Turns out 90% of the shit I learned in college was a waste and GPA matters quite a bit.
There are still jobs that's ask my GPA 10 years in. And your first job determines your second one, and I imagine I lost out on somewhere between 70-250k in compensation at least from having a bad GPA.
I still want the main takeaway to be that we shouldn't necessarily always be pushing teenagers straight into College, and that something clearly needs to change.
For some visa application the criteria was to have graduated from college, and a printed paper saying “this student graduated in 20xx” was enough. No job cared to ask what school it was, how it’s ranked or what grades, as it was out of their social ranking and they wouldn’t be able to pin it in the hierarchy. It was a good school and I enjoyed the curriculum, but really nobody cares.
what. the. hell.
I hate that mindset with passion.
Folks, just skew the odds.
Basically that there's some "chain" of dependencies, impossible to overcome when it comes to career
like previously quoted statement for me sounds like
good gpa -> good first job -> fast path to high tc jobs
mediocre gpa -> mediocre job -> a lot of other not fancy jobs -> high tc job after a lot of years
What I'm saying is that "And your first job determines your second one" is not true (except edge cases like govt jobs).
You can start your career at the most unknown company in country and still manage to jump to the top companies
>or what "skew the odds" means in this context?
Just because the odds are not favoring you, it's still doable
Time to build up a competitive resume so you get an interview despite a lower GPA, and time to study so that when you do get the interview you leave a better impression to make up for the poor GPA.
I don't even remember my GPA because I've seen it maybe twice - once when I received diploma and second time when I've been going thru my documents and just wanted to check out of curiosity
It's so flawed metrics that I'd never even consider it as reasonable when interviewing people
Also had several jobs I wanted that required a certain GPA even 5-10 years into my career.
To someone who values college as almost exclusively for its educational value, maybe that doesn't matter. But to many, especially HR, the degree is valuable for its signaling capability and watering that down has real and lasting consequences.
I still don't appreciate the value of a good education. You could have replaced mine with pre-recorded Stanford lectures, set coursework, work placements, and Saturday morning coffee with a senior engineer to go over the week with our laptops out. It would have been 10% of the cost or less and it would have taught me more.
The ability to use critical thinking does not come from a college education.
Were it possible; employers might screen candidates on the results of a test of critical thinking, as opposed to a degree. However, this has been illegal since Griggs vs. Duke.
how does this follow from not cheating. if you care about not wasting money, you would do everything, including even cheating, to pass.
they don't even know what they really want to do with their lives
or maybe they do know and just see 4 years of college as a waste of time to get there.
If you care about not wasting money, why risk everything you've spent and not even gain the education that you've purchased while you're at it?
>or maybe they do know and just see 4 years of college as a waste of time to get there.
If they truly already have the skills they need to skip to their life of choice - why cheat? If they don't have this capability, their feeling that they should just be able to skip over education is wrong.
I went through an unconventional learning path - I didn't think I was ready for post-secondary straight out of highschool, so I worked first. After I felt I was ready, I went. Everyone told me I was crazy and I needed to go straight to post secondary, but as a result I was able to figure out what I wanted to do, and gain some discipline and perspective while I was at it. I did well in post-secondary school, far better than I ever could have dreamed of in highschool.
At College I couldn't believe the number of people straight out of highschool who slacked off and wasted their parents' money. I was involved in a student drive and I got to see it even more firsthand. Asking students about why they were interested - "my parents want me to go". "I don't know". Those were the most common answers.
People mature at different rates, and expecting everyone to be ready for College right as they enter adulthood is madness. Some people need some life experience, some people will never gain those skills and should take alternate life paths. To be clear, taking an alternate life path can be risky, and the one I took is not the one for everyone. I think we just need to take a critical look at what we're asking of late teenagers and young adults.