It's time to study the value of college (rising costs, falling benefits) | Hacker News Reader

It's time to study the value of college (rising costs, falling benefits)

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13 pointstimr20 comments

The real culprit is credentialism.

In the 1800's, a high school drop out could architect the New York Public library. Abe Lincoln became a lawyer by reading in his spare time and passing the bar exam. Today, the law requires you to have 7 years of college to practice either occupation.

Why did this happen? As far as I know it was not because buildings were falling down left and right. The most likely answer is that people who work an occupation want to erect barriers to entry, thus forcing up their own wages. The policy has a ratchet effect, as a large interest group is now created of people who are dependent on those barriers. Thus the policy is extremely difficult to roll back.

If we really want to open career doors for the most people possible at the lowest cost, we should eliminate legal schooling requirements for all occupations. Then we can return to the 19th century apprenticeship system, which was completely free and gave better career preparation.

"The most likely answer is that"

There are books on the history of education you know. It's not like you have to guess.

One should certainly read such books (if you care enough). They almost certainly have useful information in them.

But read them critically. Most such books are written by "natives" rather than by dispassionate observers. A book on "history of education" is almost certainly written by an educator who is interested in history. Such a person will tend be less critical about the value of education than an outsider.

There are similar problems in some other subfields (e.g. history of labor/unions), and of course anthropology (most people studying the Navajo tend to like Navajo culture and have "gone native" in some sense).

[edit: emphasized word Most in response to next comment]

"Such a person will tend be less critical about the value of education than an outsider."

Check out John Taylor Gatto's book The Underground History of American Education.

C.f. also http://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html

You can read in the history books ( and I have) that these laws were pushed hard by the relevant professional associations. But the motives are a matter of interpretation. They aren't going to come out and say, "We want to establish legal education requirements so that we can make more money". The argument they make is that we need to make sure everyone is "qualified." Perhaps they were being sincere, perhaps not. But if even if they were wrong out of ignorance, the idea could out compete the truth because it has a built in ratchet affect.

So we might not be able to determine the absolute truth, but we can still do significantly better than taking a wild-ass guess.

It's an interesting idea and one that has merit. One of the smartest programmers I know didn't go to college. He spent his formative years building pipe organs and having 5 kids.

However, this makes the mistaken assumption that college's only role is to prepare you for a career. I majored in Philosophy at a Jesuit college in Chicago. Currently, I'm a software developer. College was about getting introduced to new ideas and read books I would have never sought out on my own. Really... who reads Augustine or Kierkegaard anymore? I learned how to live on my own in college; how I wanted to spend my time and my money, how to survive in my first apartment and make rent money. I also met a great bunch of friends I still keep in contact with.

Bottom line: college should never be treated like a trade school. It's not designed for job training. If you consider it so, it never makes economic sense. College, and liberal arts degrees in particular, teach you how to think.

I agree with everything you say, except the "it never makes economic sense" part. I'm currently unemployed and programming, thanks to savings from a job that I held for a few years after college that isn't accessible to those without a degree. I suppose there are other routes to independence at 25, too, but there are more young investment bankers in the world than self-made rich people.

On the other hand, I'm going back to grad school in the fall. It's not for the money, or even to meet co-founders. Rather, it's just something that I feel I have to do for me, to sate my curiosity. I'm young and life is long. As long as I can find a nice young lass that will stick with me and be poor for a few years, there's really no drawback to extending my education and waiting to get rich.

Also: networking.

One thing I disagree with you about college is teaching you how to think. At mine anyway, I'm assaulted every day with worthless crap that makes me want to shut off my ears. Mostly liberal crap like 'diversity,' 'cultural appreciation,' and 'the bees are being killed by cell phone waves.'

On the other hand, I do learn all kinds of wonderful things from fellow Computer Science students. It may be worth it.

If you don't feel challenged, then take harder clases then. I thought my first year was really easy, and started getting agressive in choosing harder classes. Major CS, Minor Math and Physics, and by the second semester of the third year school was kicking my balls. Plus I was busy doing TONS of extracurricular activities, meeting people, and of course having some fun and going to parties once and a while.

Overrall it was an exellent experience. If I was 18 again, I'd do it again in a heart-beat.

