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Comment by elbenshira | Hacker News Reader

This data is pretty useless without data from other time periods.

And it seems like bashing high education is the cool thing to do nowadays. We use stories of the "I'm $200,000 in debt from my Ivy league B.A. in English and no one wants to hire me!" nature to justify that higher education is becoming irrelevant.

But I think we're all missing several pieces of the puzzle. One piece is that forget that what we're trying to optimize is happiness, and if those 13.4% of waiters are happy, then who cares if they have a BA or MA? OK, maybe we've wasted government money on their education, but can we call it a waste just because they didn't use that BA in English to do Englishy stuff? No. They're probably a more refined person because of those four years.

I do agree that higher education is broken. But higher education is broken in every single freaking country. The French spend less time in college, but they have a higher unemployment rate than us. Kenya's universities are based on entrance exams that encourages memorization and discourages critical thinking and imagination. Asia's universities are based on elite entrance exams where students to spend up to a year studying for.

Yes, higher education is broken. But so is everything else in this world.

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OK, maybe we've wasted government money on their education, but can we call it a waste just because they didn't use that BA in English to do Englishy stuff? No. They're probably a more refined person because of those four years.

Are you willing to go up to 40 middle class families and demand that each of them pay $1000 to have a more refined waiter who vaguely remembers some Proust after partying for 4 years?

If not, then we can call it a waste.

Wasting "government money" isn't a tiny drop in some gigantic abstract pool of thousand dollar bills. It's hard earned money taken by force from ordinary Americans. It's not government money, it's your money.

>> It's hard earned money taken by force from ordinary Americans. It's not government money, it's your money.

The money in your hand only has the value it has because we collectively instill a value in it. This is true, isn't it? I mean it really is just numbers and ink on pieces of paper and electrons over a bunch of wires. But if it were just the ink and and numbers and electrons then I could write a few zeros on a piece of fancy paper and become rich overnight.

But then there is the printing presses, which are guarded and the vaults that are guarded and the software systems that are guarded and the counterfeiting laws none of which you created. So "your money" (see? I can do quotes too) is really society's money. Moreover we collectively agree that the government allocates a portion of all of our earnings and recognize that this happens nowadays in a mainly un-coerced fashion. Sorry it inconveniences you. Maybe we can argue about waste without bringing your pet ideology into it.

The form of the money is completely irrelevant. What's relevant is that resources are being allocated to one sector of the economy that does less to raise the standard of living than other sectors would likely be able to do with those same resources. Therefore the government, in this instance, is preventing the standard of living from increasing as much as it would have otherwise, which happens to hurt real people.

Ensuring that the resources they take from the private sector are used better than they otherwise would have been should be one of the primary concerns any government has when it decides to meddle in an economy because the consequences can negatively impact a lot of people.

I'm not bringing ideology into it. I'm focusing on the human cost of spending money, that's all.

So lets put it another way, since you want to get into arguments over the value of green pieces of paper. $40k worth of subsidies for education are about 2500 hours of labor from a median laborer. Are you willing to force 25 median Americans to work 100 hours each, just so that their waiter can party for 4 years and maybe quote Beowulf?

The output of those 2500 hours of labor are what makes the green pieces of paper worth something.

But then there is the printing presses, which are guarded and the vaults that are guarded and the software systems that are guarded and the counterfeiting laws none of which you created.

I have, however, paid far more than my fair share for this service, which probably amounts to only a few dollars per person per year. It's also dishonest for you to bring public goods into this. We are discussing redistribution of wealth in the form of private goods, not public goods (such as anti-counterfeiting, police and fire protection).

Now, you might argue there are public benefits to education (e.g., a well educated labor force is more productive). But that is irrelevant for this discussion - we are discussing workers who are choosing not to make a productive use of our investment in them.

I agree with every statement you have made highly, except for one small but significant nitpick.

Many of those people are not choosing not to make productive use of it, but failing to find a good way to do it. I have an acquantaince with an MA in English literature who was unable to find any job related to it, my own wife failed to find any reasonable job with a BA in History and is pursuing her MA so she can teach at the community college, hopefully.

You could say that they deliberately chose degrees that are hard to market and I would agree, but once they had those degrees neither of them chose not to use it deliberately. Also, I know that is anecodatal, but I strongly suspect a fair number of those PHDed waiters failed to find employment in their field rather than chose not to.

Ok, twice now, you've boiled the benefit of higher education which doesn't result in placement at jobs requiring higher education as partying for 4 years, and a weak lingering familiarity with literature. I don't think that's fair. No one here is arguing for higher education for apathetic, disengaged students, or for low standards in higher education.

