Governments have overestimated the economic returns of higher education
economist.com
economist.com
A few of the other problems with this increased drive to send people to collage is that now a collage degree is required -- as the article points out -- as a signal of employability even for jobs where a high school education would suffice; a drive away from trade school, even when a job in the trades pays well and is quite secure; and of course the debt load that comes with collage, even for a degree is in a field with little chance of providing a good return on the cost of the degree.
:-)
Fitting into that decoupage
Was a torturing massage
To the pain camouflage
I gobbled a hefty sausage
That prospect was still better envisage
Than college, lectures about collageOn the other hand, collage comes from coller in Old French and this one from kolla in Ancient Greek.
It's a strange quirk of history that two such simillar words have such different origins.
(No wonder the Germans do so well in sports!)
/jk
And escuela, like ecole in French or school in English, can refer to primary school or higher education institutions.
late 14c., "organized association of persons invested with certain powers and rights or engaged in some common duty or pursuit,"
From where expressions like "electoral college" come from
I wonder if there's a linguistic term for having a broad term become a more specific one (in some occasions like this)
Another interesting term is Faculty, which meant "branch of knowledge" then finally became "the group of teachers/professors in an educational institution" https://www.etymonline.com/word/faculty
Almost certainly there is, but if I ever learned it I can't bring it to mind.
This would be an example of the more general phenomenon "semantic shift", though.
Edit: a quick Google search suggests that this particular shift is known fairly intuitively as "semantic narrowing".
That actually does work pretty well, because it causes people to spend money. If you had none before and the government prints some and gives it to you, now you have some and can spend it. If you had some before and you know the government is going to be printing more, you want to spend it before the inflation reduces its value.
As long as the things people are stimulated to buy are economically productive, it increases real wealth.
The thing you have to be careful with is combining it with policies that cause people to spend the money on unproductive things. See housing bubble.
But making loans is a more mainstream way of accomplishing the same thing, and is in fact often considered to promote growth.
Furthermore, while there are economic models in which loans are collateralized by goods of value exceeding the amount of the loan, modern American loans are generally not that way.
Issuing a loan creates money where there was no money before.
Paying back that loan in the normal way is neutral, preserving the money that was created.
Defaulting on the loan and having value recovered, in whole, in part, or not at all, from your property, destroys money.
Actually it destroys the portion of the money that was created.
Sort of.
The bank doesn't get to keep the principal it originally created, it gets destroyed. But then they're back to having some slack against their reserve ratio, so they can immediately go recreate the money again and loan it to someone else.
Which is how banks actually create money, and inflation -- by over time increasing the net amount of outstanding loan principal across all debtors.
This is also why it's important to have the government create a certain amount of money -- it's necessary in order to allow people on net to pay down their loans without causing deflation. Or even to prevent people from having to increase their net real debt as the economy expands.
And despite all the whinging about QE, the banks are still way ahead on the "average real debt per citizen" front.
> This is also why it's important to have the government create a certain amount of money
Somehow it all worked fine before the fiat money system started in 1914. A century of incredible economic growth, and no net inflation.
Any analysis of the causes of inflation need to take into account the US from 1800-1914.
The US was on the gold standard then. There is obviously not going to be any currency inflation when the currency is pegged to gold.
> Somehow it all worked fine before the fiat money system started in 1914. A century of incredible economic growth, and no net inflation.
It all went fine except for the parts that didn't. Why do you think it was suspended in 1914? That was the start of World War I, when European companies started calling in their debts from the US and wanted payment in gold rather than dollars. That reduced the value of the dollar below the value of the gold. When that happens people start going to the banks and trading dollars for gold until the dollar supply decreases and their value returns to parity with gold, only the banks didn't have enough gold for that so everything went off the rails and it had to be suspended.
After that the gold standard was re-instituted, and to keep it solvent after the stock market crash the fed had to maintain high interest rates during the Great Depression, making it longer and more severe than it would have been.
We weren't actually off the gold standard until 1971.
Though there was some stuff about having to agree to be enlisted when the draft is made, but you know… metadata drone strikes these days may not always hit the desired target… ;)
With regards to having to pay back a loan, there is always that saying about trying to extract blood from stone…
Ultimately, if the loan is not repaid, and there is no collateral nor assets to seize, it comes out of the assets of the bank.
This is still fundamentally different from counterfeiting.
>Ultimately, if the loan is not repaid, and there is no collateral nor assets to seize, it comes out of the assets of the bank
Which bank in this case (since we're talking about government student loans, not private ones…)? Federal Reserve Bank of (NY, St Louis, Cleveland, etc)? Where do they get the money from?
Increasingly more (because seriously how much does yearly tax revenues pay the bill in full?), the government getting private (other central banks/ institutions/very wealthy individuals) buyers to buy their treasury notes/bills at record breaking supply auctions with currency that originated somehow from central banks…
Although the textbook definitions of counterfeiting and debt monetization may differ, I suspect there will be those who will never even question how the two could be perceived to be similar by anyone without dismissing them as completely insane and incapable of logical thought…
And somehow in the midst of this, we loose sight on resource allocation in general…
Those are not in the nature of free banking, however. It's a special government privilege.
Who grants the "special government privilege"?
One could dare say that this "special government privilege" could be challenged by any group of actors with varying degrees of sufficient power, at any time, and/or become effectively revoked, especially when a government overextends itself in trying to execute it's influence over an economy.
However, viewed in terms of effect on the money supply, it is the same thing as counterfeiting. They both increase the money supply.
However much disdain you have for college, it's not even close to the same as printing money. Decent, accredited institutions are still mind-expanding.
I think you're also making a different argument. The argument OP and others are making is that education doesn't create wealth. You seem to be arguing that education doesn't create educated people.
I’m in the UK where the previous government had an ideological urge to get 50% of school-leavers into university and the only way it could do that was massive dilution. The Russell Group are still quality but the gap between them and the ex-poly degree mills is vast. Attending one of those indeed is not really an education despite the certification.
It's absolutely clear about this. Printing money and handing it out is the best possible strategy if you want a vibrant, inventive culture.
Conversely rationing access is self-defeating. You get a few individuals with giga-wealth and a lot of friction everywhere else, which throws sand in the wheels of future wealth creation.
> if you want a vibrant, inventive culture
Nonsense.
Printing money and handing it out is the best possible strategy if you want a vibrant, inventive culture.
If you gain wealth but do not come from an aristocratic or "respected family in society" background, the way to gain prestige is by paying for education for yourself or your children. Buying your kids a degree is the modern day equivalent of buying a venal office in 1500's France or Spain.
(Except Venal offices probably guaranteed a little more ROI in addition to the status!)
