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Comment by anovikov | Hacker News Reader

I consider myself a liberal, and i agree with the point that college is net detrimental to society. It makes people waste their best years, teaches them mainly, useless stuff, barely breaks even in terms of lifetime earnings, and makes people bitter because they feel they are not valued by society the way they believe they should.

This world needs a lot more new plumbers than new liberal arts majors. It is the society's fault that people feel compelled to go to college having little chance to make anything out of it.

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> barely breaks even in terms of lifetime earnings

If you have any evidence to support this, I invite you to post it. Because according to the study below:

"Getting a Bachelor's degree adds another large increase in lifetime earnings. With median earnings of $56,700 ($27.26 per hour), or $2.3 million over a lifetime, Bachelor's degree holders earn 31 percent more than workers with an Associate's degree and 74 percent more than those with just a high school diploma."

But more importantly, college should NOT be job training. It should be a place to learn critical thinking, to experiment in a safe environment, and a place to learn what you even want to learn about. A college graduate should be able to learn what they need to learn, including pursuing a career in the trades.

I agree that we need more plumbers. But the idea that young adults -- in practice, working class and poor ones -- should be denied the opportunity to learn and grow and instead be offered trade school or nothing, is profoundly unfair.

This is not to say that we couldn't improve the status quo. We could make college less expensive or free, consolidate degrees (getting a law degree in 4 or 5 years of college rather than 4 years of college + 3 more of law school), etc. But a blanket statement that "college is net detrimental to society" seems ignorant even in the kindest light.

https://www2.ed.gov/policy/highered/reg/hearulemaking/2011/c...

Does college actually measurably teach critical thinking? How is that measured?

Are sociology majors measurably better at critical thinking than plumbers?

I kind of suspect a significant portion of the "college teaches critical thinking" meme is just something college educated people say to feel superior.

Sociology teaches the sociological imagination, which is specifically a form of critical thinking. This isn't something people tend to just pick up on without higher education

The problem would be separating correlation and causation. It’s obvious that higher education is correlated with critical thinking (uneducated adults are far more likely to deny climate change or believe in pizzagate etc)

But maybe this isn’t causality, maybe people with better critical thinking are going to be more attracted to college

I don't like how you presented your argument. You make it sound like trade schools, with real practical skills like plumbing, involve neither learning nor growing.

Similarly, critical thinking should be learned long before college age. If you're learning that during college, you've got a very late start.

Maybe that's not what you meant, but that's pretty much what you've written.

By definition, a trade school is designed to teach people a trade, not what lies outside it. A liberal arts education (which OP was clearly referring to) exists to teach people about a variety of different things.

This might sound like I'm biased against the trades. I'm not! I think they're crucial, and I, along with about half the software engineers I know, often daydream about becoming a fine carpenter.

I'm also not biased against trade schools in particular. They provide an important service and are a pipeline to good union jobs. The criticisms I make at the top of this comment apply equally to students who go to a top music program like Juilliard or the Oberlin conservatory, as those graduates will tell you themselves. They go to learn music, not to broaden their horizons.

A bachelor degree makes $541,000 more in life time earnings than an Associate's degree, according to your source.

College costs on average $26K and $52K per year[1] according to my google skills. 4 years of college therefore amounts to roughly $100 to $200K, which in fairness you have to subtract from that initial $541K difference. Still a nice difference.

However, the parent poster mentioned plumbers. According to my google skills again, a plumber makes $55,160 on average, compared to the $56,700 bachelor average. That difference is rather small, and a bachelor probably is worse off than a plumber once you factor in cost of education.

[1] https://www.topuniversities.com/student-info/student-finance...

[2] https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/plumber/salary

$120k sitting in a fund earning 5% a year for 30 years will be worth $518k.

Sure, and taking out loans for the $100K - $200K you need for college will also cost you more in the end, once you consider interest.

The thing tho is that people who do not go to college quite often do not have $120K just laying around to invest for 30+ years. In fact a lot of people who go to college (or their parents) do not have that kind of money lying around either.

And let's not forget that the people who do go to college and get that additional $500K can invest that additional $500K as well. Not as a lump sum either, of course.

Except that the plumber’s knees and back will be shot before they hit 50.

