I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears
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- teaching marketable skills so people can get jobs
- teaching "how to think" and learning about art and culture
- Performing cutting edge research
- minor league sports teams
If you have a physicist who's at the leading edge of research in their field, you want them doing that research, not teaching 18 year old's Newton's laws of motion. And they're mostly not doing that teaching, that gets farmed out to an adjunct paid starvation wages. So the kid who's paying through the nose to attend a top university with the best researchers doesn't get to interact with them much and gets an inferior education compared to one where they hired and properly compensated someone to actually focus on teaching.
If we want to train people for specific jobs - create institutions that do that. If the upper class want someplace to send their kids to read poetry and binge drink for 4 years before they get a jr. associate position at their Dad's investment bank, create a separate institution for that. Major league sports should create and manage their own feeder leagues to develop players, no reason to cram that into a university. We should create dedicated research institutions so researchers don't have to pretend to care about teaching.
Just so professors dont have to act oblivious as to why students are there, some still revert to “wdym, you should be here for the pursuit of learning”
But there is merit to that, the schools reserved for the upper echelon of society (in terms of most coveted exclusive network and access) have been around for like 300 years, they can weather this several decade long meme of inclusion and the coincidental corporate sector that has people convinced they need degrees to access that (and why expanded audiences want to be included in those school’s admissions to begin with)
“Hey current Dean and former US Treasury Secretary and cabinet member, remember that time when the proletariat was trying to go here? Are those dark ages going to be on the evaluation?”
A year of trade school for some very general health and safety / common sense / anything they missed in high school, then into the workplace to learn from people actually doing the job.
It's pretty unique that the US has the resources for these advances that developed nations have and simply doesn't do them. Part of it is the insular nature of where policy inspiration comes from, it has to be seen as a homegrown original idea, which hampers consensus making because examples of it working elsewhere also aren't accepted.
You left out one item though. The main role US institutions are trying to fill right now is: hire new faculty, have faculty pull in 5+ Million dollar grants in order to get tenure. After tenure, pull in multi-million dollar grants each year.
Teaching? Never heard of it. OH! That thing the actual customers are paying us for... yes, have graduate students or temporary emergency hires do it since all of our "real" faculty are bringing in research dollars.
Choosing to go to a research institution seems like such an obviously poor choice it’s strange people get suckered into it. But it’s clear education is a low priority for both students and collages.
Higher education is very competitive with a wide range of business models. One of them is to have tight collaboration with industry to have undergrad and masters programs around Mining, Manufacturing, Medicine, etc focused on employability. Some are focused on night classes for government employees who get an automatic pay raise with a higher degree irrespective of what it’s in. Others are focused on continuing education requirements.
The high prestige research institutions can be a good fit, but aren’t the only option outside of small liberal arts schools.
The best educations happen in research labs. Undergraduates should get a good foundation years 1 and 2, and then find their way as a junior research assistant years 3 and 4 if they want to make the best of their University years. These days you can follow along with any course you want on YouTube. At University you are paying to get access to top researchers and the work they do.
I'm not necessarily assuming that. I think there seems to be an assumption here that the choice is research or internship, but not both. That is not the case. Students do research with me during a typical semester, and when they are done the school year, they often go and get industry internships over the summer at top companies around the world. We train them to pass the Google-style whiteboard coding interviews; our students are very prepared for those. I don't know of any students who do internships during the school year. Most of my students who do research with me do not go on to do graduate studies.
maybe if you're the kind of undergrad that has a good shot at google straight out of college, this doesn't make as much sense. I guess if you do two summer internships at FAANGs, you already look really good and may as well diversify your experience. my guess is that does not apply to the vast majority of cs majors that are just in it to get a decent job.
I'll have to defer to your experience on undergrad research though. what do you see as the value add from doing research as a student who has no intention of continuing school after undergrad?
There’s this unfortunate idea that tests are there for the school rather than the student. Avoiding misunderstanding is critical and getting something wrong is one way to discover them. But that’s really inefficient, the basic question and answers with a professor are why your not simply reading from a textbook or watching a YouTube video.
That said, if you went to a horrible collage I can see why you would think YouTube was just as good and doing research was the real secret to learning.
> If you are doing research you have to be up to date or you don't get things published.
Only within the boundaries of your particular field of study, which in most cases is far narrower than the scope of undergrad classes.
Most of the actual work is done by trainees who are a) learning how to do <cutting-edge thing> for the first time and b) may never actually do it again because they're going to move onto something else. The profs are, at best, managing them and even that's often a bit iffy.
Everybody's obviously got to learn somewhere, but universities and research funders are oddly weird about experience and expertise.
In his words, "Why would I not? They did most of the work."
- Enterprise sales rep with a $500k-$1M annual quota (aka grants).
- R&D manager of a team comprised almost entirely of junior employees
- Lecturer and administration for teaching.
- Administrator & volunteer within the department, chair roles for key academic conferences, and editor on major journals -- all to check the "service" box for tenure.
- Because they aren't a proper CEO, they don't even have the ability to push back on obscene G&A costs (ie 50%+ of grant contracts going to university overhead!).
It's a labor of love (esp in STEM!), and I feel bad that many are caught in this morass.
- getting paid below (barely above if you are lucky) 6 figures
- requires 3+ years of postdoc training which paid even worse
This is why a lot of grants are made in-kind rather than in cash. Give the research $750K in equipment instead of $1M in cash where the university pockets $500k of it.
Also, expressly, large capital expenditures like equipment are exempt from indirect costs at most universities.
HN's notion of how universities work is probably about as accurate as my notions of how VC funding works.
In my experience, in-kind grants mostly occur when the "giver" has/gets the "gift" cheaply. For example, NVIDIA gave out tons of graphics cards, but they certainly don't pay full retail for their own product. This lets them give you a grant "worth" $5k, but costs them substantially less. Ditto pharma companies, which may not even sell the thing given.
It seems clever to give the funder a shopping list, and then get an "in-kind" grant for exactly what you want. However, many places will waive/reduce indirect costs on equipment (which, per the NIH is $5000 and lasts for >1 year).
This is inaccurate. That would be 100% overhead, which is vanishingly rare (I've only encountered one institution above that rate, and they have to maintain research ships).
50% overhead means that the indirect costs of a grant are 50% of the direct costs, i.e. 1/3rd of the total grant. Notably, a lot of grant mechanisms (i.e. NIH R01s) are discussed at the direct cost rate, instead of the totals, so this doesn't "sting" nearly as badly as you all seem to think it does.
Additionally:
- I've seen private industry overhead rates. They're not lower. Indeed, many of them are quite a bit higher.
- A funder can specify a cap on overhead costs, and as long as that's public and known, every university I've ever been at has accepted it. The Gates Foundation is notorious for this, as are most charities. Hell, I had a grant from Merck that didn't pay "full freight".
- We push back on overhead costs all the time. Faculty are wily creatures. We have lots of ways.
That might be fine except then it leads to massive distortion in incentives, so faculty are being driven to bring in money rather than do research per se.
It's kinda like the classic stereotype of a drug company not putting any RD money into something where they can't control the profit, despite efficacy, only now you're talking about this happening at a nonprofit that's supposed to be committed to research for its own sake.
I am faculty, and while yes, we are incentivized to bring in money, we also have output too. And believe me, when talking to funders, "gee, I didn't do any work because I was bringing in more grants" is a pretty dangerous strategy.
Indirects also cover important things. On my current grants, the following are covered by indirect costs, just as examples.
- The data center and networking infrastructure where my particular nodes on our cluster live.
- My actual office, including things like the facilities folks that keep it clean, lighting and heating, IT infrastructure again, as well as things like paper for the printer because I prefer to read on actual paper.
- The library and journal subscriptions that provide me the material I actually need to read.
- The admins who are helping shepherd a position I'm hiring for through the process of doing that, posting the position descriptions on the relevant sites, etc. The one who put in a bunch of orders for me for an international project where it's cheaper to buy the stuff here, set it up, and then carry it with me than it is to get it there. The one who knows the reporting requirements I don't. The IRB admin who helped us figure out some human subjects issues around doing research that involves university employees in their capacity as employees. The admin that helped me actually prepare and submit the proposal.
- The attorney that helped review and sort out several fairly complex agreements, as well as a whole host of fairly simple ones that still needed to be checked.
- The senior level administrator (the usual boogeyman in these things) who is spearheading an effort to consolidate several of individual-level efforts into something that's coherent at the university level, so we can actually act on things that don't require individual-level researchers like me to have the bandwidth to keep a relationship alive, and which persists past turnover either at the university or the organizations we are working with.
- The startup funding for a new disease ecologist before I can put them on some new grants.
All of these help propel my research forward. My indirects pay for my share of these people's time and expertise. And importantly, they help cover things that I can't foresee, or are enough layers of removed from me that I don't even really know who we're paying as much as "This thing gets done".
Is there waste in our indirects? Sure. There's waste everywhere. But it's both hardly the terribly oppressive burden HN seems to think it is (even leaving aside that HN consistently does the math wrong) and something that exists in industry as well - it's just hidden in the total price.
Incidentally, my institution is also perfectly happy to just quote folks a fully burdened price.
What happens when we don't charge full indirect costs?
The taxpayers of my state end up making up the difference, because the lights, and the reporting bits, and the IRB, etc. still have to exist to get the work done. And for some projects one might be able to justify that, but for some others (waves at industry) I have a problem with it.
However...that's not at all a good representation of the rest of the university. Maybe the very best research universities don't care about teaching. There aren't many though if you're not in a grant field.
> That thing the actual customers are paying us for
If you're in a grant field, the grant agency is the customer, not the students. Teaching is something you do on the side. And not very much compared to non-grant fields.
Indeed, "The student is the customer" is the source of a lot of really pretty flawed reasoning about how universities can and should work, including things like "Am I obligated to pass you because you really, really want to go to med school?"
This view is starting to become outdated. Plenty of schools now have a role known as "Teaching Professor" that focuses on teaching, with no research expectation. They have all the same qualifications as any faculty hired for the role, like a Ph.D. in the field. At UPenn at least they can even get tenure.
Hard Money: University-level funds (from the university, the state if a state school, etc.) provide a portion of your salary that doesn't have to be tied to a grant. This often comes with other obligations (i.e. teaching).
Most positions are a mix of the two in some form. Purely soft money positions, or >50% soft money positions, are common at some research institutes, medical schools, etc. Hard money positions that don't come with substantial non-research obligations are very rare.
I don't think the fact that they were making money on either was what surprised me or anyone else, but that they were making money on all of them at the same time.
Apparently that building is still standing, 20 years later, though I don't know who is using it now.
A friend of mine got on it after tenure (art school) because he could finance cool projects of his own design that way.
But even in a research university isn’t tenure supposed to protect you from being pushed around by the administration?
The publicly listed listed salaries are the 9-month salaries, so faculty pay isn't quite as bad as it looks at first glance. If you have funding, most grants also REQUIRE the professor to take salary money from it, otherwise they assume you aren't actually putting in any effort on that funded project.
If you were a student (or the parent of a student) looking to advance in your field, and you had the choice, would you choose Harvard or say a local community college trade school? It's easy to make massive sweeping sociological choices for the public without considering that you yourself would not make that choice. Obviously, multiply your preferences times every student in the field.
If you want to say there's a funding crisis and you want to deal with that funding crisis in some other way, then yes, I agree.
Also, I don't personally care for sports. I still think they have a place at a University, just not to the extent that they're funded. If independent undergraduate research projects were awarded (and advertised!) with the same funding as sports teams and sports teams had their funding lowered, I think that might be interesting. Incubator lab competitions in science research projects that would have the results published in journals. Start up accelerators with paid promotions etc etc.
How else to organize the budget at universities I don't know how to speculate. It means that with a finite amount of money some resource is getting cut somewhere and someone else is having an increase in endowment which gets super political. I'm also not necessarily sure that cutting liberal arts is a good idea. Many of the people I went to school with (at least one I helped pass advanced maths...) spent the majority of their time drinking and ended up working in investment banks. Forcing them to read a little poetry or sit through a lecture or two on a few sociology courses is maybe a good idea so that when they're out there ruling the (financial) universe they have a bit of awareness of the way the rest live.
My thoughts for what they're worth.
IMO we don't really need the best and brightest minds to teach undergraduate level classes, most of the contents are not really that cutting edge and can probably be standardized. We want to best minds to teach, but I think they should teach research students rather than large classes.
> the lower tier schools will attract only those teachers who are more interested in pedagogy than the subject, or who themselves are not as qualified.
Sounds better than lower tier schools attracting teachers who are not interested in teaching at all... The current system mainly considers research output, so schools trying to increase their competitiveness will push the professors to spend more time on research and less time on teaching. Teachers who are very qualified in teaching might not be able to spend much time in teaching at all.
Politicians answer to this crisis of rapaciousness is to suggest that the public should pay the ever escalating costs while suggesting nothing to rein in their growth. This suggests that the politicians have been captured in some way.
To that end, a quick google search yields an article that gives a good set of reasons a think-tank that studied the problem found as a set of causes. This is the first result of googling "what caused the student debt crisis":
https://www.businessinsider.com/why-is-the-student-debt-cris...