Personally I think this also has the unfortunate side-effect of college's turning into de-facto gatekeepers to 'earned' status/success/wealth.
The reality is that the only real "elites" are these fantasists who've bought into this narrative and actually believe they are the "Real Americans (tm)." It's a childish delusion that is only sustainable by an even more delusional pride.
There are certainly people who are elite, in one common sense or another.
Some things that work well for high income coastal areas may not be ideal for the flyover states.
But I wanted to give motohagiography an opportunity to provide a more specific description of what s/he means. He used a new term and I'd like to understand it.
I don't want to start an acrimonious dispute, but I can clarify what you are right about and what you are wrong about after moto* has had a chance. I moved here- I'm not from here- so I think I actually have a pretty good view of this FWIW.
So while their theoretical ideals are very kind, they don't understand the subtleties of trying to implement them. That's the view from my perch, anyway.
I don't know if people are aware, but the Midwest does have cities and its city dwellers have more in common with city dwellers on either coast than they do with rural areas in their own state.
Without a high school diploma, white Americans have a mere 1.7% chance of becoming a millionaire. A 20+ fold difference.
"What Are Your Odds of Becoming a Millionaire?"
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-millionaire-odds/
"Bloomberg News asked economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis a question: Would it be possible to calculate the odds of being a millionaire for anyone in the U.S., based on age, education and race?"
"According to the sample, a black person’s odds of being a millionaire increase from less than 1 percent if he or she doesn't complete high school to 6.7 percent with a graduate degree. White Americans without a high school diploma start out with slightly better chances—1.7 percent—that rapidly improve with more school: A graduate-level education increases their probability of amassing a net worth greater than $1 million to 37 percent."
The variance is extreme, not subtle, and it shows dramatic improvement for all races. It moves upwards step by step with education attainment. Incomes similarly follow that path. Which is another way of saying, everything aligns. The income you can reach on average without a high school diploma, will radically implode your chances of ever being able to amass millionaire status.
Need to save $50,000 to start a business? Good luck without a high school diploma. You're going to spend your life barely getting by, much less generating a surplus of savings.
Want to become a millionaire via a mixture of 401k, company stock grants, savings, real-estate investment? You have a near zero shot at that without a high school diploma.
Success after the program is an effect - and partly down to luck, as the SA article suggests.
Of course you'll have problems if you don't have a high school diploma. But by the time you've failed to get your diploma, the chances are excellent that your access to resources will have been severely constrained and rationed for your entire life, even if you start off with exceptional talents.
A chain of things or events can - typically does - possess multiple causes along the pathing. A cause of a cause, is a legitimate, normal and required logical concept. Practically any outcome or condition you can name has a cause, which has a cause.
Alternatively you'd have to claim that there can only be one cause in an entire chain of events. An absurd notion.
That last possibility does a much better job at explaining what the Bloomberg article is about: the different chances of success based on the color of your skin. Black students that graduate still have only 6.7% chance of becoming millionaires comparing to 37% for white people.
There are no exceptions that see a backwards regression (ie move up in education and down in wealth likelihood), which further boosts that it is very clear causation. Each step sees the average move considerably higher for all races.
The existence of these other explanations show that the data is not necessarily indicative of causation.
Similarly, having well off parents drastically increases the chances of getting a graduate degree.
Also, Google accused in lawsuit of excluding white and Asian men in hiring to boost diversity
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2018/03/01/google-a...
We do say "White Americans", meaning Americans who are "white", which means people whose ancestors were Europeans (including Russia), or from Arabia, Persia, Afghanistan, North Africa, or some (but not all) other Muslim areas.
Then "Asian" includes everyone else whose ancestors were from Asia: China, Japan, India, Vietnam, Korea, Indonesia, etc.
When combined with nationality or geographical location, race is said first, so "White Asian" would mean someone living in Asia whose ancestors were European, most likely, though it's not a phrase I've heard.
proper nouns and derivations thereof are capitalized
Both black and white are very commonly lower-case. For example in the Bloomberg article, they refer several times to "black person's" and "black." I consider it incorrect to upper-case a racial identifier if you're not going to upper-case them all. I alternatively could upper-case Black and White, however I also consider that wrong, and borderline stupid (again, my personal opinion).
If I were referring to a specific national heritage, I would upper-case. Vietnamese American. Nigerian American. German American. And so on.
I also would not upper-case "a Tall American" in description of someone. A person that is an asian American is not necessarily from Asia, asian is their race. A person is not from "black" or "white" either. It's as ridiculous to upper-case asian in this use, as it would be to upper-case Brown Eyed American or Green Eyed American or "the Freckled American."
But then you wouldn’t call a black Asian a black person, he’d just be South Asian.
Therefore since your use of colours is tied to the location of the person’s ancestors, Asia referring to the continent, oughtn’t it be capitalised?
No, they aren't.
> Even so, I don't see them often nor do I know of any current English grammar texts or thought leaders that recognize proper adjectives.
Chicago Manual of Style and AP Stylebook, two of the leading American style guides, both recognize proper adjectives.
However, I do have a rebuttal to your style guides. They are only that: descriptivist style guides. They clash with one another and are nothing more than another dialect of English. Whereas Loweth's English Grammar, the recognized beginners in English prescriptivism standard, does not recognize proper adjectives.
What is the cause of not completing high school? what about lack of IQ. There is a hidden variable that causes both not passing high school and not being a millionaire.
That's not to say that all of those people would have necessarily gone on to become millionaires, but it's really hard to improve your situation if you don't have that momentum.
Knowledge has nothing to do with colleges/schools/universities.
College degree programs have a lot of flexibility in classes you choose to take. If you choose poorly, or look for the easy classes, your education will be worth a lot less.
I.e. college provides you with an opportunity to learn. What you make of that is up to you.
Most colleges let you choose 1 semester of real world experience. And the other 95%, is classes that you have to pick from (even if you're creating your own degree). And, in a world where jobs/careers are becoming increasingly specialized, this antiquated form of education is no longer effective for many of us.
The opportunity cost is enormous. At least 6 years of lost wages (500K+). You work for them for 6 years that they don't even pay for (not even minimum wage), and to add insult to injury, you need to pay them for it.
Sure you can. You pick the college, you pick the major.
> only an A/B test can teach you that.
You learn how to do that and how to interpret the results in college. That's what your statistics class is about.
> The opportunity cost is enormous.
My college degree paid off enormously for me. Of course, I picked a major that paid well, and carefully selected the classes to maximize my value in the workplace. I also took accounting classes in college, because running a profitable business requires knowledge of accounting.
(Most startups fail because the owners don't understand notions of profit, cash flow, balance sheets, etc.)
