Hmm. Not sure if I’m top 5% now. I am male and also minority and an immigrant kid. So I know how bad most of the world has it.
Also a Pell Grant kid who maxed out on all the available Federal loans back in the day (my alma mater promises no loans for Pell Grant kids now but back then, both the Pell Grant + state low-income grant as well as all the loans were actually more than the grant money the school gave me in fin aid).
The thing is, if you ask immigrants (from any continent), a big majority will consider the US a land of freedom and opportunity. More of one than many places on this earth.
The belief that people “need to go” to college even to do mundane work, including childcare, is a major problem that leads to many kids incurring huge debt to pursue qualifications that are only necessary because vested interests want to limit competition. That pushes a lot of kids into college who aren’t ever going to “find the things they’re good at and care about, and will pour passion and energy into” because they shouldn’t need to go there in the first place and then they are “winding up trapped” in debt as a result.
Supposedly if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So I guess that if you’re a university professor, everyone looks like a potential pupil. But pouring billions in to universities to subsidize the cost of college down to 1980s levels so everyone can go, presumes everyone should go. That feels like another case of vested interests wanting to boost their own position.
I took a look at that IEEE article. It doesn’t look like they controlled for anything (like skills or experience). Just job title. If a company is trying to increase the number of female developers in its pipeline by making more offers to female developers out of college, but pay folks with less experience less for the same job title (and at many companies, “Software Engineer” may be the same title held by someone straight from college as someone with a decade experience), female developers would get lower offers and this study would make it look like that company was discriminating against female developers.
NM runs some scheme like GA’s that leads to free tuition in-state for kids that do decently well in HS. So does FL. One thing something like HOPE/Bright Futures does is keep some bright kids at in-state publics, raising the ranking of the top publics.
Most of Continental Europe has managed to keep inequality more at bay while keeping higher ed costs lower and kept their students from less debt. They did indeed not really allow privates to flourish. And then by running bare-bones public unis where admissions isn’t holistic (actually, where more of everything is test-based) and profs make even less than public here. Also with a stronger safety net and stronger unions (and apprenticeships in the Germanic world). So let’s nationalize Harvard.
Slight caveat of France, where the scholastic inequality between the decision makers who go to the grandes ecoles and the hoi polloi who attend regular unis (that let every HS grad in so are overcrowded zoos) is even greater than here. But that hasn’t led to inequality as high as in the US.
But as a counterpoint to that, there seems to be less opportunity in France, Italy, and large parts of Western Europe for young people than in the US.
The report states, "This means that 6 times out of 10, women are offered less money than men to do the exact same job at the exact same company. On average, that salary figure is 3% less. " I don’t know if 3% lower salary is exactly cause for alarm or reason to advise women to avoid tech. This also assumes that the survey has a way to measure expected salary accurately, which is often not practical in tech as salary may depend on a particular applicant’s unique skills, years of past relevant experience, job performance and related performance ratings, how well the employee and/or their team met goals in recent years, whether he/she asks for a raise, in which country he/she lives/works, etc. It’s not as simple as everyone who has the same job title gets the same salary, regardless of job performance and value to the company.
From my personal experience working in tech and knowing many women who work in tech, there can be many other forms of discrimination besides salary. I’ve heard some very troubling stories. However, rate of such discrimination and problematic work environments varies quite a bit by company, or even group within the company. Just one problematic manager can make a big difference in quality of work environment.
In any case, this isn’t really relevant to the thread. Far more relevant to the thread is how much attending an “elite” private college helps in tech. Various stats including salary suggest little advantage to attending an “elite” private in engineering. For example, in another thread I looked up the median first year earnings by college as reported on CollegeScorecard. A summary for engineering is below. There was negligible difference between public vs private or salaries overall in most fields of engineering. Differences in location and student quality would more than explain this degree of difference in salary.
------------------ MEDIAN FIRST YEAR EARNINGS BY MAJOR -----------
Major ------------------- Ivies —T20 — T50 Pri - T50 Pub — All
Engineering (All Majors) - $70k – $73k* – $69k — - $67k — $63k
*Not counting MIT EECS since most EECS majors work in CS related positions
More interesting was computer science, which did show far more substantial differences in salary by school than engineering. Specific numbers are below.
