Even Chinese Are Rejecting Mediocre American University Education

That Mozart's compositions as a child were very much part of his father's child prodigy business, and that pretty much all of Mozart's more popular output was composed when he was an adult.

You can't remember? I can't be bothered digging out specific examples - I'm happy to leave you to humiliate yourself.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
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bill.sloman
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There are 20-somethings living in really lovely homes with several cars in the Boston area, working entry-level white collar jobs that are paying maybe 35-45k a year. As I mentioned the median "lovely home" or condo price in this area is probably a half-million bucks.

College students living in apartments in in-demand areas where the monthly rent for a 1 bedroom, 1 bath is $1600, $2000, $2300/mo, depending.

Pretty sure it was Sherlock Holmes"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." The possible options are: a) They're taking on unsustainable levels of debt, or b) someone (Mom & Dad) are fronting them the cash.

Doesn't exactly take a Sherlock to figure this out.

Reply to
bitrex

Law enforcement often takes the default position that 20-somethings who have entry-level jobs but look like they're living the good life beyond what the salaries of those jobs would suggest as evidence of running drugs. Well, if you're 20-something and not white, at least.

Reply to
bitrex

There's nothing specifically American about it. European start-ups have to jump through more hoops and do correspondingly less damage to their employe es when they go belly-up, but since it is the excess self-belief that is th e problem, a similar proportion of them seem to fail early.

I've not come across a commercial opportunity that struck me as promising. If I had I'd have exploited any and all potential sources of capital, subje ct to staying in a position to make sure that the opportunity did get explo ited.

I don't think that start-ups get "cradled by the state" anywhere. Start-ups are doing something new, and the state is in the business of sustaining bu siness as usual.

Of course I've used chunks of proven circuitry from other designs - working on complicated stuff like electron microscopes and phased-array ultra-soun d makes that pretty much inevitable - but getting a package together in two weeks implies a fairly trivial design content. Even if you are recyling an old solution you really should spend some time thinking about whether it i s going to work right - all the time - in your particular situation. Two we eks doens't allow for much of that.

I once got a gadget - spread over three very small boards - designed and la id out in two weeks, which attracted favourable comment.

I pointed out that I'd spent about six months looking at pulse-width modula ted output stages for a different project, which made the process of design ing a specific example fairly trivial. It did include realising that I coul dn't rely o a running a CD-4040 as fast as I had in the hand-wired prototyp e, so it ended up as 10-bit resolution rather than 12-bit, but that fell ou t of the tolerancing stage which my colleagues seemed to skip.

Why I on earth would I read more of his self-promotion than I get here? I d o know about his laser pulse timing hardware for the US national ignition f acility, and mentioned it to a visiting fireman from there, whose reaction was nuanced.

Since John from time to time boasts about doing stuff with ECLinPS that I d id with GaAs back in the late 1980 (and I've used ECLinPS since then and li ke it a lot) I do have a few clues about some of the stuff he does. I too h ave been involved with double Eurocards that plug into VME back-planes (if not recently). He's not doing rocket science, and his craven fear of design ing his own small signal transformers doesn't suggest that he's going to mo ve into new stuff any time soon.

It depends what is going on. A university is the sum of it's current employ ees, with the administrators having a disproportionate effect.

No amount of ivy-covered wall has any effect on what gets taught inside the m.

.

I can't point to any of my lecturers who said anything that stupid.

I did learn a lot of stuff that I didn't need to know, but my main beef was that when they taught us stuff that we did need to know, you still had to go back the the library and pound the books to find out enough to work out a procedure that might work in real life. Since life it too short to teach everything in that kind of detail, and I did end up knowing enough to find what I needed in the library, it's not actually a a serious objection.

I don't flush stuff from memory - I do remember more stuff than most, and t end to build up the sparser structures, rather than leaving them to evapora te, but that's not so much a conscious strategy as a consequence of having the nervous system I've got.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

Utter leftist clap-trap. Just spend less than you make. I paid my way through college and bought out own home (when we could afford it). I've known several waitresses who make $100, up to $500 for a three hour day, supporting themselves through college. It *can* be done and is, every day. "Me, Oh My. Life is unfair." is just a load of leftist crap you shovel every day,

Reply to
krw

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  1. > >> Ok, they only have one dog and we have two. Hah! There!

Quite a while ago. US education has got quite a lot more expensive since th en.

It may be leftist to suspect that rich people who make the rules in the US would prefer to have fewer children of the poor competing for the good jobs that their kids are going after (on the basis of a education that's a lot easier to get if your parents are paying for it, and the coaching that got you into an expensive top university in the first place) but whatever the r ich may prefer, it's a lot easier to get a good education, and the kind of good job that a good education helps get, if your parents have money.

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- amongst others - has documented how that has worked, and how the process got under way when Reagan fist came to power.

Not often, and not as often as it used to. That kind of waitressing job is hard to get - regular rates are closer to the $7.25 per hour federal legal minimum ($11.00 per hour state minimu in Massachusetts and Washington).

Far be if from me to suggest that krw eats in topless bars, but it might be an explanation of the remarkably high rates of pay claimed.

Life in the US is a lot fairer if you start off with shitload of money. The US has serious income inequality, and it comes with all sorts of unfortuna te side effects, many of them documented here.