People forget that “real” work is not kind on the body.

The college you're speaking of doesn't exist today. Students are absolutely going to college to be trained for a career afterwards, and they are incurring decades worth of debt in order to do so.

Your vision is good, but its not reality.

I've never met a college grad who came out of college having learned critical thinking while in a bachelors program in college. If they are critical thinkers it was a predisposition. If anything it teaches conformism to a central line of thought. More critical skills seem to be developed if they decide to pursue a higher degree and/or engage in some research which not nearly as many people pursue.

Increase in earnings is a poor way to look at it, that is mainly from the credentialism that companies look for (which is horrible but it is what it is), and the networking that happens.

I largely agree with the sentiment that we need more plumbers than liberal arts graduates. One answer, though, is "why not be both?"

Post-secondary education, regardless of the specific major a student chooses, does provide a significant benefit to society: especially in the early years, it teaches students how to think critically. Perhaps this skill could be taught earlier during secondary education, but at least in the U.S., it is not. And this skill is incredibly important for becoming an informed member of the electorate who can separate truth from bullshit.

> And this skill is incredibly important for becoming an informed member of the electorate who can separate truth from bullshit.

Which is why both sides either denigrate college or treat it as some sort of tech jobs training.

Which "both sides" denigrate college? Last I checked some progressive Democrats wanted to make college free, not denigrate it.

The question is do they want to produce more nurses and web developers, or more informed citizens. I believe the emphasis is on the former.

It absolutely is taught in secondary education in the US. Heck, it's taught during elementary education. But you can't teach someone something unless they're willing to learn it. Post-secondary education doesn't help that.

Young children's brains aren't developed sufficiently to build these skills. Even a lot of high schoolers have difficulty with it. It's largely taught in post-secondary education because by then, the brain has matured enough to handle the cognitive load.

Tell me you haven't raised kids without saying you haven't raised kids. Mine have been critics since before they could speak.

Every kid does that. That’s not the kind of critical thinking taught in university, involving research and the evaluation of nuanced arguments, and I think you know that.

Not only is it not remotely true that children can't think critically or research something; not only is that irrelevant to whether or not it's taught to children; it's a mighty heavy assumption to say that people's brains have matured enough for anything when they're in college.

> it teaches students how to think critically

Most colleges have done the opposite in recent years. They provide echo-chambers for emotionally-fueled pseudoscience.

I've seen this while spending time at Boston University, Harvard, Brown, and Columbia. It's frightening how little people are able to think or question anything once they've gone through the college system. They become frightened by and angry at truths that don't align with the narrative they've been taught.

I've spoken to dozens of people who've gone through the wringer and come out the other side realizing how detrimental college was to themselves and their peers intellectually.

Please elaborate.. Did these people have world views that they didn't wish to have challenged and feel it was detrimental to challenge themselves? Or were they actually taught something detrimental?

What is the nature of this pseudo-science?

They were taught, through teachers but especially through the peer community, that there's an established, unarguable set of world views that shouldn't be questioned or challenged, and the scope of that set only grows larger.

I believe it really stems from a belief that they are collectively special — that they're wiser, more moral, and more 'perfect' than their ancestors, their less-educated fellow citizens, and so on. They encourage people to become 'educated' on issues that they themselves aren't particularly educated in, aside from reading Instagram graphics. They seek to 'cancel' people who present other world views.

While most people I know have been through all that and eventually come to a place of humility after college, easily half of the students never did. They continue on, unfazed, with a radical belief in their own moral superiority.

I'm sorry for the length and vagueness of this — it's really incredibly hard to describe as it's so pervasive throughout everything, and generally it's something people only understand after going through the system. You've got me thinking of how to articulate it better!

You're gonna have to cite some kind of example of what you believe pseudo-science is if you're saying critical thinking was somehow detrimental to someone intellectually. That's actually a hilarious feedback loop of a statement, considering they decided to attend a university. I assume it wasn't to study the art of plumbing?

> You're gonna have to cite some kind of example of what you believe pseudo-science is if you're saying critical thinking was somehow detrimental to someone intellectually.

I said that colleges are teaching the opposite of critical thinking, not that critical thinking was detrimental intellectually.

