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Comment by orbifold | Hacker News Reader

Well the kind of obvious explanation for that is that success in life is probably strongly determined by intelligence. So when ~10% of the population went to college there was a high chance that those were also approximately the 10% smartest of a generation. If lots more people go to college now, that just means that it ceases to be a good predictor of success.

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This has been proven. The Department of Education conducted the National Assessment of Adult Literacy in 1992 and 2003. The average score was almost identical, but the scores for college graduates plummeted. https://nces.ed.gov/naal/kf_dem_edu.asp

I mean, you could probably just sort further via what field they pursue...

When you see people with stem Masters and PhDs working as highschool teachers you begin to wonder if the problem is intelligence. Or when people with PhDs in bio/Chem are working as programmers you wonder if it's a question of talent.

The problem is that we decided to inflate education prices while deflating labor prices. You can't do both at the same time and get sane results, because each individual needs to make their labor price correspond to their (former) education price.

So you wind up with Biochem PhDs working as programmers. Neither biochemistry nor programming is for stupid people, per se, but programming hires loads of people at salaries actually commensurate with the monetized value of the time-investment spent getting a doctorate, while actual biochemistry, the field of the doctorate, has emphasized cheap labor.

A big chunk of my PhD cohort subsequently left academia, but it certainly wasn’t based on “talent” or intelligence. It was pretty much random and not at all who I would have expected from our first year.

But is that because they can't find a better job, or they just can't find a better job in academia? I find it hard to believe that someone with a Masters or PHD in stem could not find a high paying job in the tech industry. (disclosure: I didn't read the article; I'm just curious about these anecdotes I keep hearing about PHDs)

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