BS explanation for rising inequality?

“Who’s not working and why : employment, cognitive skills, wages, and the changing U.S. labor market” by Frederic L. Pryor and David L. Schaffe (CUP, 1999) provide a wealth of evidence to support CB’s scepticism – graduates increasingly going into jobs previously done by high school leavers without any clear evidence that graduate level skills are actually required for this. There’s also an extensive literature on over-education, particulalrly graduates doing jobs that don’t really require their skills, in the UK and elsewhere in Europe.

This has been the (inner-)Party line for some time. Alan Greenspan is fond of this excuse and uses it in his “Age of Turbulence”. He claims it is because the U.S. public school system is “broken” and wage stagnation will be solved by its dismantlement into private entities, access to which will be harshly rationed by wealth.

Nevermind most office jobs don’t need more than a high school diploma. Nevermind that education has NEVER CEASED EXPANDING to the point where the industrialized world is facing a massive GRADUATE GLUT. Grade and diploma inflation is the norm now.

Just a couple of thoughts. First, it’s interesting that this explanation is attractive to the same people who attack higher education in the US. Second, the unemployment numbers by educational attainment are interesting in this connection. Even now those with a BA have an unemployment rate below 5% (and during the previous upswing in employment a few years back it was essentially full employment (2.3% or so). Finally, I think the frustration with the lack of preparation for college among incoming freshmen should be considered. At most non-elite schools a significant portion of the incoming student body has (a) no real grasp of how to study for anything other than memorization (b) can barely write a coherent sentence (c) can barely read a short op-ed piece for example and identify thesis and argument (d) has atrocious oral communicative skills. This, I suspect, is the real skill set that a college degree now provides, some reasonable likelihood that a person can function in a collaborative, knowledge based, highly communicative social environment. But, one reason to doubt the explanation is that it seems unlikely that income stagnation hasn’t affected a significant portion of these college educated workers as well, which it seems this fellows hypothesis would need to explain–though I’m not an economist so perhaps I’m wrong.

So one of the mechanisms used to impose income inequality and a class structure also works as an excuse for that income inequality? That’s economical, anyway.

In fairness, without arbitrary qualifications to keep out the outsiders, just anyone might become a Chicago economist.

I think Ombrageux is right. It may be ‘BS’ but this idea has been central to New Labour (and similar ‘Third Way’) thinking for most of the last two decades. It helps to justify the 50% HE target and, more generally, the focussing of one’s egalitarian enthusiasms on giving ‘everyone’ the ‘skills’ to ‘succeed’ in the ‘labour market’ more generally rather than anything so Pleistocene as progressive income tax, improving benefits or support for organised labour…

You can also find it parroted ad nauseum in the writings of right-wing economics popularisers.

Of course, it may be that, because of competition for those jobs, you need a higher level of qualification to get one.

If a high school diploma is sufficient qualification for the job – and it usually is – there is no reason to suppose that a degree makes one better qualified. Demanding a degree for a school leaver level position is much the same as sifting out all the applications written in blue ink – it makes HR’s job easier, but doesn’t help you to hire the most appropriate candidate.

Hidari, I would prefer the gender-neutral “asshole”, or maybe “flaming asshole”. But the basic idea is very sound.

Eh, is it not a bit odd for academics to decry the degree educated office worker trend?

Less undergraduates means less academics, means smaller and less universities.

Surely HE is about more than equipping people to do a job?

If that were the case we should just shut down most humanities and social sciences faculties immediately. When the undergrads return in September I’m sure someone can explain to them that in all likelihood those who can get jobs will be working in offices, and an degree is not really required to do those kinds of jobs. The kindest thing, therefore, is draw the experience to close now.

As a college dropout myself, this is a very sore subject for me. I’m not overly sure what qualifications my friends who are Reedies and Swarthies and Obies have that I don’t, other than the sheet of paper – and yet the only jobs I can get a foothold in are unskilled-labor positions.

Mr. Labonne,

Since you are speaking of Chicago economists, I would prefer the accurate *and* precise term “clenched butthole” or “tightly clenched butthole”. “Flaming” indicates an imaginative passion that does not/cannot exist. “Asshole” is not severe enough.

“Clenchpoop” is also a wonderful term, but doesn’t provide quite the proper sense of urgency in identification. I suppose the best term would require our all conversing in Russian. Pound for pound, their more information dense profanity is hard to find.

I’m just venting my irritation at academics getting sniffy about degree holding office workers.

That might have some justification if that’s what they were doing. But reading comprehension is difficult, I guess.

The point is that expanding educational access, while simultaneously making every other area of policy more and more regressive, is hardly a useful recipe for combating inequality. Perhaps when you get over your irritation you might deign to address this, the actual topic of the post.

That seems silly, no?

Not as long as there are still people in the world who are foolish enough to believe that “Chicago economist” is an honorable appellation.

#21 – is there any need to behave like a Chicago economist?

No, so please stop.

“Chicago economist Raghuram Rajan…”

Well, I didn’t need to read any further to know that BS was coming. But I’ve seen Rajan give a presentation to a stunned audience that reached correct conclusions for all the wrong reasons–and his audience (economists) was stunned by the conclusions, not the reasons.

@ Steve LaBonne.

I can read fine, but thanks for the gratuitous insult nonetheless.

‘The point is that expanding educational access, while simultaneously making every other area of policy more and more regressive, is hardly a useful recipe for combating inequality.’

Well, that’s true. What do you suggest should be done?

Yes there is a graduate glut. But there is still a skills shortage.

We have a massive glut of arts graduates. We are desperately short of engineering graduates and science graduates capable of learning engineering skills.

Most office workers use tools such as photoshop and excel but they use them at a very low level, in large part because they don’t have the intellectual framework to understand more advanced approaches. The abysmal nature of Excel and its ad-hoc scripting scheme does not help, but the reason it is so bad is that so few people make use of it it does not need to be good.

With the exception of degrees in the graphic arts – an engineering degree in my view rather than an ‘arts’ degree, arts degrees are dispensable because they are not meant to be a training for a career. Arts degrees were originally designed as training for the clergy and were later repurposed to be preparation for the leisure class. The only employment utility in an arts degree is to teach courses in arts.

Most politicians are arts students, in the UK it is even narrower, PPE. So they conflate the skills shortage in engineering with a general demand for more graduates. But what the economy is lacking is not a more plentiful supply of English Lit graduates. They need engineers.

It is even more specific than that, demand for chemical, mechanical and civil engineers is pretty much the same as it was ten or twenty years ago. The skills shortage is in information engineering.

You could not have a Microsoft or a Google based in Britain, both would require the entire output of UK comp sci grads. Even in the US they can only survive by pulling in huge numbers of workers from India.

And here is the point where I think we reach the question of whether philosophy is really an art or like mathematics, a foundation for everything else. Because the reason really skilled computer experts are so highly sought after is that they can perform a very wide range of tasks given the right tool. Give an engineer Microsoft Project for a week and they have learned more about management than most MBAs from Harvard business school know on graduation. Give them solidworks and they become a draftsman, give them the analysis modules and the right training and they become a mechanical engineer.

