I'm sure it has downsides, but the US military does a fairly decent job of using their ASVAB[1] tests to see what jobs recruits are qualified for. As an employer, I'd much rather look at something like that rather than the name of a school and a GPA.
If a company gives a test, and there exists a protected group that does less well on the test, then discriminatory intent can be presumed. It is certainly legal to give such a test, but some valid connection to the job requirements would need to be shown. Proving that in court is probably more trouble than the test is worth.
Employers don't seem to get in trouble for requiring a degree though, or even for preferring a degree from a fancy institution, despite the fact that entering a degree program usually requires a test such as the SAT or ACT.
So that is the workaround for avoiding legal trouble: demand an unnecessary degree in order to filter by test score without directly demanding a test score. It's kind of like money laundering, but for test scores. Colleges make out very well in this deal.
The constitutional "disparate impact" constraints regarding protected groups you're referring to don't apply to businesses in Europe, who don't seem to use cognitive ability tests that much more frequently
We need a college education to be accessible to anyone who is qualified. That's different from universal higher education. Those signals get crossed a lot.
We need a college education to be accessible to anyone who is qualified
You should read the article:
The labor market doesn’t pay you for the useless subjects you master; it pays you for the preexisting traits you signal by mastering them. This is not a fringe idea. Michael Spence, Kenneth Arrow, and Joseph Stiglitz—all Nobel laureates in economics—made seminal contributions to the theory of educational signaling. Every college student who does the least work required to get good grades silently endorses the theory. But signaling plays almost no role in public discourse or policy making. As a society, we continue to push ever larger numbers of students into ever higher levels of education. The main effect is not better jobs or greater skill levels, but a credentialist arms race.
If college is mostly about signaling, then it's an arms race, and the faster the herd, the more the individual most race in order to keep up.
Accessibility to higher education is important, but much more of that education should be vocational in nature. Right now we have a lot of access to college, but that access has led to ballooning problems with student loans, along with Girard-style mimetic crises ( https://jakeseliger.com/2017/06/27/violence-and-the-sacred-o... ).
If college is part of a signaling arms race, if we conceive of education purely as a labor market good, why are we asking the laborers to stand down from that race and not the employers?
Indeed, if everybody knows that a college education is empty signaling, then how is it possibly still effective?
The best and biggest employers should have the best information on the value of college education (in whole and in terms of its parts, such as humanities courses). They could expand their potential labor pool and make better or cheaper hires by adopting different hiring standards. If there's an information arbitrage going on here, somebody should be able to make money from it.
In my view the elephant in the room is that maybe a college education is valuable after all, but we haven't put our finger on the precise reason.
>The best and biggest employers should have the best information on the value of college education (in whole and in terms of its parts, such as humanities courses).
Depends how one defines "best"; though this is debatable, because one could say that these are the most beholden to the signaling arms race despite the data they may have to the contrary (i.e alphabet, amazon, et al).
>In my view the elephant in the room is that maybe a college education is valuable after all, but we haven't put our finger on the precise reason.
I don't think this is the elephant in the room at all, people routinely say that some parts of a college education can be valuable for various reasons, while others (as judged by value by the marketability of the graduates) are not valuable at all.
In my view, the "best" and biggest employers like it because it signals some default level of competence (which is growing weaker as the incentives are to push everyone through to get some kind of degree) as well as relative malleability and conformance to institutionalized authority (those who opted out, or didn't go might not conform to the corporate identity or end up making it expensive for the employer to employ them, compared to their counter parts; after all, hiring based on objective measurements/metrics without any human involvement isn't something that happens today). Also these companies are largely affected by the turnover rates compared to smaller ones, so it's easier to target colleges graduates as a cohort.
>If there's an information arbitrage going on here, somebody should be able to make money from it.
I do think some employers take advantage of this environment, though I doubt it's alphabets, amazons, and apples…
Who is we? Certainly not the author of the article we're discussing. He specifically talks about recommending going in to higher education to the individual.
And on the flip side, in the states that use lottery funds to provide college for all graduates with a specific GPA.....we are seeing a tremendous number of students losing their scholarships for poor grades or simply delaying entering the workforce to have a semester or more of playing at college.
Accessible to anyone qualified does not equal a good choice for anyone.
Caplan's whole book, The Case Against Education, is excellent, and if it doesn't convince you, try also Paying for the Party: https://jakeseliger.com/2014/04/27/paying-for-the-party-eliz... , which is, too, congruent with my own experience on the provider side of the education system.
We ought to be moving towards de-stigmatizing and strengthening the vocational education system: http://seliger.com/2017/06/16/rare-good-political-news-boost... . Not everyone wants to be or is well-suited to being an abstract-symbol manipulator. I am! But just because someone doesn't have that disposition, doesn't mean they are less or worse of a person.
Caplan is absolutely correct to say the much of education system is a waste of resources, a pointless zero-sum competition that simply re-arranges people on the socio-economic ladder.
But strangely, Caplan is a libertarian capitalist, an advocate of the very system that sets up and enforces this a socio-economic ladder in the first place.
He's also thus an opponent of any kind of welfare system that would make this competition less intense by making the bottom of the ladder a less miserable place to be and make the difference between the top and bottom less grotesque.
You talk about the socio-economic ladder like it's a bad thing in and of itself. IMO, it's only a bad thing where it sets up an incentive gradient that encourages bad behavior. The libertarian capitalist view is very aware of how you're rewarded with socio-economic status when you feed the hungry, invent cures for diseases, and generally provide wanted goods and services.
If there aren't farmers, restaurants, grocery stores, and all the vast amounts of work done to put food on our tables, we're all going hungry. That's the point I was trying to make, it didn't quite make it to coherent words like your reaction indicates. People go into McDonald's hungry and walk out full, and the owner gets their money for doing that useful work for society.
We ought to be moving towards de-stigmatizing and
strengthening the vocational education system
Here in the UK, the traditional problem with the vocational education system has been the lack of incentive alignment between its users and politicians. If our representatives are drawn from our abstract symbol manipulator class, whence comes the representation for the vocationally educated?
And education administrators, when faced with the choice of sending a disruptive student to the well-politically-represented-abstract-symbol-manipulator track or the poorly-politically-represented-vocational track, by and large responded predictably to their incentives.
Solving this problem is, I think, crucial to effective vocational education policy - unfortunately I have no idea how it can be solved.
The more I attempt to learn (have been avoiding it for decades) the more I admire auto mechanics. Its a real skill and takes brain power in addition to the physical aspect.
Many programmers are no smarter, no matter what the wage levels tell us.
We’re in a much deeper problem than just the problem with education, the problems with economics, inequality.
The western world needs to reevaluate its values.
I didn't do the math for the US, but in France, the class that pays most of the education (and health and etc) system (through taxes that is) is also that which profits from it the most. Since in the US education and health system are way too expensive, this might be different.
Purely from an individual financial perspective this also makes sense. Take the example of the UK: fees are a flat 9k per year. At the end of a 3 year degree you're at least 30k in debt (usually closer to 50k with living costs). What chance does a drama graduate from an unheard of university have of paying that back comfortably?! Has their degree really added to their ability to earn? Add to that a whopping 6% interest rate on student loans. It's enough to make a young person depressed. A number of my friends now use less that 5% of their degree knowledge and have learnt most of their craft on the job. Maybe we could just skip uni and get straight to learning on the job? It just seems so much more sensible for a lot of careers (CS included).
I have to say, I use significant parts of my CS BSc all the time. Especially compilers, embedded systems, programming of course, algo complexity, language design, operating systems, graph theory, networking, databases, etc. My thesis was on a functional programming language and involved a deep dive into the compiler (all credit to my amazing professor for his knowledge and patience). My first job straight out was embedded systems engineer; I was asked about I2C buses in the interview (and wouldn’t in a million years have known about them without the embedded sys classes). Having worked on a compiler fundamentally changed how I look at code and how I program.
I would never have made it anywhere close to where I am today without it. I can tell you that much.
Imagine if your professor worked in the field and you were his apprentice. Could that not have had a similar impact on your life? Perhaps it would have made you even better at applying the knowledge he imparted to you. Perhaps, it would make you additionally capable of teaching and transferring that knowledge to others in a very practical manner.
Fron a individual financial perspetive, this does not make sense, and the article says so:
FTA: "Would I advise an academically well-prepared 18-year-old to skip college because she won’t learn much of value? Absolutely not. Studying irrelevancies for the next four years will impress future employers and raise her income potential. If she tried to leap straight into her first white-collar job, insisting, “I have the right stuff to graduate, I just choose not to,” employers wouldn’t believe her. To unilaterally curtail your education is to relegate yourself to a lower-quality pool of workers. For the individual, college pays."