Now those four items ARE things that have changed between now and then. Generally, the decline state funding of schools means unis now fund themselves by relying on tuition that students do not feel as a cost (at least immediately) because the federal government can give out loans like candy.
Again people, please please please don't just conjure up ideas in your head and think you understand the causes in the world that explain how everything works. You would not apply this line of thinking to your own job you are paid for, people have studied these things and generally it is understood why the debt crisis exists, it isn't a mystery!
Colleges were captured by professional administrators. That’s what’s changed, and the results are entirely predictable.
See, also, hospitals.
As another example, we have a bunch of internal grants. It's basically free money that you can apply for to do whatever you want with it, to the tune of 10s of thousands. We need to pay administrators to handle that whole process. It's a lot of money to handle and it's not a cheap process to administer these grants. We could cut them and it would shrink the budget, but it would also stop the flow of early-stage ideas from forming that later turn into huge grants. If I have an idea that might cost like $10k, I can whip up a proposal and get funding for that lickity split, without having to go to the NSF or some other external agency. Then when the idea is more mature I can go and get external funding. If you cut the administrators just looking at a budget, you're really cutting research without realizing it.
I mean, running a University is basically like running a city. You have all the same concerns: infrastructure, food, security, a citizenry, political struggles, etc. You need a government (administrators) to do that kind of work that keeps this huge system running. Yes bureaucracies are expensive and inefficient, and sure there are of course things that could be cut, but by and large the University I work at gets the job done. Day in and day out for 10s of thousands of students. That machine doesn't just happen, it's administrators keeping it running.
The students get their piece of paper that employers use as a free-to-them proxy for intelligence and diligence. I won’t cry at all when this exploitative business model is disrupted and lots of administrators have to find honest work.
Meanwhile, states have pulled back or failed to increase university funding, and the universities fill the gap with greater tuition. Here's the story+graph for the University of California system: https://accountability.universityofcalifornia.edu/2015/chapt... This is the GP's point, and completely spot on.
It is also true that there are more MBA's in the admin buildings and that they suck, and are likely paid more than they should be. But while I think it /is/ a factor, it's likely not the biggest bottleneck.
If this is the primary factor we should expect student debt load for private school graduates to have grown much more slowly than for public school graduates, right?
It may be that the increasing admin staff has taken advantage of this situation more ruthlessly than good communist professor admins would have,
Why are we giving non profit tax benefits to profit maximizers?
This is, as I understand it, correct. Administrators as a percentage of university staff has ballooned. The explanation I've seen for this is that they are needed to handle ever increasing amounts of regulations. This is the same problem faced by hospitals.
I’m cynical about this. “These damn regulations! It would be so much better for us… I mean for the public… if we could get rid of them.”
Too simplistic and too much incentive to blame regulations. No doubt it’s a burden, and some regulations are overzealous and misguided, but there’s probably more to it.
It’s a significant burden to the chemical factory when you make it illegal for them to dump their waste in the river (greed bad!). It’s also a burden to society because now we have to police their douchebaggery. Then there’s the (inevitable) chance that this policing is corrupted or becomes inefficient (regulations bad!). Probably a flawed analogy, but it’s what I think of whenever there’s an argument for or against regulation.
As an exercise, I sat down one day and listed the administrators that if I was suddenly president of my university should begin considering updating their resumes. Each one was a problem as a person, but the position was one I would want refilled - indeed, at least one of them was currently running a badly understaffed office.
Even into the 1980s buildings were simple brutalist concrete dungeons and A/C was not an expectation; there was no campus IT; no plethora of career placement systems; counseling office; Title IX compliance office; free medical clinics; fancy rec centers, and numerous other amenities.
And that's the problem! Go for a haircut and you can see the effect on a micro scale. Hair salons and barbershops have remained almost entirely unchanged for decades, yet the price of a haircut has skyrocketed. Why is that? Because you wouldn't be able to hire any hairdressers at $2/hour. Haircuts are more expensive because hairdressers need more money to live. Rent has gotten more expensive for hairdressers, just as it has for everyone else.
Increases in productivity due to automation have generated vast amounts of new wealth. It's the overall increase in wealth which has driven up real estate prices and the cost of rent. Replace the hairdresser in the above example with a doctor or a lecturer and the situation remains the same. The services of these jobs/professions have become dramatically more expensive because:
a) They cannot be automated to achieve the productivity gains seen in other sectors.
b) If wages in these sectors were to remain flat then they would see an exodus of workers to other sectors.
c) Some costs in life, such as shelter, are fixed by the availability of land. Land is finite but the demand for land continues to grow. This issue has been discussed extensively here on HN but all of the solutions I've seen are temporary. Ultimately, we could turn the entire planet into Coruscant and we would still see rent prices going up!
State school tuition cost have crushed the general level of inflation increases because it is easy money for the state and there is no state that does not love extra money to spend.
1) the staff to student ratio is going up
2) average pay for instructional staff is falling on an inflation adjusted basis
Also, unlike a haircut or knee surgery there’s no reason to believe that education should be difficult to automate if it were actually education that was being sold.
In 2008, state funding dried up, and has not returned, even in places with booming economies.
Federal funding via research grants has been, at best, flat over the same time period.
That leaves only one dial left to universities.
Agreed. See the recent UCLA TA position opening. The unpaid position.
I don’t know where you got the idea that learning about “art” is an essential job of college. I wish it were, but it’s not. And I agree that college sports are too big of their own business.
Fundamentally you cannot “train” people for jobs that don’t exist yet. I went to college only 2 decades ago and nothing remotely like my job existed at the time.
You can educate people in college though, and that is what is required to keep our society moving forward. (And prevent it from sliding backward.)
I've heard this phrase multiple times before... and yet, doctors have been studying bio, lawyers studying laws/cases, and engineers math - for hundreds of years. I don't want someone who did 4 years of philosophy and knows how to think deeply about things performing my heart surgery.
The first three bullet points are not the same thing partly because one of those bullet points specifically addresses job training, and one addresses "how to think". You're right that knowing how to think is important, but acting like hard skills don't exist is taking things too far imo.
a) you’re not getting that, if you know anything about med school admissions and b) why not? This is such a reductivist view of knowledge and talent.
To put it another way, if the university system was a public company, there would be activist shareholders advocating that the company be split. Each of these entities would perform better without the distractions of the others.
One problem with splitting, is that each sub-system has become somewhat parasitic on the other three to a harmful degree, as you hint at. The particular blend depends on the university. For example, NCAA division III teams would not survive without the subsidies of a university. But maybe they shouldn't?
As is the "4 year college experience" nonsense that has students travelling "away from home for the first time".
It's entirely a US-based dysfunctional system.
The problem with tertiary education is that it is now considered "necessary" for most employment, so therefore what used to be research institutions are now considered just an extension of secondary education.
But at the same time, the research aspect of university, being a repository of knowledge and of learning has been reduced by academic beancounters to literally counting names on papers in journals.
Tertiary undergraduate degrees are entirely vocational and should be taught that way. No one expects senior high school teachers to also "publish or perish" or be responsible for bringing grants and income into the high school.
If I'm hiring someone in my field (IT) I literally don't care if they have done a post graduate degree. Completing an MSc or PhD or equivalent adds nothing to the characteristics I want in an IT employee.
The same applies to pharmacists, engineers, doctors, lawyers, art curators, librarians, accountants, marketers, etc, etc. They are all vocations and require the same sort of training structure that applies to plumbers and electricians and plasterers and roof installers.
If someone wants to be a physicist or chemist, or a computer scientist, or a mathematician, or an art historian, or other actual "liberal arts and sciences" role, then that should be an undergraduate degree in "researcher" along with the fundamentals of their chosen art/science field.
And to get back to the original point about college sports, if someone wants to be a professional sportsperson, then that is again a vocational degree with a specialization.
> If the upper class want someplace to send their kids to read poetry and binge drink for 4 years
Is the heart of the problem. For a long time, this was basically the core function of universities - to make people part of the elite. We told ourselves that it was actually about the things being taught rather than social connections. Maybe to a certain extent it even was.
But then, operating on that assumption, we say, what gives these people the right to be elites? Let's make it more accessible! Send anyone who's smart enough and can afford it to school.
We do that. And many of them do go on to get better and higher-paying jobs. To some extent, society creates more jobs for them to do, and to some extent, existing jobs get education inflation, requiring advanced degrees for no real reason.
But why stop there? This is biased against the people who can't afford it. Let's create a ton of scholarships and student loan programs to make it more affordable so more people go. This kind of works, and kind of increases the prices even more (due to bad design of the loan system) and increases education inflation some too.
We've already made it so attractive, might as well tell all high school students that they're failures if they don't go to college, even if it really isn't for them. Tell 'em that so hard that the blue-collar jobs we do still need start to have trouble getting employees and sometimes actually increase in wage past the point of some degree-requiring jobs.
The way the whole financing of the system works makes the whole thing a huge money-pit too, which helps it keep absorbing more functions.
It sure feels like the whole system has gone crazy and needs some major reworking. I'm not sure what the new healthier system would look like or how we transition to it, but something needs to happen. Sorry, not everyone can be the elite. We should stop telling people that they're a failure in life if they don't join the elite and stop making them perform signs of elite status, like degrees at high-ranked universities, to get jobs that ultimately aren't all that important.
I find your last paragraph a bit troubling, I agree that becoming a part of the elite does not really have a significance with regards to your own worth. But the USA is not a country that revolves around the middle class, its a country that revolves around the elites. In America not being part of the elite is a failure because the political and economical system is made to benefit, empower and sustain elites. Becoming part of the elite is a very good way of sustaining your family and the future family of your family for generations to come. Look at the downward versus upward mobility! To pretend like there is a social class that just isn't for everyone is extremely offensive; everyone should have the same chance. Not everyone can be the best, but everyone who wants to should have a fair shot at it and universities and education as a whole is the best way we have to pave the way.
In Europe, in most countries, universities are accessible to all and they do have some excellent institutions. But not only that, children of all social classes go to the same schools (yes you do have mega elites but I'm talking here about the vast majority of the population) on the other hand compare that to america where children go to school that depends on their location and where you have an incredible disparity between where the poor and where the rich live. How could you say "not everyone can be part of the elite" when being part of the elite is already largely determined on the area you were born in!
I think the US education system needs a complete reform and so much has to change, but really, if youre a politician and you are part of the elite what incentive do you have to make things harder for you and your class? Your kid is going to a top high school then its going to go to a top university. And their kids will do the same if you keep things the way they are.
Status and class in the US blows. It doesn’t seem to be much different in Europe either.
The premise is faulty from the onset. Most ‘top’ European schools are mediocre outside of liberal arts degrees.
Truth is the education quality doesn't correlate that strongly with "top" University ranking; at above top X ranked university, or top university in respective country, the quality of education is mostly the same. The difference in the ranking only really reflects the research output/opportunities and networking opportunities.
This becomes so glaringly clear as soon as you start being the interviewing side of the job.
European elites seems to not go to US top universities either; top talent (in intelligence) from upper middle class and above, maybe. But there's more to gain networking in their own countries top universities than abroad. (hence the exchange year system for that)
I think the point of the top level comment here is exactly what you've said and additionally that the networking opportunities are actually what matter for success.
But it is RWTH
I went there because it was supposed to be the best university in my state. But it did not help my career at all
I should have tried to get into a US university
Education is good, but it should be as cheap and simple as possible. Putting it in universities that cost more than the per-capita GDP to attend is about as far from that as it gets. If we take that system and call it a "human right" and get the Government directly involved in paying for it, we're only making it worse by institutionalizing all of the bad practices that make it so insanely expensive, making it even more difficult to ever change and effectively extracting even more money from the people who don't use it.
Education is also not for everyone, and not at every time. People should pursue it because they actually want it, not because they perceive or are told they need it to succeed in life. We shouldn't tell kids they're destined for failure if they don't go to college, shouldn't shame people for being interested in jobs that don't need college, and shouldn't require college degrees for jobs that don't actually need it.
All rights require active participation of others to provide. Negative rights such as the right to live and the right to have property don't exist by default. They only become real if the society spends sufficient effort to prevent people from killing and stealing.
Human rights are aspirational. They are not rights people already have but rights people should have. They are the desired outcomes in an ideal society.
What we do with positive rights is bundle them up into government provided services, so the load gets distributed evenly through society. These tend to work well, at least in Europe. I really can't understand the US view that anything that is state-provided is inefficient.
First, by definition, not everyone can be elite. Hell, you can't even get more than 50% of the population to be better than average! -- its math.
And if "In America not being part of the elite is a failure because the political and economical system is made to benefit, empower and sustain elites." is true (which seems likely), then maybe that is what needs to change.
A good step would be as you suggest, to start to massively invest in education and childhood health.
That's quite a fantasy - many people in Europe who can, enlist their kids in private schools because they don't want them to go to integrated schools. Why? Because in cities like Amsterdam integrated schools usually have a big amount of children of immigrants who are poorer and harder to teach. So the teachers who go there are also oftentimes not the best (since the best teachers go to private schools). I'm not saying everyone does this, but it's getting quite common for those who can afford it.
/tinfoilhat mode off.
"To the university of Oxford I acknowledge no obligation; and she will as cheerfully renounce me for a son, as I am willing to disclaim her for a mother. I spent fourteen months at Magdalen College; they proved the fourteen months the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life...
