The Real Arbiter of College
How do you deal with a market that is changing at an accelerating pace?
One of the reasons that people can’t stand, or learn anything from economic news today is because there is absolutely no consistency to it.
It is difficult to make choices looking 15 years ahead, or a year ahead, or even a month ahead. One of the reasons that young adults (otherwise known as slightly older adolescents) are so ambivalent post-graduation is because it is difficult to assess this ever-changing terrain. The “unsureness” of the job market right now is scaring college graduates as well as incoming freshmen. So where do they turn to when they are unsure about the life deicions they are about to make? The internet of course. Bloomberg, NY Times, US News and World Report, The Princeton Review… All these bastions of information offer trends, analyses, list of best majors, list of worst majors, nicest schools, best party schools, highest paying degrees etc. for tomorrows students and todays graduates. All of it…useless. But yet it all holds so much weight. The forums at College Confidential do more to influence school and major decisions for incoming freshman more than any parent will. Your eyeballs would hurt from the kinds of questions asked there.
“Should I add on a math minor?”
“Do employees like it if I double major in this?”
“What if I take an extra year?”
Not only that, but the parents are on College Confidential too, meticulously micromanaging which schools and majors their children should pick up.
“UPenn or Berkeley?”
“Which school produces more i-bankers?”
And who can blame them? No one knows what’s coming next.
This kind of market volatility is scaring students. Uncertainty about the future market means people know little of what to do and even less of where to start. That’s why enrollment in college is increasing and why college is booming as a business with unaccreditted, for-profit universities popping up all over the country like Ponzi schemes. But that’s an entirely different beast.
If students are uneasy about the majors they choose, (students on average change majors once or twice) what makes you think that they’re trying to learn the homework assignment if its worth only 5%? You think a student studying electrical engineering is going to really be interested in learning how to do long hand Differential Equations to solve a simple theoretical circuit while there are already Fabs creating thousands of integrated chips a minute?
What that engineering student needs to be taught, or better yet, SHOWN, is that getting some number for the answer to that particular circuit through math equations isn’t as important as seeing that it CAN be modeled with math equations. And so can all the other millions of circuit variations. But since the only thing being measured is performance, students instead fall into the habit of learning and relearning how to solve individual problems because that’s what they’re going to get tested on. This is why students feel burnout. But that’s just school. What’s more important, and what weighs heavily on the minds of this generation’s students, is what’s going to happen 15 years down the road.
In this article is fantastic insight into what it means to work as a programmer; in this case, specifically Google, although it can be applied to the average American’s worklife in general. In it, author Matt Heusser estimates the average half-life of the average worker in the tech industry to be 15 years, where the skills learned become obsolete very fast as new technology kicks into place and new skills are needed. Once programmers start to approach 35, most of them have gone on to management and consulting positions. But the important part of the article was his realization that being an older interviewee in the midst of fresh and quick college grads wasn’t something to lose hope over. He realized he had a perspective that set him apart from the rest. None of the other fresh-faced college grads had the experience he had, even if they were the new cream of the crop. As he puts it so eloquently, the realization was the same shock experienced by a bird being kicked out of its nest. Interestingly enough, this is the stage in life college students must undergo upon entering the real world after graduation. It doesn’t matter whether you’re young or old, unemployed or shoulders deep in a career, this is a great thing to hear.
Practically speaking, what college students need is to care less about in-class procedure and rote homework assignments while picking up projects of their own, outside of class. It gives them ownership over their career and future, as well as a direction to go in. Morally speaking, What college students REALLY need is confidence, and no, I don’t mean patting them and giving them awards for nothing. I’m pretty sure most of them have heard that they’re entitled brats already, they don’t need to be told that again. Especially not from a generation that had jobs waiting for them after post-graduation without $50k in debt. Maybe pre-med students need to be told that having to know the TCA cycle isn’t to deprive them of sleep, but to have that ESP-like intuition that doctors need on the job. Or having that art student know that, hey, maybe it will be difficult to find a job when you graduate, so START NOW and find out what other art majors before you have done after college so you don’t have to wait tables until you’re 30.
Confidence isn’t always being sure of oneself and always knowing what to do. It’s making what you consider to be the best decision with incomplete information. It’s gambling — except you know the steps to take next when you lose. Right now, college graduates need SOME form of confidence, because they are severely lacking in it. And the world is only getting more competitive.
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This is just one view anyway, and one not quite qualified to judge, so if I’m overstepping my words here, just realize that it isn’t my intention to do so, but a perception is a perception nevertheless. And from observation, one that quite many, unconfident others share.
Great post. Here are some thoughts:
1. You kinda imply it obliquely, but the news media are not there to inform you. They don’t care about you. They care about getting your attention, so they play on your insecurities. The kinds of stories you mention at the top follow the exact same logic as fashion mags making women insecure and then selling the secret knowledge on how to beat the contrived sources of their insecurities or stories about hidden health dangers with 7 tricks on how to protect yourself.
2. Learning the nuts and bolts of how a complex system works, like the math of a circuit, can be important if injustice gets built into the system. This admittedly makes more sense in terms of programming than circuitry, but the idea is that if it’s possible to hardwirehegemony into a technical system, like google glasses or facebook terms of service, then it’s good to have people who are technically literate to notice that and maybe even hack or correct it. It might even be possible to build some kind of emancipation right into the system, which is kind of like the argument in this book. (If link is still busted, I can email it to you.)