------------------ MEDIAN FIRST YEAR EARNINGS BY MAJOR -----------
Major ------------------- Ivies —T20 — T50 Pri - T50 Pub — All
Computer Science+ ---- $110k – $104k --$86k ---- $81k — $66k
+Includes both Computer Science and Information Sciences Majors
Again there was little difference in public vs private, but there was a notable correlation with selectivity. T20 colleges had a median of a little over $100k, T21-50 had a median of ~$83k, and less selective colleges had median a little over $60k.
Part of the CS salary effect involves portion of class that chooses to work in high cost of living areas. The colleges with the largest portion of students moving to high cost of living areas like SV tended to be among those with the highest salaries, but it doesn’t explain everything. Another key factor is the competitive job interviews and chance of a particular applicant acing all the interview tech questions, which typically involve coding and are meant to identify the applicants who are best qualified for the job. I’d expect the applicants who are most likely ace the tech interview questions to be more concentrated at highly selective colleges than less selective colleges. However, it’s not clear how large a contribution these effects are without more information. There may really be a notable salary advantage to attending a more selective college for CS majors or specific subgroups of colleges that are correlated with selectivity. By more selective I don’t just mean attending a small numbers of “elite” privates. I instead mean generally more selective colleges, including public flagships, like Berkeley or Michigan.
You’re right about the shelteredness. The fact that it’s practically impossible to fire them doesn’t mean they set their own conditions and organize a stroll for themselves, though. A few do, yes. But it’s not the norm. You’re talking about shiny-apple students who spent 5-8 formative years desperately trying to please a PhD advisor, then another five years or so desperately trying to ingratiate themselves with all the faculty in their departments. When the dean or provost cracks the whip, they jump. They also care greatly about honors, prizes, awards, the things that they’re supposed to care about in lieu of more pay and promotion (keep in mind they’ve got a maximum of two promotions for the rest of their lives, unless they go administrative or get a named chair).
They’re also, mostly, very responsible people who care about and feel responsible for their students’ education, to their colleagues inside the university and out, to their own research, and to the institutions. So it’s not difficult to pile work on them until they’re working nearly all the time and having panic attacks. As enrollments climb and support staffs erode, they’re left with more and more to carry. They’re also terrified of insulting someone else who’ll never leave and starting a vendetta that’ll run for decades, so they agree to do things when they don’t have time and won’t get anything for it. And while they talk endlessly about leaving, the reality is that there aren’t many opportunities for most of them. Either they’re tethered to the town by family and they don’t want to move hundreds or thousands of miles away for the next job or there isn’t a next job waiting. While universities routinely poach faculty from each other, finding an open job in any given year in your specialty, in a place you actually want to move to, in a department that isn’t worse than the one you’re in, at the necessary rank isn’t so easy, and hiring season comes once a year. In general I don’t see people moving unless the step up is massive or they’re being hired into administration elsewhere. Lots of escape attempts, not that many actual escapes.
The fact that there are admin staff doesn’t relieve the profs from dealing with the students’ personal problems. There aren’t enough admin to deal with all the problems, and often students have problems that don’t have university offices. Profs put in hundreds of hours last summer helping students cope with living through a pandemic. The Muslim-ban rules left kids from countries on the list unable to get money from home, and they have to live somehow. A year ago I was helping a student get on the list for public housing and find free food for his kids after the dept cut his stipend. The student needs are endless, and a lot of them are going through their educations alone: no close friends, troubled families.
Actually I spent a long time on the “it’s ridiculous that this many people are going to college, most people don’t need this” side. Two things changed my mind.
One, you have to put the money in somewhere just to get to a 3Rs population. Either you’re going to do it in K12 and also in social programs that ensure that the kids have stable enough lives, basic needs met, to use a good K12 school, or you’re going to do a tremendous amount of remedial work in college. I teach college students who can’t make it through a NYT article on their own. A lot of them. Year after year. It’s not their fault: they were robbed. But if you tell them they don’t belong in college, where are they supposed to go to learn to read and write?
