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Comment by romaaeterna | Hacker News Reader

37% of the American population between 25 to 34 has a Bachelor's degree now. The subset of people who are literate and conscientious, but do not have a degree has become vanishingly small in recent decades.

This is a horrible and vicious feedback loop, but it's hard to blame the employers, who are actually being fairly rational about their use of a BS degree as a filter (it's the new HS diploma). The blame lies at the feet of an uncontrolled government loan policy that has given the BS this new status.

College is eating years of our lives and is transferring vast amounts of middle class wealth to the education sector of the economy. In the US, it's probably the greatest misallocation of resources outside of our health industry.

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This only makes sense if you think that bachelors degrees contribute no value during the entire lifetimes of the people who receive them, which seems like a pretty huge assumption that should not pass unexamined.

I agree that college financing is out of control, but that doesn’t mean a college education is a waste of time. Secondary education was once the domain of rich kids too, but we changed that and the long term value to the world is obvious. Financing public goods is a solvable problem.

It seems pretty reasonable to me that as human society grows more complex and specialized, humans would benefit from more education.

> It seems pretty reasonable to me that as human society grows more complex and specialized, humans would benefit from more education.

That narrative is totally destroyed by knowledge retention studies. It's one of the few things in life where the data is completely unequivocal: people don't keep what they don't use, and most people use almost none of what they learned in college. (I predict anybody who disagrees will be a STEM major in a STEM job, i.e. extremely unrepresentative of former college students at large.)

I still retain and use college knowledge in fields not directly related to my programs of study...

You are an outlier, as is just about everybody else commenting here.

I'm a programmer with a bachelor degree, majored in CS and minored in math. I can't do my kids AP calc anymore. I haven't used it in 20 years of programming.

Knowledge retention is the wrong metric in a world where you can look anything up in 5 seconds on your phone.

Getting a college degree requires one to work with large amounts of information. Even if you retain none of those facts and figures later in life, you can still retain facility at working with information. And that is much more important to long-term success than how much you memorize.

But a college degree is suppose to be far more than learning how to study and some minor industry exposure which is the vast majority of what it is being used for. It means people are paying for 90% fluff they don't want or need at exorbitant rates to overcome an invisible wall. Numerous classes I myself took and needed credit for to work towards a degree, while entertaining and informative, ultimately ended up as no more than what I could of obtained by reading a decent book on the subject myself. And it cost me a damn pretty penny.

While I think those types of classes should still exist, they shouldn't be used as an artificial financial and time barrier to getting a decent job.

For most, college education is a signaling method. You learn on the job.

If this weren’t the case, just hire people who dropped out during senior year for a wonderful discount. They got 7/8s the education!

Most students in CS are hired prior to graduation. On both sides the savings of skipping that last semester are marginal, and on the student side there's a nontrivial opportunity cost. 6 months of: studying whatever problem you want with the background you need to maybe solve it, networking, building code/ideas you own, socializing with a purpose (courting) or for fun, or, if you're smart, a bit of all 3.

There's a discrete jump in the career value of the education between not quite finishing a degree and graduating. It's not because there's some super important final semester that's worth much more than any of the previous ones. It's no doubt because it signals some quality like conscientiousness, or perhaps is just easier for an employer to evaluate the meaning of.

Which is why hiring college grads right before they graduate is the best deal! You get a discount hire who will have a hard time getting other jobs!

In my experience, in college I learned the theoretical and on the job I learned the practical.

For example, I learned how to conjugate verbs in foreign languages, and algorithms with O(n) vs O(log n) in computer science.

Then later in a foriegn country I expanded my my vocabulary. On the job, I learned about version control, how to read other people's code and how to fix bugs.

"more education" does not equal to college education. Education can take many different forms. It can be career and technology education, internship and apprenticeship, also self-study.

College has an entrance barrier and is very disconnected to the outside world, so it has a strong signal effect.

Also consider this: with four years of college time, you can get two career educations with real life industry experience and come with much less cost.

> with four years of college time, you can get two career educations with real life industry experience

...depending on both the student and the career.

Many tech jobs require not much more than literacy, 6th grade algebra, and a tiny bit of grit. Most smart middle schoolers could make mid five figures slinging PHP part time. I did in early high school, and I'm not particularly smart or hard working.

But there are many jobs, even in relatively easy fields like programming, where nonnegative productivity requires years of practice.

I couldn't disagree more. College teaches people to learn independently, to communicate their problems and their progress effectively, to write emails professionally, to manage their time and deal with more work than can be handled, to mentor more junior people, etc. Sure, someone straight from high school could have some of these skills, but doing well at a university practically guarantees it.

> College teaches people to learn independently, to communicate their problems...

Not mine. Went to two Universities - both taught students to regurgitate what lecturers taught. Anything beyond that meant low marks.

Shhh, the truth doesn't line up with the ideal, don't speak of it...

This seems a bit out of touch with the current career reality Americans face. Companies aren't training people nor do they want to train people, and 'career educations' generally don't exist outside of the trades and even that has been moving more towards in-class experience first, then training.

College also increasingly ties in industry experience with in-class experience as companies are only willing to take on interns that are currently studying at colleges they're partnered with. Not to mention the way people use it as a networking opportunity and a chance to try out new things before having to dedicate themselves to a career they might despise.

Career and technical education covers many fields, such as agriculture, business, education, service, military, mechanics, construction, programming, etc... Yes, field training does come later. However, in general, CTE provides more direct field experience than four-year college.