The bigger problem here is that only a small proportion of the population has the ability to handle abstract concepts on this scale and it is not something that most people can learn. Most people when they approach a computer start off by telling themselves, this is going to be too hard for me to do.

Pay computer science graduates like lawyers, and see how many graduates computer science programs produce.

Though I’m not sure the percentage in arguing with someone who argues “Give an engineer Microsoft Project for a week and they have learned more about management than most MBAs from Harvard business school know on graduation.”

Cmk, so are you saying that if something is to someone’s (presumed) material advantage then she is forbidden to criticise it? Even granting that (faintly ludicrous) principle, academics might well object, in a purely self-interested vein, to the changes in the character of Higher Education that go along with such an agenda.

Well, we all know the degree is for signaling purposes. And it is quite valuable for that purpose. Office work isn’t about having mad skills of some sort, it’s mostly just about showing up and doing your job consistently. And if I were an office manager, I’d probably be looking primarily at college graduates. Failing to get through state college suggests a disappointing lack of resolve.

Ironically, I suspect that Rajan is largely correct in his identification of the problems with our educational system, but I don’t think they lead to the income inequality that he has identified. (that probably comes more from the monetary policy of the last 30 years which has been specifically targeted to put the clamps on economic growth as soon as wages show any sign of growth- it’s been remarkably effective) But even if he were right, the solution would be obvious: more progressive income tax to fund better education and childhood nutritional programs.

‘Cmk, so are you saying that if something is to someone’s (presumed) material advantage then she is forbidden to criticise it? Even granting that (faintly ludicrous) principle, academics might well object, in a purely self-interested vein, to the changes in the character of Higher Education that go along with such an agenda.’

No, not at all. First of all, I don’t think anyone should be forbidden from criticising anything. My point is that there’s a disconnect between one stating that a high-school education is enough to do most jobs, particularly office jobs, while occupying a job educating people way beyond high-school level (and possibily paying substantial fees), knowing full well that many of these people will end up doing jobs that one believes only require a high-school education.

Do we really need to have a debate as to why office managers require a bachelor’s degree (of any sort) from job candidates? Well, I thought that point was clear by now, but I guess we can have that discussion instead.

I just think that it’s more interesting that this explanation for income inequality is not much of a defense of it.

Any particular person may have any different reason for not completing a degree. But the ability to complete a degree is one piece of evidence that managers use to weigh your fitness for the job. And it is an easy to apply filter. This issue has been discussed before, sometimes with accompanying research. It’s impossible to get inside every hiring manager’s head, but this it seems likely that this is what they do. Maybe if acquiring a HS diploma were more challenging they wouldn’t do this. But as it is, a HS diploma does not show much of anything. And as a potential hire, you have to consider not just what skills you have, but what skills you can prove you have to an employer (on a resume, without requiring much of their time). I don’t really understand the complaining about this. It’s not the first point of contact in our education/employment system that needs fixing.

Bertram and others should consider the broader literature in economics on the causes of increasing inequality before they dismiss Rajan’s explanation. I think you will find that most economists believe that technological change that increases the returns to skill is the primary culprit, along with the school system’s inability to keep up. This is hardly something that only Chicago economists believe. For example, see Goldin and Katz’s work. Here is a summary:

http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/3640

Perhaps this work is incorrect. And there are competing explanations of increased inequality. But it is ridiculous to dismiss it based on anecdotal evidence or what “sounds right” to us.

Seconding josh @37 – anybody in the USA/UK who states that there is a shortage of engineers/programmers/scientists can be dismissed as a liar from the start.

I can (just about) believe that office workers need to be more skilled than 40 years ago, due to the increased use of computers. I’ve seen plenty of people struggling to complete a business task on a computer. For that matter, I’ve had difficulty myself on plenty of occasions.

But that’s not the same as needing an undergraduate degree. Most of what you learned in University won’t help you all that much when you’re struggling to get your employer’s buggy computer system to do what you need to do. (General problem-solving skills plus a substantial amount of background knowledge on how to interpret computer error messages is what you need here).

Even a computer science degree is not primarily about knowing how to work around bugs in poorly designed office automation systems. (Although, to be sure, a CS student will learn more than they ever wanted to know about solving that kind of problem, on the way to getting to grips with the course material).

As other posters have said, the degree is probably acting as a signal.

“What Matt (16) said – as Hacker and Pierson have just described (and as anyone who has even looked at the Piketty & Saez data should know), the main driving force in inequality in the US are the incomes of the top 1% and the top .1% – and it seems reeeeeallllly hard to make a technology induced skill premium argument about those.”

Globalisation.

Almost all of us are competing in national labour markets…there’s a very few (Tiger Woods, Spielberg, etc) who are competing in a global one (as individuals that is). More globalisation means an increasing difference between those who are picking up dimes from a couple of hundred million people and those who are picking up nickels from a couple of billion.

Note that there’s nothing here about whether these people are “worth it” or not. Whether they’re rent collectors or entrepreneurs, sports stars or business people. Not even anything about whether it’s a good or a bad thing that this is happening. Just, simply, some people are collecting nickels from billions in a way that no one was a couple of decades back: thus the increasing disparity between top 0.1% and the 99th percentile.

Sam 48 that’s fair enough. Personally I wasn’t trying to prejudge the substantive issue (though I think what you call an economic consensus is more like a neo-liberal consensus). I was pointing out how central this claim is to New Labour (and neo-liberalism more generally).

My grandfather worked as a bureaucrat in a large corporation. I do today. He dealt slightly more with numbers, I deal slightly more with people. They called him a “clerk” and they call me something with four words.

The difference? My grandfather was a bright high school graduate. I have seven years of post-high school education, including a graduate degree, and six figures of education debt. None of that education helps me do the job in the least: the other person working the same job is a college drop-out.

My grandfather raised five boys in a large house in a nice small town on his salary; Mom Mom never worked. I struggle to make my loan payments. This country has lost its fucking mind.

Can you believe that Raghuram Rajan! He is concerned about income inequality! He is against remedying income inequality via easy credit! He thinks education might be the answer!

I say a 1000 deaths to to the people’s enemy Raghuram Rajan!

My initial reaction was similar to Bunbury’s, I thought it might make sense if applied to the 20th percentile, but the 50th seems inconcievable.

And when I first entered the real workforce, with an ABD (All But Doctorate) I found myself in quite a pickle, overqualified for anything that didn’t require the (advanced)degree, but seen as a flight risk to anyone hiring for something I was formally qualified for. [By flight risk, I mean the hiring managers assumption was that I would soon find a better job and leave]. Does this mentality apply to office managers vis a vis college graduates? I suspect if I were a hiring office manager that I would be looking for community college graduates, and upper tier HS graduates for that very reason. And maybe I would accept college educated houswives, if I thought they weren’t ambitious enough to look for something better.