(One of the places the money needs to go, btw, is ECE. You know, “childcare”. It’s not just about making sure the kids don’t fall out of windows or spend the whole time watching cartoons. Please do not demean the work.)
Two, we’re out of jobs that don’t involve thinking. The world is now too complex for that, and this country doesn’t need that many human robots anymore. I started noticing this about a decade ago when I was staying in a lot of fearsomely overdesigned cheap hotels. The design MFAs had been and gone. The problem was the systems they’d designed into the hotels were far too complex for the staff to manage, so everything, once broken, stayed broken. I see this problem all over now. A friend who runs a symphony’s digital concerthall recently bought a fantastic new recording system for them – and the largely high-school-educated crew wouldn’t go near it. It requires reading, thinking, significant complexities they’re not already trained in. Same thing happens every time I have something installed in my house: the engineering is spectacular, but that means you can’t just eyeball the thing and jam it in somehow and call it good. The high-school-grad tradesmen find this incredibly frustrating. Same thing when I called the insurance company over the last week or so trying to figure out how my benefits played with a particular situation: it took four calls, four wrong and conflicting answers, before I found someone who sounded like he’d be right at home in a seminar room, and he untangled the problem and answered the question. The guy who fixes my car has a master’s degree and is the best mechanic I’ve ever had. Because he’s smart and knows how to think and communicate, and you can’t just be a wrench anymore.
So: yeah, they need to go, just to be able to do mundane jobs. Do I think that’s wonderful, no, I do not. But since they do need to go, it’s time to admit that some form of higher ed has to be public ed, and paid for as public ed. If you want private, knock yourself out. But you can’t run gaily through fields of STEM making a highly complex world, one in which people must get a decent education just to get by, and then make that education too expensive for them to buy. Over the last couple of decades I’ve seen a lot of mostly-men twisting and turning, trying to throw solutions on the cheap at the problem: online ed, MOOCs, etc. They’re kidding themselves hard (and then trying to monetize and suck money out of the situation without providing serious educations). Education is expensive. It’s a very labor-intensive thing, and the labor is skilled. The cost of not doing it is a population that can’t follow pandemic news, can’t read a graph and understand what the curve-flattening’s about, and will happily drive a steamroller at a global biotech rescue mission. Among other things.
I’ve worked with students for a long time now, btw, and I find that there aren’t too many who don’t find areas they really care about if someone actually bothers to take time asking them questions, listening to them, opening doors for them, showing them what there is, following up. You get these sorts of advisors sometimes in expensive schools, almost never at state schools. I have stacks of cards from these kids thanking me for opening the world to them in one way or another. I find it hard to know how to take what they’re saying. I appreciate the gratitude; I also regard what I’m doing as part of my job, and the fact that they’re this grateful, with a lot of “no one else ever did this for me” kind of talk, is deeply troubling to me. It should be much more ordinary.
Boop ee doop doop, I can cherrypick too. From two paragraphs down, same article:
“According to Hired’s data, the gap in major metropolitan areas is largest in New York (10 percent), and smallest in Los Angeles (5 percent). The San Francisco Bay Area fell in the middle (7 percent).”
Of course, if that’s the starting gap, in a decade or so you’re going to be looking at a considerably bigger problem, and that’s before you get to bias in promotions. I agree, there are other serious problems in those industries for women. But as someone who’s had her labor stolen for a long time, I must say that the chronic theft of my time and labor has been more damaging than any of the sexual harassment or assault I’ve dealt with. If I could go back, wave a wand, and rectify only one, that’s the one I’d choose.
I’ve never worked in tech outside a university, though, so I really don’t know anything about the hiring environments – your explanation of the CS gap sounds plausible enough to me, but I wouldn’t really know.
Agreed. And tech was even great 25-30 years ago for women and bipoc and lqbtq. They led the way in paying for health insurance for same sex partners( before marriage was allowed), provided diversity training and regularly promoted women into the highest positions. That was circa 1990, it’s much better now.
