College as the base line assumption for getting a job is really bad, but there are a lot of other good effects that a year of college can give you that high school can't.
1) Since it's a lot bigger you will tend to mix with a much larger (and more diverse) number of people in an adult setting.
2) Since you get to choose your own subjects you can experience gaining knowledge that you actually want to gain, rather than knowledge as a means to an end (this would be even more true if again college wasn't a base requirement for jobs).
3) Most people will need to move at least a little way to go to college, which can help stop them forming a rut that they settle into after school and never get out of again.
Material sustenance is a prerequisite for any of those things to be considered good rather than distraction. It's not ironic that the reason poor people go to college is to get a better job; it's the result of a society divided by social class. It's the poor imitating the rich in hopes that they can make a living someday. To say the least, it is cruel and unusual.
>it's the result of a society divided by social class
Isn't it really the opposite?
Pre-industrial revolution, most people would be farmers, and they would learn outside of school nearly everything they needed to know.
Today, it's much more common for people to do something different from their parents, and even if college doesn't put you in an elite group, it gives you the freedom to choose from different lifestyles.
I think people may be oblivious to this if they are a few generations removed from their farming ancestors, such that they never knew a living relative who was the first to abandon their traditional life and get educated and go to the city to work.
> Pre-industrial revolution, most people would be farmers, and they would learn outside of school nearly everything they needed to know.
Nothing about society or college was comparable pre-industrial revolution, unless maybe you came from wealth and are comparing the life of aristocracy. What's your inheritance?
> gives you the freedom to choose from different lifestyles
See my previous comment.
> I think people may be oblivious to this if they are a few generations removed from their farming ancestors, such that they never knew a living relative who was the first to abandon their traditional life and get educated and go to the city to work.
Pre-industrial revolution peasants did not "abandon their traditional life" by choice; very far from it. They were forced into industrial centers as common lands were evacuated and commodified to staff the factories. Post-industrial revolution, they were forced by waves of technological change and economic instability. Again, only the very privileged few ever had the luxury of "abandoning traditional life" by choice.
>Nothing about society or college was comparable pre-industrial revolution, unless maybe you came from wealth and are comparing the life of aristocracy. What's your inheritance?
We must be talking past each other.
I was saying that being a farmer, or not being a farmer, but with no more formal education than a typical farmer, was brutal.
People that could've done a hundred things with a college education spent their lives doing back breaking physical labor until they couldn't stand any more.
That is exactly the excuse made by the ruling class for forcing people into the factories. It’s nonsense. We aren’t talking past each other. You are just talking about things you know nothing about.
Probably not, which is why I specified one year. It is also perfectly within the power (if not the will) of any country above subsistence to provide one year of education for free.
All of these can be accomplished without going to college.
Moving away from home and doing some vocational training/apprenticeship works just as well. Especially since you actually get payed for your education and can actually be independent, instead of your parents paying for you.
Where does online college fit into this? I got a bachelor’s degree from my state school. I never went to the campus once and only interacted with my teacher (not regularly). My diploma and transcript look exactly like everyone who went on campus.
#2 is becoming decreasing true as more general education is piled on to both make up for the knowledge that students increasingly lack of abilities (as high schools are pressured to just pass them) as well as the perverse incentive for colleges to pack in these classes to keep them paying for more classes. This is compounded by the fact that these ill-prepared students wont as successful in a more rigorous program so departmental pressures within the college system have reduced the scope of undergrad classes by a staggering amount. These days, their major grants them surface-level, watered-down understanding, requiring the need to go into a masters or post-baccalaureate program for the privilege of learning anything useful.
Credentialism and signalling are well established. At a broader level it's the old 'correlation vs causation' chestnut. Policymakers notice that people with education earn more, and decide that people should do more education so they too can earn more, but it mostly fails because it wasn't just the education that holds them back. Meanwhile, in a world where everyone is forced to see high school through to graduation the value of a diploma is diminished.
In tech, some companies are increasingly willing to captialise on this by expanding their hiring pool and benefiting from snapping up workers that other companies don't want to hire. So there's some hope it seems that we can break free from the credentialist world that we're in right now.
Despite the author's 40 years in education he still doesn't get it. Education is an end in itself not a job qualification. You can only grok this if you have lived in a country in which higher education is/was fully funded by the state. As soon as it becomes a cost/benefit exercise the original ideal behind education is lost and subjects such as Philosophy, Literature and History appear to be a waste of time and money. Ironically, when higher education in the UK was fully-funded by the state the resulting degrees, regardless of the subject(s) studied, were far more valuable in the job market than the more vocational degrees which today saddle students with £50k of debt. A society which doesn't value education as an investment is a society in decline. The same can also be said about a nation's health service.
>Education is an end in itself not a job qualification.
But even students treat it as such. Many of the people I know went to get a degree because they believed "they had to", not because of an intrinsic desire to learn. And if all involved believe that it is about getting a qualification for some career, then that is what it will become.
>when higher education in the UK was fully-funded by the state the resulting degrees, regardless of the subject(s) studied, were far more valuable in the job market
Rarity is the actual important thing here. If a significant portion of students have some degree it will be inherently irrelevant. Education has been continually broadened, making it more and more irrelevant. In the past a university degree was an enormous signifier, now it is "expected" in the job market, even if irrelevant.
>But even students treat it as such. Many of the people I know went to get a degree because they believed "they had to", not because of an intrinsic desire to learn.
They're responding rationally to a fucked up employment market that erroneously views education as an employee production pipeline.
If those perverse incentives disappeared, we'd see students more able to study what they want, not what's marketable on a resume.
Very few people, even in the west, are so privileged that they can spend years of time on full time education with no chance of economic gain.
If the perverse incentives of employers demanding significant amounts of ultimately meaningless education, people wouldn't go to universities. They would just go directly into training for a job (which has been the human norm up until a few decades ago).
Parents can view higher education as a social badge, and the students as something they have to go through, yet get valuable and life changing insights as they go through the courses.
Anecdotally the courses that were the most interesting and left an impression on me where auxiliary units we could choose from to fill a unit quota to graduate. The very low expectations kinda helped choose courses that didn't sound super useful, only to realize afterwards why they mattered.
