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Comment by tclancy | Hacker News Reader

It's nice that WalMart has done things like this and subsidizing medication costs but I think the thing we US citizens need to ask is, "What happens when we farm these incentive decisions out to corporations instead of deciding on them via government?"

>retailer said it would pay tuition for its workers ... to earn degrees in either supply chain management or business.

If we let companies decide what education will be subsidized and what will not, we are going to get a very homogenous (and I would imagine unhealthy) set of citizens. Even if the faith that capitalism will more efficiently distribute money than government would holds true, it's not necessarily a better outcome.

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This is something that bothers me every time I read about a wealthy person/biz doing something for the working poor.

It's not that I don't appreciate the actions, it's that I'm uncomfortable with the idea that oligarchy means working people are beholden to an unaccountable group of affluents. It's like we're outsourcing the government's responsibility for collective welfare.

Governments in the US have never taken up the responsibility of ensuring that everyone can get a post secondary education.

There's historically been substantial investment in universities and colleges, but that was always about increasing the number of people with those educations (economic development in other words) and never about universal higher education.

Nowadays there's lots of people pursuing professional education and the support available to each individual has been declining (this may still cost lots more than higher levels of support that existed when fewer people sought degrees).

On the flip side, I think those that have been more fortunate (as in acquiring obscene wealth) have a duty of noblesse oblige to the society and people that helped them get there.

The fact that so many shop at Walmart is what keeps the Walton family wealthy. Why would it be wrong to expect them to pay that back in some way? Nobody is saying they should go broke doing it, but they owe their success not only to their business acumen and good decisions but to the people that continue to shop there in the face of alternatives.

And they should -- by paying their taxes.

I partly agree. But to play devil's advocate:

We have a lot of people graduating with useless degrees like History & Literature. These useless degrees often land people in a state of debt with no job. If a corporation(s) decides what degree you should get, there is a higher likelihood that at the end of your degree, you'll actually get a job.

I think it is remarkably superficial to call these degrees useless. Yes- initiating a career with them is more non-trivial than a stem degree but if you look ahead and make a concrete plan you can do great things with a History degree (especially if you go to a highly regarded school).

> if you look ahead and make a concrete plan you can do great things with a History degree (especially if you go to a highly regarded school)

I realize that history-related careers are not something I am well-versed in. Can you elaborate on this point? What kind of career is best prepared for by taking a History degree? (We'll assume that any kind of professorship role in history is a no-go, given how bad the adjunct professor path is.) I might imagine someone using History as a stepping-stone to a Law degree, but cannot think of much else. Museum curator?

I am having a hard time thinking of things that would provide a labor pool large enough to have a reasonable chance of making a career of. It's very likely that I'm not thinking deeply enough about it, so I'd appreciate your insight.

There are a few skills that an undergrad history degree will do for you. Off the top of my head, critical thinking, organization of disparate concepts and events into a coherent whole, and writing well.

One of the best programmers i worked with had a philosophy degree. He could distill a bunch of random subjective information down to something reasonable to implement.

It's really an education vs training sort of issue.

Even in tech, plenty of corporate teams such as sales, marketing, HR recruiting, etc. are populated with people who had social sciences or liberal arts degrees. Not all of them majored in business. So long as their program taught them how to read, write, and speak publicly, it's better than no degree.

I think it'd be very fun to work for the state department or at a think tank as a subject matter expert-say in internal Brazilian politics or something wonky. A lot of fun government jobs. Some of those probably require a doctoral degree. Alternatively I agree a bachelors is a good foundation for a law degree.

Or I think one could work for a place like Stratfor or the other private intelligence/business intelligence firms that are less well known.

I also think it'd be a darn hoot to be a working historian (maybe in academia maybe not) of the kind who writes history books. Really just being a historian in general though.

> I am having a hard time thinking of things that would provide a labor pool large enough to have a reasonable chance of making a career of.

Everything I mentioned was a very high variance choice no doubt. Of course you are correct. It is probably not a good choice for the vast masses of people. I would not make a choice like this unless I was at a high brow college.

welp: I am stem person though but I sometimes wistfully ponder a different path.

edit: of course history seems to prepare one well for politics

Wow, that's quite the Devil's Advocacy. The idea that arts & humanities are dead ends seems to be in direct opposition with most advanced cultures.

>there is a higher likelihood that at the end of your degree, you'll actually get a job.

With that company. When your healthcare and your education are controlled by a single corporation, how are you any better off than some miner in the 19th century buying his equipment from the company store?