In the university of Oxford, the greater part of the public professors have for these many years given up altogether even the pretence of teaching.
As a gentleman commoner, I was admitted to the society of the fellows, and fondly expected that some questions of literature would be the amusing and instructive topics of their discourse. Their conversation stagnated in a round of college business, Tory politics, personal anecdotes, and private scandal...The names of Wenman and Dashwood were more frequently pronounced, than those of Cicero and Chrysostom."
(Not saying we suceed but we try almost because we don’t have a choice)
Wrong.
“I disgree. People at the cutting edge should be educating others both to help them make their ideas accessible and connect them with the future of their discipline.”
I encourage you to add more than a single word to the conversation.
I was writing for people such as you. As for the rest? Well anyone who can’t make such a trivial inference obviously has nothing interesting to say about didactic methods.
At the time, I was struggling to keep up with the marking demands of a new (i.e. This was the first year it was taught) course I was TA'ing. I had around a hundred students and each one was generating 10-20 pages of handwritten lab reports per week. Student writing varied from human typewriter to medical prescription from a meth-addicted doctor. I tried to grade everything fairly and provide feedback about mistakes so students could learn.
My fellow TA's complained to the department that we were well over the hours we were supposed to be spending by a factor of at least 3. We were told to do less. Just to be clear, I wasn't worried about how much I was being paid. The problem was that I had my own research and coursework to do. We simply needed more TA's in that course due to the way lab assignments were designed. The prof teaching the course was apologetic and furnished me with the above quote.
This is teaching at a research focused university in a nutshell. There is no shortage of people who want to do a good job teaching, but the system is designed to force them to spend their time on other things.
Why is an institution of higher learning so hostile to those who want to put an honest effort into teaching? Just as nobody has ever won a Nobel prize for having happy students, no research focused university ranks well if they aren't churning out a lot of papers. Teaching competes with that priority.
If we want better educational outcomes for students, we need to do a better job of aligning the incentives governing universities with that goal.
My first semester teaching a lab I was told "No one is remembered for being a good TA" and encouraged to do the absolute bare minimum to get paid so that I could focus on research.
They said no program wants to hear how I want to teach and that absolutely no one will hire me, then I won’t get published, and I’ll end up (if I’m lucky!) teaching at an expensive boarding school in a place I don’t get to choose.
I’m not saying I would’ve gotten into even a decent program. Hell I may have been a mediocre at best teacher. But it never felt right to me that teaching at colleges isn’t a viable career path. It was so odd to learn that my dream was simply not allowed, especially when it seemed so reasonable.
My work has always had me “tech-adjacent.” Especially the way I operate. It’s kind of hard to explain in solid terms but yeah, a few years ago I found myself here and I’ve liked it ever since. A lot of the stuff is over my head, but that’s where I learn best. You never know where you’re going to find relevant information from seemingly irrelevant posts.
HN is also great for some of my hobbies. I like messing with computers, video games, modding, etc. and love reading about other hobbies and sub cultures. Also get a lot of great tech history content here.
I got an Associate's degree at a community college, and one of the most refreshing things about it was how un-focused the professors were on research. Teaching was their Number One, and I attribute much of my overall enjoyment to their attitudes.
I then transferred to a 4-year school and received my Bachelor's in two years. The professors at this university did research, but they were also committed to teaching and interpersonal relationships with students. I'd been given the option to transfer to a large (40k+ university), and although it was more well-known I knew that I'd be in gigantic class sizes with research-heavy instructors.
IME many aren't technically professors either, instead they're instructors. It's a weird distinction but academics huff and puff about it a lot.
These institutions are usually on the small side and don’t make money in grants because they don’t do research, so they don’t spend millions in advertising or in sending out interviewers to thousands of high schools. So there’s a good chance you’ve never heard of even the ones you live near to.
These schools tend to produce both better experiences (less reliance on the painful “weed-out course” degree plan architecture of huge school) and somewhat better outcomes. I will almost certainly be sending my kids to be PUI and not a megaversity when they’re older.
The two I can think of are Harvey Mudd and Rose Hulman.
Disclosure: my alma mater is on that list.
Loyola Marymount University, in LA, fits the description. The STEM program wasn't the most competitive out there (but that's in comparison to nearby schools like UCLA, Cal Poly, etc), but the teaching quality was top-notch and there was a pretty direct pipeline from the engineering school to the big aerospace/defense contractors in the surrounding area.
I don't know anybody from any of my programs who isn't either gainfully employed in their field of study, or at some competitive grad school, and we graduated in the middle of COVID.
Of course it seems to be in a competition with USC to be the most expensive stickerprice university in the country, but the dirty little secret of private schools is that almost no one pays that price. To keep diversity up they shower disadvantaged students with scholarships, to keep academic standards up they shower academically competitive students with scholarships, and that's all paid for by charging the obscenely rich an elevated tuition, who in exchange are put in a situation where they're rubbing shoulders with a mix of talented students and a much higher than average concentration of other rich kids, leading to networking opportunities for everyone involved.
This is related to the HN person yesterday asking whether going $180K in debt for MIT would be worth it?
They introduced this well after I graduated but I did take classes with some professors who became teaching professors. They were research professors when I took them.
I found the experienced professors competent even if some were uninspired. On the other hand, I generally had negative experiences with the graduate assistants and new professors.
The graduate students and new professors didn't know the material as well and didn't have much experience teaching. The older professors mostly knew the material much better and had an established process.
I had Stuart Russell, Raimund Seidel, Randy Katz, John Wawryznek, and others.
I also had a math class taught by a well meaning fresh professor. It was on the fast Fourier transform and related techniques leading to it. Great topic choice but very awkwardly and confusingly taught. It is actually hugely relevant to video compression and decompression.
It's all about the money.
If you study for a PhD in the UK then the academic and research work is what you are there for and all that you do. And that means you get it done in much less time.
Light data for this: freshman admissions, at least within the state of Georgia, commonly have exemptions made for athletes: https://investigations.ajc.com/football-admissions/
It is similar to how when growing crops, like wheat, you should take the best of your harvest and use it for seed. Historically that is one of the most important and also one of the hardest things to teach farmers.
+ Many of the greats have loved teaching and benefited from the process. E.g. Richard Feynman, etc...
Teaching undergraduates is easily accomplished by another not working on research imho.
They should be teaching a few grad students.
Come on. Most professors are not Feynman. This is exactly the problem if anything.
If you split these two - say, had a national assessment and credentialing program that didn't require a college education - I bet most students would find much cheaper, better, and quicker ways to learn than college.
They focused on providing high equality undergraduate education.
No sports, research requirements, etc.
They found they could easily recruit junior faculty, but as the faculty got experience, they “cashed out” for a better position.
The “standard model” is hard to deviate from. Some schools do it, but it requires a large endowment, and there’s a gravitational pull towards sports teams and research grants.
Collegiate athletics emerged as lucrative entertainment, over decades. It's not as if they established sports teams originally in order to make money or to become training ground for pro teams. And good luck getting them to forfeit this willingly.
A minor league could show up to compete, but would it offer athletes an opportunity for a rite of passage too? And could it offer a hedge for the athletes who don't graduate to higher pro leagues? IMO baseball is probably a good place to look for answers because it has both a minor pro league and NCAA "student-athletes". Ice hockey, too, IIRC.
The professionalization of sports is a short history. And college sports becoming the huge media sensation it is today also a recent phenomenon.
Also, Baseball being the outlier to Football/Basketball when it comes to collegiate leagues probably comes from its very early professionalization relative to the latter two.
Could a single team in other sports go against all the rest in modern times? I highly doubt it.
PS - Rickey was passionate about collegiate sports and the role they played on campuses.
This is partially true. Most Americans still go the NCAA route the typical Canadian route being the CHL, for 16-20 year olds. Europeans follow a model similar to European soccer leagues.
The CHL offers a year of college scholarship for each year played in the league. I think it's only for the national schools, I'm not exactly sure.
- teaching marketable skills so people can get jobs
- teaching "how to think" and learning about art and culture
is part of the problem. When you go back and look at many of science and philosophy’s “greatest,” they were almost always deeply curious and inquisitive people and interested in many things, not just what they are known for now. They read other “greats” and were well-balanced intellectually.
I think a problem now is we are producing unbalanced minds, the equivalent of a bodybuilder who skips leg day, every day. Perhaps there is some something to be said about encouraging a diversity of thought, people who read poetry as you say. It is likely no coincidence that genuine genius is extremely divergent and radical in thought, likely not someone who learns physics and only physics with no other interests.
There is a really good chance they would be lured away to Wallstreet to work at a hedge fund or Silicon Valley to work on the latest CRUD application.
Especially Einstein. There is no way he would have ever been a clerk today. He would be doing something that Physics would be a massive pay cut.
I don't think the point is that these people don't exist today but the point is that people of this level can make so much more money than doing physics. It wasn't that long ago that a University Professor was a high end job that a person could afford a second vacation home and a ton of status came along with the position.
Well, part of the value of an institution like Harvard is that it connects those two groups of people. Wickliffe IV gets to meet Noah or Kumar or Xiao who got 1600s on their SAT and recommends them to his dad for positions at his investment bank.
Of course, the ever-growing expense of all the pomp and palaces will eventually bankrupt the whole system - just as the expense of the French King's court at Versailles eventually lead to the French Revolution.
From Indian perspective I see this part broken big time as well.
It takes 4 years to graduate with an engineering degree where as the core content could very well be taught well under 2 years.
The first year is common across all streams; so one is taught workshop/welding, workings of ICE and what not. 3rd semester the specialisation topics are gingerly introduced with heavy emphasis on adjacent courses (e.g., CS students are taught analogue electronics). Heavy duty math is taught for 4 semesters (PDE, Laplace transforms and what not). Only from 5th semester do the stream-specific topics start in full earnest. Then there are some fluffy courses which don't make any sense if one doesn't have experience working in as a s/w engineer; OOPs, Software Engineering.
What's worse, the syllabus has only been slightly tweaked for last 50 years or so.
I say this as a software engineer professional of 15+ years; I've had to use less than 15% of what I learnt in those 4 years. It's such a waste of precious time. Engineering education needs to radically change in India. Something similar to trade-school in Germany? Part time theory, part time working/interning under professionals? Even that shouldn't be more 2.5 years IMO.
You forgot the most important one for companies: use college or the preference for "ivy league" institutions which is on its own a neutral requirement as a proxy to weed out "undesirables" without violating the ADA and other laws: people with mental health issues and many physical disabilities don't stand a chance for the top grades, as do people from poor financial background.
It's all about keeping "corporate culture" aka White, rich and able. Anyone else is left for the bottom jobs of society.
What world are you living? Colleges and "Corporate culture" these days are all about opposing "whiteness."
In reality?! Just look at the C and VP level of most large companies. Old white men galore [1] [2], and lower management and the drones aren't much better. And by the time a woman takes the helm, the company has often been run into the ground so hard that the board can't find another man willing to risk his reputation.
To make it worse, during the 'rona female representation at C-level actually fell [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_women_CEOs_of_Fortune_...
[2] https://cooleypubco.com/2021/06/09/board-diversity-fortune-5...
[3] https://www.channelpartnerinsight.com/news/4045218/fewer-wom...
If they don't solve these things, then yeah you might see lower admission rates + quality of students' work.
That depends. Fundamental research is a tiny field and prodigies should perhaps stay there. But otherwise you want the best of the best to educate the next generation as a general rule. Their task is vastly more complex as to convey the plain material. That teachers have such a low regard is indicative of a highly anti-intellectual position, which of course makes the job fairly unattractive for anyone talented.
To supply researchers with resources that their work is not inhibited is often a logistically trivial problem, especially in modern times. So research and education can and should remain intertwined for the most part. Progress is about the pipeline too.
It's all fever dream of Utopia that made sense to post war boomers with good intentions but now the execution spirals out of control. Maybe a car or a degree or a suburban home is right for some people, but as a one size fits all solution that is indoctrinated since birth and in some cases part of peoples identity, it becomes absurd.
College will continue because we will remain irrational about these 3 things much longer than you can remain solvent.
If there's one domino that should fall first, it's the student-athlete one.
It's the easiest one to break away (relative to everything else) and should be the cleanest too.
Sports teams in theory pay for themselves with revenue. That's a matter of accounting and debate, but in theory it's just recreation. It's not really a conflict.
Marketable skills vs "how to think" is basically the domain of knowledge you study. Want more skills? pick that major. These can all coexist in the same institution and have for 100s? 1000s? of years.
The issue is the financing, facilities bloat, marketing on the basis of non-academics, inabiility to properly measure academic value, class paranoia, and the rise of the vampire administration class has blown out the cost of a high-reputation degree by a factor of 10.
Universities used to do its core activities/competencies with much less opulent housing, unnecessary buildings, basic auditoriums and rooms, basic labs. I'll put aside research here since grants will fund the facilities they need to do the research. Sports teams should theoretically self-fund their own facilities.
The issue is the bloated cost vs the value of the degree.