The fact that this is true further emphasises the need to delete this paradigm from society. Studying irrelevancies for 4 of your most capable and potentially productive years is a real waste. (My point originally was a little different - it was that a bunch of people go to uni because "it's the done thing" while saddling themselves with a mountain of debt for a poorly chosen degree, often due to pressure from uni marketing, then not getting a job that can really support them or justify the amount spent on their education)
>Studying irrelevancies for 4 of your most capable and potentially productive years is a real waste.
By what measure are 18-22 your most capable and potentially productive years? The brain doesn't stop maturing until 25-30 [0]. College is a great time for that to happen: a place and time to make mistakes without severe consequences; to explore what interests you, fall in love, try drugs, travel abroad, meet people from outside your comfort zone.
Calling these activities a waste because the person is not contributing to some economic output indicator is brutally myopic. In the age of AI and rapid automation of labor, we should be considering more than ever the importance of putting human minds first.
This is why college should be free. Let people take the courses they want, drop out, go to a trade school, do whatever. We can afford it.
Please don't make college free, it just forces people to spend even more time in education or else look lazy and unmotivated. It'd turn a Bachelor's into the equivalent of what a high school diploma is today.
Except that college/uni is frought with unnecessary stress and anxiety driven by exams etc. And I'm not saying people should focus on making money from a young age - quite the opposite actually. We should be free to explore whatever we choose. I just feel the college/uni education system is a bit of a con and learning within the confines of that system is expensive and not that advantageous to most. I too believe uni should be free (it used to be here in the UK) - and funnily enough, less people chose to go to uni back then despite it being free! Now that it's super pricey, more people seem to go as more is spent on marketing degrees to the public and it's "just the done thing" in society.
What good would life be if we only had technical writers and PR people?
Further, why stop at college? Why not just predetermine who is likely to be most successful based on their parents, and not school certain kids at all? This is beyond a slippery slope, and it's always expressed by someone with a LOT of education, like a fucking professor of economics with a PhD from an Ivy League school.
My eyes couldn't be rolling harder. I have a successful career in tech of 20+ years, without a degree, and a HUGE amount of what's wrong with the culture of tech is that we are surrounded and led by folks who haven't studied sociology, political science, even economics, having HUMONGOUS impact on what those fields teach.
Far more rarely will you hear people for whom higher education was always out of reach say that we think it had nothing to offer us. It's a great privilege, but I definitely think society could benefit from trying to get more education in the hands of folks who would do something with it, instead of greedy little fuckshits who think studying art and literature is a waste of time.
I've been working in tech since I was 16 years old, and I can never get that time back. There are subjects which I'll never be as able to learn - particularly higher math - as I was at that age.
I was excited to dive into my career when I was young, but I do not feel it yielded the best life I could have had.
> My eyes couldn't be rolling harder. I have a successful career in tech of 20+ years, without a degree, and a HUGE amount of what's wrong with the culture of tech is that we are surrounded and led by folks who haven't studied sociology, political science, even economics, having HUMONGOUS impact on what those fields teach.
Couldn't agree with this more. I'm relatively young, but I'm trying to get out of tech (and especially engineering) because of the lack of a stimulating cultural environment. The kind of conversations I like having, the kind of women I'd like to meet, and the kind of company I like to keep just don't exist in tech. Talking about video games was cool in my early 20s, but I've had 30+ coworkers that literally only talked about video games and the most recent tech stack. Yuck.
Coming from having studied philosophy (at an elite school) and where most of my old classmates are lawyers now, it's kind of a bummer. As an aside, startup people/founders/investors tend to be much more eclectic, but tech, at the ground level, is an intellectual wasteland.
I’m glad other people feel the same as me. Sometimes it seems like if you’ve got a SDE job people think you’re the king of the hill. I’m working on an exit from tech as well.
The idea that software engineers are paid more than everyone is a fallacy. There are a good deal of jobs that pay significantly more, especially when looked at over the long run. It generally does require going back to school, which is a risk/reward tradeoff that must be examined.
I can say that the older colleagues I've had can definitely have better conversations than what you're describing. One of my coworkers and I talk about skiing form, mountain climbing, and some of his experiences growing up in the 60's.
I think your experience is a byproduct of the ageism in most of the web-development companies in the bay area. You might want to consider getting in to embedded development, or some similar field that's totally unsexy and where the tools haven't changed or lost their usefulness in decades. It's a good living and none of your coworkers will talk about video games if you don't want to.
> Coming from having studied philosophy (at an elite school) and where most of my old classmates are lawyers now, it's kind of a bummer. As an aside, startup people/founders/investors tend to be much more eclectic, but tech, at the ground level, is an intellectual wasteland.
Now my eyes are rolling. It must be contagious. I'm sure the famously fascinating and well loved folks known as Lawyers will be better to work with.
I know you were just trying to get in some cheap laughs by putting other people down, but being a lawyer has made my life much more fascinating.
It's hard to imagine another profession that has as good a balance between intellectual depth (law is very much a technical skill) and intellectual breadth (a natural result of having to become conversant in whatever domain forms the context of the current dispute). Because of my job, I've learned so much about fields as diverse as Vitamin D testing and DNA identification to Sikh religious apparel to Hellfire missile post-launch abort procedures.
So, I mean, you are of course entitled to laugh at the cliché of lawyers being boring suits. But the simple reality is that it's a deeply enriching field.
Regardless of how annoying another comment is, please don't post unsubstantive comments here and especially please don't do flamewars here. Your comment downthread breaks the site guidelines even worse.
Completely fucking anecdotal. I've been in tech for decades, in diverse industries, and I've had countless interactions with others on every subject imaginable, from Dostoevsky to quantum physics and everything in between.
Perhaps you're unlucky, or perhaps there's some reason you're only ending up at places full of mindless cretins. Or perhaps the interesting people just don't care to invite you to the bar.
In fact, some of the most interesting people I've interacted with worked with me at a game company. They could talk about games all day, but there was much more to them.
I can't really explain it, but that (embarrassingly) sounds like exactly what an engineer would say. As if people are supposed to swoon over Dostoevsky and quantum physics. It just reeks of pseudo-intellectualism and try-hard-ness. Compare that to @torstenvl's laundry list, which might seem a bit esoteric, but it definitely sounds genuine.
> What's stopping people from self-educating themselves in the humanities you mention?
What's stopping me from building my own rocketship to Mars? Absolutely nothing, except for the fact I'm unlikely do it right (or at all). It's a terrible idea to look at a problem and say, "what's stopping this poor, under-educated person who has to work 10 hour days and feed a family of three from doing self-education?" Um.... a lot. Motivation, for one. A guarantee that the education will be worth anything when they're done, for two. And three, can they actually do it? Maybe they have enough self-control but that isn't all that matters.
Many people can't self-educate - it won't work for them, as education is inherently a social process for some people.
> Formal education is far from the only way to learn.
Of course not - but it's great for a lot of people, and suggesting people just learn on their own shows that you don't really understand people. There are so many benefits to a formal education environment being accessible to you even if you don't want to use it - it helps far more people than you know with the basics of getting a real, useful education.
> It's a terrible idea to look at a problem and say, "what's stopping this poor, under-educated person who has to work 10 hour days and feed a family of three from doing self-education?"
So instead we pull them out of the labor market (no income) for 4 years and tack on $100k in student loans for a humanities degree that is unlikely to lead to a high paying job?
> A guarantee that the education will be worth anything when they're done, for two.
Who is guaranteed this today? The reason we're having more of these debates about the value of formal secondary education is that the economy is pivoting from pedigree-based to skills-based hiring, and leaving a lot of degree chasers (and their families) underemployed and confused.
> And three, can they actually do it? Maybe they have enough self-control but that isn't all that matters.
If 40% of people who start secondary education fail to finish, then maybe it's appropriate to have a better filter for the motivation, discipline, and self-control needed to succeed? I know I didn't have the required inputs at 18, but I sure did by my mid 20s.
> Many people can't self-educate - it won't work for them, as education is inherently a social process for some people.
Self-education doesn't have to be a solitary endeavor. There's a spectrum of opportunities between isolation on one end and traditional college on the other - meetups, mentorship, book clubs, online forums and communities, interactive online courses, community groups, etc. I'm just arguing that if we want a generation that values humanities - which I agree is important - we can get it in other ways than pushing a lot of 18 year old kids into history, philosophy, english, and political science degrees at expensive 4 year universities.
>Learning advanced math has definitely improved my life, often in unexpected ways.
(Emphasis mine.)