> considering they decided to attend a university.

They attended university because almost all came from an upper-middle-class background where there is no viable alternative according to their families. If you think they decided to attend university, you're speaking of different types of people — the only decision for them is which college to attend.

What departments is this happening under? A lot of people (probably most people) who go to college just learn about some technical subjects and maybe read a couple classic books in gen ed courses. Politics happens on campus, but largely among students and not in classrooms.

> Post-secondary education, regardless of the specific major a student chooses, does provide a significant benefit to society: especially in the early years, it teaches students how to think critically.

(My highlight)

I wish that were true, but it isn't always the case.

My counter-example is my ex-colleague who started her science PhD at the same time as me in the same research group as me waaaay back in the late 1990s.

Long and short of it, we each did our 3-ish years in the lab, she wrote up her thesis, I wrote up my thesis, we each had our oral exam around the same time. Her writing (her words) was "torn to shreds", she ended up back in the lab for several months doing more work and some serious rewriting, I got away with only a handful of typos to fix.

I blame our supervisor for this, but that's another story.

I'm not sure how this is a counter-example of students being taught to think critically. Are you saying you did not think critically in your thesis but passed anyway?

My colleague didn't seem to think at all. I've no idea why she did a PhD, and I don't think she knew either.

EDIT: (Follow-up Q) who exactly is supposed to be teaching critical thinking?

> One answer, though, is "why not be both?"

Resource constraints basically, and the removal of the degree from free market mechanics. I.e. guaranteed loans, not being able to discharge upon bankruptcy, etc.

You also don't need to go to college to get an education in what are historically liberal arts subjects (history, etc.) and in-person classroom lectures for those topics really should be few and far between and extremely academic.

I probably remember or know as much about history as a random undergrad history major does just because I read a lot and you can't remember everything.

Most of those classes aren't worth a lot of money. In fact you can take pretty much any class you would want to for free with open lectures too. I'd also argue that most liberal arts courses don't teach students how to think critically as a broad skillset. Usually the professor just has a narrative or point of view that they want to push and you can't really write contrary to that without an inordinate amount of research which begs the question "why bother?" when the whole point of being there is to get a degree with good grades to get a job. The whole cycle is screwed up.

I'd also say besides some class signaling stuff I can't really tell the difference between university graduates and non-graduates. Work output is the same in my experience.

Can critical thinking be taught?

Through practice. It can be shown, but learning by doing is the only way.

>especially in the early years, it teaches students how to think critically

Is this a thing only in the US? I went to university in Europe and there were 0 subjects that were unrelated to the (STEM) degree I chose. It was all 100% technical stuff.

In the US and UK you can choose a (completely unrelated if you want) “minor” subject to broaden your horizons

Yes, most liberal arts programs will have a variety of general education requirements.

For my math degree, I also had requirements in: psychology, philosophy, religion, science, writing, and foreign language.

This lack of any background in the humanities (including history, philosophy, or ethics) clearly shows. It is quite astounding to me how much a certain class of STEM grads like to wear their ignorance like a badge of honor and attempt to convince us all that their ability to piece together a mediocre argument using wikipedia and google searches is somehow worthy of merit.

Given the fact that the STEM subjects most in use by the HN crowd are the easiest to learn on your own I find it fascinating when people start bragging about all of the educational opportunities they avoided.

Youre underestimating the value of a college degree. Research like [1] shows that degree holders have significantly more lifetime earnings than high school. You also miss how the democratization of education has benefited our society and helped lift millions out of subsistence lifestyles and class lock-in.

"This world needs a lot more new plumbers than new liberal arts majors"

This is a completely subjective and politically charged statement. I think the world needs more informed and educated critical thinkers. Its curious how the 90s led to a collapse in liberal arts departments and enrollments, and 20 years later we're now in an era of disinformation at massive scale.

1. https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/research-summaries/education...

Many in the tech community turn exclusively to technology to solve every problem. It doesn’t occur to such people that e.g. sociologists, who study problems of society as a discipline, have any answers whatsoever to our problems as a society. To them, sociology is just another useless liberal arts degree without job prospects.

