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Comment by wycs | Hacker News Reader

>College education and healthcare /should/ be free for all in this country(USA). They are fundamental to the social mobility and freedom that our founding principles were created for.

We had this. It was called high school. But then standards were lowered so it was no longer a good filter for intelligence and conscientiousness. Standards were lowered to increase "social mobility." This did not work. Now college performs the same function. But the average IQ of college graduates will continue to decline as the percent of the population that graduates approaches 100, and so masters degrees are becoming increasingly common.

Will this, too, increase social mobility?

Social mobility in a meritocratic society is hard given the heritability of valuable mental traits. If we keep sacrificing our schools on the alter of social mobility, we will end up burning the first 30 years of or lives getting Phds in mopping floors.

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First of all, your post shows that you think that education or going through a school is a social signal rather than an educational experience. I disagree with this.

Secondly, you seem to imply that no improvement in the education level has happened because of the normalization of high-school education. I disagree with this also. I have no numbers to back this up, but by looking at the world around us, at all the inventions and the added complexity and our increasing ability to handle complex systems, I think we have become smarter.

Thirdly, maybe social mobility was hijacked by some rhetoric or became a symbol for this or that group. But at its core, social mobility means allowing people to rise to their potential and not stifling them. How can we be "sacrificing our schools on the alter of social mobility" when social mobility is supposed to be _more_ meritocratic, not less?

To your first point, you may be interested to read Bryan Caplan’s “The Case Against Education.” He makes a very strong, quantitative case that education is primarily a signaling device.

For instance the difference between 3.5 years without graduating and 4 years + graduation is immense, whereas in a non-signaling model, they should have very similar outcomes.

Doesn't that book have a whole chapter espousing hyper-libertarian points about why child labour is good?

Depends on how you define children, how you define labor, and how you define good.

There is a huge selection bias in these groups. 3.5 years without graduating is likely to be students who are doing poorly since if you were a top tier student you aren't going to quit 0.5 years off from a degree under most circumstances. People quitting university after 3.5 years most often have a number of failed courses and aren't 0.5 years from a degree.

Another example then: college students forget a lot they learn inside of a few years. The only thing they hold for a significant amount of time is the prerequisite knowledge they needed to learn everything else they were taught. This applies especially to subjects largely unrelated to their degree / interests.

I think are two different stages we're conflating here.

Education, in the resume / HR sense is absolutely a signal.

Education, in maintaining and excelling in your profession is knowledge.

It's lamentable that degrees are used as filters, but I wouldn't trust someone to do an electrical engineering job who didn't have a related degree. There's simply too much to learn. (Yes, exceptions do exist, but they're not common)

I'd argue the more pointed questions to colleges should be: if you're not equipping your graduates with the latter knowledge, then what are they buying? And why should they continue to pay you?

>But then standards were lowered

Standards have never been higher. Students face pressure from college admissions and teachers face pressure from national standards bodies. Policies that have enriched standardized testing companies.

The real issue: Labor power has never been lower. Wages have been stagnant for the past two decades. You need a college degree now because safe middle class lifestyles that were previously available to graduates of high school are now limited to those with certain bachelors degrees.

Whether this is due to political collusion with capital, increased automation, globalized labor or a combination of the three is up for debate. The middle class you're imagining was fueled by an economic engine tooling up to rebuild Europe and a political climate that taxed the rich at 80-90%.

Requiments change based on availability of labour and is not entirely related to the difficulty of the job.

The exact same type of jobs often have different requirements year-to-year. Recruiters start adding or removing requiments based on how easy it is to find people for a role. It just acts as a filter but is often unrelated to the actual difficulty of the role.

Recruiters don't want to have to judge people entirely on merit as it is hard. They pre-filter the pool to focus their search and make it easier to manage and vary the constraints based on number of applicants.

This means people perfectly capable of doing a job get excluded for a superficial reason other than ability or competence and it overly effects people from a poorer background.

https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor...

