One thing that would help with the standardized test issue would be to set a threshold (based on what data show is needed to do well in the program) and have a random lottery of everyone who meets that bar.
Random lotteries for people meeting bars is a terrible idea. Look at the H1b wreck we have today where bodyshop companies exploit the system by gaming the lottery. Not to mention the stress, uncertainty and powerlessness of the actual applicants.
That's exactly what TJ HS (top 1 HS in the US) tried to do to reduce their Asian representation, because Asians were "overrepresented".
Standardized tests are a better solution than "holistic" admissions, which bias heavily for students who can afford to go to expensive summer camps, competitions, and volunteer in poor countries. At least standardized tests can be studied for even if you're poor.
There are entire high schools in the New Orleans area whose average scores on standardized tests exceed all but 2-3 students at any public high school in the area. Having people with experience who know the answers because they can understand and teach the problem at a fundamental level is vastly better than any handout workbook.
Or they have kids whose parents have much greater respect for education and work ethic than other high schools.
I got a 99th percentile score on the SAT with just the typical prep books you find on Amazon (which I pirated) and self study and reflection on mistakes. If you keep blaming the system instead of holding people accountable for their own failures those underperforming high schools you mention will never become top scorers.
The point about not forgiving debt without solving the underlying problem seems to be missing from much of the student debt debate.
Though, the most surprising thing to me was needing to provide a privilege statement in order to speak at the college event.
How the hell can anyone provide any sort of nuanced insight into the privilege and challenges they faced in a "disclosure"? It reeks of enacting a miniature struggle session to undermine the speaker before they even have a chance to talk.
Healthcare demonstrates the other extreme of the problem in my experience, where entrance to the field is gatekept by the medical education system to ensure that there's not an over supply of professionals that would put downward pressure on existing salaries.
> Healthcare demonstrates the other extreme of the problem in my experience, where entrance to the field is gatekept by the medical education system to ensure that there's not an over supply of professionals that would put downward pressure on existing salaries.
That's not a bad thing (to a point) when the entry-level qualification takes a massive amount of time, intense effort, and money to get; it's very important that they manage it so there's no oversupply. If you don't, then you'll have disasters like US legal education has been.
Lots of people have jobs that put lives on the line, Pilots for example. They don’t need a college degree to do that safely, competently, or legally. The idea that healthcare is somehow a special snowflake is nonsense.
I think you are digressing from the main point. Most people who devalue education are viewing it from a privileged position (ex: tech).
Parents on 3rd world countries know that education is still the safest way to a higher standard of living (not guaranteed though).
There are no shortcuts to gain knowledge (degrees, training, self-taught, etc.). It is hard to vet someone if that person has not been through accredited programs - professional scammers can even fool interviewers.
Aside from this, there is a big difference: would you trust a doctor to cure you without a medical degree? There is your answer.
>Aside from this, there is a big difference: would you trust a doctor to cure you without a medical degree? There is your answer.
It depends.
I had a recurring issue with pain and numbness in my elbow for a few years. I went to all sorts of well credentialed doctors, and every diagnosis they gave ended up being wrong. The person who cracked the case ended up being a random doctor at a hole in the wall clinic that had been the first person available to get an ear infection checked out. I mentioned my symptoms offhand while we were chatting, and he cracked it in about 3 minutes - nerve damage from leaning my elbow on my standing desk. He had a lot of practical experience with occupational related injuries, including nerve damage from poor fitting safety gear, etc. It wasn't his degree that let him find the root cause of my issue, but practical experience.
On the other hand, there's lots of diseases where doctors need to keep up on the latest advancements in research, etc. I don't really know how this works - is it trade journals? Do all doctors in fields like this regularly read them, or papers on NCBI? Does a college degree help here? I don't know. I also don't know if I fundamentally disbelieve that someone couldn't be just as effective in these areas through a more practical learning approach than a college degree, either. But I'm not sure that I believe it, either.
Medicine is a big field and not all parts of it - from my experience on the receiving end, at least - seem to require all the same skills to be successful.
Where did you get that impression? There are tons of people in healthcare without a degree. Quite common, even. You can make good money working in healthcare with as little as a certificate.
This could be Sam Altman reacting to the recent article about George Hotz [1] mentioning Sam Altman as actually being a pro status quo figure masquerading as an anti-establishment figure:
It's a poetic mission statement for an endeavor which seems to jive with Hotz’s recognition that such a school must be physical and beautiful. However, scratch away the veneer, Hotz suggests in a recent blog post, and one finds that those behind UATX “are either straight up supporters of Power or naive political children.” He points to Joe Lonsdale, Sam Altman, and Marc Andreessen, all of whom “are very successful in the current system.”
“This is not a counter-elite!” Hotz continues. “This is a spin off of the exact same BS that’s everywhere. NGO awards and fake status signaling markers.”
Got the same impression. The narrative presented indicates the writer has minimal appreciation for what degrees in fields other than their own actually provide.
Good luck being able to practice engineering if you haven't got a degree! The licensing bodies for professions won't care a fig about your life experience.
OTOH, I actually have an engineering degree and I can't build a bridge, a radio, or a robot, despite having looked at all those things during the course.
People who can actually do it have done it for a lab or a business, and then get accredited.
My impression of the engineering degree is that it's basically a certificate in being able to deep dive into... something. Whether that's actual bridges or financial derivatives or trading systems, a degree basically says you haven't given up on some large pile of math-heavy topics, so an employer should bet on you being able to learn their thing. It's also the case that there isn't enough time to learn a whole business, so really it's testing that you stuck with the introductory parts of a wide variety of techie things.
I've worked as an engineering manager for both professional engineers and non-degreed technicians / technologists. My observation (such as it is) is that the degreed engineers had a stronger framework to be able to connect ideas and learn new skills. On the other hand, technologists were able to do tasks just as well as engineers but had trouble generalizing the concepts.
Importantly, the degree (combined with professional guidance) also helps you appreciate the things you don't know. For example, a geotechnical engineer may be perfectly able to assess an abutment or design a blast but they wouldn't certify a dam foundation and would reach out for help in doing so.
It's probably worth sharing that I hated my undergraduate education with a burning passion. I've only recently begun to appreciate it more -- turns out those old farts who did the accreditation might have known a thing or two about what you need to know later in your career.
Thanks for this. As someone who also hates undergrad with a burning passion (taking classes that seem irrelevant) you helped frame this in a way I can appreciate and reconsider.
There is very little that an undergraduate degree in gender studies, media studies, history, etc. provides, even if these subjects can be considered useful in general. On the surface you are learning about the humanities but in practice the classes have such low standards that you learn neither the writing and argumentation skills needed to excel in academia nor the deep understanding of past works that is the reward of the humanities.
I say this as someone who went to a school with highly ranked humanities programs. My business communication class taught me more about communication than any rhetoric/history/media studies class. My high school AP English Language class taught me more about persuasive writing than any writing class in college.
If undergrad humanities programs are to be taken seriously they need to drastically increase their rigor and actually instill skills in their students.
I'm saying liberal arts schools fail to provide you with a liberal arts education. You do not learn how to write better nor do you dive deep into the works that you study nor do you learn how to think. Instead, you learn surface level facts about random things without any pressure to go deeper and actually understand what you're studying. Very rarely will you actually analyze a primary source in depth and you definitely won't analyze multiple in depth.
I went to a school that had top ranked humanities departments across the board. There is zero desire for rigor in any humanities courses or departments. It's a way for people to show up to class and get a degree without effort so they can party all day.
Ah, yeah. I think there has been a shift to this as 'customer demand' has tilted in that direction.
In my experience at a large state school, students could sign up for rigorous humanities courses if they wanted to. (e.g. by avoiding the 'popular' courses in auditorium rooms, etc.). Although it's a bit of a shame that it's not universal, and that the student culture often demands "the easy gen-eds"
At the end of the day, I think this is a cultural problem in some humanities departments. It's not unheard of for some STEM departments to fail 50% of their incoming students. I guess the appetite to hold the same standard in other departments just isn't there?
Universities have been around for a long time. They're some of the oldest institutions in contemporary civilization, and they're increasing in importance. They've survived upheavals that overshadow anything in our lifetimes. So I've been skeptical of prediction of its demise.
Still, there are serious problems with modern academics and higher education, and the doomsayers have some valid points. So I've thought it's possible.
After the pandemic though I wasn't sure so much about their imminent demise anymore. Students really wanted to return due to the social value it provided. It's not like institutions started collapsing.
I think it would require holders of wealth to shift in the status markers they value. So far it's still one of the primary ones.
I nearly completely agree with you. The one thing that a twitter "threat" enables that is poorly supported in other formats is the ability to have comments on a particular sentence.
The worst part of the twitter as a long form platform is when a single idea extends beyond the limitations of a single tweet.
I see your point about commenting on sentences, but would also argue that academic writing provides a better model for this via quotations and references
Yep, but there's no place that provides the combination of user base, potential for engagement, and commenting on sentences.
Long form is a much better format for comprehensive ideas, but the "this is something I want to comment on" isn't there and the engagement on the comment and comments on the comments rarely exists in those formats.
Medium's "highlight" and "respond" functionality is a rather poor implementation of that desired ability (the discoverability beyond the "top highlight" is difficult for other users) ... and then there's that whole "upgrade to read more" problem.
And beyond that, there's the bit that twitter has a large number of users - trying to traverse Wordpress pings and comment moderation... ugh.
Unfortunately, twitter is the best place that offers users, aggregation, no $ needed, comment on sentence, and the opportunity for engagement of followers.
That also causes replies to sections of text taken out of context to get more traction than they should, feeding the "dunk" culture on Twitter. I'm not sure being able to reply to and highlight an out of context chunk of text is a useful thing for communication at all really.
Imagine how busted archived Twitter threads are going to look in 20 years. If linkrot in the early Web is bad now, how bad will “tweet-rot” be, after Twitter declines into disuse, quite likely fails as a corporation, and its CDN is scattered to the winds?
I couldn’t care much less about VC or crypto-bro brain farts like the linked post, although historians writing about this period probably will be, if only to write cautionary tales. But there’s a lot of deeply interesting expertise that’s been crammed into this godawful format, especially during fraught times like the pandemic and the current Ukraine invasion. I can only guess that the experts in question assume that Twitter will be the format with the widest reach, although I have to doubt that will always be true. If the Internet Archive comes up with a project specifically targeted at archiving Twitter threads as coherent artifacts, I for one would be happy to earmark a donation for that.
I prefer them to long winded blog posts with fluffy personal anecdotes that read like a novella. Twitter threads are so bad that nobody wants to write more than they have to.
This is kind of a weird mix of points. Ignoring his political axe-grinding, I think the value of a college degree is increasingly in question for many fields because the price has risen wildly for decades without a corresponding increase in market value. (Except perhaps for elite-institution degrees, which are more about the brand and the network than what people actually learn.)
I think we haven't seen at least a partial collapse only because most American companies are bad at hiring, bad at investing in workers, and bad at keeping them. But imagine a company where programmers are happy and tend to say for years. That company might do just as well, or perhaps better, running an in-house boot camp and apprenticeship program as by hiring new grads.
Price and value are decoupled for college degrees. STEM students are subsidized by liberal arts students, and many liberal arts degrees are not, by themselves, economically valuable (I said this as someone with just such a degree).
> STEM students are subsidized by liberal arts students
Can you provide more context for this? How is the cost of teaching a STEM student higher than the cost of a liberal arts student? The classrooms are roughly the same. STEM student labs might be more expensive to manage, but that equipment is/(can be?) funded by research grants.
STEM professors have to be paid a lot more than liberal arts professors (due to competition for STEM talent). Equipment for teaching isn’t covered under research grants, but might come from overhead on those grants, but more likely from donations (from big corps), grants, or tuition.
The national center for labor statistics says labor costs are about 30% of the spend [0]. STEM programs also include Liberal Arts courses, so only a fraction of the 30% goes to STEM professors pockets. AFAIK, STEM professors justify their value by generating money for the university via patents and grants.
While there are a massive number of private liberal arts schools, there are relatively few private STEM schools. Most STEM degrees come from public university that are significantly cheaper than private universities.
STEM professors bring in billions of dollars in research grants, of which the university takes over 50% for "administration". If you aren't aware labs have to pay a big cut of any grant income they get to the school. It used to be that in exchange the school would maintain buildings, fund build outs of equipment, etc. but nowadays it's wasted on DEIABCDXYZ vice chancellors of provosts.
(1) Many grants have a mentorship / training / giving-back component. This is one of the merit-based criteria NSF reviews on.
(2) Research grants have overhead which feeds back into general budgets. At elite schools, this is about 2/3 of the money. A typical split might be 1/3 to the department, 1/3 to the school, and 1/3 to the project. It's kind of a financial scam. Nominally, these cover buildings and admin time. Practically, these feed into general budgets which do include labs and teaching. Corruptly, a lot of the money gets funnelled in creative ways to improve professor's lives through fancy faculty clubs, get-aways, and in some cases, creative (but legal) embezzlement with money ending in people's pockets.
It is largely anecdotal based on some inquiries made at my school. Different schools will vary- is it a research school? What types of STEM degrees are offered? Etc. Others likely have more concrete insight than I do.
One conversation that stuck was the me:
Back when I was in school, one of my mandarin teachers wanted to offer a "business mandarin" course outside of the general language program geared towards business students who might need basic fluency in a corporate setting. The school denied him because there wasn't a budget for it, which struck me as asinine at the time as it wasn't like there would be students who weren't paying tuition for the course anyway. The school had rooms available, and students have to buy all the materials the class would need anyway.
Would offering that course have spread the same n students across m + 1 courses? (Hence an increase in instructional costs, but no increase in tuition revenue.)
This works fine for research universities, but in teaching universities (couldn't find the statistics, but there are a lot of them out there) someone has to subsidize the new STEM programs until the alumni start giving grants. In my experience, a lot more STEM alumni give large donations than humanities and social sciences. But that does mean a bigger initial outlay by someone.
Question: do elite institution degrees confer any addition to market value commensurate with their cost, or do they simply select for people who already have high market value?
Good question. This has been studied a lot and the answer is…unclear.
I think the kind of longitudinal studies needed combined with a small “treatment” group make this kind of investigation as hard to do as a nutritional study.
It is not the degree that is valuable, it is the network it allows you to access that is valuable. The classmates you have at certain institutions will increase the probability of you achieving certain goals.
The thing is that you frequently end making connections with alumni of those institutions in your first few corporate jobs, since they all recruit out of the same pool of elite universities. So even if you didn't go to Stanford or MIT, if you work at Google (well, in the 00s - it doesn't focus nearly so much on elite universities now) you will know people who went to those schools, and if you need to make a connection with another alumnus of them you can reach out to your friends and say "Hey, can you connect me to your classmate?"
> "Question: do elite institution degrees confer any addition to market value commensurate with their cost, or do they simply select for people who already have high market value?"
Speaking only for STEM, an elite STEM program gives the student access to a bigger variety of upperclassman courses; compare the available course list for a community college vs a large university and the difference is quite noticeable. The better programs also provide access to better equipment and advising; e.g., various University of California campuses have their own on-site chip fabrication labs. If the career trajectory you're planning benefits from those advanced courses, going to the better STEM programs is going to help tremendously. If not, well, they don't but that's hardly the institution's fault; they aren't choosing who to send your resume to, you are.
(As an aside, I use the word "access" very intentionally; educational institutions don't "confer" anything. Students get access to resources and opportunities and they choose which to take. It's entirely possible to do the minimum to fulfill requirements; for example, I chose easy courses to do the minimum fulfill my humanities requirements because it wasn't where my interests lay.)
I'm sure it depends some on the degree. A very sharp friend of mine got an aeronautical engineeering degree from a good state school. After a few years in industry he went back for a brand-name MBA. He said in 2 years of school, he learned exactly one thing that he couldn't have just figured out via general knowledge and a bit of thinking. [1] He said the real value was in the network he built up, people who would soon be placed in important positions in important companies all over.
And I should add that in an age of increasing inequality, a network with a lot of elite members will increase in value much faster than inflation. So the value of an elite degree might still be a bargain even at the current prices. Which probably explains why there's a lot of bribery, legal and otherwise, by the rich trying to get students into brand-name schools.
Elite institutions could do nothing and still add market value simply by colocating people with high market value who meet each other and create lasting networks and friendships.
I do think that on top of that, they add value because students can be given more challenging and stimulating coursework. The difference in Math education between a top college and a college with loose entry requirements is staggering - we're talking people doing hard proofs freshman year vs. undergrad seniors taking upper level math courses that don't even have proofs, just computation.
Private elite institutions (Yvies) offer excellent education, and networking with really rich people ;). Some people already had that, some will make economic use of it, and some not. I assume the variance within-group is very very high, so you can probably calculate stats to defend any point. And then the cost also varies, so ...
'Elite' state schools (GA Tech, Michigan State? Etc) probably have excellent ROI.
Expensive, not really elite schools are probably not worth it on average, but again, cost varies highly, so ...
It’s been studied some and there's at least some substantial evidence that it's the latter. (I posted this on another thread last week.)
> For most students, the salary boost from going to a super-selective school is “generally indistinguishable from zero” after adjusting for student characteristics, such as test scores. In other words, if Mike and Drew have the same SAT scores and apply to the same colleges, but Mike gets into Harvard and Drew doesn’t, they can still expect to earn the same income throughout their careers. Despite Harvard’s international fame and energetic alumni outreach, somebody like Mike would not experience an observable “Harvard effect.” Dale and Krueger even found that the average SAT scores of all the schools a student applies to is a more powerful predictor of success than the school that student actually attends.
I'm not familiar with this study in particular, but there's another similar one for the elite NYC public high schools, which have historically had a similar "halo effect" attributed to them. They found that the student cohort that "barely made it" had similar long-term outcomes as students who "barely missed out".
I came away thinking that parental influence is the most important factor. If your child is well-nurtured enough to be within a crap shoot of selection for an elite institution, it probably doesn't really matter if they get in or not, they'll be successful regardless (for mysterious reasons that may be interesting to know, but don't really matter).
As such, it's better not to make your kid focus on "getting in" (which is a suspect goal for many reasons), but instead on trying their best to realize their full potential.
One dimension: In my experience one of the most valuable aspects of attending an elite institution is that many of the most prestigious, high-paying, career-accelerating jobs in the US recruit primarily or exclusively at top colleges, and this creates numerous opportunities for their students.
On one hand, the exclusive job opportunities are providing value to students which can allow students to increase their value. On the other hand, the employers are benefiting from the fact that the universities themselves are selectively gathering people with high market value. Exactly how much of whether it's the former or the latter is an open question. Whether or not a university is an expensive platform to pass a corporation's gatekeeping is questionable.
My impression is that elite institutions generally do not have a higher cost than the reasonable alternatives, so there's no need to justify if it's worth paying more for them as you're not paying more. Their credential value is strongly linked to their selection, but if they do select you, studies there can be more affordable than a "lesser" institution, especially because they are mostly funded not by your tuition fees but rather by the endowments of their alumni, so indirectly through your future income.
The highest cost seems to be for good-but-not-best institutions that have some specific niche/selling point for them but are not particularly selective and will accept almost anyone who will pay their price.
Like, if some school wants to build a reputation for having the best scientists or lawyers then they have to be somewhat selective with respect to performance and have very competitive admissions, but you also need to ensure that the particular young students with most potential can actually afford to study there; but if a school just wants to provide a good education in X and does not care who will enroll, they can just ramp up the fees until the applicants filter themselves out.
Even the way you ask the question shows that you consider them somehow different. Probably better. Which presumably means that "better" people go there or teach there. So that's better networking.
And the fact that you know them by name as better places shows better brand.
Maybe ... I think IBM, for example did, and others might.
OTOH, it may be easier and cheaper to make an agreement with their local community college.
I think what makes the discussion hard is that people say 'college' and mean wildly different things. The author seemed to mean elite colleges in some comments, overall statistics in others, and for-profits in others. I think there are very different problems in different sectors.
A degree doesn't cost the company. An in-house bootcamp and apprenticeship program does. Once the less-legibly-promising new hires are equally productive, they now have a resume making them legibly good to the company's competitors in the job market, so it can't make up its investment by underpaying. ("Programmers are happy and tend to stay" is something the competitors can do too.)
I'm not saying don't do it, or that the status quo is good. But I don't think your suggestion really addresses the problem that got us here, the problem that we've subsidized an expensive signaling game (cf Bryan Caplan's The case against education).
> Ignoring his political axe-grinding
This was gratuitous. I didn't even see any politics in the thread.
Degrees cost companies through increased wages. Student loans get paid somehow, after all.
> This was gratuitous. I didn't even see any politics in the thread.
You not seeing things is not the same as things not existing. I do see it, and wanted to focus this bit of discussion on the question of degree value, not the assorted other stuff there.
You’re a hiring manager choosing between Alice and Bob. Alice has a degree, Bob doesn’t; you estimate they’ll be equally productive, and it’s common knowledge that your competitors will judge them the same. Do you offer Bob less, since he doesn’t have student loans to pay off? You can if you like, but then Bob will go work for your competitor.
> You not seeing things is not the same as things not existing. I do see it, and wanted to focus this bit of discussion on the question of degree value, not the assorted other stuff there.
You can mention having further disagreements without making it a gratuitous diss.
Quite a lot of people will indeed pay Alice more, especially if her degree is from a brand-name school. You can look up the stats yourself, but they're striking.
I personally build my hiring processes to be relatively blind to elite status signals. But interviewees tell me that's pretty unusual.
> You can mention having further disagreements without making it a gratuitous diss.
I believe it was both accurate and necessary to divert the replies away from the politics. And given that you can't even find the politics, I don't understand why you consider it necessary to appoint yourself my editor.
You misread: given common knowledge that Alice and Bob are equally promising, all info considered, do you make them different offers?
I'm not at all asking whether Alice with a degree gets better offers than Alice without a degree. We both say she does. At the time we're checking in, Alice's degree is a sunk cost. Your proposal is not: it's extra company investment in the non-degreed after hiring.
> can't even find the politics
Are you sure you want to emphasize anyone's reading ability in this conversation?
And accusing someone of political axe-grinding is a funny way to discourage replies about politics. You could've said, for instance, "Leaving aside any politics here..." That would help engender healthier discourse here on HN.
> Once the less-legibly-promising new hires are equally productive, they now have a resume making them legibly good to the company's competitors in the job market, so it can't make up its investment by underpaying.
It's not like other industries haven't already solved this problem. Law firms will finance your law school and make you pay them back if you leave the firm.
I'm increasingly loathe to hire a new college grad for enterprise software positions due to four years of terrible instruction that we have to deplorable. What are they even learning in modern day institutions?
Meanwhile, I have zero qualms about hiring high school grads with a github who can talk about the base language intelligently, let alone frameworks like spring.
As a hiring manager at one of tech firms, I can confirm that I can’t care less where you completed your deep learning courses - at Berkeley or on Coursera. Your GitHub profile matters so much more (especially so if you are fresh out of college).
In two years of a job search, I had two firms actually look at my GitHub. It’s not a realistic path to getting hired, as much as hiring managers want you to believe otherwise.
What's the word when people with trust and experience on one field suddenly trusted when they talk about other topics too? Saw this a lot with COVID but this is a good example too.
"The halo effect (sometimes called the halo error) is the tendency for positive impressions of a person, company, brand or product in one area to positively influence one's opinion or feelings in other areas."
Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect? Although that's more about how news and social media are unreliable sources of information on all topics. I've heard "Engineer's Disease" or "Engineer Syndrome" used to describe the tendency of so-called technical people to think their expertise generalizes to topics in which they have no experience.
1) The subreddit of my alma mater has been full of posts venting anxiety, depression, trouble with financial aid, trouble making friends, frustration with administration, etc for years now, exacerbated by COVID. While that may not be representative of the whole undergrad population, I can't help but be reminded of Thiel's line from Zero to One "Why are we doing this to ourselves?"
2) I'm now seeing not only friends without bachelors degrees get well-paying CS jobs with "engineer" titles & equity comp, but even some in mechanical engineering!
3) When I was in undergrad, half of my upper div classes were so abysmal that I figured the staff who cared enough to keep the enterprise going were fighting a losing battle. A complete rewrite would be better than an in place one. "Death is the best invention of life" and we should try the creative destruction of capitalism/evolution instead of holding the oldest institutions in the highest regard.
I don't have much of a clue what the future will look like by the time I have kids of college age, but I do not think particularly highly of what we've got now.
These kind of prognostications /opinions are easily falsifiable by talking to your coworkers that went to other universities. Most of the top-25 schools have upper-div CS classes that are nothing like what you're taking about, with both faculty and TAs putting in enormous effort to make sure that courses are accessible and intellectually stimulating.
I didn't see any statements about what will be, just what should be.
The sort-of counter-example is that "Tech jobs [..] are increasingly willing to hire with no degree". But strange that he of all people didn't add a statistic on that.
It’s really too late for me to drop out (graduating in the fall), but it’s something I’ve put a lot of thought into in the past. Really, the main thing that’s had value for me has been my senior thesis. Most classes, even high-level engineering classes, are a waste of time.
I don't like Twitter threads but I agree with Sam Altman in this case. Waiving student loan debt but not resolving the root cause will give a clear signal to colleges - Increase tuition as much as you want because the taxpayers will again pick up the tab in a few years .
College is a net good, but do it on the cheap. Unless you plan to attend a top law school, no one cares about your undergrad.
Community College students can still transfer into UCLA or other top schools. Hell, community college was good for me since I was able to take out student loans and get the hell away from my family.
No more evictions for me! Even if you don't finish college, it's a great deal. I was at 6 figures before I graduated.
Very few degrees offer this type of wage at graduation. Not everyone wants to build software. Although I agree with your general point to attend cheaper schools until it matters (eg graduate level and want to be a professor or lawyer).
If you have horrible family like my own college is one of the very few options you have. If anything the FASA process needs to do more to accommodate people who don't really have families.
The calls for student loan forgiveness ignore the good these loans do. At 18 you can do so many stupid things, taking out a loan isn't the worst. If that loan gets you put of a volitile situation max it out
I don't see the point of cancelling student debt. It's obvious it's not fixing the problem. Probably the only reason it's even on the table is the fact that it's not stepping on any toes.
The government should pull out of student grants and loans.
Unfortunately, the "double pell" movement means people paying out of pocket are soon going to have to pay double.
What a coincidence, that the average degree costs the average student loan package.
Stop subsidizing education. Let the market forces actually allow for a fair price discovery, or else that college degree is as valuable in a sense as crypto is...its intrinsic value - use case - job improvement prospects, multiplied by a coefficient of speculation.
I say this as someone who has had a massive impact on the student aid lifecycle, and yet didn't go to college myself, because ironically, wasn't able to fill out the FAFSA form.
"But cancelling all student debt and then continuing to issue new debt to students that the university fails (i.e. by not putting them in a position to make enough money to easily pay it back) doesn't make sense."
That's one thing that never made any sense to me. I get it. I really do. But I've never seen any compelling, realistic answer to "And then what?". This only solves the problem of the HUGE number of people with crushing loan debt now. I get it, I really, really do. But... then what? What about the next decade? It's not getting any better.
But if solving this problem takes a huge amount of money, and the problem is going to keep coming, then actually solving it takes more than money. It takes changing things so that the problem quits showing up.
You might get everyone to pony up the money to bail everyone out who is currently mired in college debt. It's a much tougher sell to get us to pony up the money forever.
Definitely agree that removing the SAT appears to be related to the upcoming supreme court case about affirmative action. COVID was a good reason to delay it for a couple years. But schools are pushing it out further. That makes no sense.
It seems the SAT is increasingly considered "racist" because it reveals racial disparities in learning. What's next? Get rid of the driver's license test because it turns that white kids pass it at a higher rate than black kids?
Sam mentions that schools could down-weight the SAT but should still consider it. Why don't schools want to do that? My guess: if they have mediocre scores on record for a kid, then admitting him means reporting those scores to USNews. They'd rather not know that the kid has a score that would bring down their average.
that is entirely a guess, though. there's actual documented evidence of colleges admitting less Asian-Americans and Jews than the test scores of either group would suggest, and Altman refers to this phenomenon in the thread.
> It seems the SAT is increasingly considered "racist" because it reveals racial disparities in learning. What's next? Get rid of the driver's license test because it turns that white kids pass it at a higher rate than black kids?
the SAT's a way of laundering discrepancies in generational wealth, which is indeed due to racist public policy as well as racist private actions. it may be intended not that way, but that's how it functions.
so what's next would be removing other methods of laundering racist public policy and racist private action. probably drivers' licenses would not show up on that list, and your assertion that it might is so ridiculous that it's hard to believe you're examining this topic with good faith.
> the SAT's a way of laundering discrepancies in generational wealth, which is indeed due to racist public policy as well as racist private actions. it may be intended not that way, but that's how it functions.
Wealthy students do score better than poor students on the SAT. Do you know who also scores well? Students who study very hard, including poor students. If you get rid of the SAT then the poor students will find it harder to stand out. The rich kids will have ghost-written essays and extracurriculars. They won't be hurt at all.
> so what's next would be removing other methods of laundering racist public policy and racist private action. probably drivers' licenses would not show up on that list, and your assertion that it might is so ridiculous that it's hard to believe you're examining this topic with good faith.
I have never heard someone say that disparate impacts only matter if there is a laundering of wealth or public policies or private actions. Where have you seen this distinction drawn?
>the SAT's a way of laundering discrepancies in generational wealth, which is indeed due to racist public policy as well as racist private actions. it may be intended not that way, but that's how it functions.
But what are SATs being replaced with? "holistic admissions"? A poor kid can prepare for the SAT by studying his ass off, with mostly free/cheap materials from the internet. How can you do the same with "extracurriculars" (eg. going to africa to dig a well) and "hobbies" (going the country club every week)?
From my viewpoint in Europe I never understood the whole extracurricular, hobby or even the essay or recommendation letter part of admission process. All of those felt like nothing to do with actual capability to study. If SAT is a bad idea, replace it with field specific national entrance exam.
Other fun alternatives, just outright auction off certain number of admission slots. Or just award slots randomly to all applicants.
> From my viewpoint in Europe I never understood the whole extracurricular, hobby or even the essay or recommendation letter part of admission process.
First, a meta-point about questions like “why doesn’t the US have policy X Y or Z”: The US is essentially set up to be ungovernable by design (any meaningful reform requires the cooperation of both major political parties, a situation that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the developed world), you can’t really find rational reasons for most policies.
I notice this a lot, actually: the fundamental thing Europeans miss about the US is they think “a rule exists, thus it must be there on purpose”, because in your countries, unlike in the US, you have functioning parliaments and governments that can change laws as necessary.
Anyway, the US arrived at its education system, as with most things, through a long and largely random process. The catalyst for the weird non-academic admissions standards in particular is well-documented to have been pure anti-Semitism: college administrators felt that with purely academic admissions standards, too many Jews were being admitted.
Yep, the New York marathon has way more applicants than slots, so they in fact use a mix of some of the mechanisms you mention. I think Nepal should do the same for Everest climbers - auction off half the slots and randomly award the other half.
The United States does not use the European system of forcing kids to choose an area of study when they apply. Kids can, and do, study whatever they want, and change their majors at will.
So a field specific exam doesn’t really work.
And, besides that, would be opposed by the exact same people opposing the SAT.
> the SAT's a way of laundering discrepancies in generational wealth
this is a ludicrous modern reinterpretation of SAT testing.. sure, testing has lots of downsides.. linking it to "wealth laundering" is your own obsessions showing IMO
>the SAT's a way of laundering discrepancies in generational wealth, which is indeed due to racist public policy as well as racist private actions. it may be intended not that way, but that's how it functions.
I'm not aware of data on SAT scores and family net worth, but there is plenty of data on SAT scores and family income. Controlling for income doesn't come close to accounting for racial gaps; the richest black kids barely do better than the poorest white kids.
I teach at a top 40 university in the South and I promise you, the coaching for the math SAT shows, especially with COVID, there is a huge amount of overfitting going on.
> ...are just more academically inclined than others...
It's not "races", it's culture. We should just remove this whole idea of "race" from our understanding of social phenomena, all it can do is mislead. There are African, Black subcultures like the Igbo and Ashanti that achieve to the highest levels academically (including in the West!) and Asian subcultures that don't place any focus on education, and struggle as a result. Culture is what matters. Forget race.
I have lived in a USA urban metropolitan area most of my entire life.. Asian and Black are not nearly descriptive enough terms.. there are massive variations in the populations.. as the post above said.. its not sufficient, and directly misleading, to distinguish people in education.. secondly, "White Males" repeatedly get left out of special offers and incentives, and there are tons of those special incentives, for decades.. the educational spectrum of "White Males" is also huge .. its a real mess and people get angry about the topics right away when discussing them..
> the only seemingly rational explanation for inequity is discrimination
Wait, this is not what I said and is not how serious social science is done. In many ways, public K-12 education is equally abysmal for everyone. It may not overtly discriminate, but it lets people fall through the cracks in a way that amplifies the causal influence of pure luck (i.e. randomness, noise in outcomes) and external factors such as different cultural attitudes and generational history (such as whether your grandparents and great-grandparents happened to be educated or at least literate), that account for much of the observed correlation with race.
This is not much better, and is often used (without implicating the parent commenter) by racists as codeword cover. Again, I'm not implicating you, but consider for what reasons they use it.
Think about it: What do you know about these 'cultures'? Have you lived in one? How do you even define the word - is there a definition outside pop politics? Is it a static thing? Over time or space? Do you have any data correlating this thing with educational outcomes? Notice we have lots of people talking about black 'culture', etc., but WTF do they know? Where are the black people who actually know something? Would you ask someone from Mumbai about the culture of Rio?
One thing that does correlate with educational outcomes, more than anything iirc, is parental wealth. We are discriminating openly against poor kids. And you only have to see the condition of schools in poor communities to make that immediately clear.
Our society provides few educational opportunities or career opportunities, is often openly discimrinatory toward them, uses a legal system that abuses them, and mocks and attacks anyone who tries to do anything about it. I've been around these 'cultures' - I know hard-working people, like you and me, but struggling to get by every day, struggling to help their kids, and absolutely despairing against the impossible odds and the growing mountain of hate and disregard. You can't imagine it until you see it day after day after day.
One thing I've been told, when I've made an effort, is that it's useless, it's pointless, the white wealthy majority will never, ever allow it. And I've come to see that they are right, to a degree - that is how it plays out every time. One way or another, there is always a reason to shoot down anything that will give black people a way up, and it's been true for generations. 'Culture' is just another one. Forget what you believe, just watch and see if that hypothesis is matched by the data. I used to think like many on HN; the data showed my theory was wrong, and the data always wins out (or it's not scientific reasoning).
And then I come to HN and see people doing the exact same thing, repeating the same arguments that inevitably lead to the same place. And my God, imagine being black and reading this stuff about yourself, your family, your kids, on HN.
> One thing that does correlate with educational outcomes, more than anything iirc, is parental wealth.
Really? I'd love to see a study on how kids of lottery winners fare wrt. educational outcomes. That would be the real way to isolate that "wealth" factor from differences in cultural norms (and yes, generational effects of previous achievement, such as your grandparents being literate and passing on a basic awareness of education to their descendants) that merely happen to correlate in the long run with wealth. Want to take bets?
> ... One way or another, there is always a reason to shoot down anything that will give black people a way up, and it's been true for generations. ...
I really, really don't understand this claim. "Culture" is actually a very malleable thing even in the short-to-medium term, so if it happens to be a big causal factor on bad outcomes this means that efforts to help Black people achieve are more, not less likely to succeed! Compare "racism and discrimination" which basically nobody knows how to tackle in anything like an effective way. If anything it may well be that once broad outcomes improve, this will help obviate much of the previously existing motive for harmful prejudice and discrimination against Blacks.
> Compare "racism and discrimination" which basically nobody knows how to tackle in anything like an effective way.
We certainly do know how, and we've done it. The message of hopelessness is the message, perhaps unwittingly, of the white supremacists, who want nothing to be done, who want racial division to appear hopeless and unavoidable.
From segregation and lynchings in the 1950s, we now have civil rights, almost universal acceptance of interracial marriage (I think the surveys ~1960 showed ~3% acceptance), African-American education and welfare has skyrocketed - but from such a low point that it still has far to go. We elected a black President. Racism in other circumstances has died - against Germans (esp. in Revolutionary times), Italians, Irish, Catholics, Jews, Mormans, etc. etc.
But now they have made it fashionable to argue against even the presence of racism, against all fact and observation - even in this very thread, where someone openly claimed race determined educational outcomes. I periodically here openly racist comments from white people I know - as a simple example, when the plan to pay for community college fell through in Congress, one white person I know said, with a laugh, 'thank god; now we won't have to pay for blacks to go to college'. And people take it up. We live in the post-truth world, where people align with whatever can be insisted upon, and many are and will pay the cost.
>> One thing that does correlate with educational outcomes, more than anything iirc, is parental wealth.
> Really?
Yes, you can find the research easily.
> If anything it may well be that once broad outcomes improve, this will help obviate much of the previously existing motive for harmful prejudice and discrimination against Blacks.
We have 400 years history of racism; attributing it to educational outcomes has no basis.
Nobody is making any assumptions or predeterminations about cultures, the point is that we need to recognize that it's not the color of your skin or your heritage that determines your placement, it's the environment you grow up in. Coincidentally, this does match up with your 'parental wealth' claim, since any pair of upper-middle-class parents is more likely able to afford to live in an area with schools rated at least 6 by GreatSchools, thus giving their child(ren) a better opportunity at education.
> We are discriminating openly against poor kids. And you only have to see the condition of schools in poor communities to make that immediately clear.
The way I see it, the only thing directly hindering any integration of lower-class and higher-class kids in schools is what I said above - housing prices and general zoning laws that make it nearly impossible to build low-cost housing in existing high-class areas. Any time there is a housing project (read: reasonably priced apartments), "NIMBY" happens and nobody wants the new complex to be built since it'll directly lower the home values of the existing houses in the area; in general, the administration running the local city/county government has to follow their constituents' wishes, so this likely isn't going to change until some higher government passes a law softening the power of zoning laws. This combined with how schools are heavily funded by their county's property taxes creates a barrier where the poorer schools don't get the funding they need to level the playing field and poorer parents can't move to put their kid in better education, thus keeping it hard for the child and their future generations to climb out of poverty.
> it's not the color of your skin or your heritage that determines your placement
Where could that come from? There is an enormous history of racism in the US, and plenty of it overtly, less overtly, etc. right now. You could see it in this thread, where someone literally said that race was the determining factor. You have to blind yourself not to see it over and over in our society.
And yet it somehow doesn't affect people or their educations? Instead of fighting a political battle, what can we do to end it?
> this does match up with your 'parental wealth' claim, since any pair of upper-middle-class parents is more likely able to afford to live in an area with schools rated at least 6 by GreatSchools, thus giving their child(ren) a better opportunity at education.
I wonder if the research controls for that; it would tell us a lot.
> the only thing directly hindering any integration of lower-class and higher-class kids in schools is what I said above
There is plenty of data to observe; we don't have to guess. What is your guess based on? In my non-systematic and few observations, attempts at integration are resisted aggressively by white parents, especially now. Also, remember school busing.
Over time, observe if the hypothesis that I was told - that I doubted and argued against, and that I had to admit I found true to be - see whether it is true: There is always another story, another explanation, year after year, generation after generation, but the result always consistent with racial discrimination.
I’m saying that, right now, those aren’t direct factors, although they are generally the factors that have put the current generation of African Americans in this situation of living in poverty/being apart of the lower class. My point is that no school is worse because 99% of the students are black, they’re worse because they don’t have any expensive houses paying dividends in the form of property taxes to match the luxuries afforded by richer communities.
> In my non-systematic and few observations, attempts at integration are resisted aggressively by white parents, especially now.
This is not contradictory to my point, I’m simply detailing the ‘how’ in their efforts to oppose integration. Nobody is going into school board meetings asking them to put up barriers to prevent black people from integrating, they’re making sure affordable housing projects are never approved.
I agree that funding through real estate taxes is a mechanism of what is called structural racism ("the factors that have put the current generation of African Americans in this situation of living in poverty/being apart of the lower class"), but there are other mechanisms, and there are directly racist beliefs. I don't know how you can claim there are not plenty of racist beliefs, or that they magically have no impact. Off the top of my head, from the last six months, said to me personally by white people:
- 'Everyone knows that black people are biologically inferior.'
- With a smile, and disdain: 'Did you see that Biden's college funding failed? We won't have to pay for the blacks to go to college.'
Look at what happens if racism is brought up on HN: It is shut down vigorously, endless responses saying that it doesn't exist, challenging every aspect, major or minute or imaginary and mostly just argumentative. It must be proven beyond any shadow of a doubt, better than the Laws of Motion, despite overwhelming evidence - why are the standards impossibly high? Imagine all that energy going into addressing racism.
Why are you so determined to deny its existance, even beyond the limited thing about housing? You can see it everywhere, see stories of it everywhere. Talk to any black person, who actually lives it and sees it - don't argue, just be curious. I've never talked to one black person who shares the prevelent view on HN.
15 day old account, comments so far: races are just have different academic aptitudes, the US needs fewer immigrants, crypto is cool, the US needs fewer immigrants again, and the main agenda: the US needs to stop sending weapons to Ukraine.
Since you have a history of breaking the site guidelines and have been continuing to post flamebait to HN, I've banned the account. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.
Polymatter recently had a great video on the way the college ranking system is a hustle for foreign student money, and just how heavily it distorts colleges incentives: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQWlnTyOSig
IMHO the onus to establish an assertion (as a general term) is on the person making it:
1. Imagine I post an assertion, 'the moon is made of blue cheese', and it's read by 20 people. Should all 20 do the research themselves? That's much less efficient than my doing it - I already know where I got it, it's my claim, and it's 1/20th the labor.
2. Think of all the assertions you read: Do you have time to research them all?
3. The Internet is filled with information, mostly BS. I don't have time for even a fraction of the accurate info. If we had 1% of the info, but it was backed by credible research, it would be no loss in info (nobody can process even 1%) and great gain.
Finally, people can't judge content it unless they have expertise in the domain. There is plenty of research showing that to be true - that fact is fundamental to misinformation and disinformation, even something as simple as paid Amazon reviews - and it's easy to observe. Think of something in which you have expertise, like your profession: Could you persuade a non-expert? I could persuade one of almost anything, it seems; they just have no idea what are the questions, the facts (beyond a very limited range), or the answers.
As an ancedote, I was told by my low income peer group that you get 600 points just for filling out your name on the SAT and that 800 points could get you into a great school like MIT. So I assumed it was a pass/fail exam in a sense and left early during the verbal part because I found it condescending and boring.
Before the exam, I couldn't understand why the higher income kids were paying for SAT training classes. What is the point of scoring 1600 if 800 could get you in the "best" school. It would have interfered with my after school job anyway.
To add further, I thought MIT was just DeVry for rich people but otherwise equivalent and that only black kids get scholarships (ironic since I am Latino). Are things different now ? Are most kids from lower socio-economic backgrounds still clueless about the college admissions process, the difference between colleges, and scholarships. It seems like that is the part that needs to be fixed and eliminating SATs is shortsighted.
I believe it doesn't disincentivize blind guessing. It just counteracts it. If you can eliminate one answer you should guess. Even if you can't eliminate an answer you break even.
800 points on one section will get you into MIT, as that's a perfect score. 1000 on combined seems very unlikely to get you into SAT; the 25th percentile is 1500.
I was replying to a comment indicating that URMs can get in with extremely low scores. My point is that they can get in with somewhat lower scores. But they still have to clear a much higher threshold than 800 combined.