What the country needs is high-reputation high-value degrees from very modest/focused institutions. Like military-style boot camps (in terms of austerity, not authoritarianism) where you are focused on the mission of gaining knowledge and not about living in a cool dorm room, watching a good football team, drinking to oblivion. Those are ancillary, they can be there, but they can't be the focus.
That comes down to the institution mission, and selecting students in the right way.
Colleges used to be based on the quality of the people that come out of the institution. Now they are too broadly graded on non-academic and non-performance.
The impact of this issue is, if anything, greater on the cost of research than it is on the cost of an education. A major academic institution is the single most expensive place you could do research - because everything costs much more than it should, the headcount on any project is stratospheric, and everything moves so slowly that you pay much more for each "head" than you ought to. That has downstream affects that kneecap every industry reliant on academic research, from industrial and military competitiveness to medicine. It's also why there has been interest for decades, and seems to be increasing interest now, in private research lab investment from large philanthropists - it is legitimately cheaper and faster to pull a Paul Allen and stand up a new research lab from scratch than it is to get the same research done through traditional academic means.
Scott Galloway (who I know is somebody everybody has an opinion about now) has scoped this problem really well, though I've been much less impressed experientially with his solution (Section4). You're spot-on - if we optimized for creating productive members of society (bullet #2) and preparing individuals for financial independence and productivity (bullet #1) individually - or even just ceded #2 temporarily (which is a role, arguably, existing colleges are failing at anyway) and optimized toward #1 - it could be done much more cheaply than it is being done today. NOT through any kind of high-minded shift in how education is done, as education, in the sense of a teacher-in-a-classroom-teaching-students-supported-by-TAs, is not broken, and has worked for centuries. But college today is like a really bad cable bill, where the vast majority of users are paying for one thing (ESPN), but have their cost burdened by 90% of the package being a required purchase that they don't want. (All the other channels)
Other dimensions of the problem better support disruption, but most directly, your point would be well addressed by colleges simply reducing overservice. Of course, that implies gargantuan changes to the structure of these institutions, which will be wildly uncomfortable for a lot of individuals who are currently supported by them.
For example, in 2019 he said “Human radiologists are already much worse than computer radiologists. If I had to pick a human or an AI to read my scan, I’d pick the AI.” [0] However, most people with domain knowledge in this space still would not want their scan not to be read by a human. The AI radiology apps are generally narrowly focused and useful for consultation not diagnosis. [1]
In 2015 he predicted: “Self-driving cars are going to get here much faster than people think,” Altman said. He thought we’d see them in three to four years. [2]
I think he would be wise to learn from Bill Gates that it's a bad idea to over-predict what will happen in the short term. "We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten."
I'll add to this that it's generally a bad idea to make big predictions outside of areas that you have strong domain knowledge in. I doubt Sam Altman has strong domain knowledge around US higher education. Unfortunately, Silicon Valley culture is full of people who feel that because they've succeeded in one domain they have some kind of hidden insight into others.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/26/sam-altman-on-ai-jobs-may-go...
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00330-020-07230-9
[2] https://techcrunch.com/2015/10/06/elon-musk-sam-altman-say-s...
1. That’s his job as an investor. Getting one big outlier prediction right makes up for a hundred wrong ones.
2. These predictions tend to provoke interesting debates(that’s probably Sama’s intent here).
But he's not acting as an investor here. He's acting as an influencer on Twitter. And when a public figure consistently makes poor predictions, I think they should be called out for it.
It’s the equivalent of a painter doodling in his notebook. Some of them will turn into paintings.
2. There’s so many better ways to spark an interesting conversation than throw bs predictions out on Twitter. If his opinion was informed with facts, he could write a blog or (heavens forbid) a Twitter thread detailing what lead him to the conclusion.
- altman's paradox
however unlike in his job as an investor when he makes stupid takes on twitter he isn't going to lose 100k each time. If he did he would probably vet his tweets a bit more.
The reason markets work and Twitter doesn't is because there's no negative consequences for posting without thinking.
The only thing he seems to have succeeded at is convincing Paul Graham he should lead YC.
Already done (LinkedIn clone, but close enough), by an HN user too: https://www.shlinkedin.com/
It’s just simply the case of - I’ve got the money, and hence I’ve got an audience, and (hence or not) I’ve got an urgent need to make random proclamations. Founder of this site does that a lot too and just like this post almost always gets a lot of attention.
Some people can just afford to do and have people listen to their useless brain flatulations and on the side are often called visionaries and shit. That happens on every socioeconomic levels and sub-levels, of course on different scales. So that’s there.
Or is the idea to get people to drop out early so his startup and other YC startups don't have to pay high starting salaries for college educated engineers.
To be clear I don't necessarily disagree with the tweet thread - just as usual twitter provides no context and is to short to understand the real motivation for the tweet.
> A version of college replacement I'm super interested in:
Find the smartest and most driven 18 year olds in the world, and give them 'tenure'--say a decade+ of salary, resources to work on whatever they want, and a smart peer group--in exchange for small % of future earnings.
Completely agree with your statement:
> I'll add to this that it's generally a bad idea to make big predictions outside of areas that you have strong domain knowledge in. I doubt Sam Altman has strong domain knowledge around US higher education. Unfortunately, Silicon Valley culture is full of people who feel that because they've succeeded in one domain they have some kind of hidden insight into others.
It's a cognitive biased called halo effect [1]. Although, in this case, I would question if Altman is good at anything except somehow convincing Paul Graham to lead YC (as a sister comment points out).
He doesn't come across as crazy and out of touch to me.
He recently announced WorldCoin [0]:
> To address it, we built a new device called the Orb. It solves the problem through biometrics: the Orb captures an image of a person’s eyes, which is converted into a short numeric code, making it possible to check whether the person has signed up already. If not, they receive their free share of Worldcoin.
He thinks that launching a global coin owned by VCs and collecting everyone's biometric data will make the world a better place. If that's not out of touch, I don't know what is.
No, the parent comment to yours was that Altman was out of touch.
Your reply was that he makes money, which caused me to infer that you thought he could not be out of touch because of a general belief that people who are out of touch cannot be making money.
My reply gave an example of someone that was definitely out of touch but still made money, thus showing that one cannot reason that the ability to make money proves that one is in touch.
So in response to your last comment - I don't have an opinion on Altman, I just have an example of someone who made money while out of touch. That actually would mean the opposite of what you seem to think I meant, if I thought that Howard Hughes at his craziest could make money why would you assume I thought Altman could not?
The second sentence is in the present tense. Implying that Altman is currently good at making money and thus not out of touch.
I said
>When Howard Hughes was at his most batshit crazy and generally out of touch with anything resembling humanity his businesses kept being profitable, perhaps once you have a lot of money it is difficult to really screw it up.
I shall now laboriously break this down in case you have not followed my reasoning.
when I say >his businesses kept being profitable
This implies that they were profitable before he was
>at his most batshit crazy and generally out of touch with anything resembling humanity
Thus my example is of someone who was once not out of touch and made money, but then when they became out of touch they kept making money because their businesses had reached such a size and reach that they were able to make money for him without him being 'in touch'.
I did not say one could be out of touch and go from nothing to money, I said that there was an example of someone who was once 'in touch' but became out of touch and yet they continued to make money.
The criticism of Altman here that I'm reading is that he 'is' out of touch, not that he has always been out of touch. It is in fact a common criticism of very rich people that they lose contact to daily life and the critical understanding of that life that allowed them to become rich in the first place.
Thus your response that he is good at making money is meant to show that he cannot be so out of touch after all (at least this is what I supposed your intention to be and it would seem to be born out by this conversation)
This is why my example of Hughes is a good example of what I wanted to say, which is that just because someone IS good at making money they can still BE out of touch, and not anything else.
But I understand what you mean. I disagree that "rich people becoming out of touch/crazy" is as likely as you make it sound. But of course it is possible.
Nevertheless, usually there is only the track record of their past to evaluate a persons authority. You can add a small discount for "may have gone crazy", and of course attribute the luck factor, but that's it.
He leads OpenAI
> Find the smartest and most driven 18 year olds in the world, and give them 'tenure'--say a decade+ of salary, resources to work on whatever they want, and a smart peer group--in exchange for small % of future earnings.
Why do you think this is a bad idea?
And OpenAI has strayed away from their initial "vision" considerably.
> Why do you think this is a bad idea?
Because it's a very libertarian and capitalistic view of how life and society should work.
It's very one dimensional. 18-year-olds should not be put in an environment where their goal is to make money for a sicko in Silicon Valley who then takes a percentage of their future earnings. 18-year-olds should be encouraged to take time to enjoy their youth, travel, learn about a lot of different things and about themselves.
It's still very successful.
> It's very one dimensional.
It doesn't pretend to solve multiple problems. From what I understand, Altman wants to boost innovation by incentivising talented young people.
> 18-year-olds should not be put in an environment
If anything like this program were implemented, 99% of 18-year-olds wouldn't be affected by it. There are 18-year-olds that want to enjoy youth and travel and there are others that are driven to achieve things. I don't see why is it bad to boost some of the latter ones.
Why that bad? Is a very socialist or communist view on life better?
Seems like a bias rather than factually supported.
For what it’s worth, it’s not as binary as you suggest: if one doesn’t like a capitalist idea, it doesn’t automatically imply a communist alternative.
I think at the very least, Sam’s suggestion here is fairly capitalist: students are considered resources to be invested in, with a certain ROI, and capital would automatically be allocated to just those students that are the brightest of all, and/or have the best connections.
This implies that only a very narrow group of students would receive this funding, and it’s (ideally) based purely on their potential financial contribution to society. But for a country, there are lots of other reasons why you would want better educated students: crime reduction being a good example.
Countries who have a good social net and where the state plays some role in ensuring social welfare fare better than countries who don't. And no, GDP is not a good metric of how people in a country are doing as a whole.
"Libertarianism and extreme capitalism" are great for people who are intelligent and driven. There's nothing wrong with the idea of trying to identify people like that and giving them money and leaving them alone. Actually there's something progressive about it: instead of forcing people to climb a corporate/academic hierarchy before they can make decisions, you're letting them do what they like in their intellectual prime.
That doesn't mean we should apply this way of thinking to everyone. Most people are of average intelligence and drive. Some people need assistance.
It's good for people that want to rationalize their extreme wealth as "meritocracy" when it's inherently luck of the draw that any of us find ourselves where we are. A real libertarian society entails an informal economy and is what the developing world is trying to get out of. State policy is needed to maintain some kind of social order, a libertarian government is the complete inverse of a command and control economy - both are social disasters.
Maybe extreme wealth is mostly luck, but meritocracy has merit. We all want the best when we're hiring, but want to be treated like the best when we're getting hired.
Discounting merit too much would just mess the balance between the two parties and break the process. Who would hire a person unfit to do the job? Who would spend years learning just to be treated equally to someone who didn't invest as much?
Everybody who wants to should be encouraged to enjoy their lives, travel, and learn. That's not unique to 18 year olds. And if some have already done a lot of that or are just driven for entrepreneurship, that's a choice they should be able to make.
I'm not saying 18-year-olds shouldn't be entrepreneurs. But what Sam Altman is suggesting is just very dystopian to me, because he suggests it as an alternative to a traditional education. In his narrow view, the goal of education is only to produce people who maximize financial value.
> Everybody who wants to should be encouraged to enjoy their lives, travel, and learn
Yes. But as you probably know from your own life (if you're older than 30), this gets harder and harder. So we should especially encourage younger folks, who are still more opend-minded and have less responsibilities, to do that.
I don't take that as saying take your typical college student, although with the admissions process, I guess you could read it that way if you wanted to. I think we're talking about taking that kid at school who everybody made fun of because he was such a damn super genius it made everybody else feel insecure.
> But as you probably know from your own life (if you're older than 30), this gets harder and harder
It's harder and easier at various times in your life. Again, I encourage everyone who's interested to do it.
Or 30 year olds?
Or 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 year olds?
And how do you even do that? Who's more driven, the white honor roll student, the Asian honor roll student with the tiger mom pushing them, or the African student who isn't on the honor roll but came from an environment with fewer opportunities and who is raising their younger siblings alongside school? Just defining what intelligence is, is really difficult and there isn't any universally accepted measure. He just assumes these problems can be solved easily, when that question is unanswered. If it's so easy to find those the smartest and hardest working people, then you can just turn schooling into a tier system-- these schools are for the smartest and these and for everyone else. Because right now, that's akin to saying let's give everyone at Harvard a bunch of money and resources to do whatever they want. Which, I don't think will end well as there are plenty of immature people at Harvard
No, if your job is raising money and motivating people to work for you on ambitious moonshots then optimistically over-predicting is probably the correct choice. You don’t win many points for being “pessimistic but correct” in his line of work.
I don't think Altman is making any two-year short-term prediction in this thread. If anything it's closer to ten-year timespan.
It's no fun to make predictions in your field because you know plenty of reasons why things don't work, compared to outsiders who fill in from imagination the missing bits.
The entire notion of taxpayer funded student loans is a scam on both taxpayers and students. It’s a system that allows the colleges/universities to charge any tuition they want and guarantees there will be an artificial demand.
For about a decade at least 1M student loan holders default per year. Long before the defaults reached that high, everyone involved knew that student loans were far outpacing the economic value, and yet not a single college or university stepped up in goodfaith to blow the whistle, they continued to suckle at the tit to the detriment of their own students.
