Blog Marco

I remember walking past a Law lecture at my university a few years ago and seeing every student busy typing away at their laptops. Heres an article about students in the US losing their right to use a laptop in the classroom. Notable article quotes: "But as an experiment, the professor permitted laptops this past year to compare the difference in students' performance. His conclusion: Don't allow laptops." .... "A chemistry professor at the University of Oregon, said he was disturbed to find students gambling online while they were purportedly working on an in-class assignment."

This website offers a very large primer on How To Ask Questions The Smart Way

The primer advises that before asking a technical question by email, or in a newsgroup, or on a website chat board, do the following:

1. Try to find an answer by searching the Web.
2. Try to find an answer by reading the manual.
3. Try to find an answer by reading a FAQ.
4. Try to find an answer by inspection or experimentation.
5. Try to find an answer by asking a skilled friend.
6. If you are a programmer, try to find an answer by reading the source code.

It is an interesting read, it outlines the main rules that should be followed so you don't annoy your fellow users with useless questions that wastes everybody else's time.

In summary it rehashes through section by section:
* Choose your forum carefully
* Web and IRC forums directed towards newbies often give the quickest response
* As a second step, use project mailing lists
* Use meaningful, specific subject headers
* Make it easy to reply
* Write in clear, grammatical, correctly-spelled language

Over-education leads to being over-qualified for a job.

In Australia, being over-educated is becoming the standard as there is higher competition for jobs. Some may say that they get rejected from jobs as they are overqualified. But in this case, Australia is setting a trend where you actually get employed because you are over-educated and overqualified.

"Almost 30 per cent of Australians are over-educated for the jobs they do, leading to time wasting, low job satisfaction, and reduced earnings."

"People with business, engineering and architecture qualifications, in particular, are at risk of ending up in jobs for which they are overqualified, a study shows. But even big proportions of high school graduates are in jobs that require less education."
Me:: I disagree with the here: Australia plainly has an engineering shortage. Go ask The Institute of Engineers Australia. I also went on a site visit to the RAAF Richmond site and they were in demand for engineers.

In a study called "Causes of Overeducation in the Australian Labour Market", by Ingrid Linsley, it "suggests that too many young Australians have university degrees that are not strictly needed for the jobs they do; and not enough have trade qualifications in areas where the nation is suffering a skills shortage."

The reason for this is best illustrated with an example of overqualification in demand:
"Ms Linsley said managers liked to employ people with more education than less because they were easier to train. For example, a person with an arts degree would be preferred for a job as a personal assistant, though the degree was not essential, because the graduate could probably write more effectively and would be easier to teach."

"People accepted jobs for which they were over-qualified because they were the highest-paying jobs they could get. Ms Linsley said the huge expansion of university places in the 1980s and 1990s had contributed to the mismatch of jobs and skills, shifting people away from TAFE and vocational training."

And this leads to Australia's shortage of trades type personnel. Noticed the apprenticeship advertising campaign on TV? The government is also combatting this problem by enticing people from overseas with skills to come to Australia.

The attached article states that: "Many students [will] never earn enough to repay their loan," Ms Macklin said. "Students are already saying to us, and research shows, that young graduates are finding it harder and harder to buy a home and start a family because of the very high levels of HECS debt that they have. People don't want to carry those very high levels of debt throughout their lives."

That statement above is a little frightening as most people go to university in the hope of earning a better living.

But with "one-third of the multi-billion dollar HECS debt owed by university students has been written off by the Federal Government as a bad or doubtful debt"... means that a significant number of students aren't earning enough to even pay off their education debt completely.