I think this is a real fundamental problem and something that seems to easy to fix. People just don't know how the other half live. There's a persistent belief that rich people and poor people are like two different species. I got a CS degree from a pretty good school but it was almost pure luck. My high school had programming classes and I enjoyed them. I didn't realize what I was setting myself up for.
> There's a persistent belief that rich people and poor people are like two different species. I got a CS degree from a pretty good school but it was almost pure luck. My high school had programming classes and I enjoyed them.
When Covid hit, schools in poor communities tried to implement distance learning and discovered that only half (for example, in one city which I don't remember) of families had a desktop or laptop for the student to use - probably those kids aren't going to become programmers. Programming classes are non-existent, at least based on limited knowledge - seriously, look up the programming classes in a nearby poor school district.
Out of curiosity, where did the “leave early” belief come from in your opinion? In my community, leaving early would have been considered embarrassing and equivalent to conceding inability, and I fail to be but a representative member - but for you it was actually embarrassing to continue (the opposite).
I grew up a low income student as well but why kind of bullshit were they feeding you? My athlete friends were well aware you needed a 950 for any kind of NCAA consideration. It didn’t matter how good your grades or athleticism if you couldn’t pass that hurdle you were relegated to juco.
If anything most of the high school counselors in predominantly poor and black schools just don’t push very hard. They would tell you MIT was too far of a reach. They would tell you the best you could hope for was a private local, community college, or public state university. Who would ever consider Devry and MIT as equivalent?
He's responding to an anecdote - one that sounds absurd, by the way - so I would say that responding with an anecdote is fine, especially one that actually sounds realistic. Let's hear some anecdotes about being pushed hard in schools based in poor areas before dismissing it.
"sounds absurd, by the way".. that perhaps explains all the downvotes. One of the surprises about getting older is that stories from your youth sound more and more absurd with time. I didn't grow up with the Internet and the "MIT whiz kid" wasn't common in movies/shows until the mid 90's and ever after. What was a thing during my high school days were the relentless TV commercials for tech schools masquerading as advanced degree institutions. Who lies on HN about a personal story BTW ? What would be the point.
The downvotes are the aggressive reactionary tide through HN, that rises and falls. Your personal observation suggests that some 'progressive' action might be valuable, that there's a systemic problem, and therefore it is shut down.
Don't stop telling it please. We need more voices from the real world here.
Repeating what someone told you that shaped your behavior in the past is anecdote. The information given was incorrect but your conclusion that this anecdote is hearsay is in error.
I was told by my low income peer group that you get 600 points just for filling out your name on the SAT and that 800 points could get you into a great school like MIT.
The minimum score for the SAT if you do nothing is 400, not 600.
I didn’t claim the anecdote was hearsay, I used the word “it” to refer to the hearsay, not the anecdote. The mistake is in the assumption of what it refers to, especially without asking me to clarify, or in not extending the principle of charity.
It sounds absurd to you, but isn't that your own ignorance? You weren't there; they were. I've heard many tell similar stories. Again, look in the NY Times from a few years ago; elite colleges not only accept it, but have tried to mitigate it.
> one that actually sounds realistic
Isn't this just saying that it agrees with what you already believe?
> It sounds absurd to you, but isn't that your own ignorance?
Or my experience.
Of course, perhaps schools in poor areas really are pushing the children hard to go to extraordinary heights and it’s just the fault of poor people for being so damned useless that they ignore it or fail.
Or, perhaps, there’s a middle ground to be found, but I doubt it includes people who no one would describe as bright being unaware of the scores they need to enter the next stage of education, if that’s what they desire.
> perhaps schools in poor areas really are pushing the children hard to go to extraordinary heights and it’s just the fault of poor people for being so damned useless that they ignore it or fail.
That's not how I understood it - are we talking about the same comment. I understood the commenter to be saying that their school didn't give students the resources to understand and apply to top colleges, including basic understanding of colleges (e.g., who MIT is) and the admissions process. Are we talking about the same comment?
The comment that you paraphrase is, I agree, absurd!
> Are most kids from lower socio-economic backgrounds still clueless about the college admissions process, the difference between colleges, and scholarships. It seems like that is the part that needs to be fixed
There's been a lot of research and work on that, though I don't know what progress has been made. You can find NY Times articles from a few years ago.
> eliminating SATs is shortsighted
Why does the above make SATs any better? They don't predict college outcomes, and they are structured and written in ways that favor wealth, thus providing bad data on students (other than their wealth). Why use them?
I grew up in lower socioeconomic status and can confirm that the university admissions process was never really taught to us in any meaningful way. Teachers never talked about it, my parents never talked about it, counselors didn't talk about it, etc. Our education was built around testing because if our school got bad testing, then the school would lose funding. Our education was damaged as a result, every teacher talked about it as an awful system, and the kids who did well in testing had enough money to pay for tutors, ie they were already advantaged
Getting rid of SATs from my perspective sounds like a fantastic idea.
> Our education was built around testing because if our school got bad testing, then the school would lose funding.
> Getting rid of SATs from my perspective sounds like a fantastic idea.
There are two types of standardized tests. The first kind you reference measures the school. They are not used for college admissions. They can affect school funding.
The second type of test measures the student. Sometimes a school will report those numbers. But they do not affect the funding a school gets.
Getting rid of the SAT would have zero effect on contingent funding for schools.
Consider this: if the schools weren't dependent on the test scores, then they could use that same energy-for-testing to teach their students methods for improving their SAT scores. I genuinely doubt they'll switch energy, but the fact remains that the requirement to game a test-well-or-lose-funding system by necessity removes education opportunity for students in order to focus on the tests over education, especially for schools in lower income areas because they stand to suffer the most. We're relying on a system that ensures that people stay where they are. Now, if there isn't a correlation between lost education opportunity and SAT scores, then you might be right, but...
I don't understand what you are trying to argue. Your first GGP comment talks about school testing and then ends with a conclusion about the SAT. That is not a school test. It is a student test.
Your immediate parent comment indicates that if school testing were eliminated then students would improve their SAT scores. I agree with that. But it is beside the point. This thread is about whether the SAT should be eliminated, not whether school testing should be eliminated.
At the end, you start to make a point about correlation between "lost education opportunity" and SAT scores. But my reading is that you're saying there's a correlation between LEO and SAT scores. Are you saying it's a positive correlation? Or are you saying students are spending time prepping for SATs, and what they are learning there is negatively correlated with actual learning?
I am trying to understand what you mean. Are you advocating elimination of the SAT? If so, why?
My point was about this: "Are most kids from lower socio-economic backgrounds still clueless about the college admissions process, the difference between colleges, and scholarships." My original post was saying that kids from lower socio-economic backgrounds aren't as aware of these processes, largely because of the broken incentive systems around testing.
So, I'm opposed to standardized tests, in general, as a strong measure for capability because of their tendency to force the focus of schools on testing over education and in doing so, deep and localized problems are reinforced. I gave the example of my own school, because the school barely touched on the SAT since the focus was, by necessity, focused on the ACT. The SAT was an afterthought. For the teachers, it was a legitimate existential crisis if the ACT wasn't taught well, while the SAT was effectively irrelevant to them.
A large body of students don't know how important the SAT is, nor whether or how they should push themselves to test well -- we weren't taught that because of a shift in priorities. In some ways, both tests were expressed as on the same level of importance, despite the ACT not mattering in the slightest to the future of the individual student, leading to confusion by students about what is actually important.
For schools that the SAT isn't an afterthought, the SAT might make sense, but in doing so, we are culturally prioritizing the reinforcement of already-strong communities while simultaneously continuing to weaken already weak communities.
In other words, a proxy besides the SAT should be sought after, at least while we have so many broken systems and wildly different implementations of incentive systems in-place. I don't know what that proxy is.
> the school barely touched on the SAT since the focus was, by necessity, focused on the ACT. The SAT was an afterthought. For the teachers, it was a legitimate existential crisis if the ACT wasn't taught well, while the SAT was effectively irrelevant to them.
The ACT and SAT are two tests used for college admissions. If you take one, you don't need to take the other.
> despite the ACT not mattering in the slightest to the future of the individual student
The ACT is used for college admissions. Are you thinking of a different test?
It sounds like you have an issue with the teach-to-the-test mentality and the fact that "the test" isn't the SAT. I understand the concern that students are pulled in too many directions. But according to what you've written "the test" is the ACT. That is a substitute for the SAT. They are only being pulled in one direction. It is the direction that will help get them into college.
It's extremely difficult for me to pinpoint when / where the tendency to flatten (as in no more disparity) started. It's super weird. Everything is flat. I sense some kind of rejection of it from fear of potential dominance. But it's still odd to me.
You’re not the only one who notices this. I think you would be interested in Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut [1], a great short story related to this topic.
> the SAT is increasingly considered "racist" because it reveals racial disparities in learning
Could you provide an example of that claim? Usually the SAT is considered discriminatory because the way the testing is done favors wealthy, well-educated people, and gives negative results for equally talented people who lack those advantages. Colleges have found that the SAT is excluding a large part of the talent pool.
Also, SAT scores do not correlate well at all with college outcomes.
SAT math scores combined with GPA are 5 times more predictive than gpa alone at Berkeley. They also found the test was more predictive for low income students
SAT correlates well with college performance and moreover must be used to obtain the best college performance predictors we have (or something highly correlated with SAT).
Some elite law schools did a study where they admitted underprivileged students with bad LSAT scores and guess what, those students did great and got great jobs.
“black/white comparison on the SAT verbal test, some evidence of bias exists, but the bias is against white students on some questions against black students in other cases. Furthermore, our analysis of the results suggest that for this one, the effects are far too small to explain much of the SAT gap in test scores between black and white students.“ nonetheless the SAT math lets them find students who’s GPAs aren’t super high for personal reasons and also distinguish between students with the same GPA
For the SAT the difference between winning and losing in college admission is if you can prepare for it. It's not a test you take cold. That is the biggest issue with it so it advantages those with more resources.
> Could you provide an example of that claim? Usually the SAT is considered discriminatory because the way the testing is done favors wealthy, well-educated people, and gives negative results for equally talented people who lack those advantages.
As to predicting outcomes, that’s largely due to score compression (the students at any given school are in a narrow score range). Folks across the score range aren’t being compared with each other in class performance. But look at the LSAT, where all students from different schools take the same bar exam. LSAT is highly predictive of bar exam performance. Students who score less than 150 (on a 120-180 scale) are virtually guaranteed to fail the bar.
> Colleges have found that the SAT is excluding a large part of the talent pool.
No, colleges have found that the SAT produces racial demographics they don’t like. Poor white kids have been excluded by the SAT for nearly a century and colleges never took action in response to that.
> LSAT is highly predictive of bar exam performance. Students who score less than 150 (on a 120-180 scale) are virtually guaranteed to fail the bar.
Source? Or do you mean "taking LSAT at the same time as taking the bar for fun"? Because LSAT is typically done before you enter law school, while you take the bar after you get out.
> No, colleges have found that the SAT produces racial demographics they don’t like.
Where does that come from, other than repetition?
> look at the LSAT
I'm not talking about the LSAT (and bar exam performance isn't a meaningful indicator of much - the great majority of aspiring lawyers pass their bar exams).
> Poor white kids have been excluded by the SAT for nearly a century and colleges never took action in response to that.
If that's true (and I don't know that it is, especially on the scale of what has happened to blacks), what does that does that have to do with racism against black kids?
It seems everyone's great effort is not to address racism, but to deny it, against incredible evidence. Look at this entire discussion. It's incredible the effort that goes into denying racism, rather than doing something about it. Reactionary politics has swept the US and HN.
Medical sector has one responsibility: take care of the patients.
Doctors that share a racial and cultural with their patients are able to provide better care. It's been seen in multiple studies that elder African American women are more likely to follow the advice of the doctor if the doctor shared their background. There is little controversy around the fact that diversity leads to improved health outcomes ( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8675280/ / https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w24787/w247... )
Similar trends can be seen in other fields. So affirmative action is not just good because it is the morally right thing to do, but also because it is the more practical solution quite often.
Also, people of similar backgrounds are more likely to understand the environmental health problems. For example, doctors from middle-class backgrounds don't understand as well the stress and trauma of poverty, and associated malnutrition. White doctors generally don't understand as well the stress and trauma of living with racism daily.
I don't mean to suggest that (also as it turns out there's just a frightful scarcity of doctor candidates willing to work in rural America to begin with so that's a moot point to argue any which way).
I sought to note the particular and unique plight of African Americans. I came upon this picture of Ruby Bridges a month ago: https://i.imgur.com/SSRsywY.png and I got to reading what became of her, and I found this recent picture of her: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7c/Ruby_Bri... that's that little girl who put up with a lot of shit just to attend the same school as white girls -- and she doesn't even look that old in this recent pic! The idea that we don't have to do anything to make up for denying the black man and woman the right to drink from the same fountain as the white man and woman, to attend the same school only a few decades ago is deeply unsettling, as the auspices of privilege reverberate down the generations, so do the weighted anchors of un-privilege.
In that vein, I think the argument you seem to be converging toward is not very strong because we have a special select of Asians and Hispanics, they are a special bunch to have taken the initiative to leave everything behind and immigrate elsewhere for a better life, likely they were moneyed enough to make the move, likely they had a strong social support networks as indeed Hispanic&Asian households do, better eating habits, probably more active, etc.
> > No, colleges have found that the SAT produces racial demographics they don’t like.
> Where does that come from, other than repetition?
You started out talking about socioeconomic status, but by the end of your post you admitted getting rid of the SAT is an effort to “address racism.” People think getting rid of the SAT is about race and not class because proponents of the policies admit as much.
> I'm not talking about the LSAT
The SAT and LSAT are very similar both in content and distribution of outcomes.
> (and bar exam performance isn't a meaningful indicator of much - the great majority of aspiring lawyers pass their bar exams).
Half the people who take the LSAT are excluded from even attending law school based largely on LSAT score. Students with lower LSAT scores are at high risk of failing their classes or failing the bar: http://outsidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2018/01/using-ls....
> If that's true (and I don't know that it is, especially on the scale of what has happened to blacks)
The SAT is highly correlated with socioeconomic status. And most poor people are white.
> what does that does that have to do with racism against black kids?
Is the SAT “racist” or is it biased against people with low socioeconomic status? Two quite different things.
As to what’s “reactionary” or not, you should try recalibrating your bubble. The majority of white, Asian, Hispanic, and Black people oppose the practice of using race as a consideration in school admissions: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/25/most-americ.... They also say test scores and grades should be the main factors for admissions. The “race progressives” are a minority even among minority groups.
As the other comment points out, the obsession with the flaws of the SAT completely ignores the fact that every single other method of evaluation is even worse, both at identifying promising students and at equity.
If you take it away, colleges will happily admit loads of "well-rounded" students with tons of expensive extracurriculars. They will be racially as balanced as possible, but their family incomes will all be very high. The kid from a poor broken home who somehow managed to score 1400 on the SAT will lose their best shot at standing out.
Exactly. It is still the least evil, one of the reasons Chinese are still keeping their infamous GaoKao. Removing it will create a huge political hitback.
AFAIK, the SAT is biased against poorer students, including in its structure, in its content (maybe they've fixed that), and because wealthy test-takers can afford test prep courses.
What makes you say that the SAT is the best option for poor applicants?
> AFAIK, the SAT is biased against poorer students, including in its structure, in its content (maybe they've fixed that), and because wealthy test-takers can afford test prep courses.
The idea that the SAT is inherently biased against poorer students is controversial. AFAIK, the evidence for this requires advanced statistical analysis and expert interpretation and isn't widely accepted as definitive. Even among those experts who accept this evidence, there doesn't seem to be any clear sense of what is causing this bias or what can be done about it. It simply isn't the case that the SAT has some glaring bias that can easily be rectified, like questions assuming knowledge of water polo and horseback riding. Student skills in things like reading and math do not exist in a vacuum, but depend on prior exposure and knowledge, which robustly correlates with family/neighborhood/school environment and thus socioeconomic status. Efforts to create tests that are completely independent of those things have not produced useful results.
Quality studies show that the benefit of test prep is modest to moderate, on the order of 30-100 points, and almost all of the benefit is achieved within 8 hours of preparation. Even that benefit is not widely accepted as simply retaking the test can increase scores by 60 points. [1] There is no evidence that expensive private tutoring leads to better outcomes than self-study with free alternatives such as Khan Academy. [2]
> What makes you say that the SAT is the best option for poor applicants?
It's helpful to look at it more as the "least bad" than the "best" -- we need to stop focusing exclusively on the issues with the SAT and think about the actual alternatives. For example, essays, extracurriculars, and prestigious brand-name private school affiliations are all valued by prestigious colleges, and can be bought legally and very easily by rich families. It is much harder to buy a high SAT score. To buy a high SAT score, a family could pay someone to impersonate their child, but this is very risky as the recent Varsity Blues scandal showed.
Suppose we put ourselves in the shoes of a bright-but-poor high school student. We need a way to make ourselves stand out. We can sign up with Khan Academy or download some SAT prep materials at the public library and prepare for a few hours... or we can try to get into an expensive private school, get a private college essay consultant, join a rich-kid sport, take a trip to Africa, and other things that rich kids do to burnish their applications. Which of these seems more practical to you?
If you look at the criticism of the SAT from universities, I think you'll find that they are mostly interested in attacking the SAT in isolation, not comparing with the alternatives. Comparing with the alternatives would require shedding light on their opaque and subjective admissions processes and the way in which those processes favor the rich. On the contrary, research suggests that leveraging standardized tests, and increasing participation in them, tends to open doors for poor students relative to status quo [4][5].
It's interesting that they are so favorable to a change which will make their processes even more subjective and opaque, especially given their history of using subjective and opaque processes to exclude undesirable minorities (yesterday Jews [3], today Asians). Although they have proven themselves untrustworthy, they are not interested in increasing transparency and objectivity of admissions processes. I think we should be hesitant to accept their reports and recommendations as being in completely good faith, given their strong interest in (and consistently observed behavior of) recruiting as wealthy a class as possible each year.
Rather than saying "the SAT is discriminatory," maybe ask which questions on the SAT's are discriminatory, and why? And how could you fix them? This will be more revealing of what the problem might be.
I believe a lot of problems that the SAT's used to have were fixed over the years? It's somewhat of a moving target.
And if you can't make any standardized test that's fair, why is that?
A prominent researcher noted that the following question was tested by the ETS but never made it onto the SAT:
The actor's bearing on stage seemed ______; her movements were natural and her technique _____
A. unremitting...blasé
B. fluid...tentative
C. unstudied...contrived
D. eclectic...uniform
E. grandiose...controlled
Apparently 8% more black students answered this question correctly than white students, and it was never moved from a potential question into the real test. The allegation is that the racial outcome of the question is the cause of its never making it onto the SAT.
I think it never made it because the question is bad. None of the answers makes much sense (the correct answer is apparently C).
That made no sense so I followed your link and found that C is uncontrived not contrived, which then makes perfect sense.
Every option has either 2 words that make no sense, or one word that makes no sense with "her movements were natural" and one that does. Only option C has two words which make sense with both. This question is just basic English comprehension and should be on every exam.
Sorry, I had seen this elsewhere and it was incorrectly transcribed. You are correct that the linked page shows "uncontrived" for C. That makes the question less bad though still a bit stilted.
As a non-American, this thesis simply doesn't pass the smell test unless you guys are living in literal KKK land, which - from be outside - doesn't seem to be the case.
Why not read the research? A 'smell test', especially by someone with no experience or expertise, doesn't indicate much.
Any claim of racism - even raised by an expert who has done detailed research, in a society with overwhelming evidence of it historically and now, and in higher education admissions in particular - is always dismissed.
SAT is one of the strongest correlations of academic success and future income. Where did you hear that it isn't?
I worked in edtech analytics for a while where SAT among other factors were correlated with student success. SAT scores correlate with graduation rates, college GPA, job placement. Most elite universities also tend to receive applicants with higher SAT scores (A no brainer)
It seems SAT merely reflects current academic skills. If they developed to that point due to privilege, the test isn't responsible for highlighting it. If college goal is to give limited space to most skilled students then it's an effective method to do that.. isn't it?
> It seems SAT merely reflects current academic skills.
What is that based on, and how do you define academic skills? It may reflect how much time and money you can spend on test prep courses (time is also a problem for poor students who tend to have jobs, take care of siblings for parents with multiple jobs and no day care, etc.). It may reflect test-taking skills in general, which aren't skills of value.
That's a possibility, that there is a difference between test taking skills and true academic skills, in that case maybe have students take one class and admission would based on percentile... ie. 1000 student in top percentile will be accepted full time other passing students will get a credit but not admission.
I was on track to go to a prestigious university in high school when my fundamentalist christian parents kicked me out of the house at the age of 16. I ended up jumping around to live with different friends then eventually my grandparents. I had no money and thought I had no future. The stress was killing me, my grades and SAT score suffered. I ended up at a small state school in rural Georgia because of this. Today I work at one of the FANG companies but it was a long and challenging struggle to get here. A single test in high school shouldn’t define your long term success. It didn’t in my case but there are many folks who are living through difficulty at that age.
Although I'm glad it worked out for you, this sounds like a very niche case that would fail every single measure of exampination. Neither is working at a FANG company a signal of intelligence.
> Neither is working at a FANG company a signal of intelligence
You really believe that? I find it extremely hard to believe that the distribution of intelligence for engineering roles at a FAANG company is the same as that of the general population.
It seems far more likely that the distribution is shifted 10-15 points to the right.
I know anecdotes are not the singular of data, but I knew plenty of people whose young lives mirrored the OPs. My family had two couch-surfing classmates (at different times).
Neglectful parents don’t have to also kick one out of the house in order to be neglectful.
There are levels to this. I’m same as OP in terms of “looked like they could’ve gone to MIT” but was born in the wrong family. Ended up going to University of Washington after doing some community college - so it’s not like I went to the worst school in the world. But it was a long journey to get there and I do work at a target company now. Again, a very long journey… That could’ve been changed by just an interview or something else entirely.
The SAT's past racial bias is still echoing through the nation. There were still test questions based on Very White Things like cotillions and yachting as recently as 40 years ago. The repercussions of those things could be that some person barely missed getting admitted to a university, took a lifetime earnings hit, lived in a poorer town with worse schools, and now their kids who may be very smart and talented also don't score well on tests. The whole point of affirmative action is to swing the pendulum to the other side for a while, to not just make it fair now, but to counteract past unfairness.
I wish that those institutions and people on your side of the issue would be more honest about what they are doing. If Harvard would just come out and admit to the Supreme Court that they discriminate based on race, it would made the case much easier and much easier politically to shut it down.
Anyone actually in the position to make change won't, since change means work and directly puts them and their coworkers' jobs in jeopardy. The road to non-discriminatory behavior can only be implemented by the management and investors running the show, so it's done in their way and on their time table.
That sounds stretched. Smart kids failing because their parents didn't know yachting trivia 40 years ago... And in 4 decades their family couldn't crack open a math book?
The main reason for failing education is not money, it's family attitude towards education. Educational parents get better results than rich parents. Look at how the Asian group is faring. In fact having too rich parents is pulling down the kids.
The alternative, ""holistic"" admissions process was conceived for the sole reason that colleges were becoming "too Jewish". Today, that same system is being leveraged against Asian Americans, and is now even less transparent and straightforward. It is full of hateful biases and overt racism
> Cancelling student debt is good if it's tied to fixing the problem going forward, which means not offering it, or having the colleges be the guarantor, or ISAs, or something.
What do you tell the upper middle class families that didn't buy a bigger house or pad their investment accounts so that they could help put 3 of their kids through schools? My parents spent at least $200k on undergrad education between me and my siblings (UVA, Cornell, UW-Madison).
Did they make the wrong decision? Should they have saddled us with debt? At 10% (ie: S&P AAR) that would net $600,000! When America becomes a place where you're punished for having invested in your children, it becomes a place where you will no longer want to live.
You know, I've asked this exact question before, but I've changed my mind. Here is what I'd tell them: "Congratulations on being wealthy enough to afford tuition. Try to be considerate of the people less fortunate than you."
If it was $60k of opportunity cost I might be willing to accept it as a progressive tax and let bygones be bygones. But $600k likely represents half of their net worth. "Considerate" only goes so far.
Yeah, $60k is closer to the amount that I was complaining about having already paid. But you're not wrong; I'm just trying to keep the greater good in mind. How about: "Try to consider how much you and your family will benefit from the improvements made possible to society and the economy by redirecting billions of dollars from loan payments to other spending."
Red herring. Subject of TFA is the value of school. This example family wasted $200k on a low-value thing that only seems to exist because companies are terrible at recruiting. It's worse for someone who has to go in a lifetime of debt, but ideally neither the rich nor poor family would have to waste their money.
Subject of TFA is about the dwindling value of school and I agree with it. But I don't think it's wrong to push back on this aside about cancelling student debt.
It's completely untenable and anyone proposing it is ignoring the massive opportunity cost that has been incurred by people that played by the rules, pursued useful degrees, and made the responsible decision to stretch their means to do so.
I paid for my entire education myself by working nights and weekends and taking side gigs in combination with loans and scholarships. It took me 6 years to complete a 4 year degree because of sheer exhaustion and I did NOT choose the best university I could have attended (that would have been an Ivy) because I didn't have the money to do so and I didn't feel comfortable saddling myself with giant loan debt.
Two questions:
1. What do you think my opportunity cost was, and
2. How much do you think I lost by not pursuing an education at a university worthy of my accomplishments to that point?
You have a very entitled point of view from where I sit.
How am I entitled? All I’m asking for is that the government continues to enforce contract law so that people who made financial decisions under the assumption of continued enforcement of contract law aren’t left holding the bag. That’s not a huge ask. It’s a founding principle of our government.
I think most universities are scams and FWIW I made a point to literally only apply to two schools: UW Madison (in-state) and Minnesota (in-state reciprocity agreement) because I knew I’d get in and I saw what it cost my parents for my siblings to go out of state. I did a semester at a community college, too.
1. Your opportunity cost is debatable. I took 15 years of market return on the lump sum of tuition/boarding/books cost as an example. It would be about the same for you, assuming you spent ~$75k on your education between rent and supplies and food and tuition.
2. I don’t think you lost out on anything meaningful unless it was MIT, Harvard, or Stanford that you would have gone to instead.
The US is anti-children from the moment they are born. College is no exception. As someone with 2 kids under 2 years old, it’s one of those things you don’t think about until it happens to you.
- daycare is on average around $2k per month per child where I live.
- outside of tech, almost no companies pay for parental leave. At most, they are obligated to hold your position, but no pay is required. This is especially true if you or your spouse work in the healthcare field. It’s absolutely mind blowing how poorly employees are treated by their employers in the healthcare industry.
- childcare tax credits are an absolute joke. From the $32k in childcare I paid for last year, I got a $1,600 credit…
- once you have kids, your health insurance costs will be astronomical unless you’re lucky enough to work at a company that provides good insurance. In my situation, I run a small tech company where we don’t provide HC insurance (too costly atm). My wife works in healthcare. Our insurance is beyond a joke. Thousands per month with a $20k deductible. It’s hell.
- once your kids are in school they’re taught very little useful skills. It’s mostly an exercise in obedience and conformist thinking.
- once your child graduates high school they have the option to either take out hundreds of thousand of dollars in federally backed loans if they’re lucky enough to have parents that don’t make enough money. If they have middle class parents they’ll have to rely on even worse loans from private lenders.
So would I expect the US to punish middle class parents that foot the bill for their child’s college? Yes. The US hates the middle class, as much as they hate children.
> once your child graduates high school they have the option to either take out hundreds of thousand of dollars in federally backed loans if they’re lucky enough to have parents that don’t make enough money. If they have middle class parents they’ll have to rely on even worse loans from private lenders.
Um
> Currently, student loan debt at graduation is an estimated $31,100.
Yes. The average US college graduate has under $40K in debt. If you're able to get into a networking school for the upper class like Cornell you're able to get a full ride at a state university. UVA and UW-Madison means at most one of three children went to college in state, on in state tuition.
It's perfectly fine to choose the university to go to based on prestige but paying for a network is not morally superior to going to a less good university on a full scholarship, or doing two years at a community college and transferring to a state flagship for the last two years. Making expensive choices to chase status, a zero sum game, isn't eveil. Neitehr should it be encouraged.
You’re not actually answering the question I posed. My question was, assuming XYZ amount of dollars are going to be spent on education, did they make the right or the wrong decision by making sacrifices to pay for their kids instead of letting/forcing their kids to take out loans?
The question you answered was, “should a lot of money be spent on education in the first place?”. And sure, I’d agree, we all should have gone to community college for 2 years and then the state flagship, that would have been the most cost effective, bang-for-buck solution. I was the in-state kid, and also the youngest, and that’s not a coincidence; I saw what it cost my dad.
My point is that if there’s a suspension of contract law, regardless of whether you’ve spent a lot or a little on education, you’re punishing those who budgeted for it and rewarding those that didn’t. Whether it’s a lot of money or a little money, you’re fucking over the honest people.
There was a video (perhaps even from kurzgesagt) which describes how critical it is for our society to allow as many people as easy access to knowledge as possible and not only for obvious reasons but also to increase the chance for all of us that the hidden genius is finding a cure for cancer.
You can even study for free in Germany as an non German. You know what happens? Those people might stay in Germany and make Germany a better country.
Imagine a world were we compete globally with the best education system. Let's allow more people to shape our future.
>A real commitment to a policy of free tertiary education would also expand the availability of trade schools not just universities.
This is part of the proposal of progressives. They always emphasized the freedom for a student to choose between trade school or community college, and then move on to a public 4 year school if they chose to do so.
Public education in the US is the most well-funded per student you can find anywhere. Yet somehow it doesn't translate into top-tier teachers nor top-tier outcomes. It's almost like giving huge amounts of money to unaccountable bureaucrats doesn't solve problems.
What do you think about German kids being sent to different kinds of highschools at age 10.
Most of the people attending Hauptschule don't attend university [0]. In some regions 60% of the children attend it. Aren't you concerned that the person who could discover the cure for cancer is in Hauptschule right now?
Imagine a Germany in which the rest of your life isn't determined at age ten.
In fact Uğur Şahin CEO of BioNTech and co-inventor of the Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA vaccine was recommended by his teacher to attend a hauptschule. If his German neighbor hadn't intervened and stood up for him he may have never attended university let alone get a doctorate.
Germany has three “tiers” of secondary education, of which only finishing the highest will qualify you for university admission. The rationale is that not everybody benefits from learning latin or higher mathematics, when instead a focus on more trade-related skills might benefit you much more in your further career.
For late-bloomers, which might suffer under this system, it is still possible to progress from Hauptschule to Realschule and finally Gymnasium and university, without significant financial means necessary (besides cost of living).
Also, the average attendance for Hauptschule is <10% [1]. Wouldn’t you agree that at least 10% of kids would benefit from having an education experience more tailored to their needs instead of building resentment for education by being forced to sit through terribly boring lessons with the nerds knowing the answer for everything?
> For late-bloomers, which might suffer under this system, it is still possible to progress from Hauptschule to Realschule and finally Gymnasium and university
Do you know how many people in Hauptschule make it to university?
> Also, the average attendance for Hauptschule is <10% [1].
I must acknowledge I thought it was 25%, it must've changed in recent years.
> Wouldn’t you agree that at least 10% ...
Thank you for the question. I buy the thesis of the Case against education by which university is a waste of time for most people, nevertheless it's hard for me to stigmatize a percentage of the population by not allowing them to waste their time there as well with their former ten year old smarter classmates.
In Germany no way would have i have been allowed to go to college. As it was I went to a California State University. Student fees and books cost me about $12k total. Given that there isn't any reason US colleges can't be free other than Wall Street demanding a cut.
> Imagine a Germany in which the rest of your life isn't determined at age ten
What you imply here is entierly untrue. I know lots of people that made their Abitur after having been to the Haupt- or Realschule first. That is not to say that the school system doesn't have its problems -- it clearly has -- but you are painting a picture that is not rooted in reality.
I think the argument would be better if Germany was some sort of education haven. My cousin fosters study abroad kids in the US and most are German. They say the German education isn’t anything to tout and having an American education on your CV is a big +.
I’m not saying this whole thing is perfect but I just don’t see anyone banging down the doors for a German education.
Where in Europe? I’ve hired in both Portugal and Germany and have seen a ton of US education. This is for developer positions I would expect it different if you are hiring line cooks.
I don’t quite understand where you are going with this. Have you hired US nationals, or US educated people? Either way, I haven’t seen many US educated people in Europe, and especially in Portugal.
> This is for developer positions I would expect it different if you are hiring line cooks.
I’m a lead engineer myself.
Again, I yet have to find anyone in Europe who would have primary and secondary education in the US in high consideration. In fact, after traveling in Asia, I had somewhat the same experience: top US universities were highly valued, but anything below that was mostly dismissed.
For both places I was simply filling roles. I think maybe 80% local and 20% us nationals? Maybe 90/10? Probably 50% had US educations listed. Maybe 40%? But it’s not like I didn’t see any. I’m not sure what you think is surprising. US people study abroad too. It’s very common and tech people tend to pick US because it’s heavy in tech.
> Probably 50% had US educations listed. Maybe 40%?
That is an extremely large percentage if the candidate pool was chosen at random. That would be surprising in Europe.
Anyway, I didn’t say it was surprising, but it is rare.
> US people study abroad too. It’s very common and tech people tend to pick US because it’s heavy in tech.
Sure. But there is a difference between hiring US nationals abroad, who likely would be US educated, and US educated Portuguese or German nationals, who are a very small minority of the population, and that’s what I was asking.
most of the people I know, who do this kind of "study abroad" in highschool (which to my understanding is on average well below Abitur/A-levels) have their parents paying (quite a bit) for the privilege^. From what I've seen around, most of this activity is centered also around private "pay-to-your-A-levels"-schools. Notably these people might think of + on their CV (while being stupid).
^And then our public school had some funded, hidden exchange with Geelong Grammar school :)
Exactly my point. From my experience hiring in tech Europeans are very quick to mention US education believing it’s a big advantage.
Personally at that role it was an English role so I only took from their US education that they can function in an English environment. I didn’t give two shits about their Carnegie Mellon masters.
If only Germany were smart enough to give people who study here a 2-3 year work visa after they finish their studies. As it is you still need to find an employer willing to sponsor you (which at least is easy if you earn a lot).
By "free" I think what you are trying to say is that in Germany working class people, the majority of whom don't go to college, pay for rich kids to go to college, rather than having those people pay for themselves.
I'm concerned that the majority of "should we fix college or should we circumvent college" conversations don't bring up one of the scariest parts of our current economy: STEM jobs are the main viable path for economic stability and freedom.
All of the conversations I've seen implicitly assume that this is good, and that the solution to farmer workers (or other low paid workers) escaping poverty is to train them as software developers.
We really need farm workers, and most of them live in poverty. I love having more engineers, scientists, and doctors, but we desperately need non-STEM work to be a viable option
>STEM jobs are the main viable path for economic stability and freedom.
>We really need farm workers, and most of them live in poverty. I love having more engineers, scientists, and doctors, but we desperately need non-STEM work to be a viable option
This is basically a non-problem because of the supply/demand mechanics of the labor market. If farm workers' job gets sufficiently bad from a value proposition perspective, then people will leave the occupation and employers would be forced to pay higher wages to attract workers.
> We really need them if we want to farm in sustainable and moral ways
How so? Sustainable farming has nothing to do with a man vs machine doing the labor. Moral as in we need to make sure people can keep doing this job or what kind of argument are you even making? I'd rather see improved social safety nets and job training then some appeal to history that people need to work the fields because we've always done that.
Modern industrial farming practices, designed to optimize agricultural output per unit of labor, are an ecological and environmental travesty. They require the widespread use of pesticides and toxic fertilizers that are decimating the biosphere. Monocropping unsustainably degrades soil quality. And the large contiguous areas used for industrial agricultural operations are extremely disruptive to wildlife.
The most obvious solution to the above is an agricultural system with many more, much smaller farms, where human beings do the work currently done by machines and chemicals.
Not sure about this: everyone else screwed seems kind of a far reach. If you consider screwed “unable to buy luxuries” then maybe, but I consider screwed “unable to buy food” and Macro farms stand to make food substantially cheaper.
How will the four people get richer if the food they create is priced so high that no one can buy it?
I get this is deeply economic and philosophical, but it’s an interesting thought experiment.
If they can make food cheaper, what pressure is there to sell their product at a lower price? The economic answer is that a competitor will do it first to get a larger marketshare, but the pratical answer is nothing will force them. If the regulatory and capital cost to enter the market are high, then a competitor isn't likely to appear and the existing players can continue functioning in a quasi-cartel.
Taking this to its logical end, the owners of said farms will get richer as the general population earns less on average (due to their labour no longer being needed).
Before it gets that far, they build a hierarchy of underlings that oppress the labor force. (See CGP Grey's "the rules for rulers" on YouTube.)
Either that or everyone else gets fed up and violently overthrows them. It could, perhaps, be avoided with higher taxes on the rich, but the rich have the most influence over the tax code.
The government steps in and subsidizes food for those who can't afford it, either by printing money, or using taxes. The end result is robbery from the commons while your four mates who give you kickbacks and a cushy post government gig get richer.
> If farm workers' job gets sufficiently bad from a value proposition perspective, then people will leave the occupation and employers would be forced to pay higher wages to attract workers.
Serious question - have you ever been poor? Are you aware that sometimes people have to work at shitty jobs because they have no other options? And, if employers really would "be forced to pay higher wages" as you claim, why are all the restaurants in my city still short staffed?
I'm not claiming to have a solution but claiming "the market will fix it" seems like such a cop-out, like telling someone god will take care of it.
>Serious question - have you ever been poor? Are you aware that sometimes people have to work at shitty jobs because they have no other options?
OP was talking about the problem from a practical perspective (ie. "We really need farm workers", presumably worried about a future where there aren't enough farm workers and we starve or something), and I was addressing that in the same way. Your objection seems to be from a humanitarian perspective (ie. how can we provide a minimum standard of living to non-STEM workers?), which is valid concern, but ultimately not relevant to the original problem.
>And, if employers really would "be forced to pay higher wages" as you claim, why are all the restaurants in my city still short staffed?
combination of:
1. stubbornness/price stickiness
2. belief that it's better to hold out in the short term and wait for the labor supply to return, then it is to give out pay raises now. Wages are sticky, which mean wage hikes would turn into ongoing expenses into the future.
3. belief that the raising wages would raise prices, which would decrease demand and ultimately make the business worse off.
>I'm not claiming to have a solution but claiming "the market will fix it" seems like such a cop-out, like telling someone god will take care of it.
The market seems to be working just fine in my area. Some restaurants have shut down. Some have raised prices. Some have decreased service. Which is the right approach? I don't know. The restaurants that took the right approach will win out in the end. In the meanwhile I'm still able to eat out.
The whole price stickiness thing is the free market not working. How can you say the market will sort it out and in the next post give the mechanism for why it doesn't do so?
What you're really arguing isn't that the market will sort things out to someone's satisfaction, you're just saying the market is a jungle and whatever survives survives.
> The whole price stickiness thing is the free market not working
Wouldn't the standard response to that be that it's not really a free market, and if it were made more free then such inefficiencies would be less likely to occur?
I think you'll find that many do, and I also don't know why anyone persists with making absolutists statements that are clearly wrong or can be shown to be so with barely any effort.
OK then please provide an example of a market for labor (since that's what we're discussing ITT) that has been "made more free" and that has seen wages rise as a result.
Those of the former USSR. There are many other examples that are also such low hanging fruit that I wonder if you were trying to get at something else with that question?
The absolutism was in no one believes it, by the way.
I'm willing to imagine that there was some point in USSR history at which this would have been the case, but please let's not pretend that this describes the period after the fall of USSR during which life expectancy dropped by a decade. The incomes of billionaire "oligarchs" are not reflected in the median income level.
By the principle of charity, I don't expect anyone to believe nonsensical things.
If you wish to cherry pick those years, then yes, you would find some non-Soviet years that were bad, but it wouldn't be a persuasive case so be my guest.
> By the principle of charity, I don't expect anyone to believe nonsensical things.
You're not being charitable, if you were you wouldn't have begun with hyperbole, then moving the goalposts when challenged, and now cherry picking. You don't seem interested in any case but the one you already favour.
Either you meant that time, which in light of public health numbers is obviously not a good example for the argument, or you meant some other time. If you care to specify some other time, we'll be happy to consider it. If you want to forget about USSR and nominate some other time and place, we'll be happy to consider that.
I make "absolute" or even "hyperbolic" statements because I'd like to learn something. If I'm wrong, some example to that effect may easily be provided. In doing so, I'm letting someone else win all the internet points because I care more about learning than about internet points. As you observe upthread, a statement in such form can be shown to be wrong "with barely any effort". I invite you, if you please, to expend that small amount of effort. However, absolute statements can't simply be assumed to be wrong. Absolute statements exist that are absolutely true. "Any living human will die if deprived of oxygen."
I grant that you've already expended a smaller amount of effort, to somewhat imply that you yourself (or perhaps others not present in this thread?) believe that less regulation of labor markets leads to higher pay, but in the absence of any relevant example that implication is itself suspect. We know that some people believe silly things, and some other people claim to believe silly things that correspond to their particular psychological commitments (this seems common in the context of religion), but those beliefs and claims do not prove their silly objects.
> The whole price stickiness thing is the free market not working. How can you say the market will sort it out and in the next post give the mechanism for why it doesn't do so?
I suppose it's "not working" if by "not working" you mean "behaves exactly like economics 101 models that assume rational actors". But as it relates to this context, business are reacting approximately in the way we would expect, albeit with some delay/hesitancy. Average pay has gone up in the past few months, for instance.
>What you're really arguing isn't that the market will sort things out to someone's satisfaction, you're just saying the market is a jungle and whatever survives survives.
I don't argue that because it's not clear what "satisfaction" entails. If you mean the optimal choice every time, I don't think you'll find any free market advocate who would make that claim. In the meantime, I'm pretty satisfied. I can still eat out, and I have the choice between "higher wages but more expensive" restaurants and "lower wages but worse service" restaurants. It's not really clear right now which is the best choice here (eg. maybe I'd rather accept reduced/worse service than pay more), so letting consumers as a whole decide seems like the best course of action.
The free market applies at every level, but it does take time to find it's level. Is the problem that people won't just raise the wages, like the other poster described? Absolutely not. The location that doesn't raise it wages will end up losing in the end if there truly is a labor supply problem. They may refuse to raise their wages, but they will get the lower quality applicants, lower quality workers, and maybe not any workers at all if they don't raise it enough. The fact is it takes time for market to adjust and those that don't follow the market get left behind. The businesses that aren't efficient enough to run on fewer employees will get left behind. Companies don't go bankrupt overnight but they do go bankrupt eventually if they aren't as efficient as other companies. Those that make bad decisions, that raise wages to much, will get hurt, and those that don't raise them enough will get hurt. The fact is wages are only one factor and in a free market it will always find the correct level over time.
I'm no student of this, and it might come under rational/irrational actors, but I think any casual consideration of employers and wages needs to understand that the vast majority of small businesses are flying by the seat of their pants (I'm one of them, so I think about this a lot).
If the owners were competent, the businesses might have grown to the point where the enterprise isn't so much an extension of the owner's personality. A small restaurant's style extrapolates strongly from the owner's quirks - whether they feel they make enough money, they're disorganised, they're under stress going without leave or getting hit by taxes at the worst times. I figure they're the ones most likely to hold wages down almost out of angst because they themselves feel hard done by. "Why should that teenager get $15/hr?! I have the risk of the lease. I started this business! I got $5/hr when I was a kid!" I'd bet this is a solid factor in local restaurants.