The college degree has become an important credential because it signals that a person’s SAT scores were above a certain admission threshold. Scores on the SAT and other standardized tests correlate tightly with IQ scores. Thus, a college degree usually indicates a person’s IQ falls on the right side of the bell curve. (The more elite the school, the higher the minimum SAT score required for admission). The above-average IQ is the sought-after asset for the modern workplace, where learning and adaptation have become increasingly important.

I think it’s quite feasible that part of the economic crash is due to a correction based on the accelerating cognitive stratification of the workforce. As machines take over more and more of the menial labor, we’ll soon be facing a massive social conundrum: Those in the lower cognitive classes will have no value on the labor market.

Agreeing with the other commenters here: It’s silly to use college as a credential for employment. It’s inefficient and expensive, when the score from a 1-hour IQ test could serve as an equivalent predictor of on-the-job performance.

So it’s a common practice (in the US anyway) so it must be okay. Plus there are more serious problems in the world and we have to solve them all before we can think about this.

I still don’t understand the problem. At worst, this is a proxy for other issues. Either, a) there is a glut of semi-skilled office worker types and businesses are applying filters that allow them to cut out a portion of the potential workforce with minimum effort (although costing us a lot in requiring people to get degree’s if they’re serious). Okay, but I think the greater than market demand for that type of worker is the problem and you need to focus on something else to solve the problem. Or b), completing a HS degree has gotten so absurdly easy that employers really do need to require a college degree as a decent signal of competence. So do we need to start failing people out of HS? I don’t see that’s helping much of anything.

By the way, engineers in the right field are picking up nickels from billions and earning in the 90th percentile and higher. And the need for high level skills is a very significant discriminating factor. But how do you find the right field? Get lucky. That’s the bitch of the free market.

engels ,

You didn’t feel the need to comment about the informative nature of the stream of comments ridiculing Raghuram Rajan and calling him all sorts of nasty names because he thinks education and not easy credit is the solution to stagnant real wages.

You did feel the need to comment when I poked a bit of fun at those comments.

Why?

Going to hell a little bit slower and with a smoother ride is NOT a meaningful improvement, pace the wishful thinking of co-opted progressives.

Speaking from my own slice of the left, I must disagree. I believe that going to hell a little bit slower and with a smoother ride IS a meaningful improvement, because I no longer believe that anything better is possible for the foreseeable future. There are comments on this very thread that help confirm this view. And I’m selfish enough (and concerned enough for my offspring) to want to postpone as long as possible the total collapse apparently required for a Better World(TM) to arise. I briefly thought the implosion of the global financial system and the blatant discrediting of virtually everything espoused by freshwater economics would do the trick, but instead the crisis has become yet another opportunity for the usual suspects to wield the lash with abandon. Up next: Ph.Ds in engineering should be mandatory for cashiers at McDonald’s, since cash registers are so freaking complicated.

Collapses tend to get worse the longer they’re postponed, though. But your point is certainly an arguable one, and I won’t quarrel with anyone who based on such a rationale votes “lesser of two evils”, as long as they do it with their eyes open and in the full awareness that they’re rewarding bad behavior.

I would also point out “lesser of two evils” is a pretty damn poor motivator for getting out the vote in large numbers, even if some of us are individually persuaded by it. The Democrats are really playing with fire- unfortunately on behalf of the whole country, not just themselves- by doing so little to help most of their core voters.

I haven’t read Rajan yet, but I wonder if it would be true, but that he misses the bigger point?

So, technological change might account for the change in ration of those at the 9o and 50 points, but noticing that misses the bigger change that was referred to in the Politics and Society issue (referred to here a few days ago) and in Lane Kenworthy’s update yesterday: the 99.9 to [60 | 50 | 40 | 20 | whatever] ratio.

Collapses tend to get worse the longer they’re postponed, though.

Outside of, e.g., The Sky Road and its “Otoh schemata,” how much theoretical or empirical evidence is there for this? I mean, it squares with my own intuition, but my intuition has not been a universally successful guide, to put it mildly. For instance, if the Roman Empire in the West had collapsed in the crisis of the third century instead of muddling on, would this have made things better or worse? And for whom?

roac,

Yes. mpowell did.

But I wasn’t referring to that.

Did anyone read the link?

A concise summary would be ->

Raghuram Rajan is concerned about income inequality. He thinks easy credit was the cynical political solution to this problem and was a disaster. He thinks education might be the answer to remedying stagnant real wages.

I don’t agree with him. I think Greenspan’s low rates in response to the .dot com bubble pretty obviously triggered the housing bubble.

But the policies of Freddie Mac Fannie Mae were certainly a disaster and easy credit or loose monetary policy is a poor way to battle income inequality.

I am not certain if education is the answer to stagnant real wages. [I think total hourly median compensation has been trending upwards.] But I certainly favor better education for everyone.

I am amazed by the abusive reponses to Raghuram Rajan’s tame conjecture.

He thinks easy credit was the cynical political solution to this problem and was a disaster.

His proposed alternative does less than nothing to explain or address the income and wealth drain to the very top, and carefully and deliberately avoids the obvious (but unpopular among Chicago economists and their paymasters ) non-credit-bubble-based remedies for actually reducing inequality rather than temporarily masking it. That makes him a cynical, lying asshole in my book- in company with his colleagues.

Yes. mpowell did.

I went back and read all of mpowell’s posts. I saw none in which he talked up easy credit as a remedy for income inequality. He did, at 40, propose more progressivity in the tax system. Like I said.

One problem for aspiring office workers is that those jobs are scarcer. Less and less paper to be filed as electronic data takes over. But this isn’t the real problem. As earlier posters have suggested, income inequality is driven by the enormous amounts of money being made in the upper percentiles. Who are these people? The are not engineers of any description. The real money is in money management. While some of the brokers, hedgers, and assorted scammers have degrees in quantitative analysis most have MBAs from a few select schools. Entry level stock brokers can make more than most engineers. Their “skill” is in getting the job.

By the way, engineers may be in short supply but the demand for specific types of engineers waxes and wanes. Aerospace engineers get dumped onto the unemployment roles in large numbers at regular intervals. Boeing, being tired of dealing with unions, is now aggressively moving to shift production to non-union states and overseas. And if an engineer is out of work for any length of time employers prefer to hire a recent grad with the latest skills for less pay.

If you want a well-paying job that can’t be outsourced, forget all those graduate degrees. Become a plumber. Toilets can’t be sent to India for repair. I know plumbers who are self-employed and make six-figure incomes. A couple have college degrees but couldn’t find work with them.

I went back and read all of mpowell’s posts. I saw none in which he talked up easy credit as a remedy for income inequality. He did, at 40, propose more progressivity in the tax system. Like I said.

I was slightly confused at first as well. He is talking about my post

I could understand :

percentage of college graduates declining -> payoff to college graduates increasing

That is basic supply/demand.

I don’t understand:

percentage of college graduates increasing-> payoff to college graduates increasing

which is apparently what is happening.

