5+ years of experience

I read every book in the library on the higher education crisis, in 2019.

College does not lead to a job.

[5+ years of experience @isomorphed]

.

[pHiycrtyl @iycrtylph]

universal high quality education is the fruit of a just society, and that is brought about by class struggle; education is not itself what brings a just society about.

[5+ years of experience @isomorphed]

@BierVicki And yes I agree this is not quite true. A good example of why broad statements aren't good enough and collecting both supporting and contrary evidence is important.

[5+ years of experience @isomorphed]

We don't really need data to say these things:

• Harvard graduates can teach at lower schools, but not vice versa.

• Academics spend their entire lives in academia, never or almost never earning a living via conventional means. (In fact, doing so would reduce their standing.)

[5+ years of experience @isomorphed]

@BierVicki In risk? Or in engineering?

[5+ years of experience @isomorphed]

@BierVicki Not at all. I just try to post evidence when I find it. It's better to aggregate a large case then just say random stuff that seems true to you.

[5+ years of experience @isomorphed]

⅘ of US-trained tenure-track faculty at PhD-granting universities received their doctorates from just ⅕ of universities.

https://t.co/oy7Cw5nZyV

[security guard using work printer @isomorphisms]

damn, Hugo Duminil-Copin *is* John Henry

[Bryan Cheong @bryancsk]

You know a surprising number of things we do in materials science is just solve linear algebra problems...?

[5+ years of experience @isomorphed]

I will try my best to measure it…

Every book on the topic agrees with my experience:

professors—who by construction, and by association, only know that—do not, as a rule, teach to "some kid who was good at high school and wanted to listen to stuff before getting a job".

[5+ years of experience @isomorphed]

One out of five surveyed tenure-track faculty had at least one parent with a PhD, compared with less than 1% of US adults in comparable birth cohorts.

https://t.co/ecCtmtpw86

[5+ years of experience @isomorphed]

There's much more need for people to scan things, than for people to design the scanners.

[5+ years of experience @isomorphed]

Let's take Cognex as an example, because they make computer vision systems for Amazon fulfillment centers.

The stated job requirement to work there is something simple that anyone could do: "One college course in optics."

[5+ years of experience @isomorphed]

The actual requirement is completely unknown, but looking across Zebra, Cognex, and JR Systems (all scanners at an Amazon fulfillment center), the number of jobs globally is max a few dozen.

[5+ years of experience @isomorphed]

Academia is a shark tank, and what people are counting on is something very, very different.

[5+ years of experience @isomorphed]

Quite the X furore over something that, not only definitely happened, but happens all the time—even when not reported by the major newspaper of our language.

Typically, they forget to care about normal people who rely on School to *not* be a shark tank, but a place of honor.

[5+ years of experience @isomorphed]

Academia is a shark tank.

[Alex Kontorovich @AlexKontorovich]

In the US, we graduate on the order of 1000 math PhDs a year, and there are about 300 postdoc jobs (and ~70 tenure track jobs three years later). So no, a math PhD is not, and has never been, a "gold medal" (in the sense of an academic position).

And is "merit" about potential or about actual results? I really hope it's not the former (which is much more error prone to measure)!

About Zhang specifically, there's much more to his story than what's been reported, and it's devastating how much he suffered before his breakthrough.

[5+ years of experience @isomorphed]

I remember wearing these heavy backpacks filled with textbooks from age ten or twelve

We all thought this meant something!

[Banks ♞ @promisenakpan]

School is a giant pyramid scheme.

Someone studies a particular course in school and graduates without being able to get a job so he pays more money to get a PhD so he can teach other people the same course he couldn’t get a job for and make money from it.

Nice.

[5+ years of experience @isomorphed]

"Sixty-nine
percent of [new lawyers’] fathers are managers or professionals,compared to 20% of the general
workforce.

About 12% of the lawyers in the sample are the children of lawyers, and another
36% had some other close relative who was an attorney."

[5+ years of experience @isomorphed]

After the JD: First Results of a National Study of Legal Careers

NALP Foundation
American Bar Foundation

https://t.co/z4slfJwvSa

Chicago, IL
Overland Park, Kansas
• 2004