I thought it was random luck, but looking at how the graduation system is set and the way the teachers organized these courses, it was obvious after the fact that the university put a lot of effort into getting students to touch subjects they didn't understand as important.
>when higher education in the UK was fully-funded by the state the resulting degrees, regardless of the subject(s) studied, were far more valuable in the job market than the more vocational degrees which today saddle students with £50k of debt
When was that, exactly?
Maybe the problem is just that when 1% of the population is educated, they can all be in the top 1%, and when 100% is, they can't all even be above average?
That doesn't match my experience getting an education in University.
I was excited for actual learning and education but what I found was a bureaucratic box checking exercise.
That's not to say that learning didn't occur or that individual professors or students didn't care about learning. It's just to say that the 'system' of Universities didn't care all that much about learning, or at the very least it was not the primary objective of the system.
Something like the ability to follow procedures, conformity, compliance, etc. seemed to be the point. Or perhaps the primary purpose of Universities seems to be to perpetuate the existence of the University.
The real value of University for me was networking and job opportunities (which are a kind of networking).
I think your experience is due to the effects of what’s cited in the comment - college has lost it’s way and been taken over by economics and metrics rather than learning.
My experience as a neurodivergent who didn't last two semesters in college, is that the administration is basically an obstacle to actual learning actually occurring.
The real value of University for me was having the freedom to read extensively both within and outside the degree curriculum. My family were working-class but education was fully-funded which affected how I used my time. Sure, there were also many students who viewed the whole process as preparation for a career but some of us took it as an opportunity to explore intellectually.
Not everyone is smart enough to get into degrees studying philosophy, literature, and history. Some people instead get jobs as cashiers or plumbers.
Does it seem fair to you that they should subsidise the education of people smarter than them? For those people to learn subjects that don't contribute as much to the economy (ie. are able to contribute less toward paying for future students to study)?
It's easy to say education is an end in itself when you're the beneficiary of it and some poor schmuck is paying the bill.
Why shouldn't they? You say it as if educating a portion of the population has no wider benefit to the rest of society beyond the individual benefit to the students who are educated. Is it not a good idea to have trained doctors when you fall ill? Do you plan on sending your kids to school? Maybe you should support educating some teachers. Do you want to live and work in buildings that won't fall down? Hmm, maybe it would be a good idea to have a few engineers around. Of course there is some benefit to the educated individuals too and hence perhaps they should contribute to their training. But to claim society has no strategic incentive to subsidise the costs is just nonsense. If nothing else, they are likely to contribute more on average in terms of taxation in future .
They shouldn't support it because the point of the government is to act on behalf of the society as a whole. Many problems need money: healthcare, transportation, energy, disaster prevention etc. Without the market's price mechanism, in this context represented by the job prospects after graduation, it's very difficult to know how much should be spent paying philosophy and gender studies teachers. We'd be preventing an efficient allocation of resources potentially killing people in the process.
Additionally, while many people have a genuine interest in these topics (and should buy themselves books, or pay their own philosophy college course), many young adults will be happy signing up for this "education" to avoid making hard decisions for their lives (such as getting a plumbing degree). In this case, the government is financing a sort of young adult daycare and party service.
Maybe it’s because of my learning style (I don’t do well with lecture-style formats), but I disagree. I love learning and have a couple degrees, had a full-ride (academic) to undergrad and only went to 50% of classes (was docked full letter grades in a few because of attendance and still graduated with a decent GPA).
Even getting STEM degrees, I found the actual education lacking and many courses I had to take pointless.
I did learn some stuff. Learned slightly more in grad school. But I did the degrees because I knew I needed to check boxes for my future.
The price is not really the determining factor. In my country for example, each university has hundreds of free spots payed by the state for top students, and even the other spots are almost free compared to American or British education (maybe 1k euro per year or so).
And yet, everyone views education as a means to get a job, with Philosophy, Literature, and History only being good to get a job as a professor or teacher.
The real problem holding back education is that once you finish university, you must get a job to survive, and that everyone who hires a university graduate expects them to know the basics of the job they will be doing, not to require years of training for the base work.
Even if college is free, people who will have to work for a living have to compare three-four years of unproductive higher education to spending those same years in vocational training or working or getting a job-friendly degree. And most will decide that they can't afford to learn what might maybe make them better people, they have to learn something to make them better workers.
The aforementioned less-useful degrees open a lot more doors than that, particularly administrative and managerial, plus opportunities to make a lateral move into a graduate program or otherwise post-grad training opportunity in a subject with more practical utility.
Any college degree is valuable for getting a higher-paying career but the cost (both direct and opportunity) of going to college paired with bad luck or poor performance afterward may nevertheless make it a bad bet.
More vocational programs (even in STEM and "knowledge worker" domains) are a good idea, better than trying to use universities for that purpose, but the lack of prestige appears to be a problem and many of the current options in this space are borderline or outright scams with low-quality education run by very much for-profit entities.
In the UK polytechnics used to fulfill this role and they did it well as long as the sector was well funded. Once the cost accountancy rot set-in under Thatcher every higher education institution became desperate to be re-classified as a university for fear of losing custom from the new breed of students with loans to spend. As I said, once you tie education to the job market the ideal is lost and there is no place in the world for Literature, Philosophy, Sociology, History etc.
One other hypothesis I’ll throw out there is that part of the problem is that general education is seen as a phase that one goes through and then is done with. If you have stuff you want to study in an academic way, you better cover it while you’re at school. I went to undergrad for 5 years and still never had time for subjects like philosophy as much as I may have enjoyed it. The breath of human ideas is too vast to cover in the time we give for it.
The problem I have with degrees being handed out left and right is that it causes a deflation of a degree. And then we see ridiculous needs on job postings.
We currently see a lot of “reforming” in our higher education here in Denmark. There are likely many reasons for this, one being that it’s one of the areas that’s relatively “free” for politicians to do something with in that there won’t be a public backlash, but obviously they’re mainly doing it because they believe in the stuff they do.
