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Comment by megaman8 | Hacker News Reader

Pushing more and more people to go to college isn't going to raise productivity. It will just lead to even more degree inflation. We've been seeing degrees pay out less and less as more and more people get them. This shouldn't be surprising. Look at the extreme cases in China. The amount highly educated labor is so vast that Seasonal workers moving to the city earn more than the average College graduate. Is this how we want to end up?

It would be much better to give students the right kind of education, and make sure that post k-12 training reflects the demands in the market. Right now there's huge demand for construction workers that isn't being filled, and there are many other niches that could use the right type of trained workers. And industry needs to get better at highering, and better at understand what they actually need, rather than continuing to advertise job templates for which no one's given any thought to what they actually need.

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I disagree, let the companies do the training. If it's so valued in the market, then surely they will be happy to provide that training.

Why we let the companies push that externality on higher education is beyond me.

And I think degree inflation would be a great thing, if we could just reduce tuitions.

A highly educated populace is a good thing.

I've worked as farm labour in a tiny little town, where most of the the farmers went to college.

If you want to go back to the farm, it's fine. Training is fine, but a true education is something they can never take away from you.

degree inflation means A degree is less valued by employers, thus jobs that used to require bachelors, now require masters (because there's too many people running around with bachelors), and jobs that used to only require high school completion now require bachelors.

I also want a highly educated populace, but you can get that from a book/library/continuing education courses/online courses, book clubs, etc: there's no reason you MUST spend 50K on it (unless employers force it: as with degree inflation). That problem is the institutionalization of education and their subsequent monopoly on it.

Totally, one wish list item from my post was that education be cheap.

Back when I went to university I paid for it by working farm labour. Not so feasible now.

If we prioritized that as a society, we could have practically free higher education.

Education is already free, it's on the internet for anybody that wants it.

Correct, it’s only the piece of paper and the teaching staff who read the books to you that cost $50k+.

> I disagree, let the companies do the training. If it's so valued in the market, then surely they will be happy to provide that training. >Why we let the companies push that externality on higher education is beyond me.

Welcome to the flip side of doing away with non-compete agreements. Why should a business invest so much money in training workers when they'll just get poached away by a competitor who is virtually guaranteed to be able to offer higher pay, not just for the value of the trained skill but because the competitor doesn't need to pay the overhead costs of training them? When new employees can leave their contracts at any time and for any reason, the expectations of employers necessarily shift away from training.

Now of course, reality is a little more nuanced. Training for long-time employees to keep them up-to-date makes more sense since they have so much domain experience internalized. A just law would need to allow for some exceptions to allow employees to break their non-competes in cases like toxic workplaces, and the law would need to set a maximum term for a non-compete to prevent workers from being exploited for low pay for their entire working lives.

But the notion that employers today should take "no-experience-needed" candidates off the street, give them 6+ months of full-day training with pay, and allow them to walk right out the door a week later to their competitor... is laughable on its face.

Screw non competes, they aren't even enforceable most of the time anyway.

My answer to why companies should train people if they can just leave for another company is twofold:

1: It evens out. Sometimes people will leave company A, which trained them, and come to your company, and other times they you will train them and they will leave. As long as the relative rates are about even, it should be ok.

2: Any general training that would apply to all similar companies can just as easily be acquired on the job at any given company. So train the employees, and if you really don't want to lose your 'investment' then perhaps treat them nicely?

Why are we always so quick to cry a river for huge organizations that hold a disproportionate amount of power over individuals?

The problem with #2 is that if a company spends $30k of time and effort to get an employee trained up, the poaching company can offer a raise of 10k and still be in the black 3 years later. If the original company decided to match that offer, they're now spending 60k more over three years, and the poaching company can offer a 15k raise and STILL be in the black after 3 years. Any money you pay in training is a sunk cost that doesn't have to be paid by your competitors.

Sure but presumably, unless all employees start out only at your company, then the effect would also sometimes happen in your company's favour.

As I said in point #1, as long as the rate of defections/arrivals is about even, then your losses on one employee would be offset by your gains on others.

Having an even defection/arrival rate requires other companies to also train their employees, and not only hire previously trained persons.

What makes you think the poached employee is actually going to stick around for 3 years, instead of jumping ship when Company C comes along and poaches them for a $10k raise? Most people in Silicon Valley these days don't stay in jobs for 3 years, according to what I've read.

Regarding #1: From the point of view of the company, if other companies are educating their employees, then the company will likely stop spending the resources on their own employees while still taking advantage of the workers educated at the other companies. So, this point doesn't make sense without a very optimistic view on the cooperation that would take place between companies.

2. Treating 'nicely' is far from enough if another company is simply able to offer a better package. For example, are small/new tech companies not deserving of keeping their investments because they can't pay their devs as well as some large ones? Or if they can't match the prestige of other companies?

1. Relative rates are fine in aggregate. But the economy doesn't consist of actors who are perfect representations of the median. Individual companies are going to be net beneficients or net losers. And it is always the net losers who are more vocal, complaining, and ultimately influential over the wider market. Actor confidence in large markets is naturally biased towards fear, not security. This is one of the reasons why regulation is sometimes welcomed by actors, if they can influence all actors equally.

2. "Treat people nicely" is about as effective a corporate policy as a law is forcing people to "be good and moral." A small company can effectively assert hiring control in hiring only people who "gel" with the people leading the company. A large company with a hiring quota of hundreds or thousands of people a quarter cannot. Ultimately, people are going to have personality conflicts with coworkers at large companies. You can either accept that as an inevitability and find a solution for it, or you can write off people finding (somewhat legitimate but still entirely foreseeable and unavoidable) excuses to move as BigCo management not treating their workers "nicely".

