Students don't seem to be getting much out of higher education (2018)

This is a common line of argument, but you will find that many tradesmen hope their children will go to college and get office jobs.

The trades are hard on the body. Some trades are hazardous. An injury or medical problem that would be a hassle for someone with an office job can be career-ending for people in the trades.

There aren't a lot of jobs for people in middle age who can't physically work a trade anymore due to age or illness or injury -- it's about as bad as being a laid-off factory worker.

The trades also get hit very hard in recessions as people build fewer things, infrastructure spending gets cut or postponed, etc. That, combined with the serious impact of medical problems and injuries I just mentioned, can make the trades more financially precarious than they seem to be.

I'm not opposed to people going into the trades, but some of the pro-trade-education arguments need a reality check. People need to know about the downsides.

There are 35000 escalators in the US. If a typical escalator needs to be replaced every 35 years, that works out to about 1000 escalator replacements a year.

I can't find offhand any data on this, but I'd expect that most escalator installations are only a few escalators, and so that the demand for about 1000 replacements per year is pretty steady.

Thus, I'd expect that there would be about enough mechanics to handle 1000 per year, without much excess capacity.

BART has 175 escalators. That job is big enough that to do it in one year would take over 17% of the nation's escalator installation capacity. That seems like a job sufficiently out of the ordinary that it is not surprising that it has to be spread over a few years.

I used 35 years lifetime, which I got from the escalators in a manufacturer's brochure I found--it had one that was rated 30 years and one 35-40, so I took 35. But these were heavy duty escalators. Other sources suggested 25 years, or 15-20 years. If you use a lower average life, you get more mechanics needed per year.

Regardless of the lifetime used, I expect that the year to year demand will be pretty steady, and BART's 175 will still represent a very big spike.

Then I looked it up. The test is intense failing on your first try is pretty common. You have to do 4 years full time of apprenticeship under a licensed contractor who unless they are family (nepotism) will pay you the minimum they can get away with. (This is why you tend to see the kids take over the parents Pumbling/HVAC/Electricians businesses)

Only after all that can you finally go on your own. From then on you owe $3k/yr to the state for insurance in case you screw up and kill someone and the state fund has to pay out. You have to pay this every year along with a $350/yr license renewal and show you are active in the trade, otherwise you can have your license revoked. Take at least 8 credits of continuing education each year as it relates to your license, which you must pass for credit (to keep up with a changing field). Take out your own insurance in case you screw up kill or injure someone and they sue you. Your tax rate is significantly higher as a contractor as will be your health insurance because you no longer have a large collective bargaining power.

Doing the math I'm surprised new people join in the bay area. The only way it makes sense is if you were already here with family or have rent control. Or you do your apprenticeship somewhere cheap like Bakersfield then move to the Bay assuming you can afford rent till you build a solid list of clients.

Generally, campaigning to make people to do something out of a sense of moral propriety is the wrong approach to creating change.

Now, if every municipality in the US tried to do this, there would be a legitimate shortage. The highest bidders would get their mechanics. The rest would have to wait, possibly hiring from the inevitable influx of new escalator mechanics a few years later.

Or maybe not create this arbitrary distinction, and let people who are going to school with the intention of ultimately becoming a welder or a mechanic be able to take an English or a history class.

For some reason, people who go to college for basketball get to take art history, but not people learning to be machinists.

Maybe it's the mentality that you go to university to earn the honor of not having to work with your hands that's the problem; I also think that it's why the sciences and medicine often seem awkward there. I'm not exactly sure what the difference between a computer programmer and an elevator repairman is supposed to be, exactly.

Actually I quite think it's the opposite.

We should be saying, "Not everyone is cut out for escalator mechanic."

Those who aren't cut out for "real" work and traditional vocational education end up going to college to get useless marketing or business degrees. Plumbers, electricians, heavy machinery operators, drafters, are all making really good money historically due to the demands you're describing.

The "easy" path these days is to go to college.

