<p>If you don’t need high end analytic skills, why are we fighting over work visa issues? Are you saying these are the kind of jobs American kids wouldn’t ever want to consider? Like fruit picking? They seem to pay well.</p>
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<p>I am not talking about grooming in high end of analytic at an early age. Just enough practical introduction not to impede later learning. Don’t we have captain underpants for boys who dislike reading? Why not introduce something practical for quantitative stuff? Most I’ve seen is a few worksheets and recipes on how to.</p>
<p>Are we not behind in quantitave skills at every level? Calculus coming at 12th grade is just an example. We are probably worse in trigonometry. We may not need them directly in real life, but they make up foundations of quantitative reasoning. Boxers train by running although they never leave the ring during a match. Musicians play scales over and over although they never perform scales.</p>
<p>yes- large chunks of the population are behind in quant skills at every level. But you guys read an article and assume it’s talking about your own kid. Most of the teeth gnashing is because a company opens a new manufacturing plant in a depressed area and then can’t hire enough people to get the plant up and running. Modern manufacturing doesn’t require brawn- it requires the ability to operate a computer, understand that .01 and .1 are not equal, that the area of a triangle is something which can be calculated. Or teeth gnashing because a large hospital operating in a big city has to bus in pharmacy techs from the suburbs because they can’t hire enough people locally (in an area with high unemployment) who can translate a patients weight in pounds to kilo’s to figure out an accurate dose.</p>
<p>Some of your kids sound quite advanced and brilliant in math. But the kids graduating from bad high schools with a 7th grade reading level and 6th grade computational skills will never enter the modern economy. And it ain’t calculus they lack…</p>
<p>@Canuckguy, I assumed that by numerical analysis you meant data analysis. </p>
<p>@pizzagirl, don’t cite me as an advocate for calculus as a test for most corporate jobs. I started by saying that a course in how to learn things from data and how to make decisions under uncertainty would be a lot more important for most people. I’ve studied more math and stats than most people of our generation. I don’t really use much in my work. I also said didn’t think most calculus courses were great at teaching logic compared to courses with proofs. I typically don’t find the heads of HR or most high level corporate folks to be fabulous logical thinkers. Some are great at leadership. Some can tie the leadership to compelling strategy. Many more are strong at corporate politics. In reality, in the era of big data, they should probably have more grounding than they have. A biotech CEO friend has two PhDs. He told me that the field he wished he had studied was statistics as it controlled or informed every major decision they made. But in many companies and Industries I think there are and will be great opportunities to harness and use massive amounts of data to serve customers better and make money.</p>
<p>But as @blossom said, the much bigger problems are the folks who don’t know the difference between 0.1 and 0.01 and can’t use spreadsheets. </p>
<p>I notice that in Post#255 @pizzagirl asserted that I said the best job applicants were those who took proofs courses. In fact, what I said was that in my observation, proofs courses did a very good job of teaching people to reason from premises to conclusions. I saw the lack in a lot of social science professors when I was an academic and see a lack in many in the corporate world. However, it s a remarkably big leap to conclude that I said or implied that proofs training made its students the best applicants for all jobs. I rarely have done this but you so completely distorted what I was saying and combined your error with a dash of unnecessary snideness that I went back to old posts. Take a look at posts #222 and #241 and tell me where I made the claim you said I made or that it follows logically from what I wrote. </p>
<p>I never stated or implied that the ability to structure logical arguments was the only skill that was relevant to job success. All other things equal, better logical abilities can’t hurt and likely help, but lots of other skills are required to be successful in the corporate world. As such, people who are better at logical argument do not automatically make the best applicants. Someone running a sales team probably needs motivational ability more than logic. </p>
<p>Your sloppiness in reasoning, or possibly reading, lead you to misstate what I said. You surmise that we are in different industries. Likely so. Does that kind of sloppy reasoning, poor reading, and snide tone work in your industry?</p>