Once a business is large enough to have a tier or two under the owner, I suspect this buffer helps. I notice this separation a lot when working directly with an owner versus with their marketing person. The latter has to uphold their end of the relationship with me or they'll get fired. The owner meanwhile can miss deadlines and forget to write copy and so on, and usually their worst case is they keep flying by the seat of their pants. If their business fails, it's usually much later and harder to tie to specific issues along the way.
The labor market - especially the low paid labor market - is a lot less liquid than it needs to be for pure supply/demand to work in the US (that's also taking human suffering caused by poverty out of the equation, which is pretty callous).
Laissez-faire markets are also bad at taking negative externalities into account. Food being too expensive to afford in the stores while it's also rotting in the fields (which has happened in my state multiple times on the last few decades) is really bad. Children not being being effectively taught because teachers are quitting due to burnout and terrible wages is really bad. I don't think it's sufficient to shrug out hands and say "it'll work itself out" when we can actively see very these kinds of detrimental problems
The market for teachers, at least in the US, is not a 'laissez-faire market'
Whatever that means. In Alabama the low wages and poor working conditions have now led to a grave teacher shortage. The government's solution? Suspend teacher certification. To use graphic imagery: the talent pool is full of piss, let's open it to the incontinents!
This suggests 'teacher certification' isn't effective at distinguishing between good and bad teachers.
"Suspend teacher certification"
If 'teacher certification' isn't useful for distinguishing good/bad teachers, then removing the requirement may be a good idea.
"In Alabama"
It's hard to fire bad teachers in Alabama. If you're a principal in an Alabama public school, you can't just give a poorly performing teachers 2-4 weeks' notice, freeing up the money to hire someone new. Look up 'Alabama teacher tenure'.
The way to raise standards isn't to lower expectations. But you have to offer something in return, money or job security, either will work, no one will work for free.
And what's this obsession with firing people? You can get rid of subpar performers, but the rapid turnover isn't going to improve the average unless you manage to hire and retain above average performers. In the long run, it's a supply issue, and the revolving door model is going to do nothing about the subpar supply.
Re: #1, I didn't talk about lowering expectations. I talked about removing a requirement that you said resulted in a poor talent pool.
Re: #2 getting rid of underperformers helps you hire good teachers (because, unless you fire someone, you have no money to hire someone new), and retain good ones (because, if you're a good teacher, you're not going to want to work somewhere where your students' other teachers are bad).
If you look at the PRAXIS exam (there's example tests out there) you'll see that the bar is set extremely low already. Dropping it does nothing to improve the talent pool and will certainly not attract quality applicants.
I've said it already - it's not the best students that go to work in teaching. You can fire a low performer, but chances are that the replacement is just as bad. It's a supply issue, a training issue and a culture issue - the anti-intellectualism in large swathes of the population really doesn't help matters.
You say "It's a supply issue, a training issue and a culture issue".
This may be true, but it's the result of how the system is set up and, in particular, the interaction between:
a) politicians
b) teachers and teachers unions
c) school district leaders
d) school district administration staff
e) students
In most systems, group (e) is the one with the least power. Their parents may be able to vote for school board members, but these elections are infrequent, and the way to get elected is not by being an advocate for students, but by aligning with a particular political party, or getting the support of teachers unions.
Parents cannot easily opt out of that system. In Alabama, per pupil spending is ~$10k/year. This distorts the market: a parochial school that costs $10k/year to run cannot compete with a public school that costs $10k/year to run, even if the former better. Because in one case the marginal cost to the parent is $0.
It comes back to what I said at the start of our conversation: The market for teachers, at least in the US, is not a 'laissez-faire market'.
Ever time I have had co-workers fired in some desperate attempt to blame low quality of a system on individuals in the system, I leave, because that shit is demoralizing.
> This is basically a non-problem because of the supply/demand mechanics of the labor market.
You’ll have to back-up that assertion.
Supply/demand mechanisms fail the labor market badly. By law of supply and demand, professions introduce artificial scarcity to boost their income; and the market responds either through some
combination of: Immigration, automation, consolidation (less businesses), cut-corners
Farming has aspects of all three, and it’s a major
national risk.
> If farm workers' job gets sufficiently bad from a value proposition perspective, then people will leave the occupation and employers would be forced to pay higher wages to attract workers.
Not everything is like the laws of physics, which continue to work over many orders of magnitude. Supply and demand for employment works backwards at both the top and the bottom of the salary range. At the top, beyond a certain point supply decreases because people save enough to give up working. At the other end, reducing post can increase supply because people's need for income of inelastic below a certain point, so they start working longer hours and working second or third jobs.
>Supply and demand for employment works backwards at both the top and the bottom of the salary range. At the top, beyond a certain point supply decreases because people save enough to give up working.
Is this really applicable to this context? In other words, are farming jobs really going to get to a point where the pay is $10M a year, and people only take the job for a year and then never work another day? Considering that being a farmer has basically no barrier to entry, I doubt it will get to that point. Not to mention, if farm labor was really that expensive, so would the cost of living, so those would be FIRE farm workers would have to come back to pay the increased food bill.
No, the case of farm workers is much more likely to be the opposite one, where workers are paid so little that they take multiple jobs and increase supply, leading to a low income trap.
Every mechanism has regimes in which it fails. 'Supply and demand' isn't always the answer any more than 'mongodb' or 'rust' are always the answer.
during the peak of the COVID labor shortage, many producers did increase wages but found that they still couldn't get workers. also in North America at least, many/most laborers are undocumented immigrants. white collar workers aren't quitting the desk to go out in the field..it is backbreaking work. if the labor pipeline dries up (which is a very real thing as immigration has decreased in North America/the US) then no one will be doing that job.
i suspect the amount of money that farms would need to pay workers to fix these shortages would drive all producers into bankruptcy
>if the labor pipeline dries up (which is a very real thing as immigration has decreased in North America/the US) then no one will be doing that job.
>i suspect the amount of money that farms would need to pay workers to fix these shortages would drive all producers into bankruptcy
I definitely think it's the latter rather than the former. Producers being driven to bankruptcy is an issue, but that seems like it's something that's going to happen regardless if we made "non-STEM work to be a viable option". At the end of the day, if it's a shitty job, then you'll have to pay more to get people to show up.
Probably because farm labor is skilled labor and seasonal. It sucks to live out of a vehicle traveling with the crop harvest. If you want them to work just within the area you need to make the month or two of work worth more than just a month or two of wages, because they will soon have zero work and will fuck over holding other non-seasonal jobs while every other seasonal industry also competes for that labor. Agriculture is also exempt from overtime pay. On top of all that, you can't just throw some rando in a field and expect them to get anywhere near the output of an experienced picker, especially with 12 hour days and a physical workload far higher than most people have ever experienced.
Their meager wage increase is not worth uprooting your entire life just for 2 months or less of work unless you are sending that money back to a country where a dollar goes much farther. They need far more than just add 2 bucks to an already way underpaid job to not only attract workers now but keep them around and available for following years.
> If farm workers' job gets sufficiently bad from a value proposition perspective, then people will leave the occupation
They are. Farmer suicides over the past 10 years have skyrocketed. Farmers are committing suicide at twice the rate of combat veterans. [1]
I'm afraid I can't take your comment seriously as a dispassionate economic analysis since it lacks even basic empathy for people caught in this ongoing trainwreck of "supply/demand" mechanics.
This is quite convincing. We should ban independent farmers. It is too dangerous a job for independents. Industrialized commercial farming is the only acceptable recourse since we need to grow food.
As an escape valve for independents we could have them post a sufficiently large bond that will come due in the event of farm failure and bail them out.
People committing suicide rather than quitting and doing something else (declaring bankruptcy if necessary) means it's not just a supply and demand thing.
It's also important to distinguish between farm workers (hired hands) and the business owners.
At least in my limited knowledge, it's the small time farmers that commit suicide (so owner that works), and generally in the older population. What else are you going to do if you've been doing that your whole life, you're 50, no college (or it was for agriculture)? You likely can't stay where you are because many of the areas are depressed and they'll take your land if you can't pay the taxes, are foreclosed, etc. Just making it to the next year and all the hard choices become a heavy burden - one that you can struggle with for years and only make it that long because you've motivated yourself that it's the only way and only goal. So it's not just a job, but their entire way of life and identity that are lost.
Yes, people agree that farm works sucks and have low wage.
But the point that you and others are missing is that if farm works sucks, and pays low, then that means we should not be sending more people to become farmers.
And what exactly are we going to have them do that doesn't suck and isn't low wage?
The point you are missing is that jobs that suck still have to be done. If we ship many the low/medium skill jobs over seas and then automate many of the remaining ones, what are those people to do? Surely if they were able to get a higher paying job that didn't suck they would have done so.
The better solution is to make sure we appropriately value tasks that are necessary and have some level of potential self sufficiency should we find ourselves in a global event like conflict, famine, etc. Not to mention, the non-industrial farms are generally better for animals and the environment. This shouldn't be a race to the bottom.
> And what exactly are we going to have them do that doesn't suck and isn't low wage?
I am not saying that we need to retrain all existing farmers. Instead, I am saying that we should simply discourage more people going into that industry, instead of what the original poster was claiming, which is that we'd need more people there.
> The point you are missing is that jobs that suck still have to be done
We don't need more people in that industry, no. We can have less in that industry.
> what are those people to do
At a very minimum we shouldn't be adding more problems by encourage more people to go into these bad jobs, is the point though. That would just make things worse.
You didn't answer the question. What are these people going to do instead? If we keep eliminating low/middle skilled jobs, what is left for them to do?
The free market might as well be a religion for some people. Nothing (not even historical facts) is enough evidence for it to not be the answers to all economic issues.
Also, there are lots of US tech people here - with overly inflated salaries compared to approximately everyone else. And everyone knows those winning the game have a tendency to lose empathy and think the game is fair, no matter how much evidence against it.
> "Also, there are lots of US tech people here - with overly inflated salaries compared to approximately everyone else. "
And even then, you're usually required to live within reasonable driving distance of the office. You don't make enough to buy a place. At least half your salary post-tax probably goes to rent. So yeah, you've got a few bucks in the bank probably, but it's not like you're saving up to buy your third Porsche or something lol.
> The free market might as well be a religion for some people. Nothing (not even historical facts) is enough evidence for it to not be the answers to all economic issues.
Aside from their lack of empathy and the ignoring of the distortion of the supply of labour happening that makes the "non-problem" an actual problem, what is incorrect about pointing out that supply and demand are, if not the most fundamental factor then close to it, in a market?
A close to most fundamental factor must survive close to most observations of the real world. That's not the case.
Monopolies have historically shit all over the notion that supply and demand is a good model to use for the market.
Much like most economic models, there are underlying assumptions about it that make it bad at actually predicting the real world. Things like perfectly competitive markets (haha), prices being adjustable (haha) and the forces that act on supply/demand being rational (extra hahaha).
There are lots and lots of cases where it fails, like the housing bubble, administered prices and wages.
Still, it might as well be a religion. Afterall, people can say it is close to a most fundamental law about markets with a straight face (despite it failling all the time).
Monopolies are the opposite of a free market. I'm not sure how a critique of using supply and demand to explain how free markets work will apply if you choose a monopolised market as your rebuttal. You may as well say that supply and demand doesn't hold under communist conditions.
What I would counter is that it that we can see that free markets work preferably to monopolised ones, or any of the other ones you've provided where selfish intervention of one kind or another has interfered with supply or demand.
monopoly is the goal of the free market, not its opposite. "supply and demand" are clearly forces at work in the economy, but the idea that an unspecified dynamic simply called "supply and demand" is predictive of anything is not accurate.
this false dichotomy between monopoly and its precursor is non sequitur.
Ignoring the fallacious teleological argument, I'm happy to rely on Wikipedia for this as this is basic knowledge:
> In economics, a free market is a system in which the prices for goods and services are self-regulated by buyers and sellers negotiating in an open market without market coercions.
What are market coercions?
> Examples of such prohibited market coercions include: economic privilege, *monopolies*, and artificial scarcities.
So you're implying me the only place supply and demand actually works is in an idealized free market that doesn't exist? If that's the case, yeah, we agree on it.
All those cases I mentioned came arose under one of the most (maybe the most?) free market of modernity.
> So you're implying me the only place supply and demand actually works is in an idealized free market that doesn't exist?
No. I don't believe you're trying to create a straw man intentionally but if you're going to jump from black to white, and a large jump at that, then it produces the same outcome all the same.
It is not a non-problem for people without your privilege. Gig workers, immigrants and others with no viable options are forced to do these jobs or starve. All the while people complain about immigrants crossing the border and "taking their jobs". Graduating high school seniors aren't lining up to mow grass or pick fruit or work as a meat packer for $15/hour. They want to come out of college to a 6 figure job with no skills or training. It is going to be a long long time until we have enough automation to not need workers for things like picking apples, etc. A lot of people coming out of school with out a tech or medical disposition would be best served by picking a trade. We have a shortage already and it is only going to get worse. Running a 3 person plumbing company could easily compete with most tech jobs.
> It is not a non-problem for people without your privilege. Gig workers, immigrants and others with no viable options are forced to do these jobs or starve. All the while people complain about immigrants crossing the border and "taking their jobs".
That’s exactly what’s happening. With a steady flow of cheap labor to take these jobs, the wages for them will remain stagnant. It makes perfect sense for low income workers to be complaining about immigrants taking their jobs because that’s exactly what happens.
Cut off illegal immigration for a few years and watch as the price of all unskilled labor increases. It’s basic supply and demand.
The ones at the top generally don’t care because the people coming in are not competing for their jobs. And they arguably benefit from the cheap low end labor through lower prices for staples and even luxuries like landscapers and nannies.
Even that is changing with remote work and offshoring. I don’t know if it will take five years or a decade, but the so called knowledge workers who don’t sock away their savings now are in for a rude awakening when their own paper pushing jobs get replaced.
This is exactly right. Here in Australia, the borders have been closed for two years, and surprise surprise, we now have some of the lowest unemployment figures in the country's history. And for the first time in a generation, wages are starting to increase.
For knowledge workers who want to work from home, the end result will be competing on a global market against workers from developing countries who can afford to do the same work for less. We already see this on various freelancing platforms where it's only a viable side gig for those in places with a low cost of living.
At the end of the day, workers need some kind of protection against these movements, by putting local workers first and managing immigration to protect the middle and working classes. The problem is that we have a political class who have gotten rich on the back of removing such protections, because they're also business owners and property investors.
And don’t forget helping the workers in low wage places to organize and get their fair share of revenue from the multinational corps. Long term, a more level income landscape world wide is needed to protect even domestic workers power/income.
>It is not a non-problem for people without your privilege. Gig workers, immigrants and others with no viable options are forced to do these jobs or starve.
Nothing I said precludes aid for these people, to ensure a minimum standard of living. I'm just pointing out the implied consequences of not making "non-STEM work to be a viable option", isn't we run out of farmers and we all starve because the market will correct it long before the number of farmers drop dangerously low.
>All the while people complain about immigrants crossing the border and "taking their jobs".
I don't get it. Just a few sentences ago you implied that the jobs are crap, and that people are "forced to do these jobs or starve", yet here you're implying that we should allow "immigrants crossing the border" to take those crap jobs?
>Graduating high school seniors aren't lining up to mow grass or pick fruit or work as a meat packer for $15/hour. They want to come out of college to a 6 figure job with no skills or training.
People don't want hard jobs and want easy money. Can you really blame them for that? Also, the solution to this, as mentioned in the previous comment is to raise wages.
>A lot of people coming out of school with out a tech or medical disposition would be best served by picking a trade. We have a shortage already and it is only going to get worse. Running a 3 person plumbing company could easily compete with most tech jobs.
In other words, the market is working as intended, by making jobs more lucrative because there's a shortage?
Doesn't supply and demand not apply here though? There are tons of subsidies and small farmers who are propped up more by government assistance than they are the market though?
Only one person (the oldest one) from my like 20-30ppl circle within age range of 20-30 gets close to IT salaries, that's ridiculous
in most cases it is around 40% (around 2 minimal wages) of my *nothing special* salary by IT standards (4.5 minimal wages), people with better cards get 7-10 minimal wages here, top people like 15-20+
and they see no reasonably easy way to jump higher (e.g within one or two years)
I can't honestly recommend anything but IT to anyone that can put a lot of effort (while mentioning all bad things ofc)
Thanks for explaining. I was thinking along the lines of "report card", as in that document that lists your school grades for a period of time such as a semester.
Home improvement is a crazy market. A lot of people seem to quote based upon what they think you can afford, which is easy to figure out since they usually do it while standing in your house.
Home improvement is pretty cancerous right now. I get quotes with ~$5k in labor for work that would take me a week to do in the worst case. That’s literally double my rate without considering that working for yourself is tax free.
It baffles me that our markets are so inefficient that it’s 125% more effective for me to take time off my ‘highly skilled’ engineering job to do ‘low skilled’ renovation/repair work myself.
I can only imagine all of the inefficiency comes from teams of salesmen/project managers/owners who suck all of value out.
But still how do they get away with such bad deals? Are people so pigeonholed that they can’t imagine doing the work themselves? Is getting bonded/licensed/whatever other paperwork is required to compete with these sleazy companies that difficult? I’m sure a lot of people wouldn’t mind learning how to install drain systems for $125/hr minus overhead.
It's not possible to hire Americans to do this kind of work without getting screwed. If you don't want to get screwed, you have to start doing this work yourself. (Or maybe someone in your family could do it? Do you have a 19yo nephew?) Not everyone is capable of some of the manual or cognitive tasks involved, but not everyone you could hire would be, and most of the work is of the simple-yet-laborious variety.
In the 3-county rural area where I've spent most of my time recently, we have 3 Lowes, 2 Home Depots, a Menard's, multiple Orschelns and Tractor Supplies, and probably fifty smaller hardware stores and lumber yards. This is many thousands of commercial square feet basically devoted to home improvement, for an area with fewer than 140,000 residents. If it were possible to hire this sort of work without significant expense, the home supply market would be very different.
I'm not criticizing any carpenters or plumbers here. Their work is naturally seasonal and cyclical, and our society DGAF about people with that sort of work. If an electrician would wire your new bedroom for less than $3,000, he wouldn't be able to afford $1,000/month for medical insurance for his family, at least not every month of the year.
> It's not possible to hire Americans to do this kind of work without getting screwed.
It’s worse than that. Even when you try to hire Americans, it’ll turn out that only the salesman/owner are legally working. The actual work is almost exclusively done by immigrants being paid exploitative wages.
It’s frustrating that there is actually money in the industry but such a small amount reaches the laborers.
> It baffles me that our markets are so inefficient that it’s 125% more effective for me to take time off my ‘highly skilled’ engineering job to do ‘low skilled’ renovation/repair work myself.
I don’t think it’s particularly baffling. A large class of jobs, including the trades and so-called “low skilled” professions, are in very high demand - which indicates that what they do is valuable to a lot of people - and while you could theoretically do their job yourself, many people simply don’t want to “get their hands dirty.”
In my opinion that’s a good thing by the way. People who do jobs that are important for us and few people want to do should be paid accordingly.
That’s the charge out rate. The people actually doing the labor (overwhelmingly immigrants) are only seeing a tiny fraction of that money (~1/10th or less).
The unknown unknowns aren't worth it when you're risking the asset of your house. Yeah, you could spend hours on YouTube watching how to videos, spend a dozen hours on basic tools and safety skills, etc., but you're likely only gonna do this job once in 15+ years. And even then, you might still make it looks aesthetically ugly, not have the institutional knowledge of the best brands for parts that last, etc... it's really not worth it for the average home owner who can afford a house to take time away from his likely more lucrative work hours to learn this stuff, other than in really depressed areas.
It's pretty common to both pay a lot and get a bad job done. I had a bathroom redone and the very expensive plumber sawed through 3/4 of the floor joists.
If you want something done right, you gotta do it yourself.
I have noticed though that the large brand name plumbers are the most expensive. I think it's because they're mandated to upsell on any call. I hired one for $100 to replace some shower fixtures. But he spent 2 hours both figuring out what else he could do, and writing it all up and putting it in their database.
On that list of things was replacing the water pressure regulator. For $1500. It's a $300 part, and it screws on and off. Or you could buy a $100 restoration kit instead.
I was also recently quoted $1100 to replace two toilets. Not including the toilets. Looking online it should take 1-2 hours per toilet for an experienced plumber, and around $50-100 to dispose of each. So that's, at best, $200-$250 per hour. My hourly earnings after taxes are about $50. So I both learned how to, and replaced, the toilets in about 4 hours.
> People doing low voltage cat6 wiring make bank. Friend of mine got quoted 10k to run wires in his single family house, and that was w/o any walls up.
Someone on Nextdoor was confused about how to "add those jack things" to the ethernet cables in her prewired house. I spent a few minutes linking her to YT videos and an article so she could do it herself. No response, but a few weeks later someone else PM'd me: "Wanna make a couple bucks?"
Ignoring the tone-deafness of that question: yes, low voltage wiring quotes are ridiculous, but it's also one of the easiest DIY projects you can do if have an attic or crawlspace. I installed four access points through my attic and a UAP-AC-M-PRO-US for backyard coverage.
Room and board is already more expensive than the in-state tuition on an average basis. You could further reduce tuition and fees, but it costs a lot to be housed and fed (and to forgo earning a full-time income for 4 years).
Could you realistically get room and board down below $8K/year with more spartan dormitories and meal plans? Maybe, but not by much I don't think.
Speaking from anecdotal experience, the university I went to put a lot of thought and money into things like being sustainable, producing zero waste, having high quality healthy food, etc. This is fantastic if you're looking at things from a long term perspective.
On the other hand, if your goal is to churn as many bodies out as possible with degrees, it's a pretty big waste of money. We could ship in frozen tyson chicken from China or whatever and just deep fry it as dinner, and turn the dorms into pod hotels or something.
Of course that goes from ideal to complete dystopia, but if that's your goal... lol.
Europe has cheap high quality colleges, I believe part of the difference is European colleges exist mainly to teach, while American colleges are a mini city with expensive sports teams and stadiums, large bureaucracy with many layers of admin, fancy facilities not directly related to education, etc, all to attract students to pay high fees.
Europe is not some magical place where everyone goes to college. Lots of people don't, and have no ability to go, because the billets are fixed by statute.
European style colleges exist in the US: They're community colleges.
The problem in the US is that "community college" is seen as a lower grade qualification that people "settled" for, instead of an educational focused institutional with bare bones and no immoral mandatory tie-ins (e.g. first year mandatory high price accommodations/gyms/meal plans, etc).
I understand community colleges have a lot of problems too (e.g. low educator pay and conditions). I'm just pointing out that everyone thinks that a European University is 1:1 with the city-colleges of the US, when in reality they're often nothing that fancy and pretty bare-bones.
Community college doesn't let you get a bachelors degree. You can't say that is equivalent to European universities that can take you all the way through a post-doc. You map them based on how far you can progress on the academic ladder, 2 year colleges aren't a big thing in Europe. In Europe being a university means it at least graduates phd's, and most students study at universities since they are so large.
The bigger problem is that post-secondary schooling hasn't produced higher incomes to offset the cost. Adjusted for inflation, incomes are the same now as they were before anyone went to these schools (i.e. incomes are stagnant). Even if tuitions were affordable without debt, there would still be no economic return on investment. Even if it were free, the opportunity cost of your time still leaves you net negative. Unless its your hobby and you are accepting of the cost for the trade in enjoyment, why bother?
I once read an essay by an administrator of a small college who was talking about some incentives for high tuition costs. The biggest for his school was that parents and prospective students expected any tuition to be high, and if it wasn't, people figured that to mean the quality of the education was lower compared to similarly sized colleges which charged a lot more but the education was basically identical. To keep the doors open, he substantially raised tuition and enrollment increased by a huge factor.
> Double the number of large quality state universities.
As far I can tell there aren't capacity issues to get accredited education at the undergrad level. The prices are driven by student loan availability and the need for investment in amenities for colleges to attract students.
Increasing the number of universities might worsen the problem due to the latter needing to redouble investments to attract students.
> We really need farm workers, and most of them live in poverty.
How are both of these true? If a job pays poorly, doesn't that suggest there are many people willing and able to do those jobs, relative to the need for the job to be done?
Maybe this results from some market distortion? But AFAIK the main market distortion in the farming industry is the opposite: subsidies that make farming more attractive than it would be, which would tend to increase farm workers' equilibrium wages.
>> If a job pays poorly, doesn't that suggest there are many people willing and able to do those jobs, relative to the need for the job to be done?
No. This notion of relentless competition is insane. One school district was paying a janitor barely a living wage. The standard response was "he could improve himself / get a degree, and find a better job. That shifts all blame on him an ignored the fact that the district expects to pay a non living wage for that position, they'll just find someone else if he left.
No it's not. I was going to write one but then decided I'm not qualified to speak for farmers.
I will say this. Both my grandfathers were farmers. One worked his whole life and died broke. The other invested what he could, and never worked the land a day in my life (that I can remember). He once said that he didnt make his money farming, meaning it was from saving and investing. He rented his land, barn, and equipment to others.
IMHO investing is really close to renting (yes, I have some investments). SaaS is rent. Loaning money is rent. We increasingly live in a world where or renters and owners and people who do the most actual work are the least valued. It's still not a rebuttal, just a general observation that things aren't "fair" for some definitions of "fair". This situation is a societal choice and doesnt have to be that way. I'm not sure what a better way looks like though.
Yes, feel free to say that farmers are payed low. But it remains the same that if they are paid this low, then we don't really need more farmers entering the industry.
Instead hopefully less people will join that industry.
As a farmer myself, I agree that there are too many people in the industry, if you want economic efficiency. Frankly, it provides really great money per hour, making software look poorly paid in comparison, but you quickly run out of work to do because there are so many other farmers trying to do the same. Thus, incomes tend to be low when observed on a yearly basis. I don't know many farmers who wouldn't love to take on more work.
It would be wise to ensure that we have some redundancy in the farming sector. Even if it needs go be subsidized. It is arguably a national security concern.
Half of agriculture workers are immigrants. I'd guess that the harder and less lucrative jobs are going disproportionately towards immigrants and especially undocumented immigrants (about a quarter of the agriculture workforce). I think, rather than pay higher wages and give benefits to American labor, our society imports people from poorer countries to do demanding jobs for low pay.
> But AFAIK the main market distortion in the farming industry is the opposite: subsidies that make farming more attractive than it would be, which would tend to increase farm workers' equilibrium wages.
That might be true for markets in the abstract but the market for farm labor is distorted in several ways. One is due to historical reasons farm labor is treated differently from other labor categories and the end result is many of those workers have fewer protections. The second is, as others mentioned, many cannot seek other work due to lack of documentation. In effect becoming a captive labor force with limited ability to advocate for itself.
As an aside, whenever markets display aberrant behavior in the real world, it pays to look for the distortions. They're usually not hard to spot.
Regarding farm labor having fewer protections. In general, labour protections can be distortion-creating (e.g. a minimum wage) or distortion-busting (e.g. rules that ensure people are paid on time).
Regarding the captive labor force: this might be bad for non citizens (and humanity overall), but it seems like it's good for US citizens, who benefit from increased (unlimited?) supply of farm labor, reducing upward pressure on food prices.
If I've understood the above correctly, it seems that 'we need farm workers' isn't an actual problem that needs a solution (from the perspective of US citizens or, by extension, the US government).
> How are both of these true? If a job pays poorly, doesn't that suggest there are many people willing and able to do those jobs, relative to the need for the job to be done?
Or it suggests that labor doesn't flow through the system as easily as the theory assumes it does, or that the theory assumes incorrect things about the world, or that it's just wrong on the face of it in a whole lot of actual real world cases. As the biologists say, it's usually not the lab mouse who's wrong.
Well, at a first pass: Labor market negotiating power is unbalanced; owners of capital are loathe to give it away under any circumstances; workers, especially poor workers, don't have a lot of flexibility to shop around for jobs when they need one; and by and large modern business thinking & planning is incredibly short-term and liable to walk itself into stupid and avoidable situations like not being able to stock shelves with toilet paper for six months or sell $30k cars for lack of $5 worth of old computer chips.
Basically, you've got a pile of short-sighted, emotional apes, often operating under conditions of stress or duress, with imperfect information and a planning system that's effectively hijacking stress responses designed to respond to actual flesh & blood predators to evaluate interest rates. All that indicates to me that the cohabitation of "we can't find workers" and "no, we're not raising wages" is maybe less surprising than theory would suggest.
Specific to what's happening in the farm labor market, I'd suspect there's a lot of interplay between the immigration system being pretty broken and farm owners being on the whole kind of crappy businessmen that leads to this particular market distortion.
It seems like the explanation you're putting forward is: farm owners are suffering from too few farm workers but, because they are bad businesspeople, they don't realize that raising offered wages would allow them to hire enough people.
> STEM jobs are the main viable path for economic stability and freedom.
People repeat that but what is it based on? Most of the population, including most people who have economic stability and freedom, have not had STEM jobs and very likely will not have STEM jobs.
More importantly, college is about much more than job training. College prepares people to be adults in every way, not to be a resource for corporations.
> College prepares people to be adults in every way, not to be a resource for corporations.
As If you have to go to college to become an adult.
A lot of college programs seem like their purpose is for some very wealthy and sheltered children to become “cultured”, but that is completely unrelated to the skills needed to be a functioning adult or to take significant responsibilities in your life.
Without a well-informed populace, democracy cannot function. Contrary to what you have argued, becoming cultured (in other words, understanding the philosophy, ethics, history, and fundamental assumptions about how and why society functions) are essential skills for taking responsibility, and the lack of these skills is behind virtually every major deficiency in society.
College and university were never supposed to be about job training. They were supposed to teach one how to learn so you could become a lifelong learner and continue your own education in any field you chose to pursue and to use those skills to benefit the society at large so that everyone can benefit from an increasing understanding of the world.
Instead, what we have now, is an increasing focus on becoming a corporate employee, who devotes their life to marketing and selling products that society doesn’t need and are in fact increasingly destroying society and harming individual rights and lessening opportunity with each iteration. A higher education is increasingly designed for specialized corporate tasks that do not improve society and fail to solve the most pressing problems at hand.
> Without a well-informed populace, democracy cannot function. Contrary to what you have argued, becoming cultured (in other words, understanding the philosophy, ethics, history, and fundamental assumptions about how and why society functions)
Look at the marvels modern democracy has created with a population that mostly wasn’t college educated. Does democracy work better today, with vastly higher college graduation rates, than it did 30 years ago?
Also, I have two step siblings in college and they aren’t learning any of those things. They’re learning fantasies that make them less well-equipped to deal with reality than their parents and grandparents who didn’t go to college.
"College and university were never supposed to be about job training. They were supposed to teach one how to learn so you could become a lifelong learner"
I see little benefit in discussing how things should be instead of what they are. There are clearly forces that pivoted universities towards what they are today, telling people what university should be isn't gonna fix anything.
More importantly, who decided university is the only place you could learn this, or that you could not become a life long learner long before going to university?
It seems that institutional education is precisely what gives people the impression that there is such a thing as "stop learning" aka graduation.
> I see little benefit in discussing how things should be instead of what they are. There are clearly forces that pivoted universities towards what they are today, telling people what university should be isn't gonna fix anything.
What makes you say they are that, and for everyone, and from everyone's perception? Because lots of people say it on HN? Because lots of people say it anywhere? Does that make it true?
And if it is true, it changed once, why can't it change again? Through these discussions is how society changes - and it will change, one way or another.
> who decided university is the only place you could learn this, or that you could not become a life long learner long before going to university?
It seems like universities are the best place to learn, given the obvious resources? If I want to learn about history, it would be good to have experts in history, books about history, other people studying history, etc.?
It seems like universities are the best place to learn, given the obvious resources? If I want to learn about history, it would be good to have experts in history, books about history, other people studying history, etc.?
Universities that stifle dissenting opinions are the best place to learn? Interesting.
There are plenty of online resources these days with active communities where you can learn from peers without fear of being penalized by your peers or an ideologically captured professor who will fail you for not toeing the idealogical line.
Online communities don't penalize dissenting opinions? They are far worse than any university.
> ideologically captured professor who will fail you for not toeing the idealogical line
It's a baseless accusation against nobody.
> you can learn from peers
Peers are no substitue for experts. If I want to become a doctor, I need to learn from professors of medicine, not peers. Who would hire your 'peers' to teach a course in whatever you want to learn? Who would ask their advice?
> Today, a kid in the 3rd world country can access those very same resources.
They cannot access the experts to mentor them and teach them, they can't access much of scholarly work, which is in expensive books and research papers.
I'm not a child and not in a 3rd world country; I've been through higher education, and seriously studying anything is inefficient and impossible - I simply can't catch up with the expertise of professors in selecting the media and understanding it.
who said it can't? It will be changed by looking into the mirror and fix the incentives or whatever that corrupted higher education. Not by preaching people how they should invest their time and efforts. Preaching only works in churchs.
Why is my point of view "preaching", but yours is something else or something better? One way things certainly won't get better is if we dismiss each other's points of views.
Yours is telling students to fix their thinking because nothing is wrong with universities. A non preaching talking point would be to recognize that there are problems to be fixed and it's not people "thinking wrong"
Without a well-informed populace, democracy cannot function.
College campuses have gone through severe idealogical capture, so the idea that going through a 4-year degree leads to a well informed populace is laughable.
I would argue that a 4-year peace corps posting in an improvised country would lead to a better informed population than any liberal arts education.
> College campuses have gone through severe idealogical capture
Reactionaries repeat that over and over, which is their most common tactic for any issue. But reptition is not truth, as we have learned well in the Internet age, though that hasn't stopped people from repeating it. Also, the reactionaries main objection seems to be that their own ideology isn't taught (including things like denial of climate change and racism); they insist they are a non-ideological norm and everything else is ideology, again through repetition. Academia requires proof; it's not a place of equity for bad ideas. It's also a place that disrespects the current establishment; again, no ideas get special treatment.
> As If you have to go to college to become an adult.
It's sad that so many comments like this are dismissive, and therefore not much reason or argument is put behind them, making them very thin.
You can be an adult with no education or training at all, and for most of human history, that's what happened. Is that our standard? Just 'be' an adult? Why have any schooling?
Maybe that there was a stronger tie to college helping with being "well rounded" years ago, when most of the authority figures in your life up until college were politically conservative? So college might be your first experience where there were more politically liberal authority figures?
That is an interesting point. My dad entered college having grown up in some pretty fundamentalist, anti-evolution church, and became a doctor and an cosmopolitan sort of intellectual. He switched to a liberal church and learned about Darwin, and all sorts of stuff. But I took Attic Greek and Old English and weird English literary theory and Russian history and medieval history. I don’t directly use that stuff, but it does seem like it made me a better person, more aware of a bigger scene outside of my little track of software.
Right now, some knowledge of Russian history and 19th century European history is very useful. Because we're in a war that looks like a 19th century war. Like the many wars involving the British Empire, the Imperial State of Germany, the Prussian Empire, the Austria-Hungarian Empire, and France. The era of the Great Powers, engaged in power grabs for reasons people thought were good at the time.
That's what we're seeing now. Understanding where that led last time is useful.
In the 19th century, nobody had that all much firepower. Battles were local. When that changed, the routine minor wars of the 19th century turned into World War One.
Also, knowledge of international relations, international law, military command and control in the age of smart munitions, the behavior of autocrats (esp in Russia), 20th century history of Ukraine, Russia's prior invasion of Afganistan (similar in its initial plans) and war in Chechnya, the strengths and weaknesses of military alliances and NATO in particular, Poland's experiences with Russia in WWII and the Cold War, geopolitics particularly in the Black Sea, Russian naval power, politics of American war support, nuclear weapons diplomacy and tactics, modern Russian nuclear weapons tactics ("escalate to de-escalate"), propaganda campaigns, etc. etc. etc.
> In the 19th century, nobody had that all much firepower. Battles were local.
Knowing some history of Napoleon, for example, would help too. :) But yes, your general point is taken. And then 25 years later, WWII ...
> Most of the adult population have not gone to college but somehow manage to become functioning adults.
We can't do better? Functioning is our only standard? We could go back to the Middle Ages, or be hunter-gatherers, where for 95% of homo sapien history probably most adults were 'functioning'.
You made a very dubious claim that college provides some magic that makes people who go to it betters "adults".
You don't define what adult means. You don't say or imply what ways college would help you become a better one.
For what I would define as "adult", which is understanding the realities of life outside the shelter of their family infrastructure, I would argue most colleges don't really further a student's self-reliance in that way.
If anything, they create another, different reality bubble which is again popped when they are dropped into to the actual real world, often with a mountain of debt. This is the point at which, in my opinion, where someone learns to become an adult.
Does learning new information and skills help one become a better functioning adults? Of course. But college doesn't have a monopoly on being the way to acquire information and skills.
As the price of education in the US continues to increase (for no good reason, other than people can get loans to pay it), college will increasingly fail the cost/benefit analysis for a lot occupations.
As an aside, your attitude seems to imply that you think people who have not gone to college are lesser in some way. I would apply some critical analysis to that.
It's based on the entry level salary for California tech workers being six figures whereas the wage for farm workers is an exception to laws such that they can be paid below minimum wage.
> farm workers is an exception to laws such that they can be paid below minimum wage.
I’m all for setting the minimum wage for farm workers at $25/hr. Within 2-3 years every manual farm worker will be replaced by a machine, and we’ll all be better off for it.
Well, not the manual workers, temporarily. But then we’ll have to deal with the problem of unemployment honestly rather than leaving make-work jobs around.
Unemployment for migrant workers means they won't come so that isn't a problem.
The real problem is machines can't replace those jobs or they would have. 25/h would mean very high prices for local food so everything will come via imports.
> Unemployment for migrant workers means they won't come so that isn't a problem.
It is a problem for them. They wouldn't come if it weren't economically advantageous to do so. Losing those jobs leaves them worse off, at least in the short term.
> I’m all for setting the minimum wage for farm workers at $25/hr. Within 2-3 years every manual farm worker will be replaced by a machine, and we’ll all be better off for it.
Oh yeah you think the only thing between us and a fully automated robot-run future is labor market conditions? The perfect robot slaves will not be forthcoming for quite awhile. We will have to settle for human slaves, or in modern times, immigrants totally reliant on their employer and without the normal rights afforded citizens for our low prices. I sympathize with libertarian and capitalist ideals but I find it disturbing that the agricultural and energy base of the US economy is anything but free market.
The thing about minimum wage is that it is not a maximum wage. These days you're not going to find much farm help unless you're up into the $20 per hour range already anyway. Being able to theoretically pay less doesn't mean much when nobody shows up.
> More importantly, college is about much more than job training. College prepares people to be adults in every way, not to be a resource for corporations
The "preparing to be an adult" value decayed exponentially for me. The first year staying in halls with my peers was extremely valuable. The rest of the years were not so valuable.
Also, this value was 95% social. There was very little that uni itself taught me about being an adult.
I studied mechanical engineering and a bit of CS, though I didn't complete the degree. I work as a SWE now.
Regarding knowledge and intellectual skills, the vast majority of my knowledge gained in the last ~5 years has been from self-teaching or exploring things I found interesting and I think I developed far more intellectual skills from doing that than going to university.
University felt extremely intellectually restrictive to me. You were given a ton of material that you needed to learn at a surface level to pass tests. There was little room for exploration and deep understanding within courses.
Most of the material did not seem like it was going to be useful for me. I don't like learning for the sake of it, I prefer to try and focus on usefulness.
Why do I need to learn about how to draw structures in isometric and oblique or understand CPU registers when I have absolutely zero interest in those things and never want to do that kind of work?
Because "foundational knowledge" or something, even though the vast majority of people will never use the vast majority of the knowledge they learn. I've asked my friends who completed degrees how much of the information from their degree they use at work and it's practically nothing.
This is precisely why I'm glad I was able to choose (Management) Information Systems instead of Computer Science for my major. There are key courses in CS that I missed, but I feel like I also avoided a good number of courses (deeper math, specifically) that I ultimately never needed to establish my career in Web development. I've picked up the rest learning as I go.
Being able to get 1.5 years' experience in paid internships when I was at Drexel was also hugely valuable towards kick-starting my post-college career without adding additional classes.
I wonder if that's a difference between STEM and the humanities - and I wonder how much of the perception of college on HN is based on that experience.
In the humanities, learning in depth (to express it superficially), exploration, and learning the skills of how to learn in those ways, is fundamental; it's the point. Try a humanities program - you would love it!
I get where you're coming from, but at this point I'm highly skeptical of university's value-add.
From my perspective most faculty add very little value, so in terms of learning and exploration there's not much point in paying boatloads of money to attend when I could go through the material (Or similar) myself if I'm interested.
Just a suggestion: Try one class with a good professor and see what the difference is. Expert mentoring is a thing, outside academia too. How do you even know what books to read?
> I'm highly skeptical of university's value-add
This new social trend - which suits the reactionary movement very well (which doesn't mean you are a reactionary - is really tragic. We are just destroying so much in instututions and potential, so many years and resources lost, and mostly just to destroy things. It's not hard to grasp that knowledge and learning move us forward, and it's better with experts.
I know how valuable mentoring is, but a large part of the problem is that finding a "good" professor or mentor is difficult.
With people online you can at least vet them well and have access to their knowledge and advice. Even though it's not the same as a mentor I think learning from an expert online is better than having a mediocre mentor.
> It's not hard to grasp that knowledge and learning move us forward, and it's better with experts
I agree knowledge and learning are important, but I no longer feel like university is the primary place for that unless you want to go into academia. Internet communities feel like better environments than university at this point.
This doesn't feel like a purposeful destruction of university through a social trend though. The institutions are destroying themselves.
I think that 95% social is pretty important. I know it was for me. If I knew everything I know now about software after high school I could have gotten a good job, but coming out of high school I was socially completely inept. College accelerated me so much in that regard that I honestly can’t imagine my life without it today.
My point is that you claim that college prepares people to be adults “in every way”, so I wonder in what way today’s college graduates are more prepared to be adults than, say, overwhelming majority of adults were in 1930s, who didn’t have any college experience.
In the 1930s, you weren't expected to have 5 years of experience for an entry level job, and they had actual on-the-job training, which no company wants to invest in anymore.
With as bad as some of Ford's practices were, he did have a couple decent ones. If I recall correctly, Ford essentially had his own internal engineering school where some line workers could get accepted into, become engineers and work for the company as an engineer.
I haven’t heard that one before about Ford. GM supported / took over a school and renamed it the GM Institute of Technology in its earlier years, now it’s Kettering University [1].
I don't have links at hand. I learned about it my History of Engineering class. But from my understanding, employees in the program worked during the day and then essentially attended classes taught at Ford facilities during the evening.
That's great, but they only did it for white men. If you're skin color happened to be black, you couldn't advance past janitor (IIRC). It was affirmative action for white men.
Well thats a given. This program took place during segregation when people had messed up ideas in to how the color of one's skin determines the character of that person. But we can still highlight the merits of the program and bring something similar into the modern age where people are not rejected based on skin color.
Even worst than than that. Ford was a huge anti-Semite and one of his papers had major influence over Hitler who then went on to genocide millions of Jews. Dude was for sure an asshole. He also fired workers who drank or gambled during their off time and had company men who raided homes of his workers.
For the kinds of jobs that were available in 1930s, the employers today will in fact hire just about anyone, as the labor shortage is enormous. The sort of jobs you are thinking about, employers do typically require a college degree, but that’s just a self-licking ice cream cone: if only few people had college degrees, employers couldn’t really require them from all candidates.
