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This is all just leading to college becoming four more years of high school. Everyone needs to go. Everyone needs a degree to "get a job".

It all seems like a giant plan to prevent people from starting their adult lives.

If you need to just get some generic "good job", then the answer is to learn what you need in the first twelve years of school. I think that's enough time.

If you want to heavily specialize, research, or otherwise go deeper; then go to university.

Our policies should encourage following these practices. To start off, we need to fight grade inflation in high school so that it's a real signal for employers. Moving the problem of certification to college will just move the grade inflation problem there, not solve it. Then employers will want to see more credentials from a masters program or something.

Don't you see? If everyone has a degree, it offers no advantage. The lower performers just end up with more debt.

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I feel like an entire generation's brains got broken on the subject of education because they were lucky enough to be young when a new industry (web software) got off the ground that was simple and lucrative. So they saw a ton of opportunities to apply high-school-level thinking to entrepreneurship and make a lot of money. And they came to believe was the way the world normally works.

It's not. The vast majority of worthwhile, well-paying jobs require significant education and/training after high school. Not because it's a credential game, but because society and work are complex. And it's getting more complex, not less.

I'll also risk the opinion that there is more to life than work, and higher education has advantages for people far beyond their ability out-compete one another for corporate jobs. And I would argue, for society as a whole.

I think 2 years post-HS education is probably optimal right now. Trade schools are often 2 years.

No one's brain is "broken" here. You're thinking on the individual level, the parent to your comment is looking at it from a societal level.

Once someone can read, write, do arithmetic, it's more specialized skills that are needed. There are very few jobs where four years of studying history or political science is necessary. In most cases, a few months of training could do far more than four more years of general education.

The value of a degree for most jobs is it shows an ability to learn. Ultimately, having people spend six figures to send this signal is making society worse off. Employers are looking for the qualities that make someone a good student far more than they are looking for experience criticizing ancient works of literature or solving systems of equations.

So founding Amazon, Google, Netflix, etc. is high school level thinking? I wish I had gone to that high school.

> jobs require significant education and/training after high school.

To the parent's point; Many college degrees are "just a credential" at this point; and college degree or not, training still has to happen on the job.

I see a trend of millennials (my generation) who go to school to go to school, get good grades to get good grades, not apply the education to the future. Then, there's no entry level jobs (because companies didn't have to train with a recession to get experience) and they jump between unskilled jobs they could have done with a GED or less.

We can also see this with the industry survey the other week of employers saying colleges aren't preparing software developers.

Higher education does have advantages for people beyond jobs; but only if they learn (not memorize) and apply it.

Would you go to a 50-year-old with a high-school diploma and tell them they only have high-school level thinking? Of course not. Colleges do not have a monopoly on your ability to learn. Many people read a lot of books, for instance, without a teacher telling them to.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of ways to get through college without getting past a high-school level of thinking.

This is not true. As a Millennial, I know many people in my parents' generation who did well starting with a high school degree. They may have obtained further education later, but not at the beginning. This is borne out by statistics on post-secondary degree attainment by Boomers. The only exceptions were people who wanted to jump directly into professional work, like law or medicine, or, frankly, black people, who have always seemed to have to have an extra level of education to compete in the marketplace.

The problem is that we waste most of those twelve years that we already have people captive for. The high school years are especially egregious. It's a lot of marking time that could be much more profitably used.

Maybe 20% of my high school class ever finished a college degree, of any kind. A lot more went for a few semesters, struggled through some core classes, and flunked out with a load of debt and little else to show for it. The people that are best off are probably the ones that either went into the military or straight into a trade.

The college-prep for everyone model appears to have been a pretty bad failure. The system in my parent's generation where people were explicitly tracked and split into vocational, business, and college tracks appears to have had much better results. The gutting of vocational programs really hurts; it would be easily possible to do most of a trade apprenticeship during those years.

> If you need to just get some generic "good job", then the answer is to learn what you need in the first twelve years of school. I think that's enough time.

The 'Everyone needs to get a degree' mentality is really just part of a long term trend:

100 years ago 6 years of schooling was enough to get some generic 'good job'.

50 years ago 10 years of schooling was enough to get some generic 'good job'.

25 years ago 12 years of schooling was enough to get some generic 'good job'.

In another 25 years, 12 years of schooling will not be enough to get some generic 'good job'.

> If everyone has a degree, it offers no advantage.

A degree isn't just a way to give someone an advantage in a zero-sum game - it actually changes the way people think and makes them proficient at different types of work.

100 years ago, the industrial revolution was the only type of automation that existed.