<p>Just to clarify, shawbridge - I did NOT assert that you said that the best job applicants were those who took proofs courses. If you look back at post #254, it was ** Iglooo ** who said:</p>
<p>This seems in direct contradiction to what shawbridge that best job applicants are found who had done some proofs. tell me one proofs course that doesn’t require calculus that has any meat.</p>
<p>I quoted that in #255, but I neglected to show the quotes distinguishing my original comment above from Iglooo’s response so I can see where it looked that I was saying that. Sorry about that. </p>
<p>The best job applicants are those who can think. Sometimes, that means advanced math classes with proofs. Sometimes it means a demonstrable track record doing things that require thinking- an award winning paper in college comparing family structure in India vs. Brazil and why those two countries have had different paths towards industrialization and observing that social relationships may play a part.</p>
<p>It’s too simple to break the world into those with high end math skills and those without. Someone can be wildly analytical in a sociology class or an art history class. Again- not every job needs a quant. Sometimes corporate jobs need someone who can read a 100 page study and summarize the findings into three paragraphs.</p>
<p>That’s my superpower, and I never took a single class with a proof.</p>
<p>The best job applicants are those who can think. Sometimes, that means advanced math classes with proofs. Sometimes it means a demonstrable track record doing things that require thinking- an award winning paper in college comparing family structure in India vs. Brazil and why those two countries have had different paths towards industrialization and observing that social relationships may play a part.</p>
<p>It’s too simple to break the world into those with high end math skills and those without. Someone can be wildly analytical in a sociology class or an art history class. Again- not every job needs a quant. Sometimes corporate jobs need someone who can read a 100 page study and summarize the findings into three paragraphs.</p>
<p>That’s my superpower, and I never took a single class with a proof.</p>
<p>Um, I have news for some of you not acquainted with the culture and the egos of the SV. </p>
<p>Regarding this, for example:
"My take-away is that Google is looking for outstanding candidates. They want high cognitive ability, analytical vigour, emergent leadership-when to lead and when to follow, sense of responsibility and intellectual humility…Charles Murray talked about the lack of intellectual humility of our ruling class who have never experienced failure (he claimed it is particularly common among those who have not majored in STEM), and who would not want a sense of responsibility in their employees? "</p>
<p>That’s pretty hilarious. SV believes IT is the ruling class. Period. It believes that not only are Google, Apple, and Yahoo the Center of the Universe, but also that life barely existed before these companies, and that they are all that matter in the future. Most of its employees believe that the humanities were always irrelevant and now permanently are. It knows, and cares, almost nothing of anything that happened before the year 1980 C.E. Life IS technology to them, and maybe a little bit of physical sport and yummy meals thrown in to make their infatuation with themselves more bearable. Non-STEM knowledge is absolutely worthless, naturally. They ARE the future and are here to tell us that repeatedly, just in case any of us should forget it or challenge them on it.</p>
<p>In short, they cannot get over themselves. :)] </p>
<p>So that was just a reality check for those who consider East Coast colleges so unbearably “elitist.” Those who do have truly not met Elite yet.</p>
@jym626 That is very helpful. Any more where that is from? I noticed Bain and BCG are in the list of “top ten companies to work for” you posted earlier. The trick, of course, is to make it through their selection process.</p>
<p>But the world of work doesn’t separate itself into “jobs that everyone wants, covets and bows down to, and jobs that they don’t.” There may indeed be pecking orders between Bain, BCG, McKinsey and the rest; and between Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and the rest; but if someone is not interested in those fields and those companies, they don’t consider them “prestigious.” They consider them irrelevant. </p>
<p>epiphany,
your post is way off the mark. If you read Isaacson’s new book “the innovators” you’ll see that many of the big SV movers and shakers believe strongly in the combined knowledge of the humanities and sciences. This likely led to the new combined CS/humanities degree programs at Stanford.</p>
<p>Canuck,
That article on the importance of the skill of conceptualization followed a McKinsey panel discussion…</p>
