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Comment by povertyworld | Hacker News Reader

People only get the EdD because it's required to be a superintendent in most places. I'm scraping by on a part time higher ed gig, and it's just depressing how the full time staff just see degrees as an obstacle to getting a raise not a path to growth and learning. The average American already thinks higher ed is a scam. At least the people who work in it could try to believe in their own product, but even they don't.

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> it's just depressing how the full time staff just see degrees as an obstacle to getting a raise not a path to growth and learning. The average American already thinks higher ed is a scam

I think an unbiased look at the evidence might say they're right.

Would that be the evidence that college educated workers make more money than those without[1,2], or the evidence that the unemployment rate is lower for those with a college degree than for those without[3,4]?

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LEU0252918500A

[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LEU0252917300Q

[3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU04027662

[4] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS14027660

That certainly confirms degrees as an obstacle to getting a raise!

Does something have to have no value to be a scam or just a value less than what is being advertised?

I do feel lumping all higher education together is a bit unfair and a breakdown would be far more telling where scams are and aren't.

> Does something have to have no value to be a scam or just a value less than what is being advertised?

Shouldn't you present evidence if you're saying an unbiased look at the evidence shows something is a scam?

In a scientific paper, yes. Elsewhere, it depends but generally that isn't needed unless we are doubting a person's claims. For example, the claim that many people were told that a degree was a valid path to success but weren't informed their degree (and the prestige of the degree) would matter or that it was possible for it to be less of a boost than the costs incurred. Also some claims shouldn't need backing as they are common knowledge, such as the existence of diploma mills.

Also, claim that people with degrees are more likely to be employed or make more money doesn't mean the degree is worth both the debt and time investment. It also talks about degrees as a whole, which people generally don't intend to target despite often using overly general speech that could give such an impression.

Nobody gives a toss about unemployment rates when you're working at Starbucks despite holding an advanced degree.

You're in luck. Compare links [1] and [2] in the post you replied to.

If you don't control for IQ, the observation is useless.

IQ is a vanity measure at best. Look at a site as brainstats this would imply if you control for IQ it would rule out people from whole continents.

https://brainstats.com/average-iq-by-country.html

Are you really quoting a sketchy website based on the risible work of Vanhanen and Lynn?

That's not how controlling for a variable works. You don't "rule out people" - the question you need to answer is whether a college education makes people more successful than would be predicted by IQ alone, and if so, by how much?

Is your contention also that SAT/ACT are vanity measures? The correlation between IQ and ACT is very strong, or in other words they are both strongly g-loaded and are good measures for general intelligence.

http://iapsych.com/iqmr/koening2008.pdf

We also have ample evidence that general intelligence correlates with economic success:

http://sci-hub.tw/10.1016/j.intell.2006.09.004

Vanity measure, my foot.

Given that institutions of higher education aggressively select for high-scoring SAT/ACT individuals, and thus high IQ individuals, the burden of proof is on them to show that a degree results in significant socioeconomic success that cannot be explained by the preexisting psychometric attributes of the college bound population.

It's possible for a group to have more smart people despite lower mean IQ; I learned that in college (hint; it's about the variance). Anyway, college is basically a badly formulated IQ test and DEFINITELY a vanity measure. I mean it costs a hell of a lot more.

There is a very obvious correlation vs. causation counterargument that you need to address.

The point of providing those links is that a basic look at the data provides no support for the hypothesis that higher education is a scam. I was responding to someone who, without evidence, claimed that an unbiased look at the evidence would show the opposite. There's a massive academic literature on the topic that finds the same thing.

The problem with showing graphs that college degrees being correlated with higher income is that it's still what you'd expect if higher education was a scam.

A useful graph would show data that is different than what you'd expect if higher education was a scam.

I think it's generally understood that "top" schools merely select the best students, they don't create the best graduates.