The increase in the percentage of college graduates is decreasing. But, so what, the percentage of college graduates is increasing. The percentage of college graduates will plateau at some level anyway.

mpowell,

Not not fair at all, very unreasonable, and dishonest to boot.

http://www.answers.com/topic/monetary-policy

“But it is not reasonably to equate looser monetary policy with easy credit. Easy credit implies consumer credit.”

So you see no connection between say the rate I as a consumer can get say a mortgage and monetary policy?

someguy, please read- slowly, and moving your lips if necessary- mpowell’s #89. As many times as necessary until you get it. Unless of course you’re not being ironic in accusing yourself of dishonesty and unfairness. Far be it from me to disagree in that case.

I found Rajan’s primary argument poorly supported and and ideologically driven (the basic message was that it was all the Government’s fault to let poor brown and black people buy homes, thereby supporting the underlying ahistorical and utopian argument that “markets are alwasys perfect and nothing would every go wrong but for Governments,” something Adam Smith would have found very strange as he was very well aware that markets and a capitalist system could not exist but for strong government (see Somalia at the present moment, see China’s history during the last half of 19th and first half of 20th centuries, for what happens to an economy when a strong central goverment disappears and is replaced by local war lords and anarchy). He also evades the fact that financial crisis seems to be an inherent part of the capitalist system, having reoccurred at regular intervals from the 17th century to the persent (tulip bulbs to houses). The event that just occurred was a complicated event with lots of contributing causes, but the primary proximate cause in the period 2002-2007 was not any Government policy, but a sudden movement of a vast amount of money into mortgage back securities and collateralized debt obligations tranches made up of MBS, which created a demand for even more mortgages, with lots of money to made by fees generated from those mortgages. And a classic Minsky bubble formed and head for its Ponzi moment.

As for the education level in the U.S., as a whole the population of the U.S. is still much better educated than the population of China or India where half the populations are still illiterate. In regard to Germany and Japan, both of those countries have far more social democratic policies in place than the U.S. and I also wonder about the level of comparative education. Technology has risen in those countries as well, but inequality is not as great in most other OECD countries as it is in the U.S., which is now approaching 3rd world level. Rajan’s raises his opinions to the level of factual statements and I find them unproven and based more on his ideology than any evidence.

So, it would seem, it’s only (outmoded?) prejudice against child labor that stops us lowering the school leaving age to 12, or even less.

Non sequitur. It is in fact a point not in dispute that child laborers were often good at their jobs. Their lack of efficiency was not the reason for banning child labor. I suppose an ethical aversion to the use of child labor could be described as a “prejudice”, but that seems rather… tendentious.

I hope your longer explanation makes more sense than this.

Steve LaBonne,

I went to google. I typed loose monetray policy easy credit. Something like 4th link down.

http://www.answers.com/topic/monetary-policy

Search for easy credit.

“Monetary policy can be characterized as being either tight credit or easy credit.”

It seems that I am not the only person who thinks easy credit and loose monetary policy are at least somewhat similar phrases.

But I guess the folks at answer.com are just a bunch of unreasonable conservatives and being dishonest when they use the term easy credit to describe loose monetary policy.

Steve LaBonne #93 – I’m not sure if you were taking umbrage at my slightly tongue in cheek use of the term old geezers. What I also see as a problem (Which I don’t really know if it is widespread or not) is that beacuse the pool of jobs has contracted and older people are staying in their old jobs, or getting turfed out for replacement by cheap youngsters, is an information and experience gap, such that newbies don’t learn from the old hands experience. Add this to a culture which values management more than expertise and you end up with know nothing managers getting rid of experienced people and employing new people who don’t know so much, and as a result things don’t work so well.

guthrie, my comment wasn’t directed at you at all, but at the irony that proposals to raise the retirement age are increasingly popular just when they would do the most harm.

PHB, you should stop talking about lawyers. The industry you’re talking about is “accounting.” Maybe. Not that it matters much, but the “upper limit” on the size of a law firm has less (or nothing) to do with conflict issues (which are waived for 99% of clients) than the sheer impossibility of managing those firms and finding clients willing to pay a blended rate over $400 an hour. They tend to break up from inertia, not “conflict issues .” After a while, as many partners leave any give year as are made or lateral in.

Plus there aren’t any patents or copyrights for lawyers, and no ethical code of conduct for engineers. Bidding is very different, costing is very different, retainer agreements are very different. You’re also pretty off on partner payscales (the words “I wish!” come to mind – junior partners would be making over $2 million). Again, the industry you’re thinking of is accounting.

95: steven c, I don’t know you or your situation. Based on my experience/observation, the path through generic State U in the the US is not that overwhelmingly difficult for 80% of the population. Generic filters are not designed to work in every case. Just most cases.

Someguy: I don’t see the point in carrying this argument on any further. If you want to argue that looser monetary policy leads to easier consumer credit, you are free to do so. Probably there is some connection. But banks, not consumers, are the entities immediately impacted by monetary policy so you need to do more than just link to a definition. Furthermore, the article itself (which you have allegedly read) discusses specific legislative actions to increase consumer credit within the last decade distinct from monetary policy itself. So what Rajan is talking about is almost assuredly different than what I was talking about.

Chris, I’ll spell out my point at greater length, but for the moment I’ll observe that a large proportion of the population don’t much like either school or post-school education, and only go because they can’t get a job otherwise. If education requirements for jobs (legal in the case of school leaving age, market-driven beyond that) aren’t actually necessary, then we should be doing our best to get rid of them, as with other forms of unjustified discrimination. (As a side-effect, this would make it much cheaper to provide free, high quality education to those who desired it for its own sake).

I don’t believe this, and I’ll argue why at greater length when I get some time.

@ Hilarious

“As earlier posters have suggested, income inequality is driven by the enormous amounts of money being made in the upper percentiles. Who are these people? The are not engineers of any description. ”

You don’t half say some stupid stuff. I am an engineer and I am in the top percentile. And that is with the stock market in the tank and none of my companies likely to go IPO.

Some money managers have certainly been overpaid. But the typical ‘financial adviser’ working for a bank or brokerage makes considerably less than their clients who are doctors, lawyers and engineers. The wall street firms and the high flyer traders are a tiny minority even within that industry. And they don’t usually make all that much over their careers since most traders careers are rather short.

As Taleb points out, a successful trader earns many times what a compliance officer does in a year. But over a career a compliance office can expect to earn considerably more as their careers last 30+ years rather than 30 months.

The engineers on Wall Street who code the flash trading systems don’t earn as much as traders either, but they earn more than compliance officers. The other highly paid group are the quants – hey look! more engineers.

And again, I think the history of increasing education requirements in jobs that haven’t really changed that much answers that question with a resounding “yes”. As for arguments involving the necessity of using computers nowadays, ask almost any parent of pre-teens and young teens who is the go-to person in the household for computer problems. ;)

I suspect that there is a bit of path dependence on this requirement. My parents tell me that back in the day (say 40’s to 50’s), prospective employers would require a high school diploma, and that this would frequently cut the applicant pool in half or more. In fact, my dad says that recruiters would come sniffing around the schools trying to get kids to drop out and take a decent-paying factory job and that they didn’t have to worry about any fancy high school diploma in the real world.

