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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   4190 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 21, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I'm not American but eh

What are some societal roles universities are uniquely well-suited to fill but just… aren’t

Uhhh the most obvious one, give students the skills to work in the profession they are getting a degree for? It's like we all just bought the gaslighting of "oh no colleges are actually just for learning how to learn, you will actually learn on the job".. well then change the way colleges work until you learn in college! 4 years and a lot of money should not leave you with "learning how to learn".

Maybe I have a tech bias here, but it is astounding just how useless the average CS graduate is at any software engineering work. Some (most) of them can't even... code ! Similarly for most other professions. I understand no institution can probably impart those skills to most people, and IQ probably isn't the only limiting factor, but they should be honest about this.

https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/

Based on your moral values, where do you draw the line of how the various strata on a university campus (student, faculty, postgrad, admin, etc) can/should get romantically involved with each other?

Based on my moral values, the only two things that matter for morality is consent and age of majority, doesn't matter if the man is a 50 year old business mogul billionaire and the girl is a 19 year old heroin junkie living in the streets.

However, that which is moral doesn't tell you that which is optimal or conductive to producing happiness for individuals and society.

Based on my moral values, the only two things that matter for morality is consent and age of majority, doesn't matter if the man is a 50 year old business mogul billionaire and the girl is a 19 year old heroin junkie living in the streets.

You are describing the minimum morality required by the law. Most universities have somewhat higher standards than that. A professor who only hires graduate students who consent to having sex with him or her would certainly not be selecting for professional quality as much as someone who hires on professional merit. Given that the funding which is paying for these students is commonly not his private property, I can see a university (as the principal) having a legitimate interest in enforcing certain standards (on what their agent does).

But I am sure that somewhere some unis go overboard with regulations.

the profession they are getting a degree for

Well that's the whole damn problem, isn't it? You want someone who went to school for Computer Science, which tends to be mostly theoretical, to have training in the most practical and tangentially related sub-field. Why should they?

I'd argue job training is a role universities are uniquely not well-suited to fill, given the glacial pace of curriculum change, and other structural handicaps, like tenured hedgehog dens.

This seems to come up as an explanation a lot, but I don't think it really holds water. We don't have a huge number of people who are experts in pushdown automata or computational complexity or type theory, but can't code. For the most part, the people who didn't learn to code in school also didn't learn any of the theory either.

Why throw up our Pepe hands and pretend this is an unsolvable problem?

You are telling me no college out there knows that students are enrolling into their CS programs for cushy tech jobs and not to learn about automata theory..... Hell, you are telling me no student or worse, no employer knows this?

The problem goes back to Griggs vs Duke Power and related employment law cases.

Universities are the only ones who can do respected credentialization because any system will inevitably have a racially disparate result and universities are the only institution that judges respect too much to destroy for producing a "racist" result.

Any other system you try to set up is living on borrowed time until the judiciary decides to whack it.

If what you say is true, why hasn’t the judiciary destroyed Google for the fact that fewer than 15% of software engineers there are black?

I was going to say "borrowed time", but looks like the majority of the answer may be "Universities"? The first stats I found showed black people making up 4.1% of Google tech employees vs 7% of Computer field employment. That's barely more than the ratio of underrepresentation that white people have among Google tech employees. (which might also be a factor? "you picked too many whites" can become a lawsuit even without allegations of racial animus, but I'd expect "you picked too many Asians" to raise eyebrows in any crowd less racist than a Harvard admissions committee)

Edit: I initially misread that 7% as being "CS degrees", rather than employment in the field as a whole. It sounds like the gap among new graduates has narrowed, if "In computer science fields, Black students earned 9% of bachelor’s degrees, 13% of master’s degrees and 7% of all research doctorates over the 2017-2018 school year." Comparing Google's cumulative hiring stats over decades to new graduate stats a few years old is a bit apples-to-oranges, but if I were one of Google's legal compliance people I'd now definitely be looking for some apples-to-apples and oranges-to-oranges numbers before I felt safe.

This isn’t true; the military, certain unions, and even many private companies get away with racist results all the time.

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