Do your research.
- human nature has important points: teenage, young adult, young parents. Pushing education longer means delaying these.
- being a student is not necessarily being an independant adult, very often it delay teenagehood, whereas previous generation had to start earning their life around 16. It creates a meeting point between high desires and responsibilities. Something that doesn't happen nowadays where kids 'may' (only a mild subjective opinion) satisfy desires through culture and fads
- higher education was a bet on the previous structures, where being a grad student meant sure and high payoff. This changed... very often people with degrees are struggling. The education pipeline isn't met by a good demand in a way.
I think it also change the family structure where parents became grand parents earlier, now you may start stable life after 25 and have kids at 30, whereas before people would have them before that. And IMO this factor is an important source of happiness and motivation for the whole family circle. Delaying means everybody is older and doesn't respond the same way at all.
The previous generation had access to vastly more efficient and heavily taxpayer-subsidized public universities, and could pay for them with typical teenage part-time jobs. Universal high school came on the scene in the 1940s. I'm sure there was a generation that had to earn its life starting at age 16, but it was more than a couple of generations ago.
An English or art history major has a lot to add to the world, both in terms of enlightenment and analytical ability. The problem is that it isn’t worth the debt load, and the incentive structure for tuition guarantees bad outcomes.
My dad went to City College in NYC for free in the late 60s and received a great education. His dad was a widower with 5 kids who ran a neighborhood bar.
The modern version of my dad would be either in the army by necessity or saddled with massive debt even in a public school.
The societal cost of the current situation is awful — wage slave milennials who will never own a home or have a opportunity to accumulate wealth.
not with the way they spend it. i graduated in '02 with 35k dept, couldn't find work till '05. started off at 29k doing tech support. But I didnt travel, I -never- ate out, always tried to keep my spending to almost nothing. two years before i bought my house, i lived in a micro apartment for 400/month to save money. bought a house by 2013.
I dont think I qualify as being a millennial, but I do respect the hardships they faced, as I graduated during the 2001 recession and was smacked with the housing crisis as soon as I was starting to get on my feet. delayed employment and years of low wages have made it almost impossible for me to save enough to retire.
however,
when gainfully employed people say they cant afford a house, they very often mean: "I dont want to adjust my spending, and I dont want to be flexible for where I want to live."
All the San Francisco complainers could likely find living-wage jobs and houses in what's left of America's small towns and stagnant cities, and choose not to. You're right. But IT jobs only exist in Middle America because the Bay Area and Seattle cloud companies haven't gotten to them yet. If you want to be on the forefront of your industry and on the right side of history, you probably need to do it from a place where homeownership is growing further and further out of reach to mere professionals.
In those cities, the few thousand dollars a year you could save by cutting the restaurant meals and travel don't make a meaningful difference in your ability to amass as $200k down payment or plop down a $1m cash offer (increasingly necessary to win a bid).
Just a random anecdote, but I spend 10 years working crappy blue collar jobs after going to pretty good East Coast private dayschools, and while my blue collar compatriots had crappy study skills, they weren't really any smarter or dumber than my fellow students. Guess who did better in the long run...
Though I disagree with many of his political opinions Peter Thiel I think is right on the mark when it comes to education. Additionally credentials serve to lock people out of careers where they can thrive except for the rubber stamp of a piece of paper.
In the words of Syndrome "if everyone is super, no one is". If every one has a BS/BA , masters, PHD then in a real sense no one really does.
(Added after reading critical comments: "Nothing" is to strong of a word. With that said I still think most of education is about signaling/credentialism etc.)
There is a large amount of signalling in college. It's wildly inefficient. But it's not all signalling.
By the way I love to read!
This is a very small minded view of the world.
If I have a PhD, and everyone else does too, it's like I don't have one? No! I learned many things during my PhD, and that knowledge doesn't disappear because others have more knowledge too.
It seems the only thing you consider is jobs, but even there you're wrong. The job market is not zero sum.
> Yet governments may actually be overestimating the economic benefits of higher education. While universities are places of learning, they are also social sorting mechanisms.
Yes, so? The universities being a social sorting mechanism does not stop them from also being places of learning. This is American anti-intellectualism 101.
To expand on that, the more educated your neighbor is, the more productive and capable they are, and the better off you are. Do you want poor, unskilled, uneducated customers, vendors, employees, neighbors, and fellow citizens? Or skilled, prosperous, educated ones? Do we want to return to the Middle Ages?
>Do we want to return to the Middle Ages?
I'll take the universal literacy of modernity, but there's actually a lot to learn from apprentice-based systems in previous centuries.
Good for them, but it's an anecdote. People with bachelors degrees make 70% more, per the article.
So there has to be some middle ground between "everyone must get a bachelor's!!" and "start shop class at 15, you'll be fine"
1. Universities have long been tied to visible activism -- the fact that we're at the high point of a wave now isn't particularly meaningful. There is no systemically disruptive "unrest" in universities -- classes go on, degrees are being earned.
2. The feelings thing seems like your perception. Yes, more visible and provocative and simply unusual speech occurs at universities. By gross volume, there may be more feelings-based reasoning that you perceive in universities. But compared to the cultural mainstream, critical thinking is much more visible and prevalent at universities -- it is, in fact, required a lot of them time.
Specifically, ggp that you're referring to was expanding on reasons why education is good beyond it's connection to the job market.
The only extent to which people are conflating degrees and education is the empirically obvious observation that most people don't get much actionable education beyond their time in degree programs, individual counterexamples notwithstanding.
Why not? At lease Charlemagne could almost read and promoted education.
But I do think that the social signalling aspect is the dominant factor for most people's decision to get higher education. Imagine a world in which it was mandated that degrees were not allowed to be made public, to employers or anyone, and the presence or absence of a formal degree was not allowed to be a deciding factor in employment. Employers would likely find informal proxies to test for skills (either basic competence or specialized knowledge). Would-be students probably wouldn't go to college. And there's nothing wrong with that, because most jobs -- and most people's lives -- don't need the kind of degreed education that colleges are providing.
I want to dive into that a bit, if it's alright.
If the world is becoming more complex as time marches onward, which I think we all think it is, then we should expect people to specialize and then hyper-specialize with more time. I'm sure most grad students have seen this illustration: http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/
It's an informative idea, that the PhD takes a lot of effort and accounts for not so much. However, it's uninformative in the representation of science being a circle or any other uniform mass. I know I'm nitpicking a quick drawing, but I see this illustration all the time in PhD-land and it makes me a bit frustrated.
The circle misinforms the reader that at large scales, the sum of human knowledge is countable, known to all, and accessible. But even more pernicious is the idea that, in the local area, where that zit on the face of science lies, the field is moving outward/progressing uniformly. That there are no holes, or that if there are, they can be seen and worked towards.
