Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

While it is true that the school system acts as a filter that removes those who have almost no chance of upward mobility (those with crippling disabilities, for example) from completing higher and higher levels of schooling, we need to be careful to not reverse that observation. Attaining a degree is not going to undo the disability that limits one's economic growth.

With the great push for everyone to have a post-secondary education we've witnessed over the last decade or two, virtually everyone who is capable of attaining a post-secondary education has done so. Those who are not completing those levels of schooling now are those who had no chance in the first place, and they struggle equally in the rest of their life for the same reason they did not succeed in school.

That said, if you were born with what it takes to be top of the class in Harvard, but chose not to pursue that avenue of life, chances are you still have every bit of upward mobility potential as someone who did graduate from Harvard.

In the Salesforce consulting world the Certified Technical Architect (CTA) cert means you walk in the door at any of the big consulting firms at managing director or equivalent rank and that comes out to around $200k/year. The cert isn't that easy to get, it requires a dozen or so prerequisite certs and then an exam plus a board review but you could probably do it in a year and a half.

Also, i think over half of all CTAs are employed at Salesforce itself so you could always go work for them if consulting isn't your cup of tea (it's not for everyone that's for sure).

Who thinks they're ever gonna do any cloud service right employing some dude who only has worked with traditional servers?

You'd be surprised how many insanely expensive and dorked up cloud setups out there that honestly could have been solved / way cheaper by some guy with a random AWS cert.

I'm not talking former barista turned AWS guy in a couple weeks, some background is required for that and random server guy of course, but the barriers are dropping.

As it happens, I use stuff I learned in my distributed systems courses--in that oh-so-awful university, hiss--on a weekly basis, if not daily, to solve those problems. (I use stuff I learned in my microeconomics and my political science and my sociology classes daily, but you can't put that on a resume, so obviously it doesn't exist.)

When college cost in the US what it did in the 1960s this sort of little bit false-dichotomy, little bit navel gazing question was at least fairly harmless. Now it's just fucking ridiculous even for most public schools.

And taking classes also means giving up time wise something else. Opportunity cost is also a thing.

So yes, liberal arts are the higher forms of education, which are also further from the rest of us who need a credential because of credentialism so we can merely live. (Food, water, electricity, housing, medical, internet are effectively all required to live these days. )

There's something very broken with our modern society.

I don't really think the teaching part at most universities oriented toward training workers. If they were oriented toward training workers, then the administration would be worried about what skills are in demand by employers...probably training students on particular software, computer languages, jargon and techniques that are common. There would be more emphasis on getting various certifications while still in undergrad. I can't speak to promoting "intellectual curiosity" because it seems hard to define and if you did I bet it would depend mainly on the nature of the student...probably his/her genes, peer group and childhood role models...not on the actions of someone the student sees three hours per week during adulthood.

As it is, a professor can (very often, though not always) be totally incomprehensible and irrelevant to work, as long as they are not offensive, without any repercussions nor even any gentle communication that he/she explain things clearly. Humans tend to craft stories favorable to themselves, so even if the student evaluations are negative, the professor can just blame e.g., short attention spans in the era of marijuana and fortnite...or the professor just might not look at the student evaluations if they don't want to. Over time, some professors even develop a sort of perverse joy at confusing students...their confusion being the sign that the professor is very smart and that he is "challenging" them, when in all likelihood he is just asking them things he never explained clearly in the first place. In my undergrad, an EE professor bragged that the class average was a 23%; he also used his TA as a translator because he could not speak english.

It is expected most everywhere that students will learn work skills on the job and in internships...not at school. Professors at research universities spend all their time thinking about hard frontiers of a topic, and that frontier might have little to do with what you do on the job.

There’s no jobs for people.

Therefore people try to get college degrees, even if they aren’t suited for it or going to be happy with it.

This drives up the demand for college, and specifically for degrees that lead to jobs.

This degrades the image and purpose of college (students aren’t here to expand their mind. They’re here so that recruiters won’t ding them.)

All of which leads invariably to Downstream issues, like credential inflation and growing student debt.