[citation needed] On all the bullshit "IQ claims". At my alma mater (and I suspect a similar national trend at schools of equal standing) SAT scores among admitted students is the highest it's ever been. The world is just getting more competitive; there's no grand conspiracy, and there definitely never has been a meritocracy, and our elite institutions remain elite (even if people like you would no longer be able to get in).

[0] https://smartech.gatech.edu/bitstream/handle/1853/5873/00STU...

This. I once had a friend on an admissions committee at my alma mater look at my old application to see if I could get it. That was seven years after I was admitted and the answer was "No".

>SAT scores among admitted students is the highest it's ever been.

And the GDP of Venezuela as measured in bolívar is the highest it's ever been!

"More comparisons on new SAT scores versus critical reading and math scores on the old SAT:

A new 1200 corresponds to an old 1130. A new 1300 corresponds to an old 1230. A new 1400 corresponds to an old 1340. A new 1500 corresponds to an old 1460. But a new 1600 is just as perfect as an old 1600."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/05/1...

This argument exactly is why I posted the older fact book. The recent change doesn't explain the uptick going on for the past 40+ years. Also even if you take off 40-60pts there's still a rising trend.

Underestimate the caliber of the rising population at your own peril. The failing generation can only cry ageism for so long before their jobs are eaten.

You may be aware of this, but just to add to your point, the Flynn effect[0] of IQs consistently rising pretty convincingly rebuts the idea that higher SAT scores are _only_ due to the test getting easier.

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

The Flynn effect is mostly hollow gains and seems to have stopped: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028960.... And cognitive genomics is starting to show a decline: http://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2017/01/10/1612113114.

I avoided mentioning the Flynn effect because it tends to attract naysayers (see below, with some embarrassingly poorly structured studies pulled straight from google).

The argument against the downfall of society stands pretty well on it's own without it though, mostly because there's no evidence the tests are getting easier (regardless of recent score changes a 1600 is still a 1600) and even less evidence the test takes are becoming less accomplished.

What exactly is embarrassing about this study:

http://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2017/01/10/1612113114.

Extrapolating data from 90 years of an isolated island nation to evolutionary timescales is the major assumption. The other weak foundation is the assumption that this gene should correspond to educational level. It was weakly correlated in the early 20th century, less correlated now, and we can't put any weight on to what it actually controls (maybe it's related to IQ, maybe it's delaying gratification, who knows, the writers don't claim to).

I think it's a bold conclusion to leap from one genetic marker doesn't seem as strongly correlated to education levels among Icelanders to "cognitive genomics is on the decline".

> see below

Better to use hyperlinks; order of posts on HN is not immutable.

SAT scores among admitted students is the highest it's ever been.

My older son needed a certain ACT score to get into the school he wanted. He wasn’t anywhere near the score. After 10 one on one tutorial sessions at $100 a pop with former college professors. He got in. He didn’t all the sudden get smarter. He had access to resources.

Another anecdote, I had the highest SAT score in my school and I believe at least the second highest in my city out of 5000 graduating students (not a large city). How much of that do you think was due to me being one of the smartest or hardest working students in my city (usually ranked near the bottom in income in the US) and how much was it due to my mom not only being a high school math teacher but she also had done SAT workshops for years?

I didn’t have to go to a “SAT Tutorial” class with 30 other students where an overworked teacher volunteered to come in the morning for an hour before school started. I had all the help at home I needed.

It's not difficult to have a free or nearly free college system. Many European countries have this and participation rates are still generally in the same range as US college participation.

In Germany, 28% of adults age 24-35 have completed tertiary education, as compared with the United States in which 46% have.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiar...

Unfortunately this is likely correct. The race to the bottom with credentialism will continue until we break the game. The answer isn't more credentials (free college, etc), but to make credentials worthless as a social signal. Educational backgrounds should be made a protected class, much like race or religion is. Then employers will have to rely on examinations or merit (see: Bar exam for attornies), rather than pedigrees. If you can't judge or ask about your college degree or lack, the job market becomes a vastly more level place.

You're just replacing one credential (University degree) with another (has passed specific test). Go ask any CISSP how well they think exams work as a test of ability or knowledge.

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