In fact, I'd say that the sum-of-knowledge-circle is more of a fractal, something like the animated Mandelbrot set: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandelbrot_set#/media/File:Ani...
The boundary of science that a PhD pushes outward is a fractal portion of some previous portion. The circumference is always increasing and may do so until infinity, though the surface area is finite (like Euler's horn). Your doctoral work is just making more questions to be asked, though in a smaller and smaller way, like a fractal zoom. As the timestamps count up, the fractals increase in complexity, the questions science creates increase.
But it's not just science, as if 'science' can be locked away from the rest of humanity and just doled out like a communion wafer. Science is human, all of us (eventually) share in it's flowers and thorns. That includes the general populace. They are part of that fractal too. So i think that in fact, yes, given enough time, most folks will be a the level of specialization of today's PhD, because the world and the science will need for them to be there because it will be so advanced and difficult.
The issues of costs, ROI, and capabilities/interests do make it difficult to push everyone toward getting a PhD though.
Correlation is not causation. A potentially more likely explanation is that people more open to changing their mind are more likely to be willing and able to get a PhD.
Hyper-specialization benefits from, if not outright requires, a broad foundation.
I would strongly disagree. A PhD dissertation itself requires a hyper-specialisation (that's the point), but doesn't mean that a person holding a PhD forever writes about the same topic.
I'm not sure about that. By way of anecdata, there are several PhDs at my workplace, myself included. The PhDs are the most likely to be doing multi-disciplinary work, and to quickly move into new areas.
At least by tradition, the doctoral education was supposed to be about "learning how to learn," and though the research topic was specialized, you had to pick up a lot of breadth in order to make it work. In my case, though I studied some arcane properties of atoms, in order to conduct my project, I had to learn electronics, programming, and a variety of other things.
Now, another thing about the PhD education is that no two PhDs are alike, which makes it hard to talk about having a PhD as a sort of symbol -- of what? Take two PhDs in nearly the same area, and they will have remarkably different sets of knowledge and approaches to problems. A PhD project is a series of disasters, not a smooth trajectory towards mastery of a narrow field.
And as you move up the academic ladder, you are given more freedom to forge your own education, including an education that makes you more employable, or less so. Perhaps how you get yourself through your PhD amplifies the small things that make you unique as a person and problem solver.
(Note that there's some hidden advice here. If the degree itself won't make you desirable, you have to make yourself desirable by what you add to your abilities).
Your knowledge doesn't disappear sure but your opportunities particularly the ability to put that knowledge to use does.
Not zero sum? It's been completely zero sum for he past forty years. Average incomes are stagnating, the cost of essential goods is rising. Furthermore the developing world's propsperity has increased but at what cost? The cost of much of the middle classes' prosperity in the developed world.
You are actually the anti-intellectual. You would tie the gaining and practice of knowledge to exclusionary institutions.
I've never heard anyone claim that "schools are the only way to learn" or that "you must have a degree to be skilled" -- I always hear it framed as "school's a great environment for learning" and "degrees are a useful heuristic for skill"
The good observations of the school-skeptics are not helped along by the ridiculous distortions and exaggerations.
Learning what not to do helps you discover what you should do and technology increase our resolution to discover scientific principles and put them to use. A PhD is an expert in research. Yes you can learn this on your own outside of academia but why? You have to put the time in anyway, may as well get the degree.
An undergraduate education prepares you for the job market whether that be graduate work, corporate work or something other activity. It may be bad at teaching automative repair, construction, plumbing, earth work, electrical work etc... but that's OK. There are other paths for that and those are not bad jobs. Even computer programming at some levels can be seen as a trade skill (wire X to Y), debug operating system. It can also be seen as a professional skill (hence the focus on algorithms/complexity etc... that we see in interviews).
At big research institutions in the sciences you get to see the future and you get to work on it or invent it. That's a nice place to be sometimes.
Nothing? Education, like every human process and institution (and technical creation) is very imperfect, but I certainly learned a lot and found it invaluable. One thing I learned was that hyperbole is drama but not reason; nobody knows what you actually mean in any substantial way, it doesn't inform or encourage critical thought; but it is exciting!
In fact I edited my comment a bit after reading yours.
Two examples one is Churchill'/ warning in the 1930s that Hitler is evil, cannot be trusted etc. He was considered a fool who had destroyed his career until he was proven right.
Another modern example is Elon Musk's warning about AI. It may seem crazy and hyperbolic now but if he turns out to be right then it's dramatic and reasonable.
Really? Learning how the history of your country has no value? Learning how to write properly, how to construct persuasive arguments is of no use? Learning how to break an argument down into smaller parts and analyze it for soundness has no practical application?
Because those are just a small list of the many skills I learned in college.
Not to mention higher level math, an understanding of biology, physics, and chemistry, and a deeper appreciation for arts and music.
In a world flooded with propaganda and "sponsored messages", knowing how to keep a clear head and peel away the layers of misdirection is an incredibly important ability, one that a good education will teach.
In a world where scientific debate in matters of public policy is of utmost importance, being able to understand the science being debated is a necessary skill for the voting populace.
College is incredibly useful, I fail to understand why detractors insist that it has no value. I will readily agree that corruption is rife and the cost is increasing way to rapidly, while quality may very well be on the decline as universities attempt to push more and more students through, but an educated populace is by no means a bad thing.
Shouldn't these things be covered in high school? Perhaps having a 13th or 14th year of primary education would allow for these concepts to be covered in sufficient depth. Then universities could concentrate on specialized concepts pertaining to the student's major.
A number of factors.
High Schools are very subject to political whims of the local area. Teachers are often not tenured (especially in smaller districts), and school board members are frequently elected officials.
There are schools that still teach that America is literally blessed by God to rule over the earth.
Those schools aren't going to teach about the Kent State Riots, or Pinkertons. They sure as heck aren't going to have a class on dissecting political speeches (from all across the spectrum) for logical soundness. (One of the best college classes I ever took!)
These are the same schools that avoid teaching literally anything about sex (other than don't have it), and skimp out on other large portions of biology.
> Perhaps having a 13th or 14th year of primary education would allow for these concepts to be covered in sufficient depth.
The problem with mandatory education is that since everyone has to go through it, there is an expectation that everyone passes, which means courses get watered down until everyone does pass. Tests are put in place to prevent this, and then school becomes prep work for those tests, as metrics take over the entire system.
Community Colleges are, IMHO, a good stepping stone.
I also wasn't a STEM major. I know many STEM grads who had a hellish time getting good grades.