Also, this is twice that you've pulled out this 40k figure. Is that from some other article? I didn't think most degrees are subsidized that heavily, or that most college students have access to funding at that level, although if you have sources you'd like to cite, I'd be interested to see them.

[W]e are discussing workers who are choosing not to make a productive use of our investment in them. Three points: (a) it's not always obvious whether a person's education is being put to productive use. Taking a job which directly requires that education is only one way a person might put their education to productive use. (b) among people who aren't putting their education to productive use, are these really all about choice? All of the friends I have that graduated in the past couple years who haven't ended up in jobs which specifically required their education haven't chosen to not make productive use of their education. The job market for a lot of areas is tough right now, and a new graduate attempting to put his or her education to good use has to compete with more experienced applicants even for low level positions. (c) even if they haven't found jobs where they can put their education to good use yet, doesn't mean they won't when the job market changes. I think a lot of the people you'd like to paint as being deliberately bad investments are actually victims of poor economic circumstance.

Are you willing to force 25 median Americans to work 100 hours each, just so that their waiter can party for 4 years and maybe quote Beowulf?

No, but I'm willing ask they put in that amount of work to subsidize college students based on the probability that they'll later make a net contribution to society, including the laborers - if that probability is high enough. You are counting the costs while avoiding any calculation of the benefits, as if you knew with certainty which students entering college would never progress beyond being waiters afterwards.

I might as well say we should stop funding all training of doctors, because every year some of them lose their license to practice medicine, or that we cease funding mathematical research because some of recipients perpetuate logical fallacies on the internet.

No, but I'm willing ask they put in that amount of work to subsidize college students...

So they are permitted to say no?

... based on the probability that they'll later make a net contribution to society, including the laborers - if that probability is high enough.

Try to pay attention. I was responding to a comment by elbenshira questioning whether it was a waste even if the education goes unused. I was asserting that it was a waste in that case.

So they are permitted to say no?

Of course, that's what elections are for.

Try to pay attention (...) I was asserting that it was a waste in that case.

You were asserting that the wasted subsidy could be equated with the efforts of 25 laborers working 100 hours each. By that logic, 25 other laborers working the same amount might end up subsidizing the education of a student who becomes a great industrialist. Should they break out the champagne?

Tax payments go into a pool, and a proportion of the amount spent on educational subsidies will be wasted. What matters is the overall rate of return.

Of course, that's what elections are for.

I'm confused - if I vote against subsidizing other people's consumption, I'm not obligated to do so?

Or perhaps you are confused and believe that 2 people (aka, a majority) threatening 1 person with violence is not force.

By that logic, 25 other laborers working the same amount might end up subsidizing the education of a student who becomes a great industrialist.

And in that case, it might be worthwhile, depending on whether the public benefits of the great industrialist outweigh the public costs. Assuming education is what enabled this person to become a great industrialist, then it probably is worthwhile.

Again, let me repeat: elbenshira questioned whether it was a waste even in cases where there is no public benefit, only a private benefit. That's what I was responding to.

Well, you're not always guaranteed to get what you want; a loss for your preferred candidate or ballot issue doesn't equate to threats of violence, in my view.

Ask yourself: what happens if you refuse to pay the subsidies?

Laws are enforced with violence. Don't kid yourself on that.

That's correct, but incredibly irrelevant. Yes, money is only "money" because we as a society decide it is. But we as a society (in theory) also decide what our government should spend money on. It is our money, no matter how you look at it. The government does take some of it from us as the price of having a civilized society, but we still get to (collectively) decide what that money is used for. And if we don't like paying for a 4-year college education for someone who is going to end up being a parking attendant, we have the right to try to find a way to fix that.

Maybe we'll fail, but we have the right to try to change things.

I might go up to 100,000,000 families and ask them to pay one penny so that 100 waiters can clearly explain what's on the menu...

Most consumers of waiter service already pay up to 20% of the total bill for the waiter to be helpful and friendly.

But that's after the point at which anything can be done educationally. My point wasn't helpful and friendly, illiterate people aren't any less helpful or friendly than literates.

Sure, but you could say that about anything the government spends money on. I happen to believe that the value of the educational system far outweighs the small amount of money wasted on 5,000 waiters. And the bureaucracy of weeding out those 5,000 waiters would far outspend the cost of just paying for their PhDs. Do you suggest that we mandate what jobs anyone who gets a state education gets?

That's exactly the test I would use for anything the government spends money on. It's called a cost/benefit analysis. If our elected officials are not doing that, we should immediately vote them out of office.

Would I demand 100 hours of labor from 25 people to lock a rapist away from them for 2 years? Yes.

Would I demand 100 hours of labor from 25 people to lock a pot smoker away from them for 2 years? No.

