Is that even possible? It's not as if we're swimming in demand for unskilled labor at a living wage.
The underlying problem seems to be that college (along with housing and healthcare) are too expensive and people can't afford them.
Still it seems that we haven't beaten it into nearly enough peoples' heads that we all live on the same planet, that resources are finite, and that those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it. What, if not education – of the liberal arts kind – to fix that, and quick?
That's fair, but it doesn't really lead to "less education is a good thing" as a conclusion.
We may need to replace college with something more practical, but that doesn't mean it's fine to have less of it without having more of something in its place.
That will be obsolete in ten years? The whole job, I mean.
This wasn't a bad line, but today it did lose its luster.
Can you back this up? It's a big statement. Even if it's commonplace, I don't think it's well thought through. Education is for far more than jobs: People have to be citizens, community members, parents, individuals, and more - they need to be able to understand and reason critically about the world.
I'll note that the world's major problems now are not a lack of software and science, it's a lack of critical thinking about the (mis)information they read, and lack of understanding of politics and public affairs. For example, we know about climate change; the science isn't the obstacle. We've developed Facebook; more technology isn't the need.
The problem with that, however, is that there's a large proportion of the population that quite simply isn't capable of doing that (or who are located where those skills are irrelevant). They're just usually hidden from the sight of people that are, in the exact same ways and for the exact same reasons that people of different political leanings self-segregate.
The American upper class needs to find a way to make the American lower class objectively useful again. Let-them-eat-cake "just get An Education and it'll magically make things better" is not helping the people who plain aren't smart enough to get a good job any more. An objective-focused education that trains an individual to be useful at doing a certain class of tasks (like fixing automated machines as they break), however, does.
20th century American history (as well as Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs) demonstrates that society cannot advance until _everyone_ has a sense of purpose and food on the table. Since the balance of political power in the US skews rural (lower class dominant), those in urban areas (upper class dominant) need to work harder to keep things equal.
And when everyone's happy, progress happens fast (though it tends to lag about a decade behind). Civil rights in the 60s, sexual revolution in the 70s, objective gender equality movements in the 70s, EPA in the 70s (and sufficient political goodwill to get the Montreal Protocol implemented), technological revolution in the 80s (read: automation that anyone could afford to invest in).
Progress has slowed down after that. Modern education has obviously failed to provide the educated with the critical thinking skills necessary for them to understand why, but that's a topic for another day.
> "just get An Education and it'll magically make things better" is not helping the people who plain aren't smart enough to get a good job any more.
Do you have any evidence that it's an issue of smarts or natural ability? In fact, the best predictor of educational level is parental wealth. I believe almost anyone can achieve if they work hard, and that the goal of society is to give opportunity to all, including college.
The big and evil presumption here is that economic class is fixed. There's nothing about children of the wealthy that makes them any better than children of the working class. The latter have every talent and deserve every opportunity. Let people achieve whatever they can; that is freedom and the American Dream; telling them at birth that they aren't worthy of college is just lazy oppression.
Social mobility used to be much higher in the U.S., and it remains higher in other developed countries. One reason is that college tuition was lower.
The point about climate change shows why more education isn’t what we need: https://www.russellsage.org/sites/default/files/Fig10_Compar.... Countries like Germany are willing to pay twice as much for electricity to fight climate change despite far fewer people having a college degree. The fact is, even most people in the US who have been brow beaten enough by liberal academia,[1] to accept climate change aren’t willing to make any lifestyle compromises as a result. What you want is a change in peoples’ values, not their education.
[1] I of course accept climate change is happening. But despite having a STEM degree, I don’t really understand it in any way I couldn’t have with a 12th grade education. I’ve simply been inculcated with values, as a result of my upbringing, that cause me to defer to academic experts on points that I haven’t personally researched.
What basis is there for this statement? Why can't they learn far more in college? What is magical about 12th grade that makes it the perfect end to education? Why wouldn't we want everyone to learn far more?
I went to a good high school, but I learned much more in college that has been extremely valuable to my life.
A major point of college is not to personally perform climate change science, but to develop the skills to understand complex information (not something reasonably possible in 12th grade), to learn complex skills, and to be able to think critically about and evaluate information, such as what the experts, politicians and people on HN say about climate change. I spent years in college studying the best thinkers in history; IME it's given me a huge advantage over people who spent that time in vocational school or working.
I'll add that it's mostly the wealthy and college educated who say college isn't needed, and yet their kids always go to college. What they mean is, 'college isn't for the other kids, the poor ones'. And today, the biggest predictor of college education is parental wealth.
It is incredibly condescending and shortsighted of you to say that those of us who did not attend college are not capable of participating in, or even excelling at those roles in society.
I was just there to contribute financially to the system, be herded from one lecture hall to another, and just generally stay quiet. Only when I showed interest in graduate school did I get any attention.
I had to teach myself nearly everything, and were it not for the motivation that comes from attending classes, labs and exams with my peers, I could have easily done the whole things independently and remotely.
More to your point about job training, I studied math, which I thoroughly enjoyed, but I use little of it from day to day as a software engineer, and I've forgotten most of it.
Is college too expensive or is it over-required, or both? Even if it was free, that's a pretty substantial 4 year opportunity cost.
The other part, a drop in international students is something different, though. To conclude how damaging that is, we'd need to know how much of the cohort that dropped off would've otherwise stayed in the country, etc.
This comes from misalignment of specialization. We have too many English majors and not enough physicians and engineers, and the English majors can't all find skilled employment.
