny radio on the adjacent desk ceaselessly pleads, "Give me the beat, boys, and free my soul, I wanna get lost in your rock 'n roll."
And slip away.
If you're a recent grad and you think you're going to hate your bosses, wait till you meet your coworkers. You're going to be working with people who believe in UFOs. You're going to be working with people who play in REO Speedwagon tribute bands. You're going to be working with people who participate in French and Indian War re-enactments every summer. They're going to try to get you to join, mon beau chevalier. You really have no idea how awful this is going to be.
In olden days—say three years ago—young people could suck it up and endure this kind of fleeting torture, knowing that they would rapidly clamber up the ladder of success and leave the dregs of the work force behind. Not today. Economists predict that it could take five years for employment to return to pre-recession levels. Five years of working with Parrotheads. Five years of playing softball with fat, middle-aged drunks. Five years of listening to "You Had a Bad Day" while you're trying to converse with irate customers. Five years of having a bad day.
Or maybe you were thinking of throwing in the towel, giving up on launching your career right away, and spending a year abroad. After all, a year in a foreign country can give you a wonderful perspective on life that will come in handy in the years to come. So where were you thinking of going? Greece, where the unemployed were recently gunning each other down in the streets? Great Britain, which no longer has a fully functioning government? Sweden, which just officially slipped back into recession? Ireland, whose economy has imploded? Spain, whose economy has imploded? Or no, hold on, here's an idea: How about Iceland?
Of course, there's always law school. Never mind that applications are at an all-time high and that thousands of legal positions at investment banking firms have disappeared forever. Never mind that recent Ivy League law school graduates are now working as file clerks, substitute school teachers, census takers. Never mind that in order to pay back the $200,000 it's going to cost you to go to law school, you'll need to land one of those plum legal jobs at Goldman Sachs or AIG or one of those other firms that are no longer hiring because they owe so much to the lawyers they already did hire to defend them from lawsuits brought by the government's lawyers, public prosecutors who only took those jobs because Goldman Sachs and AIG weren't hiring. Good luck getting your parents to pay for that one.
Is there any silver lining in all this? Yes. As of 2014, insurance companies will no longer be able to deny young people coverage because of a pre-existing condition. After Millennials have slaved away at going-nowhere jobs for a few years, and have forked over literally thousands of dollars of their hard-earned cash to support mean-spirited, nostalgia-crazed Baby Boomer retirees who don't even like them, and are probably going to waste a lot of the money on overpriced tickets to attend "Rod Stewart Sings the Billy Joel Songbook and Vice Versa" at Madison Square Garden, those pre-existing conditions will probably include ulcers, inflamed duodenums, irritable bowel syndrome and chronic headaches. But at least the Pepcid will be competitively priced.
Baby boomers get sick of hearing young people bellyache about the grim jobs situation. They cite studies proving that entitled, self-absorbed Millennials make the worst employees ever. They recall with belligerent pride how they themselves withstood the Arab oil embargo, stagflation, the soaring interest rates of the Carter years. But Baby Boomers conveniently forget that it didn't set anyone back a year's salary to go to college in the 1960s and 1970s, and that college graduates back then were not entering a work force filled with other college grads. When I got my first job in 1973, I was surrounded by high-school dropouts. They weren't even especially bright high-school dropouts. So it was possible to make a vertical move quickly. Not today, when everybody in the white-collar world has a college degree. Today, even the idiots have college degrees. And the idiots have seniority.
My son, who graduated from college in 2009, will start law school this fall. During his brief sojourn in what is sometimes mirthfully referred to as "the real world," he worked as a bouncer, a delivery man, a focus group participant and a furniture mover. Ergo, law school. He says that when he talks to his friends, a persistent complaint is that for the first time in their lives his peers have no way of measuring their progress. "All through school, we got A's and B's, so we knew where we stood," he points out. "How do you know where you stand when you're waiting tables or parking cars?"
Good point. It's brutal out there, all right. Blogs and instant messaging and social networking systems don't help much because everyone is using the same cutting-edge tools to compete for the same low-tech jobs. The easiest way to get a job is still the oldest way: To know somebody who can get you a job or give you a job. Perhaps the biggest hurdle for freshly minted graduates is that they are now competing against last year's grads: savvy, wizened pros that already have the most sought-after jobs locked up. For example, let's say you've just finished college, and you're a reasonably creative sort, and you're looking for a job that will free up plenty of time so you can polish your chops as a dancer or a singer or an actor. For example, a job as an intern at a Lower East Side street fair.
Sorry, pal. That job is long gone.
—Joe Queenan is the author, most recently, of the memoir "Closing Time."
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Nocturne of Vladimir Jazz · May 16, 2010

tafkats said: ↑

Nocturne of Vladimir Jazz said: ↑

The Difference Between Social Etiquette and Political Correctedness
Click to expand...

Social etiquette is refraining from saying insensitive or hurtful things.

Political correctness is the hackneyed catchphrase people pull out when they want a way to feel morally superior for saying insensitive or hurtful things.
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DAMNIT, man, what are you trying to do, make my course look like a two-bit operation. These things need to last an entire semester!

Uncle Albert · May 18, 2010

tafkats said: ↑

Nocturne of Vladimir Jazz said: ↑

The Difference Between Social Etiquette and Political Correctedness
Click to expand...

Social etiquette is refraining from saying insensitive or hurtful things.

Political correctness is the hackneyed catchphrase people pull out when they want a way to feel morally superior for saying insensitive or hurtful things.
Click to expand...

Oh, fuck the goddamned hell off with this horse shit.

Jamey Whistler · May 18, 2010

tafkats said: ↑

Nocturne of Vladimir Jazz said: ↑

The Difference Between Social Etiquette and Political Correctedness
Click to expand...

Social etiquette is refraining from saying insensitive or hurtful things.

Decrying political correctness is stating that the "emperor has no clothes" [-]the hackneyed catchphrase[/-] which people pull out when they're forced to justify saying something which is true but difficult for selectively/overly sensitive people to hear [-]want a way to feel morally superior for saying insensitive or hurtful things[/-].
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For accuracy.

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Over-Education: The Education Vaccination

Nocturne of Vladimir Jazz And Hell's comin' with me!

Asyncritus Expert on everything

tafkats scream not working because space make deaf Moderator

Muad Dib Probably a Dual Deceased Member

Azure I could kick your ass

Scott Hamilton Robert E Ron Paul Lee Straight Awesome

Nocturne of Vladimir Jazz And Hell's comin' with me!

Uncle Albert Part beard. Part machine.

Jamey Whistler Éminence grise

Log in or Sign up

Over-Education: The Education Vaccination

Nocturne of Vladimir Jazz And Hell's comin' with me!

Asyncritus Expert on everything

tafkats scream not working because space make deaf Moderator

Muad Dib Probably a Dual Deceased Member

Azure I could kick your ass

Scott Hamilton Robert E Ron Paul Lee Straight Awesome

Nocturne of Vladimir Jazz And Hell's comin' with me!

Uncle Albert Part beard. Part machine.

Jamey Whistler Éminence grise

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