If you pay me a mere $8k per year -- a big savings over college -- I'll be happy to let you come over a few times a week and be shamed into reading Kierkegaard and Augustine. I'll even buy the books for you, which is more than your college will do.

For an additional fee I'll let you live on your own, in your very own apartment, and give you the valuable life experience of earning your own rent money.

I can also direct you to places where you will meet lots of college students and programmers -- I live in Boston, so this is so easy that I'll throw it in for free.

The guys is arguing that because degrees are held more widely now, they are less differentiating. That's not a reason, necessarily, to stop valuing a degree. Perhaps it indicates that employers and resumes need to look past "went to my classes, got As, was in fraternity F and honorary H" and look for things like "dual major in CS and Film, part of student team who designed university online film archive."

In other words, look for people who demonstrated non-rote talent while in college and were ambitious enough to capitalize on their education. Otherwise, I could say that almost everyone goes to high school so why go to high school and fund it with taxes or private fees? That's a bit unfair, but also a bit fair as an extension of the argument.

I don't have anything to say about the rising cost of college. I need to look into this. I know it increased every year I was in college due to projects like a new gymnasium with a big rock wall (to impress the alumni foundation) and other things like that. Much of what universities do could probably be student designed and run on the cheap, while providing practical education of the above-mentioned kind.

Exactly - just because every car has air condition now, doesn't mean that it's no longer worth putting air conditioning in the cars you sell.

But it does make your car a whole lot less special since every car has one.

The author is a neocon ex-speechwriter for Bush II. Note the bizarre focus on the nominal wage of college graduates instead of the relative bonus college graduates earn over high school graduates. Wages may be falling for college graduates, but they truly suck for high school graduates.

Given his strange inability to put together a logical argument and his entrenchment in the Republican War on Science, I'm not surprised he considers his college degree worthless. The professors are all liberal anyway.

He's not just arguing about the value of the degree itself -- he's arguing that the value of the degree, coupled with the rising costs (which are increasing at roughly double the rate of inflation), make the long-term value proposition of a college degree far less certain.

Furthermore, I think his argument is less focused on the value of the degree itself, and more on the value of subsidies for college tuition. Just as cheap lending made homes more expensive, cheap lending can/will/does make tuition more expensive. Is subsidizing a college education for everyone such a good idea, if it leads to enormous costs?

I don't know the answer, but I think that the argument is more complex than "degrees aren't worth as much when everyone has them."

Subsidies are definitely part of the problem, since they make students less price sensitive.

Another part of the problem is that there is no incentive for cost control in the university.

I can give a great example of this, from my current university. I'm currently teaching a "Quantitative Reasoning" class right now. Basically, take Weeks 1-2 of Prob&Stat and expand it to fill a whole semester (half a semester, due to poor planning and miscommunication). Some of this is my fault, some of it not (2 syllabuses floating around, both of which I was told to ignore). Plus, my students are all art/history/literature majors, and just don't need it. Everyone in the room would be better off keeping their $4,000 and not sitting through my class.

So why is this abomination required? Because the department needs money (1) and requiring everyone to take our courses is a way to get money.

In principle, someone in the university should put their foot down and say "this is nonsense, lets just require 1 less class and charge $4,000 less". But there is no such person in the modern university system.

(1) I'm told some of our "beat the Soviets through mathematics" grants were finally cancelled. But I'm not sure about this one.

We went to a financial planner and he projected how much it would cost to send our kids to college. He plotted out these graphs and then told us "we'll assume that college costs continue to outpace inflation by 2%, since they have for the past 20 years..." I appreciated what he was doing but I know there is no way that can continue. At some point in the very near future, you can live off the interest of the cost of 4 years of college.

A key to making student performance highly predictive of job performance is customizing curriculum. As nearly as I can tell, this customization requires the introduction/popularization of particular online markets.

Naturally, I'm working on said intro :-)

The BigCo-praised details of my analysis are online at http://www.loveatmadisonandwall.com.

Best,

No matter how rational it would be to not attend college or reduce the emphasis on college educations, I doubt it's gonna happen. Too many people and institutions are already vested in the system, and I doubt a parent who went to college will be happy when their child does not want to go. It just seems very self perpetuating to me.

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