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Comment by whimsicalism | Hacker News Reader

> Have we reached a state of elite-overproduction?

I'm very curious about this line of thought, as it seems to have become very popular in the blogospher over the past year or two.

What are the consequences of "elite overproduction"? I'm curious what the implications of this line of thought are.

Generally, I think more education is better than less - I am wrong to think that?

My personal hypothesis is that this fear of elite overproduction is being generated by existing professionals who are afraid an increasing supply of educated workers reducing their negotiating position/compensation.

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I think this elite notion is over-simplified and inaccurate. It suggests that some significant portion of students are at these kind of "walled garden", elite institutions where students become disconnected from the struggles of "real people".

80% of students go to a school where over half of applicants are accepted. Yes, these schools definitely are centers of, frankly, liberal idealism and free-spiritedness. But I think that would be the case in any system where young people are pretty unsupervised and have lots of time to read and study (or party). In my experience though, they aren't factories for elites in the common sense of that word. They're just a reflection of how you need much more training to be competitive in the job market today.

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/04/harvar...

Not OP. My interpretation is that society doesn’t really need as many university degrees as we are producing. Not because of competition but because not all jobs require a college degree, and ideally we should be increasing the pay of those jobs.

It might be better to adopt a model similar to the German or Swiss, in which people follow different tracks depending on their skills and interests, and not everyone goes to college, instead a lot of people go to trades schools. Of course for that to work in the US a huge societal change would need to happen first or alongside.

> ideally we should be increasing the pay of those jobs.

The pay of which jobs? The ones that require a college degree or not.

> Not because of competition but because not all jobs require a college degree

And are the number and prospects of these jobs increasing or decreasing?

I also find this whole conflation of having a college degree and being an elite silly. The problem seems much less to be that we have too many educated people and seems much more that wealth is concentrated by the small subset of wealthy people who "got here first" and then get the compounding returns.

> What are the consequences of "elite overproduction"?

Underemployment, leading to...

Long term student debts, leading to...

Fewer people starting families

> Long term student debts

I agree that this is a problem, and to the extent that we make it too easy for 18 year olds to take out massive amounts of debt, that is bad.

But I feel like many of the people arguing about "elite overproduction" would be opposed to something like making all public schools free or just free community college.

part of "elite overproduction" (or even the crux, as I understand it), is giving more degrees than jobs actually exist for those degrees. from this perspective, it doesn't make any sense to spend more tax dollars on even more degrees that we (allegedly) don't need. a college degree will stop being a "ticket to the middle-class" (as my alma mater described it) somewhere before everyone has one.

that's the economic side of the argument anyway. I partially agree with what you said further up the chain, that education is a value unto itself. but it depends on what kind of education is actually being obtained. imo, a four year program that focuses on one main area and requires a smattering of intro-level courses in others isn't worth that much if you don't end up getting a job related to that area of focus. I guess if the major was interesting to you, that's something, but was it worth four to six years of your life?

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