2500 hours of labor to kill a few Iraqis? Not liking that so much.

2500 hours of labor to vaccinate 800 babies against MMR? I'm ok with that.

Now, it might not be cost effective to police the educational system for people wasting their education. But that's not the argument elbenshira was making, or what I was arguing against.

The problem with this sort of thing is that the perceived benefit is often quite subjective. It is hard to define and get people to agree on a quantitative measure to use for evaluation

Higher education is not meant to be job training. No one gets an English BA because they think that's the path that will get them the best jobs; they get it because they think it will make them happy. And if the point of higher education isn't job training, it's silly to measure its efficacy based on how well it helps graduates into jobs which wouldn't have otherwise been accessible.

And the benefit to society of a person (who eventually waits tables) getting an education (which wasn't about how to wait tables) doesn't need to be manifested while that person brings you your check. That person has a whole life outside of work where they can benefit from a richer understanding of the world.

As an example, we're a (kinda) democratic society, and a lot of the sanity of our government and policy rests on the judgment of the citizenry. Dealing with political rhetoric, forming opinions about sometimes highly technical public policy issues, and understanding economic policy at a minimum require an ability to critically evaluate rhetoric, some level of scientific literacy, and some numeracy, which are all benefited by a well rounded undergrad program. In some places, the political process requires that people not only be able to follow and evaluate political platforms, but produce arguments on their own (I'm thinking of state primary caucuses in particular). Having an educated populace is important independent of the desire of individuals to be wealthy or professionally successful. Just because we need waiters and parking lot attendants and bar tenders doesn't mean education is wasted on the portion of the population which fills that need.

If your concern is with public funds subsidizing education, I would actually have greater objection to funding educations for people that go on to earn high salaries in jobs that require high levels of education -- those are students who could afford to take loans and pay them back.

That person has a whole life outside of work where they can benefit from a richer understanding of the world.

Why should the 3/4 Americans without a college degree be forced to subsidize the private enjoyment of an individual? Should the government also subsidize my private enjoyment of video games, pornography or martial arts?

As an example, we're a (kinda) democratic society, and a lot of the sanity of our government and policy rests on the judgment of the citizenry.

If that is the case, would you favor denying the vote to people unable to make correct judgements, deal with political rhetoric or form opinions about highly technical issues? It seems that filtering the noise is far cheaper than increasing the signal, in this case.

OK, I think maybe it's worthwhile to distinguish between the issues of (a) whether higher education has a value and function beyond job training and placement and (b) whether higher education is worthy of receiving public funds. My response above was in response to a position I perceived you to be making with respect to (a), and not so much because of my opinions with respect to (b). I think there's a coherent position that could say that higher education has value beyond job placement, but which still held that it didn't deserve public subsidies. That said, I think the $40k of public funding for a neglectful English student turned waiter is an unfair characterization. It's not like we're throwing 40k scholarships after any high school graduate that moves, and most educations are not subsidized to nearly that degree.

That seems messed up, mainly because (a) evaluating people's sophistication with respect to those abilities is tricky and doing it in a politically neutral way is even trickier and (b) I would expect that people who weren't disenfranchised by such a policy wouldn't represent the interests of the people who were disenfranchised.

However, I do think we need more high quality, wide availability of events and materials arranged by non-partisan organizations with the intent of providing the necessary background to follow the issues.

I agree with your sentiment, there is no way that the general population of taxpayers should be subsidizing education for people with the sole rational being "they're happier" or "they have a deeper understanding of the world". That's great for them, but don't spend my money on it.

However this data doesn't really mean much. The table shows how many poeple have thsoe jobs RIGHT NOW. Will they have those jobs forever? Likely not. If you have a phD and spend a year in a crap job looking for something better, I view that as better than just doing nothing.

In fact those numbers are just people with more than a bachelors degree. Some number of them are currently graduate students, I know plenty of graduate students who are bar tenders at the same time. This data doesn't differentiate.

It also doesn't tell you anything about how school was paid for. If you have a phD that someone paid for from a private school, and do nothing for with your life, that doesn't matter to me at all. Only when people start getting subsidized by the taxpayers does it matter.

And hey, if we're going to bitch about the cost of education to the taxpayer, I'd extend it even to phDs with jobs that are paid for by the government (professors doing research at both public and private universities funded by taxpayer grants). A lot of research is freaking useless, and it costs a whole heck of a lot more than the subsidy on loans for students.

Regarding your first point: since you already stated you're sometimes in favor of publicly subsidizing things like vaccinations and criminal incarcerations, your opposition to publicly funded education must result from this distinction you draw between public good and "private enjoyment". But I think rather than just assuming a position on college degrees a priori there is a rich and valuable debate to be had about whether higher education should be considered a public good and not merely a private enjoyment.