50 years ago a computer was still potentially someone that did a math calculation.

25 years ago personal computers were just barely a thing.

If you can understand how a computer works, and build one and write programs for it in 12 years, then you probably don't have need of any further need of education.

You think that if somene know how a computer works, can build one, and write some basic programs that they have no further need of education?

If you can do this, you can make 60k per year. And this is low skill imo.

We don't have people who are highly educated in useful things despite 16+ years of school.

We do have people who are highly educated doing useful things. This is so incredibly obvious that I am not sure what the purpose of your statement is.

25 years ago personal computers were just barely a thing

25 years ago was 1994. You're about 10 or 15 years off, kiddo :-) By 1995, PC's were in pretty much every office in the US. Most high schools had had them for a decade (I went to a small town midwest HS that valued football above all else... and we got our PC lab somewhat behind the better HS's in 1983). Around 20mil to 40mil PC's were sold every year during the 1990's in the US alone. From 1989 to 1994, 150mil PC's were sold in the US. I have friends now who have kids who are in university who will be third generation programmers. Digital computers themselves will be a century old in just one more generation (ENIAC came online in 1946, the 100th anniversary is just 27 years from now).

(I'm just being an old curmudgeon here, don't take it too seriously :-)

Total computer sales is a poor measurement as people would frequently upgrade or have multiple computers. One at home, one at work, possibly a laptop, and one or more upgrades really eat into that 150 million.

In 1994 an estimated 31% of us homes had a computer, and 6% of homes went online. But even here, it’s much easier to count people going online than homes with a computer.

25 years ago, if you owned a computer at home, you were a hobbyist, an engineer, scientist, or you owned a console system and were a gamer.

Yeah - servers had been around in one form or another since the 60's and even in the 90's not everyone had an office computer. Maybe if you were...again...an engineer or scientist.

> A degree isn't just a way to give someone an advantage in a zero-sum game - it actually changes the way people think and makes them proficient at different types of work.

I don't think a degree does these things. Education does, but a degree these days is not much of a metric for one's education.

> This is all just leading to college becoming four more years of high school. Everyone needs to go.

You point out a shift never discussed: 40 years ago you could graduate and be prepared for middle class life and as a member of civic society (home ec, how to vote, etc) — for free! It was assumed that it was in everybody’s interest for everyone to have a reasonable baseline.

Now the baseline preparation isn’t free, so a significant section (majority) of adults aren’t getting adequate preparation. Is that really what we want?

Maybe we should bring the baseline in high schools up? Maybe people should leave high school more prepared?

Otherwise, you'll just be saying the same thing about the same students after college: they're unprepared.

No. Time box your time to get prepared, and do it.

Also, there is no such thing as free. Every year costs a year of your life, possibly disrupting your chances to have biological children.

    possibly disrupting your chances to have biological children

You can have children while attending college. I did it, and I know plenty of other people that did it and it didn't ruin their life.

True, but it's not for everyone and not without its own costs and complications. That's why I said "possibly". The main point is that nothing is really free, it's costing time, opportunities, etc.

I had my first kid when I was fifteen. I'm doing alright, but I would not recommend it! Later is better. My former boss had his first kid at 40. He would not recommend it as earlier is better. The sweet spot is probably mid twenties for starting.

>Time box your time to get prepared, and do it.

That's kind of asking the impossible. Innovation and advancement don't stand still like that. A middle or high school should not be faulted for not knowing what technologies will be in use in 20 years. Quite literally, they can't teach technologies that have not been invented yet. So, again, they pursue the only practical strategy available to them, they teach a general course of study that gives students the ability to absorb and understand what future trainers will teach them. They can't do job training because they literally have no idea what kind of good jobs will be out there when this kid turns 30.

Just make sure the kid is able to absorb the training whatever boss s/he has gives him/her. That's about the best the schools can do. Employers and college really do have to do the rest.

I'm not saying people shouldn't learn abstract thinking. I'm just saying "get it over with".

And I'm saying you can't just "get it over with" sometimes because you can't really know what "it" is?

A kid is in middle school or high school or whatever and then 20 years later they are on an employer's doorstep. The tools and technologies that employer uses were not even invented when that kid was in middle or high school. Well, unless that kid's had some additional training in those intervening years, they're probably not going to know how to use the tools that the employer wants them to use. So it's appropriate for the employer to hire, instead, the kid who has had the training during those intervening years.

We currently call most of that training "college". If you want to call it "university", or "post high school", or "adult campus learning", or whatever, then do that if it makes it a bit more palatable. Call it whatever you like, but employers kind of need these kids to have it. And they'll only need them to have it more in the future. That's just the nature of our ever advancing society. That's actually a good thing believe it or not.