Eventually, college = jobs, and one of the greatest achievements of America, its liberals arts education, will tarnish and crumble.

The other point I think worth adding isn't that many of these humanities and arts fields are unemployable, but largely that they are some of the most popular majors and in turn their economic value is diminished as such. If there were twice or three times as many graduates per year in Computer Science, I'd expect the perceived economic value of a CS degree to decline as well.

Edit: I see we have some touchy SJW-types in the house this evening :)

When TX is taken the US will officially turn into a social/welfare state, the US is doomed already, similar to what happened to Rome in the past.

People from CA or Mexico are running from there for a reason, however when they arrive TX, their first to-do is to make TX look like where they used to live. They are virus.

I ask one simple architectural question that weeds out many of the paper tigers:

“We need to deploy a website that is fault tolerant, secure, can handle one AZ going down and scalable. How would you do it using AWS technologies?”

I’m saying this as someone who has 5 AWS certs and interviews AWS Devops candidate. But I also have 20+ years of professional software development experience, a degree, and before that I was a hobbyist for 6 years.

When I started my career as a scientist in a corporate analytical lab 36 years ago, corporate funding for travel and continuing education was plentiful. When budgets got tight, that was the first to go. Those of us who were self-directed learners survived the downsizing and cost-cutting much longer than those who didn't.

14 chapters of Digital Signal Processing in 12 weeks w00t!

For many of my engineering courses at a top tier public university it was in-one-ear-out-the-other.

Though, the most of stuff I learned at community college (pre-engineering) did stick.

That’s all well and good until they find themselves competing with people from other countries who are being trained to hit the ground running and are willing to work for less....

> I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.

But then you have to be clear-eyed about what we're talking about here: from the perspective of a college student, is it worth paying 1-200k[1] to become more worldly, with some auxiliary benefits to their income potential? I would probably still send my (future) kids to such a place, but then I'm in a pretty high income/wealth percentile. I suspect that many people (including my family when I was a kid), looking at this clear-headedly, would rationally decline this deal. If you think the pricing of college reflects the "broaden your horizons" aspect instead of the perception that it's "protection money for a middle-class career", you're sorely mistaken. Which means there are and can be far, far, far more cost-effective ways to broaden your horizons, particularly in the era of Internet communities, cheap travel, and all of humanity's knowledge at your fingertips at all times.

[1] I'm aware that there are ways to get through college more cheaply, like starting in community College. But a system in which the majority of people are going through ccs first is a very different system, so the thrust of GP's point still stands.

Even if we pretend that the majority of people attend college not for the purpose of increasing their value to employers and getting out of their parents' house, but for personal edification, colleges don't even accomplish this ostensible goal! Most students are more ignorant in most subject matter than the day they step foot on the campus - https://www.nysun.com/new-york/students-know-less-after-4-co... ; https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/01/whats-c.... Often they're propagandized for four years, saddled with debt, and told that they got an "education", so it's nobody's fault but their own if they can't find a decent job.

Three cheers for the AWS certs and modern-day educational options and good riddance to the corrupt university system (propped up by taxpayer-subsidized monies, of course).

Whatever it "should" be for doesn't really matter. The majority of people (in America) operate under the assumption that going to College helps you get a job.

This is patently false. Colleges compete and advertise based on their job placement rankings. Just a few years ago, law schools were sued for misrepresenting their employment statistics.

Whatever ideal, romanticized version of university and college experiences are touted, the reality is that they are marketed to parents and kids as the way to a better lifestyle.

Sure, "Liberal Arts" are largely about enriching the mind, but that doesn't change the fact that very, very few people can afford the luxury of going to get a 4 year degree just to "expand your horizons".

I keep seeing this on HN. Only the privileged can afford to go to college to “expand their minds”. The middle class and even the upper middle class are not spending tens of thousands of dollars a year to go to college to “expand their minds”. They are doing it so they can get a job.

Where are all of these students with “expanded minds” going to get a job? I specifically told both of my sons that I would not support them in getting a degree that didn’t have an outlook for a decent paying job. I specifically had them look at the starting salaries of graduates, the placement rates, and the five year salary averages for the school and the degree they choose.