And your second: this seems to be both a distraction (I don't see how arguing that an educated citizenry is a necessary ingredient of democracy implies that one should necessarily agree with denying participation to those deemed incapable) and somewhat misguided (seeing as we already do deny the right to vote to a certain class of people unable to make correct judgments--we call them felons).

...would you favor denying the vote to people unable to make correct judgements, deal with political rhetoric or form opinions about highly technical issues? It seems that filtering the noise is far cheaper than increasing the signal, in this case.

As to your position that "filtering the noise" is easier than "increasing the signal", I think that you have perhaps...shall we say, not carefully considered the logistics involved? But leave that aside.

The danger with disenfranchising anyone, for any reason, is that of false positives. To paraphrase Blackstone, I would far rather that a hundred idiots were voting than for one wise person to be unfairly disenfranchised.

Fundamentally, society works because most or all of its members believe that they are better off as members of the existing framework than they would be by moving away, rebelling, etc. The last time Americans were bound by laws and taxes concerning which they had no voice, they threw quite a party in this little town up in Massachusetts...I think they served tea?

Higher education is not meant to be job training. No one gets an English BA because they think that's the path that will get them the best jobs; they get it because they think it will make them happy.

It makes me unhappy to be paying into a fund to enable this sort of behavior.

That's a fair point, and I can't decide if I agree or not. But... I'd much prefer to subsidize education for someone who is going to use the skills they've learned to be productive instead of subsidizing someone going to college to have fun and feel good about themselves.

At least at a government level. I'd love to see private funding -- let people decide (in the philanthropic sense) to give money for that sort of thing. I don't think the government should be paying for 4-years of college "vacation."

It makes me unhappy to be paying into a fund to enable this sort of behavior.

I'm confused by this. Why are you happier to fund someone's education if their goals are better job placement and personal salary than if their goals are to be better, happier people? In either case, you'd be subsidizing someone else's attempt at bettering their own life -- but why is improving their income tax bracket more valuable to you than improving their wellbeing by any other metric that person might choose?

In a hypothetical scenario where you were given the choice of funding Alice's education with the certain knowledge that her degree would get her a high paying job where she'd be miserable, funding Bob's education with the knowledge that his life and relationships would be enriched but he would never earn much, would you really be happier funding Alice's education?

but why is improving their income tax bracket more valuable to you than improving their wellbeing by any other metric that person might choose?

One claim which is often made by advocates of education is that it causes productivity to increase, and that the gains from increased productivity are only partially captured by the educated individual. The remainder of the gains are spread about the general population via trade (i.e., a consumer surplus).

If the educated individual is happier but not more productive, there are no gains from trade or consumer surplus to be enjoyed by everyone. Thus, the standard rationale for public education does not apply to such an individual.

What if Bob would be even happier if you bought him a new sports car instead of paying for higher education?

Then it might be better to buy him a sports car than to fund Alice's education.

I'm confused by this. Why are you happier to fund someone's education if their goals are better job placement and personal salary than if their goals are to be better, happier people?

Because I'm not paying taxes to make other people happy.

My assumption here (and yes, it's possibly a flawed assumption) is that the person working for better job placement will -- on average -- end up contributing more to society than the person going to school because they like to read about obscure long-dead authors.

I don't believe tax money put toward education should be there to make people happy as a primary goal. It should be put there to encourage people to be productive members of society. Hopefully people find happiness along the way, but that's not my concern here.

In either case, you'd be subsidizing someone else's attempt at bettering their own life -- but why is improving their income tax bracket more valuable to you than improving their wellbeing by any other metric that person might choose?

You're putting words in my mouth here, or perhaps just misunderstanding what I'm saying. Jumping up the income tax bracket ladder is a side-effect of producing better work that ends up being a larger contribution to society.

In that specific case, no. I would be equally unhappy funding either of them. But you can't design this kind of public policy for specific extreme cases; you design it for the common average case.

You are presenting a false dichotomy where on one hand you have happy people who are low wage-earners/low producers, and on the other hand you have unhappy (or less happy) people who are high wager-earners/high producers.

There are people who make a lot of money who are happy, and who are unhappy. There are also people who don't make much money who are happy, and who are unhappy. Education in fields that also end up being economically useful need not be any more or less happiness-inducing than productive dead-ends, on average.

I think it might only be a waste if you can come up with a way to predict who is going to be the person with a BA in English that doesn't use it. If you can't predict it, then it means that those who do use it are more expensive than sticker price (their cost would be "total costs to get people BA's in English"/"total number of people that actually use it").