What I’ve always found a little tragically comic (I’m not sure what the English description for “tragikomisk” it is, I have a non classical STEM degree after all) about it is how reactive it always is. They’re focusing on STEM education and cutting the “softer” stuff. Exactly because of some cost/benefit analysis as you point out and this time they are even shortening the length it takes to get the post bachelor degrees. They’re doing it because there is a demand for educated STEM people, and they want more young people to get a desired degree faster. What I find “comical” about it though is that I’m old enough to remember when China first started to become a economic superpower and there suddenly was an extreme demand for people who had studied Chinese. Again, sort of reacting to this, the politicians exploded the funding for Chinese resulting in a bunch of people who 5-10 years later couldn’t find jobs because China had filled the gap with English speaking translators.
If our politicians are constantly adjusting our higher education to what has been in demand for the previous 5 years, then we’re always going to be educating the wrong people. Even if you think the focus on STEM is a good idea, and it probably is, what we need right now are mathematicians and not the “softer” IT educations we needed 5 years ago. Meaning even though our government focused heavily on meeting the IT demands that blew up when the digitalisation really sped up in Denmark 10 years ago, we now find ourselves in a world where we severely lack people with an education that can be used for AI/ML because those lines weren’t the STEM educations that were focused on 5-10 years ago.
I get the want to meddle, but I do wonder if maybe leaving higher education to the universities (and the students) wasn’t the better option as none of us can predict the future. At least not outside how we’re likely going to need more or whatever they de-prioritise.
This is the first time they’ve shortened the higher education though. I wonder how that will work out. There is a demand for more of what we are making now, but is giving more people a worse education faster really going to meet that demand? Or are we just fucking over a few generations before we realise the mistake?
If you need school to develop your education, you’ve already lost. This is the dichotomy of formal education: those that require it won’t benefit by virtue of the requirement and those that don’t won’t need it to become educated. Education is something you have to pursue for it to have much value. You can’t educate people that don’t care, and people that care are often quite capable of educating themselves. Is the purpose to chase credentials or to be a maximally functional human?
Far too many cultures conflate collecting credentials with a constructive education. A low-key advantage of US culture is that they care far less about educational credentials than most cultures in most contexts; people motivated to educate themselves outside formal processes are given proper consideration.
That wasn’t phrased exactly right; the point is that those who benefit from formal education are those generally motivated to seek knowledge on their own. (Similar: it doesn’t matter what parenting book you read, the fact that you wanted to be a better parent makes you a good parent.)
Throwing masses of disinterested students through 4 years of classes doesn’t benefit them the way everyone hopes.
I definitely agree, but I do think for a lot of subjects schools can provide benefits that are hard or impossible to find on your own, such as access to equipment and facilities, dialogue with peers and teachers, group activities, objective measurements of your progress etc.
Edit: the other commenter's example is a good one - you can certainly study medicine by yourself, but without access to labs, cadavers, and clinical training you'd have a tough time.
Or perhaps you are the one who doesn't get it? With so many books/courses/AI available online, you can learn for your entire life without needing to go to school for it as long as you have curiosity and movitivation.
If your goal is to learn and get educated, you don't need college.
College is mostly for getting a job and socialize with your peers(which is more important than most people think).
I don't think so. I think in almost all cases, there's a big difference of going through an entire advanced course on youtube and actually taking the class.
And most of that difference is fighting through the problem sets yourself (in STEM) and actually writing the essays (in the humanities). And feedback loop provided by grading in both cases.
When I learned quantum field theory for the first time, the course had 4 hours of lectures a week. But the problem set for the week took between 8 and 12 hours to solve - as a team (for me, it would have been close to impossible to solve solo, the discussions with peers while working the problem where vital).
I also ended up TA-ing that course the following year, and only after doing that I actually understood the material.
Would it be theoretically possible to learn the material from a youtube lecture and a pirated copy of the textbook? Of course. But I think even the majority of people who already have some formal education in the field would fail to do so.
> As soon as it becomes a cost/benefit exercise the original ideal behind education is lost and subjects such as Philosophy, Literature and History appear to be a waste of time and money.
It is a cost/benefit exercise. It always has been. If the pro-higher-education crowd wants to pretend otherwise, then not only are they deluded but their political influence is disastrous and we need to find a way to blunt it.
Not only can we not afford it (the cost has gone up at some absurdly fast rate that makes inflation look cuddly), but the very trends in higher education that cause the cost to spiral out of control are themselves on an upwards trajectory.
You're not doing anyone any favors peddling this nonsense. The later starts to adult life affect people negatively. The student debt is more than any ordinary burden, it is a boat anchor chained to everyone's neck. And it doesn't even guarantee most of these people a career. None of them sit in their cardboard box underneath the overpass in between their 5 part-time jobs thinking "gee, I can't file bankruptcy for my $170,000 in student debt, but at least I got a B+ in my undergrad philsophy class, that's what's really important".
> Ironically, when higher education in the UK was fully-funded by the state the resulting degrees,
When its population was what fraction of its current population? When it was fully-funded for those who could make the cut, and all the other chavs were tossed out to try to make some sort of life in the working class? And don't think I'm picking on the UK here, it's the same all over.
> regardless of the subject(s) studied, were far more valuable in the job market
When 5% of the population gets a university degree, that's a useful filter to decide who you want managing the other 95%. When 45% (or 75%, or 100% like you like to daydream about) have a university degree, it's not useful at all. You can no longer determine who should be in the managerial class by who has a degree and who doesn't. You need to use a different metric.
And they do. They use different metrics now. And oh, that managerial class thing... that's about the only one still around. Not much left in the way of working class jobs.
> A society which doesn't value education as an investment is a society in decline.
If it's an investment, why would you waste that on a bunch of people who will never pay off?
The UK's population has only increased 20% since 1980. As for "a bunch of people who will never pay off" you're back to education as a cost/benefit exercise. I know it can be hard to get out of this mindset but once upon a time there really was a culture of education for its own sake.
> you're back to education as a cost/benefit exercise.
In the real world that I live in, everything costs something. Only those who are insulated from the cost of things get to gibber absurdities like "this is more important than what it costs!".
