The Glade 4.0

I suppose this thread belongs in the Rant forum, though it won't appear like one. It's a rant at its heart, though, and I'd probably be rightfully called on it if I tried in Hellfire so... here goes. :p

Most of you are familiar with E3, but for those that are not, it was the press show for video games each year for well over a decade. Big announcements, unveilings, etc were saved for E3. It grew and grew over the years as gaming became a bigger and bigger industry. As a press show, being essentially a marketing tool, it invariably meant competition within the show -- if your stuff was what everyone was talking about during and after the show, that's a huge win for you and a loss for your competitors. Upping the ante became the name of the game. Booth babes got more and more extreme til the organization behind E3 stamped down on them -- to little effect. If memory serves, the area Nintendo had the year the Wii was first available for demoing was something like a football field (and the lines took many, many hours for people to get their chance.) Companies kept going bigger, hoping to be the big fish in the pond, but since everyone else also was they wouldn't get ahead. Still, it wasn't a waste for the companies, because not going bigger meant falling by the wayside while their competitors got the bigger share of the press.

Eventually, the big companies involved were pouring millions and millions of dollars into their E3 show each year. It became a big drain, as they essentially had to put out that money to put on a big show just to keep afloat. There were other reasons involved, but the expense was commonly cited, especially by the bigger companies, as a reason for discontent with the show. In 2007 the house collapsed due to pressure by those companies who didn't want to be a part of that anymore, and the E3 of today is much smaller. No more multimillion dollar shows.

Wikipedia section (see links at the bottom of the Wikipedia article for further reading!)

-

So what I describe as the E3 effect: expending time/money/effort that all of your peers are also expending, resulting in no net gain for anyone. The society of game developers unintentionally imposed this system upon themselves until they realized it was painful and sought a way out.

My question for discussion, then: does getting a career going (and maybe success in general) have an E3 effect to it? Does our society are large have similar phenomena at work?

Consider what a bachelor's degree is worth now compared to one in 1970. I have heard people say that bachelor's degrees are the new high school diplomas -- a sort of baseline for employment. Even an inexpensive school will run you into 5 digits for that baseline, and does it get you ahead of the competition?

Nowadays networking is the big thing to getting jobs. It's assumed you'll get your degree -- everyone will get their degree, so what puts you ahead? Networking will give a job-seeker that extra edge... that their competition will also get.

I suppose it's part of human nature, as the ambitious will always seek an edge when it comes to competition in anything, with the same lack of any actual gain over their competition despite the resources spent that game companies saw at E3. E3 was, relatively speaking, small enough that they could essentially conspire together to rid themselves of what became nothing more than an operating cost to maintain pace. There's no way humanity could all agree on something like this.

I guess what makes this a rant-at-heart is that I know nothing can be done. You just have to be a part of the system if you want to succeed. From what I'm seeing, however, it's somewhat depressing if you take a step back and look at it objectively. Unless you're a star entertainer or developing a trade skill, there is so much to do (and so much debt involved) just to get to the bare minimum best described as "what everyone else does". It seems to be, gradually, getting worse as time goes on.

You can even consider things from a monetary perspective, though I'll leave it up to each reader to decide if it's relevant. I can only speak for my master's degree, as I don't have in depth knowledge of others, but there are plenty of jobs out there (filled jobs, sadly for me :p) that pay barely a living wage, yet in all the job descriptions it requires the master's degree. I've seen part time job listings for 20 hours a week, paying peanuts, requiring that master's degree. Perhaps it's something that you only see in this terrible job market... again, I don't have in depth experience outside of my own search. I'm personally in a position where such a part time position would actually be feasible, but when I see job listings like that I have to wonder what they really expect. I don't believe most people (with kids or massive house payments or the like) could even work a part time job for so little. I understand things like budget concerns, so I'm not saying they are being cheap necessarily... but if they have so little to spare for this position, it seems more reasonable to me not to demand a master's degree. So either the master's degree is becoming something that will barely get you a living wage in some cases, or perhaps it's employers on a budget knowing they are in a position to ask for a lot and get it due to the job market.

...and just for the sake of disclosure, I'm not one to personally whine about money. I'm single, without kids, and very cheap besides. I've been living without a job for a bit now and doing so decently comfortably (the whole self-worth and other related issues aside) even though I haven't been spending money outside my WoW subscription fee. I can say a lot of bad things about MMOs but they sure provide a ridiculous amount of entertainment for the money. Makes those college nights out to cheap bars look downright like rich living. :p Even when I have been working in the past, I wasn't much of a spender then, so I don't expect to be in the future. I can also say that since my only debt is student loans, some barely-living wage would be fine for me personally. If anyone could live on a low wage, someone like myself would be in the best position to happily do so. Long story short, I'm far from the camp that treats master's degrees as some sort of entitlement card, turning up my nose at mere pedestrian salaries. The previous paragraph can still apply under these circumstances, however.