I think it's important for you to not go trolling. A middle class family paying a thousand dollars for one complete stranger to go to school is ridiculous sum of money, which is exactly why nobody pays that much money. Please, in the future, use figures which are more closely based in reality.

However, the fact remains that middle class families do pay for part of the tuition of certain people (people who go to public school, and those who get federal loans). It is important to question why from time to time, so I will address your argument, and I will assume a number more realistic (I don't know what a more realistic number would be, and I'm not going to do your work for you).

I think it is very important for middle class families to partially pay for part of student's college tuitions. For one, there is the very likely possibility that one of these students will go on to be a future Proust, and I think it is very important to have the resources available for such a person, even though much of that money will be 'wasted' on people who will go on to be waiters.

Secondly, we live in a mostly democratic society, for better or for worse the opinions of the public can very much shape important political and economic decisions made by our leaders. It is therefore extremely important that the public be educated enough to understand arguments made by our leaders, and to be able to parse evidence presented by experts. Obviously I don't expect the public to understand all of the details of everything, but they need to be able to listen, and to know when they don't know anything at all and shut the fuck up. We as a society can't move forward without understanding what happened in our past, what we've done right, and what we've done wrong. Right now, high school is very good about telling us certain things, while college is very good helping us understand things. For better or for worse, at some point we have learn how to analyze, and that is something that is not done very well in high school. So, you can either ask your middle class families to pay up to reform high schools, or you can ask middle class families to continue to pay for some individual's college tuitions.

> A middle class family paying a thousand dollars for one complete stranger to go to school is ridiculous sum of money, which is exactly why nobody pays that much money.

> However, the fact remains that middle class families do pay for part of the tuition of certain people (people who go to public school, and those who get federal loans). It is important to question why from time to time, so I will address your argument, and I will assume a number more realistic (I don't know what a more realistic number would be, and I'm not going to do your work for you).

So you clearly don't know what a realistic figure is, which means you obviously have no clue as to what an unrealistic figure is, yet you're highly critical of his ballpark analogy yet you can't even guesstimate to a figure within the city that the ballpark is in!

Perhaps you should ask where the original commenter is from. I grew up in the UK, the government paid for around 800GBP worth of education in night classes I took. I'm not even sure what the price tag on my 2-year certification course was but I'm sure it was a little more than a weekly Psychology and Sociology course.

As I've said before here, what pays my bills is using a hammer. At one point I was coding in HTML and PHP while I was 14 in high school, and I was pushed by every faculty member into going to university (I'm assuming to justify their own existence). I would have loved to go to university, I would have loved to have the opportunity to study psychology or ancient history, or some such... there's books for curiosity.

I use a hammer, and metal shears, and a drill. These are the basic of the basic, the most mundane objects in existence and I see dozens of intelligent, well educated people walk into a job and quit or get fired because they struggle to use them because of shitty education.

I have my woodwork and metalwork teachers to thank for a good education, one that anywhere in the world is guaranteed to pay my bills. Why is our education system set out to target self-actualization when it doesn't even teach us how to achieve our physiological needs.

First and foremost we should be teaching our children how to make money; how to work a job. Second, we should be teaching our children how to spend money; avoiding reliance on credit cards and debt traps. The aim is to improve peoples happiness, but without even teaching the basic steps on the hierarchy, it's a fruitless effort.

If more money out of my pocket would mean better education for the next generation, I'm happy to do it. I would actually love to see a generation of children told "you know it's okay to want to do carpentry, or to become a mechanic". If bashing the frivolity of higher education will get that, then I'll be happy to bash away to get a decent economy and a decent citizenry.

> Are you willing to go up to 40 middle class families and demand that each of them pay $1000 to have a more refined waiter who vaguely remembers some Proust after partying for 4 years?

This is a foolish comment, even beyond your arbitrary splitting up the cost of a degree between 40 "middle class families", or the insinuation that one can actually earn a degree by simply "partying for 4 years."

The value of education goes beyond landing one a job. Simply having well-educated citizens is of value to society -- especially in a representative democracy, where our level of education has a direct impact on how wisely we choose our own leaders. In fact, that education for its own sake is of great value to society is the core assumption behind public education.

Besides which, how exactly would you propose to "fix" the "problem" of well-educated people choosing overqualified jobs? With a state-controlled labor market, dictating what kind of people are allowed to work what kind of jobs?

Right, but a country can get well-educated citizens in high-school, and spend promoting lecture and arts. This last benefits all society, not just students and professors.

Any particular way of bringing aggregate costs down to the individual level is arbitrary. I chose a method which illustrates the cost in simple human terms. The fact is, a $10k/year subsidy for college (note: this is roughly the subsidy for Rutgers, which I chose since I attended) is expensive. To give that subsidy to one person, a median worker must work 2500 hours.