And never be exposed to a single social, political or ideological idea outside the spheres you happen to land in.

Democracies depend on voters who are lucid, informed and rational. Modern technological civilization provides so much, and in very abstract ways, that it is non-optional that people be able to understand, or know they don't understand, massive swathes of broad-reaching ideas and concepts. Because democracies say "choose a candidate to represent you on all these things".

> never be exposed to a single social, political or ideological idea outside the spheres you happen to land in

And you genuinely believe modern colleges provide this?

Yes, they do. Exposure doesn’t mean the student internalizes the ideas but yes collages absolutely expose people to a variety of view point.

Wasn't my experience taking courses in political science and political philosophy. Was exposed to a lot more viewpoints discussing with working class family, reading literature myself (reading primary sources and focused secondary sources was actually often strongly discouraged by my professors as an inefficient use of time, something that would of course change doing post-grad work, but that isn't what we're discussing here), etc.

To the extent that viewpoints not part of the accepted doctrine are presented, they are presented poorly and without passion.

> reading primary sources and focused secondary sources was actually often strongly discouraged by my professors as an inefficient use of time, something that would of course change doing post-grad work, but that isn't what we're discussing here

I think that’s exactly right. Reading primary sources is much more complicated than reading undergrad-level sources: you need to read not just the source, but enough supporting material to understand the context the source was writing in, competing movements and how they were viewed at the time, etc. You simply don’t have time in a one-semester course on, say, political thought in the 19th century, to dive into the details of any one particular movement, be it abolitionism, women’s suffrage, or anything else. The scope of these questions is enormous, and whatever primary sources a student is likely to find will have tremendous selection bias, because the student won’t even know what sources they’re ignoring or what context they might be missing.

Part of the professor’s job in undergraduate courses is to give the lay of the land. And if an enterprising student decides to put in the primary source work, to not let that one student derail the conversation into hyperfocusing on a single topic, while hopefully also preventing the student from getting hopelessly lost.

Come on, they have both kinds of ideologies in colleges: Socialist and communist

Sounds like someone hasn't heard of U Chicago, or the college professor at U Toronto, Jordan Peterson.

Or George Mason U's Mercatus Institute, headed by Tyler Cohen -- one of the larger investments in schools made by the Koch Bros. There are lots of others.

this is academic speak for "the masses should do what the elites want". exposure happens wherever people are. to the extent that it happens in universities it's because there are many people together, often not having much work, but the overton window is very limited.

The academic bubble has grown and shifted over the years, this is evident to most people i know who can peek outside their academic circles. Academia is slowly moving itself to irrelevance

1) Democracy never relies on citizens to go to college to get political education 2) The general public has far more political diversity than faculty and administrators in universities 3) The general public is exposed to a wide range of political and ideological ideas through traditional and social media.

I know you said this with some degree of sarcasm, but for the vast majority of people, you are right on the money. A bachelors degree does not only “contribute no value” but in fact leaches value from the economy. I work at a FAANG with no degree, and the reason I did so (In my 20s) was because instead of wasting my time in a classroom, I was out in the workforce working on real business problems at a telecom since I was 16, in a field where educators are 10-15 years behind reality. Most of the cutting edge work at Google or Facebook or Amazon is not public information, so how the hell would a college even teach that? It’s under NDA. Same as Ma Bell and the extraordinary innovations that came out of the telecommunications industry.

A degree doesn’t just steal value in terms of money, which puts you tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of compounding debt, but it also steals your time, and indoctrinates you into a top-down style of learning. Your time, the most valuable asset in the world, could be spent solving real problems in the real world. The whole system is a scam, and I’m truly sorry for those who have fallen for it.

My advice would be to cut your losses and get into entrepreneurship or work for a company that interests you ASAP. Life is too short to participate in someone else’s profit centered system of learning (Doctors and Lawyers excepted, but only because the level of gatekeeping in those fields is so high and perverted, and backed by government, that learning only via apprenticeship has literally been outlawed)

> Most of the cutting edge work at Google or Facebook or Amazon is not public information, so how the hell would a college even teach that?

This is a highly questionable assertion, given that these firms largely recruit candidates from CS degree programs to staff their most cutting edge projects.

The people directly recruited from CS programs to work on cutting edge projects on these companies are going to be PhD, not graduates. I can't fathom any of the above companies inviting an undergrad to work on their cutting edge projects, in doing anything but the most boilerplate of work.

Ok, but good luck getting a Ph.D. in computer science without first getting a bachelor's degree.

The point is, it's silly to condemn the value of college by waving around employment in a company that is well-known for recruiting from top-tier universities.

> I can't fathom any of the above companies inviting an undergrad to work on their cutting edge projects, in doing anything but the most boilerplate of work.

Computer science is still a young field with low-hanging fruit everywhere, all you need is a very bright person who knows the basics to make meaningful contributions on cutting edge projects because the "cutting-edge" isn't that sharp yet.

This is just false. I went to an ivy+ school and have countless peers with just a bachelor's degree that work on cutting edge projects for data science, systems engineering, autonomous vehicles, etc.