Unfortunately there’s little reason to believe that’s due to treatment rather than selection. Smart people both get more education and make more money, but the impact of education on income is mostly mediated by intelligence, not education. Otherwise the long project to get more and more people into university would have had more drastic effects on incomes rather than diminishing the usefulness of a university education as a signal of a certain minimum level of intelligence.

> Herrnstein's Syllogism: Genetic and Shared Environmental Influences on IQ, Education, and Income.

> Environmental influences due to a common shared environmental factor were 0.23 for IQ, 0.18 for education, and 0.08 for income. The model predicted a correlation of 0.63 between IQ and education and 0.34 between IQ and income. Sixty-eight percent of the former and 59% of the latter was genetically mediated; the remainder was mediated by common shared environment.

This is a symptom they believe they're under paid. Plus, you don't need an advanced 'degree' to learn much of anything anymore. The wealth of human knowledge that is available online, for free, is astounding.

As someone who has worked in higher ed, part of the degree requirements are to reduce corruption. Otherwise low tier state schools and community colleges would just be packed with the top administrator's buddies. Requiring a doctorate at least means you can't give the job to your pal Joey from Bayonne or whatever. Well, you still can, but he has to grind a mail order doctorate first.

State-level certification exams would fix this. You either pass the exam, or you don't, doesn't matter how you acquired the knowledge.

But then people will just memorize for the test. We've all seen the IT guys who crammed for some certification, but don't know anything.

That is a problem with particular certification exams, not insurmountable at all. E.g. memorizing brain dumps for Microsoft MSCE is one thing, but that trick does not work for the CCIE.

Is the CCIE one of the "hands on" exams, like the Red Hat and Kubernetes exams?

I have less familiarity with the Red Hat and Kubernetes exams, but yes -- the CCIE is a lab exam. Started out at two days but IIRC it is currently at one full eight-hour day in the lab. We have a few CCIEs where I work and the amount of studying to earn the certification is phenominal. The overall pass rate is about roughly 25%, which is notably low.

I imagine that if you're cramming for a test on how to do differential equations, and you're able to pass that test, you actually know how to solve differential equations.

"IT People" cramming for tests and memorizing the test for those certifications is a testament to the failure of those certifications, not for certifications in general.

I've done the California "Fundamentals of Engineering" Civil Engineering exam long time ago and it was no joke. Its been a while but I think they let you bring reference books or gave you one. You really had to know your stuff because you had no time to look at the reference material.

The test for e.g. programming could be "build a program to do X", where X is determined on the spot, and you have e.g. 6 hours to do it on premise...

Memorization wont help with that...

The Progressive Case for the Qing Imperial Confucian Civil Service Exam

This needs to be done for Law, Medicine and Engineering degrees. Remove the power and higher ed institutional oligopoly. In a lot of places it's regulated by "professional associations", "councils", "boards" etc. that are a horrible cross between a union and a regulatory authority. Usually due to being the first mover or through lobbying or a bit of both. They can restrict school intake numbers, set legally significant policies across the industry, dispense judgement for malpractice, sometimes even whether to allow building a new institution or not. You don't hear much about them as compared to unions because they somehow acquired regulatory powers and a fair bit of upper middle class run in their circles but they are not exactly part of the State executive/legislative hierarchy either. It's popular to complain about "cultural problems" in hospitals like massive overtime, resistance to innovation etc. You want to fix it? Move the regulatory and certification parts to under the direct oversight and control of the government and remove the limits on supply. Don't complain about talent going to work in optimizing ad consumption instead of solving human problems when most industries are rarely as flexible or easy to enter as software's.

Have you ever worked with an attorney?

You don't want Law to be run like software.

it is called marketing and higher ed has that down pat. they have pretty much convinced more than one generation of the requirement to have college degree to have a good life and about every regulatory body of the need to have even higher tiers to be suitable for the job.

that they also got the Federal government to step in and become a loan factory on encouraged them more. it will only stop when the Federal government in turn tells them how much they can charge per course credit and which courses if not degrees warrant Federal money

Agreed. I remember when this was frowned upon. No need to go into student loan debt for a stem job.

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