As for earning a degree by partying for 4 years, I stand by that claim. College isn't that hard and plenty of idiots pass while learning very little. Believe me, I passed quite a few.

The fix: end subsidies for college. I don't care if you waste your money on a worthless degree, I only care if you waste mine.

The numbers you are coming up with are utterly arbitrary. I could come up with similar numbers via anal extraction and have them be just as relevant to the question at hand. That is not at all.

As for partying for 4 years and passing - Yes, there are some who party for four years, learn nothing and pass college. There are even some who do it on scholarship or government grants. But those are the exception, not the rule.

In my experience the ones who partied like crazy and learned nothing were the ones there on their parent's dime. The ones who were there on government dime rarely left the library, worked their butts off and came away with an excellent education.

It's true, your mileage may vary, but if you ask me it is of great benefit to society that everyone gets the best level of education they can handle as determined by the quality of their mind and determination, not the quality of their parent's bank account.

After all when you're of the age to be applying to college you haven't had the chance to begin being a productive member of society or make any money of your own. The whole point of education is to make people productive members of society. So what determines whether you can pay your own way in college is whether or not your parents were productive members of society -- and no one should be limited by their parents. We'd lose a lot of very bright people that way.

That's what government subsidies are for. They are an investment by all of society in our future. And in the people of our future. Think of it like venture capital investment. Not every investment works out. But if even a few really do succeed, then the investment in all those who don't is worth it. Of course the place where the analogy fails is that unlike with venture capital where only a few will succeed, with college subsidies only a few will fail.

Are you saying that you consider the subsidy for your attendance at Rutgers was a waste of taxpayer's money as well? Also, I'm not sure whether you passed out idiot students who attended Rutgers by being smarter/working harder, or that you have given idiots who learned very little a passing grade in the classes you teach.

I don't necessarily disagree with you about ending subsidies, but it seems as if you are trying to have your cake and eat it. Maybe I've misunderstood your position. If they were abolished, would you expect college to get cheaper and academics to tolerate a pay cut, or students to make up the shortfall by borrowing higher sums?

Are you saying that you consider the subsidy for your attendance at Rutgers was a waste of taxpayer's money as well?

It probably was. It's not as clear cut as the case of the waiter, but I don't think my current work creates a benefit for the taxpayer as large as the subsidy I received. When I was still an academic, I created a larger external benefit [1], but it's far from clear that it was positive.

If subsidies were abolished, I expect college would become cheaper and more efficient, most academics would find new employment, and most marginal students would not attend college.

[1] Currently I work as a trader, and most of the benefits I provide are captured by myself and my company. None of my academic research projects have resulted in anything useful yet, though admittedly the jury is still out (people are still exploring some of the lines of inquiry I created).

What about your next job? As long as education is done at the start of one's life, we can't look at its manifested usefulness for "young" people. You can maybe make preliminary tallies at 45-50, at which point I would expect the course of their life is better defined and the contribution of various periods can start being evaluated.

Thanks for the clarification.

How about we get rid of the military first, then we can whine about how expensive higher education is for the taxpayers.

>Are you willing to go up to 40 middle class families and demand that each of them pay $1000 to have a more refined waiter who vaguely remembers some Proust after partying for 4 years?

Yes, I am. Education is a diversified investment. While you will get a few negative returns (e.g. your waiters with English BAs), you will also get a handful of exceptional returns (e.g. Sergey Brin). As long as the overall ROI is positive, public education is a good thing.

And it seems like bashing high education is the cool thing to do nowadays.

It seems to be particularly common around here. Perhaps because most of the people around here have degrees in CS, which is something relatively easy to self-teach. If you hang around on a forum with a bunch of mathematicians or molecular biologists I doubt you'd be hearing the same "blah blah, university is useless" memes.

By mathematicians, do you mean the tiny fraction of people with math PhD's employed as math profs, quants or "the machine learning guy"?

Or do you include the much larger set of mathematicians who couldn't find a job as mathematicians, and now work as high school math teachers, community college adjuncts or business analysts?

I'm a member of the former set. Most of the people I went to school with are members of the latter. School was fun, but no one is under the illusion it was a good career move.

As a math major that makes me worry a little bit.

How tiny is the fraction?

We started with 11. One left in the first year. 3 more failed to graduate after 4-7 years. 5 people got postdocs. Of the 5 with postdocs, 2 left the country (one involuntarily), I left academia to work in the private sector, and one I haven't kept in touch with. So at most, 2 are on the tenure track in the US [1].

This was Rutgers - at Princeton, the ratio would be a bit better, at NJIT it would be worse. Don't even ask about podunk state.

It's a shitty career path. Unless you are fantastically good, don't waste your time.