So... that's sort of how I'm seeing things. Maybe I'm being too cynical. Is their truth here or am I seeing things wrong? I'm curious to see what people think about the E3 effect.

edit: to extract the essence of this model out of the messy and complicated real world, I can boil it down to something like the following: A make-believe society has libraries but no universities at all. They are staffed by people interested in the profession. The society then develops the idea of universities, and now the interested people spend the money and time to get an edge over their unlearned brethren by going to the university. Finding this to be a great idea, everyone in the whole society now goes to the university. The society in the abstract prospers: their librarians are now all university trained. Now, however, any would-be librarian has to expend all the resources involved in getting a university education only to put themselves in the exact same situation they would have been in before the advent of universities. The university education fails to give them an edge, and in fact if they do not earn that education, they don't even get a chance to step up to the plate -- all those resources spent just to get a chance they'd have had for nothing in generations past. A librarian position opens, and behind the 30 interested applicants are 30 degrees from universities that aren't helping them individually at all. Feel free to repeat this process with graduate degrees for this society at this step. Maybe even segment them, if everyone gets master's degrees first, then doctorates once master's become standard.

Replace libraries with your field of choice. It works better for some (accounting) than others (chemistry), but the concept is the same. It almost makes one see university degrees as a boon to society at the expense of the individual. This seems to be going in the wrong direction for life...

It's both. Khross, in particular on this board, and others decry the devaluation of education (Bachelor's is the new High School Diploma) that Federal pushes for loan programs and need-based scholarships have been driving for a long time.

The economic situation certainly only accentuates that effect. You're also in a field that has *long* been ahead of the curve in devaluing the degree, which is why you're feeling the pain even with a Master's, while other fields are at the stage where it takes a Master's to set one apart.

_________________
"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Lemming effect would be a better descriptor.

Civil engineers are pushing for requiring a Master's for the PE license. It's being resisted by other disciplines, mind you, and some find it telling that it's only the civils that are pushing for the change.

_________________
Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Inflation happens.

Hmm. Interesting! I wonder what sort of factors make it apply to varying degrees in various fields. Probably hard to pin down since it's not really something anything intends on, or is even the result of any one person. I would have thought such a hard science field like engineering would be fairly immune to it, though. If I can design a bridge, I can design a bridge, end of story. I ruled out trade skills as exempt from this, and liken engineering very much to a trade skill in a lot of ways, but perhaps I shouldn't have been so quick to do that ruling out.

I also wonder if there is ever any going back, like happened at E3. I'm sure the state of the bachelor's degree isn't going to change... that's probably far too ingrained at this point for any hope. Individual fields, though? Maybe all those certs IST type people get. I gather some certs became something of a joke, being very easy without much practical use. That's the best idea I can come up with, at any rate. It's kind of a hard idea to argue against, since more education is always better than less. The IST example would be employers asking only for good certs and totally disregarding the shallow or irrelevant ones.

I'm seeing a lot of parallels to economics, I think. Just what can employers ask for and actually get, balanced against how willing individuals are to go through the extra hoops.

Honestly, if you don't Masters degree already, you're pretty much **** as far as any corporate mobility these days. I can tell you that one major Japanese electronics manufacturer now requires a Bachelor's Degree for employment in their American call centers.

_________________

It used to be that in the profession of Architecture, there were two means by which to become a licensed Architect.

One through apprenticeship with a licensed Architect for at least a set number of years, at which point you could qualify to sit for the licensing exam. The other was through obtaining a degree in Architecture, which would qualify you to sit for the exam.

Currently, in large part due to efforts by the AIA, the only means by which to become a licensed Architect at this point is to have a "professional" degree (5 year bachelors or a Masters, there is no longer a 4 year degree), spend at least 2 years working for a licensed Architect, and then sit for the exam.

And for those pursuing the 4+2 path (4 year bachelors and a masters), that is quickly becoming a 4+3 or 4+4 program. Most graduate schools (and professionals) aren't pleased by the quality of students and their technical background coming out of the undergraduate programs (if your bachelors was in an unrelated field, you were doing 2 years of post-bac anyway).

But then you get undergraduate programs that were held in high regard intentionally gutting their programs in the effort to make the degree more palatable to a wider audience. Clemson University recently "normalized" all their undergraduate degrees to the 120 hour range (122? forget now), at a huge cost to their undergrad design degree, which used to require 144 (or 148 depending on whether a BA or BS respectively).

The bar has been raised.

Look across history and you'll see that this is nothing new.

No, it hasn't. The quality of educational products has steadily declined since the late 1960s.

_________________

History is longer than the 1960's.