> My point is that you claim that college prepares people to be adults “in every way”, so I wonder in what way today’s college graduates are more prepared to be adults than, say, overwhelming majority of adults were in 1930s, who didn’t have any college experience.
Yes, generally speaking. And they were better prepared than people from the 1840s, who mostly were illiterate (no universal education), lost most of their kids at a young age, etc. If you spend zero years preparing for something and I spend four (or 12 and 16 years), I'm going to be better prepared most likely. There are diminishing marginal returns at some point, but college is qualitatively very different than high school.
This question comes up many times, as if it's a personal insult to people without college degrees. Let's imagine it does insult them (which I don't think it does); should we reject all progress for ourselves because others don't have access to it and might be offended? You have access to the Interet and I don't - are you saying you are better than me? The Internet is useless! And now we don't want to offend people in the 1930s? There are things other people have done that benefitted their lives, and that I missed out on - good for them!
This is not an answer to a “in what way” question. I will grant you that elementary school teaching people to read, write and basic arithmetics, does indeed inculcate skills very important in adult life, but from there to argue that a marginal year of education gives you some marginal amount of human capital, only shows how weak your argument is: it’s completely useless without trying to quantify the actual learning. What if a year of college actually reduces a day’s worth of useful stuff? What a waste of time it would be, and yet totally compatible with your argument.
And, it might be of interest to you, that the last month of 12th year of education, and last month of 16th year “teaches” a lot more useful stuff than the previous 4 years in terms of how it translates to increased success in adult life, as studies show. This is actually obvious to everyone, that obtaining diploma is worth more than 4 years worth of learning, but the point is that education is not about learning.
You're really questioning the value of education past 5th grade?
> it’s completely useless without trying to quantify the actual learning
Most things in life can't be quantified, yet aren't useless.
> the last month of 12th year of education, and last month of 16th year “teaches” a lot more useful stuff than the previous 4 years in terms of how it translates to increased success in adult life, as studies show
> You're really questioning the value of education past 5th grade?
No, I just raised this as a response to your comment claiming people in 1840 America were "mostly illiterate"[1]: I was talking about reading and writing, because you were talking about literacy, and I do agree that it is valuable to teach people basic literacy and numeracy. In no way my comment above implies that I question the value of education past 5th grade.
That said, I do in fact question value of state-organized mass education past 5th grade as it currently exist, yes. To be clear, I'm not questioning the value of learning things past 5th grade, but rather the way we pretend people learn things today.
> Most things in life can't be quantified, yet aren't useless.
If you decompose the syntax of the sentence you're referring to, you'll find that the "useless" in it does not refer to "education", but rather to your argument: it is useless to argue that "X is good for you, so extra 4-8 years doing X is worth it", unless you can quantify exactly how good X in fact is for you, and how good extra 4-8 years of doing X would be.
Say, imagine X to be "learning to play a musical instrument": it's probably worthwhile for everyone to spend some time doing that, but the idea that everyone needs to spend at least 12 years of their lifes, and most people should spend 4 on top of that, is rather ludicrous. How do you know that regular schooling is not exactly liked that, without trying to quantify it? You don't.
> What studies?
The Google Scholar keyword for you to familiarize yourself with the rather substantial literature on the topic is "sheepskin effect".
[1] - you are very much wrong that Americans in 1840 were mostly illiterate, by the way: literacy in US was historically always very high, and by mid 1800s, large majority was already literate, despite lack of federally-mandated government schooling. This is a legacy of English heritage, where majority of male Englishmen were already literate in mid 1600s. They did not get there through top-down state-organized schooling, it was mostly a bottom-up effort, where local Church played huge role.
I mean, they looked more adult. If you look at a high school year book from decades ago the seniors look like they're in their 30s. Maybe this means time is speeding up, or that life was harder then which aged them, like how outdoor cats often look all haggard. Then again was life really that much harder in the 1960s?
Are you sure it's not just that their hair and fashion styles are those of a previous decade and that that triggers the "this person is old" neurons in your brain?
In the 1930s, I'm sure the majority of children worked hard lives on farms and other jobs so they were well on their way to realizing the troubles of adulthood.
> life was harder back then, which made people tougher
Unintuitively, harder lives don't make people tougher. Intuitively, they make people more exhausted and traumatized. Look at how functional people were back then when they were elderly (though that could be due to other aspects of health). Look at anyone who has had a hard life; they wear down.
Similarly, children, contrary to some pop politico-psychology, generally grow stronger if they feel safer. Unsafe kids are scared to face the world and often never develop an inner sense of security. Trauma leaves wounds that sometimes never heal. Safe kids feel like they can brave the world, and they internalize that sense of safety that their parents model and give them.
From my experience of growing up around people who lived through war and then repressive regime and poverty, what you describe above is very much opposite to what I have seen.
> College prepares people to be adults in every way, not to be a resource for corporations.
Only 2% of Bangladeshis go to college. Are the rest not adults? Indeed, I’d say the opposite is true. Apart from job training, the main function of college in America seems to be extending adolescence and deferring dealing with the real world. 18 year olds in Bangladesh are a lot more “adult” than many college-educated 30-somethings.
The quote I believe corresponds to "the expected civic responsibilities that an individual has in that society."
There are many ways to prepare an individual for that responsibility. In western nations, that is often done more through a formal educational program than through the community and family.
This also isn't a "you must have X amount of civic responsibility" as different societies are looking for adults to have different amounts of responsibility within that society.
While American college is to an extent the deferment of responsibility, in many cases it is also the exposure to a wider range of cultures than one experienced up through high school. It is that exposure to other people and culture - learning to get along with a roommate or doing your own laundry in a gradual process that college presents.
In that respect, it is not a deferment of dealing with the real world, but rather a gradual introduction to the broader world. While the 18 year old American may be able to do unskilled labor and get along (tolerably) with siblings, being able to work in an office or understand that the upbringing of the driver of the carpool isn't the same as yours - that comes from that exposure to other people and cultures.
We talk and I've commented on posts about 'misinformation' 'propaganda' the role of social media and pernicious tentacles of marketing. The amount of surveillance, terrible software promoted as amazing (remember the articles about Shotspotter? or LIDAR? or facial recognition by airlines?)
We're already doing a pretty terrible job educating people and it shows. How much worse does it get when its outsourced to the 'community'? Communities in the US (and everywhere) are fragmented, class stratified, religiously bound structures that we have seen the detriment of when it comes to civic participation. Just check out the IG page of any former evangelical or mormon female.
A secular democracy requires education and time to participate in civic and civil society. That education must imho be grounded in not just how to think, but also the history of humanity. Otherwise we are signing ourselves up for a return to much darker days.
Yes. I fear that this is exactly what is missed by people who expect University to operate as a transaction where middle class people invest money in order to obtain membership in to an elite cast, which is a system where the state is treating these investments as a private enterprise which needs public-sector subsidy, and the university is put in to a system of economic incentives where it becomes an institution for producing people who corporations need, and in turn, the indebted student is lumbered with economic constraints which channel them into being who a corporation needs.
My 19 year old mother in Pakistan might have been a lot more adult because she had me, but I'm sure having to forego her career for a marriage with a Rs 10000 mehr was something she would have liked to have had a few more choices about. Get a grip on yourself, man. (And yes, she went to college there too)
People have more choices in America because of the country’s economic and technological advancement. For women, in particular, there are more job opportunities in an advanced economy than in one based on subsistence farming. Having more choices is one of the luxuries of living in America.
But that’s orthogonal to my point. If I were looking for people to rebuild America (or even just maintain it) I’d much rather have adults like your mom (or my mom) than the children graduating from American colleges these days.
Your mom might be better off. Look at what's happening with educated American women. They forgo children until it's too late to have them, focusing on career instead of on family, and then find that they can not do both.
My mom flipped the order, working until she had us, then taking about a decade off her career and doing an MS in Computer Science in the meanwhile, before returning to her career.
She got an MIS about a decade after having us but couldn’t get internships because she had to take care of us as a single mother so it really never helped her land a job
I'm sure you have some knowledge that I could learn from, but it requires both of us and most of that is inflammatory and hyperbole. Let's both try curiosity and bringing valuable knowledge to the table?
> 18 year olds in Bangladesh are a lot more “adult”
Imagine an 18 year old in the US. They could go to college and learn more about the world, themselves, etc., or get a menial job, an apartment, and become more adult. In fact, any learning or training is about investing in the future. Any investment is about current sacrifice (time, money, etc.) for better future returns.
We could also ask the same question - and it was asked, by prior generations - about 12 year olds, who could become adults and work in coal mines. People used to get married at that age too. In Judaism, 13 year old males technically become adults by completing their Bar Mitzvahs (obviously an ancient tradition). Were they better off? Was our society better off? Is there some benefit to achieving adulthood sooner?
Taking it further, kids who lack effective parenting, either through accident or neglect, often grow up fast. And lacking that time to be kids, to learn and explore and grow themselves, costs them for the rest of their lives. I grew a lot in high school and college, and I would have missed so much if I had to be a full-fledged adult then.
The argument that prior generations lacked college educations and therefore future ones have nothing to gain, or that it's an insult to prior generations to say there is something to gain, seem very flawed for obvious reasons. It's wrong that so many people in Bangledesh, who are just as able to grow and benefit, are denied the opportunity and those benefits.
Let's keep building and improving a world so that they, like so many others over the last several decades, become the first in their families to benefit from college.
I never went to college, instead I got a job and worked like you say at age 18. I then worked my way into software engineering. Compared to my siblings (and virtually everyone else in my family, who took more traditional routes), I’m far more independent and have a stable career with no college debt.
I’ve heard of others talk up the college experience, but I fail to see what’s so special about it. What exactly did I miss in my development? How exactly am I different (besides having a 4-6 year head-start in the working world)?
Parties and friends are also made outside of campus, in the adult world. Working a job at a young age and having to be responsible for yourself builds life skills early. Some of which, my college-educated friends are still having trouble building well into their 30’s. I know some that are terrified of “growing up”: they keep earning degrees or still in their 2nd masters program, accumulating debt that is clearly unsustainable. Many are in fields that inside the sheltered and honestly, kind of bizarre world of academia look nothing like what actually happens in the real world, and they are in for a very rude awakening when that house of cards comes tumbling down.
Every time I meet someone who went to college, if you’re in the same job as them without having a degree, the default response is “but I got the experience”. Part of me thinks this is some kind of rationalization so they don’t have to accept the fact that they might have just been swindled and could have just as easily did what I did and get the same outcome.
The “college experience” of living in a dorm for 4 years is probably overrated, but if you can afford it, there’s definitely a benefit to spending 4 years on directed learning. Both in subjects you’re interested and in being forced to learn subjects you would never touch on your own.
I went back to school after a decade of web development, and learned a ton. I think I’m a much better developer than I would have been had I learned only what I thought I needed for my job (could be wrong about that, but I don’t think I am). I’ve also worked with plenty of people without degrees who were better developers than me, but to a person, I think they would have greatly benefited from a broader theoretical foundation than what they built through self directed learning.
One thing you should think about is that rationalization likely applies to you just as much as it does to the college educated people you’re talking about.
I was in the college is useless boat before I went back and most of it was rationalizing my choices—plus a bit of feeling inferior.
It’s one thing to decide that college wasn’t the right decision for you (and maybe it wasn’t). It’s another entirely to write off everyone who went as suckers.
I graduated from college the first time; did both community college and university as a transfer. Still got the 'freshman experience' my first semester at uni, then lived on campus, except for my final semester where I commuted.
Yes, having dedicated time to focus on learning was great. But I was effective at that because I'd already learned to, well, learn, on my own, by homeschooling the latter half of high school (where I'd study, take CLEP tests).
College isn't for suckers, but the scholastic benefits of it can be gotten through other means (and should probably be done because a job you're interested in requires it, ideally in the confines of that job, like an apprenticeship in the trades). Many of the other purported benefits (social, etc) are BS.
The main benefit I can think of outside of that dedicated study time is being forced into more of a cultural milieu than I had experienced prior. I think that is important, but I also think that entirely depends on the school, just as it depends on the job, so I'm not sure that's entirely a college benefit so much as a "get into the city if you're living somewhere suburban or rural" benefit.
> College isn't for suckers, but the scholastic benefits of it can be gotten through other means
Of course it’s possible, but the number of people who have the discipline/inclination to get through a degree’s worth (or even a significant fraction of a degree’s worth) of education on their own is very small. Small enough that if the reason you’re skipping college is because you think you can/will learn everything they can teach you on your own, you’re most likely kidding yourself.
With self directed learning it’s also shockingly easy to develop huge blind spots that you have no idea you have.
> and should probably be done because a job you're interested in requires it
I’ve personally benefited a good deal from taking the year of physics I was forced to take, despite no job having ever required it.
The same goes for all the papers I had to write in non CS classes.
> the scholastic benefits of it can be gotten through other means
Where else will you get the direct access to expertise in all those fields, guiding you in what works/experiments/skills/etc to read/learn/acquire, answering questions personally, the massive labs and libraries, the students to study with.
As someone who has tried to study on my own at a serious level, I would say the opposite: Studying on my own is nothing like it. I am very jealous of those in college. I don't know which books and papers to read, how to contextualize them, what they have and lack; I have nobody to ask (Reddit and Stack Exchange being very poor substitutes); I lack access to resources that are far too expensive, JSTOR being a simple example, making much study very time-consuming or impossible. I regularly run into things, years later, that would have been introduced in the first day of class by an expert - I have an unknown but large quantity of blind spots.
That's kind of my point - the nature of "study on my own" is different than "can I find the resources I need to solve a particular problem". College is creating a problem of "pass this test" or "complete this assignment"; studying on your own, yes, you don't know where your blind spots are or where to begin, because you don't have a problem you're trying to solve. College provides you some, but they aren't fundamentally different than work problems. And while some classes may attempt to 'teach' the material, the ones where that was an effective use of my time (rather than just read the textbook, or those where class time was unrelated to the projects we were graded on) were definitely in the minority. YMMV.
You can ask a professor, or multiple ones. If the classes are within your major, the school will guide you. This part is a non-problem. You can also take several classes for a week or two, depending on the school, and see which ones suit your priorities.
> College provides you some, but they aren't fundamentally different than work problems.
Usually the opposite is said, that college problems are not at all like what you encounter in work, that students are unprepared for work problems and that professors don't understand them. College problems are crafted carefully for you to acquire knowledge and skills; work problems are crafted to avoid having you learn, because that takes extra time.
> And while some classes may attempt to 'teach' the material, the ones where that was an effective use of my time (rather than just read the textbook, or those where class time was unrelated to the projects we were graded on) were definitely in the minority. YMMV.
I think this is not realistic for most people. It's also possible you missed a lot without the professor's context and expertise. In anything, would you rather just read a book or have access to an expert mentor? There's no question IME.
Maybe it depends on the courses, which I'm starting to suspect explains a lot of the response at HN: Were you in a STEM field, particularly T or E?
Didn't see this response - but yes. Computer Science. From a top 10 school. Some of what I'm saying is mostly true of the two years of 'core' classes, and then some of the softer CS classes. Others include classes 'taught' by professors there for research. Literally the only classes that felt like "yeah, this was worth attending" were the ones being taught by 'instructors', not professors, i.e., people with Masters degrees rather than Ph Ds, who weren't being pressured to publish and bring in grant money. Meaning I can think of roughly...4, of the dozens of classes I took, that felt worth it. And chunky classes, like Data Structures and Algorithms, and Computer Graphics, there was no point to attending the class; an hour invested in the textbook was worth more than an hour attending.
Conversely I learned functional programming, multiple languages and new CS concepts, fault tolerant system design, and system architecture skills, all in the context of a short period of work.
I don't know you at all, so I have nothing to say about you, of course. Nothing personal.
Regarding the assertions: Of course, one anecdoctal experience says nothing about a population, and in the population, career and other outcomes are far better for college graduates.
We are all by not knowing what we missed and, as you say about others, to rationalize our choices. Framing the question - always the most powerful mode of argument - by saying someone meets the standard (i.e., you are happy in your life), so why do something else, makes any possible alternative useless. What good is a winning lottery ticket either? But the question is, what are the different sets of outcomes from each alternative choice? Each alternative, such as college, makes us better off in some ways, worse off in others - and that includes impacting things that the other alternatives don't touch.
You're defining the question as if college benefits are social life and speed of acquiring adult life skills and responsibilities. If those are someone's aims, I'd agree - don't go! College is about critical thinking skills, knowledge, and learning skills, which last a lifetime. Are your thinking skills so good that they can't be improved? Do you have nothing to learn? Not me. How do improve those things? Imagine studying with an expert who not only guides you in what to study, but explains the works based many other works, context, etc.; answers your questions regularly, person-to-person, in their office and via computer; pushes you to see dimensions and angles that you didn't know about, and to do it at a high level; and reviews your understanding and gives you feedback. And then it would be great to do that with others studying the same thing. And if the study needs it, if they provided other resources: A huge library of other works and every reseach paper ever written (along with experts in each field that help you discover excellent, relevant materials); labs with specialized equipment; etc. etc.
If college didn't exist for learning, it would be too good to be invented.
Also, don't you want to learn about yourself, the world, etc.? What you read on the Internet is so far removed from the quality of knowledge, it's laughable, and it's tragic.
> I know some that are terrified of “growing up”
> sheltered and honestly, kind of bizarre world of academia
These are well-worn stereotypes. People inside and outside school have trouble growing up; handling a college workload is no joke - much harder than early jobs, which often are 40 hours and not challenging (many service jobs). And academia is no more bizarre than other industries. You should see what goes on in SV or on Wall Street if you want bizarre.
Look how many people have taken this same approach - purposely miscontrue the discussion into a personal attack and respond. Perhaps people who did go to college can also take discussion personally and get mad about others saying they wasted their time and money. Then we'll have an even better discussion!
Yes, I'm saying that you personally - and your dog too - are an ignorant, uneducated, menial worker, who can't count higher than 10 without your toes, while I can count to 1024.
With that out of the way, can we actually talk about something valuable? I see lots of people trying to shut down a reasoned discussion that challenges the orthodoxy (which currently on HN is, college is a waste of time).
I dunno (I'm being kinda folksy!). It was just arguing and not really qualifying as a refutation, which generally but not always implies proof. (I did look that up to check my suspicion, but in a big dictionary.)
I would be interested in people's experiences, good and bad, with having (not) gone to college, and serious analysis - everyone seems to be trying to shut down any serious discussion and exploration.
I went to college and I've had many times that I wished I'd studied harder. I've also wished at times that I skipped college then and went later in life, when I would benefit far more. I haven't wished that I didn't go; I learned so much that forms my understanding of the world, my thinking skills, etc.; I would be a different person without it. You can't tell me that I didn't benefit greatly from college but I'm just one person. But can you tell anyone that they studied for four years, hard, and didn't learn much? That's a big stretch for anyone; you need to learn enough to pass ~32 classes at various college levels, and that's a minimum.
Many people say here that 'I didn't go and I'm fine'. Fine isn't the question; nobody said we'd die without it, but that's not our standard for our choices. Each path leads to different collections of outcomes, better and worse and completely different, and we have blind spots about what the other path could be like (having no experience of it). Maybe college emphasizes different skills, develops different tools, with different advantages and disadvantages, as an example of how that would work.
I also wonder how much HN readers think of or have experienced STEM only. The humanities is more important (unpopular, I know, and both are essential IMHO); it addresses the most critical issues in the world and life, the ones beyond quantitative understanding, which is most of them.
I watched a bunch of Shakespeare plays recently, fictionalized histories of Rome and England [0]. From them you learn more about our current society and humanity in general, including today's crazy disfuntion, the mis/disinformation and people's responses, than from all the quantitative research combined; art is a mirror that looks into ourselves. And as objects of another human being's creation, they are incredibly inspirational and beautiful. I'm wiser and have grown since a week ago. Would I turn to Shakespeare and get so much from the plays without studying literature in college? I doubt it, though that's just me.
[0] Without knowing the reader's experience with the Bard, let me recommend Julius Caesar especially, also Henry VI Part 2 and Part 3, and of course their sequel, Richard III. Richard II is good too. I'd skip Henry VI Part 1 but read a synopsis as context for Part 2: Part 1 is clearly substandard IMHO and, it turns out, is believed to be mostly written by a collaborator, Christopher Marlowe. It does constrast the difference between an excellent playwright of their day using the same forms and an all-time genius of character and language.
No one denies that humanities are useful. What people deny is that humanities as taught in universities are useful and that one has to go to school to learn them. For example, everything you describe about Shakespeare also applies to Star Wars. The prequel trilogy is a fictionalized account of the fall of the Roman Republic, and is just as useful for learning about history as Julius Caesar is. This is because Shakespeare's plays are just pop culture from the 16th and 17th centuries, and in a hundred years, people like you will be applauding Star Wars and looking down on others who prefer that century's pop culture and don't see the point in studying an old screenplay written in archaic language.
There also isn't a single person on HN who has a American STEM degree who has only experienced STEM. Nearly all STEM college degrees require a significant portion of classes to be humanities (the reverse is not true for humanities majors as they can graduate having never taken any real science or math classes), and every single high school graduate has spent 13 years studying the humanities, including Shakespeare which is a part of most high school English curriculums. What you view as naivety is actually an opinion born from experience.
> What people deny is that humanities as taught in universities are useful and that one has to go to school to learn them.
We must stand on the shoulders of giants; you can't reinvent all the wheels, all the insights, all the knowledge and tools created by all the humans in history by yourself. Why would you? Economic specialization, including in literature, yields talented experts who learn all those things for you (they don't reinvent the wheels either, or just one or two), and unless you think you know everything, you can learn a lot from them.
> everything you describe about Shakespeare also applies to Star Wars. The prequel trilogy is a fictionalized account of the fall of the Roman Republic, and is just as useful for learning about history as Julius Caesar is.
Imagine two or ten or a hundred pieces of media that fictionalize the fall of the Roman Republic. Because they refer to the same real-life history, are all of the stories therefore of equal value (and in the same ways)? That doesn't follow at all. One could be complete BS, the other transcendent genius.
The value of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, and of Star Wars, are not learning history. I've never heard someone credit Star Wars as a resource for that before now, nor Shakespeare for that matter. Read a history book. Shakespeare uses the historical setting to talk about humanity, to - like most great art - talk about ourselves, to hold up a mirror to ourselves that looks inside. To learn about ourselves, now.
I enjoy and learn from plenty of sci-fi, including parts of Star Wars (not the prequal trilogy!). Nothing I've encountered is on the same planet as Shakespeare, but that's an impossible standard. Shakespeare was popular when alive, but is also more popular than everyone since, and in languages around the world. The works of Shakespeare are not just pop culture or nothing is more than pop culture (and then we have to differentiate between pop cultural forms so the term means nothing). Einstein and many others have studied physics; their work is not all of the same value.
> the reverse is not true for humanities majors as they can graduate having never taken any real science or math classes
That's not my experience! My experience is that STEM majors usually take lightweight humanities-for-STEM-students (apparently some think they are taking the heavyweight stuff), and humanities majors usually take STEM-for-humanities majors. I almost never saw a STEM major in high-level humanities classes (and in fairness, it would be very difficult without the prerequisites of knowledge and skill - they wouldn't know much of what was being talked about or how to address it), and I almost never saw a humanities major in high-level STEM classes, for similar reasons.
And IME both sets of majors thought there was little purpose to taking the other. 'Why are you doing that?'
Both Julius Caesar and Star Wars Episodes I, II, and III use the historical/fictional setting of the fall of the Roman/Galactic Republic to talk tell a deeper story than what first appears. The fact that Lucas intended the movies to be an allegory for the fall of the Roman Republic is well known and even cited on the trilogy's Wikipedia page.
In the original post I replied to, you said:
>From [Shakespeare] you learn more about our current society and humanity in general, including today's crazy disfuntion, the mis/disinformation and people's responses, than from all the quantitative research combined; art is a mirror that looks into ourselves. And as objects of another human being's creation, they are incredibly inspirational and beautiful. I'm wiser and have grown since a week ago. Would I turn to Shakespeare and get so much from the plays without studying literature in college? I doubt it, though that's just me.
The plot of the prequels revolves around Palpatine's manipulations to destroy democracy and gain absolute control over the Republic. He does so by manipulating people like the CIS/Trade Federation with misinformation and promising to take care of their legitimate grievances. He gets them to start a war, which is legitimized through a complex legal system but immoral and unjust in reality. He then uses this war to justify the creation of an army loyal to him, which he later uses to seize power. It doesn't take a genius to realize how lessons learned from the movies could be applied to real life, in the same manner that you described Shakespeare's plays doing for you. Shakespeare doesn't talk about misinformation or modern society's disfunction directly, you inferred that, and there is nothing stopping someone from drawing similar life lessons from more modern material. It's the entire concept of allegories/fables which are thousands of years old!
I noticed that you didn't make a single argument about why Shakespeare is above being pop culture; you only asserted that it is somehow better. Since future humanities students won't have grown up viewing Star Wars as plebian content, it is possible that they will worship Star Wars the same way present day ones worship Shakespeare, Dickens, and many other historical writers who wrote for primarily to entertain. Your casual dismissal of the prequels while implying that you like the original trilogy also doesn't bode well for your argument that university education in the humanities is useful for being able to analyze and draw conclusions from literature, since the prequels have a much more complex plot and fleshed out world than the originals do. The movies have just as deep of a story as any Shakespeare play and one can draw any of the conclusions you mentioned from them, and in fact many do even without having the "proper" education. There are no analysis skills that one gains from a university humanities education, which is also likely why you didn't list any of the "tools" the "giants" have created.
A humanities education is definitely not necessary, and possibly even determinantal, to address the "critical issues in the world and life, the ones beyond quantitative understanding, which is most of them", and to think otherwise is to think that being a member of an expensive book club makes you qualified to rule the world.
This strenuous denial consumes life and effort, and for what? What do you win? Why do you care? All I can tell you is good news: These are wonderful, incredible things in the humanities, in Shakespeare, that will change you.
An experienced developer looks at code and forms perceptions 100x faster and more accurately than someone without expertise. Their brain is wired differently by their experiences, and they look for and pick out patterns, process their meaning, and understand them, all in moments without conscious thought. Similarly, someone with expertise in wine can perceive far more in a glass than someone who doesn't. I'm mostly in the latter group; often I don't know the difference.
But that doesn't imply that no difference exists; reality doesn't exist or not because I perceive it. I have no doubt that those differences exist and that the person with expertise gets far more out of that glass than I do, sees far more color and detail and shapes and images, and I take the gap between my experience and theirs as a signal that it's a fruitful territory for learning. If I denied that, and things like it, I would wall myself off from much learning.
But I can watch Shakespeare and see far more than most people who haven't studied and learned literature and arts more generally. In case you think it, I don't worship William Shakespeare, I love the works. Shakespeare is not a god and the plays are not scripture that I've been instructed to praise, but Shakespeare is just a person - like HN commenters - who made something incredible, and my experience has led me to the same response as so many others over 400 years.
My god, get some reading comprehension. You are destroying your own argument that humanities education is useful outside of academia. At no point did I deride Shakespeare and the very first sentence I wrote in this comment chain was "No one denies that the humanities are useful". Instead, I pointed out that the qualities you derive from it are available in other cultural items and that everyone draws connections from media to real life. No one needs special training to do that, and it is a waste to force students spend two years and tens of thousands of dollars to write glorified book reports.
college is delaying young people to become mature, we're producing giant babies these days, thanks to endless parenting, online gaming, social screen time, now probably even metaverse, you name it.
on the STEM subject, teens good at math are never teacher's favorites, instead they're called nerds and some are even isolated from the rest, it's quite the opposite in Asia, or even in Europe. That's the root cause we need import so many STEMs from overseas, the culture smothered STEM from K-12. K-12 is anything but success IMHO.
middle school kids are more keen about their gender or identities, or how awful US was in the past, or their hair color...high school students must show how caring they're to the community or everyone must be some leader somehow while the truth is that they can barely take care of themselves without parents' caring, for academics nowadays SAT/ACT/school-ranking/etc are either racism or unfair...I will stop here.
It's not (just) college. Even if you do make it past college, hitting what older generations would consider typical markers of adulthood (having your own place, a good job, a stable relationship, a family, etc.) are all delayed and/or more difficult to achieve.
Meanwhile many jobs are trying to sell themselves not through a TC that would let one hit these markers, but through football tables, pizza parties, drinks and other social outings. Not to hate on fun activities, but it sure does feel like trying to keep young adults in a perpetual student lifestyle when you keep the booze but not give them the wage to advance in life.
There are plenty of young adults who want to grow up, meeting a ridiculous amount of resistance.
When I was a teen, teenagers had after school jobs. McDonald's, stores, etc., were populated with teen workers at minimum wage.
Today those jobs are held by adults, expecting to be able to raise a family on it. Teenagers rarely have jobs, their first job waits until after they graduate from college.
Cherry on top: once they graduate, they are met with "entry-level jobs" asking for years of experience, giant requirements lists and an overall predatory environment, only to be reinforced that failure is a personal fault and not one of the system.
Ironic considering this is the market where feedback has been gradually taken away to the point of being so vague it is effectively useless, if there is any. Because ghosting and poor one-liners are more cost-effective.
Let's not cover up bad systems because a few individuals rise to the artificial challenge and bite through.
And adults have always occupied those jobs too. How else did you get McDonalds Breakfast 30 years ago on a Wednesday at 8 AM in October going into the office?
And they are also considered legally adults, are they not?
I remember at 18 signing up for 5 years in the Navy. I'd say that is pretty adult. If it isn't, you should consider contacting your senator about raising the age of enlistment.
All the more reason to contact your Senator. Lower the drinking age or make the age of enlistment higher. Adult enough to decide to become a sacrificial pawn, but not adult enough to drink a beer.
Based on my experience, the primary reason high school kids had jobs was to buy a car.
For various reasons (safety regulation, emissions requirements, minimum wage not keeping up with inflation, insurance outpacing inflation, cash for clunkers etc…) it’s now almost impossible to afford a car working a few hours at McDonald’s.
There’s also far more fast food restaurants per capita than there used to be, and food service/retail make up a larger part of the economy in general.
To top it off, the age of the average American has increased almost 10 years since 1960, so there are just fewer kids to do the jobs.
I still regret not buying that '68 Chevelle Super Sport for $600 when I was in h.s. That thing was a rocket with that giant V8 and very little car. I did wind up with a 67 289 Mustang. It was an automatic, and my buddy & I converted it to a 4 speed because muscle cars with automatics were for weeners.
We sure had fun shredding tires with it. I was lucky to survive the accident that terminated it.
I asked my high school math teacher to write me a recommendation letter for college. He politely refused, saying he could not in good conscience recommend me. I am grateful for him for letting me know, so I could ask another teacher.
More than once he'd announced in class that he was grading the class on a curve, but me separately.
So he didn't reject you because you were a poor student, but for some other reason? Sounds like you might want to consider what you could have done differently to improve on that outcome. Regardless of whether you agree with what s/he tells you, it's a chance to gain some valuable insights into what others think about you.
Apparently, I was pretty obnoxious in high school. It took me far too long to learn this. (And to learn when not to speak my opinion.) I would have been well served if I had swallowed pride and asked teachers (and peers) for some perspective on how my attitude was, frankly, self destructive.
>college is delaying young people to become mature, we're producing giant babies these days,
A good interpretation of humans generally is 'giant baby monkeys', in that we have curiosity and openness consistent with juveniles but not with most adult animals.
>on the STEM subject, teens good at math are never teacher's favorites, instead they're called nerds and some are even isolated from the rest,
This doesn't bear any resemblance to my experience of a not-so-special US public school in the 2000s.
I'm not saying your comment is without valid points, but you are throwing the baby out with the bathwater on your attitude about childhood.
> college is delaying young people to become mature, we're producing giant babies these days, thanks to endless parenting, online gaming, social screen time, now probably even metaverse, you name it.
It persists into the professional space, just look at how infantilizing Silicon Valley became, trying to turn the workplace into a playpen complete with propeller head hats.
I think your views on how kids view their peers who are good at math are outdated. For example, NASA gear has, fairly recently, become a fashion trend [1].
I graduated high school in 1998, was great at math, and most teachers liked me, some loved me. MAYBE if you're talking about going to high school in the 70's or 80's, or in a more small football-centered town or something, this was accurate at some point.
> middle school kids are more keen about their gender or identities, or how awful US was in the past, or their hair color
Do you genuinely believe this stuff that youre typing? I know that conservative medias say this and use it as a boogeyman to get themselves into power, but do you truly believe it? Ive worked with elementary, middle, and high school kids for the last 5 years, in an area that conservatives constantly make fun of and call awful things, but none of that is even close to the reality.
Kids know that gay people exist (and are okay with that), and they know that they might want to look or act differently than they wouldve been forced to in the past.
Kids today are significantly more accepting of tech and STEM subjects than they were even just a few years ago. Its significantly more common and accepted to play video games, kids are interested in video and picture editing because of social media (like TikTok), and they are increasingly tech literate. None of these boogeyman topics you claim are true, but they are continually parroted by people who want to move our education system backwards.
And as a side note,
> high school students must show how caring they're to the community
I personally think this is a great thing. We should encourage more community involvement with young people, especially things that help out disadvantaged community members and educate them about our government. Im surprised someone who parrots the original phrases from your comment would be against something like being caring in your community.
yes I believe it genuinely, as these are my three k-12 kids told me what's going on at school, and I got involved with school quite often, I can see those myself to some extent too. the middle school one actually told me she thinks at least 1/3 of her classmates are hard to tell their genders these days, and to greet a classmate the first sentence now should be: how should I address you? otherwise her classmates actually got offended if you got it wrong on the gender side.
my high school kids told me they are aware of those sensitive gender subjects at middle school and they feel it's more frequent these days.
Google will show you some data points, e.g. Gen Z (from 1995+) has close to 20% claiming to be LGBT+. Things changed a lot.
I'm neither a liberal or conservative, I consider myself independent.
What's wrong with those things? They are different from what I (and I guess you) knew and know, but so what? We did plenty that was shocking and new to our parents, and equally mocked - do you remember? How absurdly narrow-minded our parents seemed? We were mostly right too. Are we going to do the same?
The next generation should not tether themselves at all to what is in our comfort zones; if they aren't going far beyond them, they aren't thinking for themselves. When I was young I remember thinking that the old people were jaded, corrupt, and didn't even try to address their ignorance - and now that I'm 'old', I can see I was right! With power has come all those things - not a commitment to truth, but disdain for being made to learn anything. God I hope the next generation doesn't follow or accomodate us. And to this day, some people I know in the prior generation still don't understand things that are normal to us now as adults, because we grew up with them. I know some that won't wear blue jeans because they see jeans as a symbol of a challenging culture.
They say progress happens one funeral at a time! :)
> What's wrong with those things? They are different from what I (and I guess you) knew and know, but so what?
The numbers are vastly higher than scientific estimates of how many people are in these groups. That suggests it’s become a form of self expression, which is just a way of denying reality.
> We did plenty that was shocking and new to our parents, and equally mocked - do you remember?
Who is “we?” Millennials, as a group, are the good kids compared to baby boomers. They have less sex, do less drugs, etc.
> How absurdly narrow-minded our parents seemed? We were mostly right too.
Our parents started down this road of self expression and denying the realities of life. Mostly they sobered up after the drug binges of the 1960s, but left millennials poorly positioned to handle the real world. We are lucky to live in a society our grandparents built, because I don’t think we could build that society again today.
> The next generation should not tether themselves at all to what is in our comfort zones; if they aren't going far beyond them, they aren't thinking for themselves.
The realities of human existence don’t change so fast. The basic mechanics of American life aren’t much different today compared to 1989. If people are rushing past the comfort zones of their parents, that means they’re increasingly living in a delusion detached from reality.
> When I was young I remember thinking that the old people were jaded, corrupt, and didn't even try to address their ignorance - and now that I'm 'old', I can see I was right!
People’s brains don’t fully develop until they’re 25. So if you believe the same things now as you did when you were young…
> The numbers are vastly higher than scientific estimates of how many people are in these groups. That suggests it’s become a form of self expression, which is just a way of denying reality.
I thought the data was based on surveys of how people identify themselves, which only shows that identification has changed with time. Maybe fluid gender identity is a stage of development that has been denied before; who knows? Why do you have to tell these people what to do with their lives?
Self-expression is denying reality? I don't know what that means, what one has to do with the other. One way of looking at it is that what is inside you is part of reality; you are part of reality. Anyway, you are criticizing middle schoolers for denying reality?
Again, why do you have to tell them what to do, what to feel? Who are you to do it?
> ...
The rest is mostly your self-expression, not some objective reality. You are welcome to it, of course.
Or maybe, the entire west is increasingly a gerontocracy, with the 18-64 working age group being squeezed harder in every way to support a constantly growing number of retirees, who also as a group obstruct construction and make the traditional markers of adulthood harder to achieve. To a 70 year old, everyone below 40 must look like a baby.
> teens good at math are never teacher's favorites, instead they're called nerds and some are even isolated from the rest, it's quite the opposite in Asia, or even in Europe
Nah, no on is going to isolate you for being good at math. Literally, that does not happen. Isolation of kids that cant fit it does happen and some of those are good at math. But, the "being good at math" part is not what gets them isolated. It is the other stuff and behaviors, roughly in the "poor social skills" (may include "have hard time being assertive about own boundaries") that gets you isolated.
> the main function of college in America seems to be extending adolescence and deferring dealing with the real world.
I don't know if I'd go so far as to say that it is the other "main function" but ohhh boy does this need to be discussed more. I know a few people that seemingly couldn't break out of college. College gives a clear path forward for years, each time you're admitted into a program. Give that up and what do you have? For the people I know, the answer to that question is a minimum wage job outside of their field of study.
Since you brought Bangladeshis into it, my experience with those that came to the US (mostly for graduate studies) (all guys):
1. They complain that they have to cook
2. They complain that they have to do laundry.
3. They complain they have to iron their clothes.
4. They complain they have to tidy up the apartments.
5. They mostly care about sports, movies, and if they're not religious, getting drunk. Of course, that's not necessarily true for those that go to top universities for their PhDs, but those are the minority, in any case.
6. They boast about how great it was that they didn't take humanities in their undergrad. Talking to them, it's also clear they have little understanding of the arts.
I've also met some very responsible, intellectual Bangladeshis.
> College prepares people to be adults in every way, not to be a resource for corporations.
Most people think college prepares them to be resource for corporation, or some other things. Your college education coincides with your formative years, but from my exp, college has nothing to do with growing as an adult. It's mainly moving out of your hometown and work your part time job and start planning your life.
> Most people think college prepares them to be resource for corporation, or some other things.
They do? And if they do, is it true? Who are we talking about? High school students? People who read HN?
> from my exp, college has nothing to do with growing as an adult. It's mainly moving out of your hometown and work your part time job and start planning your life.
That's too bad. There is so much more going on. What about all the knowledge and critical thinking skills, from science and stats, to addressing the bigger questions in the humanities and social sciences?
that's not what "adult" means, you've chosen the wrong word, and now you are changing the definition of "adult" to an activist who has to have opinions about grandiose things in the world.
Again you keep making the argument that university is the only place where you can learn how to think, which is a pretty basic human skill. If that was true, then it's a dangerous system that needs to be fixed, not something to celebrate.
I said "was true" because I didn't know that the government installed locks on books and encrypting mechanisms on the internet and public libraries so that they are only accessible from universities.
You kept ignoring the more important point and cherry-pick a bikeshedding topic (the definition of some word) to reply.
> Only activists have opinions...
That's not what I said, but you certainly did say that adult means that you HAVE TO think about those things, in some particular way that is taught in an university.
Adult to me just means you can take care of people other than yourself. Of course it's a subjective definition, but a teenager can read books/go to university and have sophisticated thoughts about the world, that doesn't make them mature.
Here is something to consider though: why is it that you only study critical thinking, scientific method or whatever at the age 18? Why do kids have to fuck around for years, apparently unable to think, before "university"? Why should they? What are they before that? mindless primates?
> you certainly did say that adult means that you HAVE TO think about those things, in some particular way that is taught in an university.
I didn't say that (provide a link?), though I do happen to think that adults do have to be responsible for others, as you say, and the bigger issues are big because they impact those responsibilities. The rest is your own ideas.
At college, you learn that there is no one right way to think, and also the very narrow limits of your own mind.
> a teenager can read books/go to university and have sophisticated thoughts about the world, that doesn't make them mature.
Right, college is about knowledge and thinking skills, not so much maturity (but it helps there too). For maturity, get married and work in a coal mine at 13 years old.
> why is it that you only study critical thinking, scientific method or whatever at the age 18? Why do kids have to fuck around for years
Hmmm ... I had science classes, and was taught to think critically, before college, but not nearly on the same level. Why do people not learn more complex things earlier? Why not teach graduate level physics to 6 year olds?
> At college, you learn that there is no one right way to think
Again with this "at college" rhetoric. I guess if you don't go to college, you will be a bigot, on top of having no critical thinking and being an absolutely selfish individual
> For maturity, get married and work in a coal mine at 13 years old
I think 2 years of schooling and 2 years of working an becoming financially self-sufficient would better prepare people for adulthood than 4 years of schooling. Software development, electrical engineering, and plenty of other tech jobs could be taught in 2 years. Perhaps not to the level where people are contributing to cutting edge research - graduate and PhD programs still have their place. But I think many people are interested in an education that primarily serves to develop employment opportunities.
> I think 2 years of schooling and 2 years of working an becoming financially self-sufficient would better prepare people for adulthood than 4 years of schooling. Software development, electrical engineering, and plenty of other tech jobs could be taught in 2 years.
Engineering programs are widely considered to be difficult to complete in 4 years. Where do you get 2 years?
Also, after my sophomore year in college, I was not nearly well-educated enough (whatever 'enough' means); I would wildly approximate that I learned 70% in the last two years. Much of freshman year was just adjusting to college, learning how to write at a college level, etc.
But most importantly, you are still focusing on college as job training, and as I imply in the GGP, specific skill training is just a side benefit. If corporations want job training, they can provide and pay for it themselves. College for the student, not the corporation.
One, eliminating a bunch of required courses not relevant to the job would make things go faster. Sure, things like humanities are fun but for many people getting an education it's not worth the cost-benefit analysis. Plenty of people taking on debt going to college to improve their future prospects would be better served
Two, I don't think someone needs a full engineering degree to become productive. Writing my own compiler was a blast, and gave me some real insight into how computers work under the hood. But if our goal is to improve the earning potential of young adults with the minimum financial burden, I wouldn't be teaching compilers. I'd be teaching how to spin up cloud services, the network stack, and modern web dev.
College is for the student. But it also costs the student a boatload of money. If we want to give the student the best bang for their buck, approaching it as a form of job training would be more effective. Sure, companies could pay for that training. But they're not and colleges fulfill this role, and insist on tacking on a bunch of other requirements that don't really do much to help the student's job prospects.
> humanities are fun but for many people getting an education it's not worth the cost-benefit analysis
Humanities are more important than STEM. Humanities deal with the world and yourself on issues that aren't quantifiable, which is most of the issues in life and in the world, including at work.
> if our goal is to improve the earning potential of young adults with the minimum financial burden
Again, life is much, much more than jobs - you are much, much more than what you do for some corporation - and early jobs are the least important ones. It's all so absorbed in the corporate perspective: your only value, your existence, is for serving the corporation. And it puts people permanently in that class, as servents rather than as the powerful - the citizens of a democracy, to whom the corporations report.
I think if more people studied the humanities, it would be brazenly obvious. It's craven on the part of the powerful and corporations.
Note: 4 years of college is probably 2.5 years of school, not 4. It runs 36 weeks a year and unless you are doing something rigorous, it mostly doesn't require a 40 hour week, except in short bursts.