I enjoyed my history classes, the professor was amazing. All the tests were essay style, failing was hard, the only requirement was being able to demonstrate an understanding of the course material and being able to put together a well reasoned argument about different historical events. Often times we would be asked to explain our understanding of some major player's reasoning.
Was the course "hard" in terms of drop out rate? No. Was it rigorous and thorough? That it was.
This black and white approach is silly. Of course it has value. The question is whether the value that it provides is sufficient to offset the cost of the tuition, housing, food, books, AND opportunity cost of not working. You're easily looking at 150k at a public institution for an intelligent kid per year.
Are you saying you can't figure out how to acquire all those skills you mentioned for less than 600k and 4 years spent? And are those skills necessary for everyone?
The skills, networking, and opportunity to safely explore career options I think were worth that cost. YMMV.
To be fair to the parent poster, ~30% of a public university's funding comes from taxes[0]. Add in tax breaks on the huge amounts of often urban land situated on prime real estate, and the overall cost to society is higher than just the tuition price.
Considering the number of universities that are in the middle of nowhere, so much so that the idea of the "college town" is a thing, Im a little incredulous as to the real costs from that use of "prime real-estate" in a holistic sense.
Thinking of higher education as something that is administered to students, I think, is a major reason it does so little for so many. Students have spent their k-12 years having education 'done' to them. I would argue that you only really get a successful experience at higher education if you treat it as something you are 'doing' to/for/on yourself. In that sense its very similar to any other kind of bootstrapped education, but very much so, the higher education environment is much easier to do so in.
I think you have neatly expressed the root of the problem right there.
Education is best approached by the student, not compelled by the teacher.
Honestly 4 years felt rushed when I was in college, there was a lot more I wish I could have learned.
That aside, yes, I would reform the educational system. I'd put in place actual expectations in high school, finish it up at age 16, and have an education with the same expectations of college started where 11th grade is started now.
The AP program is kind of like this, but taught in current institutions. (Also I have heard that it is watered down now days, not sure how true that is.)
The Running Start program that Washington State has is a good model to build on, high school students can choose to go to a community college starting in 11th grade. Good students can finish up both HS and pre-major requirements by age 18. At that point their university diploma is just 2 years. The problem is that community colleges are not prevalent throughout all of the nation, making this scheme hard to implement nation wide.
I doubt the opportunity cost is at 600k, especially for the first 2 years. If you compare learning a 2 year trade and then going to work, there is certainly some cost there.
A few bad policy decisions from ill-informed voters and all that becomes moot.
While I agree with the sentiment behind your proposals, I think the real world variance of this throws things of. As an example, I had a very hard time in HS due to social issues, and basically flunked out of math my first year. Went to community college to make up the course; did fine, got a B, and ended up continuing to take CC courses and graduated a year early (did very well in CC compared with HS at the time).
Coming from a pretty low income family however, I was still utterly unprepared for higher education, in the sense that 1) my family had 0 experience on navigating the system; or 2) even having expectations of higher education. It never even occurred to me that I was almost 2 years ahead of my piers in accumulated college credits. I ended up going into the military to get the money to go to university, since my family had effectively none. It all worked out in the end, but with some decent mentorship, or even one decent teacher in HS, I could have finished an undergrad degree at 19-20.
Where on earth are you getting that number? Average student debt for a public university is something like $30k for the entire degree program, so your total cost might break $100k if you consider housing and books. Opportunity cost isn't money spent and you can't exactly stop eating if you skip uni, so it's pointless to even count those.
Having access to student loans makes college accessible across the socioeconomic spectrum. It's not the only way, of course, but it's a way and non-dischargeability of the loans is an essential element in that market IMO.
The problem is that work that does not require college education demands a degree as certification; forcing prospective employees - with no capital - to go into debt to satisfy an arbitrary hiring requirement.
Imagine a world where all employers put no stock in degrees, but instead took upon themselves the laborious task of evaluating every potential candidate's skill in any given area such as math, persuasive writing, and so on. Assume a particular candidate had taken it upon themselves to learn a college education's worth of math outside of a university, such as by spending a lot of time in a library. In this fictional world, the candidate above would be equally valued by employers as a college graduate with similar level of knowledge.
The fictional world above is very different than the world we live in. In today's world, the self-learner is unable to even apply to most jobs. The critique of credentialism is that a degree from Harvard (as in the piece of paper itself) is probably rewarded more highly in our market than having all the knowledge one could gain from studying there for 10 years.
If attending a four year college did not result in a degree or other credential, how popular would it be? How many people would invest the money and time to learn for knowledge's sake?
The cost of hiring this employee goes way up. There would be a huge gauntlet of (non-standard!) tests to try and figure out who knows what. (We are already approaching that point, but degrees serve as a first level filter.)
Students would then pay for prep courses to pass these employment tests.
At some point you have a 2 year tech school. The best of students who want to be more well rounded, and get the best jobs, would end up going to an institution that looks a lot like a modern university.
The difference is that a student who is 100% dedicated to self learning could do it all on their own, which is a net win, but I suspect that for the majority, things would not change too much.
> How many people would invest the money and time to learn for knowledge's sake?
MOOCs are incredibly popular. Some of the most popular YouTube channels are educational. People give to the patreons of these creators.
I was just wanted to point out that the parent was attacking an obsession with credentials, not the value of what you learn in college.
I have no particular proposed alternative to college degrees, and there may not be a good one. Credentials are probably indispensable given the aforementioned cost of evaluating performance.
The cost of hiring an employee would be offset from the employee to the prospective employer.
By requiring a degree as certification, the financial burden is put on the employee before they can accrue capital to pay for it. This leaves millions in serious debt before they can even start making money.
The notion that all qualified persons became qualified in the same manner ignores the rest of us who learned and gained experience with other methods. Those other methods are abundant, freely available, and comparable in quality and result to academia.
> The difference is that a student who is 100% dedicated to self learning could do it all on their own, which is a net win, but I suspect that for the majority, things would not change too much.
That is exactly the attitude that got us into this mess. The only reason "the majority" considers academia as an integral part of their career paths is that it is by virtue of employers using degrees as accreditation!
I disagree with your notion that accreditation would [d]evolve into academia. Academia demands much more of a student than accreditation: homework, time, structure, etc. It also demands a more strict learning path.
If a diverse group of people relied on a test for accreditation, the test would be better applied to that group's diverse learning paths.
The obvious counter argument to that is the incredible mess that is testing for software engineering positions! We've yet to figure that out, and compared to many other fields we have relatively quantifiable requirements!
Of course the real engineering disciplines are much more quantifiable, and they have industry wide certification and licensing programs.
I don't think that anyone was considering college to be worthless; simply unnecessary for many.
