Is it a good idea to dropout of school to retire much faster ?

Anything to do with the traditional world of get a degree, get a job as well as its alternatives
suomalainen
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Re: Is it a good idea to dropout of school to retire much faster ?

Post by suomalainen »

My impression from rumors/popular press is that engineering, at least software, is also very elitist. The high-demand employers are very selective and take mostly from the top schools. Out of curiosity, can someone from the industry confirm whether that's true?

SavingWithBabies
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Re: Is it a good idea to dropout of school to retire much faster ?

Post by SavingWithBabies »

My experience is that is true in software for recent graduates. If you've clearly demonstrated competence post-graduation, it's another route into those employers but you'll have a harder time direct from college. I've observed this directly with former coworkers going to Netflix and similar. I think it's only elitist though at the FANGs (Facebook, Apple, Netflix, Google) and even then, the demand is so high that elitism can only go so far. That said, I haven't worked within a FANG so I don't know what the dynamics are on the inside (it could be generally elitist in terms of who advances more quickly, who enters at a higher position, etc).

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jennypenny
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Re: Is it a good idea to dropout of school to retire much faster ?

Post by jennypenny »

I can't believe those IQ scores. They're so much lower than I was expecting.

A NYTimes article related to the college discussion: Revisiting the Value of Elite Colleges

jacob
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Re: Is it a good idea to dropout of school to retire much faster ?

Post by jacob »

They aren't direct IQ scores but ostensibly derived scores based on vocabulary. It wouldn't surprise me that vocabularies have declined if over the past 4 decades a) people read less in general; b) the LIX levels have continuously declined perhaps due to business decisions (sell more books?). This is, for example, the case with political speeches. They used to be dialed in so that a 10th grader would feel comfortable. Now speaking the language of 10th graders is considered "elitist" and so the average politician now engage voters at the 6-8th grade level.

daylen
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Re: Is it a good idea to dropout of school to retire much faster ?

Post by daylen »

WORDSUM and IQ are correlated at about 0.7 so not perfect. The test could be skewed by what vocabulary was used (linguistic drift), and the sample population may not include as many private schools (or be geographically limited).

Kriegsspiel
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Re: Is it a good idea to dropout of school to retire much faster ?

Post by Kriegsspiel »

Whoops, I thought I had put in some more text in that post.

I'd say that the actual IQ score numbers aren't accurate (not sure how good that GSS method is, as daylen points out), but what they show is probably right. Logically, if IQs fall on a curve, and colleges in the past only accepted a small number of people at the right of the distribution, then adding a ton of people to the college ranks is going to cause the average IQ to fall. I've seen research indicating IQ has been trending lower since the 1960s in general. Bad methodology or ____-drift?

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