Higher education isn't marginal. This isn't couch-cushion money. It either has to have a payoff, or it has to go away. It is imperative... making different choices won't prevent it going away, all you can affect is how much melodrama is stirred up when it does disappear.
He's a professor in the economics department at George Mason University. ("...founded in principles that stress the value of free markets in promoting peace and prosperity.") GMU is partially funded and controlled by the Koch foundations.[1] He is a research fellow at the Mercatus Center. ("Mercatus research focuses on how markets solve problems.") Mercatus is funded by the Koch family and Charles Koch is on the board. He is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute ("The vision of the Cato Institute is to create free, open, and civil societies founded on libertarian principles.") Cato was founded by Charles Koch, as the Koch Foundation.
So expect to hear the Koch Industries position from this source.
In this day and age a motivated 18+ year old adult has more than enough tools to actively pursue education outside a college setting while having a day job that pays. And this learning does not need to end after four years. So for most students college is just a transaction: a bachelor’s degree in exchange for some money and four years of their life. No point in passively receiving education (i.e. being indoctrinated) at college, when there are better learning tools outside.
I completely agree with this sentiment. Capitalism, Democracy and a free society only works if the citizens are educated and healthy. Why do we even elect a government and pay our taxes then. We could go back to having Kings and the "educated" aristrocrats while all of us can grow wheat. Free access to education to all in a democratic society is mandatory. Put my taxes to good use for the future of my country. I don't need another F-16 but I will definitely need a large educated workforce in the future. Invest in people first, fighter jets can come second.
Amusing that philosophy always ends up in these hypothetical lists of "less useful" degrees. At least when I was in college 15 years ago, it was topping many lists of most sought out degrees in business magazines, because problem solving is a pretty solid cross-industry skillset.
Obviously you then want to couple with it some more specific skills, but it's sort of like doing your core workout to get a solid base before worrying about specific muscle groups. Or taking a computer science curriculum before worrying about learning a specific language without any foundation in how the machine actually does, well, anything.
Literature, art history...yes, a bit less widespread in their ability to make you suited for at least many professions. Though worth remembering "schola" is an ancient Greek root meaning "leisure," and yes, just because something isn't inherently going to return a profit directly doesn't mean it's worth discarding entirely.
It sounds like you might be smarter than the vast majority of highschool students to which the GP comment was aimed at.
The problem is, the math and civics classes already present in highschool should be adequate, it's just that many of the students don't take it seriously and try to learn - an extra year isn't going to fix that.
I think there is insight to be gleaned from how learning used to be done through an academy vs what became to be known as college or education post-industrialization.
Interesting to think we inherited this structure for human knowledge from the Catholic Church.
Also I don't think reasonable people want College for Everyone™ when they defend public higher education. Entrance exams for public universities in the third world are brutal.
I attempted to finish college five times, and I fell short of my goal five times as well. This transpired over the course of 30 years.
Having washed out of college twice by 1992, I landed my first job due to networking with my classmates, at a very college-adjacent employer. I then went on to ride the dot-com bubble for years, and I was able to capitalize on my natural talents and the generally hungriness of employers for system admins. I was utterly incompetent and ill-suited for the corporate world at that point.
I was homeless a lot and I was unemployed a lot, and I couldn't really succeed at anything, even if I tried. Eventually I got used to volunteering a lot, developed a better work ethic, and then I went back to school. Several times. The first time I completed a two-year course for a certification that simply made me a better volunteer. Then I went to community college to try for an Associate of Applied Science. Unable to complete this degree, I did achieve my more realistic goals of brushing up on modern tech, and achieving the correct certifications.
I then landed a great job in academia, and perhaps the recruiter found me because community college was on my LinkedIn profile. At any rate, they didn't give a fig about my relevant certifications (and they wouldn't pay to earn/maintain them either) and so here I sit, 3 years later, with a great part-time job, no degree, and two CompTIA certifications.
College didn't matter for me. Unless it did. I definitely benefited in tangential ways from mingling and mixing in the halls of academia for so many years. I wouldn't trade it for anything.
The “everyone goes to college” mantra has caused educational inflation caused by misaligned incentives created from a misunderstood effect.
In the past, wealthy people self selected to go to college because they could afford to live and pay for college at the same time, all of their life, they liked had a lot of educational privilege because they likely were able to focus on studies and not menial work.
Post WWII, college was the hip thing to do that any good middle class young adult could do. They could go to a school that taught you almost exclusively what you wanted to know as everyone motivated enough to go likely had the background to succeed. College moved from a intellectual play grand for the rich to something closer to a vocational school.
Because these the new college grads were going into new and specialized industries and earning way higher than average, lawmakers in the US took notice and instead of paying for college for all, they created the worst class of loan in history, one that cannot be discharged, subsidized by the federal government, and under minimal oversight. Colleges noticed this and raised tuition gradually until about 2000-2005 where it rose sharply out of control because they realized that every year that the fed just increased the loan cap, so now you have this loan cap tracking the cost of college in a case of perverse incentives where the most vulnerable people in this arrangement lose. I’m not even going to mention the FAFSA and what a steaming pile of horseshit the “estimated family contribution” is and how to this day condemns millions of students to take on ridiculous private loans just to be able to qualify for a job that maybe pays above minimum wage.
Meanwhile, colleges are finding out that the “everyone goes to college” push made enrollment skyrocket but the quality of students has plummeted. Students are no longer self selecting, where in the past only the best and the brightest wanted to continue schooling, everyone from your high school valedictorian to the room-temperature-IQ nose picker was applying. They had to be more selective thereby creating more elite institutions, the rest of them had to deal with the problem of unqualified students filling up their ranks and wanted to find a way to extract more value so they lobbied for additional, comprehensive general education requirements which kept students in college, spending money on classes, because a ton of kids entering can’t do math or write coherently.
Now, college is simply an extra few years of high school that ends up being very expensive and it’s returns are questionable with the best results achieved by those actually interested in the material but their 4-year degree looks exactly the same as the other person who skirted through class doing the bare minimum. What’s next? A masters degree.
I cannot imagine a more machiavellian, insane, and hostile system for students. The current college system represents a fall from grace where students carried this increasing burden and we just let it happen.