Where did you get this idea? The term "university" (as an Anglicization of "universitas") refers to its guild-like corporate organization.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2012/01/31/the-end-o... https://hbr.org/2011/07/the-big-idea-the-age-of-hyperspecial... http://theconversation.com/want-a-job-its-still-about-educat...

The general consensus I can see is that that is not the case - employers want specialties.

And absolutely communication is a skill we require, but for some reason it's not valued.

Part of it is the size and scope of the projects and the general complexity added to the field, but 20 years ago 1-2 people would have done all of these.

We should hope that older works stay in jobs as long as they're able. The coming demographic bulge isn't pretty.

Hundreds of thousands would live on a street that now houses a thousand people.

I don’t think that density is coming back or desirable.

But on housing, there's a major issue you're not considering. This [1] is a list of US city populations in 1950. This [2] is the list for 1960. So we're looking at the sweet spot of the housing boom and a period where the population also dramatically grew increasing by about 30 million (~20%) in those 10 years. Now you might notice something funny. Nearly every major city shrank in size!

The housing boom did not involve building up (rather literally as is the desire of some people today) in desirable areas so everybody could affordably live there. Instead people sacrificed some comfort and moved outside of cities and started building houses in uninhabited areas outside of the cities. Houses were cheap because people were developing in areas where there was nothing and that nobody wanted before. In turn this movement away from city centers helped keep those prices within the city reasonable, as it had a depressing effect on demand.

The reason prices are so high today is because of simple market dynamics. People are less willing to live in less desirable areas. This is driving the prices in desirable areas into crazy land. There is still immense cheap housing available outside of these areas. Some cities are so hungry for new citizens that they're literally even giving away land on the condition that you put or build a house on it.

[1] - https://www.biggestuscities.com/1950

[2] - https://www.biggestuscities.com/1960

> "This is not factually correct - tuition at non-state schools increased 10X in the last 30 years, way ahead of the pace of inflation."

You are only considering the monetary cost of college which has, indeed, skyrocketed.

However a more significant cost in the era you are both speaking of was the cost of not working immediately after high school - especially when that same social class very likely had started a family, or had a family they were coming from that needed support.

People coming from a high SES background could afford four years of non-earning, etc.

The result is college is more attainable to people across the social stratum. And then degrees are less rare, commanding a lower premium while the people holding them have more debt.

Well, it could if it meant “near median income” if few had near the median income. Median doesn't mean particularly common (or even the most common, which is the mode.)

[0] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/09/06/the-american...

I'm not sure that's really true - or at least, it's an incomplete model.

Rather, what's happening with education, health care, & housing is that you have three sectors with flat productivity growth and large barriers to entry, which implies that the number of people they can serve remains constant. The population is growing. When you can provide a service to X people but there are Y > X people who need that service, Y - X people will necessarily end up going without. The financial insecurity is because of the mad scramble to avoid being part of the Y - X who get left out in this game of musical chairs.

The reason the middle class (using danan's definition of "employees with a comfortable and secure lifestyle") expanded so much after WW2 was because we had a number of technological breakthroughs that dramatically increased the productivity of these sectors. Antibiotics and vaccines meant that illnesses which previously would kill or require long medical care could be prevented by a simple shot. The green revolution increased the yields on crops by 10x. The interstate highway system and automobile opened up vast suburban areas for development, and developers (like our current president's father) became wealthy applying mass-production techniques to building housing. The number of skilled scientists in the U.S. increased dramatically during WW2 as they left turmoil in the rest of the world, which could support larger college populations.

We still see those technological breakthroughs in other areas like computers & media, but they don't happen anymore in fundamental areas of life like health care & education. Some of this is probably inherent in the problem domain (with all the easy diseases cured, we now die of heart disease, cancer, suicide, overdoses, etc, most of which have proven stubbornly resistant to cures) while some is because of artificial restrictions (like housing zoning laws).

Working class: One who makes money by collecting a wage.

Upper class: One who makes money through investments or similar business dealings.

Middle class: One who partially makes money by collecting a wage and partially through investing.

