In particular, male kids aren't going to college anymore (one source among many: https://www.forbes.com/sites/elizabethbradley/2022/02/03/men...), so you probably actually can't blame girls in yoga pants (though honestly, having read the article, I have no idea what the bit about the yoga pants is about)
Which makes the situation quite interesting: hypergamy and the wage gap are already in direct contradiction, now it is worse than ever with the bulk of college graduates being women. I am not sure if society is doing a suicidal move or something else.
We don't have a surplus of men, we have a lack of men: there are not enough highly educated and high earning men for all the women that want a superior men to them (the definition of hypergamy). You cannot find a partner for the 60% women in college, there are just 40% men and dropping.
The West already committed suicide in the 1990s when fertility rates plummeted. There aren't enough women in reproductive age today to keep the age pyramid from getting inverted. We're putting a band aid on it with mass immigration but the same thing is happening everywhere including Africa.
Yes, overpopulation is a problem, but an overpopulation of 60+ year olds is even worse.
This is like trying to stop a car driving off a cliff by driving into a tree.
The 'Girls in yoga pants' make even less sense in the title than they do in the article, I'd suggest simply 'The higher education apocalypse' (or perhaps 'collapse' is slightly less sensational).
Actually I read through the whole article and this doesn't really make sense. Most of her article is critical of the institution, then she just throws this in here, like the problem is too many people on their phones, which is rarely her concern before it. Or is she saying the institution requires her to be boring and this is the only one of limited ways she can entertain? I don't get it. I get it in a vacuum, but not in the greater context of the article.
> Professors like me have to fill articles like this with yoga photos to keep people’s attention. And it’s only going to get worse. Our politicians are going to get dumber. Our youth are going to get more restless and desperate. Misinformation is going to get more outlandish. That’s our future, as predicted by the movie Idiocracy.
Does that make sense to you? You read that and think Oh yes obviously, brilliant, why not adorn the article with images of 'girls in yoga pants' given fake names and paper thin characters to explain something completely unrelated to girls (specifically) or yoga 'pants', yes, you have my attention, that makes perfect sense?
> Just take it from Naomi. She wants to be a fitness influencer:
> That’s according to Olivia, who dropped out of college to make fitness videos on TikTok
> To quote the lovely Amelia, pictured below: You get what you pay for.
I think some people in here have busted irony/sarcasm meters, those are clearly ironic sentiments.
And another connection point the rest of the text is this:
> The current trend is pointing toward something darker, a large mass of under-educated, undertrained youth chasing easy money, not because they’re immature, but because other paths have shut down.
We're more and more turning into a culture of chasing easy money and the rise of everything from the "influencer" to meme stocks to phone scams.
2. I have no reason to believe that a single comment would reach all 3 posters
3. It was exceedingly, exceedingly ironic that roughly 50% of all top level comments (at the time I wrote my comments) didn’t read and/or pay enough attention to the article when said article _explicitly_ added images of girls in yoga pants to get people to read and/or pay attention to the entire article.
True. But there has been an uptick of stuff here on HN (and maybe in general, but I don't read random blogs much) of articles with dumb, often irrelevant twitter-like reaction gifs splattered throughout.
I guess if I had to pick between the two, I'd take the girls in yoga pants.
I was hoping the author was warming up towards demonstrating how girls in yoga pants, as a sociological phenomenon, predicted the higher education macro, in a Freakonomics sort of way. I've been had
Unpopular opinion: there should be fewer people going to university. The educational inflation has been immense, and many jobs simply do not (fundamentally I mean) require so much. That ought to be ok.
There's been some good progress in the UK with apprenticeship schemes, and I'd like there to be more of it. (I have, don't regret, and would recommend a degree for my job in software engineering, that's not what I'm talking about.) I think it would be better for the economy; better for innovation, to have more people working sooner where professional qualifications aren't beneficial.
It is not an unpopular opinion, it is against the grain. Education is great for countries, but when it becomes a business it is better for the universities than for the country. For politicians, more education is good on paper, any politician that would say otherwise will be called a Nazi and cancelled.
The right mix of education is great for everyone, imbalances should be corrected and these days the pendulum is on the side of too many students for a cost that is too high.
> there should be fewer people going to university
Strong disagree. This is a rational response to seeing what higher education in the US has become, but it doesn't have to be that way.
What we need is a tertiary education model that seeks to refine critical thinking, awareness of the world, and a funnel into degrees with practical job outcomes - for those that seek them.
Other countries have this model, particularly in Europe, where college isn't a requirement for employment, but a benefit none-the-less.
Refining critical thing and awareness of the world only seems necessary due to deficiencies in the public education system. High school is a joke and we should fix that rather than suggest everyone needs to get a collage degree.
I've had this thought before, that high school should be good enough to not require higher education. However I think as I've grown older I recognize that public education in the US primarily serves as day care and secondarily as an education. This is why schools have gifted programs, some students are there to learn and they are encouraged to go as far as they can, but some students are just there because its compulsory. I don't have a solution, just an observation.
Yes - it is a daycare. However - maybe we improve it from a daycare to a place of learning. That’s why we could make high school more intensive and less daycare like.
I agree with the intent, but I don't believe simply improving schools (what does that even mean? higher teacher salaries? higher standards? more funding?) will improve overall societal education. Where I grew up (Georgia, USA), there were several incentives to doing well in school:
- Your driver's license was revoked if had too many unexcused absences
- State scholarships were only available above a certain GPA
- The state academic summer camp program was only available if you were selected by your teachers based on your performance
Only one of these incentives applied to the general population, the rest only applied to motivated college-bound students. I believe we should have more incentives for all students to learn in school that affect the students instead of the school. If you punish the schools for the student's performance, you'll get the current US education system. Some ideas:
- Performance-based tuition or school lunch prices: The range cannot be too high or people will, rightly, complain that this negatively affects poor people. Make it something small but symbolic.
- A personalized excise tax on parents based on the child's school performance. Again, don't make it too large, just large enough.
- Reintroduce recess and socialization opportunities for students during school based on performance. If people start skipping, suspend their driver's license.
Honestly, American Grades 10-12 are a waste. Sure, you learn some important fundamentals for college but outside of that meh.
At least in my experience I would have far preferred being able to jump straight into college and have gotten the first 2 or so years out of the way in lieu of whatever passes for high school education. I would be far ahead of where I am and have benefited much more from the opportunity, but today you can only do such a thing by getting your GED (with parental permission) and being an incredibly driven and self-promoting autodidact with a lot of parental support.
Counter point, i found those grades as great prep for college. I took mostly AP courses. I was able to test into Calculus 3 at my university and found university to be quite easy.
Grades 4, 5, and 6 were a waste. Literally the same content for three years that could have been covered in half a term.
> High school is a joke and we should fix that rather than suggest everyone needs to get a college degree.
If the school leaving age has been raised to 18 you need to have something for everyone up to the age of 18 to do, or at least 90% of the people. There are a lot of people who are capable of passing a test for the bottom quintile of 18 year olds at 14.
> This is a rational response to seeing what higher education in the US has become [...] What we need is [...] Other countries have this model, particularly in Europe [...]
For what it's worth, I'm writing from the UK.
A degree ('college') certainly isn't required 'for employment' here, but it's increasingly (over decades) so, or de facto so because so many applicants have a degree having spilled over from not getting the job that was more relevant to (and did require) it.
College isn’t a requirement for employment in the US. The percentage of people with a college degree in the US ranks about mid pack compared to countries in Europe.
I do suspect that there are cultural differences in how people view those without college degrees in the US. I don’t know about the EU but in the US, people tend to look down on trades, even if they are well paid and skilled jobs.