If you think that's bad... it's so much worse than even you are describing.
Let's say that you are a college or university in the US. You want more students, right? You sort of need them, if enrollment drops off you lose money any number of ways, and the perception that you're a bad school makes enrollment drop off even more in some vicious circle.
So you make the college prettier. The campus gets bigger gardens and fountains. New shiny buildings. Dorms get bigger, you're no longer stuffing 4 freshmen into broom closets with bookshelves masquerading as bunks. They start to resemble every year more and more some sort of resort or spa.
How do you pay for this? You raise tuition. You add more fees. The students like it, and they're not really paying for it (not yet, in that way that young people always seem to think debt is like free money instead of an obscene trap into debt bondage). And you're hiring massive numbers now of people whose job it is just to manage this stuff (and to manage the people who manage this stuff).
But all the other schools are doing this too, so it's an arms race. And you have to do this, because if you act cost-conscious, people take it as a sign of low-quality.
Even if we turn around the perverse incentives that caused this, it does not fix the problem. Universities have been gorging themselves gluttonous on all of this, and now their costs are too high to roll it back. They've got too much staff, too many buildings that won't amortize for years. And god help if anyone were to suggest they dip into the endowments for any of this (even if they were game, what would Wall Street think of that sort of withdrawal?).
Not to mention, as bad as "everyone should go to college" is, what's left for those who wouldn't if we trimmed that back? Up until the 1970s or so, you'd go to work at the factory in your little town that would become part of the rust belt a decade or two later. That even (sort of) held in some places up to the early 1990s.
What are these kids supposed to do? On r/antiwork, they're always complaining about how no one can afford to live on a Starbucks or Dollar General job. There's a mismatch between the employment these people need, and the sort of employment that is available. And no reasonable way to shrink that gap.
I fully agree, and being in tech has insulated me from many of the repercussions of not having a degree. Yes, there are a few non-negotiable "must have a bachelors in X" but I've not lost any sleep over those opportunities.
Having had the privilege of hiring for roles, my experience has been that fresh grads need so much hand holding and have trouble understanding a lot of "glue" concepts in CS, but they can... make crude a hashtable in Java? My favorite are those who can name and implement all the data structures but have no idea what they are actually for.
Part of the way the labor market has adjusted is that all businesses (not just elite or specialized ones) can say they that a 4-year degree is a requirement, even for ostensibly entry-level roles because there are just so many people with that degree and it's a convenient filter. When you have 1000 applications to fill a single $35,000/yr entry-level position, it's always going to be person with the most experience and willing to work for that. The numbers are not in their favor at all. The pandemic has forced a small readjustment in that businesses whining about not being able to find people are shocked to discover that nobody actually wants that $35K/yr job where they have be on site 5 days per week, get maybe 6 days of vacation per year, dubiously little sick time, and have to exist in a sweat-shop-esque open office floor-plan.
The movement to remove the paper ceiling is a noble one but it will be doomed to fail unless forgoing these candidates affect their bottom line. When writing job descriptions, I tend to mercilessly pair back requirements to one or two points that are absolutely essential for the role and most everything else can be omitted. I think this is something more companies can and should do (or selfishly, maybe not) because I've picked up some absolutely fantastic employees who were passed over due to some asinine reason like failing a contrived, live leet-code problem or were demonstrably clever but didn't have a degree.
But this is tech which exists in its own world right now, but I fear we are entering the era where it is becoming like any large industry with constantly rising barriers to enter as a new company and lower standards for workers as we begin an exponential race to the bottom. I am in my 30s and have access to many well-paying options, but I am starting to see the bottom fall out of the labor force in this industry where more experienced people are taking roles they are overqualified for and this ushering in of a new generation of tech workers is just not happening at the rate that we need. We hear that there are more tech jobs than there are tech workers to fill, well most of those are shit because the balance of compensation, expectations, and requirements are way off.
If I were just entering some non-tech industry, I would have lost all hope at this point with the media fearmongering AI as anything more than a smarter autocomplete and will only serve to further exacerbate the problem of not being able to find employment in order to simply have a modest lifestyle of renting a tiny apartment and being able to pay back the absolute mountains of student loan debt. Forget owning a home, going on vacation, having kids of their own, or achieving any other goal in life on a reasonable timeframe. What are these kids suppose to do? Maybe wait for an uncaring boomer congress to help relieve some student debt? Not with the current attitudes of, "well I paid mine back so screw you" all while conveniently ignoring the fact that educational costs have outpaced inflation, as well as wages relative to that, by orders of magnitude.
I don't know what they are suppose to do and it's fucking depressing.
Education is the way we teach people to think. There are other ways. I actually prefer the apprenticeship model.
I’ve learned a staggering amount just by showing up and helping smarter people with their work.
I went to college, got a useless degree (but maybe learned to think and gained some work skills through work study). But really the valuable things I learned I learned on the job with fantastic mentors.
The standard model of education is not the only one, but yes some processes or system for leveling people up is certainly required.
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 302 ms ] thread1) Since it's a lot bigger you will tend to mix with a much larger (and more diverse) number of people in an adult setting.
2) Since you get to choose your own subjects you can experience gaining knowledge that you actually want to gain, rather than knowledge as a means to an end (this would be even more true if again college wasn't a base requirement for jobs).
3) Most people will need to move at least a little way to go to college, which can help stop them forming a rut that they settle into after school and never get out of again.
Isn't it really the opposite?
Pre-industrial revolution, most people would be farmers, and they would learn outside of school nearly everything they needed to know.
Today, it's much more common for people to do something different from their parents, and even if college doesn't put you in an elite group, it gives you the freedom to choose from different lifestyles.
I think people may be oblivious to this if they are a few generations removed from their farming ancestors, such that they never knew a living relative who was the first to abandon their traditional life and get educated and go to the city to work.
Nothing about society or college was comparable pre-industrial revolution, unless maybe you came from wealth and are comparing the life of aristocracy. What's your inheritance?
> gives you the freedom to choose from different lifestyles
See my previous comment.
> I think people may be oblivious to this if they are a few generations removed from their farming ancestors, such that they never knew a living relative who was the first to abandon their traditional life and get educated and go to the city to work.