<p>The best job applicants are those who can think. Sometimes, that means advanced math classes with proofs. Sometimes it means a demonstrable track record doing things that require thinking- an award winning paper in college comparing family structure in India vs. Brazil and why those two countries have had different paths towards industrialization and observing that social relationships may play a part.</p>
<p>It’s too simple to break the world into those with high end math skills and those without. Someone can be wildly analytical in a sociology class or an art history class. Again- not every job needs a quant. Sometimes corporate jobs need someone who can read a 100 page study and summarize the findings into three paragraphs.</p>
<p>That’s my superpower, and I never took a single class with a proof.</p>
<p>“Personally I believe this is the true advantage of attending an elite. You are betting that most employers assume you got in because you are the “brightest and the best”, not realizing that 60% of admittees are hooked (Dan Golden). Not every employer is wise enough to screen by SAT first like Bain and BCG. I see this is just another way to create a mismatch in your favour.”</p>
<p>60% of admittees to elite schools are not just schlubs-on-a-log who had some magic hook from nowhere that got them in. Yes, there are athletes, and URM’s, and legacies, and blah blah blah at elite schools. They are still academically qualified. The average SAT/ACT scores of those places wouldn’t be so sky high otherwise. (And now we’re going to trot out stories of how the 2200 black kid got into “over” the 2250 white kid, which is still completely irrelevant because the 2000 black kid is still eminently qualified.)</p>
<p>There are some college seniors who interview for corporate jobs (I can’t discuss those going straight off to med school or divinity school or law school since those aren’t the ones I’ve interviewed into the thousands over the years) who I can pretty much assure you would have been qualified for a management training program or an analyst program or an Associate program by the time they graduated from HS. That’s how exceptional they are. Curious, driven, they demonstrate intellectual vitality at such a high level that you have no doubt that you can drop them into the deep end of the pool and they’ll have taught themselves how to swim by the time they pop to the surface. They have strong and demonstrated ability to excel at something (cello? debate? butterfly collecting?) and they have tremendous empathy and people skills.</p>
<p>Employers love these kids. It doesn’t matter if they are at Yale or East Overshoe U. Yes- attendance at Yale or similar is a sorting device and a signaling device- they’ve made it through a highly selective weeding process, and then they’ve spent four years doing interesting and intellectual things and working hard at that which is a weeding process all its own.</p>
<p>The rest of the applicant pool needs more attention because it is harder to look at the relatively short runway of a 21 year old’s life and check the boxes which are relevant to most corporate employers. You are hiring future CPA’s? You need to look at the wide swath of accounting majors and pick the ones who will be “client ready” at some point not too far into the future, plus the technical skills plus being able to actually pass the CPA exam without taking 8 years. You are hiring future manufacturing leaders for a rotational program? Being a brilliant engineer isn’t enough- this could be someone who has to manage a team of 500 highly skilled unionized techs who are 20 years older (and with 20 years more tenure) not too far out in the future. You are hiring marketing management/brand talent-is this someone capable of looking at facts and seeing an insight that other people have missed? Is this someone who can relate to the 45 year old soccer mom who buys XYZ brand of detergent, or is this someone who only sees numbers and spreadsheets?</p>
<p>You guys (some of you) make things SO black and white. There’s math and science- and everything else. There are elite schools- and everything else. There are elite employers- and everything else.</p>
<p>If you want to help your own kids launch successfully, you need to remind them that the real world is much more nuanced than the picture you are painting. No college senior is going to be qualified for every job he or she might be interested in. It will take a lot of diligence for a kid to get that first job- the days of getting elevated from 2nd to 3rd grade just because you have a pulse are over. The best next step may not be right in front of you- it will require some creativity and some flexibility.</p>
<p>But please- continue the dialogue on Google and Bain. It’s entertaining if nothing else.</p>
<p>jym626: epiphany is not off the mark, notwithstanding lip service from a handful of top people who have little or nothing to do with actual day-to-day operations. Stanford’s combined CS-Humanities program is more likely an attempt to saye the humanities – which university faculties DO care about – than to appease the gods of Silicon Valley.</p>