My impression is that the arts is about expressing yourself, and about understanding others. It's about understanding the human condition. I think that just like how understanding technology will allow you to see this years technical fads and how similar they were to the cycle a decade back, reading history and literature will allow you to see the same cycles in politics and communication fads.
Also, having a common 'culture' to draw upon aids in communication. Having a common culture of the classics, I think, does this better than most things because the classics change more slowly than most things.
Thanks for replying instead of downvoting me, but I still find your answer unsatisfying.
I actually agree that learning a bit of history and politics is quite useful. But I mentioned art and literature.
I'm a major consumer of art and books, but why would I need to study them? Let's take art, for example.
There are many cases where counterfeiters have created fake "masterpieces" that fooled all the experts, even creating masterpieces that are in the style of some famous painter, but were original creations, and were sold accredited as being lost works of that painter.
Once unmasked, those paintings became essentially worthless.
Hence, it's "value" as art was purely based on who painted it. It had nothing to do with the artwork itself. To me that calls into question the whole purpose of the study of art, as even the experts seem ill-equipped to determine what is "great" art and what is a "hack job".
>Once unmasked, those paintings became essentially worthless.
>Hence, it's "value" as art was purely based on who painted it. It had nothing to do with the artwork itself. To me that calls into question the whole purpose of the study of art, as even the experts seem ill-equipped to determine what is "great" art and what is a "hack job".
One can make the argument that if society doesn't fully understand something, that makes studying that thing that isn't fully understood more valuable rather than less valuable.
In fact, I think that might be the whole of our disagreement (and the larger disagreement between those who think school should be purely vocational and those who value a broader education.)
I believe this is what is meant when the college people say that they are trying to teach "how to learn" - it's about thinking about problems where the answer is unknown and maybe unknowable.
> if you don't fully understand something, that makes studying that thing that isn't fully understood
I can't speak for WB but I think the point is that even the art professors and art experts also "don't fully understand" it either. If it's the "blind leading the blind", how do we measure the value of _formal_ classes?
(Self) study of art is great. I think we can agree. But why is _formal_ study in a very expensive _formal_ classroom better? Are there any studies of improved brain performance or expanded lateral thinking that's specifically correlated back to college art classes?
>I can't speak for WB but I think the point is that even the art professors and art experts also "don't fully understand" it either. If it's the "blind leading the blind", how do we measure the value of _formal_ classes?
Sorry, I made an edit after the quote, which I think makes my argument way more clear.
I'm suggesting that there is value to studying a thing where nobody has the right answer.
The professor doesn't have the right answer, either, but the professor does have a set of methods, tools and traditions for studying those problems for which society doesn't have the answers.
> One can make the argument that if you don't fully understand something, that makes studying that thing that isn't fully understood more valuable rather than less valuable.
One could, but I fundamentally don't care who created a painting that I enjoy looking at and would like to decorate my residence with.
Why would counterfeiting have anything to do with what you take away from a painting? As you say it has nothing to do with the art itself. The price of a piece shouldn't influence your enjoyment of it.
Counterfeiting to me is fascinating because there's a lot of diligent work that goes into producing a good fake for collectors. And skilled counterfeiters have to study the painting and the context of the painting well enough to reproduce it using period materials, period techniques, and the technique of the specific artist they're counterfeiting. That's a form of art study which you're deriding here.
When you actually get down to the business of enjoying and appreciating art, it's a deeply personal thing. For most people the price attached to the art has as much relevance to it as the cork does to the flavor of wine. Being able to talk about what you see in your favorites, why they make you feel the way you do, and what they communicate to you is what studying art is supposed to do.
If you want to get into higher math, now is an excellent time.
You can get all of the books for free on the internet, if you know where to look (Library Genesis anyone?).
If you put in 4 years dedicated to learning math, I guarantee you that you will get at least as much knowledge out of this as if you had done this when you were younger.
Not only, the visualizations available today replace years of comprehending, ie 3brown1blue , I had a tenured professor who didn't know the real world applications of linear algebra
There are actually two reasons why 3blue1brown video lectures are superior to old fashioned professor-and-blackboard lectures:
1. A video with animation and clear text and colours can be far more effective than chalk on blackboard. For example, watch 60 seconds of this video on Fourier Transformations: https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=spUNpyF58BY&t...
Such an effective, efficient presentation simply could not be done with chalk and blackboard.
>If you put in 4 years dedicated to learning math, I guarantee you that you will get at least as much knowledge out of this as if you had done this when you were younger.
This is... not the majority view? But I am attempting to teach myself math right now, as an older (late 30s) person with a job. The best tools I've found are Serge Lang's books (Basic Mathematics) and Khan Academy.
I would be super interested in recommendations for better tools and resources; Money isn't really an object, at least at student scale, but time is limited.
Khan academy, for me, is useful mostly in that it feeds me problems to solve, and I think that's the important part? At least for the 'give me problems and grade them' part, Khan is way better than a tutor, from experience. I think for the "explain things to me" either Lang's book or talking to a friend works well; My problem with local tutors is that most of them couldn't really help me with proofs for the basic math I was learning, and I think that's essential to actual understanding. I've had much better luck imposing on friends for that.
But I don't know. I'm only 60% done with Khan's "world of math" and that is somewhere near the end of what my co-workers did in 8th grade, as far as I can tell. I've been putting a low level of effort into this for about a year, while working full time, so that's not quite as embarrassing as it sounds? Still kinda embarrassing. I certainly have improved my arithmetic and attention to detail, though.
But that's been the hard part for me; most of the other things I've learned, I could just go and read the books. With math? I mean, books are fine, but it seems like I have to spend a lot of time writing things out, doing problems.
The majority has never learnt math properly, so their view doesn't count ;)
You should forget about all of that high school math and start directly with university math. It's actually easier in that it really starts from the beginning.
And limited time is really a problem. That's the reason why it is more difficult to learn math later in life, it is not because your brain is rotting, it is because you can usually dedicate much less time to it. You need to do the exercises, and think through the problems yourself.
>You should forget about all of that high school math and start directly with university math. It's actually easier in that it really starts from the beginning.
So, I think being able to do the problems in high school math is important; it's certainly expected for the college level books I've read. The books for highschoolers are completely useless, as far as I can tell, except as sources of exercises (and khan academy is way better for exercises than any book if you ask me) - My favorite books for high school math are Lang's "Basic Mathematics" and maybe "Short Calculus" which don't seem to be aimed at the high schooler, even though it covers math that the people I wish to associate myself with did in highschool. This might be what you mean about College math starting from the beginning? But my impression is that most college-level books presume you "speak the language" - presume that even if perhaps you can't prove all of high school math, you have memorized the notation and the formulas and know what formulae to apply to what situation.
I compare high school math, as conventionally taught, to the way a semi-literate reads; memorization without understanding. I Personally remain unconvinced that this has no value, though of course, it's clearly a lot less valuable than having real understanding through proofs and derivations. But value or no, most of the college-level math material seems to expect you to have spent some years memorizing and applying without understanding before you get to proofs and the other interesting stuff.
Personally, I've started working through the old memorization-and-drill because I can - though I am still functionally a layabout, I have worlds more willpower and motivation than when I was 16. Also, I've discovered spaced repetition flashcards, and between the two of those things, for the first time in my life, I can actually memorize things like the multiplication tables.
Right now, I'm looking at reading and comparing that with math; I started reading after I was expected to, and it was really quite difficult for me at first. But then I reached a certain level of proficiency, and after that? it became extremely easy, and really the foundation of all my further success. (and I am moderately successful, professionally. I've had a reasonable career as a UNIX SysAdmin/SRE/Programmer, though my competencies lean to the left of that list.)
My current working theory is that mathematics as a language is a similar sort of thing, and you certainly have to memorize the words and symbols... and memorizing the more important phrases will make you a better communicator, even before you gain true understanding of the depth of said phrase.
I guess the other thing is that when I first started learning to read... I would read books well above my level and actually understand very little of them; but I pretty quickly started filling in the holes. Perhaps I ought to utilize that strategy with math; I have plenty of good math books, but I tend to read until I find something I don't understand, then I stop and chew on it (or get help from a friend) - which is obviously way slower than just reading through even if I only understand 20%;
Be sure to read "Make it stick". It's a real eye opener about effective learning. It's written by a bunch of scientists, and based in scientific evidence. Basically, the most common study strategies are the most effective.
Also, a "A mind for numbers" is another book with a slightly different take. It's less general and more focused on how to learn math and other hard science subjects.
Edit: Basically, the most common study strategies are the least effective. Least, not most.
...a HUGE amount of what's wrong with the culture of tech is that we are surrounded and led by folks who haven't studied sociology, political science, even economics, having HUMONGOUS impact on what those fields teach.