Education is supposed to benefit students and the nation as a whole but the ridiculousness of loans has ensured it ruins lives and at >$1.5T in taxpayer funded debt that continues to grow exponentially it is a detriment to the country.
Collapse of student loans will of course have an impact of the college/university landscape, but the industry as a whole will not collapse, rather tuition will “collapse”, or come down, to what students can actually afford out of pocket without going into debt. And if the universities/colleges somehow can’t survive on existing taxpayers subsidies from the Dept. of Educations $68B annual budget plus out of pocket tuition rates, then welcome to the real world your university/college is a failed business.
If we don’t abandon the the system of guaranteed government (i.e. taxpayer) student loans, you can be sure their costs will continue to go up just like they went up when their was no inflation, and those costs will just be passed along to students and paid for with debt.
Of course, there are numerous ways to reduce the tuition cost of the last two years too. I'd love to see the same standards established by community and junior colleges be extended to advanced courses as well as making those courses available online. The final degree could be granted by a the authority who governs the standards, like Britain's Open University. But there should be many alternative ways to do this well, to provide a technical education, a artistic or literate one, or simply help folks retrain as their careers evolve.
We just need to quit making excuses and stop this merry-go-round to nowheresville NOW, before any more damage is done by the anticompetitive kleptocracy AKA the US university system.
The problem isn't that university doesn't work. The problem is that the federal government has propped it up with so much poorly underwritten debt that the prices have ballooned beyond value delivered.
That would be fine if the audience taking the debt was rational. But the discourse around university is itself irrational. And the people taking the loans have underdeveloped brains that are bad at long term thinking.
This is much better than subsidizing tuition without cross controls.
Sure, you can nitpick problems with European universities and they are not perfect. But nobody is going into debt slavery in Europe from getting a degree and nobody is talking about the collapse of European universities.
So maybe the problem lies somewhere else? Something to do with the unchecked capitalism of the American system, for example?
Besides which, I think EU countries do subsidize students from other EU countries so an Irish person can study in Sweden, for example, without paying high fees (need to confirm this).
Also, $50k is way higher than I expected. In my old university, NUIG in Ireland, it would be more like $15k/year for international students.
This completely ignores the huge benefits that come from socialized education (and healthcare, public transport and to so on). These are only a net negative when considered over a very short time frame. Long term, having a healthy, highly educated, low debt society is hugely beneficial to that society, especially when you stop looking at things through the narrow lens of "the economy" and consider the overall health of the society instead.
Even when you look at just the economy, yes, the US has higher GDP per capita, but it also has higher income inequality so that doesn't say much about what the average "person on the street" is getting. All measures of the economy have problems, but GDP per capita is one of the worst when it comes to judging how well off people in a country actually are, and it feels like people use it mostly just for scoring points. Median income, access to housing, healthcare, education, public transport, pollution levels, ease of doing business or interacting with government, corruption, freedom of the press, levels of racism and prejudice against minorities, and so on, all of these are at least as important considerations as GDP when considering the wellbeing of a country's citizens and I don't think any country in the world scores highly on all fronts.
EDIT: actually I saw you said GDP PPP per capita which is better than pure (nominal) GDP. But in that case, the US is quite far from the top - it's actually 13th, while Ireland is 5th and UK is 26th
- $7k or less per year for "book sciences" like philosophy, math, economics, business, law school
- $15k for "technical sciences" like MINT topics that need labs
- $20-30k for arts or music
- $30-$60k for medicine (on the lower end for veterinary, upper end for human medicine)
I would actually prefer a system financed purely by student loans. It does put a lot more responsibility on the prospective student to judge the quality of an education programme and the opportunities it affords. Some programmes would no longer be sustainable if they were not given free of charge. I think that would probably be a good thing.
> It does put a lot more responsibility on the prospective student to judge the quality of an education programme and the opportunities it affords.
Children cannot make this estimation, which is why we partially subsidise it. It's already a ton of pressure to know wth you're going to be doing later, let's not make that even worse just to satisfy some weird notion that higher education should be hard to reach. It's going to disproportionately impact folks without a social safety net, which is the one thing you wanted to prevent in the first place.
You seem to be assuming that higher education is something obviously good, that everyone would want if they knew what was best for them. I don't think this is true.
I think student loans (if done right) can be a good thing. They can let anyone from any social setting afford a higher education. But why the people without higher education should foot the bill for it, I have never understood.
And thus they pay more taxes, in the extremely progressive taxation systems you have in Europe that should more than pay back the cost of tuition.
> I think student loans (if done right) can be a good thing. They can let anyone from any social setting afford a higher education.
They really don't, poor people will be more scared of taking on so much debt at a young age and thus more reluctant to apply. It is much better that nobody has to worry about debt from studies, otherwise you wont have an equal playing field. We all know rich kids do better, the closer we can make typical kids experience to a rich kid the better, and that includes not having to pay for college.
If you think that poor people pay too much taxes, just make the taxation more progressive. It has nothing to do with student debt. Rather, you could say that student debt shifts money from poor students to rich people (the top of the progressive tax scale), as most students will never reach the top of the tax scale and you could say that the money that pays for the tuition comes from the top of the tax scale (it could come from anywhere, it coming from the working class was just your imagination as well, if it got freed up it could be put anywhere...).
It’s the US that has highly progressive tax systems. (well, depending on the state)
Europe has more broad-based but very effective taxes like VAT we’d probably be very annoyed if we had them.
The data supports the claim. A higher educated citizen generate more tax and in general use less money in the healthcare system. It's a net surplus to pay for the education, so the "less affluent" citizens are not paying for anything. At least that is what the Danish government claims.
> would actually prefer a system financed purely by student loans. It does put a lot more responsibility on the prospective student to judge the quality of an education programme and the opportunities it affords. Some programmes would no longer be sustainable if they were not given free of charge.
This is rather simple to correct for. If the unemployment is high for a given education it can be reduced. It is in Denmark.
I am going to absolutely need any amount of citations for this. For-profit institutions are notoriously sub-par, shady dealers.
Whether it is the loans or the reduced property taxes, the public is always footing part of the bill.
Every public institution has open board meetings, with board members who are either publicly elected, or appointed by an elected official. They also have constant and consistent reporting to the state and federal government about budget, student achievement, and various institutional and student based outcomes. I think maybe it's less that there needs to be more reporting, and maybe just put what we already have in a more accessible format?
Just for what it's worth, Australia has a taxpayer-funded student loan scheme (HECS) and the obscene fees you see in the US simply aren't a problem here. A full 4-year Electrical Engineering degree from Monash cost me about A$30k back in 2012. It looks like now they're around $40k. Even for an arts grad, this is something one could comfortably pay off in 2-3 years.
I don't know the specifics as to why this is the case, but it's clearly something that can work with proper regulation.
For comparison, student loans are a problem in the UK as well to some extent, where tuition is ~9000£ a year. Student loans get forgiven after 30 years and most graduates will never pay backtheir loans in full because they won't be done after 3 decades.
However, with typical grad wages here (you're looking at around 60k on average; a little more for engineering and a little less for arts), one very comfortably could.
What do you mean that "the obscene fees you see in the US simply aren't a problem here"? $40k across 4 years is $10k/year. The average in-state tuition in the US is $10,338k. Those are pretty close to each other.
https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-for-co...
Typically when people talk about the ridiculous cost of college in the US, they bring up these obscene $200k bills that can never be paid off. I agree that $40k isn't ridiculous, and small change compared to the opportunity cost of not working.
That is about the average student loan amount on graduation in the US, but the hidden truth is the average student will end up having to pay twice that amount or more due to interest. The students with $200k will usually payback closer to $400-$500k over 40 years.
The worst case is when you drop out of school, don’t get the degree, but still have the loan. There’s nothing good you can do about that right now except flee the country.
While the fuse may be set for student loans and housing, today’s banks are not levered to the level in the GFC, nor does there appear to be a vast derivatives bomb in waiting.
Today we have taxpayer underwritten student loans.
The prior system of taxpayer funded tuition, with minimal student loans, was pretty terrific. We should go back to that.
They also have been capped for decades now. So clearly that isn't the solution to the problem.
[0]https://www.investopedia.com/student-loan-limits-how-much-ca...
All of the conversations I've seen implicitly assume that this is good, and that the solution to farmer workers (or other low paid workers) escaping poverty is to train them as software developers.
We really need farm workers, and most of them live in poverty. I love having more engineers, scientists, and doctors, but we desperately need non-STEM work to be a viable option
>We really need farm workers, and most of them live in poverty. I love having more engineers, scientists, and doctors, but we desperately need non-STEM work to be a viable option
This is basically a non-problem because of the supply/demand mechanics of the labor market. If farm workers' job gets sufficiently bad from a value proposition perspective, then people will leave the occupation and employers would be forced to pay higher wages to attract workers.
It´s going to be a fuckin´mess, 4 dudes richer and everyone else screwed
>We really need farm workers
But point maken
How so? Sustainable farming has nothing to do with a man vs machine doing the labor. Moral as in we need to make sure people can keep doing this job or what kind of argument are you even making? I'd rather see improved social safety nets and job training then some appeal to history that people need to work the fields because we've always done that.
Modern industrial farming practices, designed to optimize agricultural output per unit of labor, are an ecological and environmental travesty. They require the widespread use of pesticides and toxic fertilizers that are decimating the biosphere. Monocropping unsustainably degrades soil quality. And the large contiguous areas used for industrial agricultural operations are extremely disruptive to wildlife.
The most obvious solution to the above is an agricultural system with many more, much smaller farms, where human beings do the work currently done by machines and chemicals.
How will the four people get richer if the food they create is priced so high that no one can buy it?
I get this is deeply economic and philosophical, but it’s an interesting thought experiment.
Taking this to its logical end, the owners of said farms will get richer as the general population earns less on average (due to their labour no longer being needed).
Either that or everyone else gets fed up and violently overthrows them. It could, perhaps, be avoided with higher taxes on the rich, but the rich have the most influence over the tax code.
Serious question - have you ever been poor? Are you aware that sometimes people have to work at shitty jobs because they have no other options? And, if employers really would "be forced to pay higher wages" as you claim, why are all the restaurants in my city still short staffed?
I'm not claiming to have a solution but claiming "the market will fix it" seems like such a cop-out, like telling someone god will take care of it.
OP was talking about the problem from a practical perspective (ie. "We really need farm workers", presumably worried about a future where there aren't enough farm workers and we starve or something), and I was addressing that in the same way. Your objection seems to be from a humanitarian perspective (ie. how can we provide a minimum standard of living to non-STEM workers?), which is valid concern, but ultimately not relevant to the original problem.
>And, if employers really would "be forced to pay higher wages" as you claim, why are all the restaurants in my city still short staffed?
combination of:
1. stubbornness/price stickiness
2. belief that it's better to hold out in the short term and wait for the labor supply to return, then it is to give out pay raises now. Wages are sticky, which mean wage hikes would turn into ongoing expenses into the future.
3. belief that the raising wages would raise prices, which would decrease demand and ultimately make the business worse off.
>I'm not claiming to have a solution but claiming "the market will fix it" seems like such a cop-out, like telling someone god will take care of it.
The market seems to be working just fine in my area. Some restaurants have shut down. Some have raised prices. Some have decreased service. Which is the right approach? I don't know. The restaurants that took the right approach will win out in the end. In the meanwhile I'm still able to eat out.
What you're really arguing isn't that the market will sort things out to someone's satisfaction, you're just saying the market is a jungle and whatever survives survives.
Wouldn't the standard response to that be that it's not really a free market, and if it were made more free then such inefficiencies would be less likely to occur?
What does it contribute?
The absolutism was in no one believes it, by the way.
By the principle of charity, I don't expect anyone to believe nonsensical things.
> By the principle of charity, I don't expect anyone to believe nonsensical things.
You're not being charitable, if you were you wouldn't have begun with hyperbole, then moving the goalposts when challenged, and now cherry picking. You don't seem interested in any case but the one you already favour.
I make "absolute" or even "hyperbolic" statements because I'd like to learn something. If I'm wrong, some example to that effect may easily be provided. In doing so, I'm letting someone else win all the internet points because I care more about learning than about internet points. As you observe upthread, a statement in such form can be shown to be wrong "with barely any effort". I invite you, if you please, to expend that small amount of effort. However, absolute statements can't simply be assumed to be wrong. Absolute statements exist that are absolutely true. "Any living human will die if deprived of oxygen."
I grant that you've already expended a smaller amount of effort, to somewhat imply that you yourself (or perhaps others not present in this thread?) believe that less regulation of labor markets leads to higher pay, but in the absence of any relevant example that implication is itself suspect. We know that some people believe silly things, and some other people claim to believe silly things that correspond to their particular psychological commitments (this seems common in the context of religion), but those beliefs and claims do not prove their silly objects.
I suppose it's "not working" if by "not working" you mean "behaves exactly like economics 101 models that assume rational actors". But as it relates to this context, business are reacting approximately in the way we would expect, albeit with some delay/hesitancy. Average pay has gone up in the past few months, for instance.
>What you're really arguing isn't that the market will sort things out to someone's satisfaction, you're just saying the market is a jungle and whatever survives survives.
I don't argue that because it's not clear what "satisfaction" entails. If you mean the optimal choice every time, I don't think you'll find any free market advocate who would make that claim. In the meantime, I'm pretty satisfied. I can still eat out, and I have the choice between "higher wages but more expensive" restaurants and "lower wages but worse service" restaurants. It's not really clear right now which is the best choice here (eg. maybe I'd rather accept reduced/worse service than pay more), so letting consumers as a whole decide seems like the best course of action.
If the owners were competent, the businesses might have grown to the point where the enterprise isn't so much an extension of the owner's personality. A small restaurant's style extrapolates strongly from the owner's quirks - whether they feel they make enough money, they're disorganised, they're under stress going without leave or getting hit by taxes at the worst times. I figure they're the ones most likely to hold wages down almost out of angst because they themselves feel hard done by. "Why should that teenager get $15/hr?! I have the risk of the lease. I started this business! I got $5/hr when I was a kid!" I'd bet this is a solid factor in local restaurants.
Once a business is large enough to have a tier or two under the owner, I suspect this buffer helps. I notice this separation a lot when working directly with an owner versus with their marketing person. The latter has to uphold their end of the relationship with me or they'll get fired. The owner meanwhile can miss deadlines and forget to write copy and so on, and usually their worst case is they keep flying by the seat of their pants. If their business fails, it's usually much later and harder to tie to specific issues along the way.
Laissez-faire markets are also bad at taking negative externalities into account. Food being too expensive to afford in the stores while it's also rotting in the fields (which has happened in my state multiple times on the last few decades) is really bad. Children not being being effectively taught because teachers are quitting due to burnout and terrible wages is really bad. I don't think it's sufficient to shrug out hands and say "it'll work itself out" when we can actively see very these kinds of detrimental problems
The market for teachers, at least in the US, is not a 'laissez-faire market'.
Whatever that means. In Alabama the low wages and poor working conditions have now led to a grave teacher shortage. The government's solution? Suspend teacher certification. To use graphic imagery: the talent pool is full of piss, let's open it to the incontinents!
This suggests 'teacher certification' isn't effective at distinguishing between good and bad teachers.
"Suspend teacher certification"
If 'teacher certification' isn't useful for distinguishing good/bad teachers, then removing the requirement may be a good idea.
"In Alabama"
It's hard to fire bad teachers in Alabama. If you're a principal in an Alabama public school, you can't just give a poorly performing teachers 2-4 weeks' notice, freeing up the money to hire someone new. Look up 'Alabama teacher tenure'.
And what's this obsession with firing people? You can get rid of subpar performers, but the rapid turnover isn't going to improve the average unless you manage to hire and retain above average performers. In the long run, it's a supply issue, and the revolving door model is going to do nothing about the subpar supply.
Re: #2 getting rid of underperformers helps you hire good teachers (because, unless you fire someone, you have no money to hire someone new), and retain good ones (because, if you're a good teacher, you're not going to want to work somewhere where your students' other teachers are bad).
I've said it already - it's not the best students that go to work in teaching. You can fire a low performer, but chances are that the replacement is just as bad. It's a supply issue, a training issue and a culture issue - the anti-intellectualism in large swathes of the population really doesn't help matters.
This may be true, but it's the result of how the system is set up and, in particular, the interaction between:
a) politicians
b) teachers and teachers unions
c) school district leaders
d) school district administration staff
e) students
In most systems, group (e) is the one with the least power. Their parents may be able to vote for school board members, but these elections are infrequent, and the way to get elected is not by being an advocate for students, but by aligning with a particular political party, or getting the support of teachers unions.
Parents cannot easily opt out of that system. In Alabama, per pupil spending is ~$10k/year. This distorts the market: a parochial school that costs $10k/year to run cannot compete with a public school that costs $10k/year to run, even if the former better. Because in one case the marginal cost to the parent is $0.
It comes back to what I said at the start of our conversation: The market for teachers, at least in the US, is not a 'laissez-faire market'.
But, with regard to public education systems in the US:
- it's definitely true that some people 'attempt to blame low quality of a system on individuals'
- it's not generally true that this leads to firing (of teachers)
If you want to know more about some of the problems, you might enjoy the documentary 'Waiting for "Superman"': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_%22Superman%22
You’ll have to back-up that assertion.
Supply/demand mechanisms fail the labor market badly. By law of supply and demand, professions introduce artificial scarcity to boost their income; and the market responds either through some combination of: Immigration, automation, consolidation (less businesses), cut-corners
Farming has aspects of all three, and it’s a major national risk.
> If farm workers' job gets sufficiently bad from a value proposition perspective, then people will leave the occupation and employers would be forced to pay higher wages to attract workers.
Is this really applicable to this context? In other words, are farming jobs really going to get to a point where the pay is $10M a year, and people only take the job for a year and then never work another day? Considering that being a farmer has basically no barrier to entry, I doubt it will get to that point. Not to mention, if farm labor was really that expensive, so would the cost of living, so those would be FIRE farm workers would have to come back to pay the increased food bill.
Care to breakdown the costs?
Every mechanism has regimes in which it fails. 'Supply and demand' isn't always the answer any more than 'mongodb' or 'rust' are always the answer.
i suspect the amount of money that farms would need to pay workers to fix these shortages would drive all producers into bankruptcy
>i suspect the amount of money that farms would need to pay workers to fix these shortages would drive all producers into bankruptcy
I definitely think it's the latter rather than the former. Producers being driven to bankruptcy is an issue, but that seems like it's something that's going to happen regardless if we made "non-STEM work to be a viable option". At the end of the day, if it's a shitty job, then you'll have to pay more to get people to show up.
Their meager wage increase is not worth uprooting your entire life just for 2 months or less of work unless you are sending that money back to a country where a dollar goes much farther. They need far more than just add 2 bucks to an already way underpaid job to not only attract workers now but keep them around and available for following years.
They are. Farmer suicides over the past 10 years have skyrocketed. Farmers are committing suicide at twice the rate of combat veterans. [1]
I'm afraid I can't take your comment seriously as a dispassionate economic analysis since it lacks even basic empathy for people caught in this ongoing trainwreck of "supply/demand" mechanics.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/06/why-are-amer...
As an escape valve for independents we could have them post a sufficiently large bond that will come due in the event of farm failure and bail them out.
It's also important to distinguish between farm workers (hired hands) and the business owners.
But the point that you and others are missing is that if farm works sucks, and pays low, then that means we should not be sending more people to become farmers.
The point you are missing is that jobs that suck still have to be done. If we ship many the low/medium skill jobs over seas and then automate many of the remaining ones, what are those people to do? Surely if they were able to get a higher paying job that didn't suck they would have done so.
The better solution is to make sure we appropriately value tasks that are necessary and have some level of potential self sufficiency should we find ourselves in a global event like conflict, famine, etc. Not to mention, the non-industrial farms are generally better for animals and the environment. This shouldn't be a race to the bottom.
I am not saying that we need to retrain all existing farmers. Instead, I am saying that we should simply discourage more people going into that industry, instead of what the original poster was claiming, which is that we'd need more people there.
> The point you are missing is that jobs that suck still have to be done
We don't need more people in that industry, no. We can have less in that industry.
> what are those people to do
At a very minimum we shouldn't be adding more problems by encourage more people to go into these bad jobs, is the point though. That would just make things worse.
The free market might as well be a religion for some people. Nothing (not even historical facts) is enough evidence for it to not be the answers to all economic issues.
Also, there are lots of US tech people here - with overly inflated salaries compared to approximately everyone else. And everyone knows those winning the game have a tendency to lose empathy and think the game is fair, no matter how much evidence against it.
And even then, you're usually required to live within reasonable driving distance of the office. You don't make enough to buy a place. At least half your salary post-tax probably goes to rent. So yeah, you've got a few bucks in the bank probably, but it's not like you're saving up to buy your third Porsche or something lol.
Aside from their lack of empathy and the ignoring of the distortion of the supply of labour happening that makes the "non-problem" an actual problem, what is incorrect about pointing out that supply and demand are, if not the most fundamental factor then close to it, in a market?
Monopolies have historically shit all over the notion that supply and demand is a good model to use for the market.
Much like most economic models, there are underlying assumptions about it that make it bad at actually predicting the real world. Things like perfectly competitive markets (haha), prices being adjustable (haha) and the forces that act on supply/demand being rational (extra hahaha).
There are lots and lots of cases where it fails, like the housing bubble, administered prices and wages.
Still, it might as well be a religion. Afterall, people can say it is close to a most fundamental law about markets with a straight face (despite it failling all the time).
What I would counter is that it that we can see that free markets work preferably to monopolised ones, or any of the other ones you've provided where selfish intervention of one kind or another has interfered with supply or demand.
this false dichotomy between monopoly and its precursor is non sequitur.
Ignoring the fallacious teleological argument, I'm happy to rely on Wikipedia for this as this is basic knowledge:
> In economics, a free market is a system in which the prices for goods and services are self-regulated by buyers and sellers negotiating in an open market without market coercions.
What are market coercions?
> Examples of such prohibited market coercions include: economic privilege, *monopolies*, and artificial scarcities.
All those cases I mentioned came arose under one of the most (maybe the most?) free market of modernity.
No. I don't believe you're trying to create a straw man intentionally but if you're going to jump from black to white, and a large jump at that, then it produces the same outcome all the same.
That’s exactly what’s happening. With a steady flow of cheap labor to take these jobs, the wages for them will remain stagnant. It makes perfect sense for low income workers to be complaining about immigrants taking their jobs because that’s exactly what happens.
Cut off illegal immigration for a few years and watch as the price of all unskilled labor increases. It’s basic supply and demand.
The ones at the top generally don’t care because the people coming in are not competing for their jobs. And they arguably benefit from the cheap low end labor through lower prices for staples and even luxuries like landscapers and nannies.
Even that is changing with remote work and offshoring. I don’t know if it will take five years or a decade, but the so called knowledge workers who don’t sock away their savings now are in for a rude awakening when their own paper pushing jobs get replaced.
For knowledge workers who want to work from home, the end result will be competing on a global market against workers from developing countries who can afford to do the same work for less. We already see this on various freelancing platforms where it's only a viable side gig for those in places with a low cost of living.
At the end of the day, workers need some kind of protection against these movements, by putting local workers first and managing immigration to protect the middle and working classes. The problem is that we have a political class who have gotten rich on the back of removing such protections, because they're also business owners and property investors.
Nothing I said precludes aid for these people, to ensure a minimum standard of living. I'm just pointing out the implied consequences of not making "non-STEM work to be a viable option", isn't we run out of farmers and we all starve because the market will correct it long before the number of farmers drop dangerously low.
>All the while people complain about immigrants crossing the border and "taking their jobs".
I don't get it. Just a few sentences ago you implied that the jobs are crap, and that people are "forced to do these jobs or starve", yet here you're implying that we should allow "immigrants crossing the border" to take those crap jobs?
>Graduating high school seniors aren't lining up to mow grass or pick fruit or work as a meat packer for $15/hour. They want to come out of college to a 6 figure job with no skills or training.
People don't want hard jobs and want easy money. Can you really blame them for that? Also, the solution to this, as mentioned in the previous comment is to raise wages.
>A lot of people coming out of school with out a tech or medical disposition would be best served by picking a trade. We have a shortage already and it is only going to get worse. Running a 3 person plumbing company could easily compete with most tech jobs.
In other words, the market is working as intended, by making jobs more lucrative because there's a shortage?
Only one person (the oldest one) from my like 20-30ppl circle within age range of 20-30 gets close to IT salaries, that's ridiculous
in most cases it is around 40% (around 2 minimal wages) of my *nothing special* salary by IT standards (4.5 minimal wages), people with better cards get 7-10 minimal wages here, top people like 15-20+
and they see no reasonably easy way to jump higher (e.g within one or two years)
I can't honestly recommend anything but IT to anyone that can put a lot of effort (while mentioning all bad things ofc)
>to have an advantage that other people do not know about:
(without that last part)
Plumbers doing fancy installs, not plunging toilets, over $100/hr. Huge demand, not nearly enough workers.
Some of the trades pay very, very, well.
Heck live in nannies working 8 hour shifts don't have to pay for housing and they pull in 60k-80k.
I know a woman running her own cat nail cutting service who is making good money and looking to hire help.
It baffles me that our markets are so inefficient that it’s 125% more effective for me to take time off my ‘highly skilled’ engineering job to do ‘low skilled’ renovation/repair work myself.
I can only imagine all of the inefficiency comes from teams of salesmen/project managers/owners who suck all of value out.
But still how do they get away with such bad deals? Are people so pigeonholed that they can’t imagine doing the work themselves? Is getting bonded/licensed/whatever other paperwork is required to compete with these sleazy companies that difficult? I’m sure a lot of people wouldn’t mind learning how to install drain systems for $125/hr minus overhead.
In the 3-county rural area where I've spent most of my time recently, we have 3 Lowes, 2 Home Depots, a Menard's, multiple Orschelns and Tractor Supplies, and probably fifty smaller hardware stores and lumber yards. This is many thousands of commercial square feet basically devoted to home improvement, for an area with fewer than 140,000 residents. If it were possible to hire this sort of work without significant expense, the home supply market would be very different.