If you genuinely put an effort into refining your critical thinking, you should have no problem getting a return on your investment on any publicly subsidized university. Plenty of jobs demand strong critical thinking or writing skills, but don't have require any specialized knowledge that you'd learn in college.
According to the author, people used to go to college to simply get drunk, and implied that this changed, so I view this as a positive change.
It'd be an improvement if this were the case- if the money was actually being spent on the students.
Generally speaking, the huge expense for any large purveyor of education is actually the administration reaping the outsized rewards. Paying themselves $150-$500k USD/yr, and simultaneously creating unnecessarily large yet low-impact organizations. This strategy soaks up every last penny.
> What we need is a tertiary education model that seeks to refine critical thinking, awareness of the world, and a funnel into degrees with practical job outcomes
This was the purpose of a University education, and the reason most degrees have a component that is liberal arts even in STEM.
Unfortunately, liberal arts colleges have become indoctrination camps for fringe views rather than honest explorations of all aspects of society. In particular Sociology as a science seems to be to blame for this. Going through school I never felt like I was being indoctrinated in my philosophy courses, but I certainly felt that way taking the mandatory "culture" classes.
We can start with anti-racism (the movement lead by Kendi) which is prominent in these schools. Refer to my post history for why Kendi is a racist bigot. We can talk about women's studies courses which have universally become megaphones for fringe third wave feminist ideas. Ideas like denying the suffering of men, or suggesting that something like misandry is not real. We can talk about how these fringe actors also go above and beyond to divert attention away from Men's issues such as child support (and the subsequent criminal punishment associated), the lack of "male abortion", etc.
For example, the women's studies course I was forced to take to graduate made me feel like a sack of shit of even being alive for a full semester. It wasn't "shedding the light" on anything. It was literally a woman standing in front of the class and telling men they are worthless. This isn't hyperbole. We had to write apology letters to pass (if we were white, and male). Other non-white, non-male students got to write about their "experiences" with white-dominated patriarchy. There was nothing to learn in this class except how far the lunatic fringe has penetrated academia, and this was over a decade ago.
Other ideas in the running for fringe include fringe economic ideas (reparations paid based on skin color) or full-on communist indoctrination like we have seen in various private liberal arts schools like Reed.
I know your post is in bad faith so I don't intend to reply any further since these radical actors in these programs have made national headlines since 2013. Suffice it to say that the ideas of the radical left are ever present in an area that should have sufficient coverage of all ideas. This is a problem, as the arts are no longer "liberal". They simply function as political indoctrination.
> I have, don't regret, and would recommend a degree for my job in software engineering, that's not what I'm talking about.
Same, although I'd add the caveat that you should be interested in the subject to study this. It's a miserable career for those that pick it for the jobs.
I don't think it's a miserable career for uninterested people. It's a miserable college degree for uninterested people, doing algorithms problem sets and such, but afterwards, you can make money doing mentally unchallenging things, like simple CRUD apps or maintenance of a ghastly complicated in-house software.
> jobs that don’t require a degree credential shouldn’t be able to mandate one
Are these not circular dependencies? Other than the few professions that require degrees by law, this is more of an operational decision than anything.
There are some narrow fields I would point to - Doctors being chief among them - that probably legitimately require extensive training.... for us normal plebs though I'd put forth an argument that degrees are pretty unnecessary. The vocational side of degrees is basically a way to get a jump start on skills acquisition (and avoid learning bad habits or wasting time) but, as I've mentioned elsewhere, I honestly don't think this training should be bundled into cultural education.
College degrees in the US are overwhelmingly not vocational in nature, they are primarily issued by liberal arts institutions. While there aren’t any legal requirements for a degree for nearly any office worker (for example), employers want formally educated workers for a variety of real operational reasons.
Doctors is a good example of people who don't need college. In Europe they go right to med school from HS. And nobody seems to think their docs are any worse than ours.
”The average American doesn’t care about college or universities at all. They resent education, and they consider professors a bunch of freeloaders who get summers off ”
> they consider professors a bunch of freeloaders who get summers off
When you go through 4 years for your undergraduate and your professor does the very barest minimum to teach the class, provides no help, defers constantly to their GAs, etc it's hard to not come to this conclusion. While it may not be true in general my experience is not much different than average and I can count the number of actual good, thought provoking, professors I've had on exactly 1 hand.
I understand the point of tenure but the dose makes the poison. Tenure should have a way to be taken under these circumstances. Otherwise, it provides an ivory tower from which a barely capable professor rests their laurels. The result, of course, is a vastly negative view of professors and academia in general.
I agree. I went to a good school and got a degree that did absolutely nothing for me career wise. Ended up just self teaching myself programming and made a great career as a software engineer for a magnitude cheaper than my college education.
I think we should normalize the idea that community colleges and remedial education is okay. Had a hard time with Algebra in High School? That's okay, you can take that, and you can work your way up to Differential Equations in the same place! For a fraction of a price of a four year school!
I'll counter with a different unpopular opinion. Specialized vocational training should be viewed separately from continued cultural education and continued cultural education should be much more accessible. After you get out of high school you should choose a vocationally oriented educational institution to learn about whatever specialized field you've chosen, whether that's decades of medicine training, a year or so of CS training or a few years of trades training - then, for the rest of your life, cultural education programs discussing higher abstract mathematics, philosophy, advanced literacy, political science and other liberal arts, should be available as ongoing pursuits that are ingested ala carte. This is drastically different from our current educational system and the cynics among us will happily point out that implementing something like that overnight would probably just defund education in the current system but I think that'd be a much nicer way to approach life and I think it's reflected in how much continuing education content exists both modern stuff like youtube and more traditional tv shows (including nature shows and things like Cosmos). Modern web based learning (everything from SkillShare which is more vocational to Khan Academy and Harvard's online lectures) are making continuing education more accessible, but we need more! Learning is an activity that should be actively engaged for your entire life!
People like to point at folks working at Mickey D's and opine on how their bachelor's degree is wasted, but if that bachelor's degree came with philosophy courses that taught you self-worth and empathy that helps you raise to a management position that creates a nice working environment for a half a dozen people then I think that is a fine use of education. Learning for learning sake is valuable enough and it doesn't need to be itemized about how much "value" (always framed in terms of vocational training) that it creates for society.
Mao Zedong did something similar to this during the great leap forward. He hoped it would have a similar effect on the peasant rice farmers as you hope for the McDonald's workers.
> then, for the rest of your life, cultural education programs discussing higher abstract mathematics, philosophy, advanced literacy, political science and other liberal arts, should be available as ongoing pursuits that are ingested ala carte.
Did you read this part? I personally see more value in lifelong liberal-arts education at a slower pace than the mismatched system we have.
That you throw in higher math as cultural instead of vocational just shows your own biases. I routinely use things I learned doing a PhD in physics in my code because mathematical abstractions really speed things up. Lumping something as useful as group theory with something as trivial as Shakespeare does a disservice to both.
I'm confused about what you are suggesting. Standard university math would still be taught to people in professions that use it as part of their vocational education, and basic university math like group theory will be eventually taught to people in professions that don't use it. Wouldn't that be an advantage over the status quo?
Please tell me you are being ironic? I’m no particular fan of Shakespeare, but to call his work trivial and to ignore the impact he had on western culture is… short sighted at best.
At the time Shakespeare wrote there were maybe half a million literate people who spoke English. Today there are more literate people who speak English in Fort Worth, Texas. The only reason to think Shakespeare is anything but a middling writer of the winning English dialect is cultural snobbery.
