I agree adverse possession is stupid. Except IP owners continually try to gain all the advantages of property law. If they get the advantages, they should get the disadvantages too.

You just made my overall point - people are making stupid decisions. But they are doing it in public, private, and for profit schools. And the for profits shouldnt be singled out when the problem is endemic to the entire system/industry.

Average nationwide tuition at a 4 year public school is 7.6k per year (30k total)
4 year private school averages 30k per year (120k! total!)
google says ITT costs 30k per year
google says devry costs 14k per year

Traditionally people at public/private schools are also going to pay for room and board as well, which many places double the cost. However, Since everyone has the option to stay at home or rent we can ignore that.

So these schools are more expensive than state school, and up to as expensive as the average private school (but significantly less than the elite private schools)

So i will admit my cost estimates were off, but I still hold that job prospects for the public school people are pretty bad too. For the masses/sheeple, going to community college or straight out into the workforce is quite often cost effective.

Those who can specialize in areas with shortages will be better off.

I absolutely agree that education leads to higher earnings and better employment options. My point (perhaps poorly made) was that even accounting for your 2-3x better job prospects, employment in the chosen field (especially for "soft" degrees) is still bad (even though you are better off than someone with no degree), and the cost of that degree was huge.

My fiance has a masters in art history and metalsmithing. 80k in debt, and her one department (highly ranked and respected) turns out about 10-15 people like her every year. A few thousand of them across the country.

Nationwide, there are a handful of (mostly academic) positions, some industrial positions, and the rest are the proverbial "starving artist"

Other departments like english, the humanities, womens studies, etc are the same, except they don't have the industrial positions.

I agree, and this somewhat reinforces my point.

Liberal arts colelges, for the most part, dump out hundreds of thousands of interchangeable people with no real skills. There are of course exceptions. Doctors, engineers, some of the scientists (although many are just recycled into faculty), some of the tech people (although in my experience any person with a masters or phd in comp sci is 100% worthless on the job)

Tech schools are focusing on areas where there are more shortages of workers (or at least the impression of shortages of workers). Now, they of course have a perverse incentive to make the shortage appear worse than it is, and continue its existence even after the shortage is no longer there. But they are responding to at least some level of market dynamics, which by and large traditional schools are insulated from completely.

There is a reason all schools (private and public) do not publish good salary or job sector data. They just give the number of people having any job. You might have gone to school for engineering, and be serving fries - thats a win to the school

But you also can't trust public colleges, and for the same reason.

Public colleges in general cost SIGNIFICANTLY more than these tech schools, and the job prospects for 4 year grads are dismal. Go to grad school (especially in something like English, Art, and the Humanities), and your only job prospects are probably working for the same school that gave you the degree.

Even formally "instant upper class" things like law school are not a good payout anymore.

by definition you cannot have water in solid form at a temperature higher than freezing. That is what freezing means. The freezing point (as well as the boiling point) is not a fixed value though, and can change based on pressure and any impurities in the water. Technically your teacher was right, according to the words you and he were using.

From the question, it is hard to ascertain the size of the "company" Below a certain size, standardization is more trouble than the benefits provide. In the middle, standardization probably depends on how willing the developers are. At the top end, where I live, some amount of standardization is a must. With 200 developers in our division alone, being hit with numeroud SOX (SarbOx to some) requirements, a need to implement massive DR plans for our systems, and a wide geographic development distribution that sometimes does not communicate well enough, treating programming languages like tools in a toolbox is unworkable. That said, you can't just quit cold turkey. At our size, you need to define a "strategic" language. In our case, many of our vendors utilize Java and J2EE, so that becomes our strategic language. However, we continue to support some older Win32 client code that demands VB6, and some vendors we use chose .NET, so we have to support that as well. That said, stuff like Python, PHP, Perl, Pascal, etc. must have serious justification before they are used for major development work (Perl is a favorite for the UNIX admins, but they are not considered development staff here)

Yes, there are times when the project gets sub-optimized by being constrained language-wise. Developers will grumble (and I am a senior development resource, BTW), but overall, the cost is less to enforce some standardization. Why?

Cross training/support. The fewer languages, the more bodies we have on staff that know it.

Integration. Not everything can be a web service. Our business users hate us telling them that we need to rewrite that chunk of code because it is in Language A and the rest of the project is in Language B

Development Machine stability: Compilers, IDEs, runtimes, etc., all have to pass through a rigorous testing matrix before they can be loaded on Development machines. Cringe if you want, but SOX and other regulations make those things necessary. Thus, more languages means more money tied to testing and certifying the components on a development box

Coding standards: The fewer languages, the fewer times we have to sanction a team to author standard for that language.

As a developer, I find the "languages as hand-tools" analogy severely lacking. Possibly, treating them like powertools is better. Once I select my Dewalt cordless tools, I am locked into a battery option, saw blades, etc. Some stuff can be bought generically, but I'm not going to go out and buy a Wilwaukee set of cordless tools just because their saw option does a better job on miter cuts. I will figure out a way to make good miters with my Dewalt. If I find myself making miters all day, I might consider buying just the Milwaukee saw, but I know I'll be forking over more bucks for extra chargers, batteries, blades, etc. I will not do that lightly.

I applaud developers who can pick up languages easily and are fluent in many. That said, language prowess does not give the developer license to create a programming Tower of Babel. If a developer can't show that kind of restraint, the company is no longer a good fit for him/her.

In the end, I think 1 is too few languages, but I think > 4 is too many for a large firm. Same goes for editors, compilers, etc. Of course, each company has to weigh the risks against the benefits. I can see a cross-platform developer needing many more compiler options, and there are no doubt firms where performance cannot ever be sub-optimized, so my comments are moot. However, for those who live in a data-processing land where I exist, there is little to gain from switching languages like a playboy switches partners.

Thanks for thinking of me, first. Have a great day.