Thoughts on Higher Education

For some time I've been preparing for this post, but many things came my way that required my attention (life happens as you know), but also, as I was pondering about the topic my ideas about it changed and morphed, and then... I decided I needed more.

The Process

Property of Stormberry

The idea to write about higher education came after I read an article in The Washington Post, titled "Equifax's security chief had some big problems. Being a music major wasn't one of them". For those of you who don't know the case, Equifax is one of the Credit Bureaus of the United States, which prepare the credit reports and credit scores of millions of Americans. These reports and scores are consulted by financial entities when people ask for loans, but also when these entities want to pick people to whom they want to sell different products, like credit cards, loans and so on. Anyway, this company got hacked this year, and the credit and personal data of 143 million Americans got loose. It happens that the Chief Security Officer, who is the top security person in the company, has no formal education in technology, cybersecurity, programming, computer engineering or any such formation. The lady has a music major.

My first reaction was - obviously - WHAT THE FUCKING HELL?  and I knew I wanted to write about that, and how I consider that this sort of thing entails something wrong in the current labour market. But then I've got thinking and other elements came to my mind and I decided to take this one step further and analyse some other elements of this question.

The Situation

After thinking some on the article, I decided to go to some statistic databases to check on what the situation is. For this I checked basically the OECD's database, and the World Bank's database. The data I use have several issues, among which I consider most important the following:

1. Many of the variables considered belong to different years (2013, 2015 and 2016).

2. We can't be sure they were collected usuing similar methodology.

These take from the comparability of the data, BUT it can still allow us to get an idea of the situation.

Source: OECD database

From what I've found, that the proportion of people with higher education is not so big. The countries with percentages include Korea (69%), Japan (59,6%) and Lithuania (54,8%). In average, for all the countries for which information was available, the 39,9% of the population has higher education. The United States is in 8th position with 46,5%.

When it comes to how much a student pays in average for higher education, the US is in first place with $27 578,29 in average, according to data from 2013 collected by the OECD. In Korea, where we have the highest rate of population with higher education, students in average pay $9 378,60, which is roughly a third of what American students pay for their education at home.

Finally, why is people supposed to pursue higher education? To get a higher chance at getting a job. In this sense, for the countries for which data was available, with the exception of Mexico, people with higher education reported a lower unemployment rate than the national average.

Source: Total unemployment by World Bank, Unemployment among population with HE by OECD

In some cases, such as Lithuania, Hungary and Latvia, the advantage of having a college degree is rather clear.

So What's My Point

In the case of the Chief Security Officer of Equifax, at one point several top officers started making noise about "not being qualified to work in Tech jobs". Twitter had some trends going on with the hashtag #unqualifiedfortech, where several of these people noted how they work in high tech positions while having degrees en entirely different areas. And this is where my issues start.

In several parts of the world getting a university degree means getting a higher chance not only to be employed, but also to have a better income. This would normally be so because when you get a Higher Education Degree you are supposed to have a Higher Education. In other words, you've acquire much more knowledge about a certain area, which qualifies you to work in it. For instance, someone who studied Medicine, is qualified to be a physician and heal people. Someone who studied Law is qualified to work as a lawyer or an attorney. To make this clear: you go to the university, and from all the options you've get, you enroll to study something that will qualify you to work in that area.

Accesing this higher education isn't either something easy of cheap in many places. Aside from the university fees, the cost of the courses, the cost of the textbooks, supplies, housing, transport and so on, often many careers make it particularly difficult for students to work next to their studies, not to mention that also often times, available jobs make it difficult not only to study next to them, but the wages they pay are hardly enough to pay for all the cost associated with education. And higher education often times implies years of living in these conditions. People with family, particularly single parents, find it very difficult to get a degree. In some countries and for some educational options, people get financial options. In some countries higher education has a subsidy, that make it much easier to pay.

In Costa Rica, for instance, at the UCR (Universidad de Costa Rica), which is a public university and the one with the highest reputation of all the higher education system, the maximum a student would pay per semester (for enrolled classes) is $287,67. Today. In most public universities here, courses are measured in "credits", which is a measure of the effort you must put in it, and also usually translate to the number of weekly hours of class you'll get. You can enroll as many courses as you want, but our government puts a cap to the number of credits you'll pay, and that maximum is 12 credits. That normally represents a full block of courses for a semester, but of you want to take on more classes to advance, you can do so for free, basically.

In for private universities here, such system does not exist, and you pay for your courses without cap. For these, as well as it happens in other countries, students can opt for education loans, which normally get to be paid after the career was concluded, or if it was abandoned by the student.