Pre-industrial revolution peasants did not "abandon their traditional life" by choice; very far from it. They were forced into industrial centers as common lands were evacuated and commodified to staff the factories. Post-industrial revolution, they were forced by waves of technological change and economic instability. Again, only the very privileged few ever had the luxury of "abandoning traditional life" by choice.
We must be talking past each other.
I was saying that being a farmer, or not being a farmer, but with no more formal education than a typical farmer, was brutal.
People that could've done a hundred things with a college education spent their lives doing back breaking physical labor until they couldn't stand any more.
If your worldview is wrong enough, even a few data points will show with high probability it is incorrect.
Moving away from home and doing some vocational training/apprenticeship works just as well. Especially since you actually get payed for your education and can actually be independent, instead of your parents paying for you.
In tech, some companies are increasingly willing to captialise on this by expanding their hiring pool and benefiting from snapping up workers that other companies don't want to hire. So there's some hope it seems that we can break free from the credentialist world that we're in right now.
But even students treat it as such. Many of the people I know went to get a degree because they believed "they had to", not because of an intrinsic desire to learn. And if all involved believe that it is about getting a qualification for some career, then that is what it will become.
>when higher education in the UK was fully-funded by the state the resulting degrees, regardless of the subject(s) studied, were far more valuable in the job market
Rarity is the actual important thing here. If a significant portion of students have some degree it will be inherently irrelevant. Education has been continually broadened, making it more and more irrelevant. In the past a university degree was an enormous signifier, now it is "expected" in the job market, even if irrelevant.
They're responding rationally to a fucked up employment market that erroneously views education as an employee production pipeline.
If those perverse incentives disappeared, we'd see students more able to study what they want, not what's marketable on a resume.
If the perverse incentives of employers demanding significant amounts of ultimately meaningless education, people wouldn't go to universities. They would just go directly into training for a job (which has been the human norm up until a few decades ago).
Parents can view higher education as a social badge, and the students as something they have to go through, yet get valuable and life changing insights as they go through the courses.
Anecdotally the courses that were the most interesting and left an impression on me where auxiliary units we could choose from to fill a unit quota to graduate. The very low expectations kinda helped choose courses that didn't sound super useful, only to realize afterwards why they mattered.
I thought it was random luck, but looking at how the graduation system is set and the way the teachers organized these courses, it was obvious after the fact that the university put a lot of effort into getting students to touch subjects they didn't understand as important.
When was that, exactly?
Maybe the problem is just that when 1% of the population is educated, they can all be in the top 1%, and when 100% is, they can't all even be above average?
I was excited for actual learning and education but what I found was a bureaucratic box checking exercise.
That's not to say that learning didn't occur or that individual professors or students didn't care about learning. It's just to say that the 'system' of Universities didn't care all that much about learning, or at the very least it was not the primary objective of the system.
Something like the ability to follow procedures, conformity, compliance, etc. seemed to be the point. Or perhaps the primary purpose of Universities seems to be to perpetuate the existence of the University.
The real value of University for me was networking and job opportunities (which are a kind of networking).
Does it seem fair to you that they should subsidise the education of people smarter than them? For those people to learn subjects that don't contribute as much to the economy (ie. are able to contribute less toward paying for future students to study)?
It's easy to say education is an end in itself when you're the beneficiary of it and some poor schmuck is paying the bill.
Additionally, while many people have a genuine interest in these topics (and should buy themselves books, or pay their own philosophy college course), many young adults will be happy signing up for this "education" to avoid making hard decisions for their lives (such as getting a plumbing degree). In this case, the government is financing a sort of young adult daycare and party service.
Even getting STEM degrees, I found the actual education lacking and many courses I had to take pointless.
I did learn some stuff. Learned slightly more in grad school. But I did the degrees because I knew I needed to check boxes for my future.
And yet, everyone views education as a means to get a job, with Philosophy, Literature, and History only being good to get a job as a professor or teacher.
The real problem holding back education is that once you finish university, you must get a job to survive, and that everyone who hires a university graduate expects them to know the basics of the job they will be doing, not to require years of training for the base work.
Even if college is free, people who will have to work for a living have to compare three-four years of unproductive higher education to spending those same years in vocational training or working or getting a job-friendly degree. And most will decide that they can't afford to learn what might maybe make them better people, they have to learn something to make them better workers.
Any college degree is valuable for getting a higher-paying career but the cost (both direct and opportunity) of going to college paired with bad luck or poor performance afterward may nevertheless make it a bad bet.
More vocational programs (even in STEM and "knowledge worker" domains) are a good idea, better than trying to use universities for that purpose, but the lack of prestige appears to be a problem and many of the current options in this space are borderline or outright scams with low-quality education run by very much for-profit entities.
What I’ve always found a little tragically comic (I’m not sure what the English description for “tragikomisk” it is, I have a non classical STEM degree after all) about it is how reactive it always is. They’re focusing on STEM education and cutting the “softer” stuff. Exactly because of some cost/benefit analysis as you point out and this time they are even shortening the length it takes to get the post bachelor degrees. They’re doing it because there is a demand for educated STEM people, and they want more young people to get a desired degree faster. What I find “comical” about it though is that I’m old enough to remember when China first started to become a economic superpower and there suddenly was an extreme demand for people who had studied Chinese. Again, sort of reacting to this, the politicians exploded the funding for Chinese resulting in a bunch of people who 5-10 years later couldn’t find jobs because China had filled the gap with English speaking translators.
If our politicians are constantly adjusting our higher education to what has been in demand for the previous 5 years, then we’re always going to be educating the wrong people. Even if you think the focus on STEM is a good idea, and it probably is, what we need right now are mathematicians and not the “softer” IT educations we needed 5 years ago. Meaning even though our government focused heavily on meeting the IT demands that blew up when the digitalisation really sped up in Denmark 10 years ago, we now find ourselves in a world where we severely lack people with an education that can be used for AI/ML because those lines weren’t the STEM educations that were focused on 5-10 years ago.