You are simply wrong. WTF is with all the misinformation in this thread? Of course, the big tech companies staff their projects, yes including cutting edge stuff, with BS grads. Maybe they'll expect you to do some grunt work too starting out, but that's just life. You're going to pay your dues, even if you skip college (possibly even more so)

It's not just them either, there are tons of non-FAANG jobs that pay very well and do cool things, that recruit recent grads. There isn't even consensus in the industry that further education is valuable; sometimes people don't even trust those that go this route (I think this is a bit harsh, but it's due to bad anecdotal experience).

This isn't questionable at all imo. College is supposed to teach you the core fundamentals, using which you should be able to learn all that other stuff.

Straight out of college, I was hired to write code in a language that didn't even exist when I started college. Why? Because those companies rely on students learning more than just "language A". They want quick-learning generalists who can pivot to any tech or language if there is a need. And I can safely say, I definitely learned all of that stuff in college, and I am very thankful for the very solid understanding of CS fundamentals that have carried me in the industry over the years.

For a lot of people, going to college is going to be a great opportunity. Not many people can simply leave school at 16 for a meaningful job that gives top tier work experience. You need to live in the right area and either get really lucky or know the right people. A lot of things need to line up well for you. A bachelor's degree is guaranteed if you can pay for it and pass the units, something that doesn't need as much of life to line up perfectly for.

Within a couple of years of starting my CS degree, I was far better at programming than every hobbyist programmer I've met. I didn't have many opportunities out of school. I was from a poor country town that topped the state crime statistics. I know my mum hadn't finished high school and I don't think my father did either. I joined the military, got a trade and went to university at 30 as a single father working full time. University changed my life for the better, gave me a lot of tools and made me much more valuable.

For real. The information you learn on-the-job v.s. the information you learn in academia is a Venn diagram where _maybe_ 50% overlaps, but that doesn’t mean the non-overlapping bits were useless. Having a broad background gives you tools to draw on and helps you see ways of framing things that could massively simplify the problem you’re facing.

I can’t imagine I would have developed the concept of LTI systems outside of academia (EE), nor realized how much of signal processing tasks can be deconstructed to just convolutions or correlations, but these modes of thinking have proved powerful in my early career and especially as a hobbyist.

I am not sure this is true. Maybe 25% overlap. Going to college allowed one to build a network. This network is what provided most of the value over time.

When in the workforce one can pick up a skill/s, from a technical institutes or college extension programs. These programs focus directly on educating for an area focus with relevant industry experience and problem sets.

I went to university but I didn't study CS, I studied mathematics. I don't think I'd be a better programmer if I'd studied CS. Am I glad I went to university? Yes, but frankly it's nothing that you couldn't learn out of a book for a lot less money.

This is a great point. The vast majority of people should simply get a job at a FAANG in their 20s with no degree, rather than wasting their time in a classroom.

There was no sarcasm that I can see. snowwrestler was earnestly saying we should doubt that "bachelors degrees contribute no value".

As anecdata, my most successful peer from school and college is a guy who didn't finish HS and calling him, at that time, an average talent (even in soft skills) was sympathetic. He happened to start working in a software company around 1998 doing menial work and today he is a continental sales manager. By the other hand I have several bright and hard working peers that are struggling in life despite having (anachronic) master degrees.

Man, I get where you are coming from, and good for you all your success. But your opinion is so extremely narrow it doesn't mean much for most of the world. You might step out of your IT bubble from time to time, real world and real people are much bigger spectrum than you seemingly understand.

Reasons are more than I can cover in one post - gatekeeping is real, very super real in most well paid jobs. Nobody hires new accountants, managers, electricians, architects, any kind of engineers, and many more without school. Nobody is going to give them expertise coming from job required to grow. Not all jobs are learnable just from online tutorials and books. You don't want to have your house built by guy who aced some online architecture test but has no degree, do you.

You were lucky and seemingly very talented. That is great, but not a usable advice for maybe 95% of the folks. I don't like how things are, but currently they are like that all around the world and there is no change coming soon.

>You don't want to have your house built by guy who aced some online architecture test but has no degree, do you.

That's not really the primary problem I think, I gladly would. But what I would like even more is an entity (probably a company) that has enough assets that if something goes wrong with the house I can get compensation from them. And this company probably isn't going to hire that guy. That's where the actual problem is.

Education aside, I find that just the network of people I made from going to college was worth the cost.

While focusing on developing marketable skills should be the top priority of students, there are a lot of other values that a college experience provides.

Sure but that is assuming:

The very best case for the non-college trajectory which is that you were able to work on real, cutting edge problems from your entry into the workforce and had the discipline to learn the important parts of CS fundamentals required to work on them.

The very worst case of college education - doing only the required for the degree, no side projects, industrial placements, or advanced topics.

Yes, a good autodidact doing genuinely interesting work is going to be a more valuable contributor at 22 than someone who has spent the last four years doing a CS degree by the numbers. That's not a good example because those are two different people. Many people who enter the tech workforce at 18 may spend years doing paint-by-numbers business applications using a single set of tools, those people aren't going to FAANG jobs.

I agree with everything except for your advice. For the vast majority of people getting into tech, college is probably the right answer. Basically, to go with the system, and accept that you're being taken for a ride (being scammed). It's the most common-sense way to get your foot in the door, even if it's "pay to win". Colleges end up being the gatekeepers and selling a product (you), usually to companies that are already satisfied with it.

> I agree that college financing is out of control, but that doesn’t mean a college education is a waste of time.

The issue is that it's a waste of time for people who will never use it for anything. If you spend four years to get a BS and then find a career as a factory worker, it was a waste of time -- the education is worth less to you than the cost in time it took from you.

