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Comment by tonmoy | Hacker News Reader

I don't know about your developed country, but education seem to have helped the people in the poor developing country I am from. I feel as more people got educated, the more ambitious they became. Instead of doing the same things their forefathers used to do, they got a broader perspective and started venturing into more businesses. More engineers, doctors, accountants and economists have also helped. When you say that someone does not need a specialized piece of education because she will never use it, you are confining her to the life you think she should lead, while more specialized education while not always directly useful can help people see what they can become. But that's just my feeling, no data, no stats

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One might say that there is a point of diminishing returns, and the U.S. has reached it while many developing countries haven't.

Exactly where that point is, seems to be a function of how many highly educated people a country can produce vs. how many jobs it can create. 100K new doctors and engineers, with 100K new jobs for them? Wonderful! But what if you only had 20K new jobs? Now you're in trouble.

Instead of treating this as a first world problem, developing countries should employ their brightest minds right now to research why this is happening in the U.S. and find a way to avoid getting stuck in the same place 20-30 years from now.

>One might say that there is a point of diminishing returns, and the U.S. has reached it while many developing countries haven't.

I'm skeptical, given that the population-wide baseline of knowledge in the USA isn't actually that high. When the subject comes up, we hear that other countries teach their high-school kids calculus, linear algebra, and real physics.

Those uneducated people are also the same ones increasingly out of work in this country today. And we 'encourage' the brightest of those children from other countries to move here (yes, not exactly what happens with H1-B, but still). I tend to agree with above poster that it'd be nice if there was substantive analysis done on the current situation.

You're only looking at one of the variables (the number and/or proportion of highly educated people). If the other variable (the number and/or proportion of well-paying jobs) is abnormally low, the first variable can be quite low and still produce the same effect. It's the ratio that matters, not absolute numbers.

Exactly.

Here in Colombia is well know this say:

Go to the university, drive a taxi.

Also:

Why go to university? The diploma.

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