> With that company

only temporarily. Once your working CV is strong enough you're free to move to another company

...assuming the other company isn't flooded with other candidates with the same subsidized business degree.

Which is a reasonable assumption to make, since we already know that - in the real world - there are opportunities to move from company to company for a wide variety of reasons.

As apposed to now? Where you have 40 history PHDs all going for a single professor slot... and at the same time have tons of positions go vacant for months because there are no qualified candidates?

It may not be perfect, but it might be better than what we have now... Although, I'm not saying it will be... I'll reserve judgement until the data arrives.

Steve Jobs studied Eastern Mysticism and Calligraphy in college. It was the calligraphy class in particular that informed his ideas about design.

I totally agree. Also, Tom Hanks & Tina Fey both studied Drama... and both have contributed enormously to the world.

However, for every employed actor, there are probably 9 other starving drama students who will never make it. It's hard to encourage kids to take Drama with those odds unless the kid is super passionate about it... especially when it costs $60k to do so.

I have a B.A. in History (Pre-industrial Europe and Far East, and post-WWII American Foreign Policy) degree from UC Davis, and I ended up full-stack programming for the last 12 years.

I use those History skills daily from writing documentation, synthesizing concepts into a coherent work, and figuring out the intent of the original coder.

My History degree is definitely not useless.

That sounds like a bundle of fun. I bet you really enjoyed undergrad!

Since when culture is considered useless?

If we let companies decide what education will be subsidized and what will not, we are going to get a very homogenous

That sounds almost completely backwards to me. If companies are subsidizing education, it would seem that you're going to get a mix of subsidized educations that matches reality. Wal-Mart will subsidize people studying supply chain management, Tesla might subsidize people studying mechanical engineering or materials science, Google would probably subsidize people studying computer science, or mathematics, etc.

And never mind that plenty of companies, in my experience, offer education reimbursement where they define "business related" in a VERY broad fashion. I've had large corporate employers where they'd reimburse you for anything except hyper-niche stuff like "Medieval Basket Weaving" or something.

OTOH, letting the State decide what gets subsidized feels like regressing back to outdated ideas like Plato's "philosopher-kings" and a society where society decides your occupation for you, with you getting little or no voice in the matter.

And what happens when the State decides this stuff, and a bunch of evangelical Christian types gain control and suddenly the options narrow to "Christian Studies", "Creationism for Dummies", etc? Thanks, but no thanks.

>"What happens when we farm these incentive decisions out to corporations instead of deciding on them via government?"

The government(s) already incentives and subsidizes higher education in a number of ways.

>If we let companies decide what education will be subsidized and what will not, we are going to get a very homogenous (and I would imagine unhealthy) set of citizens.

This is an odd comment and a little unnecessarily alarmist... tuition reimbursement is not an uncommon perk for full time employees at mid-sized to large companies. Of course, since they are footing the bill, they want to get something out of it too, so you have to study something that's related to your job. So if you're working in sales you can't get reimbursement your engineering degree but you can get your marketing degree. I think this is pretty fair and doesn't lead to "homogeneous and unhealthy citizens", not everyone does the same job. Looks like Walmart is offering education for Walmart employees that could benefit from an education. If cashiers could benefit from a degree I'm sure they'd offer that too.

(You also have to get good grades to qualify for reimbursement - usually B or over.)

>So if you're working in sales you can't get reimbursement your engineering degree but you can get your marketing degree.

I suspect that's not true at many companies. I certainly know engineers who have had MBAs subsidized.

Of course, "related to your job" is often interpreted very broadly.

Like you said, some companies don't have restrictions for tuition reimbursement, I was just speaking from personal experience at the companies I've personally worked for all have had the "related to your job" restriction in place.

Right now we have extremely expensive college tuition for degrees with very low utility. We have people stuck in jobs where they can't even hope to pay for their tuition. If corporations subsidize jobs for people then not only do they have a better educated workforce but it is likely to result in people getting a better job.

This is for their employees, not all people. Also, they are not doing this to be nice to their employees, they need to maintain their management pipeline. They are using this to grow the management ranks internally. I work for an engineering company that has good college benefits, but they only pay for STEM and Business degrees. Those are the only degrees that benefit the business.

Sure, I'm not arguing against them doing it at all, I'm concerned at the effect if it becomes commonplace across companies. It absolutely makes sense given the state of education/ higher education in the US, but that suggests maybe we should be fixing these issues in an overall way.

It's been commonplace for decades! I still don't see it having had any negative effect.

True enough, but we have been on this course for quite some time.

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