[1] My adviser told me I could have been on the tenure track if I wanted to. Since I didn't put it to the test by applying for such jobs, I won't claim it as true.

I'm guessing indicators of "fantastically good" at undergrad level are things like winning the Putnam and original research contributions right?

I don't suppose physics would be any better?

Physics is probably worse. In math, you are either in the game or eliminated. In physics, you can eliminated but still doing grunt work for low pay in someone's lab.

Putnam is less relevant than original research.

No degree will guarantee you a job. Professional degrees (law, engn, accounting, medicine etc) will come close, if you want to work in a profession.

Every other course will just give you a better chance of getting a job, and help you perform better once you get there. A math grad can solve all kinds of problems that other people will just shrug their shoulders at. That's always useful.

Academia in general is a dangerous career path though. Too many people on the ground floor (i.e. every undergrad who can't think of a better thing than grad school), too much glamor keeping them there, very bureaucratic organizations, and a complete mismatch between work (research) and funding (students).

FWIW almost all of the applied math majors I know are going into IB or trading, which is most certainly a good career move.

Are you saying moving into academia isn't a good career move? Because that's probably true with every technical profession.

Are you saying mathematics teachers shouldn't require a degree in math in teach high school mathematics? That a student who have recently graduated is qualified enough to teach the year below him? That a business analyst would do a better job without a major in statistics? Community college adjuncts who teach math don't need anything beyond high school math classes? If not then I think you were beside the point.

University is definitely useful for at least some subset of the population.

You don't need a PhD or even an MS in math to teach high school/CC math. The business analyst, for the most part, doesn't need to know math beyond means and standard deviations. Note: I'm interpreting "mathematician" to mean "math Ph.D." or "person who does/did research in math", which is typically the way the term is used.

Most people with a math degree don't use even a small fraction of their training. I do, but I'm in the minority. (Also worth noting that most of what I use I didn't learn in school.)

  I'm interpreting "mathematician" to mean "math Ph.D." or 
  "person who does/did research in math", which is typically 
  the way the term is used.

Ahh, okay then. I just thought it meant someone with a bachelor degree in mathematics.

I have a math degree. I am not a professional mathematician, but I do believe university is useless.

I don't think people here think college education is useless in all fields. In the Humanities, yes:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=565980

Also MBA degrees are bashed periodically; but I don't think engineering and medical school degrees are.

Edit: and for the Humanities and MBA, the reasons I usually see for bashing are more like "not worth spending the time to learn" than "easy to self-teach".

I'm surprised you use Mathematics as an example of a field that's hard to self teach. I actually think Mathematics is one of the easiest fields to self-teach in - you really only need books / video lectures, some paper and pencils, and your brain. It's even less demanding than programming in that sense!

There are also several famous self-taught Mathematicians.

You also need lots and lots of self-discipline. Of course, that is true for serious study in any field, but unlike many fields no one would call a mathematician someone who wasn't serious about it.

Programming is easy to self-teach because you can immediately verify whether you've got it right -- compile and run, see if it works.

Mathematics is harder to verify, though easier than (say) physics because you can test yourself by proving theorems. However, your proofs might be wrong because you're under some misconception. And, as the other response said, it requires an incredible amount of discipline.

Ramanujan was probably the last great self-taught mathematician, and I'm sure most would say he could have been a helluva lot greater if only he'd been sent off to Oxford at sixteen instead of twenty-seven.

And just let me correct myself: Ramanujan was at Cambridge, not Oxford.

I doubt it, large part of what made Ramanujan great was his independent thought, which would have been squashed pretty quickly at uni.

"Which is ye surest character of a true Mathematical Genius, learned these of his own inclination & by his owne industry without a teacher."

— Isaac Newton

In many respects, math has a totally unfair advantage over every other subject you could possibly study in college because it can be learned almost without needing any other people. Well, living people that is, as you do need the books of long deceased thinkers. (I'd say this also applies to philosophy, and hardly anything else). You just need to be willing to spend enormous amounts of time alone in contemplation reading.

The sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.

— Blaise Pascal

There's also a very limited social component layer such as you would find in medicine, law, politics, economics, et al. To become a doctor, or any kind of "professional", sure, it requires a massive social apparatus on top of a high degree of actual learning. You have to have connections, know the right people, say the right and popular things to them, be supported and credentialed by the leadership and their agenda, and basically imposture one's self into mimicking whatever behaviors and traits are specific to and dominant in whatever professional field you're studying. Eventually your identity morphs into this set of learned behaviors, and it's almost entirely built upon your position in some type of social hierarchy.