Most of those people have educations, nominally balanced by things like Common Core.
Treating the study of each art, or of literature or of each branch of history as the work of a lifetime is as much a problem as treating them as a waste of time. We need a way to be educated without it having anything to do with making a living, so that we can bring critical thinking to bear however we make our living.
The grass is always greener on the other side. Goes both ways, but I think the data is stacked against you. Plenty of people just don't fit the college mold and should go work or study in a different way (vocational school, certifications, boot-camps, self education, etc.)
The article uses the first 3 paragraphs to setup the premise that schooling is not translating directly to job skills. The article is not about "we should get rid of non tech subjects".
The real TL;DR summary is in the last sentence of a very long article:
My thesis, in a single sentence: Civilized societies revolve around education now, but there is a better—indeed, more
civilized—way. If everyone had a college degree, the result would be not great jobs for all,
but runaway credential inflation.
Trying to spread success with education spreads education but not success.
Absolutely. Even leaving aside less tangible benefits, broad education of this sort allows for broader range of lateral thinking, more frames of reference.
And on the argument: yes, the degree is "signaling". That's why there's a filter at the 4 year mark, because those who dont get there are less likely to have the same traits as those who do. But folks who should know better throw around "it's signalling" as though nothing was under the signal, just the signal itself. Saying the impact of senior year is disproportionately high also ignores that its when students tend to take the most advanced topics and add a capstone to their undergrad career. It's like saying the last quarter of a of a game is way overated and athletes are over paid for winning because most of the work was done earlier in the game. I. just. can't. even.
It is not arguing for elliminating educations. It is arguing that we don't need force every one education. It is arguing that a forced education is not a really a good education.
You make a good point, but could you please not rant like this on Hacker News? I mean, "greedy little fuckshits"? Come on.
The good part of your comment talks specifically about your own experience. It's natural to have strong feelings based on that, and Hacker News threads are a fine place to talk about one's own experiences. Just don't make generic rants out of them or sling mud at people you disagree with. For example, your sentence that begins "Far more rarely" is a fine contribution to the thread.
We're also incentivizing a disparity in credential signalling by making it so straightforward for 16 year olds to drop out of highschool. I'm not aware of any industrialized nation that makes this so easy.
It’s beneficial for a broad segment of society to be in conversant in the liberal arts — particularly history. Not everyone needs or wants a degree, but it’s hard to have an informed or politically engaged populace without this kind of education making its way into everyone’s hands.
And why can't high school communicate these critically important concepts? The current trend seems to consider those 4 years as utterly wasted. The biggest problem I have with education, as someone from an "Elite" engineering school, is the sheer inefficiency of it. We spend the first quarter of our entire lifetimes to get "educated". There has to be a better way and throwing more years at it isn't the answer.
Notice that every time someone writes an article about how some people are not cut out for higher education, it's always other people's kids who should avoid it.
I'd like to know what Bryan Caplan's (the author) kids are up to these days. Are they welders? Plumbers? That credential inflation is a topic of this article really shows the author's hand: someone keep these people out of higher ed, they don't deserve it and they're just making it harder for my offspring to differentiate themselves in the job market.
I've made the same argument as the writer, and I have children. Frankly, I'm not sure how to advise them when the time comes. It may well be that for some, I'd suggest a college education, while for others, I might suggest learning a trade and getting ahead in it while they're young. That is to say, I think your comment makes a conclusion based on your assumptions about people who question the universal value of higher education, and you don't have anything real to back it up.
I question the universal value of higher education, too. But I come to a different conclusion: that is, that education ought to be reformed to make it more universally valuable, not systematically kept from the people it failed.
Here's one argument against college education for jobs: you're very likely to be forced to move far from home to find any work in your field. There just weren't programming jobs within an hour of me in upper NY so I had to move to a place in New Jersey that I don't like that much out of necessity. I'm sure it would've went the same for chemical engineering or whatever else with very few exceptions, maybe law or medicine. If I'd taken a trade like electrical work or plumbing I could live anywhere I wanted - everyone has toilets and wires - but now I'm at the mercy of the programming job market until I can transition to remote work, so it'll be years until I get to live somewhere to my preference.
Where do you live? If it's not in or very close to highly dense areas, encourage trades if you don't want to have to take a plane or drive hours to visit your grandchildren.
While I get your point it should also be noted that an area can only sustain so many plumbers and electricians. It's not like there are hundreds of new plumber jobs opening up every year, especially in a place like Upstate NY with a shitty economy. They need people to get educated but then come back home and help improve the home economy.
Of course I say this as someone who moved from Upstate NY to Texas for work.
True, but there's still a difference. If you graduate with 50k student debt, say in CS, you're absolutely urged to work in your niche field where you're compensated for your new expertise and can pay back the loan. That may mean moving to a particular place with an industry that caters to this niche.
If you did vocational (e.g. apprenticeship) schooling and graduate with little or no debt, that urgency is far smaller, and it tends to be much less of a niche.
i.e., there's less debt pressure to pursue work that adequately compensates for your new knowledge, and there's more places (nearby) as you don't work in a niche as much.
The fact is, people perceive trades as socially inferior to white collar careers requiring college. This is completely independent of earning potential, mind.
And software engineering is mostly a trade. The fact that you do it indoors, in offices, without getting your hands dirty is deceptive; it's conceptually very similar to construction, mechanics, plumbing, etc.
>Notice that every time someone writes an article about how some people are not cut out for higher education, it's always other people's kids who should avoid it.
Well, yeah. That's the problem with positional goods in general. It's not that they aren't valuable to acquire or are bad for the recipients. It's that the competition is zero-sum, so we should be using our coordination mechanisms to reduce the total amount done.
Like, someone advocating a yacht tax wouldn't turn down owning a yacht. They simply think society is better off with fewer and less luxurious yachts in general, compared to the other things we could be doing with our effort.
Do you not think the venue here might have an impact on that?
If my kids love working with their hands, hate being cooped up inside, and find maths and science boring, I would absolutely suggest they learn a trade. There are myriad opportunities for a smart, hardworking tradesperson, especially as more and more kids are pressured into university who would be more suited to an apprenticeship.
Far better for them to be a smart, capable sparky or metalworker than to be stuck churning out mediocre 'enterprise' software and hating their job.
> What does this mean for the individual student? Would I advise an academically well-prepared 18-year-old to skip college because she won’t learn much of value? Absolutely not. Studying irrelevancies for the next four years will impress future employers and raise her income potential. If she tried to leap straight into her first white-collar job, insisting, “I have the right stuff to graduate, I just choose not to,” employers wouldn’t believe her. To unilaterally curtail your education is to relegate yourself to a lower-quality pool of workers. For the individual, college pays.
> This does not mean, however, that higher education paves the way to general prosperity or social justice. When we look at countries around the world, a year of education appears to raise an individual’s income by 8 to 11 percent. By contrast, increasing education across a country’s population by an average of one year per person raises the national income by only 1 to 3 percent. In other words, education enriches individuals much more than it enriches nations.
Essentially he makes the point that, indeed if he were a parent or would advise a parent or a student, he'd argue today, you absolutely should get a college degree. 'For the individual, college pays'. But that as a matter of national policy, we should realise there are zero-sum aspects to education, i.e. a person getting a degree competes better for attaining a job than a person without a degree, but that this doesn't translate into higher productivity / value. In other words, college should not be pursued as a national policy like say a Bernie Sanders often talks about.
And that makes sense. I'm all for distributive justice, universal education is part of that equation. But if governments and companies receive plenty of data that the marginal return of education approaches zero, they should act accordingly and fight back in some manner.
And that makes sense. For example, I can buy and eat meat while still saying that as a society, we shouldn't eat as much meat, and that we should double our taxes on them. Or sugar. Or cigs. Or SUVs. Or indeed, I can make use of a tax loophole while voting for a party that wants to end the loophole. Just because I'm self-interested in the short-term, doesn't mean that I don't want society to be shaped to make all of us better off in the long-term.
The conclusion doesn't necessarily follow from the premise; that is, the antidote to the zero-sum aspects of education are not necessarily less education.
As well, the conclusion made by the author and most of his cohorts is from a purely economic standpoint. As if there were no intrinsic value to the enrichment of the human mind. As if the economic output of an individual were his sole measure of worth.
You're essentially saying: "education is only worth investing in for some people." That's exactly what the author is saying: "Only academically well-prepared 18-year-olds ought to go to college." Ignoring that being 'academically well prepared' itself is influenced by many, many factors: race, income, test-taking aptitude, geographic location, age...