So, getting a higher education degree costs. Costs in money, costs in time, costs in effort because you actually have to study, costs in other job opportunities... So, what would be the point then, in studying, making all this effort, if - as so many opposers of #unqualifiedfortech seem to point it out - you don't seem to actually need a degree in tech to work in tech and score the highest incomes in the market within the tech industry? Because you don't need a music major or a literature major to "think outside the box" and find different ways to solve problems, which people who studied the given area aparently are not capable to do. So, how does that work exactly?

I am yet to see a job ad for filling a CEO position in a prestigious company in which "whatever college degree is accepted".

And besides, how do this people get to this positions? How do you end up in charge of the cybersecurity of a company with a degree in... philosophy? How did you qualified for that position?

Certainly, many people study something and then life force them to start working in something else. Yes, that happens and happens more often than not. I would love to see statistics about the amount of people with higher education degrees who are working in fields different than their studies. I can also agree - in the light of the previous cost and effort data and assumptions - that getting a degree for your new area might not be so easily accesible, BUT having a dab of integrity should really not cost you so much. If you know that you are going to spend the rest of your worklife in Human Resources instead of Maths as you have originally studied, the decent thing would be then to talk to your bosses, so that you can get the proper degree for it. After all, there are college choices for people who are also working, and since you are already working in the area, studies should prove to be easier.

That still don't fix the thing that still, there are people with a higher education degree unemployed, and there are jobs that should require a higher education degree filled by people who don't have it.

In my area (economics) I have met more than once people from different backgrounds trying to do my job, or even having the nerve of trying to lecture me and my colleagues about it. From their work, often times many mistakes are observed, many of which often are simple mathematical errors (a lot of people don't know how fractions work), and conceptual mistakes that could easily break the company.

Let me just put this whole diatribe in a very, very few points here, so that my message goes a bit clearer through. 

From the side of the people with higher education: getting into Higher Education demands a lot from people, not everybody gets accepted. Those who do, still have to go through it and survive and graduate. Many of these come out of the process with a debts - some more crushing than others.

From the corporative side: people without higher education degrees in the given area of the job are not only more prone to mistakes due to lack of proper knowledge, but are also more prone to let fraud pass by. Not being educated in protocols, they might allow due to lack of knowledge, a series of abuses and breaches of security that might imperil the company, the clients, the public and even larger groups and populations. People without the proper education can also be paid less, can also be convinced to take responsability over shady things made by others to profit. They can become escapegoats without even knowing so.

From the side of higher education institutions and financial entities: getting people into higher education is their business. Aparently getting them to work is not so much.

The point is that, for certain jobs background education IS needed, and there is people who have that knowledge, that studied for it. It's stupid to think that some years of experience, earned from scratch can match with all the knowledge that people can attain through education. Education is based on professors that have YEARS of knowledge, and loads of bibliography, which again comprise more years of knowledge. Theories proven and tested, experiences from all over the world... can all that be replaced with a couple of years going from messenger-to-CEO?

Now, am I here the only one to see how wrong this is?

Education and What We Laugh About

In 2009 a young lady made herself sadly famous by publicly displaying the depth of her ignorance. When asked to explain a quote by Confucius, she went on babbling about who Confucius was, in her poor mind. This hit stardom like wildfire, and the entire world was laughing out loud at her. Years after people still remember the "Chinese-Japanese" who "invented confusion". Cyber tongues went vicious about how she was evidently relying on her looks, and yes "the bigger the beauty, the smaller the brains". Though there's people who's stupid, people who neglect studying because they believe they can make it in life with "skills" different than intellingence, thing is that we often don't notice how srupid we are, and how the world around us has been going more and more stupid.

Our education system has been eroding generation after generation, year after year, and as knowledge becomes more available for all of us, our thirst for it is systematically taken away from us. This lady was asked about Confucius. How many of you (not living in the Asian continent) actually know about Confucius, and what can you say about him and his philosophy? How much were you taught at school about him? Year after year school programs get cut shorter, and circuits are run repeating the same information in the most boring of matters, taking minds that would be thrilled by the new and exciting - who in their childhood isn't thrilled about new, unknown things? - and grind them down, make them averse to any form of knowledge.

Children get out of school not knowing their country, having no idea of the presidents that have ruled them or what did they do.

Knowledge today, usually comes from other sources, and so snickery, hidden they are, that often people don't realize it. Cartoons, comix, movies... they mix often classic literature, ancient history or national history with fiction, giving thus the only base to people about classics and historic facts. We laugh at those who's ignorance becomes unveiled, but what about our own ignorance? Is that okay? Because we've been taught by incompetent teachers that anything remotely related to studying must be avoided? Think again.