Alternatively, schools assume responsibility for giving students a broad, general background and teaching them to think abstractly, with higher education involved in teaching students theoretical aspects of their concentration.

At the same time, employers will just have to train employees on the specific technologies and tools they need them to use in practice, rather than offloading the burden to society at large.

This also ameliorates the 'retraining' problem for older workers.

Your central assumption is that four more years without a job is the only way to learn whatever you need (abstract, practical, whatever). I just disagree.

Efficient processes measure outputs/results, like what people actually learn or accomplish after all that time.

But many people in this thread are measuring inputs, like, just put in four more years of time and money and that must be good for everyone, right?

A big thing I see is they keep pushing the idea on the younger generation that if you do not go to college you will fail, work McDonald's your whole life etc.

They easily load the kids up with student loans/debt and have courses/advisers readily available to sign them up and get them what they need to get into college.

I do not remember in my high school, one class about financial literacy or how the best way to pay back student loans.

No one informed us well of the risks of taking out private loans to cover what the federal loans don't cover.

No alternative options are promoted heavily, sure there may be an army recruiter or a weekend where they showcase some trades you could get into, but they never explain union/trades.

I wish they told me that at 18, I could join a Union (Carpenter, Laborer, Millwright) and enroll in a 4 year apprenticeship where you start at 60% scale your first year (Make $18 right out of high school), work while learning your skill with a 10% increase each year over 4 years so by the end of your 4 year apprenticeship when you receive your journeyman card you are making $28+, I think more people would at least consider that course if they are more hands on and like to fix stuff.

I went to HS in the 1980's and we had classes in financial literacy (though I think it was called "business" or "economics" or something like that) as an elective. It covered the basics of interest rates, what loans were and how they worked. What banks and insurance was for. The basics of how business works. Etc. We also had trades training available, everything from carpentry and metalworking to auto repair and media broadast (radio/tv). And this was a rather middling high school in a small town in the midwest.

What didn't we have? Well, I didn't know what an AP test was until I got to university and it was too late, so there's that. Different strokes for different folks, I guess.

> 40 years ago you could graduate and be prepared for middle class life and as a member of civic society

While statistically, I'm sure this applies; I see many examples of successful tradesmen making greater than a middle class life for themselves because of their hobbies during high school; things that shop class and apprenticeships in high school teach; no degree strictly required.

Well that’s kind of my point. Tradies usually get paid during their apprenticeship so start life out properly.

Were you talking about hose who left at 16 and went straight into a trade? Still no need to pay through the nose to have a good life and be a solid citizen.

We need to move to a 4 day work week, with 1 day of adult education. This way people get a chance to keep building their skills. Employers don't care about the worker; use them for 60hrs a week, fire them when no longer needed, pay minimum wage.

I think something like this would be a huge improvement on the current system. I could also see 3 month alternations between school and work - so that the learning is more closely tied to the real world. (Even if many of the classes, e.g., philosophy, sociology, may not be directly applicable.)

I think the idea is a good one in some ways. But I can also imagine some bad outcomes, like dragging things out a long time, and being responsible to two masters.

There is a dogmatic belief that 'higher education' some some panacea around these parts.

I personally think all grades across all levels of education should be pass/fail. This would give everyone a fair chance at competing, and job interviews would be based on your portfolio of work (or internships, etc), rather than HR gate-keeping of GPAs. Oh, you had to work in school so you got a couple C's in stupid-filler-class, guess you're not good enough to work for us?

We need to start at the grass-level and remove Bachelors degrees as a credentialing requirement for as many positions as we can. Why should one have a Bachelors degree to become a CPA? Why can't you just attend a CPA trade school, or self-study? It's gate-keeping by the academic class.

I agree on trade schools, I imagine there is some sort of NIMBY like feelings from the existing establishment of CPA (or other groups) that wouldn’t want to see this happen. They’re used to working with “a certain type of person” and that type of person went to college. It’s like a nice neighborhood blocking public transit

> you got a couple C's in stupid-filler-class, guess you're not good enough to work for us?

I get the cosmic justice sentiment behind this, but if there is somebody else who didn’t get any C’s, and that’s all they know about the two of you, how is it unreasonable for them to just pick the higher-on-paper achiever? If everybody had a 2.0 GPA, then employers would have to pick from somebody with a 2.0 GPA, but that’s not the case.

Why bother with interviews if we can just pick those with highest scores from school?

> Why bother with interviews

Every time I participate in one I wonder the same thing.

