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Comment by cbanek | Hacker News Reader

I agree that the system doesn't reward degrees. It merely requires them as a ticket to ride.

I'd say that we're getting less productivity gains out of degrees these days likely because a lot of people get a degree, then get a job that uses absolutely nothing they learned from that degree.

In that case, the degree is more or less worthless, and only proves to the employer that you can jump through the hoops. And between a known hoop-jumper and some random person, most companies would rather take the hoop-jumper.

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> It merely requires them as a ticket to ride.

sounds suspiciously like the advertising landscape, where it's a zero sum game. You pay $X to advertise to obtain Y% marketshare gain, but if your competitor also spends $X, it nullifies your Y% marketshare gain.

Replace the above with a college degree and job, and it seems the same.

Except that neither is actually a zero sum game. If Pepsi and Coca-Cola both spend $1B in advertising neither may gain any proportional market share but they would still expect to collectively benefit from converting some coffee/tea/juice drinkers to their product.

In the case of raising the bar for a basic education across the board, at least in theory, we would expect to increase national/global GDP.

I'm not saying the increase in either case warrants the respective cost, but dismissing improvements in education on the grounds that life is just one big zero sum rat race seems overly simplistic.

Without advertising spend, the best search engine in the world would have been a university research project (the original Google based on Page Rank.)

I would not see many of the quality TV productions, because I don't have pay TV and I don't pirate. (Survivor etc).

Advertising spend paid for instant search, voice search, knowledge graph, Chrome and even Android.

I've a friend who teaches electrical engineering at K-State University. He says that a pretty good number of his students are merely trying to get a degree, not actually learn/understand it. The minimum required to pass is all they would know at their peak.

I'm conflicted with engineering education.

On one hand, you really need to get a basic grasp of the fundamentals of a lot of areas. Even if you forget it, I like to think it's all in there somewhere, and would at least require less time to re-study it.

On the other hand, when you are actually working on a project, or at a job, typically you zoom in on one area of focus. For example, I have a Comp E degree from UIUC, and I had to take analog signal processing. Got a C, and never used it in my professional career.

But subjects that I have used, the course material was such a survey over the problems that it's only the very beginning of what you might need for the work. Therefore much study is required anyway on the job.

Then the practical experience, with test equipment, devices, best practices, isn't even usually taught in college.

I mean, is this surprising? Despite the original purpose of college, today the majority of people only go to college because they want a decent job.

If your best shot of getting a decent job requires you to first get a 40k piece of paper, many people will do this and they will put in the minimum amount of work to get what they want. I mean, it's efficient after all isn't it? Why work more for the same result?

This idea is formalised in the concept of "positional goods" [0]. Fred Hirsch coined the name in his book The Social Limits to Growth, which I definitely recommend - it contains a lot of interesting discussion about the place of positional goods in the economy, and how the rising share of consumption of positional goods affects welfare.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positional_good

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