> More importantly, college is about much more than job training. College prepares people to be adults in every way, not to be a resource for corporations.
This is just middle-class religious belief. And a good one, because middle-class professional people have to reproduce themselves every generation, so they have to center credentialism or fall to working class or poverty.
If you're born rich, it's easy to die rich; if you're born poor, it's easy to die poor; if you're born middle-class, remaining middle-class is a battle for credentials.
I would say the opposite: It's just discrimination to deny people those enormous benefits, of knowledge and skills, based on the wealth of their families.
> People repeat that but what is it based on? Most of the population, including most people who have economic stability and freedom, have not had STEM jobs and very likely will not have STEM jobs.
What generation? In my parents' generation, a secretary could get good health insurance for their family and retire with a pension. Today, someone new hired into that role would struggle to afford rent or health insurance for just themselves, and retirement is out of the question.
I think there is a relative amount of middle class wealth left that hides the fact that many modern jobs do not pay middle class compensation anymore. There are a lot of house poor people that might have the trappings of middle class life, but they're on life support.
In many places, to live a middle class lifestyle from 40 years ago would require young workers without assets to earn six figure incomes. Even in "affordable" places, incomes required for a middle class lifestyle are approaching six figures, as well. I'm certainly not one of those people who think STEM is the be-all and end-all solution to anything, but STEM jobs often put workers in the six figure income range.
STEM jobs don’t put people in that income range, a small subset of STEM jobs do. The majority of STEM careers don’t make 6 figures outside of management.
There just aren't enough STEM jobs to cover a fraction of people with financial stability.
> a secretary could get good health insurance for their family and retire with a pension. Today, someone new hired into that role would struggle to afford rent or health insurance for just themselves, and retirement is out of the question.
While I agree that wages haven't advanced outside of a the very few, secretaries aren't a good example. Computerization has made most of those skills obsolete.
We can stand on the shoulders of giants...or go back to feudalism.
Also, just because someone is doing a menial work it does not mean that they should not have a access to higher education. Especially since there's not enough of higher valued jobs for everyone. Educated worker has higher job mobility and is able to respond quickly to shifting business needs.
> Educated worker has higher job mobility and is able to respond quickly to shifting business needs.
Well, a worker with a college degree has higher job mobility. The worker being educated may be orthogonal. And I'm not sure if becoming educated increases one's ability to respond quickly to shifting business needs.
And it's also part of the problem, as I see it. Decades ago, one could switch industries or fields much more easily because of the lack of expectation of a specific college degree. Today one is much more "locked out" of other fields if they don't have that degree, and people feel trapped because they see no path to a higher paying career without taking on a ton of loans and risk to go to college (for the first time or for another degree).
I think we need to be honest with ourselves and acknowledge a lot (but not all) of higher education is arbitrary gatekeeping, and it's long past time to rein in the "arbitrary" part.
Vomit. Was Tom Swift an self-centered emerald scion who got lucky with money and poured it into his pet projects? News to me.
Seriously, Musk came into a ton of money in the dot-com era, knew how to maintain that money because of his background, seems to be a capable hands-on project manager and natural self-marketing. You surely know people smarter than him who didn't acquire the mass amounts of money required to do what he does; I certainly do.
Whatever your opinion on Musk is, he is at least an inspirational figure that helps inspire the next generation of kids.
No 10-year olds are talking about how to become a savvy financial engineer like Jack Welch at GE, but they are talking about rockets and electric cars thanks to Musk.
LOL. C'mon, Musk builds rockets, electric cars, robot trucks, and tunnel boring machines. How much more Tom Swift can one get? Ok, Ok, I admit he hasn't yet built a Jetmarine or an Atomic Earth Blaster.
> You surely know people smarter than him who didn't acquire the mass amounts of money
I've never met Musk, so cannot attest personally to his smarts. But I've met plenty of very smart people.
But smarts alone simply isn't good enough to do what Musk does. You'll also need:
1. excitement
2. interest
3. drive
4. willingness to try impossible things
5. perseverance in the face of enormous obstacles
6. a thick skin for being laughed at
7. a willingness to continue in spite of withering criticism and vomit
"Musk says that before the company became successful, he could not afford an apartment and instead rented an office and slept on the couch and showered at the YMCA, and shared one computer with his brother."
He made his initial money on an internet startup. Nothing wrong with that.
Wikipedia quotes Elon Musk saying something, and we take it at face value? Let's apply some collegiate (or otherwise) critical thinking about our sources.
> College prepares people to be adults in every way, not to be a resource for corporations.
Have you ever met someone fresh out of college? Let's be real, if they didn't do something before or during that wasn't college, they are arguably less qualified to do anything than an average person who didn't. Wew, they've memorized how to traverse a graph, or something something roman emperors
Don't worry, they will catch up and exceed the others. Everyone has to start their adult life experience somewhere, and there is prize for doing it sooner. Note who runs the world for the most part.
>Most of the population, including most people who have economic stability and freedom, have not had STEM jobs and very likely will not have STEM jobs.
For now. Let's look at young people though. They're indicative of the future.
Outside of finance and STEM, it's really hard to see a clear and reliable path to prosperity for a 20-something year old. Perhaps some trades as well.
What's even worse is that the paths to prosperity seems to get narrower and narrower by the year.
What is often missing in the evaluation of US colleges is just how different they are from most European colleges. I compare, for instance, with the Spanish system. A very high percentage of young Spaniards go to college, just like in the US. However, this whole idea of "learning how to learn" and "college is about learning to be an adult" is completely missing there. All the electives that have nothing to do with your major? Nope. Going to college with an undeclared major? Nope. An experience where most students live, eat and sleep on campus? Again, no.
What does a computer science student take in their first year? In year 1, in my hometown's university, through year 1, a student takes Linear Algebra, Calculus, Human-Machine interaction, Computer Hardware Fundamentals, Electrical engineering fundamentals, Intro to programming, Logic, Discrete Math, Discrete Automata, Numerical Methods, and intro to software engineering. Very different from an American University that might have 1 or 2 years worth of cross-major electives.
This is not unique to computing: A 1st year med students (which you get to start at 18), is going to be crushed under a pile of biology, biostatistics, cytology, anatomy and the like. Literature? Philosophy? History? You better have taken those in high school if you wanted to learn them, because college has no time for you to decide what you want to do with your life.
I am not going to try to figure out which system is better in the short or the long run, but it makes it pretty clear that college in the US is nowhere near close to universal in western countries, even after we take away the unique financial challenges the US gives college students.
The US system is clearly worse and inefficient. Even a GP doctor doesn't finish basic training until about age 30. The whole medical education process has ridiculous amounts of time off -- just wasting human potential -- coupled with redundant learning. It culminates, however, in three years of anachronistic and unnecessary shift work that is a disgusting way of discriminating against pregnant and nursing women by making them work 24 hours at a time. And yeah, they can take time off, but what if they have a baby every year and are never willing to work 24 hour shifts?
As the linked Twitter thread implies, I don't even look at degrees when I do my hiring. I hear that, in the security industry, it's even worse where people with degreed are discriminated against for being filled with worthless and downright wrong bits of knowledge. Based on the latest round of entry level interviews I've had held in software land with recent college graduates, I'm inclined to agree.
College as STEM job training is absurd and clearly a failure. As you say, it's about much more than job training, but I would argue it doesn't even do that. Hell, it makes applicants worse somehow.
> I love having more engineers, scientists, and doctors, but we desperately need non-STEM work to be a viable option
I’m not sure I agree. We could open more research labs, and dramatically increase the number of positions in STEM.
We could double or quadruple the number of teachers, and if we got even a small increase in the number of highly successful students who can do original work in research or STEM it would make all our lives better.
We could increase the number of nurse practitioners who could do basic medicine like fixing broken bones and treating common illnesses.
There’s room to add lots more mechanical and robotics engineers, and a lot of that work requires more spatial reasoning skills than math, despite what one might think. A lot of people who we wouldn’t think of as STEM oriented can do and enjoy those jobs.
I don't like how the word STEM gets thrown around because I feel it whitewashes the fact that most of the opportunity is in ad-supported web apps. Anyone trying to work in chemistry or physics finds this out the hard way.
Yeah. My friends with PhDs in physics are working in software engineering departments at startups and FAANG, their educations almost completely irrelevant to the work they do. At our college reunion, a beloved physics professor was disappointed that not one of his former students at the reunion was still in physics. But I am not sure why he was surprised given how hard and unpleasant it is to stay in academia/research. I didn’t even work at a FAANG, but leaving grad school and getting a programming job immediately cut my workload in half and increased my income by almost 4x … roughly an order-of-magnitude better deal. There’s no real opportunity in physics or math without essentially switching to software eventually.
> There’s no real opportunity in physics or math without essentially switching to software eventually.
In a real free-market scenario, would'nt those PhD programs be drastically reduced?
I suspect this is because this physics PhD program is providing an implicit signalling function, that the fellow out of this program is worth more than the ave college guy - doing the same programming job - because he proved himself on more complex study materials.
This is definitely how it’s interpreted. Especially when a lot of the people in the industry nowadays are clueless PMs who spent college going to frat parties and who can’t do anything in life besides be a PM (or account manager, business analyst, etc), whose first reaction is “oh wow, physics” and the deference begins from there.
Plenty of opportunity in all kinds of software. Ad supported webapps get the headlines because they (or at least the ones you're thinking about) aggregate really well, but there's a lot of work out there.
Academic physics research is not very useful economically, since we've figured out most of the stuff that will ever contribute to engineering needs -- building stuff that real people benefit from -- in our lifetimes. Not all! But most.
Mechanical/structural/chemical/etc. engineering on the other hand (a.k.a. physics and chemistry applied to real world problems) are very well-compensated skill-sets.
> Plenty of opportunity in all kinds of software. Ad supported webapps get the headlines because they (or at least the ones you're thinking about) aggregate really well, but there's a lot of work out there.
I mean, take a look at the next "who's hiring" page. Ad supported webapps seem pretty well represented.
> Academic physics research is not very useful economically, since we've figured out most of the stuff that will ever contribute to engineering needs -- building stuff that real people benefit from -- in our lifetimes. Not all! But most.
My phone lasts a day on a battery because we've managed to turn off the CPU as much as possible - we've got a supercomputer in our pocket that we can't use at its full capacity because battery technology isn't advancing. Academic physics research is not very useful economically because we've defined "useful economically" as "able to be converted into profits within 2-5yrs", and unfortunately we did that about 20 years ago, so the whole thing's sorta running on fumes right now.
> I mean, take a look at the next "who's hiring" page. Ad supported webapps seem pretty well represented.
This is hackernews. The organization that founded this site has mostly made its billions by investing in web properties. They are branching out these days, but that's the demographic.
> battery technology isn't advancing. Academic physics research is not very useful economically because we've defined "useful economically" as "able to be converted into profits within 2-5yrs", and unfortunately we did that about 20 years ago, so the whole thing's sorta running on fumes right now.
If I'm understanding the claim, we aren't doing enough battery R&D, so battery technology advancement is slow? First off, I don't think most physics labs are researching anything even remotely useful to improving batteries. But for the ones that are, let's do fund them.
Second, battery technology is and has been advancing rapidly. See for example the slide in the presentation on the following website ("Battery cell energy densities have almost tripled since 2010 [as of 2020]"):
That being said, it's far from clear that we are spending less than the optimal amount on battery R&D (the current amount is many billions of dollars per year -- Samsung alone spend ~$1B on research and development for just electric vehicle batteries in 2020). How much do you think we are spending? How much more should we spend?
> First off, I don't think most physics labs are researching anything even remotely useful to improving batteries. But for the ones that are, let's do fund them.
The problem is, we don't know which ones those are. We won't know, until the discoveries and advancements they make are refined to the point where they can produce batteries.
That's my point - the actual work that needs to happen to make something new that can be put into an "economically useful" product happens 20-30 years beforehand. That's what we need to fund.
> "Battery cell energy densities have almost tripled since 2010 [as of 2020]"
We have a different definition of "rapidly", and a different definition of need. Battery density is the single largest brake on the day-to-day usefulness of electronic devices right now. 3x is nothing. 10x is better, 100x is what we probably need.
> We have a different definition of "rapidly", and a different definition of need. Battery density is the single largest brake on the day-to-day usefulness of electronic devices right now. 3x is nothing. 10x is better, 100x is what we probably need.
I think we probably disagree on two points. First, it seems unlikely that it is even physically possible to beat current lithium ion energy density by 100x. That would imply batteries that are 2x as energy dense as gasoline. I think there's pretty good reason to believe that is not possible -- i.e. there is no easily reversible configuration of atoms that will yield that level of density.
Even if it were physically possible, I doubt that we'd be there today even if we had bent the entire productive capacity of the planet to this problem excluding all others for the last thirty years. You can't make a baby in a month even if you have nine willing mothers to be.
If you're inclined to strengthen the argument you're presenting here, I have one suggestion. If there is widespread underfunding of battery or precursor research, experts in the field are probably talking about this fact. You should be able to find some talk by a respected academic showing that particular worthy ideas likely to add value that aren't being researched for lack of funds. Another option would be to demonstrate that recent advances in battery technology resulted from blue-sky research in the past of the kind that 1. isn't being funded today and 2. could not reasonably have been foreseen to lead to improvements in battery energy density.
(I should also just point out that the whole thesis that we have stopped funding basic research is not even true, see here: https://www.aaas.org/sites/default/files/2020-05/FunctionNON... -- general science funding, after adjusting for inflation, has increased substantially over time.)
I also question your estimate of the importance of energy density, but that's a secondary issue, since I think your views on how fast the technology could be developed are unrealistic under any spending scenario.
That's the attention-share majority, and it's the majority that gets the most press largely because it's so relevant to the press and to people who read a lot of press (investors, other media), but it's an overstatement to say it's the entirety.
Just looking at some quick stats, a little more than half of all STEM occupations are outside of "Computer Occupations", though that one chunk is by far the largest single chunk. And far from the entirety of "Computer Occupations" is ad-supported web apps.
There are a lot of fucking engineers (traditional engineers - based on the definition of 20-30 years ago) out there, and a great many of them make a solid living off it. Most of them simply do their job in relative obscurity compared to the computer workers these days.
Have you been to a shopping mall or McDonalds, even in expensive areas like the Bay Area? Poor , low-income families with the latest gadgets, nice clothes. The money is coming from somewhere. Also, tons of subsidized programs like education, housing, and healthcare. Sure, they are not wealthy in the sense of making a lot of money, but enjoy a good standard of living nevertheless.
Damn, you must have that special type of clairvoyance that allows you to look at a person and determine both their income and the cost of their phones and clothes. Do you make your money teaching this skill or do you do web apps?
It's called debt and most households are swimming in it. Looking at what people wear or if they use an iPhone is a really poor proxy for their financial health.
Imagine having tons of debt but enjoying a high standard of living as if you were making more money. so what, if the end result is the same anyway, that being a high standard of living, but one one funded by debt and the other funded by earning more money. It's not like your children will inherit your debt. Debtors prisons do not exist either. I think debt is a problem though if you already have a lot of money, because then you're just being wasteful.
My niece was in that situation -- she always had the latest iPhone, drove a nice (leased) car, went out to nice bars with friends, had nice clothes (but worked in a mall, so at least the clothes were inexpensive).
Turns out she was racking up 10's of thousands of dollars of credit card debt and skimping on necessities -- literally eating Ramen noodles at home and food she scavenged from friends at the mall, she wasn't paying her gas bill and got cut off after she accumulated over $3000 of unpaid bills (in the winter she heated only the bedroom of her apartment with a space heater), etc. It all started falling apart when she got pneumonia and was off work for a few weeks and couldn't pay any of her bills.
She had some of the accoutrements of a high standard of living, but was still very much living in poverty. She's living with her mom now and working on paying down the debt.
Debt is just a result of poor education. People literally not realizing what is happening with credit card debt is 100% an education problem. I've had girlfriends who build up credit card debt like they were going for a high score until I tell them what it's doing and how much they could save. They literally don't understand that buying something they want because its on sale at a 20% discount on the credit card is not a discount when you end up paying 20% on that money every single year going forward. They just saved $20 on some purse and because they carry a big running balance on their card, it will be 5 years until they even get close to paying down that purchase. That $100 purchase that was discount to $80 actually costs them around $200 in 5 years, when actually it will be much longer than that for them than 5 years to pay off with the balances they have. I've seen people who make $40/hour being a waiter or waitress after tips at a nice restaurant but they just purely live beyond their means. They often just eat out, every single day for lunch and dinner, not realizing if they look at their charges that they just spent $2K on food this month, and $400 was given straight to Uber just for convenience. Then you also have the people that are just going through hard times and want to survive using debt but I've found again, an education problem, not as simple as simple not understanding interest, but a problem none the less. No budgeting, no planning, no sacrifices. The amount of people that could move each other out of poverty by simply getting a roommate is insane. On another note, there's a hotel nearby, it's not the best but it is the cheapest and the homeless will spend $60/night together to stay there as a group of 4 people, only about $15/day per person more than they make panhandling in a day. They are almost there with their thinking in sharing but again have made a critical mistake. $60 a night is also equal to about $1,800 per month - the same cost it would have been to get maybe a 1 or 2 bedroom apartment. Sure they would have to actually trust the people they live with, but on literally $15 per day, they could have permanent shelter. Of course drugs and everything else complicates that, but in our society it really isn't that bad to simply get food and shelter, but people always live beyond their means and make poor decisions due to poor education.
Our current president has been in the employ of credit card companies for decades. Many others in Congress and in state offices are the same. Do you really think they're going to allow "education" (or anything, really) to cut into their bottom line? This would be like Raytheon allowing us to get into fewer stupid wars. There may be a nation like that, but we don't live in it.
I think the piece that you are missing is automation. A large portion of non-STEM jobs (including most farm jobs) can be automated and likely will be automated in the coming decades. If you are college age, you should be planning for a more automated future.
> A large portion of non-STEM jobs (including most farm jobs) can be automated
Most farm jobs are STEM. The non-STEM aspects of agriculture were mostly automated away centuries ago. You'll notice that farming went from ~90% of the workforce to ~2% over that time.
There exists some remaining small scale stuff that hasn't justified the cost of automation, but at the small scale it will be a long time before automation does pencil out. Robots don't work for free.
It appears we have a demographic crisis in the making. We desperately need to automate as many jobs as we can, get people to take the jobs we can't, and pay UBI to folks without the skills to find a job.
STEM jobs are the main viable path for economic stability and freedom.
You are correct -- this is an awful notion. Plumbers, HVAC technicians, electricians, bricklayers, joiners, framers, builders, are the people who build and maintain the real world, and we need to raise the status of these (and others, forgive me for not listing them all) professions, which take just as long if not longer in which to get qualified, and recognize the dedication to professional standards and the entrepreneurial attitude required to be successful in their respective trade and to bring up the next generation of tradespeople via apprenticeships. * In fact, when you add it all up it meets or exceeds the work put into an undergraduate degree, and yet we don't value it the same.
If you're going to college, you could do worse than to begin getting qualified in a trade on the side -- at worst, you'll learn some widely-transferable practical skills.
* One might also note how much of the above is missing or done badly in the software industry.
Saying we need to pay them more doesn't change the laws of supply and demand. Besides, as of right now none of the careers you mentioned pay poorly, they are in very high demand and most live very comfortable lives. Are they getting Google software engineer type salaries? No, unless they branch off and start their own business. You can't just say "these people deserve more" because it's just not true. If the path to a STEM job was just as easy as becoming a plumber then literally everyone would do it just for the pay. They don't because it is actually harder to become an expert and you don't have a secure base of customers. Plumbers are needed in every single building and for every person to live. Tech is mostly non necessary and you literally have to improve upon those before you to make it. It is actually much much more difficult to succeed to tech.
I am often curious about the actual salary numbers for the trades versus STEM and often see comments around trade positions being high demand and "none . . pay poorly."
I googled around a bit to grab some numbers. I think the below supports the idea that the trades mentioned by GP have median earning numbers very close to the median earning numbers for a full time worker in the United States, maybe a touch less if we grouped all the trades together.
The demand question is less clear to me. The BLS source implies less demand (measured by job growth) in general for the trades than the "average" demand growth for jobs in the US.
The U.S. Census Bureau lists the annual real median earnings at $41,535 in 2020 for all workers with earnings[4] and lists the annual median earnings at $56,287 in 2020 for people who worked full-time, year round. [1]
Plumber - median $56,330, demand growth, slower than average [2]
HVAC tech - median $50,590, demand growth, slower than average [3]
Electrician - median $56,900, demand growth average (actually 9%) [4]
Framer(Carpenter) - median $49,520, demand growth, slower than average [5]
Bricklayer(Mason) - median $47,710, declining demand. [6]
Software engineer - median $110,140, demand growth, higher than average [7]
The same source of data projects the average job growth to be 8%, so "slower than average" and "higher than average" are in relation to that number.
It gets interesting trying to generally compare demand for STEM to the trades. The BLS estimates about 84,700 openings for electricians per year for the next decade. Contrast that to, for example, chemists - the BLS estimate there is 9,100 positions per year. I didn't find a really great source for the number of BS degrees awarded per year to Chemistry majors, but numbers seemed to be between 14,000 and 17,000 per year.
When I think about supply and demand in careers, it seems to me that STEM is weird. People say "STEM is harder and just worth more in the end" but there seems to me, based on the numbers, for there to be a large "winners take all" effect. But it's hard to measure how many BS in Chemistry holders go to medical school, law school, or take project managment jobs versus being baristas in your local coffee shop. I did find one source that implied the highest percentage of graduates with "Physical Science" degrees (which includes chemistry graduates) at 8.5% work in post-secondary education.
One thing I know for sure - my organization (academic medical research) often hires post-docs that start at a little less than the US median earnings for full-time workers. And there seems to be a lot of competition for those post-doc roles. Salaries do go up over time.
You don't need to raise the status. They pay well enough. Most trade gigs require shift work, for 12 hours at a time - STEM workers get 9-5. That is a massive disparity. It's never been necessary for workers to be on days one week and nights the next in order for industries to function, but this persists and even union shops allow it.
The other side of the coin is for-profit colleges which are providing the highest cost and lowest value educations. Most of the most indebted college students attended for-profit colleges.
> We really need farm workers, and most of them live in poverty.
Do we, though? As a farmer and software developer, I struggle to find enough farm work to do. I'd take on more work if I could. Everyone and their brother wants to be farmers, though, so there is hot competition and a lot of us end up with only a small piece of the pie.
Per hour it pays more than software. There just aren't that many hours. I would likely be apporaching poverty relying on my farm income alone, but it is also very little work, so maybe that's economically rational?
I work just shy of 500 acres, for what it's worth. While that may still be a hobby, you're off by a couple of orders of magnitude.
Still not a career, perhaps, but that's kind of the point here. I could easily handle thousands of acres if it were my career. However, obtaining thousands of acres to work is effectively impossible. Every other farmer is also desperately trying to get their hands on those acres.
If we want farming to be a viable, full-time career for people then we need far fewer people involved in the industry, not more.
>STEM jobs are the main viable path for economic stability and freedom.
Why STEM and not tradesmen? Plenty of decent trade jobs out there that can lead to serious $$$ if you're hard-working and competent enough to manage self-employment.
Do we really need farm workers? Then why is nobody paying them? I think most stories about poor farmers is about farmers who want to farm in a more traditional way, while actually most stuff is produced in huge enterprises that don't need as many people to run anymore?
Nothing against farmers, just would like to see the real picture.
In any case, if farmers are needed and still don't get paid, there has to be a reason, and it presumably isn't the markets.
Non-STEM viability, in any sustainable sense, is a productivity problem.
It's similar to the debate around onshoring manufacturing. There is a clear and simple (not easy, simple) way we can have more blue-collar workers making livable wages in the United States, despite that livable wage requirement being much higher than what other countries require to produce the same goods - improve either the quality of the outputs or the productivity of each laborer. My understanding is this is how Germany held such a strong position in manufacturing for years - by doing things better. It's also why one of the most direct blue-collar paths to a six-figure salary in the U.S. is machine shop work, because the U.S. has, in some regions, maintained the ability to produce parts that cannot be produced more cheaply elsewhere, by developing and maintaining a highly skilled workforce and the tools to support them within that particular sector.
Put in the negative sense - I would be curious to know what the average profit generated by an average farmworker is these days, after both internal and external expenses are taken into account, and how much slack there is between the wages they are currently earning and that profit. My understanding from family-owned / smaller operations is that running a farm in 2022 is really hard and really expensive, and that there isn't a whole lot of slack there right now.
Of course, there is a solution other than increasing productivity - a giant mess of regulatory and fiscal policy that, in direct and indirect ways, subsidizes the industry in a way that makes paying farm workers a livable wage tenable in a way a truly free market would not bear. And those policies are reasonable and even desirable within certain frameworks, and furthermore may be necessary as an interim step toward increased productivity. But wouldn't it be better for America to be able to subsidize a whole bunch of six-figure salaries not simply because that is what people need to live (i.e., that it is a public good to have six-figure salaries, and so we will take on public cost to ensure they exist), but because we have a whole bunch of people that generate six-figures annually in productivity?
Obviously, this is all empirically justifiable or refutable, so if I'm totally off my rocker qualitatively and if there's something offensive here like, "each farmworker actually generates $1.1MM/yr in pretax profit for the average farm employer", then let's frame all that out and legislate til the cows come home. And once they're home, too.
The elephant in the room is that college doesn't teach you anything you need to know at a job.
I'm not talking about the obvious exceptions like medicine or law (though even that can be done as a conversion rather than an undergrad degree) or anything else where you literally need the paper that says you can do it. I'm also not talking about becoming a researcher, where obvious you need to know a bit of X to become a professor of X. I'm talking about the vast number of degrees that are not job specific. Business, economics, history, literature, and so on with humanities, but also math, chemistry, physics, and biology.
There is no real reason an employer would care what you studied, because as a new graduate your job is to learn the business. Whether you were interested in one thing or another in college doesn't matter much, the main line is between math-tech stuff and not-math-tech stuff. Employers who reckon their work is techie will gravitate towards those graduates, while others will be open to anyone.
All the degree signals is that you somehow gathered yourself and read a bunch of books and solved a bunch of questions. That's somehow supposed to be evidence that you can learn their business.
Of course the problem is there's plenty of people who instead of learning Krebs cycle could just go directly into finance or accounting or any number of jobs without jumping through the hoops. The issue is that college has become a destination for so many smart kids, it's hard to imagine a smart kid who skips it. So absolutely everyone feels they need to go to college, and absolutely every employer thinks they need to hire just college grads.
In terms of helping the economy, it's really not efficient. Everyone has to sit around for three or four years when they really want to be working, and everyone who can't find the money/time to do it is cut out from middle class aspirational jobs.
>All the degree signals is that you somehow gathered yourself and read a bunch of books and solved a bunch of questions. That's somehow supposed to be evidence that you can learn their business.
>[...]
>In terms of helping the economy, it's really not efficient. Everyone has to sit around for three or four years when they really want to be working, and everyone who can't find the money/time to do it is cut out from middle class aspirational jobs.
What's the alternative? Like you said yourself, employers want some sort of signal that you're reasonably smart and can put the work in. You can't really replace that with a 6 month bootcamp.
Massive online learning/examination system, fewer places in university, reserved for people who actually are going to be professors.
Everyone else sits at home and just learns the stuff and does the exams while driving an uber. It will take a lot less time to just jump the math hoops than to do four years of half holidays, eg my total university time was actually 96 weeks but spread over 4 years. So a couple of years of doing that and people can see you can learn stuff.
>Everyone else sits at home and just learns the stuff and does the exams while driving an uber. It will take a lot less time to just jump the math hoops than to do four years of half holidays, eg my total university time was actually 96 weeks but spread over 4 years. So a couple of years of doing that and people can see you can learn stuff.
All that does is test whether you know the content, which you said yourself "doesn't teach you anything you need to know at a job". It doesn't tell the employer whether you can handle 4 years of assignments and showing up labs/tutorials. I suppose you could add those back, but then we're back to square one when it comes to the university experience.
It just needs to be done cheaper, in a way that doesn't waste so much time. Why make people do 4 years of slogging through umpteen courses when you can just do a few, and let that be your evidence they can do it?
In the end there's just no way a course in some science can substitute for a job in business, so if you're going to use a course as your hurdle, why not just do a short one?
You could also just say we'll have fewer students. That way businesses will have to choose between high school grads. But as it is now, very few people will want to be that guy who doesn't have a degree.
60-70% of the adult population does not have a college degree. There is a huge potential pool of cheap, untapped labor right there. so why aren't more companies biting?
Because college is also a social filter. While some have said that there are highly motivated smart software engineers out there without a college degree, I have never actually seen one. If I did, I would absolutely hire them.
“A college degree will get you a good job” is the most incorrect meme that baby boomers ever came up with. Education, skills, and talent are all three entirely different things.
Being educated does not get you a job. Being educated is step one.
You also need to have:
* a workplace that exists
* the soft skills required to interact in that workplace
HYP (Harvard, Yale and Princeton), and top tier law schools (Harvard, Yale, Stanford), top tier b schools (Harvard and Stanford) still control the whole thing.
Sure, if you can ace leetcode like an olympiad, you can become a L7 at FAANG. However, if you are a MBA from San Jose state, you would be working as a financial analyst. However, if you are a Stanford MBA, you would be a SVP.
Top tier firms in PE, VC, IC, and top tier consulting companies still go for elite colleges. Why? That is the path to c-level positions (not leetcode). Same thing for big law. Same thing goes for Washington consensus (the cesspool of Beltway), where pedigree matters.
What they signal? Like generational wealth and elite connections? [1]
I have definitely seen hiring managers lean very hard on pedigree so they didn't have to do the actual work of evaluating candidates. It was basically the same deal with a lot of certifications, like Scrum/Agile and Java certs.
I also think that your bucketing people such that Harvard = smart and state school = "the opposite" is a great example of the problem. Personally, I'd always rather work with somebody who has had to work their way up, as they tend to have a more balanced perspective.
Nope, intelligence matters at the end if that person works hard too, there is no ceiling unlike the opposite. Intelligence or/and hard work alone can only carry you so far, there are so many other factors that lead to success (ex: luck)
As a business, you bet your risks against the person who has been vetted vs. the unproven one.
I get why on HN saying "intelligence matters" seems like an uncontroversial opinion. Under the right circumstances and ceteris paribus, it can help. But it doesn't always. Indeed, as a person who is officially very smart, that has often been a problem for me. E.g., the way smart people can easily learn to perform smartness rather than doing the long-term smart thing. Or our tendency to value theory over experience and book smarts over street smarts. Early on, being smart also helped me avoid learning discipline and gumption, two things without which smartness may not do a lot of good.
And anyway, you're again, not very smartly, ignoring the point that a fancy degree doesn't correlate particularly well with smartness, so the whole intelligence thing is a bit of a sideshow to the actual discussion here.
Simply having 1/3 of Harvard admissions being legacy does not disprove that those who go to Ivy Leagues are not intelligent. On the contrary, studies show that IQ is highly genetic (up to 80%). So it is just reasonable for admission offices to accept students based on family ties
There is also a correlation between IQ, general intelligence and SAT scores (a requirement for admissions), despite what the media portrays.
FYI: Media is manipulated to create controversy and get views. Scientific studies are not perfect, but has far lower cases due to the peer review process, except for privately funded research
Hah. Look at you cherry-picking the numbers. And apparently not being able to work with them. Legacy admissions aren't used as a proxy for IQ; they're used as a proxy for power and money. Indeed, if the SAT is as good a measure as your non-study says, they could drop legacy admissions entirely. Ask yourself why they don't.
But what you're really dodging is the question of how much the very narrow sort characteristic tested by IQ really matters for hiring. I get that you think it's super important. Probably because you see yourself there. But as somebody in the top 1% of IQ scores, I'm telling you it's not a great way to select employees, and in many circumstances it can correlate negatively. You can use it for hiring if you want, and if you work for a competitor, I encourage you to. But I sure won't.
Again, digressing from the initial statement. The only variable in question here is intelligence and its correlation to top schools.
Employment is a separate matter, the follow up will be if leadership or management competence (different) is tied to intelligence and elite school attendance.
It signals wealth and an upbringing that meshs with the current c-level staff. this is not controversial to assert. I'm not saying these people are not smart, but they are also definitely rich.
My life is great, I am not trying to complain.
Elsewhere you asked for proof. There is plenty of proof that income is the best predictor for attending an ivy league school.
Two intelligent people--one due to his circumstances end up going to UC Merced, another ends up graduating from Harvard. Both excel in excel sheets, financial modeling, the UCMerced graduate would be working as a financial analyst at Cisco, whereas the Harvard one will be doing a similar thing at Goldman Sachs.
So, the issue is not one of smartness, as Harvard itself says in its reports, since majority of their applicants are smart anyway. That's how the filtering works for the super elite, and the 'servants' of this super elite--and this 'servant' class also also elite as well. Here, I am not using 'servant' in pejorative sense, but in the sense that one who works for super elite end up making millions a year.
I mean for the vast majority of work a day people who just want to work so they can live, college is becoming a waste of their time/resources. The people who want to rise to the top of their field, for them college is very valuable and top schools much more.
I suspect many people would like to think that if they looked different they may have had a somewhat harder time succeeding but would have done so anyway.
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Standardized tests are a better solution than "holistic" admissions, which bias heavily for students who can afford to go to expensive summer camps, competitions, and volunteer in poor countries. At least standardized tests can be studied for even if you're poor.
I got a 99th percentile score on the SAT with just the typical prep books you find on Amazon (which I pirated) and self study and reflection on mistakes. If you keep blaming the system instead of holding people accountable for their own failures those underperforming high schools you mention will never become top scorers.
Though, the most surprising thing to me was needing to provide a privilege statement in order to speak at the college event.
How the hell can anyone provide any sort of nuanced insight into the privilege and challenges they faced in a "disclosure"? It reeks of enacting a miniature struggle session to undermine the speaker before they even have a chance to talk.
Maybe the Long March through Institutions was real...
That's not a bad thing (to a point) when the entry-level qualification takes a massive amount of time, intense effort, and money to get; it's very important that they manage it so there's no oversupply. If you don't, then you'll have disasters like US legal education has been.
Society needs a lot of doctors. It doesn't need any english lit PhDs. Not to say the latter isn't without benefit.
Parents on 3rd world countries know that education is still the safest way to a higher standard of living (not guaranteed though).
There are no shortcuts to gain knowledge (degrees, training, self-taught, etc.). It is hard to vet someone if that person has not been through accredited programs - professional scammers can even fool interviewers.
Aside from this, there is a big difference: would you trust a doctor to cure you without a medical degree? There is your answer.
It depends.
I had a recurring issue with pain and numbness in my elbow for a few years. I went to all sorts of well credentialed doctors, and every diagnosis they gave ended up being wrong. The person who cracked the case ended up being a random doctor at a hole in the wall clinic that had been the first person available to get an ear infection checked out. I mentioned my symptoms offhand while we were chatting, and he cracked it in about 3 minutes - nerve damage from leaning my elbow on my standing desk. He had a lot of practical experience with occupational related injuries, including nerve damage from poor fitting safety gear, etc. It wasn't his degree that let him find the root cause of my issue, but practical experience.
On the other hand, there's lots of diseases where doctors need to keep up on the latest advancements in research, etc. I don't really know how this works - is it trade journals? Do all doctors in fields like this regularly read them, or papers on NCBI? Does a college degree help here? I don't know. I also don't know if I fundamentally disbelieve that someone couldn't be just as effective in these areas through a more practical learning approach than a college degree, either. But I'm not sure that I believe it, either.
Medicine is a big field and not all parts of it - from my experience on the receiving end, at least - seem to require all the same skills to be successful.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30738763
It's a poetic mission statement for an endeavor which seems to jive with Hotz’s recognition that such a school must be physical and beautiful. However, scratch away the veneer, Hotz suggests in a recent blog post, and one finds that those behind UATX “are either straight up supporters of Power or naive political children.” He points to Joe Lonsdale, Sam Altman, and Marc Andreessen, all of whom “are very successful in the current system.”
“This is not a counter-elite!” Hotz continues. “This is a spin off of the exact same BS that’s everywhere. NGO awards and fake status signaling markers.”
I call those "liberals." /s
Good luck being able to practice engineering if you haven't got a degree! The licensing bodies for professions won't care a fig about your life experience.
People who can actually do it have done it for a lab or a business, and then get accredited.
My impression of the engineering degree is that it's basically a certificate in being able to deep dive into... something. Whether that's actual bridges or financial derivatives or trading systems, a degree basically says you haven't given up on some large pile of math-heavy topics, so an employer should bet on you being able to learn their thing. It's also the case that there isn't enough time to learn a whole business, so really it's testing that you stuck with the introductory parts of a wide variety of techie things.
I've worked as an engineering manager for both professional engineers and non-degreed technicians / technologists. My observation (such as it is) is that the degreed engineers had a stronger framework to be able to connect ideas and learn new skills. On the other hand, technologists were able to do tasks just as well as engineers but had trouble generalizing the concepts.
Importantly, the degree (combined with professional guidance) also helps you appreciate the things you don't know. For example, a geotechnical engineer may be perfectly able to assess an abutment or design a blast but they wouldn't certify a dam foundation and would reach out for help in doing so.
It's probably worth sharing that I hated my undergraduate education with a burning passion. I've only recently begun to appreciate it more -- turns out those old farts who did the accreditation might have known a thing or two about what you need to know later in your career.
I say this as someone who went to a school with highly ranked humanities programs. My business communication class taught me more about communication than any rhetoric/history/media studies class. My high school AP English Language class taught me more about persuasive writing than any writing class in college.
If undergrad humanities programs are to be taken seriously they need to drastically increase their rigor and actually instill skills in their students.
Liberal arts schools are not and never have been vocational training institutions. They are academic in nature.
I went to a school that had top ranked humanities departments across the board. There is zero desire for rigor in any humanities courses or departments. It's a way for people to show up to class and get a degree without effort so they can party all day.
In my experience at a large state school, students could sign up for rigorous humanities courses if they wanted to. (e.g. by avoiding the 'popular' courses in auditorium rooms, etc.). Although it's a bit of a shame that it's not universal, and that the student culture often demands "the easy gen-eds"
At the end of the day, I think this is a cultural problem in some humanities departments. It's not unheard of for some STEM departments to fail 50% of their incoming students. I guess the appetite to hold the same standard in other departments just isn't there?
Universities have been around for a long time. They're some of the oldest institutions in contemporary civilization, and they're increasing in importance. They've survived upheavals that overshadow anything in our lifetimes. So I've been skeptical of prediction of its demise.
Still, there are serious problems with modern academics and higher education, and the doomsayers have some valid points. So I've thought it's possible.
After the pandemic though I wasn't sure so much about their imminent demise anymore. Students really wanted to return due to the social value it provided. It's not like institutions started collapsing.
I think it would require holders of wealth to shift in the status markers they value. So far it's still one of the primary ones.
The worst part of the twitter as a long form platform is when a single idea extends beyond the limitations of a single tweet.
Long form is a much better format for comprehensive ideas, but the "this is something I want to comment on" isn't there and the engagement on the comment and comments on the comments rarely exists in those formats.
Medium's "highlight" and "respond" functionality is a rather poor implementation of that desired ability (the discoverability beyond the "top highlight" is difficult for other users) ... and then there's that whole "upgrade to read more" problem.
And beyond that, there's the bit that twitter has a large number of users - trying to traverse Wordpress pings and comment moderation... ugh.
Unfortunately, twitter is the best place that offers users, aggregation, no $ needed, comment on sentence, and the opportunity for engagement of followers.
I couldn’t care much less about VC or crypto-bro brain farts like the linked post, although historians writing about this period probably will be, if only to write cautionary tales. But there’s a lot of deeply interesting expertise that’s been crammed into this godawful format, especially during fraught times like the pandemic and the current Ukraine invasion. I can only guess that the experts in question assume that Twitter will be the format with the widest reach, although I have to doubt that will always be true. If the Internet Archive comes up with a project specifically targeted at archiving Twitter threads as coherent artifacts, I for one would be happy to earmark a donation for that.
I think we haven't seen at least a partial collapse only because most American companies are bad at hiring, bad at investing in workers, and bad at keeping them. But imagine a company where programmers are happy and tend to say for years. That company might do just as well, or perhaps better, running an in-house boot camp and apprenticeship program as by hiring new grads.
Can you provide more context for this? How is the cost of teaching a STEM student higher than the cost of a liberal arts student? The classrooms are roughly the same. STEM student labs might be more expensive to manage, but that equipment is/(can be?) funded by research grants.
While there are a massive number of private liberal arts schools, there are relatively few private STEM schools. Most STEM degrees come from public university that are significantly cheaper than private universities.
[0] - https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=75
Hence why I said "overhead from research grants."
(1) Many grants have a mentorship / training / giving-back component. This is one of the merit-based criteria NSF reviews on.
(2) Research grants have overhead which feeds back into general budgets. At elite schools, this is about 2/3 of the money. A typical split might be 1/3 to the department, 1/3 to the school, and 1/3 to the project. It's kind of a financial scam. Nominally, these cover buildings and admin time. Practically, these feed into general budgets which do include labs and teaching. Corruptly, a lot of the money gets funnelled in creative ways to improve professor's lives through fancy faculty clubs, get-aways, and in some cases, creative (but legal) embezzlement with money ending in people's pockets.
One conversation that stuck was the me:
Back when I was in school, one of my mandarin teachers wanted to offer a "business mandarin" course outside of the general language program geared towards business students who might need basic fluency in a corporate setting. The school denied him because there wasn't a budget for it, which struck me as asinine at the time as it wasn't like there would be students who weren't paying tuition for the course anyway. The school had rooms available, and students have to buy all the materials the class would need anyway.
I think the kind of longitudinal studies needed combined with a small “treatment” group make this kind of investigation as hard to do as a nutritional study.
Speaking only for STEM, an elite STEM program gives the student access to a bigger variety of upperclassman courses; compare the available course list for a community college vs a large university and the difference is quite noticeable. The better programs also provide access to better equipment and advising; e.g., various University of California campuses have their own on-site chip fabrication labs. If the career trajectory you're planning benefits from those advanced courses, going to the better STEM programs is going to help tremendously. If not, well, they don't but that's hardly the institution's fault; they aren't choosing who to send your resume to, you are.
(As an aside, I use the word "access" very intentionally; educational institutions don't "confer" anything. Students get access to resources and opportunities and they choose which to take. It's entirely possible to do the minimum to fulfill requirements; for example, I chose easy courses to do the minimum fulfill my humanities requirements because it wasn't where my interests lay.)
[1] For the curious, it was the notion of comparative advantage, which was counterintuitive for me too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage
I do think that on top of that, they add value because students can be given more challenging and stimulating coursework. The difference in Math education between a top college and a college with loose entry requirements is staggering - we're talking people doing hard proofs freshman year vs. undergrad seniors taking upper level math courses that don't even have proofs, just computation.
'Elite' state schools (GA Tech, Michigan State? Etc) probably have excellent ROI.
Expensive, not really elite schools are probably not worth it on average, but again, cost varies highly, so ...
> For most students, the salary boost from going to a super-selective school is “generally indistinguishable from zero” after adjusting for student characteristics, such as test scores. In other words, if Mike and Drew have the same SAT scores and apply to the same colleges, but Mike gets into Harvard and Drew doesn’t, they can still expect to earn the same income throughout their careers. Despite Harvard’s international fame and energetic alumni outreach, somebody like Mike would not experience an observable “Harvard effect.” Dale and Krueger even found that the average SAT scores of all the schools a student applies to is a more powerful predictor of success than the school that student actually attends.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/does-it-ma...
