The question of whether or not to pursue higher education is a relevant one among my almost-graduating peers. Especially with all the attention this issue has received recently, I can't help but engage in a bit of amateur speculation myself. Most of the articles on this issue study the nature of higher education directly. I don't wish to do that. Instead, I'd like to speculate about why it makes sense economically for there to be education inflation, and why education inflation might have an effect analogous to producing a generation of sitcom fans.
Education Inflation
The amount of education one needs to obtain a particular job has increased over the years. Positions that used to require high school level education now require college/university education. One can say that technological advances demand more skilled individuals in the workforce, but that's not the whole story: Asian countries such as China aren't exactly more technologically sophisticated than countries in North America, but in China one would need to have a PhD, have decent grades, and have spent at least a year studying abroad in order to even apply for an entry position at a bank.
So education inflation is real, and overpopulated Asian countries are having it much worse. This makes sense considering the natural explanation for education inflation that I always hear: as population increases, the number of candidates that apply for a given job increases, forcing employers to raise the bar on what is considered to be a "qualified" candidate. Admitting only candidates that have achieved a certain level of education is a quick and easy way of reducing the resume pile, albeit it is somewhat arbitrary.
This is a nice explanation, but I think we can dig deeper: why are the number of qualified candidates per job increasing?
Technological Advancement
Back in the day of subsistence farming, every person in a society needed to contribute his or her efforts in order for the group to survive. With technological advancement, one person's effort is now sufficient enough to feed many other people. The advancement allowed us to move from an agriculture-based economy to a service-based economy, meaning that instead of 50 people working on food production, 10 people can take care of food production while the 40 others find other ways to enrich each others' lives.
This is supposed to be a good thing. Technological advancement gives us, as a society, free time to do whatever we wish: build better shelter, design better clothing, invent the internet, speculate about the meaning of life, or even just take a break! Unfortunately, we have a different name for prolonged free time: unemployment.
We produce enough food to feed everyone, yet in order to live well and be respected, you need a job. In order to obtain a job, you need to satisfy an employer's stringent and sometimes arbitrary requirements. In order to do so, you must spend extra years of your life in school. Thus, as a society, instead of using the free time we gain from technological advancement to our advantage, we end up forcing people to spend this time in school pursuing education that they might not necessarily enjoy.
Cognitive Surplus
I first saw the idea that "free time" might be an important aspect of society from an article by Clay Shirky. Shirky hypothesized that as we initially introduced the five-day work week and 8-hour work days, we didn't know what to do with all the extra free time. As a consequence, we spent the extra time watching sitcoms. "The interesting thing about a surplus like that is that society doesn't know what to do with it at first" – he says. Shirky's article is about how sites like Wikipedia are finally taking advantage of the cognitive surplus, a resource that can do so much for us.
Back to the original question: when we don't need every single person in society to work to supply everyone's basic needs, what should we do with the extra time available? This is by no means an easy question to answer. I think that in some cases, pursuing higher education now is like what watching sitcoms were back in the day. It is society's first answer to the question, perhaps a decent first-order approximation but definitely not the best answer.
To be fair, the question of what to do with extra resources isn't a new question. We've had to answer this question many times over as our technology became better and better. We started by moving from an agricultural economy to an industrial economy to a service economy. I'd like to ask an economical historian whether the move was as smooth as we'd like to think it is.
Now what?
"Now what?" is the final thing the fishes say in the ending scene of "Finding Nemo" when they've finally escaped from the aquarium into the ocean. It's never an easy question to answer, yet it is one that many of us will need to answer in the next year or so. In this economy, higher education is the default answer, much like watching television was back in the 50's. After all, when we ask a senior student what they plan on doing after graduation, we expect to hear either the name of a prospective employer or that of a university.