> After you get out of high school you should choose a vocationally oriented educational institution to learn about whatever specialized field you've chosen
I didn’t know what I wanted to do for a career until I was almost done with graduate school (I have a bachelors in history, a bachelors in linguistics, and a masters in educational psychology - I’ve worked as a professional programmer for nearly 25 years). My kids have gone to college, but they didn’t know what they wanted to do either. My oldest daughter is a semester from graduating and has finally decided what she actually wants to do - in a field wholly divorced from her undergraduate degree. So now she is applying to graduate programs. Frankly, none of my kids college bound friends knew what they wanted to do until they were almost graduated. It seems to me that many of us learn what we want to do by being exposed to many different things in the college environment. But it takes years and sort of floundering to figure that out.
> I didn’t know what I wanted to do for a career until I was almost done with graduate school (I have a bachelors in history, a bachelors in linguistics, and a masters in educational psychology - I’ve worked as a professional programmer for nearly 25 years). My kids have gone to college, but they didn’t know what they wanted to do either. My oldest daughter is a semester from graduating and has finally decided what she actually wants to do - in a field wholly divorced from her undergraduate degree.
This is why I strongly advocate for taking a gap year - or 2 or 5. Kids need experience - broad real world experience being exposed to lots of different things - in order to determine what turns their crank and rises to the level that they (a) know what they are getting into and (b) actually want to do it for (possibly) the rest of their lives.
This focus on moving from birth to career in one unbroken path increases the odds that people commit the sunk cost fallacy - with their life! - continuing to pursue something only because they started doing so without really knowing themselves. What a silly waste of this one and only magical life.
But the opposite is also kinda true. I was pretty sure that I wanted to do software when I was 15 and then I had to sit through a lot more stuff to be able to study that, that was basically my main motivator to finish our equivalent of high school (bit more complicated here in Germany, to be able to go to uni I had to finish my 13 years of schools, or go a very complicated route of exiting school at 16, do a 3 year vocational training (that could have been application development), to go back to school for 1-2 years, with no time saved. But yeah, could've just done work then and not go to uni, but I wanted to learn).
I think, and this is all set in the very different educational system, that if there was an education track purely devoted to vocational learning that it'd be perfectly socially acceptable to delay enrolling until it's relevant to you or to re-enroll later if you'd benefit from different vocational skills.
I'm a CS major myself but when I first entered university I was pursuing a degree in statistics and had hardly done any computer programming at all in high school - I was computer literate and played plenty of games but programming had never been accessible or interesting until I started using SASS and then moved on to more powerful languages.
Not a perfect system but the Folkuniversitet in some parts of Sweden provides similar education to what you envision here.
They have both vocational courses (business, economics, IT, healthcare, etc.) as well as courses in humanities, arts (including performing arts, and writing) and so on.
You can take courses whenever you want, or apply for a longer vocational education.
That is giving way too much credit to liberal arts. In theory they might be good, but in practice there is nothing to connect it to reality (if you are a shitty philosopher, you can make your self sound effective; if you are a shitty mathematician, others will point out that your proofs do not work).
If you want me to take the liberal arts seriously, you're going to have to show how they can be held to the same kind of standard that we hold, say, physics to.
Worse, you also simultaneously managed to insult half your audience. I attended a CS only university. I did not have one hour of history class. Not one hour was spent on anthropology, physics or language study except as necessary for our compiler classes.
If you cut out the lesser useful classes, such as anything having to do with user interface design, then maybe you could've gotten a year out of it. That will still have taken me four years, to get that CS degree.
I'm so confused at how you managed to be insulted by the parent comment. Someone else finding value in liberal arts education is not an attack on those that don't.
physics has its own class of problems in that theoretical physics can spout any nonsense it wants as long as the testing to verify if it is correct or not is suitably expensive as to ensure it doesn't happen and the math is reasonably complex. it's not on the same scale of rampant bullshitism that is going on in the arts programs, where thousands of people have made entire careers out of generalizing marxism from the domain of labor to all the other domains of social interaction, physicists would have gotten that done in a flurry of papers over two weeks and moved on to something else more abstract and difficult to verify level of truth.
"Learn a craft to survive and letters to not be stolen from."
You don't want a democratic society lacking or with subpar education. Do you prefer your neighbor voting for the future of the economy, your kids, your long term state goals to be well educated or lacking education. And a lot of populism is based on tricking your constituents with statistics.
But even then: we need skilled workers. Looking 10-20 years ahead, what is the ratio of unskilled/skilled jobs that we need? I would argue the ratio is dropping. And if it isn't, one can always do an unskilled job with a graduate degree. Not so much the other way around. At least if you want to compete globally.
I see your point. But I think doing some back of the envelope in my head it doesn't work in the long run and is bad for the democracy.
The US does have a pricing social issue, but that is not true for the UK from my understanding (outsider, from other part of Europe).
My 2c anyways.
I just got downvoted hard for that but it’s true. Both political and etiquette teaching. Teaches people what things are currently right and wrong to believe though very strong social pressure.
What actually happened is that politics has changed significantly over the past 20 years.
For one example, go watch the 2000 presidential debate: many social issues were danced around in a delicate manner that certainly is not the case today. And the rhetoric is downright academic compared to the shit throwing that happens these days.
This is a strawman. In fact if you go search for actual leftists that don't just repeat keywords on social media you will find that most agree in some sense with what you just said (in the sense that the political situation is tons of superficiality). You cannot just put the spotlight on your weakest adversaries. This whole situation is because political education is at a general low level and universities are under pressure, hence even the leftists (just like everybody) are fighting hard with shortcuts/groupthink/.. inside their ranks.
ps: it's definitely not unpopular, it's a mainstream media talking point, but that's another story
I like how you pointed out a strawman in my argument with another strawman. Not every generalization is a strawman.
Sometimes, it is just simpler to state the truth and not beat about the bush. Today's Universities are insane and completely deranged.
If you want to know exactly how we got here, Marc Andreesen talks about it frequently about last 100 years of education evolution. Universities today are an insurance product with a bunch of brainwashing built into the scheme.
> I like how you pointed out a strawman in my argument with another strawman. Not every generalization is a strawman.
A strawman isn't about generalization it's about simplification of opponent points to the point that they make no sense. In which way did i simplify anything about your point with the aim of contradicting it? In fact imho i did the opposite: i took what i believe to be the actual valid core of it (superficiality etc) and said i agreed with it. Still you're not answering to my rebuttal: your initial point (1) contains no substance since anybody worth discussing with across the political spectrum agrees to some form of it (i do and OP most surely do as i pointed out, and seeing you cite andreesen we are definitely wide apart on the that spectrum, which in itself is ok) and (2) is part of a general pattern of passing opinions widely shared inside a well-known thought-school as being something "unpopular", which is a whole minefield of bogus concepts that get nice dialogues derailed into flames.
This point is moot. You can think that if you want but it solves in no way the problems as described by OP. In the article, you can basically replace university with school and get the same result (perhaps at a very slightly lower level of gravity). I'm french and just went through education, the situation here is structurally the same. Buildings and furniture is shit; teacher are underpaid and overworked; tons are outright bad (missing field knowledge, missing child psychology understanding, missing basic philosophical concepts about school mission); lower management is under stress and career-oriented, higher management is short-term political and incompetent in the field, in the middle they are borderline corrupted / have mafia-like structure. This whole situation is generalized (one can even look at other public services like health or libraries which are very much taking the same path). So would you say less people should go to high-school? Or less to elementary school? Where do we stop?