Right now in the bay we have IBEW journeyman electricians making around 200k a year. Shoot. Pipefitters, Ironworkers, they all do well.

Yes it is. Throw enough money at it and you'll have contractors from all around the world flying in to do the work.

It's like how tech companies complain that they can't find candidates to fill their positions: yes you can, just pay >50% more than FAANG does, offer them good employment conditions and you'll have the people. You just can't find the people at the cost that you want to find them for.

same goes for teachers. many universities aren’t about education anymore. they are what everything else has become: fundraisers. it’s sad given the education that i have had that i can count the good professors on one hand.

Money IS the problem. And the root is an inability to have continuous political will.

The issue is that San Francisco never voted to schedule replacement of 10% of escalators every year.

So, San Francisco voted to go from almost zero spending on escalator maintenance to a large single burst outlay which will go back to zero after the aforementioned 7 years.

What do the escalator mechanics do when the spending goes back to zero?

I don't know. One might argue that the licensing requirement for escalator mechanics is causing the shortage. Or maybe impediments related to unionized work minimums are causing a bottleneck in the flow of people who are allowed to hold these escalator mechanic jobs.

I think the root problem is the negative perception of not going to college.

So is the problem that there aren't enough mechanics, or not enough licenses?

I think Monty Python was aware of this 40 odd years ago, although it’s one of the few clips not on YouTube.

I call BS. An "escalator mechanic" sounds like a profession that could be trained in a year, or far less if the person is some other kind of mechanic. The reason why this training doesn't happen is likely there's not much money to be gained, if anything at all. Or maybe there's a union constraining supply of mechanics, or both.

I agree that there needs to be more vocational education, and less stigma against it. But the claim that the problem above could not be solved with liberal application of cash is dubious at best.

Anecdotally, vets on campus tended to be more 'serious' than ones that were not drafted. That said, most vets would have elected not to have undergone the experience regardless of their level of involvement in the war.

Also, the costs of such programs are very high. If you look at military conscription today, it is limited to countries with small populations or ones that are actively threatened. Mobilizing, feeding, housing, and caring for nearly 450,000 people is not an easy task. The net benefit of this conscription is ambiguous as well. Denmark used to use their conscripts in the care of the elderly and in wildland firefighting, but has since degraded that from their service. Doing so here in the US may be of benefit, but not at the costs that would be sustained. Such work is better left to the professionals, typically.

I'm not even close to an expert in this field, but a cursory look at it suggests that the cost/benefit ratio is not close. However, the same can be said of nearly any educational endeavor, yet we know that on a decadeal timeline it pays for itself many times over.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_civilian_service

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_service

I told my youngest sister to take a gap year to figure herself out. She didn't, and now years into college she has decided to switch studies, just like I did. Luckily we're Dutch and this is actually a realistic possibility for us.

That's called "adulthood."

- Would help people mature before diving into the next stage of life, especially immature people whose upbringing has failed to imbue them with responsibility.

- Would boost civic participation. When everyone's kid is at risk of dying, everyone pays attention to who we're going to war with and why.

- Would provide structure for people when they are at the point when they could do the most damage to themselves or society (young adulthood).

- Would strengthen military power; every citizen would have at least a small amount of military training, if we really need it.

- Would greatly diminish stratification of social/cultural/economic groups. Would help get people out of the bubbles they grow up in.

- Would increase physical fitness and health of the population.

I see very little downside to a mandatory 2 year military service.

Because the government is subsidizing education. His suggestion is simple: cut/lower the subsidies.

I highly recommend his book: The Case Against Education - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B076ZY8S8J.

But then, that growth ran out, and as Weinstein says, “We were left with all of our institutions looking in some form or another like a Ponzi scheme.”

Was from here: https://youtu.be/LruYnDjkOgU?t=895

For the general skills stuff, that is all remedial stuff that should be obtained prior to entering formal college. Students should have mastery of those subjects before even being admitted. Have community colleges do remedial course exclusively (or some way to self-study online and test out).