As part of my List of 13, I went today to visit a museum close by, the Thermae Maiores Museum. Don't be too impressed, it's not like you would imagine it. If you remember earlier posts (in case you've read them, because in case you don't, you have nothing to remember, obviously), I mentioned that I live in a districts of Budapest called "Óbuda", or Ancient Buda, which is the Northern district of the Capital city... on this side of the Danube at least. In here - unlike in other parts of Budapest - one can find Roman Ruins. Indeed, here was located the province of Pannonia, the North-Easter one of the Roman Empire. The Capital city of this provinec was Aqvincum, which is basically where we are located now.

Though there's an Aqvincum Museum, which I intend to discover before June, according to my List of 13, there's this Bath Museum I have been seeing a couple of times now, that has piked my curiosity. It is an inconspicuous place etched under a bridge, between the lines of a main road, but under the level of it, in a nook of a subway pass. It displays no artifacts, it has no vitrines, and only a few plastic covered posters stand here and there tell something, quite dryly about the history of this place. The entrance is for free, so anyone can come in and take a stroll along the ruins, but it seems not many people are interested in coming to take a look .

The place was completely deserted when I've got there, and truth to be told, I have never seen a single soul walk around the place. It is dirty, it has bits and pieces of junk rolling around, and it could really use some serious dusting and sweeping of cobwebs and seeds and petals from the nearby trees. Then there are parts that kinda look disappointing because you see some wall parts with a layer of red brick in it, and to my very, very limited knowledge of Ancient History, Romans didn't use symetric, factory made red bricks in their construction. Then again, that's me, and I've never really studied Ancient History (Costa Rica's Education Minister considered back then a waste of time to teach anything in school that isn't Costa Rica's history... over and over and over, so aside from systematically forgetting Costa Rican history, not much else stuck to me).

I still quite enjoyed the experience because it gave you the chance to walk around the ruins freely. It didn't smell like Romans, if you ask me, but actually getting that close to the structures, and being able to walk into them gives you an idea of what were the sizes of the rooms back in that time. To my amazement, these rooms and places seemed to me much bigger than some of the rooms I've seen that have been kept from the Medieval Times.

The information available was quite little, so I'll probably conduct some research on the matter, and make the Aqvincum Museum my next stop, just to learn a little bit more of life in Pannonia, and the life before Pannonia was conquered by the Romans. This question, at the same time, entails the topic of immigration, of the moving of people from one land to another, either by mass migration, by "colonization" or by conquest. Yesterday's conversation comes to my mind and for an instant I wonder if it is so hard for the Europeans to understand, because they haven't lived what we Americans have. But that's a topic for another post.

Real Life Investigation

There are many things I love about my job, but something I enjoy like you have no idea, is when you do research. Sure, there's not-fun-research like when you have to tap uncooperating targets that won't even help you actually wrap around the topic, but there are others where the information is available, like public documents and so. Not everybody likes to do this, but I love it, and thus I was exhilarated when my latest assignment entailed following leads. Well, it was desired we would do some lead-following, but I took it to heart and tried to clear up as much as possible. In the end my effort was rewarded greatly as many things got explained and others opened doors to further inoperancies.

A coworker of mine was assigned as well to the project, and to my dismay, she didn't seem to look forward to this kind of research. How could that be?

Back in the days when I was in University, we used to hit the major data-gathering institutions for the information we needed for our homeworks and team projects. Places such as the Central Bank (similar to the Fed), the National Institute of Statistics and Census, the General Controller of the Republic, several service regulators and industrial cameras for information. Sometimes we even visited the companies and institutions we were researching from information, such as the time we visited on several occasions the Oil Refinery. At first we didn't get much of the structure of the information, but by pressing our noses to the ledgers we slowly got the hang of it, and the working of the different institutions and companies became transparent for us. Also, getting information, gathering data was tied to legwork. Perhaps it had something to do the fact that the Internet was still quite new, and public institutions usually drag last in the embracing of the technology, but for us the information we could get online was just a scrap very poor to get out researches done.

For me, going back to one of these places was like walking into a memory. The days when I was dressed always in jeans, sneakers and big tees, when I didn't wear make-up at all and cut my own hair. My friends and classmates were my team, and all of us worked equally hard for the paper we had to do. Leaning over the heavy documents, having them xeroxed only to keep scrutinizing them, turning words and figures over and over to get to the root of things.

My coworker, from a much fresher generation, stepped now for the first time into one of these places - due to this work - and was shocked at the experience. No digital copies, only heavy paper ledgers bounded in cardboard and screw contraptions her modern vision of the world never knew. She decided not to come back ever again.

The world has, indeed, been evolving and with it the appreciation of it and the way people grasp it. The information, the real and complete information is supposed to be on the net, not out of it, and it seems that the information you find on it is - and should be! -  enough. But is it?