Education is for everyone. Higher education -- community college -- is for everyone. It is worth investing in for everyone who wants it. That it doesn't bear out on the balance sheet of economics is a failure of economic measurement and the education system, not of education itself.
> The conclusion doesn't necessarily follow from the premise; that is, the antidote to the zero-sum aspects of education are not necessarily less education.
That feels like a strawman. After all, he didn't say the antidote necessarily was less education, but also different education. i.e., not everyone should go to college could mean more people ought to go to vocational training. An argument he makes quite clearly:
> The college-for-all mentality has fostered neglect of a realistic substitute: vocational education. It takes many guises—classroom training, apprenticeships and other types of on-the-job training, and straight-up work experience—but they have much in common. All vocational education teaches specific job skills, and all vocational education revolves around learning by doing, not learning by listening. Research, though a bit sparse, suggests that vocational education raises pay, reduces unemployment, and increases the rate of high-school completion.
> You're essentially saying: "education is only worth investing in for some people."
So, absolutely not. None of this was said.
As for the argument about economics and the intrinsic value to enrich the human mind... Sure, in principle I and everyone else agrees (see K12 history classes). But you'd also agree, there are limits. For one, we don't expect people to go to super-college from 30 to 60, paying $10k a year either, to enrich the human mind. At some point education becomes a personal concern for everyone to pursue according to his/her wishes, interests, desires, rather than a societal concern.
And secondly, it feels like this argument is completely detached from reality. Nobody cares if you spent $5k on a history education and enjoyed it, nobody argues against that. What people argue against is spending $50k on a history education you'll never use in the marketplace that either put you 50k in debt, which will burden you for an entire decade, or require other people (including those who didn't go to college) to pay for it. If you simply enjoy history, there's plenty of ways to study it for free. You and I probably do it all the time. If you want to study history to become an academic, teacher, writer etc, assuming the job exists, that's fine, there's a connection between the skills you learn and the skills your future job requires. And if that requires investments to overcome sociological differences, I'm all for that. (minority who studied sociology here, you get no complaints from me).
But we obviously also see people getting taught skills that are completely useless. I've worked in a few faculties in a university. I'm not even necessarily talking about history majors or something. The most egregious example I think are business students, they get taught tons of stuff they never use. And don't tell me they study them for the sake of cultural enrichment, either, that's a joke, they'll tell you themselves. They study these things to get the piece of paper that gives them entrance to a job they didn't need to study for, which they've essentially bought with useless effort and debt. That's wrong, you know it, and the answer isn't 'more college education for everyone'. The author's suggestion that college-for-all neglects a substitute: vocational schooling, I think is really apt. That's different education, not less.
Interesting article (also something of a condensed version of his book, The Case against Education), and a couple of counterpoints.
Caplan is making several seemingly-logical assumptions that most readers will miss. I will say that at least some of these assumptions are false, negating the conclusion.
Caplan assumes that people are largely immutable ("What I’m cynical about is people."). His touts several studies about both the retention and application of knowledge that support his point excellently. That being said, these studies are, at best, empirical estimations of a philosophical issue. The issue of "real world" ability suffers from being largely impossible to test, has no real definition, and is fraught with assumptions, none of which make for rigorous science.
Caplan, as I imagine, is taking college at its full cost when arguing that less people ought to go. I would like to point out it is fully possible to provide a college level education for significantly less than is done so now. I believe point this out makes his pragmatic argument much less strong.
I take issue to this claim in particular "My exams are designed to measure comprehension, not memorization. Yet in a good class, four test-takers out of 40 demonstrate true economic understanding." If just 10% of students understand, I would argue the teacher is either grossly ineffective or the student is grossly underprepared. Teasing out the fault is difficult, but don't forget, this anecdote is wholly from the teacher. Also, what constitutes "true economic understanding"?
I don't disagree with Caplan's conclusion personally, but I do disagree with how he arrives there. Calling students philistines is both an unfair generalization and a sidelining insult. His assumptions allow him to arrive at an agreeable point, but that path taken is full of disagreeable compromises.
Why teach everyone advanced math and physics? Because you have to start training for it at a very young age in order to have mathematically and mentally matured enough to be ready for a modern PhD in your early 20's. The system is inefficient but has naturally evolved to give everyone a shot, starting everyone on this path and letting people drop out at different steps along the way. Our society needs scienstis, lawyers, doctors, and MBAs. Everyone's parent want their child to be one of these. So everyone is sent along this path.
It's better than the old style where you could only go to school if you were rich enough. That kind of society couldn't compete with a society that found the best among millions instead of thousands and thus naturally eroded away.
The fraction of people out of the total population that will actually want (need?) a PhD in math, physics, or other related fields doesn't really support your statement.
Also, I know plenty of parents who don't have specific career goals in mind for their children, who support their children following their own calling towards a particular profession.
It is easier today than ever before to share a basic great books history and philosophy "story" today. We can include our primate biology, geology, food history and organizational and strategic narratives from Sun Tzu to Aristotle to Schelling's game theory to Robert's Rules of order.
If we're going to live to 100, we should should share some tooling for how to get there better together. Education is not the problem. Constant crop dusting on filmic conflict fictions and staged sport conflicts is the problem. Living together in an industrial world secreted behind walls or even continents away on 1-way broadcast communications is foolhardy.
Classic American: "I can't make money on it, it's useless".
Having an education (at least a high school diploma) is supposed to make you a civil and functioning citizen of your country, with enough knowledge to understand (albeit at a basic level) why things are the way they are.
The article defeats its own arguments with statements like, "In other words, education enriches individuals much more than it enriches nations." Hard to argue against education at that point but the article tries anyway. Let's ignore the fact that that is the point of education. When was it the the object of education to teach specific job skills? That's a new one to me. After all, we must be talking about fortune tellers if you can tell which job skills will be in most demand and pay best two decades from now.
It's sad that people don't want to learn, educate, or improve themselves. It's a defeatist attitude and sad that we as a society are willing to explore so little of people's potential. This attitude towards education in the US is, in many ways, more corrosive to our society than the lack of quality education itself.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 162 ms ] thread[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armed_Services_Vocational_Ap...
If a company gives a test, and there exists a protected group that does less well on the test, then discriminatory intent can be presumed. It is certainly legal to give such a test, but some valid connection to the job requirements would need to be shown. Proving that in court is probably more trouble than the test is worth.
Employers don't seem to get in trouble for requiring a degree though, or even for preferring a degree from a fancy institution, despite the fact that entering a degree program usually requires a test such as the SAT or ACT.
So that is the workaround for avoiding legal trouble: demand an unnecessary degree in order to filter by test score without directly demanding a test score. It's kind of like money laundering, but for test scores. Colleges make out very well in this deal.
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2013/07/three_big_facts....
You should read the article:
The labor market doesn’t pay you for the useless subjects you master; it pays you for the preexisting traits you signal by mastering them. This is not a fringe idea. Michael Spence, Kenneth Arrow, and Joseph Stiglitz—all Nobel laureates in economics—made seminal contributions to the theory of educational signaling. Every college student who does the least work required to get good grades silently endorses the theory. But signaling plays almost no role in public discourse or policy making. As a society, we continue to push ever larger numbers of students into ever higher levels of education. The main effect is not better jobs or greater skill levels, but a credentialist arms race.
If college is mostly about signaling, then it's an arms race, and the faster the herd, the more the individual most race in order to keep up.
Accessibility to higher education is important, but much more of that education should be vocational in nature. Right now we have a lot of access to college, but that access has led to ballooning problems with student loans, along with Girard-style mimetic crises ( https://jakeseliger.com/2017/06/27/violence-and-the-sacred-o... ).
The best and biggest employers should have the best information on the value of college education (in whole and in terms of its parts, such as humanities courses). They could expand their potential labor pool and make better or cheaper hires by adopting different hiring standards. If there's an information arbitrage going on here, somebody should be able to make money from it.
In my view the elephant in the room is that maybe a college education is valuable after all, but we haven't put our finger on the precise reason.
Depends how one defines "best"; though this is debatable, because one could say that these are the most beholden to the signaling arms race despite the data they may have to the contrary (i.e alphabet, amazon, et al).
>In my view the elephant in the room is that maybe a college education is valuable after all, but we haven't put our finger on the precise reason.
I don't think this is the elephant in the room at all, people routinely say that some parts of a college education can be valuable for various reasons, while others (as judged by value by the marketability of the graduates) are not valuable at all.
In my view, the "best" and biggest employers like it because it signals some default level of competence (which is growing weaker as the incentives are to push everyone through to get some kind of degree) as well as relative malleability and conformance to institutionalized authority (those who opted out, or didn't go might not conform to the corporate identity or end up making it expensive for the employer to employ them, compared to their counter parts; after all, hiring based on objective measurements/metrics without any human involvement isn't something that happens today). Also these companies are largely affected by the turnover rates compared to smaller ones, so it's easier to target colleges graduates as a cohort.