Of course, after enough parents discovered that pressuring the school administration to pass their kid was an easy way to get an advantage, standards started to slip and the natural incremental reform was to require some sort of post-high school training. And so while the earlier requirement of simply graduating high school may have been a very valid one, the new standard as it became ever more elevated became much less so.

Given that we are focusing on the explicit content of the curriculum, it’s hard to see much in the typical school curriculum that contributes to the requirement of democracies for an informed citizenry.

Let’s take, say, the need for US citizens to take an informed view of the debate over health care reform. That needs at least some economics, some demography, some idea about how the health care sector works, and some understanding of US political processes – the major parties, the rules of the Senate and so on. Ideally, you’d want some ideas from political theory and sociology to put the debate into a broader context.

As far as I can see, the intersection of these requirements with the content of a typical high school education* is approximately zero, and there are plenty of college degrees for which the same would be true.

So, in exactly the same way that an intelligent 7-th grader could in principle do the average office job, an intelligent 7-th grader with access to the New York Times could be at least as well-informed a citizen as a high school or college graduate.

In reality, I agree, there are all sorts of indirect ways in which education promotes a more informed citizenry, but that’s my point. These are exactly the same ways in which education promotes a more productive workforce.

* I think some US high schools teach classes in civics which might cover the basics of US political institutions – Australia didn’t even have this when I went to school, and look how I turned out.

Piglet, I agree that, as an explanation for growing US inequality, stagnation in educational attainment doesn’t do well (though I think it is a contributing factor). I’m responding to the view, shared by most commenters here that this explanation can’t possibly be right because education is unrelated to productivity.

(My 120 refers to 118)

119:

“I’m responding to the view, shared by most commenters here that this explanation can’t possibly be right because education is unrelated to productivity.”

Chris Bertram:

“My guess is that, in terms of the real skills objectively needed to do the job, a high school diploma is more than adequate for most office work. Of course, it may be that, because of competition for those jobs, you need a higher level of qualification to get one. But that’s a different story.”

Don’t think these positions are mutually exclusive. Employers may rationally prefer college grads for certain types of work that traditionally didn’t require a degree, but the question is whether employers would be willing to hire more college grads at good salaries and conditions if only they could find them. And that I think is just not the case. They may choose to fill the few slots they have with more educated applicants (and pay them like unskilled workers) but that doesn’t mean there is a shortage of college educated applicants. It is precisely a consequence of there being plenty of college grads willing to take whatever job they can get.

You are mixing up two things: better credentials and better education. They are not necessarily the same thing. Rajan is not really addressing the credentials aspect of the equation. It’s part of the weakness of his argument, but you should be careful there.

I am not sure about your point. Rajan:

“…technological progress in the US requires the labor force to have ever greater skills. A high school diploma was sufficient for office workers 40 years ago, whereas an undergraduate degree is barely sufficient today. But the education system has been unable to provide enough of the labor force with the necessary education.”

It sounds like Rajan is saying we need more college grads because they are better office workers. You may attack the second part of that statement but the first part also seems wrong.

mpowell,

Roac asked –

“someguy—Did someone on this thread propose “easy credit” as a solution to the problem of stagnant real wages? I missed that. ”

I pointed out that you had. Since I consider easy credit and loose monetary policy to be fairly inter changeable terms. The sole purpose of the link is to show that lots of people think easy credit and loose monetary are fairly inter changeable terms. Given that a very fair and reasonable interpetation of your post at that point, before you explained that you no longer felt monetary policy would get the job done, was that you felt that easy credit ie loose monetary policy was a solution to stagnant wages.

You responded that –

“But it is not reasonably to equate looser monetary policy with easy credit. Easy credit implies consumer credit. ”

“and it would not be honest to describe my earlier post as wishing to address income inequality through easy credit.”

That just isn’t true. My characterization your post at the time was reasonable and honest. See above.

125 I think what you are missing is the difference between the incremental effect on an individuals economic prospects of an incremental increase in his education, versus what the effect on the entire system would be from an incremental increase in the educational level of the entire population. In the former case, the ability to outcompete his lesser educated cohorts will boost your choosen individual at the expense on his cohorts. I.E. the gain might be to one player in a zerosum game. In order to affect the overall statistics, we must change the economic output of the nation as a whole. Now, I strongly suspect that other things being equal, we could magically improve the educational attainment across the board, that productivity -or more likely productivity growth would probably improve. But, I suspect it would be a fairly weak effect. I also don’t see it having much impact on relative income distribution (which was Rajan’s argument).

In education, more could be done with the concept of ‘Flucht nach vorn’, or the Red Queen, or doubtless some other clever guy’s recent book-title. Anyway, it’ll always be a loser’s game for the USA, as for much of the West, so long as India, China, etc have such a long way to go to catch up to our wage-levels, and such a large capacity for educational productivity.

The point that Chris and Omega are making here is that education is a normal good. As such it’s subject to diminishing returns. I agree about that.

However, is it really the case in the US that employers require more qualifications than they need? In Ireland and Britain it’s sometimes difficult to get people who can do simple filing.

In Ireland and Britain it’s sometimes difficult to get people who can do simple filing.

I really doubt this. I’ve applied for jobs like this in the past – there’s no shortage of candidates.

Coming from a country with a strong system of vocational schools, I can say they are a double-edged sword. They do help to make sure that nearly everyone can get some or even a lot of training, even if they no interest or capabilities for intellectual schooling.

on the other hand, they become low-status no matter what you do. educated and otherwise in-the-loop xpeople try to keep their kids out of them, and by and large they succeed. Also, decision makers everywhere in the system did not attend vocational school themselves, or at most the ‘higher vocational school’ type that really is more like a basic US college. Some vocational schools do manage to achieve a relatively good status reputation, like schools for laboratory assistants for a while., And then they manage to attract students would could have gone to other parts of the system.

But this never lasts long. Either the school rebrands itself as non-vocational, or it gradually loses its best students until its reputation is middling again.

You could argue that there is plenty of need for basic schools for people who do not intend to make ‘being good at school’ a major facet of their personality, but the risk is always there for a class divide: vocational students send their children to vocational schools, the rest do not

Is the judgment that there is a shortage of engineers also based on the assumption that engineering is intrinsically more worthwhile than other jobs? Certainly one could easily get this impression from reading comments like PHB’s.

Barry,
MIT caliber people are a pain in the you know what. More likely they want people who are so desperate to rise to the top–or to form an emotional bond with their superiors–that they’ll do whatever is necessary.

Let’s take, say, the need for US citizens to take an informed view of the debate over health care reform. That needs at least some economics, some demography, some idea about how the health care sector works, and some understanding of US political processes – the major parties, the rules of the Senate and so on.