So the only alternative is to let corporations offload their training externalities onto higher education?

If that's what you're saying, it's a false dichotomy.

Cry me a river for the corporations, who cares what they want? It's always their agenda that wins these days anyway. That's the way the world is going.

No, what I'm saying is that we need to find some kind of way that balances protecting workers from exploitation with the kind of security that allows corporations to invest in workers' training.

Yes, one way, in theory, of doing that is by offloading training externalities to higher education. But that has its own tradeoffs, namely, the tendency of universities to adopt ivory-tower attitudes to education, the tendency of American higher education to inflate costs beyond any reasonable limit to afford facilities, services, and administration of dubious value to the education afforded the end consumer / student, and the tendency of universities to not educate with an eye to the skillsets which contemporary employers value.

Which is why the better way is to localize training efforts with the actors for whom it is most relevant. But corporate actors are not going to do "the right thing" in a vacuum, the law needs to empower them to do "the right thing", because typically "the right thing" will hurt any actor who does it in isolation but is bearable if all actors commit to doing it together. The easiest, safest, and most predictable way of making that happen is through law or regulation.

I agree and am against non competes, but feel weird about how that would be replaced. Obvious thought is to put a monitary value of the training and let that value "vest" over a year or two, so if the employee leaves early they have to pay back everything. That sounds good, but then you'll have situations where some company is just inflating the true costs of their training in order to make an employee stick around because they don't want to be on the hook for $X0,000. It would end up being like a reverse signing bonus.

So I have no clue what the solution is, all alternatives seem to be negative.

I think there's workable ways around this. One of my past employers required a retention contract if they pay for specific education.

Sure, I could still leave prior to the agreed upon term but I'd be required to pay back their investment. I thought that was fair.

Have you ever heard of a relocation bonus? Do you think the notion that an employer can give a new employee $10k+ for moving costs, and then allow them to walk out the door a week later to their competitor is laughable? You might, which is why relocation bonuses almost always have a retention clause: if the employee voluntarily quits before a certain amount of time, then the employee has to pay back all or part of that bonus.

I got a huge relo bonus once to move cross-country. But it had a 2-year clause attached to it, so if I had left after a year, for instance, I would have had to pay back 1/2 of it.

I don't see why the same couldn't be done for education paid by employers.

There's a difference between a relocation bonus paid to a mid-career professional for recouping relocation expenses and an educational debt owed by somebody entering an entry-level position. A mid-career professional can pay back a relocation bonus from savings if necessary, but an educational debt would generally result in debt bondage until the debt was cancelled.

Remember, a non-compete doesn't prevent people from leaving, it just prevents people from leaving and taking a job in the same field. Most people won't want to leave their field, which is why the non-compete is effective, but in the case of exploitation, people still have an out. An educational debt would follow somebody if they decided to leave, and that's therefore much more coercive and prone to exploitation.

I got my giant relocation bonus when I was only a couple years out of college.

I have a practical question about the seeming truism that a highly educated population is a good thing.

Our educational attainment rates have absolutely skyrocketed. The number of people with a bachelor's degree or higher is now comparable to the number that managed a high school degree in the 1950s. What would you say are the clear benefits we've really achieved from this? It's hard to disagree with a highly education population being a good thing, yet in practice I find myself able to list quite a lot of negatives relating to our sharp increases in educational attainment, but I'm not really sure what the positives are except in the most abstract terms.

The 'education' of today is starting to look more and more like job training.

However, education is meant to expand your mind and to teach you how to think critically.

Education is supposed to round you out, teach you about the history of your culture.

Adam Gopnik once wrote a piece for the New Yorker. The gist of it is that he was living in Paris, and his wife was pregnant with a girl, after having already had a boy. When French people found out about this the would always say to him: "Mais c'est le choix du roi!"[1]

Finally after a taxi driver said the same thing to him for the 10th time, he asked a bit exasperatedly, what it meant.

The point of the anecdote is that the taxi driver then proceeded to explain how under the Salic law governing the succession of French royalty, having a son followed by a girl had certain advantages.

That is education populace.

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2000/01/31/like-a-king (Paywalled)

I'd completely agree with you here about the ideal of education being meant to expand your mind and teaching one to think critically. But this is where we might begin to diverge a bit. Is this really happening in modern times? Do you associate fresh graduates with anything like critical thinking and breadth (let alone depth) of views and understanding?

We could blame this on our educational institutions of course. And I'd agree that our institutions have changed. But this gets into the question of why have they changed? And I think there we get back to the initial issue. As we see vastly more people pursuing post-secondary education, it means that the demographic of your average student is changing. Systems that worked and produced a certain tier of student when dealing with top e.g. 2% of society, cannot reasonably be expected to achieve the same or comparable results when dealing with more than 30% of society.

This is what made me ask the question. In principle I cannot disagree with the notion that an educated population is a good thing. But in practice, universities are seemingly giving it their all to make me rethink this view.

The change we need isn't going to be arrived at by turning some knobs. We need deep structural change around our relationship with growth, capital and ownership. The total job pool due to the way we have structured and rewarded society will only continue to shrink. No amount of votec training will change that. It is all just deck chairs.

https://www.ted.com/talks/kate_raworth_a_healthy_economy_sho...

I disagree with your core argument (that a more educated populace is not necessarily a good thing). I’m not going to argue that, though.

Even if you have a finite number of spots for educated people, isn’t it better to give those spots to the more naturally talented people? Wouldn’t be be better off educating our smartest?

> Pushing more and more people to go to college isn't going to raise productivity.

"Every appeal for productivity comes from above. But only creativity is spontaneously rich. It is not from ’productivity’ that a full life is to be expected, it is not ’productivity’ that will produce an enthusiastic collective response to economic needs."

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