Nope, imho it's pretty clear that there's an elephant in the room: public services are better run with long term stable funding (no need for tons, just what's needed) and completely independently of whatever the short term economic market incentives are. Some sprinkle of oversight from generalists and politics is good, but ffs let the people that actually do the thing decide the shape of it. I'm not telling bankers whom they should lend to. (But that's just my extremist pov /s).
ps: just to be clear, the actual acceptable part of your opinion is even acknowledged in the article, in the start of paragraph "We’re going to regret it." tldr: the current university focused on abstraction/math/erudition is stupid anyways. Yes it should go away (as a mainstream thing).
We don't need more low skill workers. We need more doctors, more nurses, more medical technicians, we need more plumbers, more electricians, more software developers, more engineers, and more teachers teaching all these things.
In addition to universities sucking more we've also scaled back on training people throughout the economy. Heck, we're running out of pilots for airplanes and there's no plan to train more.
We've got a hungry generation of young adults with desire to do more but society hasn't provided the means for them to succeed. We failed to invest in the future.
In my experience, it seems like it's very hard to get into some programs despite the job demand. There's either a lack of resources to make spaces available or it is gatekeeping.
How many of these jobs will be left in 50 years due to automation? 100? The capital required to automate a lot of these jobs is declining and wages are rising, at some point they're going to intersect.
It seems disingenuous to say, on the one hand, "tech is going to disrupt industries and people just need to deal with it" but on the other hand "education to acquire higher skills should be restricted to the elite few."
Competence is very much a secondary priority of universities whose primary goal is a demonstration of loyalty.
All college students are double majoring in Ideology, as demonstrated by their ability to conform for four years. This in turn unlocks a host of professions only accessible to Ideology majors: bureaucracies, paper pushers, journalists, NGOs, HR, teachers, etc. The extra patient and above-average smart ones can sit through more college and get better deals in finance, medicine, law, and science (although society is definitely losing out on the most competent people in these fields, because they are constitutionally unable to sit through 8 years of Ideology).
There are very few arenas were raw competence is needed badly enough and results can't be faked, even in the short term, that begrudgingly, people with no Ideology certifications are allowed to operate: engineers are the ones with the highest wealth potential of these. I'd bet that most engineers are successful in spite of college, many would choose to skip it if they could get a do-over, and the best engineers have the lowest opinion of higher education.
It's a pretty good article, if you read the whole thing. People seem to be getting hung up on the "girls in yoga pants" non-sequiturs. The author spells it out near the bottom of the article:
> Meanwhile, we’ve systematically defunded classrooms... It has consequences... Professors like me have to fill articles like this with yoga photos to keep people’s attention. And it's only going to get worse. Our politicians are going to get dumber. Our youth are going to get more restless and desperate. Misinformation is going to get more outlandish. That’s our future, as predicted by the movie Idiocracy.
In other words, she did it for the clicks. It's either a mildly clever rhetorical device or rage-inducing clickbait, depending on where you fall on the "easily angered" spectrum.
This entire article is a weird ramble around the central point of "college enrollment has dropped year over year", which, while true, can easily be attributed to students not wanting to pay the same amount of money as before to sit in front of a Zoom screen. Give it a couple of years and the numbers will go back up to normal and this forced "Gen Z doesn't want to go to college" narrative will disappear.
There is also a fast growing collective of students who see how useless an expensive degree can get. They fear the debt that hangs over so many graduates heads.
I do not think this trend will correct post-zoom. I think this is the beginning of a long education winter, at least until the education market can prove actual value instead of certified bullshit printed on $100 bills
I have been hearing this same argument for at least two decades now, yet the numbers never back it up. People may think college degrees are useless but they will still get in line (and in debt) to get one. The only ever big dent in enrollment came because of covid, and it is not (yet) a valid victory lap for all these narratives.
The economy actually needs colleges and universities, for purely practical reasons. They’ve been keeping about 15–20 million young adults out of the job market. They suppress unemployment.
If nothing else, affordable college was a holding tank for America’s youth. We kept them occupied and entertained.
This fundamentally misunderstands economics. There isn’t a fixed lump of labor that we want to save up for our favorite people.
We don’t want to warehouse adults because it’s doubly destructive. The students are out of the labor market not producing anything and the people babysitting them aren’t producing anything either. That makes us all poorer.
I didn't read it as a joke. Young adults can be incredibly destructive if left to their own devices.
> The relationship between aging and criminal activity has been noted since the beginnings of criminology. For example, Adolphe Quetelet (1831/1984) found that the proportion of the population involved in crime tends to peak in adolescence or early adulthood and then decline with age. In contemporary times, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report (UCR) arrest data (1935–1997), particularly the Crime Index (homicide, robbery, rape, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny-theft, auto theft), document the consistency of the age effect on crime.
Elite overproduction produces civil wars. Universities are a way to keep people on the elite treadmill long enough to get past their 20s and stop thinking about revolution.
The USSR largely collapsed because of that. Occupy wall-street was the moment it nearly happened in the US.
I assumed this was going to be about the disconnect between male/female enrollment and about how girls might choose yoga pants to help attract a rare mate.
Instead the yoga pants were completely non sequitur to the article. They are actually the reason I stopped reading the article since it was clearly pointless.
So she didn't actually talk to the women in the pictures about this issue, right? Maybe this is related to a running joke on the blog that doesn't make sense out of context?
No, they were labeled as stock photos, and then when you get to the end(which I skipped to) she just says "I had to put girls in yoga pants to keep you reading".
I thought, and still think, it was a fairly lame concept to base an article around
> The police are very well funded. Campus police at some universities have armored vehicles now. Meanwhile, we’ve systematically defunded classrooms. Every year, states have cut funding to schools and colleges. Teachers use their own money to buy school supplies. A lot of them can’t even support themselves.
States do give less than they used to, but the federal government gives more. The combination of the two is increasing, slowly, after suffering during the Great Recession. Third-party funding has also increased, by the way.
This to say that I don't think the reason fewer people are going to college is because there's less money in higher education. Funding is a factor, but the lack of state funding doesn't explain the poor choices schools make with that money.
This will likely be a problem for the democratic base eventually. As Hispanics go conservative and less students go to college to be indoctrinated into liberal values the country will shift conservative. Democrats will need to find an alteration source of voters
If young people are going straight into the workforce as Uber drivers or Amazon warehouse workers, I think they’re going to find liberal values even faster.
This may be true in the US but it's based on a false dichotomy. And i'm even convinced that any kind of factual reality it has in the US is because this false political dichotomy has been put into reality by bipartism. If you actually look precisely what's going on in the general political opinions in the west, you have wealthy people that want liberal economics (near the middle of the traditional division left/right), then you basically have two blocks of more precarious people that either are more socialist (skewed towards young and educated) or reactionary (skewed towards old and less educated). This is still very crude but at least it has 3 dimensions instead of two.
> They don’t do much but send out confusing emails all day. They’re so sleep-deprived and addled with caffeine, they can barely think.
I do find the article interesting but an editor would be useful since lines like these cast doubt on the rest of the article. Interesting none the less, and oddly I don’t even the yoga pics.
All these students who aren't going to college are still going to high school. Can someone please explain to me why 13 years of education is considered barely sufficient but someone 17 years of education is considered enlightening and "well rounded."
This is easy: up to and including high school, the education is tailored for the many, with the intention that almost everyone has to make it. It means the standards are lowered to almost the lowest denominator. College has raised standards, the people that get there are above average and move faster and higher.
For example you can teach half of the Computer Science courses to half of the high school students directly in high school, but you completely lose the other half. So you move it to college and have everyone happy to have 12 years of mediocre education. It is called equality.