3. The idea in the ‘What I learned from Google’ post and your conclusion is about right, and the Foreign Policy article (just read the headline) is boilerplate text that they reprint every decade with a different bogeyman. From personal experience, you have a much better chance of getting hired if you’re a) competent in your basic skills; b) halfway likeable (i.e. you don’t go in with a ‘survival of the fittest/eat or be eaten’ attitude and can enjoy a sociable beer after work on Fridays); c) have some skill/talent/experience that no other candidate really has. Good shops aren’t necessarily looking for the fastest drone as much as an individual who will help the shop develop, and the indicator of this is personal development, and the indicator of this is taking the odd risk and making hay out of it.
As for China and India eating your lunch, meh. The Russians were gonna eat your grandparents’ lunch, the Japanese were gonna eat your parents’ lunch, but everybody still got lunch. See pt. 1 above.
Firstly I have to apologize. I really like your article Macky and I couldn’t wait for it to be up just so I can disagree with everything you’re saying. But still, it’s a great article, don’t get me wrong.
So the problem is insecurity in adolescents today. Why does the insecurity come only now? Why not 4 generations back? Well, generations back had this idea that if their parents were a carpenter, the children would just follow suit and that was that, no anxiety – their future planned out for them. Now, there is this whole idea about oh im going to make it out on my own and become a secret genius, the field is open. You go to school, you come out, it’s free for all.
Now, comes the news media outlet. Guy touched about it, but I’m long winded so here’s a little more. Collegeconfidential and all the other sites feed on insecurity, but it is their presence itself that becomes the ‘default’ way to assuage their nerves – this is true especially for people who don’t use the forum. If you’re calm and okay don’t use the forum but everyone does and they start talking about how lunches are eaten, you get worried and you play into their game. Now…
You say that parents need to give their kids confidence – but isn’t this precisely what the forums are for? Isn’t all of this upenn or uchi blabbering for that very purpose? To give the kids confidence?
I think that this is precisely the problem itself – believing that there is a system in the first place. You want to give kids confidence – but the underlying assumption here is that if you get to figure out the right way to do things much earlier, you can do it. In other words, there is a system.
Guy’s conception is threefold here: there is a real system, and then a manipulated image of an unstable society that manifests from the media outlet, and then on the very top the security the the media gives. I claim differently, the media in itself is what makes things unconfident by being confident. Upenn or Uchi gives you confidence now but it is this specific confidence that makes you unbalanced and you have to continually supplement it. It is this confidence that makes you unconfident.
Guy thinks that the media is merely propagating competition for fear so that you tune in to them, well that’s true – but he’s saying there’s nothing to worry about, it’s just fear. This is my problem, I don’t agree. Lunches are being eaten, it’s inevitable, but I’m going a level down and saying this is the way it is and you must bite the bullet and live with it (like a stoic I know). Essentially things happen, things become chaotic, you can’t get a job but wait tables for the next 30 years, but my claim is that you must accept this to be able to transcend it.
If anybody else gives you that confidence, be suspicious. Unless you can be confident of your own accord that you’re good enough to invent cold fusion or that you’re not good enough and all you can do is wait tables – then whatever confidence anybody gives you is just a lie.
The problem is expectations. You seem to want to be confident that your expectations will in some way turn out true, so please don’t worry now. But I don’t think that’s true, these expectations must change, we must see reality and accept it before we can change anything else. Confidence doesn’t do that, it hinders it.
Your idea of confidence being the source of insecurity is brilliant, but I’m not sure how it follows that the best way to deal with the illusion is resignation, and I’m not sure how resignation is supposed to be transcendant. In other words, I’ll see your sadsack Camus and raise you a humanist Nietzsche.
There might be a sort of nobility in realizing how the game is rigged and playing along anyway. I.e. the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, you’re not special, so suck it up and get on with it. Very British, in fact. But here’s the thing: you will lose yourself in that choice. You cannot accept it and claim to transcend it at the same time (or if so, how?). There is no patron saint of quitters, but there is one for lost causes (Hey Jude!) No mystic ever got enlightenment by treading the same path as countless peers. If you want to transcend, you gotta actually transcend and not just say it, dammit.
The alternative path to nobility is to recognize that the deck is stacked against you, that you are an insignificant flake of dead skin on a mere hemorrhoid on the a$$ end of creation, but to fight your balls off anyway. To take your pathetic little existence as a challenge and make something of it. (There’s something poetic in the phonetic similarity of the French défi, ‘challenge’, and defeat.) Where’s your gumption?
The trick is in not letting your struggle for individuality in the context of your peers become an excuse to steamroller them. By all means find yourself in the struggle, but do it in the service of others. And yes, this applies to electrical engineering as much as it does to theology.
Think Kierkegaard and Abraham. [In agreement with you.]
I wasn’t going Camus at all. My point was that Macky bought into the whole symptomatic idea of external competition from Chinese and Indians eating American lunches. His whole response was geared towards this particular insecurity. Your advice is great, but I claim it’s not enough. It isn’t that the Chinese and Indians eating lunches are just a rumour so we should ignore it, that is not enough – Macky had this ideological presupposition that lunches were initially American – that it is American lunches. The Chinese and Indians are eating ‘American lunches’. My point is that this is absolute bullshit – you need to transcend this only by recognizing the fact that lunch is lunch and it belongs to nobody.
Do you see? Macky’s fear stems from the ‘loss’ of lunches. He wants somebody to tell him that nobody’s taking away his lunchbox. That is not true, people are, but it’s only because it didn’t belong to him in the first place. We have to go a level down and understand that, and only then can we lose the fear and expectations – and only then can he transcend this.
How?
That’s for another post.