I'm not criticizing any carpenters or plumbers here. Their work is naturally seasonal and cyclical, and our society DGAF about people with that sort of work. If an electrician would wire your new bedroom for less than $3,000, he wouldn't be able to afford $1,000/month for medical insurance for his family, at least not every month of the year.
It’s worse than that. Even when you try to hire Americans, it’ll turn out that only the salesman/owner are legally working. The actual work is almost exclusively done by immigrants being paid exploitative wages.
It’s frustrating that there is actually money in the industry but such a small amount reaches the laborers.
I don’t think it’s particularly baffling. A large class of jobs, including the trades and so-called “low skilled” professions, are in very high demand - which indicates that what they do is valuable to a lot of people - and while you could theoretically do their job yourself, many people simply don’t want to “get their hands dirty.”
In my opinion that’s a good thing by the way. People who do jobs that are important for us and few people want to do should be paid accordingly.
If you want something done right, you gotta do it yourself.
I have noticed though that the large brand name plumbers are the most expensive. I think it's because they're mandated to upsell on any call. I hired one for $100 to replace some shower fixtures. But he spent 2 hours both figuring out what else he could do, and writing it all up and putting it in their database.
On that list of things was replacing the water pressure regulator. For $1500. It's a $300 part, and it screws on and off. Or you could buy a $100 restoration kit instead.
I was also recently quoted $1100 to replace two toilets. Not including the toilets. Looking online it should take 1-2 hours per toilet for an experienced plumber, and around $50-100 to dispose of each. So that's, at best, $200-$250 per hour. My hourly earnings after taxes are about $50. So I both learned how to, and replaced, the toilets in about 4 hours.
Disposing of the old toilet, eh, that is a bit more work depending on how far your local dump is.
Someone on Nextdoor was confused about how to "add those jack things" to the ethernet cables in her prewired house. I spent a few minutes linking her to YT videos and an article so she could do it herself. No response, but a few weeks later someone else PM'd me: "Wanna make a couple bucks?"
Ignoring the tone-deafness of that question: yes, low voltage wiring quotes are ridiculous, but it's also one of the easiest DIY projects you can do if have an attic or crawlspace. I installed four access points through my attic and a UAP-AC-M-PRO-US for backyard coverage.
Double the number of large quality state universities.
Re-index public university tuition to what they were in 2000 + inflation. Mandate that funding comes with X number increase in tenured professors.
Re-instate public funding for state universities to what it was in 2000 + inflation.
A supply/demand imbalance is in effect, and bloat has taken hold on top of that.
Yes building new 20k student universities takes time, but in 20 years these problems will be solved.
Could you realistically get room and board down below $8K/year with more spartan dormitories and meal plans? Maybe, but not by much I don't think.
On the other hand, if your goal is to churn as many bodies out as possible with degrees, it's a pretty big waste of money. We could ship in frozen tyson chicken from China or whatever and just deep fry it as dinner, and turn the dorms into pod hotels or something.
Of course that goes from ideal to complete dystopia, but if that's your goal... lol.
As Bronn of the Blackwater said, “it’s all [housing policy] in the end”.
The problem in the US is that "community college" is seen as a lower grade qualification that people "settled" for, instead of an educational focused institutional with bare bones and no immoral mandatory tie-ins (e.g. first year mandatory high price accommodations/gyms/meal plans, etc).
I understand community colleges have a lot of problems too (e.g. low educator pay and conditions). I'm just pointing out that everyone thinks that a European University is 1:1 with the city-colleges of the US, when in reality they're often nothing that fancy and pretty bare-bones.
As far I can tell there aren't capacity issues to get accredited education at the undergrad level. The prices are driven by student loan availability and the need for investment in amenities for colleges to attract students.
Increasing the number of universities might worsen the problem due to the latter needing to redouble investments to attract students.
Does the US have colleges that choose to attract students with lower prices instead?
How are both of these true? If a job pays poorly, doesn't that suggest there are many people willing and able to do those jobs, relative to the need for the job to be done?
Maybe this results from some market distortion? But AFAIK the main market distortion in the farming industry is the opposite: subsidies that make farming more attractive than it would be, which would tend to increase farm workers' equilibrium wages.
No. This notion of relentless competition is insane. One school district was paying a janitor barely a living wage. The standard response was "he could improve himself / get a degree, and find a better job. That shifts all blame on him an ignored the fact that the district expects to pay a non living wage for that position, they'll just find someone else if he left.
I will say this. Both my grandfathers were farmers. One worked his whole life and died broke. The other invested what he could, and never worked the land a day in my life (that I can remember). He once said that he didnt make his money farming, meaning it was from saving and investing. He rented his land, barn, and equipment to others.
IMHO investing is really close to renting (yes, I have some investments). SaaS is rent. Loaning money is rent. We increasingly live in a world where or renters and owners and people who do the most actual work are the least valued. It's still not a rebuttal, just a general observation that things aren't "fair" for some definitions of "fair". This situation is a societal choice and doesnt have to be that way. I'm not sure what a better way looks like though.
Yes, feel free to say that farmers are payed low. But it remains the same that if they are paid this low, then we don't really need more farmers entering the industry.
Instead hopefully less people will join that industry.
https://research.newamericaneconomy.org/report/immigration-a...
That might be true for markets in the abstract but the market for farm labor is distorted in several ways. One is due to historical reasons farm labor is treated differently from other labor categories and the end result is many of those workers have fewer protections. The second is, as others mentioned, many cannot seek other work due to lack of documentation. In effect becoming a captive labor force with limited ability to advocate for itself.
As an aside, whenever markets display aberrant behavior in the real world, it pays to look for the distortions. They're usually not hard to spot.
Regarding farm labor having fewer protections. In general, labour protections can be distortion-creating (e.g. a minimum wage) or distortion-busting (e.g. rules that ensure people are paid on time).
Regarding the captive labor force: this might be bad for non citizens (and humanity overall), but it seems like it's good for US citizens, who benefit from increased (unlimited?) supply of farm labor, reducing upward pressure on food prices.
If I've understood the above correctly, it seems that 'we need farm workers' isn't an actual problem that needs a solution (from the perspective of US citizens or, by extension, the US government).
What have I missed?
Or it suggests that labor doesn't flow through the system as easily as the theory assumes it does, or that the theory assumes incorrect things about the world, or that it's just wrong on the face of it in a whole lot of actual real world cases. As the biologists say, it's usually not the lab mouse who's wrong.
Any ideas?
Basically, you've got a pile of short-sighted, emotional apes, often operating under conditions of stress or duress, with imperfect information and a planning system that's effectively hijacking stress responses designed to respond to actual flesh & blood predators to evaluate interest rates. All that indicates to me that the cohabitation of "we can't find workers" and "no, we're not raising wages" is maybe less surprising than theory would suggest.
Specific to what's happening in the farm labor market, I'd suspect there's a lot of interplay between the immigration system being pretty broken and farm owners being on the whole kind of crappy businessmen that leads to this particular market distortion.
Have I understood correctly?
People repeat that but what is it based on? Most of the population, including most people who have economic stability and freedom, have not had STEM jobs and very likely will not have STEM jobs.
More importantly, college is about much more than job training. College prepares people to be adults in every way, not to be a resource for corporations.
As If you have to go to college to become an adult.
A lot of college programs seem like their purpose is for some very wealthy and sheltered children to become “cultured”, but that is completely unrelated to the skills needed to be a functioning adult or to take significant responsibilities in your life.
College and university were never supposed to be about job training. They were supposed to teach one how to learn so you could become a lifelong learner and continue your own education in any field you chose to pursue and to use those skills to benefit the society at large so that everyone can benefit from an increasing understanding of the world.
Instead, what we have now, is an increasing focus on becoming a corporate employee, who devotes their life to marketing and selling products that society doesn’t need and are in fact increasingly destroying society and harming individual rights and lessening opportunity with each iteration. A higher education is increasingly designed for specialized corporate tasks that do not improve society and fail to solve the most pressing problems at hand.
Look at the marvels modern democracy has created with a population that mostly wasn’t college educated. Does democracy work better today, with vastly higher college graduation rates, than it did 30 years ago?
Also, I have two step siblings in college and they aren’t learning any of those things. They’re learning fantasies that make them less well-equipped to deal with reality than their parents and grandparents who didn’t go to college.
I see little benefit in discussing how things should be instead of what they are. There are clearly forces that pivoted universities towards what they are today, telling people what university should be isn't gonna fix anything.
More importantly, who decided university is the only place you could learn this, or that you could not become a life long learner long before going to university?
It seems that institutional education is precisely what gives people the impression that there is such a thing as "stop learning" aka graduation.
What makes you say they are that, and for everyone, and from everyone's perception? Because lots of people say it on HN? Because lots of people say it anywhere? Does that make it true?
And if it is true, it changed once, why can't it change again? Through these discussions is how society changes - and it will change, one way or another.
> who decided university is the only place you could learn this, or that you could not become a life long learner long before going to university?
It seems like universities are the best place to learn, given the obvious resources? If I want to learn about history, it would be good to have experts in history, books about history, other people studying history, etc.?
Universities that stifle dissenting opinions are the best place to learn? Interesting.
There are plenty of online resources these days with active communities where you can learn from peers without fear of being penalized by your peers or an ideologically captured professor who will fail you for not toeing the idealogical line.
> ideologically captured professor who will fail you for not toeing the idealogical line
It's a baseless accusation against nobody.
> you can learn from peers
Peers are no substitue for experts. If I want to become a doctor, I need to learn from professors of medicine, not peers. Who would hire your 'peers' to teach a course in whatever you want to learn? Who would ask their advice?
That would be true prior to the internet and/or digitalization of resources.
Today, a kid in the 3rd world country can access those very same resources. Whats left is the value of the credential - accepted in the marketplace.
They cannot access the experts to mentor them and teach them, they can't access much of scholarly work, which is in expensive books and research papers.
I'm not a child and not in a 3rd world country; I've been through higher education, and seriously studying anything is inefficient and impossible - I simply can't catch up with the expertise of professors in selecting the media and understanding it.
who said it can't? It will be changed by looking into the mirror and fix the incentives or whatever that corrupted higher education. Not by preaching people how they should invest their time and efforts. Preaching only works in churchs.
College campuses have gone through severe idealogical capture, so the idea that going through a 4-year degree leads to a well informed populace is laughable.
I would argue that a 4-year peace corps posting in an improvised country would lead to a better informed population than any liberal arts education.
Reactionaries repeat that over and over, which is their most common tactic for any issue. But reptition is not truth, as we have learned well in the Internet age, though that hasn't stopped people from repeating it. Also, the reactionaries main objection seems to be that their own ideology isn't taught (including things like denial of climate change and racism); they insist they are a non-ideological norm and everything else is ideology, again through repetition. Academia requires proof; it's not a place of equity for bad ideas. It's also a place that disrespects the current establishment; again, no ideas get special treatment.
Tell that to Judith Butler.
It's sad that so many comments like this are dismissive, and therefore not much reason or argument is put behind them, making them very thin.
You can be an adult with no education or training at all, and for most of human history, that's what happened. Is that our standard? Just 'be' an adult? Why have any schooling?
People repeat that but what is it based on?
Most of the adult population have not gone to college but somehow manage to become functioning adults.
That's what we're seeing now. Understanding where that led last time is useful.
In the 19th century, nobody had that all much firepower. Battles were local. When that changed, the routine minor wars of the 19th century turned into World War One.
> In the 19th century, nobody had that all much firepower. Battles were local.
Knowing some history of Napoleon, for example, would help too. :) But yes, your general point is taken. And then 25 years later, WWII ...
We can't do better? Functioning is our only standard? We could go back to the Middle Ages, or be hunter-gatherers, where for 95% of homo sapien history probably most adults were 'functioning'.
You don't define what adult means. You don't say or imply what ways college would help you become a better one.
For what I would define as "adult", which is understanding the realities of life outside the shelter of their family infrastructure, I would argue most colleges don't really further a student's self-reliance in that way.
If anything, they create another, different reality bubble which is again popped when they are dropped into to the actual real world, often with a mountain of debt. This is the point at which, in my opinion, where someone learns to become an adult.
Does learning new information and skills help one become a better functioning adults? Of course. But college doesn't have a monopoly on being the way to acquire information and skills.
As the price of education in the US continues to increase (for no good reason, other than people can get loans to pay it), college will increasingly fail the cost/benefit analysis for a lot occupations.
As an aside, your attitude seems to imply that you think people who have not gone to college are lesser in some way. I would apply some critical analysis to that.
I’m all for setting the minimum wage for farm workers at $25/hr. Within 2-3 years every manual farm worker will be replaced by a machine, and we’ll all be better off for it.
Well, not the manual workers, temporarily. But then we’ll have to deal with the problem of unemployment honestly rather than leaving make-work jobs around.
The real problem is machines can't replace those jobs or they would have. 25/h would mean very high prices for local food so everything will come via imports.
It is a problem for them. They wouldn't come if it weren't economically advantageous to do so. Losing those jobs leaves them worse off, at least in the short term.