That’s not “education” directly, but does suggest an extremely strong applicant pool selection effect is happening.
I came away thinking that parental influence is the most important factor. If your child is well-nurtured enough to be within a crap shoot of selection for an elite institution, it probably doesn't really matter if they get in or not, they'll be successful regardless (for mysterious reasons that may be interesting to know, but don't really matter).
As such, it's better not to make your kid focus on "getting in" (which is a suspect goal for many reasons), but instead on trying their best to realize their full potential.
The highest cost seems to be for good-but-not-best institutions that have some specific niche/selling point for them but are not particularly selective and will accept almost anyone who will pay their price.
Like, if some school wants to build a reputation for having the best scientists or lawyers then they have to be somewhat selective with respect to performance and have very competitive admissions, but you also need to ensure that the particular young students with most potential can actually afford to study there; but if a school just wants to provide a good education in X and does not care who will enroll, they can just ramp up the fees until the applicants filter themselves out.
Even for a place like MIT/Caltech?
Even the way you ask the question shows that you consider them somehow different. Probably better. Which presumably means that "better" people go there or teach there. So that's better networking.
And the fact that you know them by name as better places shows better brand.
OTOH, it may be easier and cheaper to make an agreement with their local community college.
I think what makes the discussion hard is that people say 'college' and mean wildly different things. The author seemed to mean elite colleges in some comments, overall statistics in others, and for-profits in others. I think there are very different problems in different sectors.
I'm not saying don't do it, or that the status quo is good. But I don't think your suggestion really addresses the problem that got us here, the problem that we've subsidized an expensive signaling game (cf Bryan Caplan's The case against education).
> Ignoring his political axe-grinding
This was gratuitous. I didn't even see any politics in the thread.
Degrees cost companies through increased wages. Student loans get paid somehow, after all.
> This was gratuitous. I didn't even see any politics in the thread.
You not seeing things is not the same as things not existing. I do see it, and wanted to focus this bit of discussion on the question of degree value, not the assorted other stuff there.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics)#Job-mar... for the model behind my comment.
You’re a hiring manager choosing between Alice and Bob. Alice has a degree, Bob doesn’t; you estimate they’ll be equally productive, and it’s common knowledge that your competitors will judge them the same. Do you offer Bob less, since he doesn’t have student loans to pay off? You can if you like, but then Bob will go work for your competitor.
> You not seeing things is not the same as things not existing. I do see it, and wanted to focus this bit of discussion on the question of degree value, not the assorted other stuff there.
You can mention having further disagreements without making it a gratuitous diss.
I personally build my hiring processes to be relatively blind to elite status signals. But interviewees tell me that's pretty unusual.
> You can mention having further disagreements without making it a gratuitous diss.
I believe it was both accurate and necessary to divert the replies away from the politics. And given that you can't even find the politics, I don't understand why you consider it necessary to appoint yourself my editor.
I'm not at all asking whether Alice with a degree gets better offers than Alice without a degree. We both say she does. At the time we're checking in, Alice's degree is a sunk cost. Your proposal is not: it's extra company investment in the non-degreed after hiring.
> can't even find the politics
Are you sure you want to emphasize anyone's reading ability in this conversation?
And accusing someone of political axe-grinding is a funny way to discourage replies about politics. You could've said, for instance, "Leaving aside any politics here..." That would help engender healthier discourse here on HN.
I also didn't hire you as my editor, so perhaps you can just apply your advice on comity to your own work and leave me be.
Comity is not the same as healthy discourse. Objecting to a cheap shot is not hiring myself as your editor. I do agree on ending the thread here.
It's not like other industries haven't already solved this problem. Law firms will finance your law school and make you pay them back if you leave the firm.
Meanwhile, I have zero qualms about hiring high school grads with a github who can talk about the base language intelligently, let alone frameworks like spring.
"The halo effect (sometimes called the halo error) is the tendency for positive impressions of a person, company, brand or product in one area to positively influence one's opinion or feelings in other areas."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect
https://nitter.eu/sama/status/1505597901011005442
1) The subreddit of my alma mater has been full of posts venting anxiety, depression, trouble with financial aid, trouble making friends, frustration with administration, etc for years now, exacerbated by COVID. While that may not be representative of the whole undergrad population, I can't help but be reminded of Thiel's line from Zero to One "Why are we doing this to ourselves?"
2) I'm now seeing not only friends without bachelors degrees get well-paying CS jobs with "engineer" titles & equity comp, but even some in mechanical engineering!
3) When I was in undergrad, half of my upper div classes were so abysmal that I figured the staff who cared enough to keep the enterprise going were fighting a losing battle. A complete rewrite would be better than an in place one. "Death is the best invention of life" and we should try the creative destruction of capitalism/evolution instead of holding the oldest institutions in the highest regard.
I don't have much of a clue what the future will look like by the time I have kids of college age, but I do not think particularly highly of what we've got now.
The sort-of counter-example is that "Tech jobs [..] are increasingly willing to hire with no degree". But strange that he of all people didn't add a statistic on that.
Am I missing something?
https://educationdata.org/student-loan-debt-statistics#:~:te....
College is a net good, but do it on the cheap. Unless you plan to attend a top law school, no one cares about your undergrad.
Community College students can still transfer into UCLA or other top schools. Hell, community college was good for me since I was able to take out student loans and get the hell away from my family.
No more evictions for me! Even if you don't finish college, it's a great deal. I was at 6 figures before I graduated.
Very few degrees offer this type of wage at graduation. Not everyone wants to build software. Although I agree with your general point to attend cheaper schools until it matters (eg graduate level and want to be a professor or lawyer).
If you have horrible family like my own college is one of the very few options you have. If anything the FASA process needs to do more to accommodate people who don't really have families.
The calls for student loan forgiveness ignore the good these loans do. At 18 you can do so many stupid things, taking out a loan isn't the worst. If that loan gets you put of a volitile situation max it out
It is no surprise that many scream about it.
Unfortunately, the "double pell" movement means people paying out of pocket are soon going to have to pay double.
What a coincidence, that the average degree costs the average student loan package.
Stop subsidizing education. Let the market forces actually allow for a fair price discovery, or else that college degree is as valuable in a sense as crypto is...its intrinsic value - use case - job improvement prospects, multiplied by a coefficient of speculation.
I say this as someone who has had a massive impact on the student aid lifecycle, and yet didn't go to college myself, because ironically, wasn't able to fill out the FAFSA form.
That's one thing that never made any sense to me. I get it. I really do. But I've never seen any compelling, realistic answer to "And then what?". This only solves the problem of the HUGE number of people with crushing loan debt now. I get it, I really, really do. But... then what? What about the next decade? It's not getting any better.
The most important word in this is "realistic".
That's a big problem solved. We can also solve other problems. Nothing requires us to solve all of them at the same time.
You might get everyone to pony up the money to bail everyone out who is currently mired in college debt. It's a much tougher sell to get us to pony up the money forever.
It seems the SAT is increasingly considered "racist" because it reveals racial disparities in learning. What's next? Get rid of the driver's license test because it turns that white kids pass it at a higher rate than black kids?
Sam mentions that schools could down-weight the SAT but should still consider it. Why don't schools want to do that? My guess: if they have mediocre scores on record for a kid, then admitting him means reporting those scores to USNews. They'd rather not know that the kid has a score that would bring down their average.
> It seems the SAT is increasingly considered "racist" because it reveals racial disparities in learning. What's next? Get rid of the driver's license test because it turns that white kids pass it at a higher rate than black kids?
the SAT's a way of laundering discrepancies in generational wealth, which is indeed due to racist public policy as well as racist private actions. it may be intended not that way, but that's how it functions.
so what's next would be removing other methods of laundering racist public policy and racist private action. probably drivers' licenses would not show up on that list, and your assertion that it might is so ridiculous that it's hard to believe you're examining this topic with good faith.
Wealthy students do score better than poor students on the SAT. Do you know who also scores well? Students who study very hard, including poor students. If you get rid of the SAT then the poor students will find it harder to stand out. The rich kids will have ghost-written essays and extracurriculars. They won't be hurt at all.
> so what's next would be removing other methods of laundering racist public policy and racist private action. probably drivers' licenses would not show up on that list, and your assertion that it might is so ridiculous that it's hard to believe you're examining this topic with good faith.
I have never heard someone say that disparate impacts only matter if there is a laundering of wealth or public policies or private actions. Where have you seen this distinction drawn?
But what are SATs being replaced with? "holistic admissions"? A poor kid can prepare for the SAT by studying his ass off, with mostly free/cheap materials from the internet. How can you do the same with "extracurriculars" (eg. going to africa to dig a well) and "hobbies" (going the country club every week)?
Other fun alternatives, just outright auction off certain number of admission slots. Or just award slots randomly to all applicants.
First, a meta-point about questions like “why doesn’t the US have policy X Y or Z”: The US is essentially set up to be ungovernable by design (any meaningful reform requires the cooperation of both major political parties, a situation that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the developed world), you can’t really find rational reasons for most policies.
I notice this a lot, actually: the fundamental thing Europeans miss about the US is they think “a rule exists, thus it must be there on purpose”, because in your countries, unlike in the US, you have functioning parliaments and governments that can change laws as necessary.
Anyway, the US arrived at its education system, as with most things, through a long and largely random process. The catalyst for the weird non-academic admissions standards in particular is well-documented to have been pure anti-Semitism: college administrators felt that with purely academic admissions standards, too many Jews were being admitted.
So a field specific exam doesn’t really work.
And, besides that, would be opposed by the exact same people opposing the SAT.
this is a ludicrous modern reinterpretation of SAT testing.. sure, testing has lots of downsides.. linking it to "wealth laundering" is your own obsessions showing IMO
I'm not aware of data on SAT scores and family net worth, but there is plenty of data on SAT scores and family income. Controlling for income doesn't come close to accounting for racial gaps; the richest black kids barely do better than the poorest white kids.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ezekiel-Dixon-Roman/pub...
It's not "races", it's culture. We should just remove this whole idea of "race" from our understanding of social phenomena, all it can do is mislead. There are African, Black subcultures like the Igbo and Ashanti that achieve to the highest levels academically (including in the West!) and Asian subcultures that don't place any focus on education, and struggle as a result. Culture is what matters. Forget race.
Wait, this is not what I said and is not how serious social science is done. In many ways, public K-12 education is equally abysmal for everyone. It may not overtly discriminate, but it lets people fall through the cracks in a way that amplifies the causal influence of pure luck (i.e. randomness, noise in outcomes) and external factors such as different cultural attitudes and generational history (such as whether your grandparents and great-grandparents happened to be educated or at least literate), that account for much of the observed correlation with race.
This is not much better, and is often used (without implicating the parent commenter) by racists as codeword cover. Again, I'm not implicating you, but consider for what reasons they use it.
Think about it: What do you know about these 'cultures'? Have you lived in one? How do you even define the word - is there a definition outside pop politics? Is it a static thing? Over time or space? Do you have any data correlating this thing with educational outcomes? Notice we have lots of people talking about black 'culture', etc., but WTF do they know? Where are the black people who actually know something? Would you ask someone from Mumbai about the culture of Rio?
One thing that does correlate with educational outcomes, more than anything iirc, is parental wealth. We are discriminating openly against poor kids. And you only have to see the condition of schools in poor communities to make that immediately clear.
Our society provides few educational opportunities or career opportunities, is often openly discimrinatory toward them, uses a legal system that abuses them, and mocks and attacks anyone who tries to do anything about it. I've been around these 'cultures' - I know hard-working people, like you and me, but struggling to get by every day, struggling to help their kids, and absolutely despairing against the impossible odds and the growing mountain of hate and disregard. You can't imagine it until you see it day after day after day.
One thing I've been told, when I've made an effort, is that it's useless, it's pointless, the white wealthy majority will never, ever allow it. And I've come to see that they are right, to a degree - that is how it plays out every time. One way or another, there is always a reason to shoot down anything that will give black people a way up, and it's been true for generations. 'Culture' is just another one. Forget what you believe, just watch and see if that hypothesis is matched by the data. I used to think like many on HN; the data showed my theory was wrong, and the data always wins out (or it's not scientific reasoning).
And then I come to HN and see people doing the exact same thing, repeating the same arguments that inevitably lead to the same place. And my God, imagine being black and reading this stuff about yourself, your family, your kids, on HN.
Really? I'd love to see a study on how kids of lottery winners fare wrt. educational outcomes. That would be the real way to isolate that "wealth" factor from differences in cultural norms (and yes, generational effects of previous achievement, such as your grandparents being literate and passing on a basic awareness of education to their descendants) that merely happen to correlate in the long run with wealth. Want to take bets?
> ... One way or another, there is always a reason to shoot down anything that will give black people a way up, and it's been true for generations. ...
I really, really don't understand this claim. "Culture" is actually a very malleable thing even in the short-to-medium term, so if it happens to be a big causal factor on bad outcomes this means that efforts to help Black people achieve are more, not less likely to succeed! Compare "racism and discrimination" which basically nobody knows how to tackle in anything like an effective way. If anything it may well be that once broad outcomes improve, this will help obviate much of the previously existing motive for harmful prejudice and discrimination against Blacks.
We certainly do know how, and we've done it. The message of hopelessness is the message, perhaps unwittingly, of the white supremacists, who want nothing to be done, who want racial division to appear hopeless and unavoidable.
From segregation and lynchings in the 1950s, we now have civil rights, almost universal acceptance of interracial marriage (I think the surveys ~1960 showed ~3% acceptance), African-American education and welfare has skyrocketed - but from such a low point that it still has far to go. We elected a black President. Racism in other circumstances has died - against Germans (esp. in Revolutionary times), Italians, Irish, Catholics, Jews, Mormans, etc. etc.
But now they have made it fashionable to argue against even the presence of racism, against all fact and observation - even in this very thread, where someone openly claimed race determined educational outcomes. I periodically here openly racist comments from white people I know - as a simple example, when the plan to pay for community college fell through in Congress, one white person I know said, with a laugh, 'thank god; now we won't have to pay for blacks to go to college'. And people take it up. We live in the post-truth world, where people align with whatever can be insisted upon, and many are and will pay the cost.
>> One thing that does correlate with educational outcomes, more than anything iirc, is parental wealth.
> Really?
Yes, you can find the research easily.
> If anything it may well be that once broad outcomes improve, this will help obviate much of the previously existing motive for harmful prejudice and discrimination against Blacks.
We have 400 years history of racism; attributing it to educational outcomes has no basis.
> We are discriminating openly against poor kids. And you only have to see the condition of schools in poor communities to make that immediately clear.
The way I see it, the only thing directly hindering any integration of lower-class and higher-class kids in schools is what I said above - housing prices and general zoning laws that make it nearly impossible to build low-cost housing in existing high-class areas. Any time there is a housing project (read: reasonably priced apartments), "NIMBY" happens and nobody wants the new complex to be built since it'll directly lower the home values of the existing houses in the area; in general, the administration running the local city/county government has to follow their constituents' wishes, so this likely isn't going to change until some higher government passes a law softening the power of zoning laws. This combined with how schools are heavily funded by their county's property taxes creates a barrier where the poorer schools don't get the funding they need to level the playing field and poorer parents can't move to put their kid in better education, thus keeping it hard for the child and their future generations to climb out of poverty.
Where could that come from? There is an enormous history of racism in the US, and plenty of it overtly, less overtly, etc. right now. You could see it in this thread, where someone literally said that race was the determining factor. You have to blind yourself not to see it over and over in our society.
And yet it somehow doesn't affect people or their educations? Instead of fighting a political battle, what can we do to end it?
> this does match up with your 'parental wealth' claim, since any pair of upper-middle-class parents is more likely able to afford to live in an area with schools rated at least 6 by GreatSchools, thus giving their child(ren) a better opportunity at education.
I wonder if the research controls for that; it would tell us a lot.
> the only thing directly hindering any integration of lower-class and higher-class kids in schools is what I said above
There is plenty of data to observe; we don't have to guess. What is your guess based on? In my non-systematic and few observations, attempts at integration are resisted aggressively by white parents, especially now. Also, remember school busing.
Over time, observe if the hypothesis that I was told - that I doubted and argued against, and that I had to admit I found true to be - see whether it is true: There is always another story, another explanation, year after year, generation after generation, but the result always consistent with racial discrimination.
> In my non-systematic and few observations, attempts at integration are resisted aggressively by white parents, especially now.
This is not contradictory to my point, I’m simply detailing the ‘how’ in their efforts to oppose integration. Nobody is going into school board meetings asking them to put up barriers to prevent black people from integrating, they’re making sure affordable housing projects are never approved.
- 'Everyone knows that black people are biologically inferior.'
- With a smile, and disdain: 'Did you see that Biden's college funding failed? We won't have to pay for the blacks to go to college.'
Look at what happens if racism is brought up on HN: It is shut down vigorously, endless responses saying that it doesn't exist, challenging every aspect, major or minute or imaginary and mostly just argumentative. It must be proven beyond any shadow of a doubt, better than the Laws of Motion, despite overwhelming evidence - why are the standards impossibly high? Imagine all that energy going into addressing racism.
Why are you so determined to deny its existance, even beyond the limited thing about housing? You can see it everywhere, see stories of it everywhere. Talk to any black person, who actually lives it and sees it - don't argue, just be curious. I've never talked to one black person who shares the prevelent view on HN.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It would be useful if people said why they trust whatever they are linking to. Random stuff on the Internet isn't worth the time.
I'm sorry, but who are you and why should I trust your reasons to trust other people?
Judge the content for yourself.
IMHO the onus to establish an assertion (as a general term) is on the person making it:
1. Imagine I post an assertion, 'the moon is made of blue cheese', and it's read by 20 people. Should all 20 do the research themselves? That's much less efficient than my doing it - I already know where I got it, it's my claim, and it's 1/20th the labor.
2. Think of all the assertions you read: Do you have time to research them all?
3. The Internet is filled with information, mostly BS. I don't have time for even a fraction of the accurate info. If we had 1% of the info, but it was backed by credible research, it would be no loss in info (nobody can process even 1%) and great gain.
Finally, people can't judge content it unless they have expertise in the domain. There is plenty of research showing that to be true - that fact is fundamental to misinformation and disinformation, even something as simple as paid Amazon reviews - and it's easy to observe. Think of something in which you have expertise, like your profession: Could you persuade a non-expert? I could persuade one of almost anything, it seems; they just have no idea what are the questions, the facts (beyond a very limited range), or the answers.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/17/us/columbia-university-ra...
Before the exam, I couldn't understand why the higher income kids were paying for SAT training classes. What is the point of scoring 1600 if 800 could get you in the "best" school. It would have interfered with my after school job anyway.
To add further, I thought MIT was just DeVry for rich people but otherwise equivalent and that only black kids get scholarships (ironic since I am Latino). Are things different now ? Are most kids from lower socio-economic backgrounds still clueless about the college admissions process, the difference between colleges, and scholarships. It seems like that is the part that needs to be fixed and eliminating SATs is shortsighted.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT
[0] - https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/sat/whats-on-the-test/stru...
https://www.prepscholar.com/sat/s/colleges/MIT-SAT-scores-GP...
Reading and Writing 730-780, Math 780-800
When Covid hit, schools in poor communities tried to implement distance learning and discovered that only half (for example, in one city which I don't remember) of families had a desktop or laptop for the student to use - probably those kids aren't going to become programmers. Programming classes are non-existent, at least based on limited knowledge - seriously, look up the programming classes in a nearby poor school district.
If anything most of the high school counselors in predominantly poor and black schools just don’t push very hard. They would tell you MIT was too far of a reach. They would tell you the best you could hope for was a private local, community college, or public state university. Who would ever consider Devry and MIT as equivalent?
The downvotes are the aggressive reactionary tide through HN, that rises and falls. Your personal observation suggests that some 'progressive' action might be valuable, that there's a systemic problem, and therefore it is shut down.
Don't stop telling it please. We need more voices from the real world here.
> they didn’t need to lie about it to still be untrue and absurd
What basis do you have for saying it's untrue?
That is hearsay.
> What basis do you have for saying it's untrue?
I was pointing out that it could be untrue without needing to be a lie. As to the “basis” for my saying it is untrue, I’ve been over that.
Why do you say that?
The minimum score for the SAT if you do nothing is 400, not 600.
Average SAT Score of admitted students: 1525
https://testive.com/mit-sat-scores-act-scores/
It sounds absurd to you, but isn't that your own ignorance? You weren't there; they were. I've heard many tell similar stories. Again, look in the NY Times from a few years ago; elite colleges not only accept it, but have tried to mitigate it.
> one that actually sounds realistic
Isn't this just saying that it agrees with what you already believe?
Or my experience.
Of course, perhaps schools in poor areas really are pushing the children hard to go to extraordinary heights and it’s just the fault of poor people for being so damned useless that they ignore it or fail.
Or, perhaps, there’s a middle ground to be found, but I doubt it includes people who no one would describe as bright being unaware of the scores they need to enter the next stage of education, if that’s what they desire.
That's not how I understood it - are we talking about the same comment. I understood the commenter to be saying that their school didn't give students the resources to understand and apply to top colleges, including basic understanding of colleges (e.g., who MIT is) and the admissions process. Are we talking about the same comment?
The comment that you paraphrase is, I agree, absurd!
There's been a lot of research and work on that, though I don't know what progress has been made. You can find NY Times articles from a few years ago.
> eliminating SATs is shortsighted
Why does the above make SATs any better? They don't predict college outcomes, and they are structured and written in ways that favor wealth, thus providing bad data on students (other than their wealth). Why use them?
Getting rid of SATs from my perspective sounds like a fantastic idea.
> Getting rid of SATs from my perspective sounds like a fantastic idea.
There are two types of standardized tests. The first kind you reference measures the school. They are not used for college admissions. They can affect school funding.
The second type of test measures the student. Sometimes a school will report those numbers. But they do not affect the funding a school gets.
Getting rid of the SAT would have zero effect on contingent funding for schools.
Consider this: if the schools weren't dependent on the test scores, then they could use that same energy-for-testing to teach their students methods for improving their SAT scores. I genuinely doubt they'll switch energy, but the fact remains that the requirement to game a test-well-or-lose-funding system by necessity removes education opportunity for students in order to focus on the tests over education, especially for schools in lower income areas because they stand to suffer the most. We're relying on a system that ensures that people stay where they are. Now, if there isn't a correlation between lost education opportunity and SAT scores, then you might be right, but...
Edit: This article goes into the problem in the context of No Child Left Behind and confirms my point: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/03/...
Your immediate parent comment indicates that if school testing were eliminated then students would improve their SAT scores. I agree with that. But it is beside the point. This thread is about whether the SAT should be eliminated, not whether school testing should be eliminated.
At the end, you start to make a point about correlation between "lost education opportunity" and SAT scores. But my reading is that you're saying there's a correlation between LEO and SAT scores. Are you saying it's a positive correlation? Or are you saying students are spending time prepping for SATs, and what they are learning there is negatively correlated with actual learning?
I am trying to understand what you mean. Are you advocating elimination of the SAT? If so, why?
So, I'm opposed to standardized tests, in general, as a strong measure for capability because of their tendency to force the focus of schools on testing over education and in doing so, deep and localized problems are reinforced. I gave the example of my own school, because the school barely touched on the SAT since the focus was, by necessity, focused on the ACT. The SAT was an afterthought. For the teachers, it was a legitimate existential crisis if the ACT wasn't taught well, while the SAT was effectively irrelevant to them.
A large body of students don't know how important the SAT is, nor whether or how they should push themselves to test well -- we weren't taught that because of a shift in priorities. In some ways, both tests were expressed as on the same level of importance, despite the ACT not mattering in the slightest to the future of the individual student, leading to confusion by students about what is actually important.
For schools that the SAT isn't an afterthought, the SAT might make sense, but in doing so, we are culturally prioritizing the reinforcement of already-strong communities while simultaneously continuing to weaken already weak communities.
In other words, a proxy besides the SAT should be sought after, at least while we have so many broken systems and wildly different implementations of incentive systems in-place. I don't know what that proxy is.
The ACT and SAT are two tests used for college admissions. If you take one, you don't need to take the other.
> despite the ACT not mattering in the slightest to the future of the individual student
The ACT is used for college admissions. Are you thinking of a different test?
It sounds like you have an issue with the teach-to-the-test mentality and the fact that "the test" isn't the SAT. I understand the concern that students are pulled in too many directions. But according to what you've written "the test" is the ACT. That is a substitute for the SAT. They are only being pulled in one direction. It is the direction that will help get them into college.
[1]: https://www.cvccworks.edu/Downloads/HarrisonBergeronByKurtVo...
Any teacher who puts this on the syllabus today would be fired for doing a racism.
Could you provide an example of that claim? Usually the SAT is considered discriminatory because the way the testing is done favors wealthy, well-educated people, and gives negative results for equally talented people who lack those advantages. Colleges have found that the SAT is excluding a large part of the talent pool.
Also, SAT scores do not correlate well at all with college outcomes.
Why then use the SAT?
The alternatives, such as essays, are even more highly correlated with wealth: https://cepa.stanford.edu/content/essay-content-strongly-rel...
As to predicting outcomes, that’s largely due to score compression (the students at any given school are in a narrow score range). Folks across the score range aren’t being compared with each other in class performance. But look at the LSAT, where all students from different schools take the same bar exam. LSAT is highly predictive of bar exam performance. Students who score less than 150 (on a 120-180 scale) are virtually guaranteed to fail the bar.
> Colleges have found that the SAT is excluding a large part of the talent pool.
No, colleges have found that the SAT produces racial demographics they don’t like. Poor white kids have been excluded by the SAT for nearly a century and colleges never took action in response to that.
Source? Or do you mean "taking LSAT at the same time as taking the bar for fun"? Because LSAT is typically done before you enter law school, while you take the bar after you get out.
Where does that come from, other than repetition?
> look at the LSAT
I'm not talking about the LSAT (and bar exam performance isn't a meaningful indicator of much - the great majority of aspiring lawyers pass their bar exams).
> Poor white kids have been excluded by the SAT for nearly a century and colleges never took action in response to that.
If that's true (and I don't know that it is, especially on the scale of what has happened to blacks), what does that does that have to do with racism against black kids?
It seems everyone's great effort is not to address racism, but to deny it, against incredible evidence. Look at this entire discussion. It's incredible the effort that goes into denying racism, rather than doing something about it. Reactionary politics has swept the US and HN.
Doctors that share a racial and cultural with their patients are able to provide better care. It's been seen in multiple studies that elder African American women are more likely to follow the advice of the doctor if the doctor shared their background. There is little controversy around the fact that diversity leads to improved health outcomes ( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8675280/ / https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w24787/w247... )
Similar trends can be seen in other fields. So affirmative action is not just good because it is the morally right thing to do, but also because it is the more practical solution quite often.
Let me guess that you’re white.
Explain why Asians and Hispanics live longer than whites despite most doctors being white?
Conversely, are you suggesting all those Indian doctors all over rural America should be replaced with white doctors?
I sought to note the particular and unique plight of African Americans. I came upon this picture of Ruby Bridges a month ago: https://i.imgur.com/SSRsywY.png and I got to reading what became of her, and I found this recent picture of her: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7c/Ruby_Bri... that's that little girl who put up with a lot of shit just to attend the same school as white girls -- and she doesn't even look that old in this recent pic! The idea that we don't have to do anything to make up for denying the black man and woman the right to drink from the same fountain as the white man and woman, to attend the same school only a few decades ago is deeply unsettling, as the auspices of privilege reverberate down the generations, so do the weighted anchors of un-privilege.
In that vein, I think the argument you seem to be converging toward is not very strong because we have a special select of Asians and Hispanics, they are a special bunch to have taken the initiative to leave everything behind and immigrate elsewhere for a better life, likely they were moneyed enough to make the move, likely they had a strong social support networks as indeed Hispanic&Asian households do, better eating habits, probably more active, etc.
> Where does that come from, other than repetition?
You started out talking about socioeconomic status, but by the end of your post you admitted getting rid of the SAT is an effort to “address racism.” People think getting rid of the SAT is about race and not class because proponents of the policies admit as much.
> I'm not talking about the LSAT
The SAT and LSAT are very similar both in content and distribution of outcomes.
> (and bar exam performance isn't a meaningful indicator of much - the great majority of aspiring lawyers pass their bar exams).
Half the people who take the LSAT are excluded from even attending law school based largely on LSAT score. Students with lower LSAT scores are at high risk of failing their classes or failing the bar: http://outsidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2018/01/using-ls....
> If that's true (and I don't know that it is, especially on the scale of what has happened to blacks)
The SAT is highly correlated with socioeconomic status. And most poor people are white.
> what does that does that have to do with racism against black kids?
Is the SAT “racist” or is it biased against people with low socioeconomic status? Two quite different things.
As to what’s “reactionary” or not, you should try recalibrating your bubble. The majority of white, Asian, Hispanic, and Black people oppose the practice of using race as a consideration in school admissions: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/25/most-americ.... They also say test scores and grades should be the main factors for admissions. The “race progressives” are a minority even among minority groups.
If you take it away, colleges will happily admit loads of "well-rounded" students with tons of expensive extracurriculars. They will be racially as balanced as possible, but their family incomes will all be very high. The kid from a poor broken home who somehow managed to score 1400 on the SAT will lose their best shot at standing out.
I think taking away the SAT as criteria will actually enhance racial bias through subjective measures - than the flip
What makes you say that the SAT is the best option for poor applicants?
The idea that the SAT is inherently biased against poorer students is controversial. AFAIK, the evidence for this requires advanced statistical analysis and expert interpretation and isn't widely accepted as definitive. Even among those experts who accept this evidence, there doesn't seem to be any clear sense of what is causing this bias or what can be done about it. It simply isn't the case that the SAT has some glaring bias that can easily be rectified, like questions assuming knowledge of water polo and horseback riding. Student skills in things like reading and math do not exist in a vacuum, but depend on prior exposure and knowledge, which robustly correlates with family/neighborhood/school environment and thus socioeconomic status. Efforts to create tests that are completely independent of those things have not produced useful results.
Quality studies show that the benefit of test prep is modest to moderate, on the order of 30-100 points, and almost all of the benefit is achieved within 8 hours of preparation. Even that benefit is not widely accepted as simply retaking the test can increase scores by 60 points. [1] There is no evidence that expensive private tutoring leads to better outcomes than self-study with free alternatives such as Khan Academy. [2]
> What makes you say that the SAT is the best option for poor applicants?
It's helpful to look at it more as the "least bad" than the "best" -- we need to stop focusing exclusively on the issues with the SAT and think about the actual alternatives. For example, essays, extracurriculars, and prestigious brand-name private school affiliations are all valued by prestigious colleges, and can be bought legally and very easily by rich families. It is much harder to buy a high SAT score. To buy a high SAT score, a family could pay someone to impersonate their child, but this is very risky as the recent Varsity Blues scandal showed.
Suppose we put ourselves in the shoes of a bright-but-poor high school student. We need a way to make ourselves stand out. We can sign up with Khan Academy or download some SAT prep materials at the public library and prepare for a few hours... or we can try to get into an expensive private school, get a private college essay consultant, join a rich-kid sport, take a trip to Africa, and other things that rich kids do to burnish their applications. Which of these seems more practical to you?
If you look at the criticism of the SAT from universities, I think you'll find that they are mostly interested in attacking the SAT in isolation, not comparing with the alternatives. Comparing with the alternatives would require shedding light on their opaque and subjective admissions processes and the way in which those processes favor the rich. On the contrary, research suggests that leveraging standardized tests, and increasing participation in them, tends to open doors for poor students relative to status quo [4][5].
It's interesting that they are so favorable to a change which will make their processes even more subjective and opaque, especially given their history of using subjective and opaque processes to exclude undesirable minorities (yesterday Jews [3], today Asians). Although they have proven themselves untrustworthy, they are not interested in increasing transparency and objectivity of admissions processes. I think we should be hesitant to accept their reports and recommendations as being in completely good faith, given their strong interest in (and consistently observed behavior of) recruiting as wealthy a class as possible each year.
[1] https://slate.com/technology/2019/04/sat-prep-courses-do-the...
[2]
I believe a lot of problems that the SAT's used to have were fixed over the years? It's somewhat of a moving target.
And if you can't make any standardized test that's fair, why is that?
The actor's bearing on stage seemed ______; her movements were natural and her technique _____
A. unremitting...blasé B. fluid...tentative C. unstudied...contrived D. eclectic...uniform E. grandiose...controlled
Apparently 8% more black students answered this question correctly than white students, and it was never moved from a potential question into the real test. The allegation is that the racial outcome of the question is the cause of its never making it onto the SAT.
I think it never made it because the question is bad. None of the answers makes much sense (the correct answer is apparently C).
1: http://www.jayrosner.com/publication-onwhitepreferences.html
Every option has either 2 words that make no sense, or one word that makes no sense with "her movements were natural" and one that does. Only option C has two words which make sense with both. This question is just basic English comprehension and should be on every exam.
Every single question carefully preselected to appear on the test favors whites over blacks.
Any claim of racism - even raised by an expert who has done detailed research, in a society with overwhelming evidence of it historically and now, and in higher education admissions in particular - is always dismissed.
I worked in edtech analytics for a while where SAT among other factors were correlated with student success. SAT scores correlate with graduation rates, college GPA, job placement. Most elite universities also tend to receive applicants with higher SAT scores (A no brainer)
> Most elite universities also tend to receive applicants with higher SAT scores
Many don't use SAT scores anymore.
What is that based on, and how do you define academic skills? It may reflect how much time and money you can spend on test prep courses (time is also a problem for poor students who tend to have jobs, take care of siblings for parents with multiple jobs and no day care, etc.). It may reflect test-taking skills in general, which aren't skills of value.
It sounds like maybe money would have been the limiting factor in your case but I don’t know.
You really believe that? I find it extremely hard to believe that the distribution of intelligence for engineering roles at a FAANG company is the same as that of the general population.
It seems far more likely that the distribution is shifted 10-15 points to the right.
Neglectful parents are common.
There are levels to this. I’m same as OP in terms of “looked like they could’ve gone to MIT” but was born in the wrong family. Ended up going to University of Washington after doing some community college - so it’s not like I went to the worst school in the world. But it was a long journey to get there and I do work at a target company now. Again, a very long journey… That could’ve been changed by just an interview or something else entirely.
The main reason for failing education is not money, it's family attitude towards education. Educational parents get better results than rich parents. Look at how the Asian group is faring. In fact having too rich parents is pulling down the kids.
Yes, that's all we ever did in the trailer parks.
What do you tell the upper middle class families that didn't buy a bigger house or pad their investment accounts so that they could help put 3 of their kids through schools? My parents spent at least $200k on undergrad education between me and my siblings (UVA, Cornell, UW-Madison).
Did they make the wrong decision? Should they have saddled us with debt? At 10% (ie: S&P AAR) that would net $600,000! When America becomes a place where you're punished for having invested in your children, it becomes a place where you will no longer want to live.
It's completely untenable and anyone proposing it is ignoring the massive opportunity cost that has been incurred by people that played by the rules, pursued useful degrees, and made the responsible decision to stretch their means to do so.
Two questions:
1. What do you think my opportunity cost was, and 2. How much do you think I lost by not pursuing an education at a university worthy of my accomplishments to that point?
You have a very entitled point of view from where I sit.
I think most universities are scams and FWIW I made a point to literally only apply to two schools: UW Madison (in-state) and Minnesota (in-state reciprocity agreement) because I knew I’d get in and I saw what it cost my parents for my siblings to go out of state. I did a semester at a community college, too.
1. Your opportunity cost is debatable. I took 15 years of market return on the lump sum of tuition/boarding/books cost as an example. It would be about the same for you, assuming you spent ~$75k on your education between rent and supplies and food and tuition.
2. I don’t think you lost out on anything meaningful unless it was MIT, Harvard, or Stanford that you would have gone to instead.
- daycare is on average around $2k per month per child where I live.
- outside of tech, almost no companies pay for parental leave. At most, they are obligated to hold your position, but no pay is required. This is especially true if you or your spouse work in the healthcare field. It’s absolutely mind blowing how poorly employees are treated by their employers in the healthcare industry.
- childcare tax credits are an absolute joke. From the $32k in childcare I paid for last year, I got a $1,600 credit…
- once you have kids, your health insurance costs will be astronomical unless you’re lucky enough to work at a company that provides good insurance. In my situation, I run a small tech company where we don’t provide HC insurance (too costly atm). My wife works in healthcare. Our insurance is beyond a joke. Thousands per month with a $20k deductible. It’s hell.
- once your kids are in school they’re taught very little useful skills. It’s mostly an exercise in obedience and conformist thinking.
- once your child graduates high school they have the option to either take out hundreds of thousand of dollars in federally backed loans if they’re lucky enough to have parents that don’t make enough money. If they have middle class parents they’ll have to rely on even worse loans from private lenders.
So would I expect the US to punish middle class parents that foot the bill for their child’s college? Yes. The US hates the middle class, as much as they hate children.
For whatever reason, the USA is extremely hostile to having kids.
Um
> Currently, student loan debt at graduation is an estimated $31,100.
https://educationdata.org/average-student-loan-debt-by-year
Yes. The average US college graduate has under $40K in debt. If you're able to get into a networking school for the upper class like Cornell you're able to get a full ride at a state university. UVA and UW-Madison means at most one of three children went to college in state, on in state tuition.
It's perfectly fine to choose the university to go to based on prestige but paying for a network is not morally superior to going to a less good university on a full scholarship, or doing two years at a community college and transferring to a state flagship for the last two years. Making expensive choices to chase status, a zero sum game, isn't eveil. Neitehr should it be encouraged.
> Yes
You’re not actually answering the question I posed. My question was, assuming XYZ amount of dollars are going to be spent on education, did they make the right or the wrong decision by making sacrifices to pay for their kids instead of letting/forcing their kids to take out loans?
The question you answered was, “should a lot of money be spent on education in the first place?”. And sure, I’d agree, we all should have gone to community college for 2 years and then the state flagship, that would have been the most cost effective, bang-for-buck solution. I was the in-state kid, and also the youngest, and that’s not a coincidence; I saw what it cost my dad.
My point is that if there’s a suspension of contract law, regardless of whether you’ve spent a lot or a little on education, you’re punishing those who budgeted for it and rewarding those that didn’t. Whether it’s a lot of money or a little money, you’re fucking over the honest people.
I'm sure they'll be itching to move to a new country where their children can spend another $200k on their grandchildren.
There was a video (perhaps even from kurzgesagt) which describes how critical it is for our society to allow as many people as easy access to knowledge as possible and not only for obvious reasons but also to increase the chance for all of us that the hidden genius is finding a cure for cancer.
You can even study for free in Germany as an non German. You know what happens? Those people might stay in Germany and make Germany a better country.
Imagine a world were we compete globally with the best education system. Let's allow more people to shape our future.
https://www.mygermanuniversity.com/universities
You are a little bit limited by what you like to study if you don't speak German as not every university offers a bachelor in English but it's doable.
If there is no money in something, then it's assumed there is no value. It's the American way.
You would only get those same problems if you made college mandatory, as well as free.
A real commitment to a policy of free tertiary education would also expand the availability of trade schools not just universities.
This is part of the proposal of progressives. They always emphasized the freedom for a student to choose between trade school or community college, and then move on to a public 4 year school if they chose to do so.
Public education in the US is the most well-funded per student you can find anywhere. Yet somehow it doesn't translate into top-tier teachers nor top-tier outcomes. It's almost like giving huge amounts of money to unaccountable bureaucrats doesn't solve problems.
Most of the people attending Hauptschule don't attend university [0]. In some regions 60% of the children attend it. Aren't you concerned that the person who could discover the cure for cancer is in Hauptschule right now?
Imagine a Germany in which the rest of your life isn't determined at age ten.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauptschule
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uğur_Şahin
Also, the average attendance for Hauptschule is <10% [1]. Wouldn’t you agree that at least 10% of kids would benefit from having an education experience more tailored to their needs instead of building resentment for education by being forced to sit through terribly boring lessons with the nerds knowing the answer for everything?
[1]: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulsystem_in_Deutschland#Sch...
Do you know how many people in Hauptschule make it to university?
> Also, the average attendance for Hauptschule is <10% [1].
I must acknowledge I thought it was 25%, it must've changed in recent years.
> Wouldn’t you agree that at least 10% ...
Thank you for the question. I buy the thesis of the Case against education by which university is a waste of time for most people, nevertheless it's hard for me to stigmatize a percentage of the population by not allowing them to waste their time there as well with their former ten year old smarter classmates.
I went to Realschule, made a 3 year apprenticeship as a software engineer and went for 2 further years to bos.
I'm now able to study.
Why do you think that? Genuinely curious.
What you imply here is entierly untrue. I know lots of people that made their Abitur after having been to the Haupt- or Realschule first. That is not to say that the school system doesn't have its problems -- it clearly has -- but you are painting a picture that is not rooted in reality.
Having lived in Europe for 30+ years, I have never heard of this outside higher education at very famous institutions, e.g. Stanford, Harvard, MIT.
In fact, primary and secondary schools in the US are usually seen as quite insufficient.
> This is for developer positions I would expect it different if you are hiring line cooks.
I’m a lead engineer myself.
Again, I yet have to find anyone in Europe who would have primary and secondary education in the US in high consideration. In fact, after traveling in Asia, I had somewhat the same experience: top US universities were highly valued, but anything below that was mostly dismissed.
That is an extremely large percentage if the candidate pool was chosen at random. That would be surprising in Europe.
Anyway, I didn’t say it was surprising, but it is rare.
> US people study abroad too. It’s very common and tech people tend to pick US because it’s heavy in tech.
Sure. But there is a difference between hiring US nationals abroad, who likely would be US educated, and US educated Portuguese or German nationals, who are a very small minority of the population, and that’s what I was asking.
^And then our public school had some funded, hidden exchange with Geelong Grammar school :)
Personally at that role it was an English role so I only took from their US education that they can function in an English environment. I didn’t give two shits about their Carnegie Mellon masters.
I have no clue if your education system is better or ours.
It's just that we think multiple choice tests are easier than free form.
By "free" I think what you are trying to say is that in Germany working class people, the majority of whom don't go to college, pay for rich kids to go to college, rather than having those people pay for themselves.
All of the conversations I've seen implicitly assume that this is good, and that the solution to farmer workers (or other low paid workers) escaping poverty is to train them as software developers.
We really need farm workers, and most of them live in poverty. I love having more engineers, scientists, and doctors, but we desperately need non-STEM work to be a viable option
>We really need farm workers, and most of them live in poverty. I love having more engineers, scientists, and doctors, but we desperately need non-STEM work to be a viable option
This is basically a non-problem because of the supply/demand mechanics of the labor market. If farm workers' job gets sufficiently bad from a value proposition perspective, then people will leave the occupation and employers would be forced to pay higher wages to attract workers.
It´s going to be a fuckin´mess, 4 dudes richer and everyone else screwed
>We really need farm workers
But point maken
How so? Sustainable farming has nothing to do with a man vs machine doing the labor. Moral as in we need to make sure people can keep doing this job or what kind of argument are you even making? I'd rather see improved social safety nets and job training then some appeal to history that people need to work the fields because we've always done that.
Modern industrial farming practices, designed to optimize agricultural output per unit of labor, are an ecological and environmental travesty. They require the widespread use of pesticides and toxic fertilizers that are decimating the biosphere. Monocropping unsustainably degrades soil quality. And the large contiguous areas used for industrial agricultural operations are extremely disruptive to wildlife.
The most obvious solution to the above is an agricultural system with many more, much smaller farms, where human beings do the work currently done by machines and chemicals.
How will the four people get richer if the food they create is priced so high that no one can buy it?