College is seen as a necessary credential for work, but really ends up putting people in debt instead.
College isn't some magic that will make you significantly more proficient at every job; no matter how much our culture seems to think so.
Lack of college does not define someone as uneducated, uninformed, or less qualified for the vast majority of work. It's unfortunate that our culture has trended to requiring people go into serious debt to accommodate such a notion.
I am completely baffled by this comment. University education changed my life and mind completely. Not from social access or gatekeeping - I just spent years learning amazing things. Knowing some things has been powerfully useful for me. Also, I just like it.
It was totally the best. If you like learning, higher education is like getting your retirement in at the beginning of your career.
I understand it's not for everyone. But it was incredible for me and people like me. I grew up on welfare by the way, so it's not a wealth club thing.
I totally support investing in another route for training for people who wouldn't get that much from years of books, lectures and essays. Apprenticeships and technical vocational school worked for thousands of years alongside academic degrees.
I stuck with it because I want to work for a particular organization, and working in that organization in the position I want absolutely requires a degree. If there was any other path to getting a degree besides sitting through years of classes, I'm confident that I would be every bit as good a person and developer if I had taken that route over going to a University.
> I consistently stayed so far ahead of the curriculum in personal projects and internships
Wait a second! So you learned a lot while at college? You wouldn't have had those internships if you had a regular job. And maybe not the time to do personal projects. The college system set up that experience and time for you. College is about the opportunity to learn, not them doing anything to you. Maybe there's something to it after all.
Right, because everyone knows you can design a working rocket engine using high school knowledge, and that the guy who mows your lawn is a good source of advice on your medical problems.
But that does not mean university should be demanded of everyone!
Obviously there is an opportunity cost which can affect individuals terribly. Look at all the med students that dropped out and tell them "well, you got some education right?"
Yes, but a big part of university is just checking boxes to get the degree to get the job.
There are some classes that are great and educational and there are some that are just wasting time sitting in classrooms with some poor underpaid grad student going through a powerpoint and giving you a standardized test.
The more expensive university gets the less it can be about education and the more it has to be evaluated as an investment.
The average student has to pay back their tuition with interest (double the price at least) so if they aren't looking at it as an investment they are not going to experience good outcomes.
College is an extension of this. I was a computer science major, so I definitely did see professional benefits from my education, but a major part of my education involved the non-major classes I took in history, anthropology, language, etc, as well as the concentrated interactions I had with peers from diverse backgrounds. Had I not attained a practical degree, the return on investment might not have been terribly high at a personal level (as the article describes), but at a societal level, having more people who have a more accurate and nuanced understanding of the world undoubtedly helps us achieve societal goals.
And on the other side of the coin, the opportunity cost of the student not working 4 years 'in the real world'.
But generally (and probably controversially, although the following is not intended to devalue non-uni-goers) I would place massive value in it producing more scientific, globally aware people - And being the best structure to 'stand on the shoulders of giants' to embody human 'continuous improvement'
i definitely agree. but i think education for education's sake can be delivered in less expensive, more efficient formats than degree programs from accredited colleges
The saddest moment in my career was realizing my boss makes a fraction of what I make after he pays his student loans. He still had to pay those loans when the recession hit and he was out of a job for 3 years. That kind of pressure with a wife and kids drives a man to crawl into a bottle.
But there was a window in the 1970s-1990s in the US where it was MUCH easier to use college and hard work to advance. Tuition was lower and it was easier for poor and middle class kids to get in. Today, tuition has skyrocketed and the middle class is completely filled with kids who hire college consultants and train for standardized tests. Kids outside that elite sphere are at a big disadvantage. That wasn't true in the 70s and 80s, but eventually the upper and upper-middle class figured out how to take advantage of college opportunities and crowded out the working and middle classes.
The current disadvantage=discrimination debate has the same problem. So do many of the Scandi-inspired policy suggestions, assuming that policy X caused result Y, and will again.... If we apply this logic in other places we'd conclude that homosexuality increases salary. Evidence for these things is probabilistic, and we suck at statistics, especially when we're being political.
Anyway, I found this interesting (by ommission):
Part of the reason why university graduates earn more is because they are brighter and harder-working to begin with
Not that they were wealthier to begin with? Not for class reasons?
and...
humanities graduates, ...tend to earn more if they come from more prestigious institutions suggests that one reason ... get ahead of peers in the job market.
Get ahead how? Knowing people who are ahead? Being associated with people who are ahead? Talking like people who are ahead? They already conceded that it isn't the education....
Humanities (and educations generally), was the domain of the educated classes. Lower class people sent their kids there for class mobility reasons. It was a way for the more talented middle class kids to join the upper-middle classes, by joining them physically. Kids from those classes, went to college to strengthen the class association. In the UK, they were generally explicit about this. The economist knows this. Why beat around the bush.
Higher class seeming people (yes, this still exists) do better in job markets. ..also in marriage markets, probably get loans easier...
The trades (electrical, plumbing, automotive, etc) are good examples of specialized but not college-educated positions.
Some jobs do (Doctor, Lawyer, Teacher, etc), while other specialized careers you get all the training once you join the career (car salesman, grocers, etc). Yes they are both specialized, but they are different.
But... it is also a social signal, and therefore a positional good. To the extent there is social status in being among the top third of the education scale, there can never be more than third of all people in that category.
The above seems ridiculously obvious... but is underappreciated in the analysis of many phenomena.
(Another example: if you define poverty as the 15th percentile of some measure, by definition the poverty level will always be 15%. To figure out if there's real progress being made, on poverty or education or anything else, a scale must be found that is not positional, that is somehow an absolute measure.)
2) the government makes it really easy to secure loans to go to college (short-sighted)
3) the market is oversaturated with demand AND buying power (because of the easy loans)
4) prices rise (duh)
5) now everyone is in crushing debt and a degree is far less valuable
Very simplified; but why is anyone surprised?
e.g., see Peter Thiel's criticisms https://techcrunch.com/2011/04/10/peter-thiel-were-in-a-bubb...
I think your summary gets at a key aspect of it too.
That is hardly the case; it's trendier to criticize than to defend.
> Thiel
Thiel has many crazy ideas, some of which lack the sophistication of an undergraduate paper. Money doesn't make you smart, but perhaps college would have helped him. (EDIT: Apparently he did go to college and graduate school; my point was mostly snark, but some education in many issues saves people from thinking they are too clever.) It's no surprise that someone who openly wants to disempower the public and eliminate democracy would be against the public becoming educated and empowered.
It says in the article that he went to Stanford and Stanford Law.