Aizle:

And? The entirety of history defeats your case even further. People in the 19th Century didn't need public education to learn more than our average high school graduate knows and can apply.

_________________

Riiiight.

Aizle:

Integrate this equation for me: x^2+3.

_________________

It's been a while for me since my last math class, but am I correct in stating that what Khross posted above is not an equation?

And, no, I can not integrate. I did not apply myself well to Calculus. Another mistake I made when I was in college that I now regret.

_________________
This must be Thursday. I could never get the hang of Thursdays.

It's a trap!

_________________
"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

Perhaps it would be best to demonstrate the decline in quality of public education by presenting a question that can not be solved with Google's calculator.

And yes, Foamy, you are correct. That is an expression, not an equation.

_________________
Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Corolinth:

You are, of course, dead on. I should be less lazy.

_________________

Once again, this comes down to averages. This is the nature of public vs. private. In the 19th century you had to work hard to even get the right to be educated if your parents weren't wealthy and providing it for you. So the top rungs of society got excellent educations, the bottom rungs got nothing. While I have absolutely no doubt that the top 20% of society in the 19th century was relatively more educated than the top 20% now, what about the bottom 20%? Or hell, the bottom 50%? I doubt many of the factory workers during the Industrial Revolution were even literate, nor the rural farmers prior to that.

Khross, my individual math skills have absolutely nothing to do with the issue at hand.

Aizle:

They have everything to do with the issue at hand. So do your reading skills and reasoning skills, as does your ability to form a cogent argument and engage in discussion when your position is challenged. You think the bar has been raised; as such, integrate the expression. Once you're done with that, show me how integration applies to such positions as telephone operate in a call center or burger flipper at McDonald's and basic management skills.

_________________

The math requirement for a standard four-year degree has been college algebra for the past umpteen years. Until around the 1980s, the only degree you could receive without it was that of an elementary school teacher. The reason for the change in the 1980s was not that elementary school teachers were required to take algebra, but rather other programs began to allow elementary school teacher math to qualify. This is an example of the bar being lowered, not raised.

Had the bar been raised, the majority of four-year degrees would require calculus. This is not a major stretch of the imagination. This is not expecting too much of students. More and more high schools are turning into college preparatory schools as the nation in general demands everyone have a four-year degree. It is becoming the rule, not the exception, for high school students to take college algebra their junior year, and trigonometry in their senior year. As such, J Random **** should be able to test straight into calculus, or perhaps precalculus. He can not. The inability of a random person to solve a simple calculus 1 integral does not necessarily reflect poorly on the individual in question. In other words, Aizle, it does not suggest you are stupid. What it does strongly indicate, however, is that the proverbial bar has certainly not been raised. If it had, you would have been able to perform the indicated operation despite it having very little relevance to your life in general. This example does, of course, make the implicit assumption that you have a four-year college degree, which might not be the case.

I am an engineer. I have to take a certain amount of philosophy. I am not going to use philosophy in the design of an electrical circuit. I am certainly not going to use three semesters worth of philosophy. Why, then, do I have to take philosophy classes? The answer is simple - there is a bar. Likewise, what purpose do chemistry courses serve for me? What I do is based primarily on physics. There is very little chemistry involved unless I were to become a chemical engineer. Why do I have to take chemistry? Again, the answer is very short and very simple. If you can't pass chemistry, you don't get to be an engineer. I'm okay with that. I spend most of my time at work teaching the math required to enroll in basic chemistry courses. If I can't pass freshman level chemistry, I should be drug out behind the math and science building and beat to death.

_________________
Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

I know you touched on this before, but I'm not sure if math classes are the best metric for this. It seems to me you have to be a "math person" for math classes to teach you much of anything. I actually started college with a different major in mind and tried to go up the Calc ladder. I got an A in Calc I, a B+ in Calc II. I had to drop Calc III, because I was completely clueless. I remember my Calc I pretty well, but I don't remember learning much of anything from Calc II, it went in one ear and out the other as soon as the test was over. As such when I was called on to apply these concepts in Calc III I simply couldn't do it. I'd look in the book for the correct procedure, and the whole time wondering, "Why am I doing this? It doesn't make any sense."



This is basically it. Math and science aren't easier now than they were 100 years ago, in fact they're harder. It's just now you ONLY need to learn math and science for the related degree. Before the 20th century to get a degree you had to learn the quadrivium. It was mandatory for pretty much any degree. That meant learning music, astronomy, and being versed in Latin. These things are generally completely worthless when it comes to practical application, they just served to make the degree harder to get.

Ugh. I just realized it's been roughly 10 years since I've done any calculus.

IIRC:

(1/3)*x^3 + (3/2)*x^2 + C

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

It's still a trap, Stathol. He didn't indicate which variable to integrate with respect to.

_________________
"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones