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Comment by mmmrk | Hacker News Reader

I'm currently reading Taleb's Antifragility book and he strikes a similar tune: The education system being little more than a way to cement social status, with actual innovation and entrepreneurship largely taking place outside it. Wealth leads to education, not the other way around.

I find this topic fascinating and it makes me see discussions about underfunded education systems and universities from a different angle.

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Innovation and Entrepreneurship are supposed to take place outside of academia. Core research is the mission of academia. The research that doesn’t have the immediate returns or value capture to justify starting a company around. Some exceptions where academics launch businesses from their research but those are exactly that, exceptions.

"Wealth leads to education". This is how it used to be. The "Liberal" Arts were named so as the sort of people who studied them had freedom from normal labour.

Then came the push in the 80s to 00s to get more working class kids into higher education, so they could have the same opportunities as upper class folk, thinking education leads to wealth. Instead we've just ended up with a bunch of working class kids graduating to become baristas.

Education doesn't lead to real wealth. University educated higher professionals still go back to their middle class home to open a carton of orange juice.

Having started a business recently, I've realised how much I didn't need anything I learned at uni to do this.

Eh, a lot of folks forget that the shift to the liberal arts after the 50s had a lot to do with a surplus of engineers (and relatively lower salaries for their capabilities) and the desire to get into corporate management positions, which was a reasonable ambition before the popularity of MBAs and business programs.

> Then came the push in the 80s to 00s to get more working class kids into higher education, so they could have the same opportunities as upper class folk, thinking education leads to wealth. Instead we've just ended up with a bunch of working class kids graduating to become baristas.

How much of this is just being stuck in old mindsets?

I went to an expensive private school with lots of rich people and just 1 student chose a program outside of business, engineering, or medicine and we were far from a science school. It was clearly understood that arts was a path to serving coffee. A school that arguably had more people win essay/book competitions than science fairs produced nobody in those areas.

In university, I met tons of people who thought that having a degree alone opened up a pile of job options. They were 20 years behind the mindset of my private school.

It is now that certain education leads to wealth and plenty of people are doing education which does not.

Boomer here. A number of my professors (at a so-so school in the US West) came from at best lower middle class families and went through college on the GI Bill. One of the better ones had been something like a signalman in the Navy, another (a star from whom I never took a class) did enlisted service in the USAAF, I think.

Alvin Kernan, who had a long career in academia, wrote in the early pages of his memoir In Plato's Cave of the influx of men like himself, attending college on the GI Bill in the late 1940s.

I haven't read the book, but have often heard that trope - did he write about actual research into the topic?

I ask because in the fields I'm familiar with many innovative approaches are actually university spin-offs.

Edit: The point of this beautiful article, "a society that is blind to the potential of so many of its young people, is a wasteful, unfair and ineffective society" is a sad truth, but in my opinion the answer is openening the institution up, not abolishing it. Those people didn't learn middle class behaviour in universities, they were socialized with it since birth. Good, widely available public education is an effective means to level out this class-based inequality.

Same. The yearly local value added from eship alone at the university I work at is in the 200-300M+ USD/CHF range. The global value added is significantly higher.

I imagine that technical universities, like ETHZ/EPFL, have a much larger annual impact

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