Also because money is the only god in this country.

But I do think can versus will is a thorny question. Restaurant and delivery dining are highly elastic in general, and big cities aren't necessarily an exception. People who can stably afford to live in downtown SF, NYC, LA, Boston, etc. are still frequently paying >33% of income in rent, and ~50% isn't shocking for younger people. As a result, you've got a major demographic that's relatively high-income but still tight on cash and consequently price sensitive. (More speculatively, I think there's also a grain of truth to the "avocado toast" thing; young urbanites seem likely to cut back on purchase frequency before they cut back on quality.) So it's not necessarily the case that restaurants can make things work by raising prices; there's no rule saying that a given type of restaurant has to be viable at any price point.

I realize that we can label all of this as free markets doing their thing; maybe mid-tier restaurants with lots of staff are just an inefficient use of valuable urban space. But real estate is infamously messy, and there are some interesting questions about whether city rents would be more functional if not for the conversion of usable space into artificial demand (e.g. mandatory parking with housing) and disused investment space. And even if that's not the case, it's still news if we've built a market where "going out for dinner" is no longer a standard transaction.

Restaurants that try to charge "too much for their station" don't last here.

  There is only so much land, food, and materials to go around.

I say "ish" for the first one because hopefully humanity will grow beyond Earth in the near future.

Generally, all of the above are false unless you are talking about a population which never stops growing, and in that case that would be the problem. Not wealth inequality.

I've read conflicting things about gentrification. But on the "gentrification is good" side, the theory goes that areas that tend to "suffer" the most gentrification, tend to be areas that have very high levels of displacement already. They tend to be poor, lots of foreclosures or dead beat renters. In other words, gentrification doesn't necessarily increase levels of displacement. Owners in gentrified areas stand to greatly benefit from gentrification. The renters... they get displaced - but that was happening whether the area was gentrified or not.

The question was really simple. Your answer is the kind that inevitably ends with "you just have to read Das Kapital". That is not an answer.

You seem to believe there's a fixed pile of money in the world that every human competes for (e.g., 16th century Mercantilism).

Go into the woods and turn a tree into a chair. Where did that value come from? Will it run out?

I firmly believe that one of two things will eventually happen:

• We will find new industries which replace the old jobs. Companies in these industries will by necessity find ways to fill positions, either by paying enough that (even) more people can afford college, or by providing on-the-job training, etc.

• Society will reach a point where it no longer makes sense for so much of the population to be in the workforce. We will need some form of Universal Basic Income to allow people who choose not to work to still live. The amount of money distributed would be set according to the number of workers needed—we'd raise the UBI when there's too many workers, and lower the UBI when there's too few.

If they break this compact, I see no reason to protect their patent. Eminent domain is a thing. Lets use it.

If a city does not want to add much density, I am fine with that as long as they are not allowed to keep adding jobs.

160,000 more people work in San Francisco than work there.

Some will win huge as major contractors want to replace your quarter acre sprawl development or row house with 10+ story urban and are offering absurd amounts of money for all the lots. Some will lose if nobody has the capital to redevelop their area and density goes up around it. But if you get the ball rolling there is so much pent up demand for urban migration and sustainable living that we could probably go decades of continuous development in most cities without the money drying up. Its an untapped gold mine of economic growth.

You can think of it from the perspective of how cities grow - there is pressure inward to grow up the core and people will push from the outsides in. That push can result in low density sprawl or upsizing density, but they are pushing in to get closer to the actual city core where maximum interconnectedness and locality can happen.

In the naive way most US cities have grown individual townships and developments manage themselves and protect their own to the detriment of the whole. Its how you get situations like what Strong Towns talks about all the time[1] where sprawling out has quadratic expenses. As metro areas grow, and certainly when you are in the tens of millions, you are looking at spending preposterous amounts of money on your suburban infrastructure that way eclipses the per-unit costs of building denser buildings in a smaller footprint.

[1] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/9/18/more-math

So no, the baristas, janitors, etc of London can't live in London. But at least most of their commutes aren't as terrible as the majority of US workers driving individual cars over great distances every day to go to work.