Steve Jobs credited Apple's phenomenal success to what he learned at liberal arts college.
http://www.reed.edu/steve-jobs
Bill Gates attended an elite high school and some elite college -- he was at least as formally educated as the average college grad.
But what does that have to do with spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to get stuff that you could get for free from a library or online?
You can't get a college education for free or online, or anything like it. Professors won't spend large chunks of time talking to you and working with you. You won't have access to labs, research libraries (including JSTOR), or other resources. You won't have a room full of peers to study with.
(Online you can get some of those things, but not all and IIRC the research shows it seldom works out the same.)b
This is nothing new.
It was this way since the beginning of higher education in religious institutions. Higher education was a social signal that gave clerics power over many aspects of society in their roles as religious leaders and advisers to rulers.
In Europe it was common for non first-born sons of aristocrats to go into the clergy via the academic route. They didn't do this to give up power, but to associate themselves and their families with powerful religious/academic cultural institutions.
Even during the post WW2 broadening of higher education access, it served as a bridge to upper social classes.
You can't get rid of the class signalling aspect unless you can get rid of class as a cultural phenomenon, which is unlikely.
Being broadly educated will always be a signal of class, no matter how it is achieved, simply because it implies that you had the resources to study things that are not of immediate vocational value.
But many aspects of higher education that don't have vocational value have a lot of value in creating an informed, adaptable citizenry.
You can, however, reduce the degree to which higher class association via higher education is needed in order to learn skills needed to achieve a decent livelihood.
One way to achieve this is to reverse the trend of large cuts to public higher education funding, which is the largest factor in the increased costs of those institutions [1] (not fancy buildings).
[1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fancy-dorms-arent-the-m...
This sort of casual assumption is infuriating:
"Part of the reason why university graduates earn more is because they are brighter and harder-working to begin with."
Whether or not college is only a sorting mechanism is unsupported by the article. If we restate the intention of higher education as "make everyone brighter and harder-working", then this whole article falls apart.
university graduates still make around 70% more than non-graduates suggests that demand for skilled workers still far exceeds supply. / Yet governments may actually be overestimating the economic benefits of higher education.
The article says the economic returns could be overestimated do to the social benefits of college. I certainly agree about the social benefits, and I think we need college open to all:
First, it's really about wealth and class; these economic arguments are a BS distraction to a significant degree (though not entirely). I know of schools in rich districts where 95% go to college, and in poor districts only miles away where it's maybe 5%. What does that have to do with economic and social benefits? Why should those social and economic benefits go to kids in rich districts? The expansion of college means expanding it to the poor district; I don't hear wealthy parents saying that their own kids shouldn't go, or that their district should send fewer to college; the argument against college is really an argument to not expand the same opportunities to the working class and poor. For social/political reasons (racism, maintaining political power) and self-interest (not paying taxes), there are even some who don't want the poor kids to get the opportunity; it's an nascent aristocracy protecting itself, which is incompatible with democracy (which is why people like Thiel are against democracy and education) - though certainly that doesn't apply to all critics and criticisms, we also shouldn't pretend it's not an issue.
Second, in the land(s) of opportunity, why are we suddenly rationing it through central planning? Let people advance themselves and go to college if they want to; give them the chance to advance themselves by making college available to them, the best one they can get into. Who are you or I to tell them they shouldn't go because we don't think it's economically worthwhile?
This leads to a dangerous debt situation. I saw this up close in New Mexico. The state gave everyone a "bridge" scholarship which covered the first semester of college. Students who had no business going to college would go anyway and get a loan to cover the second semester. They would fail out and be stuck with a nasty loan for no good reason.
A prosperous country gets more educated but an educated country may not always prosper.
While we have a public university that is free, mostly middle class goes there. Upper class goes private, and lower class does not graduate highschool. Our high-school graduation rate is 50%. And our public college graduation rate is about 50% as well.
Poor countries with excellent education systems usually end up with brain drain - their education budget subsidizing the richer countries their smartest citizens inevitably flee to.
I live in Poland and education actually seems to be getting worse over time, while catholic church is consistently gaining ground. In primary + secondary schools, there's more religion than physics, biology or chemistry. Mathematics is the only science lesson still more common than religion. Technically there should be "ethics" lessons as an alternative, but very few schools actually employ such teachers, citing various excuses.
Recently, there's a push by education minister to let priests become educators (form masters), taking orders from bishop rather than principal. Final exams from catholic religion are not far away.
If you put tax money into religion rather than scientific grants, and you complain your country has very low innovation rating, really, what do you expect? Maybe you could export a new religion?
Do you really think that changing for example 1 hour of religion lesson per week to 1 hour of chemistry would change a lot?
I doubt whether the ethics lesson in your case would result in less religion intolerance. Someone who is that much ashamed of his own country should simply emigrate, as President Komorowski advised.
PS. Polish Catholic Church also overestimated the impact of religion classes for practicing Catholics. Now less people attend Sunday masses.
Unrevokable student debt is one of the biggest government assets.
So, the total value of student loans in America today is LARGER than the total value of subprime loans at the peak of the financial bubble.
And just like the subprime mortgages, many student loans are in default.
According to the Fed’s most recent Household Debt and Credit Report, the student loan default rate is 11.2%, almost the same as the peak mortgage default rate in 2010.
This is particularly interesting because student loans essentially have no collateral.
Lenders make loans to students… but it’s not like the students have to pony up their iPhones as security.
That’s what made the subprime debacle so dangerous.
Millions of homes were underwater, so when borrowers didn’t pay, lenders didn’t have sufficient collateral to cover their loan exposure.
With student loans, there is no collateral. Lenders have no security to recoup their loans.
So when students don’t pay, someone is going to take a hit.
That ‘someone’ will likely be you.
That’s because hundreds of billions of dollars of these student loans are either owned or guaranteed by the United States government.
So as borrowers stop making payments, it’s the taxpayer who will suffer yet another massive loss.
Let’s be honest, though, there’s something seriously screwed up with this system.
Young people are pushed into this system by a society that places an irrationally high value on university degrees.
Kids are told for their entire lives that if they study hard to get into a good school, there will be a great career waiting for them.
For many young people this turned out to be a total lie.
In fact, Federal Reserve data once again show that, for at least 25% of college graduates, salaries are no higher than for people with just a high school diploma.
Racking up so much debt hardly seems worth it.
It seems bizarre to begin with that an 18-year old will know what s/he wants to do in life, to the point that they should take on $50,000 in debt for a piece of paper that might not even make them marketable.
What did any of us really know at age 18? And how many of us could have accurately predicted our life’s path?
Very few.