This piece makes a lot of assertions. Some of them are familiar, but citations or more rigorous argument would be helpful.
I suppose that the form of this argument itself could be mimicking the anti-intellectualism that the article decries, much like the acknowledged use of the stock photos to attract&retain attention.
What the hell has it got to do with yoga pants? I agree university is a complete scam right now though. I’ve never felt more wronged in my life than when I was going through my education at Monash (Australia).
We need to change education, and until we devalue prestigious institutions, this will never change.
I'd look at breaking it out into 3 separate areas.
1. Foundations (1-2 years). This is a course offered which introduces students to the basics of areas they're interested in. Students can learn about many different areas to study or work in, as well as understand what the requirements of Academia are (essay writing, research, studies, etc).
Once Foundations are done, you split out into either..
A. Apprenticeships, Technical Institutions, Polytechnics: Created by industry leaders, board members are those who have worked in the industry, trainers are those who have worked in the industry recently and are limited to tenures of no more than 2 years - but they get paid more than they would in their roles.
Course length depends on field. For example if you were to become a Software Engineer, probably 18 months is enough. Medicine on the other hand will be more aligned to current expectations.
B. Academia, University: Created by those who want to write and study the field, but not work in it primarily. These will occasionally work with folks in the industry to try new research. These are usually primarily publicly funded.
Right now, the institutions who run and advertise B are the majority - but pretend to operate and work for A. Which is bullshit, but they are incentivized to continue operating that way by the government, by their board and by their own corporate institutions.
The yoga pants thing wasn't necessary. You don't have to show me pretty women for me to care.
I don't care. I'm happy about it actually. We are going through a transformation with regard to our relationship with information. Libraries, copyright, higher learning institutions, $100 text books, professors teaching, your kid getting roughed up by the school resource officer, $60k degrees in English followed by the Starbucks job, smoking in the boys' room, they're all going the way of the dinosaur, and it's very exciting. It's exciting because the gatekeepers are being destroyed, the rent seekers are going hungry, education and information are the same thing, equally accessible to everyone. However, nobody is going to show you your path, chart it for you, not anymore. You can learn anything you want, anything at all, for free, with nobody's permission, but you've got to figure out what to learn by yourself. It is a revolution in self actuation, from now on you'll be what you make of yourself. Of course, it's always been that way, they lied to you when they told you they knew better or that there was a shortcut, but at least it's not a secret anymore. So go out into the world and do whatever the fuck you want, there's never been a better time to do it than now.
> I'm happy about it actually. We are going through a transformation with regard to our relationship with information. [...]
Imho this is naive optimism. Surely things are changing and surely things weren't great, but the direction in which things are changing are not for the better. I'm not familiar with the US but around here affordable publicly-funded university that have generally kind of ok quality are going under just the same. Where do you see any kind of non-commercial learning platform building up? I only see edtech. You're talking about copyright which hints at free software movement and the like: we are loosing ground in that field too (or at best it's stable, but it's still completely niche).
I never said anything about platforms. You're misunderstanding me, I'm not talking about replacement institutions, I don't want to have to pay for a power point course and a printable PDF with my name in block letters on it.
I'm glad to see publicly funded institutions go under as well. There should be no gatekeepers to information.
The information you need to get the skills universities claim only they can give you is freely available. You want to learn how to do residential electricity? Commercial HVAC? Programming, data analysis, and/or statistics? A handful of search queries and a ton of reading are all you need to get started. About the only things you can't do professionally by just following your interests on the internet right now are medicine and law. I expect that to change too.
I believe you are talking about a replacement institution which would be internet. I stand by my point: "the skills universities claim only they can give you is freely available.", "A handful of search queries and a ton of reading are all you need to get started." this is simplistic (i would describe this stance as nihilist but perhaps you won't like the connotation). I get your idea, free knowledge makes current-world universities redundant, sure, that's fine. But this content is not a byproduct of ethernet cabels (not even commoditized and ubiquitous), it is created and maintained by people (grouped in free and fun learning and self-help communities much like OP defends). This should explain why i think you are talking about replacement institutions. Now for the optimism part: the fact that the internet fosters this kind of communities is not a given, it's enabled by having community-friendly internet. And this internet is currently being steam-rolled by corporate and state interests. Or better said, it is niche, just like it always has been. And funnily, this niche always had a sizeable intersection with academics, albeit outsiders. So yes, universities should be put upside down and shaked, and they could learn a lot from the internet, perhaps you'd say "get absorbed into". But the concept of enabling groups of people to maintain and create public-interest information using experiment and formalism won't go anywhere. This is the concept OP talks about when they say "university".
Let me try to take the bait in all its seriousness, for potential YC companies.
This article creates heat and smoke but not much illumination - motivation without direction. Irony here is both the epitaph and murderer of citizen education and culture being lamented.
Rome the Republic gave rise to consummate ironists, and the correspondingly detached professional classes allowed Imperial Rome to flourish. Must we follow?
Yes, tech bears some responsibility (and credit) both for the means of production and the incentive influences on consumers, workers, and investors. But the question is, what would make a difference?
Stock options have been mostly successful at getting people to work together, as have reputation privileges on forums like this. But those might just be noise in the signal of vast profits or continuous attention highs.
No incentives really distinguish good from bad: profit and reputation work just as well for the black market and poorly-managed companies. In response companies try to adopt an ethos of operational efficiency or mission-orientation, but ethos devolves to signaling and tribalism.
My experience is that the only countervailing force is the formative lifeboat experience: when young having to work intensely together on things that matter, often losing some people as a result. This happened writ large in WWI and WWII, as soldiers came back guilt-ridden and dedicated to humbly building society (* ok relatively speaking), but it also happens in the small in college, just helping each other figure out what to do and how to learn what you need (with the sadness of watching some of your friends get lost). Somehow having worked together and suffered and lost makes you less inclined to take advantage of others, even when you can. (fwiw I believe there's a recent article on the sense of guilt being a distinguishing attribute of a leader.)
Political apathy, the great resignation, opting out of college (or lacking grit or work ethic or ...), people are detaching from systems they find toxic (some would say challenging): competition with foreign engineers or immigrant workers, cultural assimilation, political discussion of any sort, etc. If human relations are disciplined by exit (when consensual) or voice (when exit is not an option), high utilization rates of both mechanisms indicate that relations aren't good, largely because of forces introduced by tech.
No one would recommend a real lifeboat experience if you can avoid it, and they're not a scalable response in any case. However, I think they help, and I think college can deliver that, if it's 2-4 year residential, in-person, small-classes with a strong element of student self-governance culminating in the selection of a career as a life's work. The curriculum should expand attention spans, critical thinking, diversity of friend groups, and (above all) a sense of responsibility for the effects of your own actions on yourself and others, and the sense of agency and ownership, where you realize you can make a difference.
Obviously, college should not support or reward cheating, cramming for exams, collecting credentials, social isolation, marketable skills trumping professional judgment, privilege networks, decomposed learning, etc.
Tech's influence on education should not be to scale horizontally but vertically. If the article is right that education is contracting demographically and burdened with bureaucracy, it has the two characteristics that make it ripe for tech disruption -- not by scaling single classes to world audiences, but by making small intensive environments economically feasible and enriching.
For heaven's sake, the next generation has to be grounded enough to manage climate collapse, authoritarianism, and technology-driven disruption. It's the least we can do for them!
The rich and powerful who run our country don't want an educated society. A society of critical thinkers is harder to control. Better to have sheep who are easy to herd.