This comes from subsidies causing oversupply. If you're going to actually be a doctor or an engineer then a college degree is worthwhile. But some people are going to be retail clerks and factory workers. Just blindly sending everyone to college because Everyone Should Go To College is wasting their time and the taxpayer's money.

I'm surprised that nobody in this thread has brought up economist Bryan Caplan's 2nd most recent book, "The Case Against Education".

This economist has looked at economic research on the effects of education, such as:

* How well students retain information

* How well students apply their knowledge in contexts outside of the classroom

* How much college graduates make versus how much someone makes after dropping out of school at the last minute

* How much more productive nations are after educating large swaths of their population

* How many companies outright tell their new hires that the knowledge they gained in school needs to be forgotten, and that they need to start learning everything from scratch.

And the conclusion Caplan comes to is that college education is a social signal, i.o.w. it's a zero-sum game where getting a college degree comes at the expense of everyone else with a college degree since the signal is degraded and is not as special as it once was.

> If you're going to actually be a doctor or an engineer then a college degree is worthwhile. But some people are going to be retail clerks and factory workers.

The WSJ article linked up at the top is literally about how factory work increasingly requires professional education like a college degree.

> The WSJ article linked up at the top is literally about how factory work increasingly requires professional education like a college degree.

But does the job really require a degree in order to do it, or is it only the employer that requires the degree, as a filter, because now they can get away with it as a result of the oversupply of college degrees?

Can you explain how an employer gains any advantage by pointlessly requiring degrees today, when they did not previously? What would that do other than raise their labor costs?

Anyway, the article is clear that increasingly automated factory work requires more educated and independent employees.

This is starting to happen in retail too. Thanks to self-checkout machines, there are now more employees in the pharmacy at a local CVS than in the rest of the store combined.

> Can you explain how an employer gains any advantage by pointlessly requiring degrees today, when they did not previously? What would that do other than raise their labor costs?

Suppose that people with a degree are significantly less likely to quit shortly after you've spent a lot of money training them on your equipment, regardless of whether what they studied in college has any application to the job. If you have to pay the person with a degree a lot more money then maybe it isn't worth it just for that, but if everybody gets degrees and there is an oversupply such that there are more people with degrees than jobs that actually require them, now maybe you can get someone with a degree for a low enough price to be worth requiring it.

> Anyway, the article is clear that increasingly automated factory work requires more educated and independent employees.

That's just the signaling value again. They're not looking for someone with knowledge of GAAP or materials science or economics, they're looking for someone with the proven capacity to earn a degree by studying those things, because it implies they can also learn to run the machines well.

If not as many people had degrees then it wouldn't be worth paying the premium for one of the people who do, and then people who are going to be machine operators don't have to burn four years of their lives and incur significant student debt just to engage in signaling behavior. Instead the employers would have to bear the (lower, but unsubsidized) cost of more attrition as a result of not having the degree to use as an early filter against low quality employees.

It is an easy filter for job applicants, who are also likely in debt and desperate for stable work. If they had or could get a decent job in their field of study they wouldn't be applying for factory work unless they were an automation specialist.

> humans would benefit from more education.

Seems reasonable to me. I'd love a better method for quantifying the value of education, too. It's too easy for Big Ed to argue how college is essential as they jack up the prices.

Big 3:

Cost structure of college

Cost structure of healthcare

Mass incarceration (actual cost + lost GDP etc.)

If we fixed those 3, or at least dramatically reduced their impact, we would unlock 30+ years of growth. Its basically free money, just sitting there, waiting for someone to restructure each of them.

There are a lot more broken cost structures - housing, which has similar potential losses to incarceration with the stress of rent driving drug use and homelessness costing a ton and taking potentially productive people out of the economy.

Transportation and infrastructure are broken requiring private car ownership and whose design holds back community and local growth around the country (in transit and in broken water, electric, and internet monopolies).

Agriculture is also super broken with subsidies for unhealthy corn syrup, half of food wasted, huge meat subsidies, an industry dependent on undocumented labor, etc.

Really they all come back to planned bad incentives - housing is regulated to be cost prohitive and NIMBYed, all infrastructure is deeply controlled to protect encumbant oligarchs, prison industrial complex is lobbied by the prison supply chain and police forces. It all comes back to politicians acting in the interest of few over the many contextualized over many circumstances. And that can only happen if they are unaccountable, which is the root problem to fix.

Housing is cheap in small towns. As I understand it, America has "Section 8" housing which pays most of the rent for unemployed people and they pay 30% out of their unemployment benefit. So are homeless people really just choosing to live in a city where they're not eligible for section 8 because they don't want to live in a small town? Or have they done something so badly wrong that they can't get it anywhere? If your income is too high for section 8 but too low for rent, then you need to move because your labor is worth less than your living costs.

To get section 8 you must meet a list of requirements. Just being unemployed is not enough.

Even if you qualify, there is limit to how total many section 8s are given out. So there is a waiting list of several years, during which time you must still qualify.

You can not just sign up on that waiting list. There are small windows open at random a few days a year when they will accept names.

No leasor is required to accept section 8 people and very few do. So even if you get a section 8 voucher, you still need a lot of luck to find a place.

Thus the streets are paved with homeless.

But in order for affordable housing to drive economic growth it needs to be in areas with lots of good jobs. Just imagine if you could rent a decent apartment in silicon valley for $600 a month, we'd see an explosion of new companies and jobs!