That allows the unskilled employers to require a college degree, because the unemployed English majors will take an unskilled job over nothing, so the availability of degree-holding job seekers allows employers to use a degree as a filter to include only people who have demonstrated the ability to follow instructions and stick with something for multiple years.
But that doesn't mean we have too much education, it means we need to educate more people in things that are in higher demand rather than lower demand so they don't end up doing unskilled labor (and depriving actually-unskilled people of that work).
So we could do with fewer low-demand graduates, but we want all of them and more to instead become high-demand graduates, which means the cost still matters.
But here's where I run into a problem with this theory: why haven't we already, then? If the demand is that imbalanced, why aren't more companies desperate for labor to the point of training workers themselves despite mismatched (or no!) degrees, or why isn't the big pool of under-employeed workers finding massive benefit to individual re-training that should pay off in spades? Even in the most immediately obvious areas, software, a lot of bootcamps have mixed or dubious outcomes, yet in theory it should be easy to do extremely well with that.
By what mechanism would you do this? It's not as if there is a centralized bureau of programs for all universities.
In theory you could stop offering student loans to students studying low demand subjects, but we haven't actually done that.
> If the demand is that imbalanced, why aren't more companies desperate for labor to the point of training workers themselves despite mismatched (or no!) degrees, or why isn't the big pool of under-employeed workers finding massive benefit to individual re-training that should pay off in spades?
The reason employers don't train workers is that it's all risk no reward. If the person drops out without finishing, or worse quits the day after you train them, you lose money. It's easier to just pay high salaries to qualified graduates from normal schools, which is what they do.
As to why people don't take on the retraining themselves, part of that is the cost. Which includes the opportunity cost. You not only have to pay tuition, you're spending all day studying instead of working.
And that can be a deterrent even if it balances in the long term. If you're making $30K/year now but would make $80K/year with a degree that costs $120K in tuition and another $120K in opportunity cost, you break even within a few years after graduating. But only if you have or can get somebody to loan you $240,000 at a low interest rate.
Obviously that becomes more attractive if either the tuition is lower, or there is less opportunity cost because the alternative pays less than $30K/year.
I'd favor a less prescriptive method around "study this, not that" and a more responsive one: your loans are in danger if your students' debt-to-income ratios are bad, or they aren't employed, etc. Probably "employed" is fine as long as debt-vs-income is checked too, vs "employed in the field," as I do find the liberal arts valuable in general for critical thinking skills even if not directly tied to specific careers. That's the five minute version, it doubtless needs some tweaks, but I wouldn't want to over-target it for today's specifics.
On the point of whether or not university education, as currently practices, is needed more or less:
> The reason employers don't train workers is that it's all risk no reward. If the person drops out without finishing, or worse quits the day after you train them, you lose money. It's easier to just pay high salaries to qualified graduates from normal schools, which is what they do.
That just makes me skeptical to if they really need the workers that much, though. Emerging industries can't work like this - someone has to do the work before the universities catch up - so how do we quantify e.g. how desperate we truly are for programmers? Heck, we even have people with degrees we generally don't want to hire because they somehow still fail fizzbuzz! Doesn't that speak terribly of our ability to produce high-demand graduates?
I'm sure there's a middle ground between "the risk of training this person and them leaving is small enough compared to the potential return they'd give us since the field is so ripe" and "nah, we're totally good," but how do we find out where in that space we are?
Creating something new and teaching people the current state of the art are two separate things. And universities do both of them.
The things invented in Bell Labs in the 1950s are taught in universities today, but the researchers at Bell Labs had college degrees. It's a feedback loop.
> so how do we quantify e.g. how desperate we truly are for programmers?
Median salary is a very strong quantification, especially accounting for sub-specialization. It's possible we need more DBAs but not more web designers.
> I'm sure there's a middle ground between "the risk of training this person and them leaving is small enough compared to the potential return they'd give us since the field is so ripe" and "nah, we're totally good," but how do we find out where in that space we are?
They just don't benefit from it at all.
Suppose you pay $150,000 to train someone with the expectation that you'll pay them $50,000/year for five years and the training will allow them to do the work of an $80,000/year employee, so you'll break even (ignoring time value of money). Except that once they can do the work of an $80,000/year employee, they can immediately quit and get a job paying $80,000/year and you can't retain them by paying $50,000/year.
The alternative is to loan them the money, so if they leave they still have to pay you back for the training. But now you've just reinvented universities and student loans and companies don't get anything out of doing it in house that they wouldn't from hiring graduates from normal schools who borrow money from normal banks.
Companies know that they aren't any better at being a university than a university is and they aren't any better at being a bank than a bank is, so they don't try to be.
Often, in fields that are just emerging into commercial viability, the people doing the new work before it gets taught in universities or commercially applied are researchers at universities (professors leading, but graduate students often doing the heavy lifting and often undergraduates working in supporting roles), who are then also (both via publication and personal contact and advisory councils) taking it to industry to further development.
So, yeah, while someone is doing work before university classroom instruction catches up, a lot of that advance work is done in universities, across the whole professor-to-undergraduate academic heirarchy.
Can you back that up? As far as I know, it's a myth about employment; generally, the world is run by liberal arts majors and not by engineers (at least outside SV).
Also, as I point out in another post, college is not vocational school; it's far more important:
I’ve worked with a bunch of MDs with undergrad degrees in things like art history.
Sure, this is all anecdata but let’s not pretend a liberal arts degree necessarily dooms one to a life of flipping burgers