I get this is deeply economic and philosophical, but it’s an interesting thought experiment.
Taking this to its logical end, the owners of said farms will get richer as the general population earns less on average (due to their labour no longer being needed).
Either that or everyone else gets fed up and violently overthrows them. It could, perhaps, be avoided with higher taxes on the rich, but the rich have the most influence over the tax code.
Serious question - have you ever been poor? Are you aware that sometimes people have to work at shitty jobs because they have no other options? And, if employers really would "be forced to pay higher wages" as you claim, why are all the restaurants in my city still short staffed?
I'm not claiming to have a solution but claiming "the market will fix it" seems like such a cop-out, like telling someone god will take care of it.
OP was talking about the problem from a practical perspective (ie. "We really need farm workers", presumably worried about a future where there aren't enough farm workers and we starve or something), and I was addressing that in the same way. Your objection seems to be from a humanitarian perspective (ie. how can we provide a minimum standard of living to non-STEM workers?), which is valid concern, but ultimately not relevant to the original problem.
>And, if employers really would "be forced to pay higher wages" as you claim, why are all the restaurants in my city still short staffed?
combination of:
1. stubbornness/price stickiness
2. belief that it's better to hold out in the short term and wait for the labor supply to return, then it is to give out pay raises now. Wages are sticky, which mean wage hikes would turn into ongoing expenses into the future.
3. belief that the raising wages would raise prices, which would decrease demand and ultimately make the business worse off.
>I'm not claiming to have a solution but claiming "the market will fix it" seems like such a cop-out, like telling someone god will take care of it.
The market seems to be working just fine in my area. Some restaurants have shut down. Some have raised prices. Some have decreased service. Which is the right approach? I don't know. The restaurants that took the right approach will win out in the end. In the meanwhile I'm still able to eat out.
What you're really arguing isn't that the market will sort things out to someone's satisfaction, you're just saying the market is a jungle and whatever survives survives.
Wouldn't the standard response to that be that it's not really a free market, and if it were made more free then such inefficiencies would be less likely to occur?
What does it contribute?
The absolutism was in no one believes it, by the way.
By the principle of charity, I don't expect anyone to believe nonsensical things.
> By the principle of charity, I don't expect anyone to believe nonsensical things.
You're not being charitable, if you were you wouldn't have begun with hyperbole, then moving the goalposts when challenged, and now cherry picking. You don't seem interested in any case but the one you already favour.
I make "absolute" or even "hyperbolic" statements because I'd like to learn something. If I'm wrong, some example to that effect may easily be provided. In doing so, I'm letting someone else win all the internet points because I care more about learning than about internet points. As you observe upthread, a statement in such form can be shown to be wrong "with barely any effort". I invite you, if you please, to expend that small amount of effort. However, absolute statements can't simply be assumed to be wrong. Absolute statements exist that are absolutely true. "Any living human will die if deprived of oxygen."
I grant that you've already expended a smaller amount of effort, to somewhat imply that you yourself (or perhaps others not present in this thread?) believe that less regulation of labor markets leads to higher pay, but in the absence of any relevant example that implication is itself suspect. We know that some people believe silly things, and some other people claim to believe silly things that correspond to their particular psychological commitments (this seems common in the context of religion), but those beliefs and claims do not prove their silly objects.
I suppose it's "not working" if by "not working" you mean "behaves exactly like economics 101 models that assume rational actors". But as it relates to this context, business are reacting approximately in the way we would expect, albeit with some delay/hesitancy. Average pay has gone up in the past few months, for instance.
>What you're really arguing isn't that the market will sort things out to someone's satisfaction, you're just saying the market is a jungle and whatever survives survives.
I don't argue that because it's not clear what "satisfaction" entails. If you mean the optimal choice every time, I don't think you'll find any free market advocate who would make that claim. In the meantime, I'm pretty satisfied. I can still eat out, and I have the choice between "higher wages but more expensive" restaurants and "lower wages but worse service" restaurants. It's not really clear right now which is the best choice here (eg. maybe I'd rather accept reduced/worse service than pay more), so letting consumers as a whole decide seems like the best course of action.
If the owners were competent, the businesses might have grown to the point where the enterprise isn't so much an extension of the owner's personality. A small restaurant's style extrapolates strongly from the owner's quirks - whether they feel they make enough money, they're disorganised, they're under stress going without leave or getting hit by taxes at the worst times. I figure they're the ones most likely to hold wages down almost out of angst because they themselves feel hard done by. "Why should that teenager get $15/hr?! I have the risk of the lease. I started this business! I got $5/hr when I was a kid!" I'd bet this is a solid factor in local restaurants.
Once a business is large enough to have a tier or two under the owner, I suspect this buffer helps. I notice this separation a lot when working directly with an owner versus with their marketing person. The latter has to uphold their end of the relationship with me or they'll get fired. The owner meanwhile can miss deadlines and forget to write copy and so on, and usually their worst case is they keep flying by the seat of their pants. If their business fails, it's usually much later and harder to tie to specific issues along the way.
Laissez-faire markets are also bad at taking negative externalities into account. Food being too expensive to afford in the stores while it's also rotting in the fields (which has happened in my state multiple times on the last few decades) is really bad. Children not being being effectively taught because teachers are quitting due to burnout and terrible wages is really bad. I don't think it's sufficient to shrug out hands and say "it'll work itself out" when we can actively see very these kinds of detrimental problems
The market for teachers, at least in the US, is not a 'laissez-faire market'.
Whatever that means. In Alabama the low wages and poor working conditions have now led to a grave teacher shortage. The government's solution? Suspend teacher certification. To use graphic imagery: the talent pool is full of piss, let's open it to the incontinents!
This suggests 'teacher certification' isn't effective at distinguishing between good and bad teachers.
"Suspend teacher certification"
If 'teacher certification' isn't useful for distinguishing good/bad teachers, then removing the requirement may be a good idea.
"In Alabama"
It's hard to fire bad teachers in Alabama. If you're a principal in an Alabama public school, you can't just give a poorly performing teachers 2-4 weeks' notice, freeing up the money to hire someone new. Look up 'Alabama teacher tenure'.
And what's this obsession with firing people? You can get rid of subpar performers, but the rapid turnover isn't going to improve the average unless you manage to hire and retain above average performers. In the long run, it's a supply issue, and the revolving door model is going to do nothing about the subpar supply.
Re: #2 getting rid of underperformers helps you hire good teachers (because, unless you fire someone, you have no money to hire someone new), and retain good ones (because, if you're a good teacher, you're not going to want to work somewhere where your students' other teachers are bad).
I've said it already - it's not the best students that go to work in teaching. You can fire a low performer, but chances are that the replacement is just as bad. It's a supply issue, a training issue and a culture issue - the anti-intellectualism in large swathes of the population really doesn't help matters.
This may be true, but it's the result of how the system is set up and, in particular, the interaction between:
a) politicians
b) teachers and teachers unions
c) school district leaders
d) school district administration staff
e) students
In most systems, group (e) is the one with the least power. Their parents may be able to vote for school board members, but these elections are infrequent, and the way to get elected is not by being an advocate for students, but by aligning with a particular political party, or getting the support of teachers unions.
Parents cannot easily opt out of that system. In Alabama, per pupil spending is ~$10k/year. This distorts the market: a parochial school that costs $10k/year to run cannot compete with a public school that costs $10k/year to run, even if the former better. Because in one case the marginal cost to the parent is $0.
It comes back to what I said at the start of our conversation: The market for teachers, at least in the US, is not a 'laissez-faire market'.
But, with regard to public education systems in the US:
- it's definitely true that some people 'attempt to blame low quality of a system on individuals'
- it's not generally true that this leads to firing (of teachers)
If you want to know more about some of the problems, you might enjoy the documentary 'Waiting for "Superman"': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_%22Superman%22
You’ll have to back-up that assertion.
Supply/demand mechanisms fail the labor market badly. By law of supply and demand, professions introduce artificial scarcity to boost their income; and the market responds either through some combination of: Immigration, automation, consolidation (less businesses), cut-corners
Farming has aspects of all three, and it’s a major national risk.
> If farm workers' job gets sufficiently bad from a value proposition perspective, then people will leave the occupation and employers would be forced to pay higher wages to attract workers.
Is this really applicable to this context? In other words, are farming jobs really going to get to a point where the pay is $10M a year, and people only take the job for a year and then never work another day? Considering that being a farmer has basically no barrier to entry, I doubt it will get to that point. Not to mention, if farm labor was really that expensive, so would the cost of living, so those would be FIRE farm workers would have to come back to pay the increased food bill.
Care to breakdown the costs?
Every mechanism has regimes in which it fails. 'Supply and demand' isn't always the answer any more than 'mongodb' or 'rust' are always the answer.
i suspect the amount of money that farms would need to pay workers to fix these shortages would drive all producers into bankruptcy
>i suspect the amount of money that farms would need to pay workers to fix these shortages would drive all producers into bankruptcy
I definitely think it's the latter rather than the former. Producers being driven to bankruptcy is an issue, but that seems like it's something that's going to happen regardless if we made "non-STEM work to be a viable option". At the end of the day, if it's a shitty job, then you'll have to pay more to get people to show up.
Their meager wage increase is not worth uprooting your entire life just for 2 months or less of work unless you are sending that money back to a country where a dollar goes much farther. They need far more than just add 2 bucks to an already way underpaid job to not only attract workers now but keep them around and available for following years.
They are. Farmer suicides over the past 10 years have skyrocketed. Farmers are committing suicide at twice the rate of combat veterans. [1]
I'm afraid I can't take your comment seriously as a dispassionate economic analysis since it lacks even basic empathy for people caught in this ongoing trainwreck of "supply/demand" mechanics.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/06/why-are-amer...
As an escape valve for independents we could have them post a sufficiently large bond that will come due in the event of farm failure and bail them out.
It's also important to distinguish between farm workers (hired hands) and the business owners.
But the point that you and others are missing is that if farm works sucks, and pays low, then that means we should not be sending more people to become farmers.
The point you are missing is that jobs that suck still have to be done. If we ship many the low/medium skill jobs over seas and then automate many of the remaining ones, what are those people to do? Surely if they were able to get a higher paying job that didn't suck they would have done so.
The better solution is to make sure we appropriately value tasks that are necessary and have some level of potential self sufficiency should we find ourselves in a global event like conflict, famine, etc. Not to mention, the non-industrial farms are generally better for animals and the environment. This shouldn't be a race to the bottom.
I am not saying that we need to retrain all existing farmers. Instead, I am saying that we should simply discourage more people going into that industry, instead of what the original poster was claiming, which is that we'd need more people there.
> The point you are missing is that jobs that suck still have to be done
We don't need more people in that industry, no. We can have less in that industry.
> what are those people to do
At a very minimum we shouldn't be adding more problems by encourage more people to go into these bad jobs, is the point though. That would just make things worse.
The free market might as well be a religion for some people. Nothing (not even historical facts) is enough evidence for it to not be the answers to all economic issues.
Also, there are lots of US tech people here - with overly inflated salaries compared to approximately everyone else. And everyone knows those winning the game have a tendency to lose empathy and think the game is fair, no matter how much evidence against it.
And even then, you're usually required to live within reasonable driving distance of the office. You don't make enough to buy a place. At least half your salary post-tax probably goes to rent. So yeah, you've got a few bucks in the bank probably, but it's not like you're saving up to buy your third Porsche or something lol.
Aside from their lack of empathy and the ignoring of the distortion of the supply of labour happening that makes the "non-problem" an actual problem, what is incorrect about pointing out that supply and demand are, if not the most fundamental factor then close to it, in a market?
Monopolies have historically shit all over the notion that supply and demand is a good model to use for the market.
Much like most economic models, there are underlying assumptions about it that make it bad at actually predicting the real world. Things like perfectly competitive markets (haha), prices being adjustable (haha) and the forces that act on supply/demand being rational (extra hahaha).
There are lots and lots of cases where it fails, like the housing bubble, administered prices and wages.
Still, it might as well be a religion. Afterall, people can say it is close to a most fundamental law about markets with a straight face (despite it failling all the time).
What I would counter is that it that we can see that free markets work preferably to monopolised ones, or any of the other ones you've provided where selfish intervention of one kind or another has interfered with supply or demand.
this false dichotomy between monopoly and its precursor is non sequitur.
Ignoring the fallacious teleological argument, I'm happy to rely on Wikipedia for this as this is basic knowledge:
> In economics, a free market is a system in which the prices for goods and services are self-regulated by buyers and sellers negotiating in an open market without market coercions.
What are market coercions?
> Examples of such prohibited market coercions include: economic privilege, *monopolies*, and artificial scarcities.
All those cases I mentioned came arose under one of the most (maybe the most?) free market of modernity.
No. I don't believe you're trying to create a straw man intentionally but if you're going to jump from black to white, and a large jump at that, then it produces the same outcome all the same.
That’s exactly what’s happening. With a steady flow of cheap labor to take these jobs, the wages for them will remain stagnant. It makes perfect sense for low income workers to be complaining about immigrants taking their jobs because that’s exactly what happens.
Cut off illegal immigration for a few years and watch as the price of all unskilled labor increases. It’s basic supply and demand.
The ones at the top generally don’t care because the people coming in are not competing for their jobs. And they arguably benefit from the cheap low end labor through lower prices for staples and even luxuries like landscapers and nannies.
Even that is changing with remote work and offshoring. I don’t know if it will take five years or a decade, but the so called knowledge workers who don’t sock away their savings now are in for a rude awakening when their own paper pushing jobs get replaced.
For knowledge workers who want to work from home, the end result will be competing on a global market against workers from developing countries who can afford to do the same work for less. We already see this on various freelancing platforms where it's only a viable side gig for those in places with a low cost of living.
At the end of the day, workers need some kind of protection against these movements, by putting local workers first and managing immigration to protect the middle and working classes. The problem is that we have a political class who have gotten rich on the back of removing such protections, because they're also business owners and property investors.
Nothing I said precludes aid for these people, to ensure a minimum standard of living. I'm just pointing out the implied consequences of not making "non-STEM work to be a viable option", isn't we run out of farmers and we all starve because the market will correct it long before the number of farmers drop dangerously low.
>All the while people complain about immigrants crossing the border and "taking their jobs".
I don't get it. Just a few sentences ago you implied that the jobs are crap, and that people are "forced to do these jobs or starve", yet here you're implying that we should allow "immigrants crossing the border" to take those crap jobs?
>Graduating high school seniors aren't lining up to mow grass or pick fruit or work as a meat packer for $15/hour. They want to come out of college to a 6 figure job with no skills or training.
People don't want hard jobs and want easy money. Can you really blame them for that? Also, the solution to this, as mentioned in the previous comment is to raise wages.
>A lot of people coming out of school with out a tech or medical disposition would be best served by picking a trade. We have a shortage already and it is only going to get worse. Running a 3 person plumbing company could easily compete with most tech jobs.
In other words, the market is working as intended, by making jobs more lucrative because there's a shortage?
Only one person (the oldest one) from my like 20-30ppl circle within age range of 20-30 gets close to IT salaries, that's ridiculous
in most cases it is around 40% (around 2 minimal wages) of my *nothing special* salary by IT standards (4.5 minimal wages), people with better cards get 7-10 minimal wages here, top people like 15-20+
and they see no reasonably easy way to jump higher (e.g within one or two years)
I can't honestly recommend anything but IT to anyone that can put a lot of effort (while mentioning all bad things ofc)
>to have an advantage that other people do not know about:
(without that last part)
Plumbers doing fancy installs, not plunging toilets, over $100/hr. Huge demand, not nearly enough workers.
Some of the trades pay very, very, well.
Heck live in nannies working 8 hour shifts don't have to pay for housing and they pull in 60k-80k.
I know a woman running her own cat nail cutting service who is making good money and looking to hire help.
It baffles me that our markets are so inefficient that it’s 125% more effective for me to take time off my ‘highly skilled’ engineering job to do ‘low skilled’ renovation/repair work myself.
I can only imagine all of the inefficiency comes from teams of salesmen/project managers/owners who suck all of value out.
But still how do they get away with such bad deals? Are people so pigeonholed that they can’t imagine doing the work themselves? Is getting bonded/licensed/whatever other paperwork is required to compete with these sleazy companies that difficult? I’m sure a lot of people wouldn’t mind learning how to install drain systems for $125/hr minus overhead.
In the 3-county rural area where I've spent most of my time recently, we have 3 Lowes, 2 Home Depots, a Menard's, multiple Orschelns and Tractor Supplies, and probably fifty smaller hardware stores and lumber yards. This is many thousands of commercial square feet basically devoted to home improvement, for an area with fewer than 140,000 residents. If it were possible to hire this sort of work without significant expense, the home supply market would be very different.
I'm not criticizing any carpenters or plumbers here. Their work is naturally seasonal and cyclical, and our society DGAF about people with that sort of work. If an electrician would wire your new bedroom for less than $3,000, he wouldn't be able to afford $1,000/month for medical insurance for his family, at least not every month of the year.
It’s worse than that. Even when you try to hire Americans, it’ll turn out that only the salesman/owner are legally working. The actual work is almost exclusively done by immigrants being paid exploitative wages.
It’s frustrating that there is actually money in the industry but such a small amount reaches the laborers.
I don’t think it’s particularly baffling. A large class of jobs, including the trades and so-called “low skilled” professions, are in very high demand - which indicates that what they do is valuable to a lot of people - and while you could theoretically do their job yourself, many people simply don’t want to “get their hands dirty.”
In my opinion that’s a good thing by the way. People who do jobs that are important for us and few people want to do should be paid accordingly.
If you want something done right, you gotta do it yourself.
I have noticed though that the large brand name plumbers are the most expensive. I think it's because they're mandated to upsell on any call. I hired one for $100 to replace some shower fixtures. But he spent 2 hours both figuring out what else he could do, and writing it all up and putting it in their database.
On that list of things was replacing the water pressure regulator. For $1500. It's a $300 part, and it screws on and off. Or you could buy a $100 restoration kit instead.
I was also recently quoted $1100 to replace two toilets. Not including the toilets. Looking online it should take 1-2 hours per toilet for an experienced plumber, and around $50-100 to dispose of each. So that's, at best, $200-$250 per hour. My hourly earnings after taxes are about $50. So I both learned how to, and replaced, the toilets in about 4 hours.
Disposing of the old toilet, eh, that is a bit more work depending on how far your local dump is.
Someone on Nextdoor was confused about how to "add those jack things" to the ethernet cables in her prewired house. I spent a few minutes linking her to YT videos and an article so she could do it herself. No response, but a few weeks later someone else PM'd me: "Wanna make a couple bucks?"
Ignoring the tone-deafness of that question: yes, low voltage wiring quotes are ridiculous, but it's also one of the easiest DIY projects you can do if have an attic or crawlspace. I installed four access points through my attic and a UAP-AC-M-PRO-US for backyard coverage.
Double the number of large quality state universities.
Re-index public university tuition to what they were in 2000 + inflation. Mandate that funding comes with X number increase in tenured professors.
Re-instate public funding for state universities to what it was in 2000 + inflation.
A supply/demand imbalance is in effect, and bloat has taken hold on top of that.
Yes building new 20k student universities takes time, but in 20 years these problems will be solved.
Could you realistically get room and board down below $8K/year with more spartan dormitories and meal plans? Maybe, but not by much I don't think.
https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college
On the other hand, if your goal is to churn as many bodies out as possible with degrees, it's a pretty big waste of money. We could ship in frozen tyson chicken from China or whatever and just deep fry it as dinner, and turn the dorms into pod hotels or something.
Of course that goes from ideal to complete dystopia, but if that's your goal... lol.
As Bronn of the Blackwater said, “it’s all [housing policy] in the end”.
The problem in the US is that "community college" is seen as a lower grade qualification that people "settled" for, instead of an educational focused institutional with bare bones and no immoral mandatory tie-ins (e.g. first year mandatory high price accommodations/gyms/meal plans, etc).
I understand community colleges have a lot of problems too (e.g. low educator pay and conditions). I'm just pointing out that everyone thinks that a European University is 1:1 with the city-colleges of the US, when in reality they're often nothing that fancy and pretty bare-bones.
As far I can tell there aren't capacity issues to get accredited education at the undergrad level. The prices are driven by student loan availability and the need for investment in amenities for colleges to attract students.
Increasing the number of universities might worsen the problem due to the latter needing to redouble investments to attract students.
Does the US have colleges that choose to attract students with lower prices instead?
How are both of these true? If a job pays poorly, doesn't that suggest there are many people willing and able to do those jobs, relative to the need for the job to be done?
Maybe this results from some market distortion? But AFAIK the main market distortion in the farming industry is the opposite: subsidies that make farming more attractive than it would be, which would tend to increase farm workers' equilibrium wages.
No. This notion of relentless competition is insane. One school district was paying a janitor barely a living wage. The standard response was "he could improve himself / get a degree, and find a better job. That shifts all blame on him an ignored the fact that the district expects to pay a non living wage for that position, they'll just find someone else if he left.
I will say this. Both my grandfathers were farmers. One worked his whole life and died broke. The other invested what he could, and never worked the land a day in my life (that I can remember). He once said that he didnt make his money farming, meaning it was from saving and investing. He rented his land, barn, and equipment to others.
IMHO investing is really close to renting (yes, I have some investments). SaaS is rent. Loaning money is rent. We increasingly live in a world where or renters and owners and people who do the most actual work are the least valued. It's still not a rebuttal, just a general observation that things aren't "fair" for some definitions of "fair". This situation is a societal choice and doesnt have to be that way. I'm not sure what a better way looks like though.
Yes, feel free to say that farmers are payed low. But it remains the same that if they are paid this low, then we don't really need more farmers entering the industry.
Instead hopefully less people will join that industry.
https://research.newamericaneconomy.org/report/immigration-a...
That might be true for markets in the abstract but the market for farm labor is distorted in several ways. One is due to historical reasons farm labor is treated differently from other labor categories and the end result is many of those workers have fewer protections. The second is, as others mentioned, many cannot seek other work due to lack of documentation. In effect becoming a captive labor force with limited ability to advocate for itself.
As an aside, whenever markets display aberrant behavior in the real world, it pays to look for the distortions. They're usually not hard to spot.
Regarding farm labor having fewer protections. In general, labour protections can be distortion-creating (e.g. a minimum wage) or distortion-busting (e.g. rules that ensure people are paid on time).
Regarding the captive labor force: this might be bad for non citizens (and humanity overall), but it seems like it's good for US citizens, who benefit from increased (unlimited?) supply of farm labor, reducing upward pressure on food prices.
If I've understood the above correctly, it seems that 'we need farm workers' isn't an actual problem that needs a solution (from the perspective of US citizens or, by extension, the US government).
What have I missed?
Or it suggests that labor doesn't flow through the system as easily as the theory assumes it does, or that the theory assumes incorrect things about the world, or that it's just wrong on the face of it in a whole lot of actual real world cases. As the biologists say, it's usually not the lab mouse who's wrong.
Any ideas?
Basically, you've got a pile of short-sighted, emotional apes, often operating under conditions of stress or duress, with imperfect information and a planning system that's effectively hijacking stress responses designed to respond to actual flesh & blood predators to evaluate interest rates. All that indicates to me that the cohabitation of "we can't find workers" and "no, we're not raising wages" is maybe less surprising than theory would suggest.
Specific to what's happening in the farm labor market, I'd suspect there's a lot of interplay between the immigration system being pretty broken and farm owners being on the whole kind of crappy businessmen that leads to this particular market distortion.
Have I understood correctly?
People repeat that but what is it based on? Most of the population, including most people who have economic stability and freedom, have not had STEM jobs and very likely will not have STEM jobs.
More importantly, college is about much more than job training. College prepares people to be adults in every way, not to be a resource for corporations.
As If you have to go to college to become an adult.
A lot of college programs seem like their purpose is for some very wealthy and sheltered children to become “cultured”, but that is completely unrelated to the skills needed to be a functioning adult or to take significant responsibilities in your life.
College and university were never supposed to be about job training. They were supposed to teach one how to learn so you could become a lifelong learner and continue your own education in any field you chose to pursue and to use those skills to benefit the society at large so that everyone can benefit from an increasing understanding of the world.
Instead, what we have now, is an increasing focus on becoming a corporate employee, who devotes their life to marketing and selling products that society doesn’t need and are in fact increasingly destroying society and harming individual rights and lessening opportunity with each iteration. A higher education is increasingly designed for specialized corporate tasks that do not improve society and fail to solve the most pressing problems at hand.
Look at the marvels modern democracy has created with a population that mostly wasn’t college educated. Does democracy work better today, with vastly higher college graduation rates, than it did 30 years ago?
Also, I have two step siblings in college and they aren’t learning any of those things. They’re learning fantasies that make them less well-equipped to deal with reality than their parents and grandparents who didn’t go to college.
I see little benefit in discussing how things should be instead of what they are. There are clearly forces that pivoted universities towards what they are today, telling people what university should be isn't gonna fix anything.
More importantly, who decided university is the only place you could learn this, or that you could not become a life long learner long before going to university?
It seems that institutional education is precisely what gives people the impression that there is such a thing as "stop learning" aka graduation.
What makes you say they are that, and for everyone, and from everyone's perception? Because lots of people say it on HN? Because lots of people say it anywhere? Does that make it true?
And if it is true, it changed once, why can't it change again? Through these discussions is how society changes - and it will change, one way or another.
> who decided university is the only place you could learn this, or that you could not become a life long learner long before going to university?
It seems like universities are the best place to learn, given the obvious resources? If I want to learn about history, it would be good to have experts in history, books about history, other people studying history, etc.?
Universities that stifle dissenting opinions are the best place to learn? Interesting.
There are plenty of online resources these days with active communities where you can learn from peers without fear of being penalized by your peers or an ideologically captured professor who will fail you for not toeing the idealogical line.
> ideologically captured professor who will fail you for not toeing the idealogical line
It's a baseless accusation against nobody.
> you can learn from peers
Peers are no substitue for experts. If I want to become a doctor, I need to learn from professors of medicine, not peers. Who would hire your 'peers' to teach a course in whatever you want to learn? Who would ask their advice?
That would be true prior to the internet and/or digitalization of resources.
Today, a kid in the 3rd world country can access those very same resources. Whats left is the value of the credential - accepted in the marketplace.
They cannot access the experts to mentor them and teach them, they can't access much of scholarly work, which is in expensive books and research papers.
I'm not a child and not in a 3rd world country; I've been through higher education, and seriously studying anything is inefficient and impossible - I simply can't catch up with the expertise of professors in selecting the media and understanding it.
who said it can't? It will be changed by looking into the mirror and fix the incentives or whatever that corrupted higher education. Not by preaching people how they should invest their time and efforts. Preaching only works in churchs.
College campuses have gone through severe idealogical capture, so the idea that going through a 4-year degree leads to a well informed populace is laughable.
I would argue that a 4-year peace corps posting in an improvised country would lead to a better informed population than any liberal arts education.
Reactionaries repeat that over and over, which is their most common tactic for any issue. But reptition is not truth, as we have learned well in the Internet age, though that hasn't stopped people from repeating it. Also, the reactionaries main objection seems to be that their own ideology isn't taught (including things like denial of climate change and racism); they insist they are a non-ideological norm and everything else is ideology, again through repetition. Academia requires proof; it's not a place of equity for bad ideas. It's also a place that disrespects the current establishment; again, no ideas get special treatment.
Tell that to Judith Butler.
It's sad that so many comments like this are dismissive, and therefore not much reason or argument is put behind them, making them very thin.
You can be an adult with no education or training at all, and for most of human history, that's what happened. Is that our standard? Just 'be' an adult? Why have any schooling?
People repeat that but what is it based on?
Most of the adult population have not gone to college but somehow manage to become functioning adults.
That's what we're seeing now. Understanding where that led last time is useful.
In the 19th century, nobody had that all much firepower. Battles were local. When that changed, the routine minor wars of the 19th century turned into World War One.
> In the 19th century, nobody had that all much firepower. Battles were local.
Knowing some history of Napoleon, for example, would help too. :) But yes, your general point is taken. And then 25 years later, WWII ...
We can't do better? Functioning is our only standard? We could go back to the Middle Ages, or be hunter-gatherers, where for 95% of homo sapien history probably most adults were 'functioning'.
You don't define what adult means. You don't say or imply what ways college would help you become a better one.
For what I would define as "adult", which is understanding the realities of life outside the shelter of their family infrastructure, I would argue most colleges don't really further a student's self-reliance in that way.
If anything, they create another, different reality bubble which is again popped when they are dropped into to the actual real world, often with a mountain of debt. This is the point at which, in my opinion, where someone learns to become an adult.
Does learning new information and skills help one become a better functioning adults? Of course. But college doesn't have a monopoly on being the way to acquire information and skills.
As the price of education in the US continues to increase (for no good reason, other than people can get loans to pay it), college will increasingly fail the cost/benefit analysis for a lot occupations.
As an aside, your attitude seems to imply that you think people who have not gone to college are lesser in some way. I would apply some critical analysis to that.
I’m all for setting the minimum wage for farm workers at $25/hr. Within 2-3 years every manual farm worker will be replaced by a machine, and we’ll all be better off for it.
Well, not the manual workers, temporarily. But then we’ll have to deal with the problem of unemployment honestly rather than leaving make-work jobs around.
The real problem is machines can't replace those jobs or they would have. 25/h would mean very high prices for local food so everything will come via imports.
It is a problem for them. They wouldn't come if it weren't economically advantageous to do so. Losing those jobs leaves them worse off, at least in the short term.
Oh yeah you think the only thing between us and a fully automated robot-run future is labor market conditions? The perfect robot slaves will not be forthcoming for quite awhile. We will have to settle for human slaves, or in modern times, immigrants totally reliant on their employer and without the normal rights afforded citizens for our low prices. I sympathize with libertarian and capitalist ideals but I find it disturbing that the agricultural and energy base of the US economy is anything but free market.
The "preparing to be an adult" value decayed exponentially for me. The first year staying in halls with my peers was extremely valuable. The rest of the years were not so valuable.
Also, this value was 95% social. There was very little that uni itself taught me about being an adult.
I learned so much, I cannot imagine having only the knowledge and intellectual skills that I had from high school.
Regarding knowledge and intellectual skills, the vast majority of my knowledge gained in the last ~5 years has been from self-teaching or exploring things I found interesting and I think I developed far more intellectual skills from doing that than going to university.
University felt extremely intellectually restrictive to me. You were given a ton of material that you needed to learn at a surface level to pass tests. There was little room for exploration and deep understanding within courses.
Most of the material did not seem like it was going to be useful for me. I don't like learning for the sake of it, I prefer to try and focus on usefulness.
Why do I need to learn about how to draw structures in isometric and oblique or understand CPU registers when I have absolutely zero interest in those things and never want to do that kind of work?
Because "foundational knowledge" or something, even though the vast majority of people will never use the vast majority of the knowledge they learn. I've asked my friends who completed degrees how much of the information from their degree they use at work and it's practically nothing.
Being able to get 1.5 years' experience in paid internships when I was at Drexel was also hugely valuable towards kick-starting my post-college career without adding additional classes.
In the humanities, learning in depth (to express it superficially), exploration, and learning the skills of how to learn in those ways, is fundamental; it's the point. Try a humanities program - you would love it!
From my perspective most faculty add very little value, so in terms of learning and exploration there's not much point in paying boatloads of money to attend when I could go through the material (Or similar) myself if I'm interested.
> I'm highly skeptical of university's value-add
This new social trend - which suits the reactionary movement very well (which doesn't mean you are a reactionary - is really tragic. We are just destroying so much in instututions and potential, so many years and resources lost, and mostly just to destroy things. It's not hard to grasp that knowledge and learning move us forward, and it's better with experts.
With people online you can at least vet them well and have access to their knowledge and advice. Even though it's not the same as a mentor I think learning from an expert online is better than having a mediocre mentor.
> It's not hard to grasp that knowledge and learning move us forward, and it's better with experts
I agree knowledge and learning are important, but I no longer feel like university is the primary place for that unless you want to go into academia. Internet communities feel like better environments than university at this point.
This doesn't feel like a purposeful destruction of university through a social trend though. The institutions are destroying themselves.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kettering_University
Even worst than than that. Ford was a huge anti-Semite and one of his papers had major influence over Hitler who then went on to genocide millions of Jews. Dude was for sure an asshole. He also fired workers who drank or gambled during their off time and had company men who raided homes of his workers.
Yes, generally speaking. And they were better prepared than people from the 1840s, who mostly were illiterate (no universal education), lost most of their kids at a young age, etc. If you spend zero years preparing for something and I spend four (or 12 and 16 years), I'm going to be better prepared most likely. There are diminishing marginal returns at some point, but college is qualitatively very different than high school.
This question comes up many times, as if it's a personal insult to people without college degrees. Let's imagine it does insult them (which I don't think it does); should we reject all progress for ourselves because others don't have access to it and might be offended? You have access to the Interet and I don't - are you saying you are better than me? The Internet is useless! And now we don't want to offend people in the 1930s? There are things other people have done that benefitted their lives, and that I missed out on - good for them!
This is not an answer to a “in what way” question. I will grant you that elementary school teaching people to read, write and basic arithmetics, does indeed inculcate skills very important in adult life, but from there to argue that a marginal year of education gives you some marginal amount of human capital, only shows how weak your argument is: it’s completely useless without trying to quantify the actual learning. What if a year of college actually reduces a day’s worth of useful stuff? What a waste of time it would be, and yet totally compatible with your argument.
And, it might be of interest to you, that the last month of 12th year of education, and last month of 16th year “teaches” a lot more useful stuff than the previous 4 years in terms of how it translates to increased success in adult life, as studies show. This is actually obvious to everyone, that obtaining diploma is worth more than 4 years worth of learning, but the point is that education is not about learning.
> it’s completely useless without trying to quantify the actual learning
Most things in life can't be quantified, yet aren't useless.
> the last month of 12th year of education, and last month of 16th year “teaches” a lot more useful stuff than the previous 4 years in terms of how it translates to increased success in adult life, as studies show
What studies?
No, I just raised this as a response to your comment claiming people in 1840 America were "mostly illiterate"[1]: I was talking about reading and writing, because you were talking about literacy, and I do agree that it is valuable to teach people basic literacy and numeracy. In no way my comment above implies that I question the value of education past 5th grade.
That said, I do in fact question value of state-organized mass education past 5th grade as it currently exist, yes. To be clear, I'm not questioning the value of learning things past 5th grade, but rather the way we pretend people learn things today.
> Most things in life can't be quantified, yet aren't useless.
If you decompose the syntax of the sentence you're referring to, you'll find that the "useless" in it does not refer to "education", but rather to your argument: it is useless to argue that "X is good for you, so extra 4-8 years doing X is worth it", unless you can quantify exactly how good X in fact is for you, and how good extra 4-8 years of doing X would be.
Say, imagine X to be "learning to play a musical instrument": it's probably worthwhile for everyone to spend some time doing that, but the idea that everyone needs to spend at least 12 years of their lifes, and most people should spend 4 on top of that, is rather ludicrous. How do you know that regular schooling is not exactly liked that, without trying to quantify it? You don't.
> What studies?
The Google Scholar keyword for you to familiarize yourself with the rather substantial literature on the topic is "sheepskin effect".
[1] - you are very much wrong that Americans in 1840 were mostly illiterate, by the way: literacy in US was historically always very high, and by mid 1800s, large majority was already literate, despite lack of federally-mandated government schooling. This is a legacy of English heritage, where majority of male Englishmen were already literate in mid 1600s. They did not get there through top-down state-organized schooling, it was mostly a bottom-up effort, where local Church played huge role.
Unintuitively, harder lives don't make people tougher. Intuitively, they make people more exhausted and traumatized. Look at how functional people were back then when they were elderly (though that could be due to other aspects of health). Look at anyone who has had a hard life; they wear down.
Similarly, children, contrary to some pop politico-psychology, generally grow stronger if they feel safer. Unsafe kids are scared to face the world and often never develop an inner sense of security. Trauma leaves wounds that sometimes never heal. Safe kids feel like they can brave the world, and they internalize that sense of safety that their parents model and give them.
Only 2% of Bangladeshis go to college. Are the rest not adults? Indeed, I’d say the opposite is true. Apart from job training, the main function of college in America seems to be extending adolescence and deferring dealing with the real world. 18 year olds in Bangladesh are a lot more “adult” than many college-educated 30-somethings.
There are many ways to prepare an individual for that responsibility. In western nations, that is often done more through a formal educational program than through the community and family.
This also isn't a "you must have X amount of civic responsibility" as different societies are looking for adults to have different amounts of responsibility within that society.
While American college is to an extent the deferment of responsibility, in many cases it is also the exposure to a wider range of cultures than one experienced up through high school. It is that exposure to other people and culture - learning to get along with a roommate or doing your own laundry in a gradual process that college presents.
In that respect, it is not a deferment of dealing with the real world, but rather a gradual introduction to the broader world. While the 18 year old American may be able to do unskilled labor and get along (tolerably) with siblings, being able to work in an office or understand that the upbringing of the driver of the carpool isn't the same as yours - that comes from that exposure to other people and cultures.
We're already doing a pretty terrible job educating people and it shows. How much worse does it get when its outsourced to the 'community'? Communities in the US (and everywhere) are fragmented, class stratified, religiously bound structures that we have seen the detriment of when it comes to civic participation. Just check out the IG page of any former evangelical or mormon female.
A secular democracy requires education and time to participate in civic and civil society. That education must imho be grounded in not just how to think, but also the history of humanity. Otherwise we are signing ourselves up for a return to much darker days.
But that’s orthogonal to my point. If I were looking for people to rebuild America (or even just maintain it) I’d much rather have adults like your mom (or my mom) than the children graduating from American colleges these days.
My mom flipped the order, working until she had us, then taking about a decade off her career and doing an MS in Computer Science in the meanwhile, before returning to her career.
> 18 year olds in Bangladesh are a lot more “adult”
Imagine an 18 year old in the US. They could go to college and learn more about the world, themselves, etc., or get a menial job, an apartment, and become more adult. In fact, any learning or training is about investing in the future. Any investment is about current sacrifice (time, money, etc.) for better future returns.
We could also ask the same question - and it was asked, by prior generations - about 12 year olds, who could become adults and work in coal mines. People used to get married at that age too. In Judaism, 13 year old males technically become adults by completing their Bar Mitzvahs (obviously an ancient tradition). Were they better off? Was our society better off? Is there some benefit to achieving adulthood sooner?
Taking it further, kids who lack effective parenting, either through accident or neglect, often grow up fast. And lacking that time to be kids, to learn and explore and grow themselves, costs them for the rest of their lives. I grew a lot in high school and college, and I would have missed so much if I had to be a full-fledged adult then.
The argument that prior generations lacked college educations and therefore future ones have nothing to gain, or that it's an insult to prior generations to say there is something to gain, seem very flawed for obvious reasons. It's wrong that so many people in Bangledesh, who are just as able to grow and benefit, are denied the opportunity and those benefits.
Let's keep building and improving a world so that they, like so many others over the last several decades, become the first in their families to benefit from college.
I’ve heard of others talk up the college experience, but I fail to see what’s so special about it. What exactly did I miss in my development? How exactly am I different (besides having a 4-6 year head-start in the working world)?
Parties and friends are also made outside of campus, in the adult world. Working a job at a young age and having to be responsible for yourself builds life skills early. Some of which, my college-educated friends are still having trouble building well into their 30’s. I know some that are terrified of “growing up”: they keep earning degrees or still in their 2nd masters program, accumulating debt that is clearly unsustainable. Many are in fields that inside the sheltered and honestly, kind of bizarre world of academia look nothing like what actually happens in the real world, and they are in for a very rude awakening when that house of cards comes tumbling down.
Every time I meet someone who went to college, if you’re in the same job as them without having a degree, the default response is “but I got the experience”. Part of me thinks this is some kind of rationalization so they don’t have to accept the fact that they might have just been swindled and could have just as easily did what I did and get the same outcome.
I went back to school after a decade of web development, and learned a ton. I think I’m a much better developer than I would have been had I learned only what I thought I needed for my job (could be wrong about that, but I don’t think I am). I’ve also worked with plenty of people without degrees who were better developers than me, but to a person, I think they would have greatly benefited from a broader theoretical foundation than what they built through self directed learning.
One thing you should think about is that rationalization likely applies to you just as much as it does to the college educated people you’re talking about.
I was in the college is useless boat before I went back and most of it was rationalizing my choices—plus a bit of feeling inferior.
It’s one thing to decide that college wasn’t the right decision for you (and maybe it wasn’t). It’s another entirely to write off everyone who went as suckers.
Yes, having dedicated time to focus on learning was great. But I was effective at that because I'd already learned to, well, learn, on my own, by homeschooling the latter half of high school (where I'd study, take CLEP tests).
College isn't for suckers, but the scholastic benefits of it can be gotten through other means (and should probably be done because a job you're interested in requires it, ideally in the confines of that job, like an apprenticeship in the trades). Many of the other purported benefits (social, etc) are BS.
The main benefit I can think of outside of that dedicated study time is being forced into more of a cultural milieu than I had experienced prior. I think that is important, but I also think that entirely depends on the school, just as it depends on the job, so I'm not sure that's entirely a college benefit so much as a "get into the city if you're living somewhere suburban or rural" benefit.
Of course it’s possible, but the number of people who have the discipline/inclination to get through a degree’s worth (or even a significant fraction of a degree’s worth) of education on their own is very small. Small enough that if the reason you’re skipping college is because you think you can/will learn everything they can teach you on your own, you’re most likely kidding yourself.
With self directed learning it’s also shockingly easy to develop huge blind spots that you have no idea you have.
> and should probably be done because a job you're interested in requires it
I’ve personally benefited a good deal from taking the year of physics I was forced to take, despite no job having ever required it.
The same goes for all the papers I had to write in non CS classes.
Where else will you get the direct access to expertise in all those fields, guiding you in what works/experiments/skills/etc to read/learn/acquire, answering questions personally, the massive labs and libraries, the students to study with.
As someone who has tried to study on my own at a serious level, I would say the opposite: Studying on my own is nothing like it. I am very jealous of those in college. I don't know which books and papers to read, how to contextualize them, what they have and lack; I have nobody to ask (Reddit and Stack Exchange being very poor substitutes); I lack access to resources that are far too expensive, JSTOR being a simple example, making much study very time-consuming or impossible. I regularly run into things, years later, that would have been introduced in the first day of class by an expert - I have an unknown but large quantity of blind spots.
That's kind of my point - the nature of "study on my own" is different than "can I find the resources I need to solve a particular problem". College is creating a problem of "pass this test" or "complete this assignment"; studying on your own, yes, you don't know where your blind spots are or where to begin, because you don't have a problem you're trying to solve. College provides you some, but they aren't fundamentally different than work problems. And while some classes may attempt to 'teach' the material, the ones where that was an effective use of my time (rather than just read the textbook, or those where class time was unrelated to the projects we were graded on) were definitely in the minority. YMMV.
You can ask a professor, or multiple ones. If the classes are within your major, the school will guide you. This part is a non-problem. You can also take several classes for a week or two, depending on the school, and see which ones suit your priorities.
> College provides you some, but they aren't fundamentally different than work problems.
Usually the opposite is said, that college problems are not at all like what you encounter in work, that students are unprepared for work problems and that professors don't understand them. College problems are crafted carefully for you to acquire knowledge and skills; work problems are crafted to avoid having you learn, because that takes extra time.
> And while some classes may attempt to 'teach' the material, the ones where that was an effective use of my time (rather than just read the textbook, or those where class time was unrelated to the projects we were graded on) were definitely in the minority. YMMV.
I think this is not realistic for most people. It's also possible you missed a lot without the professor's context and expertise. In anything, would you rather just read a book or have access to an expert mentor? There's no question IME.