ISTM that even more important are some idea of how to think about heterogeneous groups without reducing them to their “typical” members, statistics, and how to think critically and spot bullshit. The lack of those skills is, IMO, how we wound up with the systematically misinformed citizenry we have right now. I don’t know if Australia is any better off, but I bet not much.

@engels 137, Steve 143: In a primarily capitalist society you can’t really pin that failure on the employers, I don’t think. An employer who voluntarily undertook that kind of avoidable cost would be outcompeted as a result, and that’s how cherrypicking the already-trained becomes the dominant strategy. Individual volition is irrelevant from a societywide perspective, since society will always be made up of different people who make different choices and the societal outcomes are the results of that diversity of choices.

Rather, an educated workforce needs to be recognized as a public good and provided accordingly, which brings us back around to the educational system. We really need to get the financial weight of education off the working class — they just don’t have the resources for it, and the result is undereducation. But that’s just my hopelessly liberal (by US standards) view.

An employer who voluntarily undertook that kind of avoidable cost would be outcompeted as a result

No, in many cases an employer who isn’t smart enough to understand the value of investing in training (and in then treating trained workers well enough so that they stick around) is outcompeted. In fact that’s exactly what’s happening to us vis a vis the global economy.

We really need to get the financial weight of education off the working class—they just don’t have the resources for it, and the result is undereducation.

When you put it like that it sounds eerily like common sense. It’s just a pity that policy in the UK is taking us in precisely the opposite direction…

Oh, dear. Further corrections to 147 are called for. Cardozo went to Columbia not Harvard, and the switch to three years happened about 1890. Why do I not look these things up before posting rather than after?

‘John Stuart Mill says in his “Principles of Political Economy”:

‘“It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being.”

‘That is, however, by no means the aim of the capitalistic application of machinery. Like every other increase in the productiveness of labour, machinery is intended to cheapen commodities, and, by shortening that portion of the working-day, in which the labourer works for himself, to lengthen the other portion that he gives, without an equivalent, to the capitalist. In short, it is a means for producing surplus-value.’

@148
There’s no way to prove it. If the employees were good they wouldn’t have left. If they were good the company wouldn’t be failing. If they were good they wouldn’t have complained about their treatment. I’m not saying people don’t complain for insufficient reason or that they don’t make similar mistakes in some cases.

As far as training, on the one hand you need a cushion (of time and money), which is impossible given Wall Street demands for quarterly profits that consistently exceed projections by more than the amount they were projected to exceed projections (I am not making this up), and for appropriate measures to ensure costs are continually minimized. And on the other hand, there are sometimes other substantive issues, too complicated to explain.

When I want to be mentally assualted, I just read an article or study from any Professor from Chicago.

That entire university should be burned to the ground.

I love the idea that apart from engineers the US economy sorts everyone into an appropriate ‘rank’ based on his or her IQ.

Engineer is simply too broad of a class to talk about this way. You can get tied up in this kind of debate with people talking past one another, but nothing much useful happens. It is the problem of arguing while pretending anecdotes=data.

And @151, isn’t that exactly Hayek’s position: that the money is made by the man who knows how to move workers and materials (equally kind of natural resources) around to where someone will pay $$$$ for them? I suppose in preindustrial societies this was true, and it may be true again.

Then (and more relevant to the OP) there’s the misguided idea that if person P directly or indirectly supervises several individuals including Q, P has at minimum (at his/her fingertips) all the information possessed by Q and the others P supervises. After all, P is at a higher level than Q, therefore is better than Q, therefore Q may not know anything P does not know.

Chris Bertram: (regarding engineer pay and supply) “Only someone really gripped by a particular view of the world could write such a thing.”

Do you really think that paying engineers more would have no effect on the number of young people who decide to become engineers? If the government set a minimum pay level of $250,000 a year for graduates of Caltech, MIT, and Georgia Tech, it would have no effect on the number of people trying to get into those schools? What if they prohibited corporations from paying any non-engineer a higher salary than the lowest-paid engineer in the company? (Note: I’m not actually advocating these things – this is pretty much a reducio ad absurdum argument.) Sure, there would still be some people who pursued other fields, but most people are going to go where the money is. Most people do not go into law, finance, or medicine because they have a deep and abiding love for those fields. They go into those fields because they are some of the few remaining that can pretty much guarantee an upper-middle-class lifestyle for someone who is sufficiently intelligent and driven.

#169: Do you really think that paying engineers more would have no effect on the number of young people who decide to become engineers?

The interesting question is not this, but rather whether it would increase the number of good engineers available. It is not “engineers” that are in short supply, but rather engineers who are skilled and effective and have current skills (at least where software engineers are concerned). The idea, expressed earlier in the thread, that “anyone can learn to code in Java,” is somewhat true, but not relevant. There is far more to being a good software engineer than knowing how to write Java code (or C++, or any other popular language). The level of skill required to design and write good code and to keep up with the many skill sets needed to do so in a rapidly changing field is high. Not everyone has that level of skill. In fact, few do.

Chris, my original statement was hyperbole. The underlying point still stands, I think.

171-171, I guess hyperbole is now on the list of rhetorical figures banned from CT.

Very funny, Chris ;-)

As noted one of the skills that one acquires a bit in a 4 year degree, is how to communicate both in writing and orally. If you read reports its clear that the average High School Graduate can not write very well. Also you are looking for evidence that a person can learn and if possible to teach themselves. So a big piece of the reason is both the better communication skills and then the ablity to learn (which then means in a lot of jobs what you learned in college is less important than that you demonstrated that you can master a significant unit of knowledge.
As an example once I left Grad School in Geophysics, I hardly used much advanced math and definitly did few proofs. (My Grandfather who got a EE in 1916 observed the same in his career)

Way to fail to grasp my point, which was that we are not producing (culturally + through the educational system) enough good-to-excellent engineers.

Don’t get sidetracked by the “how many engineers get into the top 0.5%” argument – a career engineer who is good out-earns the vast majority of other workers. It’s a great and desirable job. There are positions sitting open for 6 months with good salary and benefits (well above the median) that need either an excellent graduate, an experienced industry candidate, or an immigrant candidate on H1-B (big hassle for all involved) to fill them. There are plenty of applicants, and the salary is very elastic and negotiable (upwards). But not very many of them are excellent, and it’s a damn shame.

If you think employer-sponsored training is going to turn anyone with a reasonable IQ into a productive engineer, you are high, and/or a communications/business graduate. These are highly intelligent and trained people, not stem cells.

The main problem of this discussion seems to be the assumption that anyone ought to be able to earn in the top 10%, to do so straight out of college, and then be in the top 1% within 10 years. That, of course, is not going to happen. Coming to terms with one’s own mediocrity may be a life’s work, but it looks to me as if quite a lot of people should be starting in on it rather sooner.

If you think employer-sponsored training is going to turn anyone with a reasonable IQ into a productive engineer, you are high, and/or a communications/business graduate.

Perhaps deserving of an award for Strawman of the Month. Well, if there weren’t so many other candidates.

