All about College!

I heard IB assignments involve a lot more writing. Is that true?

I don’t know, but I wouldn’t be surprised as it is probably more humanities focussed.

Also, more writing than what? Than regular courses? Almost certainly because IB is an honors track. But I don’t know how it would compare to AP US History or AP English.

Good question. Not sure compared to what. It was a vague comment I picked up.

Don’t need college anymore for govt jobs. Purrfect… :crazy_face: US will soon lead the world…

Shoot, why stop there with eliminating degrees??? Just give everyone who says they deserve a 6 figure job one with perks up the ying yang!!!

I have heard the same from a friend’s kid who’s pursuing IB currently. In Seattle region several public schools offer IB.

There’s a growing perception that Higher Ed has turned into a scam and most jobs in tech don’t really benefit from what’s learned in college. Coding boot camps and other certifications might be sufficient and keep students out of debt.

Someone I knew who was an adjunct professor at UC Berkeley B-school was a big believer.

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And look at the founders of big MOOCs like Coursera. From Stanford.

Overall, HigherEd definitely needs disruption.

I think with the rise of chatGPT and similar tools, boot camps will no longer be enough. chatGPT can already write quite sophisticated code. People can describe what they want in plain English and chatGPT can spit out working code.

Coding will likely bifurcate into either something simple that everyone can do, or something very sophisticated that only very few can do. It’s like Excel. Any random Joe can quickly whip up a simple model to do basic data analysis. On the other hand, there are data scientists that make 200K+ a year. There is nothing in the middle.

In the not too distant future, we may have software tools that take in simple English description for logic, plus some visual tool to build a UI, and out pops a functional program hosted on the cloud. Any random Joe or Jane can be a “programmer”, just like anybody can be an Excel user. Bootcamps won’t have any reason to exist. On the high end, we still need smart people who actually knows the more academic side of CS. They can’t be trained in 3 months in a bootcamp.

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agreed, but I also agree higher ed is a scam, unless you want a regulated role like doctor, lawyer, etc. If you want a tech role, a bootcamp, or skill based learning, along with an applied internship or just starting out the role. Most colleges don’t teach advanced skills in classes, you have to find those in the college extracurriculars (like Solar Racing, hackathons, etc), and i think in theory you can now do that without paying $80k/year for those extracurriculars.

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Here, more data points for you Tiger Moms and Dads to dig through…

As long as companies are eager to hire such people.

It is not mainstream yet. Google and others have made commitments but haven’t really followed thru for most core Eng jobs. I have seen a movement towards not needing a college degree as must-have in job postings unless it is a very technical role.

Coding boot camps won’t produce Google Engineers. But they can produce support technicians.

There should be a big range between Google Engineers and support technicians.

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There are some high school’s graduates who I would take over someone with a college degree.

I think certifications are the way forward. So much online learning available. Why pay > $100K to go to a school with irrelevant requirements? And with the colleges playing weird games with admissions, the smartest, most capable kids are are sometimes taking gap years because they don’t get in anywhere. The system is seriously messed up in the US.

I have the opposite argument. I think it’s increasingly important for kids to attend college because of AI. Not to learn any one particular skill. Because like you said skills can be picked up online or in bootcamps.

Rather it’s to raise the kid’s ability to think and reason abstractly. There are different levels of abstraction. It’s most clear in math. Calculus is more abstract than high school algebra. Linear algebra is more abstract than calculus. Group theory is more abstract than linear algebra etc.

I think once a kid leaves school they are mostly stuck with the abstraction level they achieved in the last grade. It’s not that college professors teach you how to think abstractly. Sometimes they do that. But mostly I think because kids are immersed in a learning environment away from distractions of adult life.

So if a kid already knows some programming it’s easy to learn Python or any other language by themselves. No need for college. But to learn linear algebra by themselves? Much tougher.

I think with the rapid advance of AI we humans need to up our game. We can’t just be a coding monkey copying and pasting from Stackoverflow. We need to climb up on the abstraction level.

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Can be taught? :face_with_hand_over_mouth::face_with_hand_over_mouth::face_with_hand_over_mouth:

You can practice it by thinking in analogies.

:smile:

What makes you think that kids are learning to reason abstractly in US colleges? Some would argue that instead of learning to think for themselves, they’re learning to keep quiet, and never ever think anything that violates the social norms. And if you do think such a thing, never say what you think because you’ll be expelled. And to top that why work hard anymore withgrade inflation?

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