The world turns slowly to the minimum effort, to the cybernetic media, and the shallow, fleeting things clutter the space. The pile up, pretend to be things, but are only that: a pretention. Things simply try to "look like" what they should be, but they are not, and no one seems to care to make sure they are what they intend to be. After all, everybody lives in the mediocre-philosophy, and are too busy reading 500 e-mails a day, four e-magazines and 20 e-news. You are busy tweeting, updating your facebook, reading blogs, so you can't really follow up, verify the veracity of the information you receive, but expect it to be right, or to someone to take responsability if it is not. And besides, if it's not real, you won't need it in five minutes, so it doesn't matter if it's wrong.

This is how the most abhorrent mistakes and omisions happen, things that wouldn't happen if people actually did the legwork, did their job, did checked the information. So, in the end, could it be that - in the name of commodity -  the world is willing to accept a deep plung in quality?

No legwork, the Internet is just enough... but not for me.

Schools: Bye-Bye Books, hello Internet Clippings

This one is about news, or more like headlines. If I recall correctly, it was the New York Times (that paper going bankrupt anf selling several floors of its HQ building... yeah, that one), that contained an article about the education system incentivating the teachers to leave the books and use more information from the net in their classes. I would like to know who thinks that's a good idea. I certainly see no good in it. It might work in research, but it's not the best path to walk down when it comes to education. Lemme explain you why.

Books, particularly textbooks fulfill several important functions in our lives and in our education. Unlike the Internet, they are a constant source of reference that can't be altered or "hacked" as easily as a site in the Internet. It's easy to use, simple, and also easy to reference. A mistyped word won't send you to a different book, and add to it, usually all book include a table of contents that helps people get an idea of what does it has. Books are stable, and unless you jump from edition to edition, they usually contain the same information. That allows professors and educational teams to study several textbooks, compare them and choose those which prove to be better and fulfill the requierements of a given educational curriculum. These books are also checked up by editorial houses, and often even by scholars and education specilists, who make sure the information contained in them are right and proper for the given age for which they are being intended. (Young children don't really need all the gore from history, now do they?) But are internet articles, Wikipedia information, or any other source, whatever other source in the net, checked up by someone? Does someone make sure everything on the net is right and proper? We all know anything goes online, you can't guarantee the truth or quality of what you read. A textbook can often make it up for a not-so-good teacher, and we all know there are plenty of not-so-good teachers and down right mediocre teachers who rather bully kids with tests and hard questions for which they don't have the answers, than admit they have no idea what should they be teaching. But if you leave the teacher to the Internet, how can the student make sure he or she is really studying facts? Truth?

Books also help stablish an order in the study material. Books make sure that year after year all students go through the same subjects, so that no kid is stuck learning several years in a row the exact same topic. That actually happened to me. I was forced to study for eleven years Costa Rica's history, which helped me only block the entire thing out until up to today I know nothing. Yes, that was before the Age of the Net, but back then teachers used xeroxed pages, and left the books behind, or changed a good textbook collection for several versions of the same thing.

Then, when you give a kid a book, the kid can page forward, look into things that haven't been talked over at class and maybe something triggers his or her curiousity and sends him or her on a "little research party". Sure, they might not be many, but what about these kids? I was one, and I remember reading parts from what was left behind, sad because we didn't get to study it in class. However it gave me the push to take off by myself and read other things. But in a cacophonic ocean as the Internet, where can a child find guidance?

If books have worked so well these past years, why should they be replaced? Government can subside them, make them affordable or even make them available for free to the students. You don't need any hardware, any handset or equipment to read a book, you don't need to tangle yourself into any bill, make it electrical bill, phone bill, internet bill, any bill to read a book. All you need are your eyes, or your fingers, if you are blind and need a Braille book. With the Internet is another story. Either articles will have to be xeroxed, and all those copies must be paid somehow, must likely by parents, or the computer, the internet bill and the jump in the electrical bill will be a requierement to go to school. For the middle class family maybe that's not a surplus, but what about the low income families? Those where the parents have to take many jobs to suppor the family, or can't because of the crisis and no one is hiring, and money at home ain't enough? Would kids have to make a line at the local library, and let's hope that's a safe neighbourhood, spend time waiting for a computer, and hopefully that goes for free, and then that it wouldn't take all their time. But then there's a time when a kid can study, and really, how many of us prefered to study at night? Could these kids do that? Will the printing of the material for school be for free? And could a kid concentrate at the computer on homework and don't go rather playing online?

A lot of kids grow up stupid already thanks to the ongoing monotone, boring teaching style that goes running in circles, but throwing books away in favor of the Internet is the last step into absolute, massified stupidity around the world.

-books are still the best, most convenient way of studying.