Indeed. And the average American will spend more in mortgage interest + rent than any of those others: 5x to 10x more than a college education. Unfortunately, since housing has become a ponzi scheme, mortgage interest is confused with investment.

Yes, Food. I spent a couple of years in California and I miss it very much. However, the one thing that I would not have been able to work around, if I were to make my home there, is the food. Not that it tastes bad, but that it is bad, and there is no escaping from that food chain, and its long term effects on health, compounded generation by generation. I now live in a supposedly poor EU country - of course there are problems, but everyone is smart and healthy. It is the food. Adopt EU food regulations now.

Hmm, California's obese plus overweight is 69%, significantly more but not quite the picture you're drawing in comparison to France's 60%.

For what it's worth, the parent comment didn't explicitly mention weight, and health has a lot to do with nutrition, and I would imagine they were commenting on that as well.

Right but 100% of overweight people are unhealthy. So clearly that can't be right that EU food regulations are ensuring good health.

I guess they could be saying that among the remaining third of the population, the Californians are still unhealthy even if not overweight while the French are healthy. Seems unlikely to be true, though.

That 37% of people really needs to be understood as bifurcated though. There is the (smaller) group that do the degrees that lead to high skills and gainful employment (medecine, engineering, finance), and the other (larger) group that are enrolled in mostly cotton-candy degrees (Communications, Business, Media) that lead just to debt.

Paying for the Party is a good book that explores this modern issue.

I think comms/broadcast degrees often are pointless. But in media, anything web/video and journalism focused was a solid career until very recently. Wages are dropping fast in that field. Social media and phones really took a chunk out of it. It feels like the collapse of newspapers all over again, especially in the TV sector.

Its always surprising when on HN these degrees are considered non desirable and yet every time one of us starts a company we realize we need them.

Let's assume you're telling the truth, how many would be needed? How many social media experts versus engineers? Sales is the real hidden people employer, you'll probably have as many or sales people than engineers, but the fact of the matter is now all degrees are created equal.

I can well imagine "ran a Youtube channel with x,xxx subscribers in High School" being way more valuable for getting into media work than a degree in media would be, which is something that wouldn't have even been possible not that long ago.

> it's probably the greatest misallocation of resources outside of our health industry.

wasn't there an article trending on HN a few hours ago about the 2T$ for Afghanistan?

$100 billion a year isn’t even close to the biggest misapplication of resources in the US economy.

No, but I'd still take a three-fold increase in NIH funding, or a 14x increase in the NSF budget.

drop in the bucket by comparison

Problem with Afghanistan/Iraq is that the US lost the knowledge on how to conduct a war since WW2. There was no plan on how to fix/rebuild the country after the threat (Taliban/Saddam) was eliminated - which led to the Taliban rising again with public support and the Iraqi political landscape essentially fractured.

With Germany, in contrast, the priority was to get us up and running as a democratic society. Mostly this was a side effect of needing a stronghold against Communist-Russia dominated GDR, but still - had the US gone through with de-industrialization of Germany as some plans wanted to, Germany would have been in chaos again.

I think an important part of the story with Germany is that Hitler's rise was substantially aided by the Germany's treatment after WW1. Everybody was aware of the importance of doing a better job this time.

And everybody should have learned from history in Afghanistan/Iraq/Libya, but no one did apparently :(

Sure they did, they just didn't care.

> Problem with Afghanistan/Iraq is that the US lost the knowledge on how to conduct a war since WW2.

Did Vietnam and Korea not happen? Plenty of nation building going on there. Vietnam failed because peacekeeping isn't the same as peacemaking. The Nazi fought to the last man (or close to it) and were beaten down completely; the Japanese were nuked into submission. Both of those are not or were not options in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, where there was/is still strong opposition backed by foreign powers.

> There was no plan on how to fix/rebuild the country after the threat (Taliban/Saddam)

Afghanistan wasn't intended to be a long term fix, just chase out the Taliban, kill Osama, and let the Northern Alliance take over. That didn't work out so well. Nation building is also a lot easier when the nations were already global empires; Afghanistan is still having a hard time catching up to the 20th century.

Iraq was a deliberate failure in this regard, and troop numbers were kept deliberately low to more easily sell the operation to the public.

First off you just stated that 63% of the US population 25-34 is either illiterate or non consceintious, so, yikes.

Secondly, I'd love to see some real data on college as a misallocation of resources. Everything ive seen would suggest the opposite. The "college experience" is kinda the height of a true free market place for ideas and people leave better for it. The government should be funding more for education, not cutting people off from it.

Maybe you went to a great college. I went to a large state school, and the "college experience" there was not at all like you described it.

At best, it could be close to that if you chose the right major and friends. But the majority experience seemed closer to binge drinking, cheating on homework assignments, and wasting time in class by asking the professor if X was going to be on the test.

College is absolutely just a continuation of high school for most people, and I'm afraid it's going to become even worse as the demands for free college get louder.

I also went to a large state school (although to be fair, one that's fairly highly rated for STEM). Access to people, both socially and academically, access to information, access to opportunity (I did not get a degree in CS yet here I am making piles of cash in this field) all increase with the resources available at uni.

Asking a high school student, especially one that likely grew up in a small town with limited exposure to people careers, and ideas, to go into an uncaring workforce essentially unable to pivot for the rest of their lives sounds heartbreaking. I strongly believe that my opportunity should be available to every person.