>If there's an information arbitrage going on here, somebody should be able to make money from it.
I do think some employers take advantage of this environment, though I doubt it's alphabets, amazons, and apples…
Who said it's empty? It's effective at finding the employer what they want. Just not efficient on the part of the employee.
Who is we? Certainly not the author of the article we're discussing. He specifically talks about recommending going in to higher education to the individual.
Anyone != everyone (literally the point of my post)
And "qualified" != anyone who can squeeze out a 20 on the ACT. Certainly far south of 70+%.
> labor market doesn’t pay you for the useless subjects you master ...Girard-style mimetic crises
Well hell, maybe try less Girard and more Fourier?
Accessible to anyone qualified does not equal a good choice for anyone.
We ought to be moving towards de-stigmatizing and strengthening the vocational education system: http://seliger.com/2017/06/16/rare-good-political-news-boost... . Not everyone wants to be or is well-suited to being an abstract-symbol manipulator. I am! But just because someone doesn't have that disposition, doesn't mean they are less or worse of a person.
But strangely, Caplan is a libertarian capitalist, an advocate of the very system that sets up and enforces this a socio-economic ladder in the first place.
He's also thus an opponent of any kind of welfare system that would make this competition less intense by making the bottom of the ladder a less miserable place to be and make the difference between the top and bottom less grotesque.
LOL
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
And education administrators, when faced with the choice of sending a disruptive student to the well-politically-represented-abstract-symbol-manipulator track or the poorly-politically-represented-vocational track, by and large responded predictably to their incentives.
Solving this problem is, I think, crucial to effective vocational education policy - unfortunately I have no idea how it can be solved.
Many programmers are no smarter, no matter what the wage levels tell us.
We’re in a much deeper problem than just the problem with education, the problems with economics, inequality. The western world needs to reevaluate its values.
I would never have made it anywhere close to where I am today without it. I can tell you that much.
FTA: "Would I advise an academically well-prepared 18-year-old to skip college because she won’t learn much of value? Absolutely not. Studying irrelevancies for the next four years will impress future employers and raise her income potential. If she tried to leap straight into her first white-collar job, insisting, “I have the right stuff to graduate, I just choose not to,” employers wouldn’t believe her. To unilaterally curtail your education is to relegate yourself to a lower-quality pool of workers. For the individual, college pays."
By what measure are 18-22 your most capable and potentially productive years? The brain doesn't stop maturing until 25-30 [0]. College is a great time for that to happen: a place and time to make mistakes without severe consequences; to explore what interests you, fall in love, try drugs, travel abroad, meet people from outside your comfort zone.
Calling these activities a waste because the person is not contributing to some economic output indicator is brutally myopic. In the age of AI and rapid automation of labor, we should be considering more than ever the importance of putting human minds first.
This is why college should be free. Let people take the courses they want, drop out, go to a trade school, do whatever. We can afford it.
[0]http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24173194
Edit: just saw this on the BBC - very relevant to my point: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-42923529
What good would life be if we only had technical writers and PR people?
Further, why stop at college? Why not just predetermine who is likely to be most successful based on their parents, and not school certain kids at all? This is beyond a slippery slope, and it's always expressed by someone with a LOT of education, like a fucking professor of economics with a PhD from an Ivy League school.
My eyes couldn't be rolling harder. I have a successful career in tech of 20+ years, without a degree, and a HUGE amount of what's wrong with the culture of tech is that we are surrounded and led by folks who haven't studied sociology, political science, even economics, having HUMONGOUS impact on what those fields teach.
Far more rarely will you hear people for whom higher education was always out of reach say that we think it had nothing to offer us. It's a great privilege, but I definitely think society could benefit from trying to get more education in the hands of folks who would do something with it, instead of greedy little fuckshits who think studying art and literature is a waste of time.
I've been working in tech since I was 16 years old, and I can never get that time back. There are subjects which I'll never be as able to learn - particularly higher math - as I was at that age.
I was excited to dive into my career when I was young, but I do not feel it yielded the best life I could have had.
Couldn't agree with this more. I'm relatively young, but I'm trying to get out of tech (and especially engineering) because of the lack of a stimulating cultural environment. The kind of conversations I like having, the kind of women I'd like to meet, and the kind of company I like to keep just don't exist in tech. Talking about video games was cool in my early 20s, but I've had 30+ coworkers that literally only talked about video games and the most recent tech stack. Yuck.
Coming from having studied philosophy (at an elite school) and where most of my old classmates are lawyers now, it's kind of a bummer. As an aside, startup people/founders/investors tend to be much more eclectic, but tech, at the ground level, is an intellectual wasteland.
I think your experience is a byproduct of the ageism in most of the web-development companies in the bay area. You might want to consider getting in to embedded development, or some similar field that's totally unsexy and where the tools haven't changed or lost their usefulness in decades. It's a good living and none of your coworkers will talk about video games if you don't want to.
Now my eyes are rolling. It must be contagious. I'm sure the famously fascinating and well loved folks known as Lawyers will be better to work with.
It's hard to imagine another profession that has as good a balance between intellectual depth (law is very much a technical skill) and intellectual breadth (a natural result of having to become conversant in whatever domain forms the context of the current dispute). Because of my job, I've learned so much about fields as diverse as Vitamin D testing and DNA identification to Sikh religious apparel to Hellfire missile post-launch abort procedures.
So, I mean, you are of course entitled to laugh at the cliché of lawyers being boring suits. But the simple reality is that it's a deeply enriching field.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Perhaps you're unlucky, or perhaps there's some reason you're only ending up at places full of mindless cretins. Or perhaps the interesting people just don't care to invite you to the bar.
In fact, some of the most interesting people I've interacted with worked with me at a game company. They could talk about games all day, but there was much more to them.
I can't really explain it, but that (embarrassingly) sounds like exactly what an engineer would say. As if people are supposed to swoon over Dostoevsky and quantum physics. It just reeks of pseudo-intellectualism and try-hard-ness. Compare that to @torstenvl's laundry list, which might seem a bit esoteric, but it definitely sounds genuine.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
What's stopping me from building my own rocketship to Mars? Absolutely nothing, except for the fact I'm unlikely do it right (or at all). It's a terrible idea to look at a problem and say, "what's stopping this poor, under-educated person who has to work 10 hour days and feed a family of three from doing self-education?" Um.... a lot. Motivation, for one. A guarantee that the education will be worth anything when they're done, for two. And three, can they actually do it? Maybe they have enough self-control but that isn't all that matters.
Many people can't self-educate - it won't work for them, as education is inherently a social process for some people.
> Formal education is far from the only way to learn.
Of course not - but it's great for a lot of people, and suggesting people just learn on their own shows that you don't really understand people. There are so many benefits to a formal education environment being accessible to you even if you don't want to use it - it helps far more people than you know with the basics of getting a real, useful education.
> It's a terrible idea to look at a problem and say, "what's stopping this poor, under-educated person who has to work 10 hour days and feed a family of three from doing self-education?"
So instead we pull them out of the labor market (no income) for 4 years and tack on $100k in student loans for a humanities degree that is unlikely to lead to a high paying job?
> A guarantee that the education will be worth anything when they're done, for two.
Who is guaranteed this today? The reason we're having more of these debates about the value of formal secondary education is that the economy is pivoting from pedigree-based to skills-based hiring, and leaving a lot of degree chasers (and their families) underemployed and confused.
> And three, can they actually do it? Maybe they have enough self-control but that isn't all that matters.
If 40% of people who start secondary education fail to finish, then maybe it's appropriate to have a better filter for the motivation, discipline, and self-control needed to succeed? I know I didn't have the required inputs at 18, but I sure did by my mid 20s.
> Many people can't self-educate - it won't work for them, as education is inherently a social process for some people.
Self-education doesn't have to be a solitary endeavor. There's a spectrum of opportunities between isolation on one end and traditional college on the other - meetups, mentorship, book clubs, online forums and communities, interactive online courses, community groups, etc. I'm just arguing that if we want a generation that values humanities - which I agree is important - we can get it in other ways than pushing a lot of 18 year old kids into history, philosophy, english, and political science degrees at expensive 4 year universities.
Learning advanced math has definitely improved my life, often in unexpected ways. But I have a hard time seeing how studying art and literature would.
(Emphasis mine.)
My impression is that the arts is about expressing yourself, and about understanding others. It's about understanding the human condition. I think that just like how understanding technology will allow you to see this years technical fads and how similar they were to the cycle a decade back, reading history and literature will allow you to see the same cycles in politics and communication fads.