For those 60 units of old "general education" replace it with 30 units of general career skills and 30 units of applied career skills. So the course track would go like this - first 30 units is exclusively your 30 general career skills then the next 60 units is the traditional academic track that most people take currently for their major. The last 30 units is exclusively used at applying those skills to various project-based work.

For all those old course that are currently considered general education, make them all optional, not required courses.

An easy solution would just to make replacements. Have students take introductory classes like data science, logic and reasoning, ethics, public policy, etc.

I was prevents from graduating on time because I needed to take 9 credits of... whatever. Why? Am I really a better person for being made to spend the extra time and money taking some bullshit class I barely remember?

Working any entry level office job from age 18-22 would be a pretty good test. I would not have survived it.

If this is true could you explain what I missed out on?

The advantage of getting through the fourth and final year is the signal that it shows you are not one of those who did worse.

What happened to the notes you took for your classes at the end of the semester? I suspect that they are thrown away and never seen again.

I suspect part of the problem with education is that we don't learn how to learn, and that we done very little work on how to retain those skills and connect them to our world.

Its important, but I definitely agree with the OP its not ~40k a year and 3 prime years of your life important.

Its also something high school should be presenting. Its the literal last step that the state has in producing productive members of society from its curriculum, and they waste it on Shakespeare driving generations to "hate" reading than trying to diversify their students interests to get them excited about career prospects and opportunities they can rise into.

Its evident in how totally directionless and lost most college freshman are. They did what they were told in gradeschool, don't remember a fraction of it, and are now being drilled with the same kinds of banal "diversification" classes of lecture and monotony they have toned out for a majority of their life at that point.

Experiencing diversity is something that requires a desire to experience it in the first place. Forcing people to do it when all they want is a job that pays them a living wage is at least disrespectful to their self determination.

What I think we should instead pay attention to is the rate of re-learning. Something may take significant time and effort to learn the first time, and after say a year or two, one may forget it. But when re-introduced to the concept (when you may actually need it), I think one can re-learn it quite rapidly.

Or to put it another way, there isn't a direct correlation between Bachelor's holders and innovators. Sure there are some ridiculously smart people out there, and probably most of them have some formal higher education. But their education probably isn't what made them ridiculously smart; instead it was probably their education that helped shape their thinking and possibly opened some doors.

And of course there are many examples of innovations that came from people without degrees. Many technology company founders that we would today consider innovative did not necessarily hold a Bachelor's degree.

In short, I think your connection that 33% of Americans are automatically innovative just because they have a degree is quite the stretch. A degree doesn't have any correlation to ones aptitude for innovation.

The other thing is that I think that we should teach history, because what happened in history is closely related to how world functions now. So having rough idea that things happened (which is pretty much what high school history teaches) is something good to have.

Anecdotally, as an engineer in industry, I use very little of the engineering math. Number sense and sort of general quantitative reasoning are used.

Let's suppose for sake of argument that I actually used engineering math though. Analytic solutions to derivatives and integrals (2 semesters of calculus) are largely useless because of applications like Wolfram Alpha that will solve these problems for you. The small class of ODE/PDE problems that are handled by analytic undergrad math classes will most often be solved using numerical methods such as Runge Kutta. Linear algebra is actually super useful in practice because you can use matrix solvers to solve systems of linear equations -- but a first course in undergraduate linear algebra is often just basic by-hand computations on matrix systems, and don't discuss higher order concepts at more than a shallow level (spans, invertibility, spectral decomposition, canonical forms, etc.)

Then it's not worth subsidizing with government-backed loans and grants. That money would be better spent elsewhere.

That's just your opinion. Unfortunately, it's supported by the entrenched education establishment, but that doesn't make it true.

The cold hard reality is, if you aren't college material, don't attend some vocational school, and don't learn a trade, you're in for a life of hard labor or burger flipping. It's going to be a completely crap life for most people.

> those of us who do want to pursue a career that requires a higher education shouldn't have to spend the rest of our lives in debt just to do so.

