I agree on the brick-and-mortar schools suggestion.

I wrote this in favor of them: https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/14833/9518

> Students overwhelmingly report retaining and applying less from online courses versus face-to-face courses. > However, this may be due to a difference in factors other than distance learning.

However, I find your insult to Trump voters gratuitous and unnecessary.

Here's an interesting thought: do you find the notion/anecdote regarding the returned servicemen insulting?

Because to me, he's applied an analogy describing a certain behaviour to both groups: but you find one "a political insult" and presumably one "an accurate description, or at least an acceptable anecdote".

It appears to me, as a non-american, the analogy is not only apt but accurate, but i understand how one may find it insulting.

But then, I also understand how a returning veteran might find this entire thread/idea insulting when applied to them.

But in both cases...that doesn't make the point deviate or approach the truth any more or less.

Personally, I believe there is a "rational voter paradox" at play in both of our societies political cultures (I'm australian for what its worth).

We find certain ideas insulting and degrading when applied to the notion of "voter", because we carry a political ideology of sanctity (the rational voter) around the voters decision. Because we are partisan, any attempt to analyse voter activity that draws away from the rational automatically puts you in the camp of "the other", which makes you an enemy, which makes everything an insult.

Hint that voters voted for trump because they were anxious and threw their lot in with someone giving out soothing epithets and its an insult.

That same idea however, returned service men being anxious about the future and being duped into throwing their lot into schools that make grand promises...and its an observation. Even a completely legitimate thread.

I've had the same thing happen to me a few times: express what I think is a fact, and been told that this is not the place for such hostile speak, insults, or comments.

I will leave HN today with this thought from my professional experience: If you're an analyst, and you actually have to predict these things, don't give anything but politeness to the people who find such observations to be insults, even though you know they're wrong, and use them if they're predictive :P

This veteran is in complete agreement with your assessment.

> However, I find your insult to Trump voters gratuitous and unnecessary.

I read it without placing the emphasis on the colon and I'm sure it's less barbed and strengthens the point:

They are like [the] Trump voters willing to throw their lot in with whomever tells them "it will be okay", regardless of how unscrupulous and incompetent those promise-makers are.

That there were some, not all, trump voters who were actually quite vulnerable and were manipulated. Just as there were some Clinton, Johnson and abstaining voters who were vulnerable and manipulated.

The key difference was that Trump dropped a shockingly honest hint about the desire to exploit the manipulable: "we love the poorly educated," arguably has a hint of suckering about it. I suspect this is something some Trump supporters are uneasy about by appealing to symmetry (i.e. if the other side had done this).

I found the analogy I misread quite useful as it linked two phenomena that I had previously believed to be disparate. It would be a shame for that to be lost for the sake of a missing word and a superfluous colon.

Trump was "shockingly honest" - and it was shocking! - about a lot of things about which Nice People Don't Speak, all throughout the election cycle. His bombshell about buying politicians in the first GOP debate is a sterling example - roughly from memory: "I know you guys are for sale because I buy you all the time!"

Shocking indeed. But not on substance - no one familiar with modern US politics would seriously doubt that most politicians are absolutely for sale, although probably not thinking of it in those terms, or that the two meaningful parties do absolutely sucker rubes into voting for cynically promised outcomes which often aren't even plausible and are the rest of the time rarely pursued. Obama was the best I've seen in my lifetime, in terms of trying hard to live up to his campaign promises and also being competent to pursue them, and even he only passes if we grade on a real generous curve.

No, what's shocking is that anyone would say it, at least where the rubes might hear. And, again, that is shocking! One does not expect to hear the inchoate doubts shared among much of the electorate confirmed outright by a major-party candidate. And I suppose if one confidently expects to get screwed either way, it might make some sense to vote for the guy who's at least honest about it.

As OP, I would like to hereby adopt your reading, but it's beyond the edit window to fix directly. Alas, I hereby leave this as my mea culpa.

Reminder: Trump University probably falls under the category of 'sketchy school'.

www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/03/31/522199535/judge-approves-25-million-settlement-of-trump-university-lawsuit

My apologies, I would like to adopt dpwm's restatement:

> They are like [the] Trump voters willing to throw their lot in with whomever tells them "it will be okay", regardless of how unscrupulous and incompetent those promise-makers are.

Ok, we've put that edit in. But please don't drop partisan tangents into HN comments. It's basically trolling, as you can see by the destructive effects on this thread (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14277404) and, even with the edit, mars your otherwise fine comment.