I get the want to meddle, but I do wonder if maybe leaving higher education to the universities (and the students) wasn’t the better option as none of us can predict the future. At least not outside how we’re likely going to need more or whatever they de-prioritise.
This is the first time they’ve shortened the higher education though. I wonder how that will work out. There is a demand for more of what we are making now, but is giving more people a worse education faster really going to meet that demand? Or are we just fucking over a few generations before we realise the mistake?
Far too many cultures conflate collecting credentials with a constructive education. A low-key advantage of US culture is that they care far less about educational credentials than most cultures in most contexts; people motivated to educate themselves outside formal processes are given proper consideration.
This is nonsense.
Have you ever been to a doctor that educated themselves?
Throwing masses of disinterested students through 4 years of classes doesn’t benefit them the way everyone hopes.
The GP is correct; and your view of education is a good example of it.
Edit: the other commenter's example is a good one - you can certainly study medicine by yourself, but without access to labs, cadavers, and clinical training you'd have a tough time.
And most of that difference is fighting through the problem sets yourself (in STEM) and actually writing the essays (in the humanities). And feedback loop provided by grading in both cases.
When I learned quantum field theory for the first time, the course had 4 hours of lectures a week. But the problem set for the week took between 8 and 12 hours to solve - as a team (for me, it would have been close to impossible to solve solo, the discussions with peers while working the problem where vital).
I also ended up TA-ing that course the following year, and only after doing that I actually understood the material.
Would it be theoretically possible to learn the material from a youtube lecture and a pirated copy of the textbook? Of course. But I think even the majority of people who already have some formal education in the field would fail to do so.
It is a cost/benefit exercise. It always has been. If the pro-higher-education crowd wants to pretend otherwise, then not only are they deluded but their political influence is disastrous and we need to find a way to blunt it.
Not only can we not afford it (the cost has gone up at some absurdly fast rate that makes inflation look cuddly), but the very trends in higher education that cause the cost to spiral out of control are themselves on an upwards trajectory.
You're not doing anyone any favors peddling this nonsense. The later starts to adult life affect people negatively. The student debt is more than any ordinary burden, it is a boat anchor chained to everyone's neck. And it doesn't even guarantee most of these people a career. None of them sit in their cardboard box underneath the overpass in between their 5 part-time jobs thinking "gee, I can't file bankruptcy for my $170,000 in student debt, but at least I got a B+ in my undergrad philsophy class, that's what's really important".
> Ironically, when higher education in the UK was fully-funded by the state the resulting degrees,
When its population was what fraction of its current population? When it was fully-funded for those who could make the cut, and all the other chavs were tossed out to try to make some sort of life in the working class? And don't think I'm picking on the UK here, it's the same all over.
> regardless of the subject(s) studied, were far more valuable in the job market
When 5% of the population gets a university degree, that's a useful filter to decide who you want managing the other 95%. When 45% (or 75%, or 100% like you like to daydream about) have a university degree, it's not useful at all. You can no longer determine who should be in the managerial class by who has a degree and who doesn't. You need to use a different metric.
And they do. They use different metrics now. And oh, that managerial class thing... that's about the only one still around. Not much left in the way of working class jobs.
> A society which doesn't value education as an investment is a society in decline.
If it's an investment, why would you waste that on a bunch of people who will never pay off?
In the real world that I live in, everything costs something. Only those who are insulated from the cost of things get to gibber absurdities like "this is more important than what it costs!".
Higher education isn't marginal. This isn't couch-cushion money. It either has to have a payoff, or it has to go away. It is imperative... making different choices won't prevent it going away, all you can affect is how much melodrama is stirred up when it does disappear.
So expect to hear the Koch Industries position from this source.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/05/us/koch-donors-george-mas...
Obviously you then want to couple with it some more specific skills, but it's sort of like doing your core workout to get a solid base before worrying about specific muscle groups. Or taking a computer science curriculum before worrying about learning a specific language without any foundation in how the machine actually does, well, anything.
Literature, art history...yes, a bit less widespread in their ability to make you suited for at least many professions. Though worth remembering "schola" is an ancient Greek root meaning "leisure," and yes, just because something isn't inherently going to return a profit directly doesn't mean it's worth discarding entirely.
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
The problem is, the math and civics classes already present in highschool should be adequate, it's just that many of the students don't take it seriously and try to learn - an extra year isn't going to fix that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factory_model_school
Also I don't think reasonable people want College for Everyone™ when they defend public higher education. Entrance exams for public universities in the third world are brutal.
Having washed out of college twice by 1992, I landed my first job due to networking with my classmates, at a very college-adjacent employer. I then went on to ride the dot-com bubble for years, and I was able to capitalize on my natural talents and the generally hungriness of employers for system admins. I was utterly incompetent and ill-suited for the corporate world at that point.
I was homeless a lot and I was unemployed a lot, and I couldn't really succeed at anything, even if I tried. Eventually I got used to volunteering a lot, developed a better work ethic, and then I went back to school. Several times. The first time I completed a two-year course for a certification that simply made me a better volunteer. Then I went to community college to try for an Associate of Applied Science. Unable to complete this degree, I did achieve my more realistic goals of brushing up on modern tech, and achieving the correct certifications.
I then landed a great job in academia, and perhaps the recruiter found me because community college was on my LinkedIn profile. At any rate, they didn't give a fig about my relevant certifications (and they wouldn't pay to earn/maintain them either) and so here I sit, 3 years later, with a great part-time job, no degree, and two CompTIA certifications.
College didn't matter for me. Unless it did. I definitely benefited in tangential ways from mingling and mixing in the halls of academia for so many years. I wouldn't trade it for anything.
In the past, wealthy people self selected to go to college because they could afford to live and pay for college at the same time, all of their life, they liked had a lot of educational privilege because they likely were able to focus on studies and not menial work.
Post WWII, college was the hip thing to do that any good middle class young adult could do. They could go to a school that taught you almost exclusively what you wanted to know as everyone motivated enough to go likely had the background to succeed. College moved from a intellectual play grand for the rich to something closer to a vocational school.