How exactly? You can change jobs quite easily based on skills. When I worked in tech, it was very common to have companies try to poach workers for higher incomes. I once doubled my salary this way, was again met with a higher offer and ended up compensated at a higher rate. Even within companies this is common.
Well based on what you have written, it’s night and day. None of the things you have written resonate with the experiences we’ve had with decades in tech across many companies both small and large.
Why is this the job of even the “average state U”? You are making a case for better K-12 education or at most accessible low cost evening classes at community college. Why would it make sense for people to waste another four years of their lives to attend college full time at huge cost both to them personally and to society as a whole simply to “learn to read and write”?
Likewise training people in how to use electronic systems requires proper apprenticeships. I worked in an electronics company before college that took kids who left school at 16 and gave them a full year of basic training to become engineering technicians, including welding, fabrication, machining, technical drawing, etc. Sadly, very few of those apprenticeships still exist.
I can’t imagine why I would want my car mechanic or plumber or childcare provider to be forced to spend four years getting a college degree, whether that was at 1980s rates or current prices.
That’s a comparison at different companies and not necessarily same role. There is a 3% wage difference if you compare the same role at the same company, such as Google SW eng A vs Google SW eng B. While there is a 7% wage difference if you do not control for company and use “similar” instead of same roles, such as comparing Google SW eng A to IBM computer eng B. Obviously controlling for same role at same company is relevant in this comparison. The report (not article) at https://hired.com/page/wage-inequality-report spells it out in more detail, as quoted below.
“It is important to note that these wage gaps are higher than the 3% average wage gap reported in the first section of this report. Our US local market data looks at the gap between the average man and the average woman in that market, while the 3% wage gap is based on salary offers for the same role at the same company.”
After a decade, the report mentions a ~3% difference in wage – 4% for 9-10 years experience and 3% for 11-12 years experience.
This doesn’t strike me as being worse than other industries or a reason for women to avoid tech. If anything, it’s better than other industries, likely because of a more merit/quality based salary process that has more influence from market conditions. If a SV company has a policy of paying male SW engineers more than females who are equally qualified/skilled/experienced/valuable/…, they they run the risk of losing some of their most valuable employees to nearby peer companies with more equitable salaries between genders. Attrition can be quite high in tech. At some SV companies, the majority of tech employees leave (usually switch to a similar role at a different SV company) within 3 years.
I think what is more unique about tech is the vast majority of tech majors are males, so there is often an extreme gender imbalance. This gender imbalance can result in a variety of negative work place situations for women. I’ve heard of small startups that are nearly all male and had a frat boy type atmosphere, even with things like being comfortable with having porn on computer during workplace hours. There are also far more subtle issues. For example, I once worked at a company that had 2 male bathrooms on the floor, but no female bathrooms on the floor. There is a certain logic to it, with the vast majority of employees being male, but the few female employees certainly were not happy about it.
Only you don’t have to go near that to get (back) to greater equality. All you have to do is re-fund the publics and subsidize COA so that there’s no longer a reason for bright kids who can’t really afford top schools to go, and also not so much reason to have these bizarre, twisted childhoods of resume-building for college. If you restore the publics, there’s not so much urgency about going to good/top privates, and then it becomes rather difficult for them to charge giant money. It also equalizes things between the children of well-educated parents who start saving for college the minute the pee strip turns pink and the kids whose parents don’t regard it as their job to furnish their kids with college educations.
Yes. That would not be true if the task were to train people in a sharply limited set of complex rote tasks with well-defined decision trees. In that case a community college could do the job fine. Once a job actually requires thought, the ability to make subtle distinctions, the ability to connect what’s happening on the job to events and analogues outside the job, and the ability to make complex decisions and plans and communicate these to other people, you need the kind of training in thinking you find in universities.