As a side bar I think this probably should start way earlier than college; more well run state boarding schools would be a huge life line to high performing students stifled by their geography.

I went to an excellent college, and I don’t think public money should be spent on “the college experience.” It’s not like American college graduates are leaving well versed in the works of Aristotle. We’re talking about spending tax dollars subsidizing what is mostly drinking/sex/video games/partying, with someone occasionally picking up a shallow idea.

i know you're just being needlessly flippant, but, givenmost hs curriculum don't cover classical philosophy how is a student supposed to know they're interested in the field if not exposed to it during higher education ( i know I personally got into Foucault during conversations I had with classmates after snubbing the field like many an edgy teen).

Plenty of people meet their co-founders, find their passion, pivot their lives entirely during the time; even if the only activities a student takes are "drinking/sex/video games/partying" they're probably out making connections that end up serving them pretty well interms of employment/relationships.

Restricting access just so some group youve determined "doesn't deserve it" is elitist to the extreme. I'd much rather have 5% ( or more)of my income go to funding state run education rather than subsidizing my extracurriculars (which ironically are way more drinking/sex/video games/partying than I ever had time for in college).

I’m not being flippant. I don’t think college is valuable for most people, and the “four year vacation for already privileged kids” isn’t something I want to see public money being spent on.

As to being elitist: subsidizing college is a handout to people who are already pretty well off. The people who need help the most aren’t going to college. I’d very much like to see colleges defunded and that money redirected to social services for kids in high-need communities.

It's not a 0 sum game; it's very possible to have subsided education and meaningful social services; hell you can even deliver on economies of scale and do both academic out reach run by the local school with the intention of preparing applications from high-need communities.

In today's system if you can afford university with no debt you're very well off and it's probably a wash since the funds are coming largely out of your taxes (ie just about everyone that works in US tech and comments on this forum). The biggest winners are middle class families that can prepare their children for college but can't pay for it; but again, helping one group doesn't mean that it's no longer possible to help another group.

I can't see how restricting higher education back to the days when the hyper rich gathered to circle jerk about how much of the classics they've memorized helps in anyway (other than give all of us already educated in the workforce a lovely gate against the next generation).

The money is spent either way, whether it's tax dollars in a "free college" system or tuition dollars in the system we have or anything in between. Every dollar spent on college is a dollar that didn't get spent on some other service.

Meanwhile, if university education really is mostly a vacation for wealthy young adults, then funding it is regressive, because no matter how directly accessible you make it financially, it's still tilted towards the wealthy because they have the means to forego 4 years of income to attend, and because they're better prepared to apply and take advantage of it in the first place.

By that logic there should be no progressive programs at all because "someone" wealthy might also benefit. Especially in the current system, a college degree is overwhelmingly income positive[0]. Progressive programs don't imply the wealthy don't benefit just that the wealthy do pay for them. A student unable to afford university would be far better equiped to "forgo 4 years of income" (because there are so many well paying jobs for the highschool graduate in a low income area) if state schools were publically funded at the level they were 40 years ago.

A dollar spent on accessible college is just a dollar that can't be spent else where not necessarily a dollar taken from another services. Despite what some people might lead you to believe, taxes can be raised to pay for things (usually disproportionately affecting those wealthy people you're so concerned about getting a handout).

[0]https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/the-college-payoff/

This rebuttal pretends to say something, but really doesn't. Obviously, there are cases where subsidy makes no sense (universal free yacht moorings) and where it makes lots of sense (the fire department). The question is, where does a 4-year university degree fall on that spectrum? It's Rayiner's contention, and mine as well, though to a lesser extent, that college is a yacht mooring, not a fire department.

You can disagree, and then make your case, but you have to make it on the merits, not with mic-drop logic.

Note that my side already has a highly instructive example to argue from: the mortgage interest tax deduction, which turned out to be expensive, distortive, and highly regressive.

You're not going to get everyone into college. If you make the government pay for college then you're also asking those who couldn't go to college to pay for others to be able to go to college. Essentially, poor(er) people paying so that rich(er) people can drink/sex/video games/party.

Hold up. I know college is like that for some people, but not everyone. I pretty much never partied and spent my time studying at the library. I wouldn't have been able to usefully work on Rust without a lot of the PL theory that I learned at university—is Rust just "shallow ideas"? Before learning PLT I thought that the C type system was all anyone needed. I sure wasn't going to write an H-M style typechecker—the original version of which I wrote for rustc—for fun on my own time. (And I did end up with a decent knowledge of Aristotle, too.)

Are there too many people who get in to Ivy League schools just to party? Sure. But fixing that problem—which I agree is worth fixing—need not involve burning higher education to the ground and depriving those who are actually going to get use out of it.

> Are there too many people who get in to Ivy League schools just to party? Sure. But fixing that problem—which I agree is worth fixing—need not involve burning higher education to the ground and depriving those who are actually going to get use out of it.

Within Ivy League schools there are a ton of (very bright!) kids who get a degree just to have a credential they use to punch their ticket at a bank or consulting shop. And outside the Ivy League there are tons of kids who get a degree, spend a lot of time partying, to get a job they could have done without the degree. All told, probably a majority of people who get a degree today don’t need one. (Back when we sent a man to the moon only 10% of Americans had a college degree. It probably never needs to get higher than that.)