Also, having a common 'culture' to draw upon aids in communication. Having a common culture of the classics, I think, does this better than most things because the classics change more slowly than most things.
I actually agree that learning a bit of history and politics is quite useful. But I mentioned art and literature.
I'm a major consumer of art and books, but why would I need to study them? Let's take art, for example.
There are many cases where counterfeiters have created fake "masterpieces" that fooled all the experts, even creating masterpieces that are in the style of some famous painter, but were original creations, and were sold accredited as being lost works of that painter.
Once unmasked, those paintings became essentially worthless.
Hence, it's "value" as art was purely based on who painted it. It had nothing to do with the artwork itself. To me that calls into question the whole purpose of the study of art, as even the experts seem ill-equipped to determine what is "great" art and what is a "hack job".
>Hence, it's "value" as art was purely based on who painted it. It had nothing to do with the artwork itself. To me that calls into question the whole purpose of the study of art, as even the experts seem ill-equipped to determine what is "great" art and what is a "hack job".
One can make the argument that if society doesn't fully understand something, that makes studying that thing that isn't fully understood more valuable rather than less valuable.
In fact, I think that might be the whole of our disagreement (and the larger disagreement between those who think school should be purely vocational and those who value a broader education.)
I believe this is what is meant when the college people say that they are trying to teach "how to learn" - it's about thinking about problems where the answer is unknown and maybe unknowable.
I can't speak for WB but I think the point is that even the art professors and art experts also "don't fully understand" it either. If it's the "blind leading the blind", how do we measure the value of _formal_ classes?
(Self) study of art is great. I think we can agree. But why is _formal_ study in a very expensive _formal_ classroom better? Are there any studies of improved brain performance or expanded lateral thinking that's specifically correlated back to college art classes?
Sorry, I made an edit after the quote, which I think makes my argument way more clear.
I'm suggesting that there is value to studying a thing where nobody has the right answer.
The professor doesn't have the right answer, either, but the professor does have a set of methods, tools and traditions for studying those problems for which society doesn't have the answers.
One could, but I fundamentally don't care who created a painting that I enjoy looking at and would like to decorate my residence with.
Counterfeiting to me is fascinating because there's a lot of diligent work that goes into producing a good fake for collectors. And skilled counterfeiters have to study the painting and the context of the painting well enough to reproduce it using period materials, period techniques, and the technique of the specific artist they're counterfeiting. That's a form of art study which you're deriding here.
When you actually get down to the business of enjoying and appreciating art, it's a deeply personal thing. For most people the price attached to the art has as much relevance to it as the cork does to the flavor of wine. Being able to talk about what you see in your favorites, why they make you feel the way you do, and what they communicate to you is what studying art is supposed to do.
You can get all of the books for free on the internet, if you know where to look (Library Genesis anyone?).
If you put in 4 years dedicated to learning math, I guarantee you that you will get at least as much knowledge out of this as if you had done this when you were younger.
1. A video with animation and clear text and colours can be far more effective than chalk on blackboard. For example, watch 60 seconds of this video on Fourier Transformations: https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=spUNpyF58BY&t... Such an effective, efficient presentation simply could not be done with chalk and blackboard.
2. The internet provides a way to watch the best of the best lectures in the world. Grant Sanderson, the guy behind 3blue1brown, is a Khan Academy talent search winner: https://www.khanacademy.org/about/blog/post/125876900000/mee...
This is... not the majority view? But I am attempting to teach myself math right now, as an older (late 30s) person with a job. The best tools I've found are Serge Lang's books (Basic Mathematics) and Khan Academy.
I would be super interested in recommendations for better tools and resources; Money isn't really an object, at least at student scale, but time is limited.
Khan academy, for me, is useful mostly in that it feeds me problems to solve, and I think that's the important part? At least for the 'give me problems and grade them' part, Khan is way better than a tutor, from experience. I think for the "explain things to me" either Lang's book or talking to a friend works well; My problem with local tutors is that most of them couldn't really help me with proofs for the basic math I was learning, and I think that's essential to actual understanding. I've had much better luck imposing on friends for that.
But I don't know. I'm only 60% done with Khan's "world of math" and that is somewhere near the end of what my co-workers did in 8th grade, as far as I can tell. I've been putting a low level of effort into this for about a year, while working full time, so that's not quite as embarrassing as it sounds? Still kinda embarrassing. I certainly have improved my arithmetic and attention to detail, though.
But that's been the hard part for me; most of the other things I've learned, I could just go and read the books. With math? I mean, books are fine, but it seems like I have to spend a lot of time writing things out, doing problems.
The majority has never learnt math properly, so their view doesn't count ;)
You should forget about all of that high school math and start directly with university math. It's actually easier in that it really starts from the beginning.
And limited time is really a problem. That's the reason why it is more difficult to learn math later in life, it is not because your brain is rotting, it is because you can usually dedicate much less time to it. You need to do the exercises, and think through the problems yourself.
So, I think being able to do the problems in high school math is important; it's certainly expected for the college level books I've read. The books for highschoolers are completely useless, as far as I can tell, except as sources of exercises (and khan academy is way better for exercises than any book if you ask me) - My favorite books for high school math are Lang's "Basic Mathematics" and maybe "Short Calculus" which don't seem to be aimed at the high schooler, even though it covers math that the people I wish to associate myself with did in highschool. This might be what you mean about College math starting from the beginning? But my impression is that most college-level books presume you "speak the language" - presume that even if perhaps you can't prove all of high school math, you have memorized the notation and the formulas and know what formulae to apply to what situation.
I compare high school math, as conventionally taught, to the way a semi-literate reads; memorization without understanding. I Personally remain unconvinced that this has no value, though of course, it's clearly a lot less valuable than having real understanding through proofs and derivations. But value or no, most of the college-level math material seems to expect you to have spent some years memorizing and applying without understanding before you get to proofs and the other interesting stuff.
Personally, I've started working through the old memorization-and-drill because I can - though I am still functionally a layabout, I have worlds more willpower and motivation than when I was 16. Also, I've discovered spaced repetition flashcards, and between the two of those things, for the first time in my life, I can actually memorize things like the multiplication tables.
Right now, I'm looking at reading and comparing that with math; I started reading after I was expected to, and it was really quite difficult for me at first. But then I reached a certain level of proficiency, and after that? it became extremely easy, and really the foundation of all my further success. (and I am moderately successful, professionally. I've had a reasonable career as a UNIX SysAdmin/SRE/Programmer, though my competencies lean to the left of that list.)
My current working theory is that mathematics as a language is a similar sort of thing, and you certainly have to memorize the words and symbols... and memorizing the more important phrases will make you a better communicator, even before you gain true understanding of the depth of said phrase.
I guess the other thing is that when I first started learning to read... I would read books well above my level and actually understand very little of them; but I pretty quickly started filling in the holes. Perhaps I ought to utilize that strategy with math; I have plenty of good math books, but I tend to read until I find something I don't understand, then I stop and chew on it (or get help from a friend) - which is obviously way slower than just reading through even if I only understand 20%;
Also, a "A mind for numbers" is another book with a slightly different take. It's less general and more focused on how to learn math and other hard science subjects.
Edit: Basically, the most common study strategies are the least effective. Least, not most.
Most of those people have educations, nominally balanced by things like Common Core.
Treating the study of each art, or of literature or of each branch of history as the work of a lifetime is as much a problem as treating them as a waste of time. We need a way to be educated without it having anything to do with making a living, so that we can bring critical thinking to bear however we make our living.
The article uses the first 3 paragraphs to setup the premise that schooling is not translating directly to job skills. The article is not about "we should get rid of non tech subjects".
The real TL;DR summary is in the last sentence of a very long article:
On topic for the whole article please.And on the argument: yes, the degree is "signaling". That's why there's a filter at the 4 year mark, because those who dont get there are less likely to have the same traits as those who do. But folks who should know better throw around "it's signalling" as though nothing was under the signal, just the signal itself. Saying the impact of senior year is disproportionately high also ignores that its when students tend to take the most advanced topics and add a capstone to their undergrad career. It's like saying the last quarter of a of a game is way overated and athletes are over paid for winning because most of the work was done earlier in the game. I. just. can't. even.
The good part of your comment talks specifically about your own experience. It's natural to have strong feelings based on that, and Hacker News threads are a fine place to talk about one's own experiences. Just don't make generic rants out of them or sling mud at people you disagree with. For example, your sentence that begins "Far more rarely" is a fine contribution to the thread.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
p.s. Please don't use allcaps for emphasis. That's in the guidelines too.