Because these the new college grads were going into new and specialized industries and earning way higher than average, lawmakers in the US took notice and instead of paying for college for all, they created the worst class of loan in history, one that cannot be discharged, subsidized by the federal government, and under minimal oversight. Colleges noticed this and raised tuition gradually until about 2000-2005 where it rose sharply out of control because they realized that every year that the fed just increased the loan cap, so now you have this loan cap tracking the cost of college in a case of perverse incentives where the most vulnerable people in this arrangement lose. I’m not even going to mention the FAFSA and what a steaming pile of horseshit the “estimated family contribution” is and how to this day condemns millions of students to take on ridiculous private loans just to be able to qualify for a job that maybe pays above minimum wage.
Meanwhile, colleges are finding out that the “everyone goes to college” push made enrollment skyrocket but the quality of students has plummeted. Students are no longer self selecting, where in the past only the best and the brightest wanted to continue schooling, everyone from your high school valedictorian to the room-temperature-IQ nose picker was applying. They had to be more selective thereby creating more elite institutions, the rest of them had to deal with the problem of unqualified students filling up their ranks and wanted to find a way to extract more value so they lobbied for additional, comprehensive general education requirements which kept students in college, spending money on classes, because a ton of kids entering can’t do math or write coherently.
Now, college is simply an extra few years of high school that ends up being very expensive and it’s returns are questionable with the best results achieved by those actually interested in the material but their 4-year degree looks exactly the same as the other person who skirted through class doing the bare minimum. What’s next? A masters degree.
I cannot imagine a more machiavellian, insane, and hostile system for students. The current college system represents a fall from grace where students carried this increasing burden and we just let it happen.
Let's say that you are a college or university in the US. You want more students, right? You sort of need them, if enrollment drops off you lose money any number of ways, and the perception that you're a bad school makes enrollment drop off even more in some vicious circle.
So you make the college prettier. The campus gets bigger gardens and fountains. New shiny buildings. Dorms get bigger, you're no longer stuffing 4 freshmen into broom closets with bookshelves masquerading as bunks. They start to resemble every year more and more some sort of resort or spa.
How do you pay for this? You raise tuition. You add more fees. The students like it, and they're not really paying for it (not yet, in that way that young people always seem to think debt is like free money instead of an obscene trap into debt bondage). And you're hiring massive numbers now of people whose job it is just to manage this stuff (and to manage the people who manage this stuff).
But all the other schools are doing this too, so it's an arms race. And you have to do this, because if you act cost-conscious, people take it as a sign of low-quality.
Even if we turn around the perverse incentives that caused this, it does not fix the problem. Universities have been gorging themselves gluttonous on all of this, and now their costs are too high to roll it back. They've got too much staff, too many buildings that won't amortize for years. And god help if anyone were to suggest they dip into the endowments for any of this (even if they were game, what would Wall Street think of that sort of withdrawal?).
Not to mention, as bad as "everyone should go to college" is, what's left for those who wouldn't if we trimmed that back? Up until the 1970s or so, you'd go to work at the factory in your little town that would become part of the rust belt a decade or two later. That even (sort of) held in some places up to the early 1990s.
What are these kids supposed to do? On r/antiwork, they're always complaining about how no one can afford to live on a Starbucks or Dollar General job. There's a mismatch between the employment these people need, and the sort of employment that is available. And no reasonable way to shrink that gap.
Having had the privilege of hiring for roles, my experience has been that fresh grads need so much hand holding and have trouble understanding a lot of "glue" concepts in CS, but they can... make crude a hashtable in Java? My favorite are those who can name and implement all the data structures but have no idea what they are actually for.
Part of the way the labor market has adjusted is that all businesses (not just elite or specialized ones) can say they that a 4-year degree is a requirement, even for ostensibly entry-level roles because there are just so many people with that degree and it's a convenient filter. When you have 1000 applications to fill a single $35,000/yr entry-level position, it's always going to be person with the most experience and willing to work for that. The numbers are not in their favor at all. The pandemic has forced a small readjustment in that businesses whining about not being able to find people are shocked to discover that nobody actually wants that $35K/yr job where they have be on site 5 days per week, get maybe 6 days of vacation per year, dubiously little sick time, and have to exist in a sweat-shop-esque open office floor-plan.
The movement to remove the paper ceiling is a noble one but it will be doomed to fail unless forgoing these candidates affect their bottom line. When writing job descriptions, I tend to mercilessly pair back requirements to one or two points that are absolutely essential for the role and most everything else can be omitted. I think this is something more companies can and should do (or selfishly, maybe not) because I've picked up some absolutely fantastic employees who were passed over due to some asinine reason like failing a contrived, live leet-code problem or were demonstrably clever but didn't have a degree.
But this is tech which exists in its own world right now, but I fear we are entering the era where it is becoming like any large industry with constantly rising barriers to enter as a new company and lower standards for workers as we begin an exponential race to the bottom. I am in my 30s and have access to many well-paying options, but I am starting to see the bottom fall out of the labor force in this industry where more experienced people are taking roles they are overqualified for and this ushering in of a new generation of tech workers is just not happening at the rate that we need. We hear that there are more tech jobs than there are tech workers to fill, well most of those are shit because the balance of compensation, expectations, and requirements are way off.
If I were just entering some non-tech industry, I would have lost all hope at this point with the media fearmongering AI as anything more than a smarter autocomplete and will only serve to further exacerbate the problem of not being able to find employment in order to simply have a modest lifestyle of renting a tiny apartment and being able to pay back the absolute mountains of student loan debt. Forget owning a home, going on vacation, having kids of their own, or achieving any other goal in life on a reasonable timeframe. What are these kids suppose to do? Maybe wait for an uncaring boomer congress to help relieve some student debt? Not with the current attitudes of, "well I paid mine back so screw you" all while conveniently ignoring the fact that educational costs have outpaced inflation, as well as wages relative to that, by orders of magnitude.
I don't know what they are suppose to do and it's fucking depressing.
I’ve learned a staggering amount just by showing up and helping smarter people with their work.
I went to college, got a useless degree (but maybe learned to think and gained some work skills through work study). But really the valuable things I learned I learned on the job with fantastic mentors.
The standard model of education is not the only one, but yes some processes or system for leveling people up is certainly required.