Personally, I think this is a disaster. While we can radically improve the position of most people coming into universities, making the society’s workings, even the mundane ones, more complex than most people will ever be equipped for will always go poorly. The best you can do at that point is infantilize people by trying to predict a handful of the most common complexities they’ll encounter, and building a very simple interface and hiding the complexity behind it, but by the time you’re done doing that, you’re not far from robots anyhow. This is part of what I mean when I say that STEM alone, or even in the majority, is not an education that kits you out for societal planning. If you build a world that MS engineers like, you get people having to go to college to understand how to install a floor or a water softener or fix a car.
However, I don’t know anyone who’s been successful in telling the engineers to cool it. They’re pretty sure they know best.
As for what happens if people still can’t read and think when they come out of college, they don’t go to grad school, but they do wind up having to go back to some form of school. The fact that this is news to people on this thread should be telling you something about how much catch-up you have to do with the state of affairs in this country, and how far out of date your own ideas are about the range and distribution of what “college” means now.
This passage and a few others reminds me of @Twoin18’s comment that to someone with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Do jobs in Germany in general require less thought, the ability to connect, make distinctions, decisions, etc.?
Yet they are managing to run a high-skill economy with a tertiary education rate below the OECD average (the US tertiary education rate is above the OECD average). They do have a strong apprenticeship tradition that not only instills pride in a craft/trade (they have apprenticeships for programmers; the Swiss do for bankers) but also teaches theoretical/classroom material.
As for more funding, per student funding at most publics in most states have fallen in the past several decades. But the number of students going to public colleges has about doubled since the ‘70’s. It’s just that states have not kept up with the increase (state support has stayed flattish so the per capita funding has dropped). However, I really doubt that simply funding public college more by itself will reverse the inequality in the US or make up for the conditions that lead to kids graduating from HS unable to read the NYT. There are deeper societal problems there.
To pay for it, you’d have to get rid of all Federal loan programs, Pell grants, state grants, 529 plans, tax credits/deductions for college/college loans. Basically all fin aid and tax subsidies related to college. I can see the merits. Don’t see it being politically feasible at all, though.
Or the Federal government could just pay for it all. Or double government support for higher ed but keep all current programs in place. That would take per capita government support back to ‘70’s levels despite a doubling in college enrollment in publics. That would cost about $130B/year, it seems. Less that $500/American/year. Personally, I would be all for it.
Politically, it might be explosive, though, considering that older working class people (who’s kids are already past college age) most likely won’t benefit much at all but would have to pay in. And note that the majority of Americans (and the vast majority of older Americans) are not college-educated. And old people vote.
You seem to be really critical of engineers when it is those in “elite society-defining jobs” (which you suggest history majors are better suited for) who are the ones making the decisions or advising those making the decisions (CEOs, management consultants advising CEOs, Wall Street financiers pressuring CEOs to deliver a good quarter, politicians making policy, politicians’ advisers advising the politicians making policy, etc.) to eliminate, outsource, or automate jobs.
When you get right down to it, inequality and the perpetuation of inequality is based on the increasing dominance of capital over labor.
Capital is less perishable than labor. Unused (unemployed) labor is completely wasted, never to be useful in the future by the laborer or anyone else. While capital may be subject to inflation or investment losses, the mere non-use of it for a day does not typically bring its value to zero like the non-use of labor. But that means that labor is at an inherent disadvantage in negotiations (e.g. compare the weakness of the unemployed person’s position looking for a job versus employers who may hire).
Capital is more mobile than labor. It is generally far easier to move capital than the move labor. Compare moving your money from one savings / investment account to a different savings / investment account to moving yourself to a new job in a different area, for example.
Capital can be bequeathed to and inherited by the next generation, giving the next generation an unequal playing field or starting line in the race to join the capitalist class.
Capital can be used to purchase opportunities for the next generation to improve the quality and desirability of its labor (including improving its chance to get into “elite society-defining jobs”), further giving the next generation an unequal playing field or starting line in the race to join the capitalist class. Typical example is parents with money spending for houses in good public school zones or private schools, test preparation, larger range of financially available colleges, etc…
Capitalism works better at generating wealth than other economic systems, but letting it go to the extremes to where many people do not share the wealth leads to the kind of resentment that leads to the embrace of noxious political ideologies like communism, racism, conspiracy theories, etc…