I'd like to know what Bryan Caplan's (the author) kids are up to these days. Are they welders? Plumbers? That credential inflation is a topic of this article really shows the author's hand: someone keep these people out of higher ed, they don't deserve it and they're just making it harder for my offspring to differentiate themselves in the job market.
Where do you live? If it's not in or very close to highly dense areas, encourage trades if you don't want to have to take a plane or drive hours to visit your grandchildren.
Of course I say this as someone who moved from Upstate NY to Texas for work.
If you did vocational (e.g. apprenticeship) schooling and graduate with little or no debt, that urgency is far smaller, and it tends to be much less of a niche.
i.e., there's less debt pressure to pursue work that adequately compensates for your new knowledge, and there's more places (nearby) as you don't work in a niche as much.
And software engineering is mostly a trade. The fact that you do it indoors, in offices, without getting your hands dirty is deceptive; it's conceptually very similar to construction, mechanics, plumbing, etc.
Well, yeah. That's the problem with positional goods in general. It's not that they aren't valuable to acquire or are bad for the recipients. It's that the competition is zero-sum, so we should be using our coordination mechanisms to reduce the total amount done.
Like, someone advocating a yacht tax wouldn't turn down owning a yacht. They simply think society is better off with fewer and less luxurious yachts in general, compared to the other things we could be doing with our effort.
If my kids love working with their hands, hate being cooped up inside, and find maths and science boring, I would absolutely suggest they learn a trade. There are myriad opportunities for a smart, hardworking tradesperson, especially as more and more kids are pressured into university who would be more suited to an apprenticeship.
Far better for them to be a smart, capable sparky or metalworker than to be stuck churning out mediocre 'enterprise' software and hating their job.
> What does this mean for the individual student? Would I advise an academically well-prepared 18-year-old to skip college because she won’t learn much of value? Absolutely not. Studying irrelevancies for the next four years will impress future employers and raise her income potential. If she tried to leap straight into her first white-collar job, insisting, “I have the right stuff to graduate, I just choose not to,” employers wouldn’t believe her. To unilaterally curtail your education is to relegate yourself to a lower-quality pool of workers. For the individual, college pays.
> This does not mean, however, that higher education paves the way to general prosperity or social justice. When we look at countries around the world, a year of education appears to raise an individual’s income by 8 to 11 percent. By contrast, increasing education across a country’s population by an average of one year per person raises the national income by only 1 to 3 percent. In other words, education enriches individuals much more than it enriches nations.
Essentially he makes the point that, indeed if he were a parent or would advise a parent or a student, he'd argue today, you absolutely should get a college degree. 'For the individual, college pays'. But that as a matter of national policy, we should realise there are zero-sum aspects to education, i.e. a person getting a degree competes better for attaining a job than a person without a degree, but that this doesn't translate into higher productivity / value. In other words, college should not be pursued as a national policy like say a Bernie Sanders often talks about.
And that makes sense. I'm all for distributive justice, universal education is part of that equation. But if governments and companies receive plenty of data that the marginal return of education approaches zero, they should act accordingly and fight back in some manner.
And that makes sense. For example, I can buy and eat meat while still saying that as a society, we shouldn't eat as much meat, and that we should double our taxes on them. Or sugar. Or cigs. Or SUVs. Or indeed, I can make use of a tax loophole while voting for a party that wants to end the loophole. Just because I'm self-interested in the short-term, doesn't mean that I don't want society to be shaped to make all of us better off in the long-term.
As well, the conclusion made by the author and most of his cohorts is from a purely economic standpoint. As if there were no intrinsic value to the enrichment of the human mind. As if the economic output of an individual were his sole measure of worth.
You're essentially saying: "education is only worth investing in for some people." That's exactly what the author is saying: "Only academically well-prepared 18-year-olds ought to go to college." Ignoring that being 'academically well prepared' itself is influenced by many, many factors: race, income, test-taking aptitude, geographic location, age...
Education is for everyone. Higher education -- community college -- is for everyone. It is worth investing in for everyone who wants it. That it doesn't bear out on the balance sheet of economics is a failure of economic measurement and the education system, not of education itself.
That feels like a strawman. After all, he didn't say the antidote necessarily was less education, but also different education. i.e., not everyone should go to college could mean more people ought to go to vocational training. An argument he makes quite clearly:
> The college-for-all mentality has fostered neglect of a realistic substitute: vocational education. It takes many guises—classroom training, apprenticeships and other types of on-the-job training, and straight-up work experience—but they have much in common. All vocational education teaches specific job skills, and all vocational education revolves around learning by doing, not learning by listening. Research, though a bit sparse, suggests that vocational education raises pay, reduces unemployment, and increases the rate of high-school completion.
> You're essentially saying: "education is only worth investing in for some people."
So, absolutely not. None of this was said.
As for the argument about economics and the intrinsic value to enrich the human mind... Sure, in principle I and everyone else agrees (see K12 history classes). But you'd also agree, there are limits. For one, we don't expect people to go to super-college from 30 to 60, paying $10k a year either, to enrich the human mind. At some point education becomes a personal concern for everyone to pursue according to his/her wishes, interests, desires, rather than a societal concern.
And secondly, it feels like this argument is completely detached from reality. Nobody cares if you spent $5k on a history education and enjoyed it, nobody argues against that. What people argue against is spending $50k on a history education you'll never use in the marketplace that either put you 50k in debt, which will burden you for an entire decade, or require other people (including those who didn't go to college) to pay for it. If you simply enjoy history, there's plenty of ways to study it for free. You and I probably do it all the time. If you want to study history to become an academic, teacher, writer etc, assuming the job exists, that's fine, there's a connection between the skills you learn and the skills your future job requires. And if that requires investments to overcome sociological differences, I'm all for that. (minority who studied sociology here, you get no complaints from me).
But we obviously also see people getting taught skills that are completely useless. I've worked in a few faculties in a university. I'm not even necessarily talking about history majors or something. The most egregious example I think are business students, they get taught tons of stuff they never use. And don't tell me they study them for the sake of cultural enrichment, either, that's a joke, they'll tell you themselves. They study these things to get the piece of paper that gives them entrance to a job they didn't need to study for, which they've essentially bought with useless effort and debt. That's wrong, you know it, and the answer isn't 'more college education for everyone'. The author's suggestion that college-for-all neglects a substitute: vocational schooling, I think is really apt. That's different education, not less.
Caplan is making several seemingly-logical assumptions that most readers will miss. I will say that at least some of these assumptions are false, negating the conclusion.
Caplan assumes that people are largely immutable ("What I’m cynical about is people."). His touts several studies about both the retention and application of knowledge that support his point excellently. That being said, these studies are, at best, empirical estimations of a philosophical issue. The issue of "real world" ability suffers from being largely impossible to test, has no real definition, and is fraught with assumptions, none of which make for rigorous science.
Caplan, as I imagine, is taking college at its full cost when arguing that less people ought to go. I would like to point out it is fully possible to provide a college level education for significantly less than is done so now. I believe point this out makes his pragmatic argument much less strong.
I take issue to this claim in particular "My exams are designed to measure comprehension, not memorization. Yet in a good class, four test-takers out of 40 demonstrate true economic understanding." If just 10% of students understand, I would argue the teacher is either grossly ineffective or the student is grossly underprepared. Teasing out the fault is difficult, but don't forget, this anecdote is wholly from the teacher. Also, what constitutes "true economic understanding"?
I don't disagree with Caplan's conclusion personally, but I do disagree with how he arrives there. Calling students philistines is both an unfair generalization and a sidelining insult. His assumptions allow him to arrive at an agreeable point, but that path taken is full of disagreeable compromises.
Yea, exactly. That, and I just wish I could study and compete for degrees in an open, competitive and lucrative system.
It's better than the old style where you could only go to school if you were rich enough. That kind of society couldn't compete with a society that found the best among millions instead of thousands and thus naturally eroded away.
Also, I know plenty of parents who don't have specific career goals in mind for their children, who support their children following their own calling towards a particular profession.
If we're going to live to 100, we should should share some tooling for how to get there better together. Education is not the problem. Constant crop dusting on filmic conflict fictions and staged sport conflicts is the problem. Living together in an industrial world secreted behind walls or even continents away on 1-way broadcast communications is foolhardy.
Having an education (at least a high school diploma) is supposed to make you a civil and functioning citizen of your country, with enough knowledge to understand (albeit at a basic level) why things are the way they are.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's sad that people don't want to learn, educate, or improve themselves. It's a defeatist attitude and sad that we as a society are willing to explore so little of people's potential. This attitude towards education in the US is, in many ways, more corrosive to our society than the lack of quality education itself.