Not so with math. You either know some theorem and the proof, or you don't. How much you know and how advanced you are is entirely dependent upon what you have worked through on your own. What new stuff you can create only comes from what old stuff you already know. None of this has anything to do with interacting with people. Sure, you can benefit by talking to other mathematicians, attending lectures, conferences, teaching others, etc, but at the end of the day, at some point, you still have to sit down and learn the material by yourself. And if you don't do that, it doesn't matter how much of a social butterfly you are—you can't be a mathematician.

No man is an island, but I imagine a Robinson Crusoe type figure would have no such problems becoming a mathematician on a desert island, given enough math books(and some kind of Internet connection).

Well, it was a lot easier to be self-taught in Newton's day... there wasn't that much to learn! You could read Euclid and you're be mostly done. Newton alone probably made learning mathematics at least three times harder during his career.

Anyway, if you're trying to make me regret choosing mathematics as one of my examples, y'all have won. I see no molecular biologists have popped up to advocate for self-taught molecular biology.

You do have a point there.

I've read that the last Universal mathematicians we've had were Chebyshev and Poincare, who could claim to know "all of math", and who were active in research in nearly every sub-field. It's been over 50 years since their time, and much like the fabled Renaissance Man, that frontier is now closed.

I disagree that math is easy to self-teach:

The fundamental things being taught to math majors are how to distinguish between valid and invalid reasoning, and how to produce arguments (proofs) that contain only valid reasoning.

For better or worse, the way these skills are taught is to pick a couple of subjects (like analysis, algebra, or number theory) and demand that students produce dozens of proofs, which are then mercilessly picked apart by professors and grad students. That negative reinforcement is combined with lectures that (should) consist entirely of good examples of mathematical reasoning, at that's an Education.

(The fact that students may also pick up a few facts about analysis or algebra is just a bonus, it's not the main point.)

You can certainly get the good examples from books and video lectures, but not the experience of having your arguments criticized by experts. This part is crucial -- it's just as easy to miss the flaws in your own proofs, especially your early attempts, as it is to miss the flaws in your own programs. (Worse, it's perfectly possible to reach a conclusion that's correct through an invalid argument. You're wrong, but you'll never be able to find evidence against your conclusion.) Feedback from experts is essential.

Perhaps because most of the people around here have degrees in CS, which is something relatively easy to self-teach.

Except that it isn't. The problem is that computer programming is easy to self-teach (indeed, that's pretty much the only way it can be taught) and many people confuse computer programming with computer science.

You hear a lot of "I should never have spent 5+ years on my Ph.D." from chemists and biologists in today's job market, trust me.

"One piece is that forget that what we're trying to optimize is happiness, and if those 13.4% of waiters are happy, then who cares if they have a BA or MA?"

Sorry to nitpick, but this is important. Never mind whether a degree really brings more happiness - who said we're trying to optimize happiness anyway? It's certainly not what most societies try and optimize, at least not on the societal level.

Just as a simple example, sending kids to join the army is not in the best interests of the kids' happiness, nor in the best interests of the parents' happiness; yet every society chooses to do so (never mind your personal stance on the military, societies are obviously optimizing for self-preservation over the happiness of individuals.)

Consider as a counterpoint Aristotle's Politics, Vii.2: "It is evident that the form of government is best in which every man, whoever he is, can act best and live happily."

Not all societies. Fighting wars has usually been a profession for adults, and even today there are countries without military: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_without_armed...

BA in English

I think it's a fallacy to automatically hone in on liberal arts degrees. When I worked for several manufacturing companies, I always came across people with engineering and other technical degrees that were working on the production floor as assembly workers. These were entry level jobs paying $6-10/hr.

They often had one or more or the following attributes:

  - They were 45+ years old.
  - They were more introverted, less likely to network.
  - They had technical degrees from outside the US.
  - Their careers had taken them into management or PM roles.

So these are just a few career considerations if you don't want to be pushing a mop when you're 55.

I'd be fine with people going to college to be happy if it wasn't based on tax dollars forcibly collected from me. It's time to end public funding for higher education and let people pay their own way.

I am sure someone will comment and say, "But you benefit from people going to college." And of course I do just as each of us benefit from all kinds of network effects. Volitional trade is the way to settle those scores, not stealing someone's money because you claim to have helped them.

Higher education isnt necessarily broken - it just serves a different purpose than you might think. The signalling theory suggests that gaining a higher education isnt meant to equip you with a specific set of skills. Instead higher education simply works as a filter to distinguish between efficient and less efficient persons. An efficient person is able to get a college degree, which in terms signals to potential employers that this student is very productive. This is especially true, if you consider how little application most of the things you learned actually have in the real world.

"Yes, higher education is broken. But so is everything else in this world."

^ Such an accurate, simple statement.

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