And yet there’s an absurd amount of pressure to force young people into this system that heaps debt upon them. “
— Simon Black
I'm curious: unlike with the mortgage bubble, student loan debt is non-dischargable-- even bankruptcy won't wipe it clean. And if you default on it, they'll eventually start taking a percentage from your paychecks before they're even deposited in your bank account. Doesn't this mean that the government is eventually going to get its due from pretty much every student, unless the student literally spends their entire life making no money/only under-the-table income? Personally I'd be more concerned about the students who will never escape their constantly-increasing debt than I am about the US government, which will probably come out ahead no matter what here since a good portion of students pay back their loans + high interest. Aren't we guaranteeing loan profits for the US government on the backs of the future retirement accounts and savings accounts of the middle class?
Then again, enough of the US already lives in poverty that I'm not convinced that this is any worse than the situation we've had for the past 50 years. Depressing, yes. But different, maybe not.
Student loan debt is not non-dischargeable, though it's harder to discharge in bankruptcy than general unsecured debt (and much harder to get out of than mortgage debt, which can often be escaped without bankruptcy.)
I think it would help to step back (rather like an anthropologist) and ask fundamental questions regarding the social, cultural, and economic functions of education in a given society or economy (or globally) and go from there.
Regarding practical, real world questions on the value of a college education, I can only say this: as much as I dislike German-style educational tracking, the so-called 'dual system' in Germany does produce interesting results, and provided the right conditions, something like it could be put into practice elsewhere. At the very least it provides workers with the necessary technical skills to do their jobs while shielding them somewhat from competition from outsiders (this protectionist function should in theory help buoy up wages and add job security, though collective agreements and general employment law contribute to both) without without sending them to college. One can and should of course debate the merits of general education and its putative political, social, and cultural benefits, but if we are talking about the bare-bones technical skills and practical experience needed to do a job, a parallel apprenticeship and vocational training system as exists in Germany is a viable alternative to university.
I could say a lot more, but I will leave it at that for now.
If the strongest possible economy is the one where the highest proportion of citizens are making the most of their individual talents, apprenticeships seem like a better fit than university for many professions, as they let the apprentices learn a trade directly, which either results in them finding a job they're good at or in finding out early that it isn't the path for them. Studying at a university has other benefits outside the job market, and I would still want anyone who wanted to go to have the opportunity to do so (by making it more affordable), but if the only reason that some people (not all) are going to university is to land a decently paid job, then let's just cut out the middle man and let people learn whilst they work.
This has benefits for companies too, as they get a larger pool of potential employees to work with, which ultimately keeps wages lower in the long run, and I'd also suggest that apprentice schemes help build loyalty, which should result in reduced disruption to business operations (compared to companies that struggle to retain their staff).
But there is a caveat that I see: If it is true that not all people benefit from college, likewise, not all people benefit from not going to college. I'm thinking of myself here. I would have been a terrible bricklayer. For one thing, I'm not a physically strong person, though laying bricks might have rectified that situation. I also don't know if I would have been able to live with the nature of the job for 45 years, including its physical effects.
I might have been a terrible computer programmer. I learned programming in high school, at a time when it didn't require a college degree. But would I really have enjoyed being a programmer for 45 years? And so forth.
Which governments? What were their estimates exactly?
This article just throws some factoids together to form paragraphs - not making any coherent points in the process.
The article concludes with this: Governments are right to fret about training future workers
Who is fretting? What does that even mean?
This sloppy journalism merely plays the good old tune of 'government isn't doing the right thing' (a form of 'someone else is at fault'). It'd do more good to look in the mirror and ask if you're doing a good job and start from there. Don't worry about governments, start with yourself. In the case of journalism, start with doing some research, coming up with a stance, having arguments from multiple sides and then presenting them in a compelling manner.
For schools that cost 100K+/year, parents would be better off taking the 400K and investing in the S&P 500 over those 4 years. Because of compounding, their child would never need to save a penny to have an outstanding retirement. If the money doubles around every 8 years (9% ish) and they retire in about 48 years, they get 6 doubles, so their 400K is worth approximately 25 million (in non inflation adjusted dollars)
SCENARIO 1:
- Year: 1965
- # of jobs requiring college degree: 75
- annual college graduates: 60
SCENARIO 2:
- Year: 2018
- # of jobs requiring college degree: 150
- annual college graduates: 1,000
Aside from how horrifically wrong this^ is, the ratio problem remains.
"The key issue ... isn’t whether college pays, but why. The simple, popular answer is that schools teach students useful job skills. But this dodges puzzling questions."
More here:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/01/whats-c...
Did I miss something? "Half" is not a substantial argument without more detail. What about the other half? Stagnant? Rising a little? Rising dramatically? Which types of jobs fall into each bucket?
Not against the signalling argument per se, I'm just missing information.
There is clearly a problem but I'm not sure what the answer is.
Is that it, though? Or do they just get to reap the rolling snowball of opportunity from successful parents?
If you prefer the degree to the education than you likely value the signaling more than the human capital argument for education
This could be seen quite blatantly in the first years of MOOC courses.
People became really angry at the end because there was no real certification being given.
It got really ugly.
People became quite enraged in the forums because the "diploma" was not issued by MIT and also because at one point there was no grade in the diploma.
Similar things happened in the Stanford associated courses, though not as ugly from my recollection.
Coursera's original course offerings gave free certificates upon completion. My understanding is that MOOCs started charging for certifications in an effort to pay the bills. The jury is still out on whether these certifications are taken seriously or not.
It boils down to your last sentence:
> The jury is still out on whether these certifications are taken seriously or not.
Many people were taking those courses under the expectation that the certification would be highly prestigious and felt defrauded when that wasn't the case. The fact that they paid nothing only made matters worse because people feel more entitled when they pay nothing for a service.
I'm getting downvoted, but I tried the first 20 results from the 'web link', I can't read the article on any of them. Why not just post a readable link?
Real talk: it's easier to govern a nation of debt serfs who have to take out loans to take a glorified IQ test.
General crime maybe...drugs not so much.
Considering how safe I'd feel on a college campus at 2am on a Friday night compared to a rundown section of town, I'm tempted to believe that college does keep kids away from the worst of violent crime. I can't find any studies on the subject, unfortunately.
this could very well be true, but it hardly seems obvious. i could readily believe that fewer serious crimes occur at universities, but it seems like the combination of a large, low-friction network and a general blunting of consequences would lead to more drug use at least, and the ability to avoid or defer direct consequences does tend to exacerbate addictions and increase their harm over time.
But I think the modern equivalent is closer to high school, because we have a society that places inherent value on universal grade school education, and thus mandates attendance (anti-truancy, etc). One unfortunate effect is that for some, school ends up feeling like a prison or holding pen just to keep some young people off the street and out of trouble.