In my opinion, if we listened to more socieologists instead of the Zuckerbergs and Bezoses of the world, we’d be much better off as a country.

But I did listen to sociologists when I took a distribution requirement in college. I'll never do it again. It was 80% totally obvious facts about human behavior that don't need to be taught and 20% totally contrived BS. No science going on there.

So you took 1 intro class into a subject and determined the entire field is worthless? Do you apply this decision-making process to other aspects of your life?

Also, not a lot of actual "science" going on in Computer Science departments (meaning following the scientific method in the course of conducting research, as opposed to "here is a thing I built, isn't it neat?"), but that doesn't stop tech-inclined people from joining in droves. So I'm not sure what the "no science going on" criticism means. It's not like the scientific process is used when deploying technology solutions to problems. We just say "Here's a thing! Let's distribute this to as many people as possible!" without any forethought into what consequences will be.

To that last point, from my recollection of the late aughts, early 10s, it was sociologists who first identified that maybe Facebook and Instagram would be bad for society. Turns out they were right. Again.

But this doesn't adjust for intelligence. If employers are just using the degree as a proxy for a base level of intelligence (and they really are, also class) then you would see tremendous value by this measure. But really that would be 100% waste, because you could do the same thing in an hour with an IQ test that is currently being done with 4 years of college. The tech industry basically does this now with algorithm problems. Google DGAF if you have a degree if you can memorize a bunch of algorithms.

> You[']re underestimating the value of a college degree

Tony Blair's university pledge has failed, says his son

"Tony Blair's landmark target for half of school leavers to attend university is no longer fit for purpose, his son has said – claiming that the former prime minister agrees with him [..] critics have argued that it encouraged an unhealthy focus on higher education which led to a proliferation of pointless "Mickey Mouse" degrees and lured undergraduates into racking up large debts without a meaningful increase in their salary prospects."

If this is the problem in the UK where education is cheap, it is even more of a problem in the USA.

I found college had a net positive effect on me. It gave me a great deal of discipline and the helped me develop important critical thinking skills. Though I did a mix of STEM and economics, I can't vouch for other degrees.

Regardless, I disagree that it's a waste of a person's best years. Most work is some variation of drudgery, I think it's great young adults get to spend a few years learning about interesting topics and making new friends.

It'd be nice if America could do that and not saddle these youngsters with crippling debt (as other countries manage to do), but I wouldn't say that feature of the American education system invalidates the basic concept.

The whole "college = liberal arts majors" is a wildly reductive argument and is extremely common among the types that OP is referring to. It's pretty disheartening to see it repeated here.

Do you have any actual numbers on BA vs BC (or BA vs BSc)?

There's value in the arts, but I think it is overrepresented in universities.

> it is overrepresented

Definitely relative to the available jobs in those fields.

Should college primarily function as job training? No, but unfortunately - for what it currently costs - it has to.

> I think it is overrepresented in universities

What would over-represented mean in this case? Here's a graph[1] of bachelors' degrees granted in various fields - the social science are grouped with history and are not particularly popular.

I'm personally somewhat mystified when people talk about degrees like they're ice cream flavors. I've met people with a wide variety of aptitude and interest and energy and while I think that anyone can get any degree, I do think we each individually have proclivities and talents. Even if I wanted to double the number of STEM majors, I suspect that many of the people who have chosen not to be STEM majors did that because they liked their chosen major better.

Edit: For what it is worth, I do think we could use many more people in the trades. I also think that people going to trade school should have the option to get the same "gen ed" college curriculum that people going to college get. It might help the idea that trade work is lesser (which, of course, it is not).

[1] http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cta#4

People who take up STEM, are of course of different type, and for them, surely college is a net benefit. But that kind of people would go to college even 50 or 70 years ago already. All paranormal increase of college admissions in the last decades came from precisely those people who are getting those bullshit degrees just because they are the only ones they can get, and they feel compelled to get some kind of a college degree.

