Why they can't take kids through "high school" algebra in middle school and have them ready to take more serious math in high school is a mystery to me. From what I gather, a considerably accelerated math curriculum is common in other countries.

Is there any reason other than inertia that we can't do this?

After a year at the junior college (which I define by "They had a little IBM mainframe, and punch cards") I was a lot more ready for the Large Cow College (30K students, much beefier mainframe with actual terminals for post-first-year courses).

I'm convinced it's calculus that separates us from the lower primate kingdom. We should introduce it as early as we can.

I spent a few years at a college before going to a university, and the (average) quality of teaching was actually higher at the college, for half the tuition. So insofar as post-secondary is about the stuff you learn in class, college is awesome. And I used to recommend it highly to any high-school-student who would listen.

However, there are some other benefits that are in short supply at colleges. Your peers will, on average, be less intelligent and less dedicated. And even if your peers are worth cultivating, you won't be living dorms, which means less parties (could be a pro or a con), but also means less close bonding with those same peers. Your instructors will not have openings in their labs where you can work for slave wages during the summer, getting five times as much real education as you got the preceding 8 months.

And ALSO, "cut the price in half" is completely disingenuous. Tuition is a fraction of the total cost of school: there's fees and books, of course. But more importantly, there's opportunity cost, usually represented by some kind of unskilled pay, perhaps $20k/year. In Vancouver in the early 2000s, college will run you roughly $250/course, and university $500/course. That sounds like half the price, until your calculation includes that $20k/year in lost salary (plus $1k-$2k in fees and supplies). Suddenly it's a $26k vs $22k, which is no savings worth talking about.

I am worried about the opportunity cost, in terms of networking with people, but I had no choice but to start in a community college due to poor high school grades. After 30 hours I can transfer, but I will probably stay since I can maintain my full time software developer job while in the community college. I don't think I'll be able to do that when I transfer to the university.

- A good english teacher (Strunk and White). My writing improved tremendously.

- Calculus

- A taste for history

What I didn't get:

- Anything relevant to CS

- Any good math beyond calculus (they offered "statistics for business majors", which was really lame)

On the whole it was a good way for a self-learner to get some cheap learning out of the way, and also get some job experience (as a coop in the IT shop of a local government organization).

They effectively had to go through 4 years of college anyway, they could have saved just as much by enrolling immediately and taking JC courses over the summers and graduated in 4 years instead of 5-6.

EDIT: In response to some of the questions below, please let me clarify. When I said "other side" I was meaning a lack of well-roundedness. I was NOT trying to pit STEM grads against liberal arts grads.

I do not intend to state that STEM graduates don't know problem solving or critical thinking. Far from it. However in my experience, those skills are discarded too quickly - similar to how Liberal Arts grads tend to discard even the limited quantitative toolsets they've acquired. (I'll concede its probably not as prevalent among the HN crowd.)

Ultimately, its a lack of well-roundedness that limits all camps (I'm sure it would be more accurate to consider more tightly-defined groups than just liberal arts vs engineers.) Ideas are cheap, that's why we laugh at the Wharton posts looking for "code monkeys" every few months. Just as problematic though, is the greatest product but no ability to bring it to market and sustain a viable business.

Statistics does fit into that, as one particular species of correctly using empirical evidence. But most freshmen students aren't even constructing coherent arguments in the broad sense; having a technical knowledge of statistical theorems isn't the main bottleneck. This is actually a common problem in my classes: technically-solid students who can't write a coherent essay-length or blog-post-length argument in favor of or against a point. The better students tended to have taken at least a Philosophy 101 course, which taught them how to write a basic "argument for or against a position" paper. Once you have that, there's a pretty good basis on which to expand the argumentation toolbox with statistical arguments.

This seems closer to "statistics versus logos" than "statistics versus rhetoric."

On the other side you have the ability to phrase it as a question in the same language as Aristotle.

This is an incredibly gross simplification of applying statistical theory. I suggest you pick up some texts on inference, Bayesian stats, and probability theory to learn how stats != "running t-tests".

I'm not making any statement about whether I agree with him, but if you disagree you will have to claim that he is cherry picking one useful and one useless skill, not just say that there is more to stats than t-tests.

So, 112% of the time 60% of STEMS <X>? What a strange way of phrasing it.

In fact recently some job reqs were going around the company through several of the "communication" oriented people, and it was the engineers correcting the grammar and improving the flow of the text.

An unkind impulse suggests that when logic and traditional rhetoric become the domain of "dead prejudiced white guys" you're not looking at the ideal environment for teaching communication skills. The writing of some of my high school acquaintances with English or Journalism degrees blows my mind, and not in a good way.

Are you really claiming that Liberal Arts grads don't discard their problem solving and critical thinking?

I ask because I don't see them demonstrating either, at least compared to STEM folk. So, either they didn't learn them or they discard them quickly.

When a 20-something is strapped with a 50-100K+ debt, the perceived risk involved in doing something they did not exactly go to school for is usually too much to handle.

Sure there is. It's called Baumol's Cost Disease.

Now of course some of those engineers & scientists are working on things like khan academy and other methods of attacking that problem. The downside is that the demand for English or Philosophy majors will only further erode (what do you do with a philosophy degree when there are fewer jobs teaching the next generation of philosophy students?).

No one is saying that everyone should be an engineer or scientist, but it's blatantly obvious that moving the ratio a good bit is, in fact, the answer. English and Philosphy majors can't get jobs while some kids with CS degrees are getting close to making 100k/yr straight out of undergrad. The market is speaking. Listen to it.

Not if the lender is the US govt, as it is today.

Not if the loans are guaranteed by the US govt, as it was before.