If the employer didn't pay for the school, they shouldn't have access to the information. You either graduated from the program and the program is respected, or you didn't/program isn't respected.

On that note, perhaps we should remove school names from degrees, and you simply get a degree from an institution that has x accreditation.

The problem of course is that it's cultural.

Interviewer: So how did you enjoy your time in school?

Interviewee: Oh Cambridge was a great place!

Just a few nit-picks with what you're saying.

>If you need to just get some generic "good job", then the answer is to learn what you need in the first twelve years of school.

One issue here is "advancement", "innovation", or whatever else you would like to label it as. Schools can't know when a student starts 7th or 8th grade, what technologies will be in use 10 or 20 years later. So schools have to teach general subjects that confer a broad foundation for later trainers to build on. That's just schools doing what makes sense. They can't teach tools and techniques that have a very good chance of not having been invented yet.

The fact that employers are expecting employees to be able to use tools and techniques that are becoming more complex and requiring a bit more abstract thought to use with any sort of facility is exactly the reason employers are asking for college grads. They know there is no way anyone in high school could have been trained on a lot of those tools.

Finally, none of this movement towards universal undergrad precludes high performers from going further in their educational pursuits.

So in short, I do see the whole movement towards universal undergrads. I understand it from the perspective of employers. But I also see where people who maybe got undergrads before everyone had to have them might feel a bit hoodwinked. It's like they were told, "this is the advanced training." And now are learning, "No, that was just the normal training. You have to do more if you want to advance."

> Don't you see? If everyone has a degree, it offers no advantage. The lower performers just end up with more debt.

The problem with this thinking is that it is individualistic, zero-sum, and reeks of "I got mine, fuck you". Society itself gains an advantage when the labor force has a higher level of education, it also contributes to economic dynamism.

The major issue with higher education is the amount of debt that students face, aside from that hurdle we should be doing everything we can as a society to encourage students to consider higher education.

This isn't the 50s anymore, you can't build the economy on folks with a high school degree who get a union job at a factory for 30 years.

> This isn't the 50s anymore, you can't build the economy on folks with a high school degree who get a union job at a factory for 30 years.

Or perhaps high school should be teaching more advanced subjects. Compare US high school against the equivalent education level in Europe for example

The problem is that in the US we lump together multiple types of high school diplomas. In most school districts, you can specify either: 1) a College Prep track in which case you will take Algebra/Geometry/Trigonometry/Calculus, Biology/Chemistry/Physics, World and American History, English Literature, etc. or 2) a General Ed track where you will take arithmetic, science, social studies, basically 4 more years of middle school. Both sets of students get the same diploma. In other countries you have things like A Levels to differentiate the high school diploma holders who took hard classes vs those that took dum-dum classes. Without that, you end up with an information asymmetry like the market for used cars.

It all seems like a giant plan to prevent people from starting their adult lives

It literally is; the Blair government specifically had their 50%-go-to-university goal to monkey with youth unemployment figures.

The problem with keeping your scheme in high school is that you're then dealing with actual legal minors who are very close to home. You're essentially trying to track young people whose brains aren't even fully physically developed yet, and something tells me that the parents of those children are not going to take the systematic closing of doors of opportunity so lightly.

I guess it kind of works in Europe and Japan. But then, Americans reject a lot of things that work in Europe and Japan.

It offers no additional signalling advantage, but information gleaned from education will not be applied homogeneously across the economy.

your comment reminds me of this post: http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/

>If everyone has a degree, it offers no advantage.

No advantage? Everyone would have a much broader education including a specialty. Even if they don't directly use that specialty it in their future career, it's still useful.

>The lower performers just end up with more debt.

Hmm if only there was a way to solve something like that....

>Everyone would have a much broader education including a specialty

No, there is a large set of people who go to college to get the paper they need, and do not end up with any more broad of an education at all, or no more broad, possibly less, than work experience would have given them.

This is only true in theory, not in practice. For example see the "education" that many student athletes obtain. As demand for college increases, and subsidies from the government continue, the incentive for colleges to offer a good education decreases. Going to college does not ensure broad knowledge or a quality education.

Student athletes are such a narrow subset of the overall population of a college, that using them as an example doesn't really make any kind of case about whether subsidies help or hurt.

Going to college doesn't ensure broad knowledge or a quality education, but it sure is a prerequisite to those things in this day and age. And we should try to give that opportunity to as many smart, motivated people as we can find in our country, irrespective of their ability to pay. The alternative is a return to deep class stratification. There's no guarantee that anyone will receive a quality education even at a quality school. Demanding that as a prerequisite to subsidies is like demanding that farmers not lose crops as a prerequisite to subsidizing corn.