So if they managed to screw an entire generation with high debt because "of course college is required for a good life in the US", great! If the next generation can't afford it and has to take lower-paying jobs, great! And now we got abortion nixed, so there will be more desperate kids having kids. Great - they'll take any job we offer at the lowest rate possible!
I wouldn't trade my years and years of college for anything. Got a BS and MS back-to-back.
My part time internship paid my college and living expenses.
Not all my profs were great, but I had the space to explore on my own.
What's not to like? Sure, I came out of that $2,000 in debt, but I paid that off from my new gig in one payment the second it was about to start accruing interest.
I'd argue that the keystone to the downfall of higher education is the cost, full stop. Other problems? Yes, of course. But fix the cost, and these problems lose most of their effect.
The writer focus on financial dropping reasons, and neglect the collages part: the cancelation colture, the one sided propaganda, the education system where facts are replaced with narratives. Why would anyone pay for neo communism? At least in Russia it was free.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 203 ms ] threadYes, overpopulation is a problem, but an overpopulation of 60+ year olds is even worse.
This is like trying to stop a car driving off a cliff by driving into a tree.
I guess it didn’t keep everyone’s attention :(
I guess it didn’t keep everyone’s attention :(
> That’s according to Olivia, who dropped out of college to make fitness videos on TikTok
> To quote the lovely Amelia, pictured below: You get what you pay for.
I think some people in here have busted irony/sarcasm meters, those are clearly ironic sentiments.
And another connection point the rest of the text is this:
> The current trend is pointing toward something darker, a large mass of under-educated, undertrained youth chasing easy money, not because they’re immature, but because other paths have shut down.
We're more and more turning into a culture of chasing easy money and the rise of everything from the "influencer" to meme stocks to phone scams.
I guess it didn’t keep everyone’s attention :(
2. I have no reason to believe that a single comment would reach all 3 posters
3. It was exceedingly, exceedingly ironic that roughly 50% of all top level comments (at the time I wrote my comments) didn’t read and/or pay enough attention to the article when said article _explicitly_ added images of girls in yoga pants to get people to read and/or pay attention to the entire article.
EDIT: Downvote me, ya bastages. What can I say, I'm a straight man who appreciates women willing to objectify themselves modestly
I guess if I had to pick between the two, I'd take the girls in yoga pants.
There's been some good progress in the UK with apprenticeship schemes, and I'd like there to be more of it. (I have, don't regret, and would recommend a degree for my job in software engineering, that's not what I'm talking about.) I think it would be better for the economy; better for innovation, to have more people working sooner where professional qualifications aren't beneficial.
The right mix of education is great for everyone, imbalances should be corrected and these days the pendulum is on the side of too many students for a cost that is too high.
Strong disagree. This is a rational response to seeing what higher education in the US has become, but it doesn't have to be that way.
What we need is a tertiary education model that seeks to refine critical thinking, awareness of the world, and a funnel into degrees with practical job outcomes - for those that seek them.
Other countries have this model, particularly in Europe, where college isn't a requirement for employment, but a benefit none-the-less.
- Your driver's license was revoked if had too many unexcused absences
- State scholarships were only available above a certain GPA
- The state academic summer camp program was only available if you were selected by your teachers based on your performance
Only one of these incentives applied to the general population, the rest only applied to motivated college-bound students. I believe we should have more incentives for all students to learn in school that affect the students instead of the school. If you punish the schools for the student's performance, you'll get the current US education system. Some ideas:
- Performance-based tuition or school lunch prices: The range cannot be too high or people will, rightly, complain that this negatively affects poor people. Make it something small but symbolic.
- A personalized excise tax on parents based on the child's school performance. Again, don't make it too large, just large enough.
- Reintroduce recess and socialization opportunities for students during school based on performance. If people start skipping, suspend their driver's license.
At least in my experience I would have far preferred being able to jump straight into college and have gotten the first 2 or so years out of the way in lieu of whatever passes for high school education. I would be far ahead of where I am and have benefited much more from the opportunity, but today you can only do such a thing by getting your GED (with parental permission) and being an incredibly driven and self-promoting autodidact with a lot of parental support.
It's a farce.
Grades 4, 5, and 6 were a waste. Literally the same content for three years that could have been covered in half a term.
We need better self-paced systems.
If the school leaving age has been raised to 18 you need to have something for everyone up to the age of 18 to do, or at least 90% of the people. There are a lot of people who are capable of passing a test for the bottom quintile of 18 year olds at 14.
Quality, rigour, universality, uniformity. Choose.
I did say it was an 'unpopular opinion'!
> This is a rational response to seeing what higher education in the US has become [...] What we need is [...] Other countries have this model, particularly in Europe [...]
For what it's worth, I'm writing from the UK.
A degree ('college') certainly isn't required 'for employment' here, but it's increasingly (over decades) so, or de facto so because so many applicants have a degree having spilled over from not getting the job that was more relevant to (and did require) it.
I do suspect that there are cultural differences in how people view those without college degrees in the US. I don’t know about the EU but in the US, people tend to look down on trades, even if they are well paid and skilled jobs.
According to the author, people used to go to college to simply get drunk, and implied that this changed, so I view this as a positive change.
Generally speaking, the huge expense for any large purveyor of education is actually the administration reaping the outsized rewards. Paying themselves $150-$500k USD/yr, and simultaneously creating unnecessarily large yet low-impact organizations. This strategy soaks up every last penny.
If anything, European companies are more credentialist when it comes to degrees than their USA equivalents.
The European model is better simply because it's free-to-cheap for the student.
This was the purpose of a University education, and the reason most degrees have a component that is liberal arts even in STEM.
Unfortunately, liberal arts colleges have become indoctrination camps for fringe views rather than honest explorations of all aspects of society. In particular Sociology as a science seems to be to blame for this. Going through school I never felt like I was being indoctrinated in my philosophy courses, but I certainly felt that way taking the mandatory "culture" classes.
For example, the women's studies course I was forced to take to graduate made me feel like a sack of shit of even being alive for a full semester. It wasn't "shedding the light" on anything. It was literally a woman standing in front of the class and telling men they are worthless. This isn't hyperbole. We had to write apology letters to pass (if we were white, and male). Other non-white, non-male students got to write about their "experiences" with white-dominated patriarchy. There was nothing to learn in this class except how far the lunatic fringe has penetrated academia, and this was over a decade ago.
Other ideas in the running for fringe include fringe economic ideas (reparations paid based on skin color) or full-on communist indoctrination like we have seen in various private liberal arts schools like Reed.
I know your post is in bad faith so I don't intend to reply any further since these radical actors in these programs have made national headlines since 2013. Suffice it to say that the ideas of the radical left are ever present in an area that should have sufficient coverage of all ideas. This is a problem, as the arts are no longer "liberal". They simply function as political indoctrination.
Same, although I'd add the caveat that you should be interested in the subject to study this. It's a miserable career for those that pick it for the jobs.
Are these not circular dependencies? Other than the few professions that require degrees by law, this is more of an operational decision than anything.
When you go through 4 years for your undergraduate and your professor does the very barest minimum to teach the class, provides no help, defers constantly to their GAs, etc it's hard to not come to this conclusion. While it may not be true in general my experience is not much different than average and I can count the number of actual good, thought provoking, professors I've had on exactly 1 hand.
I understand the point of tenure but the dose makes the poison. Tenure should have a way to be taken under these circumstances. Otherwise, it provides an ivory tower from which a barely capable professor rests their laurels. The result, of course, is a vastly negative view of professors and academia in general.
To fix and address the current challenges, the current institutional structure needs to be changed.