I made no implications about merit. Regardless of the mechanism by which rewards are distributed, only 1% of the population can be in the top 1% of anything. If we return to the original discussion, then it might well be observed that there are many things wrong with how the US economy distributes rewards at the moment. But that was not where the discussion seemed to have proceeded, being more concerned with whining about how much ‘engineers’ get, or should get, paid. To which I might retort that ‘engineers’ are all very well, but you wouldn’t want to actually put them in charge of anyone else. For a start, they’re quite likely to be jihadists. Or Nazis, apparently.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jan/02/extremism-engineering

I meant to add that my advice, especially to women (who tend to do the opposite), is to the “hardest” specialty you can do. If you can do embedded systems work, you probably won’t be out of work unless the economy really collapses.

Coder: So, in your opinion, virtually every engineer above age 50 is incompetent? Because these people just can’t get jobs. And how is someone supposed to start a family while working continuous 80-hour weeks?

alex: “The main problem of this discussion seems to be the assumption that anyone ought to be able to earn in the top 10%, to do so straight out of college, and then be in the top 1% within 10 years.”

No, but the smartest people in the country should be able to do so. The problem is that engineering is a strange outlier in this regard: it requires an extremely high IQ (not to mention lots of studying and hard work), yet the pay, prestige, and working conditions are far beneath any other similarly demanding job. A further issue is that a lot of very stupid people can earn lots of money in fields like finance and management, despite doing nothing productive whatsoever, and that allocation of such sinecures has a great deal to do with the existing class structure in America. The Wharton MBA is the modern-day title of nobility: it permits its holder to obtain massive income derived from the labor of others, without regard to knowledge or merit.

IMNSHO someone who hasn’t taken Data Structures and Algorithms, the non-math part of the standard sophomore sequence, is next to useless.

I got out of the biz a long time ago, but I really didn’t need to know more than a few basic types of structures, the stack, the queue, the tree, etc and some sorting stuff. What are you thinking of when you say this? Bear in mind that I was basically a code monkey and that we were using a version of C++ in a DOS environment.

Bianca makes good points. Deep understanding of tough material, and the ability to *produce* something will take you far.

Josh: 80 hour weeks? I guess I can’t respond with data, but smells like bullshit to me. Plus, if we’re going by “hours” worked, I’d prefer to be a professional working 40-60hr weeks than an unskilled wage earner hammering out at least as many hours with very little job security. Anecdote time – I know a bunch of top notch software engineer folks under 40, who have recently started families. I am certain that none of them are chained to their desks/laptops cranking out 80 hour weeks. There are empty desks in our building – we simply can’t find enough good people (and not for lack of competitive salary. Six figures and reasonable working conditions are a probably a decent deal for a middle class family )

As upset as I am about rising income inequality (largely an effect of out-of-control earnings for finance industry types, entertainment types, and peak-level exeutives who have their compensation packages designed by their own friends), I’m frustrated by the low skills and poor educations of most of the people younger than me, and my own age — and I’m not exactly a highly credentialed supergenius. I’m also really frustrated by an educational system that seems to be more of a social networking tool than creating hard-boiled intellects, and enabling them with skills to go further in academia/industry/home life, invent things, design important life-saving (or planet-saving) technologies, etc. So bring on the immigrants.

The high school diploma was once America’s basic credential of overall competence. It could, at one time, reasonably be assumed that a high school graduate was able to read fluently, write well, and handle basic math. That is no longer the case. What happened was that well-meaning social reformers pushed for universal high school graduation, and the only way to accomplish this was by watering down the standards.

If by “well-meaning social reformers” you mean “parents determined to see that their kid get every advantage possible”, you might have a point. Otherwise, not so much.

The gap between the rich and the extremely rich is the fastest-growing

I wonder if there’s any way out of our situation without an (unlikely) revolt against the top 1% by the next 9%. God knows the rest of us have little say nowadays.

There’s also a danger that if you educate people too much they might not want to do the jobs you’ve got lined up for them anymore.

“is a strange outlier in this regard: it requires an extremely high IQ (not to mention lots of studying and hard work), yet the pay, prestige, and working conditions are far beneath any other similarly demanding job. ”

Are we back talking about academia again?

So if I may summarise. The big money in America goes to the smartest people. How do we know they are the smartest? Because they managed to get their hands on the money.

engels, I said that “only 1% of the population can be in the top 1% of anything”. If there is no top 1%, because there’s no distribution, then there’s no “there” there, is there?

Anyhoo, since the likelihood of incomes in the USA being distributed entirely equally is slightly smaller than that of the Second Coming, the whole point is rather moot.

Under an egalitarian distribution of everyone’s earnings would fall within the first percentile (and within the 99th percentile.) Perhaps more significantly, under a distribution which is _close_ to egalitarian everyone’s earnings would be _close_ to those at these points in the distribution.

The ‘bottom’ 90% of people in the US have in fact got plenty of power. Try carrying on economic production or fighting a war without them. I think you would struggle, even with a few hundred thousand members of the high IQ society on your side. Maybe one day they’ll realise they have it.

Robert,
In my day, Data Structures/Algorithms was a one-year sequence. The math was in the second semester and a lot of the programming exercises were duplicated. A fair number of people cannot learn to do the programming exercises after having them presented to them two or even three times. I love the abstract stuff (never got to attempted proofs of code though) and it’s a great exercise to try to get a design as close to the ideal ADT form as possible, but the principles behind ADTs or whatever you call them are important. Learning Java first doesn’t give you them for free, especially if your first language was Visual Basic or Perl.

SoV,
What Robert mentioned w/r/t knowing there are different algorithms to do the same thing is one thing I have in mind, and knowing there is a way to do it that will be horrifically inefficient, another way that isn’t much harder that will have reasonable performance, and another way that in the limit case is amazingly efficient but isn’t usually worth the trouble it usually gives. Twenty-five years ago, you didn’t have the tools that come with Java and C++ now. We expected a first-year hire to be able to code, for example, a linked list from scratch. But occasionally you’d find a graduate who had to have dynamic memory allocation explained to him using a diagram like the one in the TRS-80 manual.

Incidentally, though this is getting off-track, in the mid-1980s we recruited at places like UW-Madison and Penn State. A few years later, we were hiring fewer people and not spending money on travel and relocation expenses, so students in those places simply didn’t get the chance to come work for us in Massachusetts.

“A graduate who can’t program a linked list will never be able to learn it.”

That is a strange statement. How else would they know how to program a linked list than by learning it. Besides, only a tiny percentage of software programmers actually need to program a linked list. I understand you are probably saying that one should understand the nuts and bolts even without having to directly tinker with them but this statement is pretty narrow and somewhat arbitrary.

(Also, people who don’t know important things because their education was based on an assumption that there would be other people somewhere in their workplace who could take care of that for them happens to be one of my pet peeves.)

It is not the purpose of education to provide on the job training, but rather the intellectual ability to absorb on the job training. It’s not possible in academic coursework to teach everything any graduate might need to know in his or her first year on the job.