The intellectual gain is there, but sadly it is wasted on job tasks which are nor intellectually challenging, or even require the knowledge learned during college - EVEN if your education and job is in the same field.

For example, a lot of regular/consumer banking jobs today require a college degree, but did not 15-20 years ago. The job has not changed; The people that work there still mainly help people with savings accounts, mortgages, loans, etc.

But since there are so many applicants for these positions, you now need a Bachelors degree in Economics, Business Administration, or similar.

I've seen job ads for bank greeters and receptionists that required a bachelors.

Man that is crazy but I guess it makes sense if the employer can be picky. It does go to show that college has become a signaling mechanism in addition to or instead of credentialing.

> Everyone would have a much broader education including a specialty.

No. People inclined towards that kind of thing would go to college anyway.

Compelling others to also go to college won't have those positive results unless the high school already failed them, in which case college is just a "sorry four years of your life were wasted, let's have a do-over".

But it seems like the better answer is to fix broken high schools.

I would seriously rethink whether we need to subject young people to compulsory education at all. Mass education is a sacred cow that just doesn't want to die.

A brief glance at history would seem to say otherwise. Uneducated masses are easy to control. It 'doesn't want to die' because it shouldn't. It's a vast improvement over how people loved their lives for the majority of our existence.

Education doesn't make the masses any more difficult to control. And it isn't an improvement over anything at all. That is just dogma.

I knew my comment would get downvoted though. :P

Care to explain your reasoning? What you're saying doesn't make any sense on its face.

I know it sounds strange, as it runs contrary to perceived wisdom on the subject. That is precisely why I question it.

I would place the origin of this thinking in the crusading social reform movements of the 19th and 20th centuries, or perhaps more broadly in Protestantism, and later, in emerging nationalist projects (with a few outliers of course).

I think it is important to examine the origins of our ideas on compulsory education, and the crucial questions of what purpose an education system actually serves, what purpose it should serve, and how its purpose has changed over time.

I would advocate a paradigm shift in how we think about education and its place in modern society. I am of course not the only person who advocates this, but I disagree with those who would carry on the tradition of imbuing education with a social and moral mission. I would not argue against the benefits of a broad humanistic education, or the necessity of technical and vocational education in an advanced economy, but rather point out that we collectively allocate a vast amount of resources to education, and place an almost religious faith in its value. The latter points are worthy of debate.

I could write a book on the subject, and I've read quite a bit in the area over the years. I'd really love to continue with the historical side of things, as well as my own suggestions and reflections, but it's too much to properly explain here.

> It all seems like a giant plan to prevent people from starting their adult lives.

I agree with this;

Somewhere where high schools started "college prep" curriculums, students forgot that they were working towards a job. A high school diploma means something; it signals you're trained in core subjects more than ~40% of peers who didn't graduate with one. You should have more job prospects that being a server or cashier as you have a formal education in professional writing and even complex math.

I assume this was lost in the transition to "college prep" curriculum; where trade classes and apprenticeships in high school clearly show you are some degree of about to be an adult and able to enter the workforce in a trade.

"It all seems like a giant plan to prevent people from starting their adult lives.

If you need to just get some generic "good job", then the answer is to learn what you need in the first twelve years of school. I think that's enough time."

Some guy on the internet said 12 years is enough to get a good job so I guess its true? A number other than 12, the product of history and chance, must be a sinister plan to uh extend childhood indefinitely by some cabal for some mysterious reason.

(Full disclosure, I went to school till I was 28. It fucking ruled and I think everyone should do it if they want to).

I don't think that your response is in good faith.

Not everyone wants to spend a third of their life in school. And I have proof that it is not necessary in all cases by the existence of at least one counterexample:

I have a friend who did not receive a college degree. He is now a professional fabricator, and a better mechanical engineer than most of the mechanical engineers I went to school with

I wasn't saying _everyone_ needs to have a greater than 12 year education. I was pointing out that 12 years is an arbitrary number to place so much faith in. It was formalized in an entirely different historical moment.

> (Full disclosure, I went to school till I was 28. It fucking ruled and I think everyone should do it if they want to).

If they want to, sure. Hurrah for education-for-its-own-sake.

If 20+ years of school is what you want, go for it. But a lot of people want to move on sooner, and so we should use the first 12 years of education efficiently. High schools don't get to just pass the buck onto the college system for all the kids that they failed to educate. And students who don't use their HS opportunities well shouldn't have the excuse that they will just get a HS do-over in college (at taxpayer expense).

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