Even STEM degrees could be optimized. Most of what I've learned is not applicable to software dev, but at least some of the classes (like foreign language) were neat, although college classrooms are a suboptimal way to study that.

as a sw dev / sre / engineer with 10+ years of experience, i can say that without a doubt the skills one learns that are not hard STEM courses and programming are 100% useful. i need engineers with critical thinking, a sense of empathy, eloquence, and a host of other social skills that lots of nerds-turned-comp-sci-student lack

Outside of STEM classes, the only thing I learned that was relevant to my career was from my Technical Writing course, where I learned that people in charge can be capricious and screw you over in the process. The teacher didn't like me, so he consistently gave my work mediocre scores and couldn't quantify anything about the work or the scores.

Even some of the STEM classes were a waste of time, especially the Computer Science classes where the professor would grade people on attendance and random minutia.

I ended up just learning computer science on my own off of Wikipedia after I graduated since I couldn't get a decent hardware design job with my Electrical Engineering degree. It only took a couple of months, BTW, to get from the point where I was just playing around with JavaScript to where I could pass a coding interview laden with data structures and algorithms.

If I could go back in time for a day and talk to my former self, I'd tell him to just buy some used physics, math, and computer science textbooks, then spend six months couch surfing, partying, and studying on his own. Then he could go find a CS job and start making money right away

The UK government has taken a different approach to all-out anti-higher-ed. attack: cut 50% of the funding for many university arts courses, while keeping the overall budget fairly flat. In the UK media this is seen as an attack on "lefties", either justified or unwarranted, depending on the outlet.

https://www.designweek.co.uk/issues/19-25-july-2021/funding-...

> makes people waste their best years

What do you mean "waste"? Just that they're building career capital instead of directly earning money? You've got your whole life to work, spending that time learning, meeting new people, and trying new things seems way less "wasteful" than just starting your career 4 years sooner. Plus it gives you time to figure out what you want to do, most 18-year-olds aren't really equipped to decide what they'll want to be doing when they're 50 and the value of starting a career sooner is greatly diminished if you just end up switching careers anyway.

> teaches them mainly, useless stuff

Meh, most knowledge is useless, but it's not always easy to determine which knowledge will be useful in advance. I thought my linguistics class was useless (though interesting) at the time, years later I went into data science, turns out linguistics is pretty important for NLP. Also, I think learning for the sake of learning is a Good Thing, even given that most knowledge is useless.

> barely breaks even in terms of lifetime earnings

Got a source for that? Cause last I checked, holders of even most "useless" degrees out-earn those with just a high school diploma by something like $15k/year, making them well worth it financially unless you pay the sticker price for a private or out-of-state school. For better or worse, there are a ton of decent jobs in the US that just require any college degree.

> and makes people bitter because they feel they are not valued by society the way they believe they should

I haven't seen that at all. I know people who are bitter because they have a ton of student debt and are struggling to pay it off, but I don't know anyone who expects to be put on a pedestal because they have a college degree, if anything they're bitter at their colleges and/or their high school guidance counselors. Also, those people are outliers in terms of their debt levels, the average new college graduate (among those who take out student loans) earns ~$55k and leaves with ~$30k in debt, which is very manageable almost everywhere in the US and probably puts them at a higher income (though with less wealth) than their peers who started plumbing apprenticeships at 18.

> makes people waste their best years

I strongly believe that one's best years can be after college. Our society fetishizes youth too much. I've grown more as a person in the few years following college than I did in the decade prior.

We'd need to significantly improve high schools before considering eliminating college. Let's face it. We can't expect American high schools to teach students anything about the world. We've had schools try to spin the slave trade as sending "workers" to the New World. We've had attempts to show "both sides" of the Holocaust. And yes, college isn't perfect at teaching liberal arts, but it's better than not learning at all.

I don't mean to straw man you, so I'm not implying this is what you said, but a liberal arts education is extremely important! Where else do you learn that racism isn't just slurs, that a bus route can be racist, that a health policy can be racist? Where can you get introduced to writers of color, to works by people from all times and all races? Where can you get an in depth view into how art reflects society and society reflects art?

Even if you don't step into a classroom, college teaches so much by forcing students out of their hometown and out of the communities. One of the biggest issues with racism and discrimination and partisanship is that most people haven't met the other side. College is a way to meet the other side in one's formative years.

I'd argue that college is the single most liberalizing institution in people's lives. No other institution takes students, transports them into a (hopefully) diverse, intellectually stimulating center and teaches them about society.