People like to point at folks working at Mickey D's and opine on how their bachelor's degree is wasted, but if that bachelor's degree came with philosophy courses that taught you self-worth and empathy that helps you raise to a management position that creates a nice working environment for a half a dozen people then I think that is a fine use of education. Learning for learning sake is valuable enough and it doesn't need to be itemized about how much "value" (always framed in terms of vocational training) that it creates for society.
Mao Zedong did something similar to this during the great leap forward. He hoped it would have a similar effect on the peasant rice farmers as you hope for the McDonald's workers.
Did you read this part? I personally see more value in lifelong liberal-arts education at a slower pace than the mismatched system we have.
Please tell me you are being ironic? I’m no particular fan of Shakespeare, but to call his work trivial and to ignore the impact he had on western culture is… short sighted at best.
I didn’t know what I wanted to do for a career until I was almost done with graduate school (I have a bachelors in history, a bachelors in linguistics, and a masters in educational psychology - I’ve worked as a professional programmer for nearly 25 years). My kids have gone to college, but they didn’t know what they wanted to do either. My oldest daughter is a semester from graduating and has finally decided what she actually wants to do - in a field wholly divorced from her undergraduate degree. So now she is applying to graduate programs. Frankly, none of my kids college bound friends knew what they wanted to do until they were almost graduated. It seems to me that many of us learn what we want to do by being exposed to many different things in the college environment. But it takes years and sort of floundering to figure that out.
This is why I strongly advocate for taking a gap year - or 2 or 5. Kids need experience - broad real world experience being exposed to lots of different things - in order to determine what turns their crank and rises to the level that they (a) know what they are getting into and (b) actually want to do it for (possibly) the rest of their lives.
This focus on moving from birth to career in one unbroken path increases the odds that people commit the sunk cost fallacy - with their life! - continuing to pursue something only because they started doing so without really knowing themselves. What a silly waste of this one and only magical life.
I'm a CS major myself but when I first entered university I was pursuing a degree in statistics and had hardly done any computer programming at all in high school - I was computer literate and played plenty of games but programming had never been accessible or interesting until I started using SASS and then moved on to more powerful languages.
They have both vocational courses (business, economics, IT, healthcare, etc.) as well as courses in humanities, arts (including performing arts, and writing) and so on.
You can take courses whenever you want, or apply for a longer vocational education.
If you want me to take the liberal arts seriously, you're going to have to show how they can be held to the same kind of standard that we hold, say, physics to.
Worse, you also simultaneously managed to insult half your audience. I attended a CS only university. I did not have one hour of history class. Not one hour was spent on anthropology, physics or language study except as necessary for our compiler classes.
If you cut out the lesser useful classes, such as anything having to do with user interface design, then maybe you could've gotten a year out of it. That will still have taken me four years, to get that CS degree.
"Learn a craft to survive and letters to not be stolen from."
You don't want a democratic society lacking or with subpar education. Do you prefer your neighbor voting for the future of the economy, your kids, your long term state goals to be well educated or lacking education. And a lot of populism is based on tricking your constituents with statistics.
But even then: we need skilled workers. Looking 10-20 years ahead, what is the ratio of unskilled/skilled jobs that we need? I would argue the ratio is dropping. And if it isn't, one can always do an unskilled job with a graduate degree. Not so much the other way around. At least if you want to compete globally.
I see your point. But I think doing some back of the envelope in my head it doesn't work in the long run and is bad for the democracy.
The US does have a pricing social issue, but that is not true for the UK from my understanding (outsider, from other part of Europe). My 2c anyways.
Edit: fixed typos
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2018/03/20/1-trends-in-...
What actually happened is that politics has changed significantly over the past 20 years.
For one example, go watch the 2000 presidential debate: many social issues were danced around in a delicate manner that certainly is not the case today. And the rhetoric is downright academic compared to the shit throwing that happens these days.
ps: it's definitely not unpopular, it's a mainstream media talking point, but that's another story
Sometimes, it is just simpler to state the truth and not beat about the bush. Today's Universities are insane and completely deranged.
If you want to know exactly how we got here, Marc Andreesen talks about it frequently about last 100 years of education evolution. Universities today are an insurance product with a bunch of brainwashing built into the scheme.
A strawman isn't about generalization it's about simplification of opponent points to the point that they make no sense. In which way did i simplify anything about your point with the aim of contradicting it? In fact imho i did the opposite: i took what i believe to be the actual valid core of it (superficiality etc) and said i agreed with it. Still you're not answering to my rebuttal: your initial point (1) contains no substance since anybody worth discussing with across the political spectrum agrees to some form of it (i do and OP most surely do as i pointed out, and seeing you cite andreesen we are definitely wide apart on the that spectrum, which in itself is ok) and (2) is part of a general pattern of passing opinions widely shared inside a well-known thought-school as being something "unpopular", which is a whole minefield of bogus concepts that get nice dialogues derailed into flames.
Nope, imho it's pretty clear that there's an elephant in the room: public services are better run with long term stable funding (no need for tons, just what's needed) and completely independently of whatever the short term economic market incentives are. Some sprinkle of oversight from generalists and politics is good, but ffs let the people that actually do the thing decide the shape of it. I'm not telling bankers whom they should lend to. (But that's just my extremist pov /s).
ps: just to be clear, the actual acceptable part of your opinion is even acknowledged in the article, in the start of paragraph "We’re going to regret it." tldr: the current university focused on abstraction/math/erudition is stupid anyways. Yes it should go away (as a mainstream thing).
In addition to universities sucking more we've also scaled back on training people throughout the economy. Heck, we're running out of pilots for airplanes and there's no plan to train more.
We've got a hungry generation of young adults with desire to do more but society hasn't provided the means for them to succeed. We failed to invest in the future.
It seems disingenuous to say, on the one hand, "tech is going to disrupt industries and people just need to deal with it" but on the other hand "education to acquire higher skills should be restricted to the elite few."
All college students are double majoring in Ideology, as demonstrated by their ability to conform for four years. This in turn unlocks a host of professions only accessible to Ideology majors: bureaucracies, paper pushers, journalists, NGOs, HR, teachers, etc. The extra patient and above-average smart ones can sit through more college and get better deals in finance, medicine, law, and science (although society is definitely losing out on the most competent people in these fields, because they are constitutionally unable to sit through 8 years of Ideology).
There are very few arenas were raw competence is needed badly enough and results can't be faked, even in the short term, that begrudgingly, people with no Ideology certifications are allowed to operate: engineers are the ones with the highest wealth potential of these. I'd bet that most engineers are successful in spite of college, many would choose to skip it if they could get a do-over, and the best engineers have the lowest opinion of higher education.
> Meanwhile, we’ve systematically defunded classrooms... It has consequences... Professors like me have to fill articles like this with yoga photos to keep people’s attention. And it's only going to get worse. Our politicians are going to get dumber. Our youth are going to get more restless and desperate. Misinformation is going to get more outlandish. That’s our future, as predicted by the movie Idiocracy.
In other words, she did it for the clicks. It's either a mildly clever rhetorical device or rage-inducing clickbait, depending on where you fall on the "easily angered" spectrum.
I do not think this trend will correct post-zoom. I think this is the beginning of a long education winter, at least until the education market can prove actual value instead of certified bullshit printed on $100 bills
If nothing else, affordable college was a holding tank for America’s youth. We kept them occupied and entertained.
This fundamentally misunderstands economics. There isn’t a fixed lump of labor that we want to save up for our favorite people.
We don’t want to warehouse adults because it’s doubly destructive. The students are out of the labor market not producing anything and the people babysitting them aren’t producing anything either. That makes us all poorer.