There is a place for public funding of college. We need engineers, doctors, even writers and journalists. And we need to address the plight of people from disadvantaged backgrounds. But I suspect you could get most of the economic benefits with a targeted system that gave out full ride scholarships based on merit, need, and plan of study, instead of making college into grades 13-16 as we have today.

> And outside the Ivy League there are tons of kids who get a degree, spend a lot of time partying, to get a job they could have done without the degree.

Reminds me of something I recently read. iirc, it was some local news story regarding a college student at a nearby state university. I remember someone asked him his plans after college and he replied something about wanting to start a landscaping business. I wondered why the hell someone would bother with all that debt for something that they could have started years ago.

>I pretty much never partied and spent my time studying at the library. I wouldn't have been able to usefully work on Rust without a lot of the PL theory that I learned at university

Did studying by yourself at the library really require being enrolled in a university though? I mean which part of this education is not indefinitely scalable? Pretty much only the personal attention of a professor. Did you require the personal attention of a professor to learn PLT? Somehow I don't think so.

>Before learning PLT I thought that the C type system was all anyone needed.

Using C for a while would've fixed that for you, too.

I surmise that pcwalton may have higher standards for "useful work on Rust" than the average HNer. (It is, after all, quite difficult to appreciate a "complex design" that doesn't yet exist - not in its current form, at least.)

> I mean Rust isn't exactly very difficult to use.

He's talking about working on Rust, not working in Rust. A Rust compiler, with its borrowing/type-checking, is an order of magnitude more complicated than one for C.

> The government should be funding more for education, not cutting people off from it.

College costs an insane amount of money in the States. I'm not sure more money is the answer. The government should be pushing ways to make it cheaper. Ceasing to guarantee public student loans and making private debt more easily dischargeable in bankruptcy would be a great start.

Turn off the money firehose and colleges will return to their core competencies - teaching and research - instead of building football stadiums, basketball arenas, and doing other stuff that's irrelevant to a good education. They may also differentiate by having tuition prices better reflect costs and future job prospects. So for example art, writing, polisci, history degrees may cost way less than engineering, science or medical degrees. Making community-college-to-state-college transfers easier would be another thing to try.

Basically there are many things one could do to expand access to college, and leave students better off, without spending more tax money.

To me the solution is simple, make college debt dischargable through bankruptcy. The only people who are actually going to declare bankruptcy are people who aren't and can't pay for their loans in the first place. It isn't just a simple reset button like people pretend, declaring bankruptcy has a serious repercussions, but at the end of it all they will end up in a better position and will contribute far more to the economy than they will stuck in a poverty trap.

I think it also comes down to the "quality" of the college, good schools and great teachers can make a massive difference. College allows you to explore your interests, make friends with a wide variety of people, which you may not be able to do later in life. I got a good education - but besides that, I made great friends who introduced me to interests which am still pursuing. Unfortunately, a lot of the American college experience centers on binge drinking, getting laid, frats and sororities and college sports. Find a school that is not about the above BS and you'll get a first-class experience.

Its not just the college but a program. #1 thing no one told 18 year old me that I wish they had- a mathematics degree (for example) from generic state university will pretty much get you the same job interviews as a fancy school degree will. Because employers respect the fact that Mathematics is hard wherever you do it. An Economics degree from nowhere gets you pretty much nothing while a Ivy Econ degree will get you into consulting or banking, and even more so for pure humanities. The less technical the material the more work the reputation of the school has to do.

Makes sense, but an Economics degree from Harvard teaches you a lot more ( the course and projects are way harder, the people teaching it are top-notch in their field). In engineering, as well, I've seen the same computer science degree and courses being a joke at another university compared to where I went.

There has been some study that shows the school itself correlated with post school achievement with a large caveat: those who were accepted to “higher” quality schools but ended up attending a lower regarded institution did just as well. The implication being it has less to do with the school and more to do with the students who can get accepted to those schools.[1] There was a comparatively larger impact on those coming from lower level income families.

There’s also been some follow on studies that look for differences in the effect depending on race and gender

[1]https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C32&q=Kru...

63% of people between 25 to 34 (or may be less for those still in school but I imagine not by much) isn't "vashingly small."

You read that wrong, most people aren't conscientious and those who are conscientious are likely to get a college education.

Then you're saying most people are unable to be gainfully employed. That's a pretty fatalistic (and unrealistic) read of the current situation.

What are you talking about? You can be gainfully employed and be a productive member of a team without being conscientious. I fit in that group.

>37% of the American population between 25 to 34 has a Bachelor's degree now. The subset of people who are literate and conscientious, but do not have a degree has become vanishingly small in recent decades.

So you think 63% of the population under 34 are either illiterate or unconscientious?

I think a larger misallocation of resources is money that is syphoned off / sucked out of every sector and sent to offshore tax havens..

University did take a chunk of my life that I would have liked to be earning money and growing my family. But it was a much better experience, and made me a much better person than when I was surrounded by ignorant and bitter men working in the trades as a commercial electrician.

>who are actually being fairly rational about their use of a BS degree as a filter (it's the new HS diploma).

It just chaps me that employers immediately think (in my case) 14 years of professional working experience is worth less than being able to APA format your paper and temporarily remember stuff for a test between rounds of beer pong.

More so than real estate? You might pay $50k for your education, but in hot markets with no construction you might pay literally a million dollars more than for the same house elsewhere. Huge allocation of resources there on the zero-sum competition with other buyers in the market.