Defaulting to a job or a masters program gives us a certain social standing along with a support structure and an illusion of certainty (some money or a degree at the end). It's certainly not the only choice, though. For those of us that can live off of savings or parents for the next few years, we have a tremendous amount of freedom to do whatever we want. Freedom in excess is terribly scary and has inherent risks, but if we can accept the uncertainty, we can work through it. We've done it before: we eventually watched less sitcoms and created Wikipedia. We can do something better here, too.
End of Entry
Friday, April 15, 2011
Friday, April 1, 2011
Canadian J1 visa data: sanity check failed
Being sick was an excuse for me to playing around with R and this dataset from data.gov. If you're a Waterloo student and you did an internship in the US, you might find the below plot to not quite add up...
If I recall correctly, both in 2008 and 2009 the number of people attending the US Visa info session was well over 100. In fact, the summer 2009 contact sheet for Waterloo students interning in California alone contains 41 names -- that's NOT even including students doing their co-ops in other places in the US and in the fall/winter terms.
Alas, I wonder how trustworthy other numbers listed in this and other datasets are. It's too bad that we can't sanity check other datasets in a similar, direct fashion.
End of Entry
If I recall correctly, both in 2008 and 2009 the number of people attending the US Visa info session was well over 100. In fact, the summer 2009 contact sheet for Waterloo students interning in California alone contains 41 names -- that's NOT even including students doing their co-ops in other places in the US and in the fall/winter terms.Alas, I wonder how trustworthy other numbers listed in this and other datasets are. It's too bad that we can't sanity check other datasets in a similar, direct fashion.
End of Entry
Monday, March 28, 2011
End of Entry
Monday, February 14, 2011
"R Graph Cookbook" - a review
A publisher asked me to write a review for the book "R Graph Cookbook". Out of curiosity (and since they didn't mind if I wrote honestly), I complied. It ended up being a good decision, since this was a pretty easy reading, and there are things in base R graphics that I've missed since venturing into ggplot2-land.
The book is most appropriate to beginner (and early-intermediate) users of R and R graphics. It is very well structured, always with code for generating a graph preceding each graph, and explanations as to how everything works after the graph. The examples are relevant, and are quite easy to follow. While the author does not explicitly include an introduction to R, he explains the functions used in each code segment.
Earlier chapters go through the commonly-used charts, how to make them and and how to tweak certain parameters. The author goes very slowly over the different plots and gives many examples over different chapters. Later chapters cover recipes for more exotic plots (like 3d plots, maps, sparklines, and calendar maps), showing the true power of the R graphics, as well as the author's creativity. I don't think the author intended it to be read from the beginning to the end: the sections are very well structured, so it's pretty easy to flip to a random plot and look at how it's made.
One thing that I didn't like (which some people might like) is that most of the earlier chapters seemed like a puffed up version of the R documentations. While the advantage of having a book is that you get a more approachable and thorough overview of a subject, you can find information much more quickly by using a combination of google, online R graphics tutorials, and the R documentations. For example, if you know you want a bar plot, looking up the documentation for barplot() to see all tweak-able parameters is easier than waiting until chapter 5 to learn a few more of them.
The later chapters are more interesting: it really shows that R can do a lot, and it did give me ideas about how to visualize the data I am currently working with. Of course, the advanced materials are far from complete -- and it can't possibly be complete given the open nature of R: there are many, many packages in R, and the best thing to do if you're looking for something specific is just to use a search engine and read documentations.
So yeah, it's a really well-written book by someone who is definitely qualified to write it (Mittal started http://www.prettygraph.com/). It's a book that does what it intends to do: good for beginners to flip through to get ideas, and well-suited for someone to whom the documentations are too intimidating. If you are at the stage where you're comfortable reading the documentations, though, then maybe about 30%-40% of the book could be helpful: you may still be inspired by some examples, though in that case I'd wonder if the book has enough content to be worthwhile.
So that's it. "R Graph Cookbook" by Hrishi V. Mittal. It was strange to find a bio of my friend Paul Butler on the list of reviewers, though that only affected the degree of my amusement and not how I saw the book.
