Comment by kace91
7 days ago
Universities consider themselves pure and isolated from lowly industry.
Industry demands specifically university degrees to gatekeep positions.
And then we leave teenagers to figure out the puzzle by themselves. I think it's a disservice to the youth.
Universities produce research, and students; Students produce industry, and the body politic; Industry and polity produce university funding.
A cycle I like to call, the "ring-bugger."
I'm not saying it's right, or acceptable, or particularly moral… But I agree that by obscuring the facts, we only serve to confound the decent and good-willed of our students.
Edit: derp.
In Portugal it depends on which university degree you go to, there are for all levels.
If you want a higher education degree focus on what the industry is using today, you go to a politécnico, or técnico superior school.
If you want more focus to learning to learn, with more broader horizons, then you go into plain old university.
If you want to broaden the horizons, but still have some contact with what is industry is using today, you go into an applied engineering degree.
Additionally, similar to Germany with their Azubis program, you can just go to a technical school, with focus on being industry prepared, learning on the job during summer internships, and still leave the door open for going into the university later on, e.g. técnico professional.
The problem are the places that only have one way to approach higher education.
While I have my issues with the system, many Soviet-controlled countries implemented a two-tier higher education system that solved this by having one tier be focused on practical subjects and the other on theoretical ones.
Britain used to have this too. Sadly it was strangled to death by the UK class system, but the replacement didnt help.
Once upon a time the white collar track was to go to University. One of the old ones if your class situation was pushing you towards executive roles in the Civil Service or banking or some big corporation. One of the newer, redbrick ones if your horizon was more like running a textile mill in the North. You were trained to think and had a fairly Great Books style of curriculum.
For the people who needed advanced education to keep the electric grokulator working, there were polytechnics. People came out of here with practical skills. In some areas, like mathematics, there would have been overlap between University and Polytechnic courses.
Then there were technical colleges where working class people could get skills to help them in their jobs, like rebuilding engines or CNC machining.
Then, people got antsy that university was so elite and only 5% of highschoolers were going. why not let polys be universities? After all, we need to keep up in a global economy. And so there was a massive gold rush and places that had no business or capability became A University overnight.
But...Brits being how they are, they still stratified themselves into class layers. You're far more likely to find a Russell Group university graduate in a fancy job than someone from a former poly in the North. The class system persisted despite everything, and attempts to broaden educational access ultimately did not simultaneously keep the quality uniformly high.
> While I have my issues with the system, many Soviet-controlled countries implemented a two-tier higher education system that solved this by having one tier be focused on practical subjects and the other on theoretical ones.
In Germany, there exist even more tiers for tertiary education:
- vocational training
- universities (academic training)
- Fachhochschule (instutions of tertiary education that offer study programs that is more focused on skills that are needed by industry)
- in some parts of Germany: Berufsakademie: even more applied than Fachhochschule; you absolve half of your tertiary education at a company
Those exist elsewhere too, but at least in Hungary, they aren't separate institutions with different legal statuses (except for vocational schools), unlike the system I was talking about.
Yeah, I got duped by this. Did a CS degree because that's what you're "supposed" to do to get a programming job, and it was almost all theoretical junk I had no interest in. I hated it. I think I learned useful things in like, two of my classes. I knew more about programming than all but one of my instructors. It was awful and going through that degree program is one of the biggest regrets in my life. But hey, I get to stick "CS Degree from University" as the very last line on my resumes, I guess. Woo.
I was directly told by senior staff at a large org I worked for that I'd be eligible for a managerial position-- the only thing I was missing was a degree. Unfortunately, getting a degree while working full time for the income I needed was impossible for me at the time.
My entire career would've been different if I had that "very last line on my resumes" and I'd be better off financially. I just couldn't pull it off. I hope yours pays you back eventually, it seems like you worked hard to get it.
That sucks and is super unfair.
For my career path specifically I don't think it has made a difference. I've only had two software jobs in my 17 year career, the first definitely didn't need a degree and I think my current one would've let me in without a degree as I was referred by an employee. I doubt my next job will still be in software, so I'll probably have gotten largely nothing out of the time & money I blew on getting that useless degree.
Where exactly did this "supposed to" come from? I've never met anyone who expected (or needed) a CS degree to teach them programming.
From the post I was replying to:
> Industry demands specifically university degrees to gatekeep positions.
At the time (mid-2000s), people who wanted to get programming positions got CS degrees, so that's what I did. I didn't expect it to teach me anything, it was just the path I was told I was expected to take. In retrospect I should have done literally anything else, but like that same post said:
> And then we leave teenagers to figure out the puzzle by themselves. I think it's a disservice to the youth.
I was a teenager. I made a bad call and wasted 4 years on a degree program I hated because everyone said a degree is required to get a good job, and the degree that programmers get is CS. Sucks.
So do you think most people get into tens of thousands of debt to be “a better citizen of the world” or to learn what they need to know for some company to allow them to exchange labor for money to support their addictions to food and shelter?
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