This is why reasonable, rational people are losing and will continue to keep losing. Because we accept calling Trump unscrupulous and incompetent as a partisan opinion when it is actually clearly a statement of fact based on ample amounts of evidence.

There are certain topics that destroy otherwise rational discussions.

You know this. We all know this. So why bring it up in an unrelated thread?

All it does is damage the quality of conversation.

OP here. In response to your question, I was seizing on a well-known phenomenon (voters responding to a hollow jobs promise) to make an illustrative comparison to my thesis, another situation that evokes similar behavior.

To me, it was like being in a thread about trees and saying "Trees are green, you know, like money." The "like money" part, was just a comparison.

"Gratuitous and unnecessary" is well put. Because it's not like I disagree with the comment, but I cringed a little.

> However, I find your insult to Trump voters gratuitous and unnecessary.

I originally upvoted the OP's comment as I somehow missed this aside at the end and unvoted. HN is really not the place for that stuff...

As OP, I would like to adopt dpwm's restatement:

> They are like [the] Trump voters willing to throw their lot in with whomever tells them "it will be okay", regardless of how unscrupulous and incompetent those promise-makers are.

I met many on the GI bill at my 'brick and mortar' school. They still did not do well. I honestly think people who have only known the military since highschool need a step down program to reintroduce them to civilian-style learning. The concept of sitting in a class for months then writing one all-or-nothing exam was terrifying. They needed constant reassurances that they were keep pace. They wanted weekly testing and assignments. They also had serious reading issues. They could read, but ask them to read more than a few pages of prose and they would zone out. Military manuals, like most highschool textbooks, are written in easily digestible packets, bullet points. University texts are not. Whereas most university students wouldn't have trouble tackling a few hundred pages over a weekend, I saw Iraq vets in apparent combat with books, veins pumping as if they were preparing for an assault.

> The concept of sitting in a class for months then writing one all-or-nothing exam was terrifying. They needed constant reassurances that they were keep pace. They wanted weekly testing and assignments. They also had serious reading issues. They could read, but ask them to read more than a few pages of prose and they would zone out.

This all sounds like pretty much every starting undergraduate student I've ever encountered.

That isn't universally true. The enlisted ranks have some pretty good training in many cases. Navy electronic techs take months of classes that are quite intensive.

Similar for other technical tracks like aircraft maintenance. The bar to entry for these kind of jobs are minimum ASVAB test scores that aren't easy to make.

You may have encountered a lot of ex infantry or similar. They get intensive training as well, just not as cerebral.

But the ASVAB tests are precisely my point. They are rapid-fire multiple choice questions asking the taker to bounce between subjects. Doing well in that sort of test means nothing to the standard undergrad assignment of "pick a topic and write a 10-page paper". I once spent an hour explaining IRAC style to a former special forces soldier. Everything he had ever done in the armed forces was to prove that he knew material. He had never been asked to write a paper or give a speech with the intent of convincing others, never imagined that structure was as important as facts.

PSA: While IRAC is generally associated with law school and lawyers, anyone can learn and use it. It really does works.

A special forces guy isn't the best example of someone with the kind of training I'm talking about.

I mentioned the asvabs not as a comparison to writing a paper, but to note there is a bar to get into the highly technical jobs. Similar to the bar created by things like minimum SAT scores for some schools.

Talk to an ex military person that had a highly technical job that required 6+ months of military tech school. They have the skills you are talking about.

Talking about ex military like they are one homogeneous​ group just doesn't make sense. Skills vary, just as with recent high school grads.

My only experience with anyone from a SOF background comes from a coworker who is a mechanical engineer but I would think that someone from a special forces background would actually be a fairly good example.

It might not require the kind of very technical training that say Navy nuke school does, but assuming sandworm was talking about proper "special forces", as in Army SF, most of those guys tend to be older, more mature soldiers and I believe all Army SF candidates have to take the DLAB and then attend language school for 6+ months. I would have assumed that sort of environment would actually translate fairly well to undergrad.

Just pointing out that their training is less read, attend lecture, write a paper. So, they could turn out to be good at that, but it's not something they typically do a lot. But, there are ex-military that have lots of experience with that pattern.

Also, FWIW, I don't buy the premise anyway. Some percentage of fresh HS grads do well at college, some don't. Same is true for military vets. I was trying to pinpoint a specific group that I knew would mostly do well to dispel the notion that vets are somehow not great candidates for it.

There's an organization in my area that I've heard a lot about geared toward addressing this exact problem.

http://upstatewarriorsolution.org/