> The relationship between aging and criminal activity has been noted since the beginnings of criminology. For example, Adolphe Quetelet (1831/1984) found that the proportion of the population involved in crime tends to peak in adolescence or early adulthood and then decline with age. In contemporary times, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report (UCR) arrest data (1935–1997), particularly the Crime Index (homicide, robbery, rape, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny-theft, auto theft), document the consistency of the age effect on crime.
[1] https://www.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-binaries/602...
The USSR largely collapsed because of that. Occupy wall-street was the moment it nearly happened in the US.
Instead the yoga pants were completely non sequitur to the article. They are actually the reason I stopped reading the article since it was clearly pointless.
I thought, and still think, it was a fairly lame concept to base an article around
States do give less than they used to, but the federal government gives more. The combination of the two is increasing, slowly, after suffering during the Great Recession. Third-party funding has also increased, by the way.
This to say that I don't think the reason fewer people are going to college is because there's less money in higher education. Funding is a factor, but the lack of state funding doesn't explain the poor choices schools make with that money.
I do find the article interesting but an editor would be useful since lines like these cast doubt on the rest of the article. Interesting none the less, and oddly I don’t even the yoga pics.
For example you can teach half of the Computer Science courses to half of the high school students directly in high school, but you completely lose the other half. So you move it to college and have everyone happy to have 12 years of mediocre education. It is called equality.
I suppose that the form of this argument itself could be mimicking the anti-intellectualism that the article decries, much like the acknowledged use of the stock photos to attract&retain attention.
I'd look at breaking it out into 3 separate areas.
1. Foundations (1-2 years). This is a course offered which introduces students to the basics of areas they're interested in. Students can learn about many different areas to study or work in, as well as understand what the requirements of Academia are (essay writing, research, studies, etc).
Once Foundations are done, you split out into either..
A. Apprenticeships, Technical Institutions, Polytechnics: Created by industry leaders, board members are those who have worked in the industry, trainers are those who have worked in the industry recently and are limited to tenures of no more than 2 years - but they get paid more than they would in their roles.
Course length depends on field. For example if you were to become a Software Engineer, probably 18 months is enough. Medicine on the other hand will be more aligned to current expectations.
B. Academia, University: Created by those who want to write and study the field, but not work in it primarily. These will occasionally work with folks in the industry to try new research. These are usually primarily publicly funded.
Right now, the institutions who run and advertise B are the majority - but pretend to operate and work for A. Which is bullshit, but they are incentivized to continue operating that way by the government, by their board and by their own corporate institutions.
I don't care. I'm happy about it actually. We are going through a transformation with regard to our relationship with information. Libraries, copyright, higher learning institutions, $100 text books, professors teaching, your kid getting roughed up by the school resource officer, $60k degrees in English followed by the Starbucks job, smoking in the boys' room, they're all going the way of the dinosaur, and it's very exciting. It's exciting because the gatekeepers are being destroyed, the rent seekers are going hungry, education and information are the same thing, equally accessible to everyone. However, nobody is going to show you your path, chart it for you, not anymore. You can learn anything you want, anything at all, for free, with nobody's permission, but you've got to figure out what to learn by yourself. It is a revolution in self actuation, from now on you'll be what you make of yourself. Of course, it's always been that way, they lied to you when they told you they knew better or that there was a shortcut, but at least it's not a secret anymore. So go out into the world and do whatever the fuck you want, there's never been a better time to do it than now.
Imho this is naive optimism. Surely things are changing and surely things weren't great, but the direction in which things are changing are not for the better. I'm not familiar with the US but around here affordable publicly-funded university that have generally kind of ok quality are going under just the same. Where do you see any kind of non-commercial learning platform building up? I only see edtech. You're talking about copyright which hints at free software movement and the like: we are loosing ground in that field too (or at best it's stable, but it's still completely niche).
I'm glad to see publicly funded institutions go under as well. There should be no gatekeepers to information.
The information you need to get the skills universities claim only they can give you is freely available. You want to learn how to do residential electricity? Commercial HVAC? Programming, data analysis, and/or statistics? A handful of search queries and a ton of reading are all you need to get started. About the only things you can't do professionally by just following your interests on the internet right now are medicine and law. I expect that to change too.
This article creates heat and smoke but not much illumination - motivation without direction. Irony here is both the epitaph and murderer of citizen education and culture being lamented.
Rome the Republic gave rise to consummate ironists, and the correspondingly detached professional classes allowed Imperial Rome to flourish. Must we follow?
Yes, tech bears some responsibility (and credit) both for the means of production and the incentive influences on consumers, workers, and investors. But the question is, what would make a difference?
Stock options have been mostly successful at getting people to work together, as have reputation privileges on forums like this. But those might just be noise in the signal of vast profits or continuous attention highs.
No incentives really distinguish good from bad: profit and reputation work just as well for the black market and poorly-managed companies. In response companies try to adopt an ethos of operational efficiency or mission-orientation, but ethos devolves to signaling and tribalism.
My experience is that the only countervailing force is the formative lifeboat experience: when young having to work intensely together on things that matter, often losing some people as a result. This happened writ large in WWI and WWII, as soldiers came back guilt-ridden and dedicated to humbly building society (* ok relatively speaking), but it also happens in the small in college, just helping each other figure out what to do and how to learn what you need (with the sadness of watching some of your friends get lost). Somehow having worked together and suffered and lost makes you less inclined to take advantage of others, even when you can. (fwiw I believe there's a recent article on the sense of guilt being a distinguishing attribute of a leader.)
Political apathy, the great resignation, opting out of college (or lacking grit or work ethic or ...), people are detaching from systems they find toxic (some would say challenging): competition with foreign engineers or immigrant workers, cultural assimilation, political discussion of any sort, etc. If human relations are disciplined by exit (when consensual) or voice (when exit is not an option), high utilization rates of both mechanisms indicate that relations aren't good, largely because of forces introduced by tech.
No one would recommend a real lifeboat experience if you can avoid it, and they're not a scalable response in any case. However, I think they help, and I think college can deliver that, if it's 2-4 year residential, in-person, small-classes with a strong element of student self-governance culminating in the selection of a career as a life's work. The curriculum should expand attention spans, critical thinking, diversity of friend groups, and (above all) a sense of responsibility for the effects of your own actions on yourself and others, and the sense of agency and ownership, where you realize you can make a difference.
Obviously, college should not support or reward cheating, cramming for exams, collecting credentials, social isolation, marketable skills trumping professional judgment, privilege networks, decomposed learning, etc.
Tech's influence on education should not be to scale horizontally but vertically. If the article is right that education is contracting demographically and burdened with bureaucracy, it has the two characteristics that make it ripe for tech disruption -- not by scaling single classes to world audiences, but by making small intensive environments economically feasible and enriching.
For heaven's sake, the next generation has to be grounded enough to manage climate collapse, authoritarianism, and technology-driven disruption. It's the least we can do for them!
So if they managed to screw an entire generation with high debt because "of course college is required for a good life in the US", great! If the next generation can't afford it and has to take lower-paying jobs, great! And now we got abortion nixed, so there will be more desperate kids having kids. Great - they'll take any job we offer at the lowest rate possible!
The US doesn't want a good education system.
My part time internship paid my college and living expenses.
Not all my profs were great, but I had the space to explore on my own.
What's not to like? Sure, I came out of that $2,000 in debt, but I paid that off from my new gig in one payment the second it was about to start accruing interest.
I'd argue that the keystone to the downfall of higher education is the cost, full stop. Other problems? Yes, of course. But fix the cost, and these problems lose most of their effect.