That’s not misallocation. House prices are not meant to be uniform. It’s based on supply and demand.

The allocation is the huge portion of your salary going towards your mortgage.

The (arguable) "mis-" part is that while it's normal for some property to be worth more than others, and the housing market is functioning as it should given the parameters, we have chosen to make the supply highly inelastic in desirable places with predictable outcome.

Why are people choosing to accept salaries that are too low?

(Proven) collusion between employers to keep wages down would be one reason.

Proven?

Given companies have a legal responsibility to make a profit for shareholders...

Nobody has to work for them if they aren’t paying enough

Alright, technically it was only settled, but I'm referring to:

Four Silicon Valley companies -- including Apple and Google -- have agreed to pay $415 million to settle an antitrust lawsuit that accused the companies of conspiring not to hire away each other's employees.

Ok, but that isn’t going on now.

Your choice is a salary that's too low or no salary. Which do you choose?

You reallocate a million dollars from cash to property, it’s not spent.

From the perspective of one worker, until such a time as they sell & move away it is indeed spent. The old adage, house rich cash poor.

> College is eating years of our lives

True, and it's exploitative in a Marxist sense.

> transferring vast amounts of middle class wealth to the education sector

Confusing to me. Who are the institutions most benefitting from this? Are they not simply the _financial_ institutions furnishing the liquidity? I am not seeing the towering edu-monopolists' gravitational pull warping markets and other economic realities.

> In the US, it's probably the greatest misallocation of resources outside of our health industry.

There are a few others, such as the Military-Industrial Complex, the Prison-Industrial Complex (Militarization of Police, War on Drugs, etc.), Monocrop Agriculture chewing through our ecological endowment, etc.

Why do you assume the financial institutions, rather than the colleges themselves? Don't you think that a person being paid a salary to teach students skills that are less valuable than what the person pays is also benefiting? What about university administrators?

A few years ago, there was a widely publicized article about University of Florida getting rid of their CS programs while simultaneously expanding their English/History programs.

> A few years ago, there was a widely publicized article about University of Florida getting rid of their CS programs while simultaneously expanding their English/History programs.

Do you have a source for this. This is possibly one of the dumbest things I've heard coming from a university.

https://www-forbes-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.forbes.com...

I think you could argue it's created a class of wealthy and super wealth admins who don't add value. From what I've read several studies have shown the vast increase in college expense has been sucked up by administrators and non teaching staff. I was looking at my college's (midwest state school) payroll and the various provost were making $600k. Kinda wondering what in god's name these people do.

They sit around and make sure the teachers work. For some reason teachers think their 50k salary isn’t enough, so you need someone to keep them in line.

Note: Actually, I have no idea, but that is what my mind immediately went to when hearing provost.

I honestly don't think you're far off, but I also tend to think the "wealth admins" are a response to system inputs.

Take an example of catering to veteran students. Previously, many schools had a single person who was the veteran liaison as a side duty and not their primary function. When the post 9/11 GI Bill promised much more money for service members, colleges responded by having entire dedicated teams to help veterans navigate school. From the outside this may look like admin bloat to some, but for the college it actually does add value by helping attract students and guaranteed tuition payments. In a perfect world, that increase in students would ideally offset the salary for those positions, but I'm not sure if that happens. Please note that I'm not necessarily saying that's a bad thing, it just highlights that "wealth admins" may be providing something considered valuable to the university. Multiply that by all the various special interest groups and the number of administrative personnel can grow quite fast.

> Who are the institutions most benefitting from this? Are they not simply the _financial_ institutions furnishing the liquidity?

The US Federal Government is providing 90%+ of the liquidity. What benefit is it gaining?

> The US Federal Government is providing 90%+ of the liquidity. What benefit is it gaining?

A perpetual (young) underclass and whose legal status is favourable, thus tax requirements are firmly intact, but whose job opportunities for social mobility are ever diminishing, should make that obvious. Cheap, local sourced labour is critical to a consumer-driven, service sector economy: which the US is.

The limited manufacturing that does take place in the US is increasingly automated away, and the maintenance, deployment, installing and management of said equipment is limited in both scope and capacity, but could also be learned as an apprentice as it was done for millennia for other of man's highly coveted crafts. University requirements are a subsidy for an industry, much like Insurance was after WWII--they sought to inflate a needless sector of the economy.

No, the US Federal Reserve loans the US Government (treasury) money at interest which is then the basis for its ever increasing debt ceiling; the US government itself has the sole monopoly as having the Reserve Currency of the World (USD), with the largest Military and the biggest pollution based footprint on the World to maintain its inflation based petro-dollar.

They already won. This is merely about keeping the system in place, this the 'American Century' these plutocrats extolled and sold generations on can be viewed as such: they went from exploiting black slaves to being indiscriminate and targeting the youth and poor. Debt is the tool, and its effective.

I really can't understand how you guys in the Valley can just ignore all the homeless so effectively (many are really young) that you cannot see how obvious it all is; I guess being in a place modeled on affording its affluent residents a permanent state of infantile distraction must work.

My alternate theory: glut of labor.

It’s that and the poor state of public education. I couldn’t read this article so I searched using similar terms. Seiners could only find 15% of applicants that could read at the 9th grade level. Companies are finding that the Federal government has been driving education into the ground since it took over on the 70s.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/educ...

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