Maybe it depends on the courses, which I'm starting to suspect explains a lot of the response at HN: Were you in a STEM field, particularly T or E?
Conversely I learned functional programming, multiple languages and new CS concepts, fault tolerant system design, and system architecture skills, all in the context of a short period of work.
Regarding the assertions: Of course, one anecdoctal experience says nothing about a population, and in the population, career and other outcomes are far better for college graduates.
We are all by not knowing what we missed and, as you say about others, to rationalize our choices. Framing the question - always the most powerful mode of argument - by saying someone meets the standard (i.e., you are happy in your life), so why do something else, makes any possible alternative useless. What good is a winning lottery ticket either? But the question is, what are the different sets of outcomes from each alternative choice? Each alternative, such as college, makes us better off in some ways, worse off in others - and that includes impacting things that the other alternatives don't touch.
You're defining the question as if college benefits are social life and speed of acquiring adult life skills and responsibilities. If those are someone's aims, I'd agree - don't go! College is about critical thinking skills, knowledge, and learning skills, which last a lifetime. Are your thinking skills so good that they can't be improved? Do you have nothing to learn? Not me. How do improve those things? Imagine studying with an expert who not only guides you in what to study, but explains the works based many other works, context, etc.; answers your questions regularly, person-to-person, in their office and via computer; pushes you to see dimensions and angles that you didn't know about, and to do it at a high level; and reviews your understanding and gives you feedback. And then it would be great to do that with others studying the same thing. And if the study needs it, if they provided other resources: A huge library of other works and every reseach paper ever written (along with experts in each field that help you discover excellent, relevant materials); labs with specialized equipment; etc. etc.
If college didn't exist for learning, it would be too good to be invented.
Also, don't you want to learn about yourself, the world, etc.? What you read on the Internet is so far removed from the quality of knowledge, it's laughable, and it's tragic.
> I know some that are terrified of “growing up”
> sheltered and honestly, kind of bizarre world of academia
These are well-worn stereotypes. People inside and outside school have trouble growing up; handling a college workload is no joke - much harder than early jobs, which often are 40 hours and not challenging (many service jobs). And academia is no more bizarre than other industries. You should see what goes on in SV or on Wall Street if you want bizarre.
Yes, I'm saying that you personally - and your dog too - are an ignorant, uneducated, menial worker, who can't count higher than 10 without your toes, while I can count to 1024.
With that out of the way, can we actually talk about something valuable? I see lots of people trying to shut down a reasoned discussion that challenges the orthodoxy (which currently on HN is, college is a waste of time).
Did I use that word right?
I would be interested in people's experiences, good and bad, with having (not) gone to college, and serious analysis - everyone seems to be trying to shut down any serious discussion and exploration.
I went to college and I've had many times that I wished I'd studied harder. I've also wished at times that I skipped college then and went later in life, when I would benefit far more. I haven't wished that I didn't go; I learned so much that forms my understanding of the world, my thinking skills, etc.; I would be a different person without it. You can't tell me that I didn't benefit greatly from college but I'm just one person. But can you tell anyone that they studied for four years, hard, and didn't learn much? That's a big stretch for anyone; you need to learn enough to pass ~32 classes at various college levels, and that's a minimum.
Many people say here that 'I didn't go and I'm fine'. Fine isn't the question; nobody said we'd die without it, but that's not our standard for our choices. Each path leads to different collections of outcomes, better and worse and completely different, and we have blind spots about what the other path could be like (having no experience of it). Maybe college emphasizes different skills, develops different tools, with different advantages and disadvantages, as an example of how that would work.
I also wonder how much HN readers think of or have experienced STEM only. The humanities is more important (unpopular, I know, and both are essential IMHO); it addresses the most critical issues in the world and life, the ones beyond quantitative understanding, which is most of them.
I watched a bunch of Shakespeare plays recently, fictionalized histories of Rome and England [0]. From them you learn more about our current society and humanity in general, including today's crazy disfuntion, the mis/disinformation and people's responses, than from all the quantitative research combined; art is a mirror that looks into ourselves. And as objects of another human being's creation, they are incredibly inspirational and beautiful. I'm wiser and have grown since a week ago. Would I turn to Shakespeare and get so much from the plays without studying literature in college? I doubt it, though that's just me.
[0] Without knowing the reader's experience with the Bard, let me recommend Julius Caesar especially, also Henry VI Part 2 and Part 3, and of course their sequel, Richard III. Richard II is good too. I'd skip Henry VI Part 1 but read a synopsis as context for Part 2: Part 1 is clearly substandard IMHO and, it turns out, is believed to be mostly written by a collaborator, Christopher Marlowe. It does constrast the difference between an excellent playwright of their day using the same forms and an all-time genius of character and language.
There also isn't a single person on HN who has a American STEM degree who has only experienced STEM. Nearly all STEM college degrees require a significant portion of classes to be humanities (the reverse is not true for humanities majors as they can graduate having never taken any real science or math classes), and every single high school graduate has spent 13 years studying the humanities, including Shakespeare which is a part of most high school English curriculums. What you view as naivety is actually an opinion born from experience.
We must stand on the shoulders of giants; you can't reinvent all the wheels, all the insights, all the knowledge and tools created by all the humans in history by yourself. Why would you? Economic specialization, including in literature, yields talented experts who learn all those things for you (they don't reinvent the wheels either, or just one or two), and unless you think you know everything, you can learn a lot from them.
> everything you describe about Shakespeare also applies to Star Wars. The prequel trilogy is a fictionalized account of the fall of the Roman Republic, and is just as useful for learning about history as Julius Caesar is.
Imagine two or ten or a hundred pieces of media that fictionalize the fall of the Roman Republic. Because they refer to the same real-life history, are all of the stories therefore of equal value (and in the same ways)? That doesn't follow at all. One could be complete BS, the other transcendent genius.
The value of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, and of Star Wars, are not learning history. I've never heard someone credit Star Wars as a resource for that before now, nor Shakespeare for that matter. Read a history book. Shakespeare uses the historical setting to talk about humanity, to - like most great art - talk about ourselves, to hold up a mirror to ourselves that looks inside. To learn about ourselves, now.
I enjoy and learn from plenty of sci-fi, including parts of Star Wars (not the prequal trilogy!). Nothing I've encountered is on the same planet as Shakespeare, but that's an impossible standard. Shakespeare was popular when alive, but is also more popular than everyone since, and in languages around the world. The works of Shakespeare are not just pop culture or nothing is more than pop culture (and then we have to differentiate between pop cultural forms so the term means nothing). Einstein and many others have studied physics; their work is not all of the same value.
> the reverse is not true for humanities majors as they can graduate having never taken any real science or math classes
That's not my experience! My experience is that STEM majors usually take lightweight humanities-for-STEM-students (apparently some think they are taking the heavyweight stuff), and humanities majors usually take STEM-for-humanities majors. I almost never saw a STEM major in high-level humanities classes (and in fairness, it would be very difficult without the prerequisites of knowledge and skill - they wouldn't know much of what was being talked about or how to address it), and I almost never saw a humanities major in high-level STEM classes, for similar reasons.
And IME both sets of majors thought there was little purpose to taking the other. 'Why are you doing that?'
In the original post I replied to, you said:
>From [Shakespeare] you learn more about our current society and humanity in general, including today's crazy disfuntion, the mis/disinformation and people's responses, than from all the quantitative research combined; art is a mirror that looks into ourselves. And as objects of another human being's creation, they are incredibly inspirational and beautiful. I'm wiser and have grown since a week ago. Would I turn to Shakespeare and get so much from the plays without studying literature in college? I doubt it, though that's just me.
The plot of the prequels revolves around Palpatine's manipulations to destroy democracy and gain absolute control over the Republic. He does so by manipulating people like the CIS/Trade Federation with misinformation and promising to take care of their legitimate grievances. He gets them to start a war, which is legitimized through a complex legal system but immoral and unjust in reality. He then uses this war to justify the creation of an army loyal to him, which he later uses to seize power. It doesn't take a genius to realize how lessons learned from the movies could be applied to real life, in the same manner that you described Shakespeare's plays doing for you. Shakespeare doesn't talk about misinformation or modern society's disfunction directly, you inferred that, and there is nothing stopping someone from drawing similar life lessons from more modern material. It's the entire concept of allegories/fables which are thousands of years old!
I noticed that you didn't make a single argument about why Shakespeare is above being pop culture; you only asserted that it is somehow better. Since future humanities students won't have grown up viewing Star Wars as plebian content, it is possible that they will worship Star Wars the same way present day ones worship Shakespeare, Dickens, and many other historical writers who wrote for primarily to entertain. Your casual dismissal of the prequels while implying that you like the original trilogy also doesn't bode well for your argument that university education in the humanities is useful for being able to analyze and draw conclusions from literature, since the prequels have a much more complex plot and fleshed out world than the originals do. The movies have just as deep of a story as any Shakespeare play and one can draw any of the conclusions you mentioned from them, and in fact many do even without having the "proper" education. There are no analysis skills that one gains from a university humanities education, which is also likely why you didn't list any of the "tools" the "giants" have created.
A humanities education is definitely not necessary, and possibly even determinantal, to address the "critical issues in the world and life, the ones beyond quantitative understanding, which is most of them", and to think otherwise is to think that being a member of an expensive book club makes you qualified to rule the world.
An experienced developer looks at code and forms perceptions 100x faster and more accurately than someone without expertise. Their brain is wired differently by their experiences, and they look for and pick out patterns, process their meaning, and understand them, all in moments without conscious thought. Similarly, someone with expertise in wine can perceive far more in a glass than someone who doesn't. I'm mostly in the latter group; often I don't know the difference.
But that doesn't imply that no difference exists; reality doesn't exist or not because I perceive it. I have no doubt that those differences exist and that the person with expertise gets far more out of that glass than I do, sees far more color and detail and shapes and images, and I take the gap between my experience and theirs as a signal that it's a fruitful territory for learning. If I denied that, and things like it, I would wall myself off from much learning.
But I can watch Shakespeare and see far more than most people who haven't studied and learned literature and arts more generally. In case you think it, I don't worship William Shakespeare, I love the works. Shakespeare is not a god and the plays are not scripture that I've been instructed to praise, but Shakespeare is just a person - like HN commenters - who made something incredible, and my experience has led me to the same response as so many others over 400 years.
on the STEM subject, teens good at math are never teacher's favorites, instead they're called nerds and some are even isolated from the rest, it's quite the opposite in Asia, or even in Europe. That's the root cause we need import so many STEMs from overseas, the culture smothered STEM from K-12. K-12 is anything but success IMHO.
middle school kids are more keen about their gender or identities, or how awful US was in the past, or their hair color...high school students must show how caring they're to the community or everyone must be some leader somehow while the truth is that they can barely take care of themselves without parents' caring, for academics nowadays SAT/ACT/school-ranking/etc are either racism or unfair...I will stop here.
A road to hell.
Meanwhile many jobs are trying to sell themselves not through a TC that would let one hit these markers, but through football tables, pizza parties, drinks and other social outings. Not to hate on fun activities, but it sure does feel like trying to keep young adults in a perpetual student lifestyle when you keep the booze but not give them the wage to advance in life.
There are plenty of young adults who want to grow up, meeting a ridiculous amount of resistance.
Today those jobs are held by adults, expecting to be able to raise a family on it. Teenagers rarely have jobs, their first job waits until after they graduate from college.
Let's not cover up bad systems because a few individuals rise to the artificial challenge and bite through.
I remember at 18 signing up for 5 years in the Navy. I'd say that is pretty adult. If it isn't, you should consider contacting your senator about raising the age of enlistment.
The ones that do sign up, though, grow up fast.
All the more reason to contact your Senator. Lower the drinking age or make the age of enlistment higher. Adult enough to decide to become a sacrificial pawn, but not adult enough to drink a beer.
For various reasons (safety regulation, emissions requirements, minimum wage not keeping up with inflation, insurance outpacing inflation, cash for clunkers etc…) it’s now almost impossible to afford a car working a few hours at McDonald’s.
There’s also far more fast food restaurants per capita than there used to be, and food service/retail make up a larger part of the economy in general.
To top it off, the age of the average American has increased almost 10 years since 1960, so there are just fewer kids to do the jobs.
We sure had fun shredding tires with it. I was lucky to survive the accident that terminated it.
More than once he'd announced in class that he was grading the class on a curve, but me separately.
Suffice to say we didn't get along.
What was his public reason for doing so?
Apparently, I was pretty obnoxious in high school. It took me far too long to learn this. (And to learn when not to speak my opinion.) I would have been well served if I had swallowed pride and asked teachers (and peers) for some perspective on how my attitude was, frankly, self destructive.
A good interpretation of humans generally is 'giant baby monkeys', in that we have curiosity and openness consistent with juveniles but not with most adult animals.
>on the STEM subject, teens good at math are never teacher's favorites, instead they're called nerds and some are even isolated from the rest,
This doesn't bear any resemblance to my experience of a not-so-special US public school in the 2000s.
I'm not saying your comment is without valid points, but you are throwing the baby out with the bathwater on your attitude about childhood.
It persists into the professional space, just look at how infantilizing Silicon Valley became, trying to turn the workplace into a playpen complete with propeller head hats.
Instead of playing foosball and gaming online, we should be playing cards and drinking like previous generations?
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/9tk0jw/w...
my kids are still in k-12, nothing has really changed for them though.
Do you genuinely believe this stuff that youre typing? I know that conservative medias say this and use it as a boogeyman to get themselves into power, but do you truly believe it? Ive worked with elementary, middle, and high school kids for the last 5 years, in an area that conservatives constantly make fun of and call awful things, but none of that is even close to the reality.
Kids know that gay people exist (and are okay with that), and they know that they might want to look or act differently than they wouldve been forced to in the past.
Kids today are significantly more accepting of tech and STEM subjects than they were even just a few years ago. Its significantly more common and accepted to play video games, kids are interested in video and picture editing because of social media (like TikTok), and they are increasingly tech literate. None of these boogeyman topics you claim are true, but they are continually parroted by people who want to move our education system backwards.
And as a side note, > high school students must show how caring they're to the community
I personally think this is a great thing. We should encourage more community involvement with young people, especially things that help out disadvantaged community members and educate them about our government. Im surprised someone who parrots the original phrases from your comment would be against something like being caring in your community.
my high school kids told me they are aware of those sensitive gender subjects at middle school and they feel it's more frequent these days.
Google will show you some data points, e.g. Gen Z (from 1995+) has close to 20% claiming to be LGBT+. Things changed a lot.
I'm neither a liberal or conservative, I consider myself independent.
The next generation should not tether themselves at all to what is in our comfort zones; if they aren't going far beyond them, they aren't thinking for themselves. When I was young I remember thinking that the old people were jaded, corrupt, and didn't even try to address their ignorance - and now that I'm 'old', I can see I was right! With power has come all those things - not a commitment to truth, but disdain for being made to learn anything. God I hope the next generation doesn't follow or accomodate us. And to this day, some people I know in the prior generation still don't understand things that are normal to us now as adults, because we grew up with them. I know some that won't wear blue jeans because they see jeans as a symbol of a challenging culture.
They say progress happens one funeral at a time! :)
The numbers are vastly higher than scientific estimates of how many people are in these groups. That suggests it’s become a form of self expression, which is just a way of denying reality.
> We did plenty that was shocking and new to our parents, and equally mocked - do you remember?
Who is “we?” Millennials, as a group, are the good kids compared to baby boomers. They have less sex, do less drugs, etc.
> How absurdly narrow-minded our parents seemed? We were mostly right too.
Our parents started down this road of self expression and denying the realities of life. Mostly they sobered up after the drug binges of the 1960s, but left millennials poorly positioned to handle the real world. We are lucky to live in a society our grandparents built, because I don’t think we could build that society again today.
> The next generation should not tether themselves at all to what is in our comfort zones; if they aren't going far beyond them, they aren't thinking for themselves.
The realities of human existence don’t change so fast. The basic mechanics of American life aren’t much different today compared to 1989. If people are rushing past the comfort zones of their parents, that means they’re increasingly living in a delusion detached from reality.
> When I was young I remember thinking that the old people were jaded, corrupt, and didn't even try to address their ignorance - and now that I'm 'old', I can see I was right!
People’s brains don’t fully develop until they’re 25. So if you believe the same things now as you did when you were young…
I thought the data was based on surveys of how people identify themselves, which only shows that identification has changed with time. Maybe fluid gender identity is a stage of development that has been denied before; who knows? Why do you have to tell these people what to do with their lives?
Self-expression is denying reality? I don't know what that means, what one has to do with the other. One way of looking at it is that what is inside you is part of reality; you are part of reality. Anyway, you are criticizing middle schoolers for denying reality?
Again, why do you have to tell them what to do, what to feel? Who are you to do it?
> ...
The rest is mostly your self-expression, not some objective reality. You are welcome to it, of course.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/age-dependency-ratio-old?...
Nah, no on is going to isolate you for being good at math. Literally, that does not happen. Isolation of kids that cant fit it does happen and some of those are good at math. But, the "being good at math" part is not what gets them isolated. It is the other stuff and behaviors, roughly in the "poor social skills" (may include "have hard time being assertive about own boundaries") that gets you isolated.
I don't know if I'd go so far as to say that it is the other "main function" but ohhh boy does this need to be discussed more. I know a few people that seemingly couldn't break out of college. College gives a clear path forward for years, each time you're admitted into a program. Give that up and what do you have? For the people I know, the answer to that question is a minimum wage job outside of their field of study.
It's discussed all the time, for decades.
> I know a few people that seemingly couldn't break out of college.
Many people have trouble moving forward, regardless of college.
1. They complain that they have to cook
2. They complain that they have to do laundry.
3. They complain they have to iron their clothes.
4. They complain they have to tidy up the apartments.
5. They mostly care about sports, movies, and if they're not religious, getting drunk. Of course, that's not necessarily true for those that go to top universities for their PhDs, but those are the minority, in any case.
6. They boast about how great it was that they didn't take humanities in their undergrad. Talking to them, it's also clear they have little understanding of the arts.
I've also met some very responsible, intellectual Bangladeshis.
There are problem people in every society.
Most people think college prepares them to be resource for corporation, or some other things. Your college education coincides with your formative years, but from my exp, college has nothing to do with growing as an adult. It's mainly moving out of your hometown and work your part time job and start planning your life.
They do? And if they do, is it true? Who are we talking about? High school students? People who read HN?
> from my exp, college has nothing to do with growing as an adult. It's mainly moving out of your hometown and work your part time job and start planning your life.
That's too bad. There is so much more going on. What about all the knowledge and critical thinking skills, from science and stats, to addressing the bigger questions in the humanities and social sciences?
Again you keep making the argument that university is the only place where you can learn how to think, which is a pretty basic human skill. If that was true, then it's a dangerous system that needs to be fixed, not something to celebrate.
I said "was true" because I didn't know that the government installed locks on books and encrypting mechanisms on the internet and public libraries so that they are only accessible from universities.
> Only activists have opinions...
That's not what I said, but you certainly did say that adult means that you HAVE TO think about those things, in some particular way that is taught in an university.
Adult to me just means you can take care of people other than yourself. Of course it's a subjective definition, but a teenager can read books/go to university and have sophisticated thoughts about the world, that doesn't make them mature.
Here is something to consider though: why is it that you only study critical thinking, scientific method or whatever at the age 18? Why do kids have to fuck around for years, apparently unable to think, before "university"? Why should they? What are they before that? mindless primates?
I didn't say that (provide a link?), though I do happen to think that adults do have to be responsible for others, as you say, and the bigger issues are big because they impact those responsibilities. The rest is your own ideas.
At college, you learn that there is no one right way to think, and also the very narrow limits of your own mind.
> a teenager can read books/go to university and have sophisticated thoughts about the world, that doesn't make them mature.
Right, college is about knowledge and thinking skills, not so much maturity (but it helps there too). For maturity, get married and work in a coal mine at 13 years old.
> why is it that you only study critical thinking, scientific method or whatever at the age 18? Why do kids have to fuck around for years
Hmmm ... I had science classes, and was taught to think critically, before college, but not nearly on the same level. Why do people not learn more complex things earlier? Why not teach graduate level physics to 6 year olds?
Again with this "at college" rhetoric. I guess if you don't go to college, you will be a bigot, on top of having no critical thinking and being an absolutely selfish individual
> For maturity, get married and work in a coal mine at 13 years old
Did college teach you this stellar argument?
Engineering programs are widely considered to be difficult to complete in 4 years. Where do you get 2 years?
Also, after my sophomore year in college, I was not nearly well-educated enough (whatever 'enough' means); I would wildly approximate that I learned 70% in the last two years. Much of freshman year was just adjusting to college, learning how to write at a college level, etc.
But most importantly, you are still focusing on college as job training, and as I imply in the GGP, specific skill training is just a side benefit. If corporations want job training, they can provide and pay for it themselves. College for the student, not the corporation.
Two, I don't think someone needs a full engineering degree to become productive. Writing my own compiler was a blast, and gave me some real insight into how computers work under the hood. But if our goal is to improve the earning potential of young adults with the minimum financial burden, I wouldn't be teaching compilers. I'd be teaching how to spin up cloud services, the network stack, and modern web dev.
College is for the student. But it also costs the student a boatload of money. If we want to give the student the best bang for their buck, approaching it as a form of job training would be more effective. Sure, companies could pay for that training. But they're not and colleges fulfill this role, and insist on tacking on a bunch of other requirements that don't really do much to help the student's job prospects.
Humanities are more important than STEM. Humanities deal with the world and yourself on issues that aren't quantifiable, which is most of the issues in life and in the world, including at work.
> if our goal is to improve the earning potential of young adults with the minimum financial burden
Again, life is much, much more than jobs - you are much, much more than what you do for some corporation - and early jobs are the least important ones. It's all so absorbed in the corporate perspective: your only value, your existence, is for serving the corporation. And it puts people permanently in that class, as servents rather than as the powerful - the citizens of a democracy, to whom the corporations report.
I think if more people studied the humanities, it would be brazenly obvious. It's craven on the part of the powerful and corporations.
This is just middle-class religious belief. And a good one, because middle-class professional people have to reproduce themselves every generation, so they have to center credentialism or fall to working class or poverty.
If you're born rich, it's easy to die rich; if you're born poor, it's easy to die poor; if you're born middle-class, remaining middle-class is a battle for credentials.
What generation? In my parents' generation, a secretary could get good health insurance for their family and retire with a pension. Today, someone new hired into that role would struggle to afford rent or health insurance for just themselves, and retirement is out of the question.
I think there is a relative amount of middle class wealth left that hides the fact that many modern jobs do not pay middle class compensation anymore. There are a lot of house poor people that might have the trappings of middle class life, but they're on life support.
In many places, to live a middle class lifestyle from 40 years ago would require young workers without assets to earn six figure incomes. Even in "affordable" places, incomes required for a middle class lifestyle are approaching six figures, as well. I'm certainly not one of those people who think STEM is the be-all and end-all solution to anything, but STEM jobs often put workers in the six figure income range.
> a secretary could get good health insurance for their family and retire with a pension. Today, someone new hired into that role would struggle to afford rent or health insurance for just themselves, and retirement is out of the question.
While I agree that wages haven't advanced outside of a the very few, secretaries aren't a good example. Computerization has made most of those skills obsolete.
Also, just because someone is doing a menial work it does not mean that they should not have a access to higher education. Especially since there's not enough of higher valued jobs for everyone. Educated worker has higher job mobility and is able to respond quickly to shifting business needs.
Well, a worker with a college degree has higher job mobility. The worker being educated may be orthogonal. And I'm not sure if becoming educated increases one's ability to respond quickly to shifting business needs.
And it's also part of the problem, as I see it. Decades ago, one could switch industries or fields much more easily because of the lack of expectation of a specific college degree. Today one is much more "locked out" of other fields if they don't have that degree, and people feel trapped because they see no path to a higher paying career without taking on a ton of loans and risk to go to college (for the first time or for another degree).
I think we need to be honest with ourselves and acknowledge a lot (but not all) of higher education is arbitrary gatekeeping, and it's long past time to rein in the "arbitrary" part.
I agree completely, and I didn't mean to imply otherwise.
I never went to college to get a STEM degree to be a resource for anybody. I went because I imagined myself being Tom Swift.
Of course, Elon Musk turned into a real life Tom Swift!
Seriously, Musk came into a ton of money in the dot-com era, knew how to maintain that money because of his background, seems to be a capable hands-on project manager and natural self-marketing. You surely know people smarter than him who didn't acquire the mass amounts of money required to do what he does; I certainly do.
No 10-year olds are talking about how to become a savvy financial engineer like Jack Welch at GE, but they are talking about rockets and electric cars thanks to Musk.
LOL. C'mon, Musk builds rockets, electric cars, robot trucks, and tunnel boring machines. How much more Tom Swift can one get? Ok, Ok, I admit he hasn't yet built a Jetmarine or an Atomic Earth Blaster.
> You surely know people smarter than him who didn't acquire the mass amounts of money
I've never met Musk, so cannot attest personally to his smarts. But I've met plenty of very smart people.
But smarts alone simply isn't good enough to do what Musk does. You'll also need:
1. excitement
2. interest
3. drive
4. willingness to try impossible things
5. perseverance in the face of enormous obstacles
6. a thick skin for being laughed at
7. a willingness to continue in spite of withering criticism and vomit
Besides, although Musk was born into wealth, there's no evidence on his wikipedia page that he had access to it:
"working odd jobs at a farm and lumber-mill" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk
"Musk says that before the company became successful, he could not afford an apartment and instead rented an office and slept on the couch and showered at the YMCA, and shared one computer with his brother."
He made his initial money on an internet startup. Nothing wrong with that.
Got any evidence of this beyond what his estranged father said?
no
Have you ever met someone fresh out of college? Let's be real, if they didn't do something before or during that wasn't college, they are arguably less qualified to do anything than an average person who didn't. Wew, they've memorized how to traverse a graph, or something something roman emperors
Ironically, college starts preparing people to be adults at age 18, where in most jurisdictions in the US, you are already an adult.
This can't be good because it suggests that 30%+ of the adult population aren't prepared to be adults.
For now. Let's look at young people though. They're indicative of the future.
Outside of finance and STEM, it's really hard to see a clear and reliable path to prosperity for a 20-something year old. Perhaps some trades as well.
What's even worse is that the paths to prosperity seems to get narrower and narrower by the year.
What does a computer science student take in their first year? In year 1, in my hometown's university, through year 1, a student takes Linear Algebra, Calculus, Human-Machine interaction, Computer Hardware Fundamentals, Electrical engineering fundamentals, Intro to programming, Logic, Discrete Math, Discrete Automata, Numerical Methods, and intro to software engineering. Very different from an American University that might have 1 or 2 years worth of cross-major electives.
This is not unique to computing: A 1st year med students (which you get to start at 18), is going to be crushed under a pile of biology, biostatistics, cytology, anatomy and the like. Literature? Philosophy? History? You better have taken those in high school if you wanted to learn them, because college has no time for you to decide what you want to do with your life.
I am not going to try to figure out which system is better in the short or the long run, but it makes it pretty clear that college in the US is nowhere near close to universal in western countries, even after we take away the unique financial challenges the US gives college students.
College as STEM job training is absurd and clearly a failure. As you say, it's about much more than job training, but I would argue it doesn't even do that. Hell, it makes applicants worse somehow.
I’m not sure I agree. We could open more research labs, and dramatically increase the number of positions in STEM.
We could double or quadruple the number of teachers, and if we got even a small increase in the number of highly successful students who can do original work in research or STEM it would make all our lives better.
We could increase the number of nurse practitioners who could do basic medicine like fixing broken bones and treating common illnesses.
There’s room to add lots more mechanical and robotics engineers, and a lot of that work requires more spatial reasoning skills than math, despite what one might think. A lot of people who we wouldn’t think of as STEM oriented can do and enjoy those jobs.
In a real free-market scenario, would'nt those PhD programs be drastically reduced?
I suspect this is because this physics PhD program is providing an implicit signalling function, that the fellow out of this program is worth more than the ave college guy - doing the same programming job - because he proved himself on more complex study materials.
Academic physics research is not very useful economically, since we've figured out most of the stuff that will ever contribute to engineering needs -- building stuff that real people benefit from -- in our lifetimes. Not all! But most.
Mechanical/structural/chemical/etc. engineering on the other hand (a.k.a. physics and chemistry applied to real world problems) are very well-compensated skill-sets.
I mean, take a look at the next "who's hiring" page. Ad supported webapps seem pretty well represented.
> Academic physics research is not very useful economically, since we've figured out most of the stuff that will ever contribute to engineering needs -- building stuff that real people benefit from -- in our lifetimes. Not all! But most.
My phone lasts a day on a battery because we've managed to turn off the CPU as much as possible - we've got a supercomputer in our pocket that we can't use at its full capacity because battery technology isn't advancing. Academic physics research is not very useful economically because we've defined "useful economically" as "able to be converted into profits within 2-5yrs", and unfortunately we did that about 20 years ago, so the whole thing's sorta running on fumes right now.
This is hackernews. The organization that founded this site has mostly made its billions by investing in web properties. They are branching out these days, but that's the demographic.
> battery technology isn't advancing. Academic physics research is not very useful economically because we've defined "useful economically" as "able to be converted into profits within 2-5yrs", and unfortunately we did that about 20 years ago, so the whole thing's sorta running on fumes right now.
If I'm understanding the claim, we aren't doing enough battery R&D, so battery technology advancement is slow? First off, I don't think most physics labs are researching anything even remotely useful to improving batteries. But for the ones that are, let's do fund them.
Second, battery technology is and has been advancing rapidly. See for example the slide in the presentation on the following website ("Battery cell energy densities have almost tripled since 2010 [as of 2020]"):
https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/05/eternally-five-years...
That being said, it's far from clear that we are spending less than the optimal amount on battery R&D (the current amount is many billions of dollars per year -- Samsung alone spend ~$1B on research and development for just electric vehicle batteries in 2020). How much do you think we are spending? How much more should we spend?
The problem is, we don't know which ones those are. We won't know, until the discoveries and advancements they make are refined to the point where they can produce batteries.
That's my point - the actual work that needs to happen to make something new that can be put into an "economically useful" product happens 20-30 years beforehand. That's what we need to fund.
> "Battery cell energy densities have almost tripled since 2010 [as of 2020]"
We have a different definition of "rapidly", and a different definition of need. Battery density is the single largest brake on the day-to-day usefulness of electronic devices right now. 3x is nothing. 10x is better, 100x is what we probably need.
I think we probably disagree on two points. First, it seems unlikely that it is even physically possible to beat current lithium ion energy density by 100x. That would imply batteries that are 2x as energy dense as gasoline. I think there's pretty good reason to believe that is not possible -- i.e. there is no easily reversible configuration of atoms that will yield that level of density.
Even if it were physically possible, I doubt that we'd be there today even if we had bent the entire productive capacity of the planet to this problem excluding all others for the last thirty years. You can't make a baby in a month even if you have nine willing mothers to be.
If you're inclined to strengthen the argument you're presenting here, I have one suggestion. If there is widespread underfunding of battery or precursor research, experts in the field are probably talking about this fact. You should be able to find some talk by a respected academic showing that particular worthy ideas likely to add value that aren't being researched for lack of funds. Another option would be to demonstrate that recent advances in battery technology resulted from blue-sky research in the past of the kind that 1. isn't being funded today and 2. could not reasonably have been foreseen to lead to improvements in battery energy density.
(I should also just point out that the whole thesis that we have stopped funding basic research is not even true, see here: https://www.aaas.org/sites/default/files/2020-05/FunctionNON... -- general science funding, after adjusting for inflation, has increased substantially over time.)
I also question your estimate of the importance of energy density, but that's a secondary issue, since I think your views on how fast the technology could be developed are unrealistic under any spending scenario.
Just looking at some quick stats, a little more than half of all STEM occupations are outside of "Computer Occupations", though that one chunk is by far the largest single chunk. And far from the entirety of "Computer Occupations" is ad-supported web apps.
https://www.rclco.com/publication/2021-stem-job-growth-index...
There are a lot of fucking engineers (traditional engineers - based on the definition of 20-30 years ago) out there, and a great many of them make a solid living off it. Most of them simply do their job in relative obscurity compared to the computer workers these days.
https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/average-credit-card-debt-hou...
Turns out she was racking up 10's of thousands of dollars of credit card debt and skimping on necessities -- literally eating Ramen noodles at home and food she scavenged from friends at the mall, she wasn't paying her gas bill and got cut off after she accumulated over $3000 of unpaid bills (in the winter she heated only the bedroom of her apartment with a space heater), etc. It all started falling apart when she got pneumonia and was off work for a few weeks and couldn't pay any of her bills.
She had some of the accoutrements of a high standard of living, but was still very much living in poverty. She's living with her mom now and working on paying down the debt.
Most farm jobs are STEM. The non-STEM aspects of agriculture were mostly automated away centuries ago. You'll notice that farming went from ~90% of the workforce to ~2% over that time.
There exists some remaining small scale stuff that hasn't justified the cost of automation, but at the small scale it will be a long time before automation does pencil out. Robots don't work for free.
You are correct -- this is an awful notion. Plumbers, HVAC technicians, electricians, bricklayers, joiners, framers, builders, are the people who build and maintain the real world, and we need to raise the status of these (and others, forgive me for not listing them all) professions, which take just as long if not longer in which to get qualified, and recognize the dedication to professional standards and the entrepreneurial attitude required to be successful in their respective trade and to bring up the next generation of tradespeople via apprenticeships. * In fact, when you add it all up it meets or exceeds the work put into an undergraduate degree, and yet we don't value it the same.
If you're going to college, you could do worse than to begin getting qualified in a trade on the side -- at worst, you'll learn some widely-transferable practical skills.
* One might also note how much of the above is missing or done badly in the software industry.
I googled around a bit to grab some numbers. I think the below supports the idea that the trades mentioned by GP have median earning numbers very close to the median earning numbers for a full time worker in the United States, maybe a touch less if we grouped all the trades together.
The demand question is less clear to me. The BLS source implies less demand (measured by job growth) in general for the trades than the "average" demand growth for jobs in the US.
The U.S. Census Bureau lists the annual real median earnings at $41,535 in 2020 for all workers with earnings[4] and lists the annual median earnings at $56,287 in 2020 for people who worked full-time, year round. [1]
The same source of data projects the average job growth to be 8%, so "slower than average" and "higher than average" are in relation to that number.It gets interesting trying to generally compare demand for STEM to the trades. The BLS estimates about 84,700 openings for electricians per year for the next decade. Contrast that to, for example, chemists - the BLS estimate there is 9,100 positions per year. I didn't find a really great source for the number of BS degrees awarded per year to Chemistry majors, but numbers seemed to be between 14,000 and 17,000 per year.
When I think about supply and demand in careers, it seems to me that STEM is weird. People say "STEM is harder and just worth more in the end" but there seems to me, based on the numbers, for there to be a large "winners take all" effect. But it's hard to measure how many BS in Chemistry holders go to medical school, law school, or take project managment jobs versus being baristas in your local coffee shop. I did find one source that implied the highest percentage of graduates with "Physical Science" degrees (which includes chemistry graduates) at 8.5% work in post-secondary education.
One thing I know for sure - my organization (academic medical research) often hires post-docs that start at a little less than the US median earnings for full-time workers. And there seems to be a lot of competition for those post-doc roles. Salaries do go up over time.
Do we, though? As a farmer and software developer, I struggle to find enough farm work to do. I'd take on more work if I could. Everyone and their brother wants to be farmers, though, so there is hot competition and a lot of us end up with only a small piece of the pie.
Per hour it pays more than software. There just aren't that many hours. I would likely be apporaching poverty relying on my farm income alone, but it is also very little work, so maybe that's economically rational?
Five acres is a great lifestyle and some nice tax benefits, but not a career.
Still not a career, perhaps, but that's kind of the point here. I could easily handle thousands of acres if it were my career. However, obtaining thousands of acres to work is effectively impossible. Every other farmer is also desperately trying to get their hands on those acres.
If we want farming to be a viable, full-time career for people then we need far fewer people involved in the industry, not more.
Why STEM and not tradesmen? Plenty of decent trade jobs out there that can lead to serious $$$ if you're hard-working and competent enough to manage self-employment.
Nothing against farmers, just would like to see the real picture.
In any case, if farmers are needed and still don't get paid, there has to be a reason, and it presumably isn't the markets.
Until the STEM workers figure out a way to completely automate food production, anyway.
It's similar to the debate around onshoring manufacturing. There is a clear and simple (not easy, simple) way we can have more blue-collar workers making livable wages in the United States, despite that livable wage requirement being much higher than what other countries require to produce the same goods - improve either the quality of the outputs or the productivity of each laborer. My understanding is this is how Germany held such a strong position in manufacturing for years - by doing things better. It's also why one of the most direct blue-collar paths to a six-figure salary in the U.S. is machine shop work, because the U.S. has, in some regions, maintained the ability to produce parts that cannot be produced more cheaply elsewhere, by developing and maintaining a highly skilled workforce and the tools to support them within that particular sector.
Put in the negative sense - I would be curious to know what the average profit generated by an average farmworker is these days, after both internal and external expenses are taken into account, and how much slack there is between the wages they are currently earning and that profit. My understanding from family-owned / smaller operations is that running a farm in 2022 is really hard and really expensive, and that there isn't a whole lot of slack there right now.
Of course, there is a solution other than increasing productivity - a giant mess of regulatory and fiscal policy that, in direct and indirect ways, subsidizes the industry in a way that makes paying farm workers a livable wage tenable in a way a truly free market would not bear. And those policies are reasonable and even desirable within certain frameworks, and furthermore may be necessary as an interim step toward increased productivity. But wouldn't it be better for America to be able to subsidize a whole bunch of six-figure salaries not simply because that is what people need to live (i.e., that it is a public good to have six-figure salaries, and so we will take on public cost to ensure they exist), but because we have a whole bunch of people that generate six-figures annually in productivity?
Obviously, this is all empirically justifiable or refutable, so if I'm totally off my rocker qualitatively and if there's something offensive here like, "each farmworker actually generates $1.1MM/yr in pretax profit for the average farm employer", then let's frame all that out and legislate til the cows come home. And once they're home, too.
I'm not talking about the obvious exceptions like medicine or law (though even that can be done as a conversion rather than an undergrad degree) or anything else where you literally need the paper that says you can do it. I'm also not talking about becoming a researcher, where obvious you need to know a bit of X to become a professor of X. I'm talking about the vast number of degrees that are not job specific. Business, economics, history, literature, and so on with humanities, but also math, chemistry, physics, and biology.
There is no real reason an employer would care what you studied, because as a new graduate your job is to learn the business. Whether you were interested in one thing or another in college doesn't matter much, the main line is between math-tech stuff and not-math-tech stuff. Employers who reckon their work is techie will gravitate towards those graduates, while others will be open to anyone.
All the degree signals is that you somehow gathered yourself and read a bunch of books and solved a bunch of questions. That's somehow supposed to be evidence that you can learn their business.
Of course the problem is there's plenty of people who instead of learning Krebs cycle could just go directly into finance or accounting or any number of jobs without jumping through the hoops. The issue is that college has become a destination for so many smart kids, it's hard to imagine a smart kid who skips it. So absolutely everyone feels they need to go to college, and absolutely every employer thinks they need to hire just college grads.
In terms of helping the economy, it's really not efficient. Everyone has to sit around for three or four years when they really want to be working, and everyone who can't find the money/time to do it is cut out from middle class aspirational jobs.
>[...]
>In terms of helping the economy, it's really not efficient. Everyone has to sit around for three or four years when they really want to be working, and everyone who can't find the money/time to do it is cut out from middle class aspirational jobs.
What's the alternative? Like you said yourself, employers want some sort of signal that you're reasonably smart and can put the work in. You can't really replace that with a 6 month bootcamp.
Everyone else sits at home and just learns the stuff and does the exams while driving an uber. It will take a lot less time to just jump the math hoops than to do four years of half holidays, eg my total university time was actually 96 weeks but spread over 4 years. So a couple of years of doing that and people can see you can learn stuff.
All that does is test whether you know the content, which you said yourself "doesn't teach you anything you need to know at a job". It doesn't tell the employer whether you can handle 4 years of assignments and showing up labs/tutorials. I suppose you could add those back, but then we're back to square one when it comes to the university experience.
In the end there's just no way a course in some science can substitute for a job in business, so if you're going to use a course as your hurdle, why not just do a short one?
You could also just say we'll have fewer students. That way businesses will have to choose between high school grads. But as it is now, very few people will want to be that guy who doesn't have a degree.
Being educated does not get you a job. Being educated is step one.
You also need to have:
* a workplace that exists
* the soft skills required to interact in that workplace
* and ability to apply your education
I agree the current debt-based solution is bad. But there is more to life than efficiency and numbers.
Sure, if you can ace leetcode like an olympiad, you can become a L7 at FAANG. However, if you are a MBA from San Jose state, you would be working as a financial analyst. However, if you are a Stanford MBA, you would be a SVP.
Top tier firms in PE, VC, IC, and top tier consulting companies still go for elite colleges. Why? That is the path to c-level positions (not leetcode). Same thing for big law. Same thing goes for Washington consensus (the cesspool of Beltway), where pedigree matters.
Ethics aside, I rather have a smart person in charge rather than the opposite
I have definitely seen hiring managers lean very hard on pedigree so they didn't have to do the actual work of evaluating candidates. It was basically the same deal with a lot of certifications, like Scrum/Agile and Java certs.
I also think that your bucketing people such that Harvard = smart and state school = "the opposite" is a great example of the problem. Personally, I'd always rather work with somebody who has had to work their way up, as they tend to have a more balanced perspective.
[1] E.g.: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/07/harvards-freshman-class-is-m...
As a business, you bet your risks against the person who has been vetted vs. the unproven one.
And anyway, you're again, not very smartly, ignoring the point that a fancy degree doesn't correlate particularly well with smartness, so the whole intelligence thing is a bit of a sideshow to the actual discussion here.
Simply having 1/3 of Harvard admissions being legacy does not disprove that those who go to Ivy Leagues are not intelligent. On the contrary, studies show that IQ is highly genetic (up to 80%). So it is just reasonable for admission offices to accept students based on family ties
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ#cite_note-B...
There is also a correlation between IQ, general intelligence and SAT scores (a requirement for admissions), despite what the media portrays.
FYI: Media is manipulated to create controversy and get views. Scientific studies are not perfect, but has far lower cases due to the peer review process, except for privately funded research
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC6963451/#B...
But what you're really dodging is the question of how much the very narrow sort characteristic tested by IQ really matters for hiring. I get that you think it's super important. Probably because you see yourself there. But as somebody in the top 1% of IQ scores, I'm telling you it's not a great way to select employees, and in many circumstances it can correlate negatively. You can use it for hiring if you want, and if you work for a competitor, I encourage you to. But I sure won't.
Employment is a separate matter, the follow up will be if leadership or management competence (different) is tied to intelligence and elite school attendance.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30791424#30803184
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5665562/
My life is great, I am not trying to complain.
Elsewhere you asked for proof. There is plenty of proof that income is the best predictor for attending an ivy league school.
Here is an article from harvard: https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2020/06/at-home-with-harvard...
Harvard has almost as many students from the nation’s top 0.1 percent highest-income families as from the bottom 20 percent.
So, the issue is not one of smartness, as Harvard itself says in its reports, since majority of their applicants are smart anyway. That's how the filtering works for the super elite, and the 'servants' of this super elite--and this 'servant' class also also elite as well. Here, I am not using 'servant' in pejorative sense, but in the sense that one who works for super elite end up making millions a year.