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Krw is already doing better, so he doesn't feel the need to pay attention.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

Haha, is that what they told you.

Reply to
bitrex

lol, they told him they paid for their 40k/year college tuition "waitressing" part-time three hours a day

Reply to
bitrex

Not really. I talked at length to a bar keeper who has that side job next to her studies. She wants to become a dental hygienist, a very lucrative job in the US if you do it right. There are some schools that want five-digit a year but she found one that is less than $2k/year which she can easily self-fund, sans student loan. Way to go!

[...]

Then get a job that pays better. When I was in school I had some goals but those required more than the usual waiter, shore shelf stuffer, whatever job paid. So I applied at a meat factory. Initially they didn't want to take me as a kid, stating "They all refuse to come back after the first day". I promised that I would not quit. It was grueling work but that paid very well. Later while studying for my masters degree I did pretty much what I do today, developing electronics for money. That required knowing the stuff that we "hadn't learned yet" but due to my ham radio background designing RF stuff was something I already knew, self-taught. I could live pretty well that way and also had savings by the time I got my masters degree, enough to pay for a good used car that I'd need for my first job. Yes, it is possible.

The usual mistake. Everyone thinks they absolutely have to go to Stanford for their degree to land a well-paying job later. Which, of course, is nonsense.

Heck, you can even study abroad for much less money. I did.

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/
Reply to
Joerg
[...]

Rightfully so and I say that as someone who will have zero benefit from this. Taxing the event of a death is one of the most despicable overreaches ever. I have seen first-hand what that does when a family had to let go of their business (Sam's Town in Cameron Park, CA) because of death taxes. I saw people standing around in the street crying. They all lost their jobs because of it, IIRC over 100 people unemployed as a result of death taxes. It was also a substantial tourist magnet bringing in tons of local sales taxes ... gone.

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Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/
Reply to
Joerg

They don't want an education, they want to be buddies with what they

No. They often don't even get off the ground. BTDT, I have tried. You probably never have but voice an opinion anyhow.

I have also gotten a start-up off the ground but in the US.

Wot nonsense.

Exactly. No more questions.

It does not. I have done it many times, in a team.

Ever heard of ... SPICE?

[...]

A fireman runs a high-tech electronic gadget? Are you serious?

He doesn't need decades to fiddle with a Baxandall oscillator :-)

SCNR.

It still does not take away past performance which is a good parameter to look at.

[...]
--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/
Reply to
Joerg

If you want to go to UMass Dartmouth as a student from out-of-state, yearly tuition is around 42k/year, not including room and board and supplies. It has a good engineering school but it's not exactly Stanford, it's not even the flagship UMass campus (that's out in Amherst.)

In-state will run you closer to 30.

Reply to
bitrex

Sorry, those figures do include room and board, my bad.

But that's what it costs in 2k17 to go to the engineering school tied for 137th place in "Best Engineering Schools in the US"

Reply to
bitrex

Problem then is that you're working your ass off in a meat factory 20 hours a week and still expected to hit the same level of academic performance as students whose Mom and Dad are comping everything and have their schedules completely open to study and prep for tests and are even sometimes getting $50/hr private tutoring also comped by the same people.

They're gonna be bright eyed and bushy-tailed come Monday exam day while most people working their way thru school in a meat factory are going to be exhausted and thinking about steak.

Glad it worked for you but I'd be surprised if you could make 45k/yr working _full time_ in a packing plant in 2017 much less part-time. And that's what a year at even mediocre 4 year undergrad universities cost. If paying for college as a store-shelf stuffer or waiter wasn't possible in 1985 it's definitely not possible now.

The reason you see college students and 20-somethings who look like they're living the American Dream on an entry-level salary the same way your parents may have 30 years ago is because their Mom and Dad are footing a substantial fraction of the cost - whatever they may tell you in casual conversation. Gosh dude, get with it.

Reply to
bitrex

It used to be reasonable to work your way through college. Tulane charged $1200 a year (which I didn't have to pay... scholarship) and I made $400 a month at an outside job. A small apartment was $80/month. There was money left over for motorcycles and girls.

The cost of education has increased far faster than inflation, partly fueled by the silly concept that everyone should go to college, partly fueled by the student loan program, mostly fueled by universities being in the money business, not the education business. Grrrrr.

--
John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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John Larkin

And where is your evidence that I did not know this? Was Mozart a child prodigy or not?

You claim that I do not know things because I do not say anything about them. That is like saying that I do not know what color grass is because I have not said what color it is. How did you ever get though college mich less grad school.

I take this as an admission that you do not know of a single example. The readers of SED are smart enough to see through your posts.

Reply to
dcaster

You're lying again but you're in good company with Slowman.

Reply to
krw

One of the waitresses we got to know fairly well put herself through Auburn University, then transferred to Alabama for her Masters.

Absolute bullshit. A good waitress can easily make $50 an hour in tips, more (a lot more) in high-end establishments.

They claim it even if they're lying when they claim it.

There are a lot of options that don't cost $40k/year. There are a lot of careers that pay better than a Gender Studies degree from that $40K/year college, too.

Reply to
krw

All irrelevant. Don't spend what you don't have and can never repay.

Reply to
krw

No, that's a fact. You're the congenital liar (AKA "leftist").

Reply to
krw

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