End of Entry
The book is most appropriate to beginner (and early-intermediate) users of R and R graphics. It is very well structured, always with code for generating a graph preceding each graph, and explanations as to how everything works after the graph. The examples are relevant, and are quite easy to follow. While the author does not explicitly include an introduction to R, he explains the functions used in each code segment.
Earlier chapters go through the commonly-used charts, how to make them and and how to tweak certain parameters. The author goes very slowly over the different plots and gives many examples over different chapters. Later chapters cover recipes for more exotic plots (like 3d plots, maps, sparklines, and calendar maps), showing the true power of the R graphics, as well as the author's creativity. I don't think the author intended it to be read from the beginning to the end: the sections are very well structured, so it's pretty easy to flip to a random plot and look at how it's made.
One thing that I didn't like (which some people might like) is that most of the earlier chapters seemed like a puffed up version of the R documentations. While the advantage of having a book is that you get a more approachable and thorough overview of a subject, you can find information much more quickly by using a combination of google, online R graphics tutorials, and the R documentations. For example, if you know you want a bar plot, looking up the documentation for barplot() to see all tweak-able parameters is easier than waiting until chapter 5 to learn a few more of them.
The later chapters are more interesting: it really shows that R can do a lot, and it did give me ideas about how to visualize the data I am currently working with. Of course, the advanced materials are far from complete -- and it can't possibly be complete given the open nature of R: there are many, many packages in R, and the best thing to do if you're looking for something specific is just to use a search engine and read documentations.
So yeah, it's a really well-written book by someone who is definitely qualified to write it (Mittal started http://www.prettygraph.com/). It's a book that does what it intends to do: good for beginners to flip through to get ideas, and well-suited for someone to whom the documentations are too intimidating. If you are at the stage where you're comfortable reading the documentations, though, then maybe about 30%-40% of the book could be helpful: you may still be inspired by some examples, though in that case I'd wonder if the book has enough content to be worthwhile.
So that's it. "R Graph Cookbook" by Hrishi V. Mittal. It was strange to find a bio of my friend Paul Butler on the list of reviewers, though that only affected the degree of my amusement and not how I saw the book.
End of Entry
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Another Pascal's Wager
What is your goal in life? It's a difficult question to answer, and if you haven't found an answer yet, let me propose a temporary one to you:
The second reason is that it is fulfilling. Most people would say that they want to live to be happy, but there are different forms of happiness: there's happiness arising from everyday situations, and there's the deep sense of happiness you get from reflecting on who you are and what you do. Growing and becoming better includes being able to balance between the two types of happiness, and can be immensely fulfilling.
A third reason would apply if you are agnostic about whether or nor we would retain our consciousness after death. In the event that we do retain our consciousness, then who we are, the maturity and discipline of our thoughts, are the only things we might be able to take away (certainly we can't take away much else, including anything physical). Our maturity and cognitive discipline are the only things that might help us in tackling the new challenges that might lie ahead.
End of Entry
Live to grow. Live to be more mature, to be able to learn more quickly, and to be able to more quickly adapt to new situations. Treat life as training.The reason is two-folds: for one, if you eventually decide to do something else with your life, then regardless of what it is, the growth you've gained will help you. The strengths/maturity you gain would make you more capable of achieving other things you want. You would have more and better tools to draw from.
The second reason is that it is fulfilling. Most people would say that they want to live to be happy, but there are different forms of happiness: there's happiness arising from everyday situations, and there's the deep sense of happiness you get from reflecting on who you are and what you do. Growing and becoming better includes being able to balance between the two types of happiness, and can be immensely fulfilling.
A third reason would apply if you are agnostic about whether or nor we would retain our consciousness after death. In the event that we do retain our consciousness, then who we are, the maturity and discipline of our thoughts, are the only things we might be able to take away (certainly we can't take away much else, including anything physical). Our maturity and cognitive discipline are the only things that might help us in tackling the new challenges that might lie ahead.
End of Entry
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