Yeah, one way to reduce costs would be to remove all the extraneous coursework that's of zero value to society.

The arts and history teach us empathy and give us context of the human condition. There is so much more to being a cog in the machine, as you said correctly. The more I see the way people behave in today's "current events" realm, the more I believe these things are more important than ever.

While I entered the school intent on majoring in Biological Sciences (genetic engineering), music is my second love and I was quite fortunate that UChicago had a fantastic music history/theory department. While picking up "marketable" skills in science/research, I picked up a double major in music, the musical skills of which have improved my playing every single time I have stepped to the piano since.

In my view, university should be about setting oneself up for a productive life. For most, this should include marketable skills, as well as enriching and non-obviously employable skills.

In my experience, enforcing a "well-rounded" education also fails in practice. Most of my peers in college sought out the easiest possible courses not directly related to their degrees in order to satisfy the university requirements.

Pursuing a "well-rounded" education should be a choice. You just can't teach someone who is unwilling to learn.

I think we'd benefit from two distinct tracks, which I'm starting to see more in practice: one track is to take the traditional college approach, the second is to take more practical training specific to your profession. I think in that way the students specifically trying to build careers for as little money and time as possible would benefit greatly, while the former group would still enjoy the traditional "college experience". Vocational training has been the case for a long time with "blue-collar" jobs, and I hope we will see more progress for "white-collar" jobs as well. I also get the arguments around building tools for complex reasoning and the time investment required, but a lot of us just don't have 4-5 years to invest.

> We can’t measure education’s social benefits solely with test scores or salary premiums. Instead we must ask ourselves what kind of society we want to live in—an educated one or an ignorant one?

> Normal human beings make a solid point: We can and should investigate education’s broad social implications. When humanists consider my calculations of education’s returns, they assume I’m being a typical cynical economist, oblivious to the ideals so many educators hold dear. I am an economist and I am a cynic, but I’m not a typical cynical economist. I’m a cynical idealist. I embrace the ideal of transformative education. I believe wholeheartedly in the life of the mind. What I’m cynical about is people.

He also cites a number of studies that show that the desired benefits of "training your brain to solve problems" either don't materialize or are non-existent after a few years.

Sure it’s introductory, but so was my freshman year.

I don’t really agree with the article though, I enjoyed philosophy and history as side tracks doing my entire schooling, and I use the creativity and insights I got from those a whole lot more than I ever use economics or math.

> Why do advanced-math classes bother with proofs almost no student can follow?

Because that literally _is_ mathematics, and the point of working through them is because students can actually understand them and learn to do the same thing with new problems. How does he expect anyone to create or discover anything new with just arithmetic 101?

There's a kernel of a good argument in that signaling probably is one of the main values that students get from a college degree, but it's overstated to such a degree that it crosses over into idiocy.

A possible better route to teaching appreciation of classic literature would be focusing on debate about which popular media is best. Natural competitiveness will make people take this seriously, and at some point people will figure out that comparisons to classic literature, discussion of formal rhetorical technique, etc. are highly effective tools for debate. Pretty much no kid will read Shakespeare for fun, but if it means proving that their favorite media is better than somebody else's favorite, it might be worth the effort.

Caplan says that the book has an entire chapter dedicated to refuting this argument, which I can't speak to.

[0] https://youtu.be/kCLGURUubzc?t=1893

How do you propose to do that? At least with developers you can make the candidate do some toy project or whiteboard but that process is woefully flawed and controversial.

That’s tech, but what if you’re hiring for something more abstract, like Human Resources or sales?

What if you just need a person who can learn quickly and is easy to work with?

Almost every job I was in changed significantly within a year of being there. New tasks, new responsibilities, new teams. I grew with the changes or I left when I wanted a change. Screening upfront for specific skills only in all but the most narrow jobs will have limited usefulness.

It seems to me the best way to accomplish this is to have a clear statement of the role, provide excellent on-boarding and make hiring and firing much easier, so you can quickly end a relationship that’s not definitely not working.