> spin the slave trade as sending "workers" to the New World

That's not spin. That's exactly what the slave trade was.

I'd firmly disagree. Workers has an implication of voluntary, paid work. There's a reason we have a specific word for unpaid, non-voluntary work. Not to mention slavery extended beyond work. Being a slave was not only backbreaking unpaid labor, but also a whole host of horrors outside work such as rape, family separation, forced breeding, torture, etc. Calling slaves "workers" is a deeply inaccurate categorization.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/06/us/publisher-promises-rev...

I would associate that more with "employee," with "worker" being an umbrella term. Note that "worker" is also used in a bunch of other contexts. Worker bee, worker thread, miracle worker, etc.

Okay but using umbrella terms obscures the crucial aspect of being a slave: non voluntary, unpaid labor. Yes, it is technically correct in an extremely literal sense. But that's not the same as it being the right term in the context of teaching students about the slave trade. If I said "his great grandfather was a worker", it would not imply slavery, indeed most people would assume the opposite connotation, that his great grandfather was a paid worker.

I can't help but feel like you're confusing literal correctness with appropriateness. And while literal correctness is an easier judgement to make, there are many literally correct statements that absolutely miss the point. Saying that slaves were "workers" is one of them.

> It is the society's fault that people feel compelled to go to college

That may be true but the amount of assistance available through student loans and grants enables people to actually go. Without that, the people that feel compelled to go still wouldn't because they simply couldn't afford it.

Higher education in this country is a minefield of unintended consequences.

The very same article I linked to suggests yours is a minority view among those who have attended college:

> When it comes to their own experiences with higher education, an earlier Center survey found that the vast majority of college graduates (from both two- and four-year institutions) say college was useful for them in terms of helping them grow personally and intellectually (62% say it was very useful in this regard, 31% say it was somewhat useful). Large majorities also say it was useful in opening doors to job opportunities (53% say very useful, 29% say somewhat) and in helping them develop specific skills and knowledge that could be used in the workplace (49% very, 35% somewhat).

I think the cost of higher ed is an enormous societal problem which leads some to feel embittered towards the system as a whole for good reason. But it's important to not throw the baby out with the bathwater and to separate the ballooning cost from the education itself.

Worth noting that Ivy League costing hundreds of thousands is quite different from college too. Also, the major matters heavily. In something like computer science, you may be able to get by fine without a degree, but good luck becoming a doctor or lawyer with an online education.

I can find a competent plumber trivially. Hiring white collar jobs are much harder, especially specialized tech work.

I think the anti-college popularity ties directly to the incredible cost of it in the USA, not that its necessarily a bad thing.

> I can find a competent plumber trivially.

You must not live in any major U.S. coastal city. Plumbers and other skilled tradespeople are in extremely high demand right now.

To say nothing of _competent_ ones. It is a great deal of work to find a tradesperson that is 1) available and 2) competent. Unsurprisingly the most available ones seem to be the least competent.

If you look, most trades limit the number of new students they will accept for apprentiship programs. Even if everyone suddenly wanted to be a plumber (or electrictian, etc) they can't get into the programs that will allow them to become certified.

Its not just the trades, in my state, we have had an epidemic of retirements since 2008 for teachers, nurses, and police officers.

yet the programs that are required to get your licenses don't accept any more applicants per year than they did 15 years ago. The gatekeeping has to stop, or at least be increased to allow the market to actually meet demand. But the groups benefiting from that mismatch in demand have no reason to increase capacity.

>> I can find a competent plumber trivially. Hiring white collar jobs are much harder, especially specialized tech work.

This is broadly not true in most US cities. Skilled tradespeople who are insured, licensed, and bonded have major backlogs of work - especially electricians, but also plumbers, carpenters, etc.

But incredible cost is because of the inflated demand. Too many people go to college who don't need it. Reduce demand by, pun intended, educating people that they don't need college unless they can make it to the top, and prices will fall.

Needing it is defined by employers considering them as base qualifications

> I can find a competent plumber trivially.

I kinda doubt this. My mother wanted me to learn plumbing or to become an electrician because they were always in much more demand than supply and can effectively determine their own rates.

Most are self-employed. (UK).

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