However your other point is quite compatible with what I just said and makes sense.

It is certainly possible in academic coursework to convey an impression (accurate or not) about the discipline being taught, or to teach the material in such a way that graduates will be able, for example, to code to others’ designs but not modify the designs or create new designs. (Forty years ago it could be assumed that large numbers of programmers would do nothing but write tiny, simple bits of code to others’ well-specified designs, under close supervision–see The Mythical Man-Month.)

piglet,
I’m not sure how relevant your question is because I don’t know who is hiring recent bachelor’s candidates these days, and no recent CS graduate would not have Data Structures. A CS graduate without good programming skills would probably go into a nonprogramming related job in the industry, like Quality Assurance or Customer Support.

Ramp-up time to learn object-oriented design from scratch, for example, especially without a good CS grounding, would probably involve months of dedicated study and practice. But I have often not found experienced people who had the skills I wanted, or argued with others and with HR about what skills and experience were actually mandatory. Some things can be taught on the job, but learning through making errors is not always feasible. In most cases, if no one could be found, we would leave the position open and a current employee would do the extra work, which would take less time than training and otherwise dealing with someone unqualified.

ScentOfViolets: “There seem to be a few ill-defined terms here! But really, what do you mean when someone is “not cut out either intellectually or temperamentally” for higher education? If all you mean by the latter is that you have to have the ability to sit still, concentrate for long periods of time, and have the self-discipline to work towards long-term goals with little immediate reward, well, maybe.”

Yes, that’s pretty much what I mean by not being temperamentally suited. Some people will never have these traits, and others might at a later time but not when they are in their late teenage years. In fact, a majority of teenagers (especially teenage males) don’t have these traits. Science shows that the human brain does not completely mature until age 25, and teenagers all throughout human history are known for their recklessness and inability to think straight. Yet we construct our systems of higher education in flagrant disregard for the facts of human biology.

To some extent, I am speaking from personal experience here. Despite high SAT scores and a good degree of intellectual curiosity, I did very poorly in high school, and struggled through college for several years. I was intellectually prepared for the work, but not yet emotionally or temperamentally ready. When I went back to college at age 26, I had a far easier time and graduated with little trouble.

Ramp-up time to learn object-oriented design from scratch, for example, especially without a good CS grounding, would probably involve months of dedicated study and practice.

In my experience, nobody graduates who doesn’t need months of practice on the job to understand object-oriented design, even if they took relevant courses, and many never will. Not that the courses are useless but you seem to rather underestimate the relevance of on the job experience. Incidentally, I started in software engineering without having learned either database theory or OO. I did study serious computer science, mostly theoretical stuff, and learned everything I really needed on the job. I’m not arguing that this is the best way to start a career in the field, though. One pecularity of software engineering seems to be that nobody agrees on what it really takes to be a good programmer. Everybody has their own pet theory and every hiring manager uses different criteria.

engels, I said that “only 1% of the population can be in the top 1% of anything”. If there is no top 1%, because there’s no distribution, then there’s no “there” there, is there?

I’m not following you on this one. Are you saying that only the top 15 of the population can be in the top 1% of any measurement (test scores, track times, etc) if you are ranking them by relative performance, say as is the case with IQ scores? Because I’ve had both more than 10% and less than 10% of my students receive 90% or more of all possible points awarded during a semester.

We expected a first-year hire to be able to code, for example, a linked list from scratch. But occasionally you’d find a graduate who had to have dynamic memory allocation explained to him using a diagram like the one in the TRS-80 manual.

Auuugh! Pointers! I hate pointers. That’s were most of my debug time was spent :-( Anyway, a question: when you talk about coding up a linked list from scratch, does it have to work the first time around? Or do you just have to get the general algorithm and variables right? There’s a big difference there, I would think. A lot of guys I knew back then would just do a cut-&-paste of some old linked list code and progressively modify it, and this seemed to make the work go quicker than doing it from scratch.

#232 It’s really not that interesting, but I thought the original claim was that if 100 students take a test then only 10 of them can score within the top decile of scores for that test, regardless of the distribution. I said that is false, because, eg., if they all get full marks they have all scored in the top decile of the distribution (and in the bottom decile, etc). Alex’s response, as I understand it, was that you can’t refer to this distribution as a ‘distribution’ but I think most mathematicians, not to mention ordinary speakers of English, would disagree.

Anyway it is perhaps more noteworthy that someone who advises everyone who isn’t among the super-rich to ‘com[e] to terms with [their] mediocrity’ then goes on to claim that he ‘made no implications about merit’.

guys, you are not being fair to alex. His point, taken not as a mathematical proposition but as an observation about US income distribution, is totally valid. And it is important to understand the fallacy in Rajan’s argument. Cf. 219.

Bianca, I am not sure which question of mine you’re answering.

I know its off topic (the original one anyway), but there are many paths to SW development. The one I am familar with is hard-science or engineering types who are handed a computer manual, and told -“now go solve your/our research problem”. Most of these people had little to no formal training in CS or software engineering, and yet they routinely outperformed CS majors.
I remember helping a good friend make a career change, he was a theoretical physicist, but the geographical place he wanted to come to needed computer/software designer types. I had to teach him what the compiler/computer hardware did with his code, as he had no idea how it worked. Within a few years he became a toplevel computer architect.

Scent of Violets #229, fascinating post, but what I think you are describing is best summarized as “doublethink”. There are a number of examples on this thread and on the “creative class BS” thread, not as pristine.

Those straw man Communists have declared you an Enemy of the People? Oh dear. Maybe you should follow your own advice in #184.

Barry,

1. I was saying that “linked list, which is a well defined problem of moderate difficulty, involving a variety of useful subskills, and incidentally a useful thing to know about if you are going to design, code, or debug programs of more than minimal complexity, is a weed-out exercise widely employed in undergraduate computer science degree programs, and an exercise I think it’s important to be able to do if you’re going to be employed as a software engineer, inability to do which exercise would not only negatively impact grades in the sophomore year but would probably keep a student out of any advanced course that was programming-intensive (i.e. does not impact your ability to pass cryptography and other math-heavy courses but does impact your ability to pass software-design and -architecture courses).”

2. I was responding to piglet, who made a complaint along the lines of “why should we bother teaching kids to factor quadratic equations or what the First Amendment is, most of them will never need to use the knowledge.”

If you’re saying I neglected to write a phrase-by-phrase demolition of a comment with which I disagreed, sure.

America is much poorer than it was 30 years ago. People can’t afford college, and evidently, the government doesn’t consider higher education to be worth the cost of making it available to all qualified Americans. I know that there are some who are exceptional students and able to earn enough scholarships to cover most of the cost of of college; my own daughter did this. But most of us are, by definition, average.

Young people know that if they can’t find a way to pay for college, they’ll almost certainly remain locked into poverty for the rest of their lives. I think this is why so many young people are dropping out of high school today. A high school diploma means nothing today, so if one has no way to pay for college, there really isn’t much point in finishing high school.