Oh yeah you think the only thing between us and a fully automated robot-run future is labor market conditions? The perfect robot slaves will not be forthcoming for quite awhile. We will have to settle for human slaves, or in modern times, immigrants totally reliant on their employer and without the normal rights afforded citizens for our low prices. I sympathize with libertarian and capitalist ideals but I find it disturbing that the agricultural and energy base of the US economy is anything but free market.
The "preparing to be an adult" value decayed exponentially for me. The first year staying in halls with my peers was extremely valuable. The rest of the years were not so valuable.
Also, this value was 95% social. There was very little that uni itself taught me about being an adult.
I learned so much, I cannot imagine having only the knowledge and intellectual skills that I had from high school.
Regarding knowledge and intellectual skills, the vast majority of my knowledge gained in the last ~5 years has been from self-teaching or exploring things I found interesting and I think I developed far more intellectual skills from doing that than going to university.
University felt extremely intellectually restrictive to me. You were given a ton of material that you needed to learn at a surface level to pass tests. There was little room for exploration and deep understanding within courses.
Most of the material did not seem like it was going to be useful for me. I don't like learning for the sake of it, I prefer to try and focus on usefulness.
Why do I need to learn about how to draw structures in isometric and oblique or understand CPU registers when I have absolutely zero interest in those things and never want to do that kind of work?
Because "foundational knowledge" or something, even though the vast majority of people will never use the vast majority of the knowledge they learn. I've asked my friends who completed degrees how much of the information from their degree they use at work and it's practically nothing.
Being able to get 1.5 years' experience in paid internships when I was at Drexel was also hugely valuable towards kick-starting my post-college career without adding additional classes.
In the humanities, learning in depth (to express it superficially), exploration, and learning the skills of how to learn in those ways, is fundamental; it's the point. Try a humanities program - you would love it!
From my perspective most faculty add very little value, so in terms of learning and exploration there's not much point in paying boatloads of money to attend when I could go through the material (Or similar) myself if I'm interested.
> I'm highly skeptical of university's value-add
This new social trend - which suits the reactionary movement very well (which doesn't mean you are a reactionary - is really tragic. We are just destroying so much in instututions and potential, so many years and resources lost, and mostly just to destroy things. It's not hard to grasp that knowledge and learning move us forward, and it's better with experts.
With people online you can at least vet them well and have access to their knowledge and advice. Even though it's not the same as a mentor I think learning from an expert online is better than having a mediocre mentor.
> It's not hard to grasp that knowledge and learning move us forward, and it's better with experts
I agree knowledge and learning are important, but I no longer feel like university is the primary place for that unless you want to go into academia. Internet communities feel like better environments than university at this point.
This doesn't feel like a purposeful destruction of university through a social trend though. The institutions are destroying themselves.
Even worst than than that. Ford was a huge anti-Semite and one of his papers had major influence over Hitler who then went on to genocide millions of Jews. Dude was for sure an asshole. He also fired workers who drank or gambled during their off time and had company men who raided homes of his workers.
Yes, generally speaking. And they were better prepared than people from the 1840s, who mostly were illiterate (no universal education), lost most of their kids at a young age, etc. If you spend zero years preparing for something and I spend four (or 12 and 16 years), I'm going to be better prepared most likely. There are diminishing marginal returns at some point, but college is qualitatively very different than high school.
This question comes up many times, as if it's a personal insult to people without college degrees. Let's imagine it does insult them (which I don't think it does); should we reject all progress for ourselves because others don't have access to it and might be offended? You have access to the Interet and I don't - are you saying you are better than me? The Internet is useless! And now we don't want to offend people in the 1930s? There are things other people have done that benefitted their lives, and that I missed out on - good for them!
This is not an answer to a “in what way” question. I will grant you that elementary school teaching people to read, write and basic arithmetics, does indeed inculcate skills very important in adult life, but from there to argue that a marginal year of education gives you some marginal amount of human capital, only shows how weak your argument is: it’s completely useless without trying to quantify the actual learning. What if a year of college actually reduces a day’s worth of useful stuff? What a waste of time it would be, and yet totally compatible with your argument.
And, it might be of interest to you, that the last month of 12th year of education, and last month of 16th year “teaches” a lot more useful stuff than the previous 4 years in terms of how it translates to increased success in adult life, as studies show. This is actually obvious to everyone, that obtaining diploma is worth more than 4 years worth of learning, but the point is that education is not about learning.
> it’s completely useless without trying to quantify the actual learning
Most things in life can't be quantified, yet aren't useless.
> the last month of 12th year of education, and last month of 16th year “teaches” a lot more useful stuff than the previous 4 years in terms of how it translates to increased success in adult life, as studies show
What studies?
No, I just raised this as a response to your comment claiming people in 1840 America were "mostly illiterate"[1]: I was talking about reading and writing, because you were talking about literacy, and I do agree that it is valuable to teach people basic literacy and numeracy. In no way my comment above implies that I question the value of education past 5th grade.
That said, I do in fact question value of state-organized mass education past 5th grade as it currently exist, yes. To be clear, I'm not questioning the value of learning things past 5th grade, but rather the way we pretend people learn things today.
> Most things in life can't be quantified, yet aren't useless.
If you decompose the syntax of the sentence you're referring to, you'll find that the "useless" in it does not refer to "education", but rather to your argument: it is useless to argue that "X is good for you, so extra 4-8 years doing X is worth it", unless you can quantify exactly how good X in fact is for you, and how good extra 4-8 years of doing X would be.
Say, imagine X to be "learning to play a musical instrument": it's probably worthwhile for everyone to spend some time doing that, but the idea that everyone needs to spend at least 12 years of their lifes, and most people should spend 4 on top of that, is rather ludicrous. How do you know that regular schooling is not exactly liked that, without trying to quantify it? You don't.
> What studies?
The Google Scholar keyword for you to familiarize yourself with the rather substantial literature on the topic is "sheepskin effect".
[1] - you are very much wrong that Americans in 1840 were mostly illiterate, by the way: literacy in US was historically always very high, and by mid 1800s, large majority was already literate, despite lack of federally-mandated government schooling. This is a legacy of English heritage, where majority of male Englishmen were already literate in mid 1600s. They did not get there through top-down state-organized schooling, it was mostly a bottom-up effort, where local Church played huge role.
Unintuitively, harder lives don't make people tougher. Intuitively, they make people more exhausted and traumatized. Look at how functional people were back then when they were elderly (though that could be due to other aspects of health). Look at anyone who has had a hard life; they wear down.
Similarly, children, contrary to some pop politico-psychology, generally grow stronger if they feel safer. Unsafe kids are scared to face the world and often never develop an inner sense of security. Trauma leaves wounds that sometimes never heal. Safe kids feel like they can brave the world, and they internalize that sense of safety that their parents model and give them.
Only 2% of Bangladeshis go to college. Are the rest not adults? Indeed, I’d say the opposite is true. Apart from job training, the main function of college in America seems to be extending adolescence and deferring dealing with the real world. 18 year olds in Bangladesh are a lot more “adult” than many college-educated 30-somethings.
There are many ways to prepare an individual for that responsibility. In western nations, that is often done more through a formal educational program than through the community and family.
This also isn't a "you must have X amount of civic responsibility" as different societies are looking for adults to have different amounts of responsibility within that society.
While American college is to an extent the deferment of responsibility, in many cases it is also the exposure to a wider range of cultures than one experienced up through high school. It is that exposure to other people and culture - learning to get along with a roommate or doing your own laundry in a gradual process that college presents.
In that respect, it is not a deferment of dealing with the real world, but rather a gradual introduction to the broader world. While the 18 year old American may be able to do unskilled labor and get along (tolerably) with siblings, being able to work in an office or understand that the upbringing of the driver of the carpool isn't the same as yours - that comes from that exposure to other people and cultures.
We're already doing a pretty terrible job educating people and it shows. How much worse does it get when its outsourced to the 'community'? Communities in the US (and everywhere) are fragmented, class stratified, religiously bound structures that we have seen the detriment of when it comes to civic participation. Just check out the IG page of any former evangelical or mormon female.
A secular democracy requires education and time to participate in civic and civil society. That education must imho be grounded in not just how to think, but also the history of humanity. Otherwise we are signing ourselves up for a return to much darker days.
But that’s orthogonal to my point. If I were looking for people to rebuild America (or even just maintain it) I’d much rather have adults like your mom (or my mom) than the children graduating from American colleges these days.
My mom flipped the order, working until she had us, then taking about a decade off her career and doing an MS in Computer Science in the meanwhile, before returning to her career.
> 18 year olds in Bangladesh are a lot more “adult”
Imagine an 18 year old in the US. They could go to college and learn more about the world, themselves, etc., or get a menial job, an apartment, and become more adult. In fact, any learning or training is about investing in the future. Any investment is about current sacrifice (time, money, etc.) for better future returns.
We could also ask the same question - and it was asked, by prior generations - about 12 year olds, who could become adults and work in coal mines. People used to get married at that age too. In Judaism, 13 year old males technically become adults by completing their Bar Mitzvahs (obviously an ancient tradition). Were they better off? Was our society better off? Is there some benefit to achieving adulthood sooner?
Taking it further, kids who lack effective parenting, either through accident or neglect, often grow up fast. And lacking that time to be kids, to learn and explore and grow themselves, costs them for the rest of their lives. I grew a lot in high school and college, and I would have missed so much if I had to be a full-fledged adult then.
The argument that prior generations lacked college educations and therefore future ones have nothing to gain, or that it's an insult to prior generations to say there is something to gain, seem very flawed for obvious reasons. It's wrong that so many people in Bangledesh, who are just as able to grow and benefit, are denied the opportunity and those benefits.
Let's keep building and improving a world so that they, like so many others over the last several decades, become the first in their families to benefit from college.
I’ve heard of others talk up the college experience, but I fail to see what’s so special about it. What exactly did I miss in my development? How exactly am I different (besides having a 4-6 year head-start in the working world)?
Parties and friends are also made outside of campus, in the adult world. Working a job at a young age and having to be responsible for yourself builds life skills early. Some of which, my college-educated friends are still having trouble building well into their 30’s. I know some that are terrified of “growing up”: they keep earning degrees or still in their 2nd masters program, accumulating debt that is clearly unsustainable. Many are in fields that inside the sheltered and honestly, kind of bizarre world of academia look nothing like what actually happens in the real world, and they are in for a very rude awakening when that house of cards comes tumbling down.
Every time I meet someone who went to college, if you’re in the same job as them without having a degree, the default response is “but I got the experience”. Part of me thinks this is some kind of rationalization so they don’t have to accept the fact that they might have just been swindled and could have just as easily did what I did and get the same outcome.
I went back to school after a decade of web development, and learned a ton. I think I’m a much better developer than I would have been had I learned only what I thought I needed for my job (could be wrong about that, but I don’t think I am). I’ve also worked with plenty of people without degrees who were better developers than me, but to a person, I think they would have greatly benefited from a broader theoretical foundation than what they built through self directed learning.
One thing you should think about is that rationalization likely applies to you just as much as it does to the college educated people you’re talking about.
I was in the college is useless boat before I went back and most of it was rationalizing my choices—plus a bit of feeling inferior.
It’s one thing to decide that college wasn’t the right decision for you (and maybe it wasn’t). It’s another entirely to write off everyone who went as suckers.
Yes, having dedicated time to focus on learning was great. But I was effective at that because I'd already learned to, well, learn, on my own, by homeschooling the latter half of high school (where I'd study, take CLEP tests).
College isn't for suckers, but the scholastic benefits of it can be gotten through other means (and should probably be done because a job you're interested in requires it, ideally in the confines of that job, like an apprenticeship in the trades). Many of the other purported benefits (social, etc) are BS.
The main benefit I can think of outside of that dedicated study time is being forced into more of a cultural milieu than I had experienced prior. I think that is important, but I also think that entirely depends on the school, just as it depends on the job, so I'm not sure that's entirely a college benefit so much as a "get into the city if you're living somewhere suburban or rural" benefit.
Of course it’s possible, but the number of people who have the discipline/inclination to get through a degree’s worth (or even a significant fraction of a degree’s worth) of education on their own is very small. Small enough that if the reason you’re skipping college is because you think you can/will learn everything they can teach you on your own, you’re most likely kidding yourself.
With self directed learning it’s also shockingly easy to develop huge blind spots that you have no idea you have.
> and should probably be done because a job you're interested in requires it
I’ve personally benefited a good deal from taking the year of physics I was forced to take, despite no job having ever required it.
The same goes for all the papers I had to write in non CS classes.
Where else will you get the direct access to expertise in all those fields, guiding you in what works/experiments/skills/etc to read/learn/acquire, answering questions personally, the massive labs and libraries, the students to study with.
As someone who has tried to study on my own at a serious level, I would say the opposite: Studying on my own is nothing like it. I am very jealous of those in college. I don't know which books and papers to read, how to contextualize them, what they have and lack; I have nobody to ask (Reddit and Stack Exchange being very poor substitutes); I lack access to resources that are far too expensive, JSTOR being a simple example, making much study very time-consuming or impossible. I regularly run into things, years later, that would have been introduced in the first day of class by an expert - I have an unknown but large quantity of blind spots.
That's kind of my point - the nature of "study on my own" is different than "can I find the resources I need to solve a particular problem". College is creating a problem of "pass this test" or "complete this assignment"; studying on your own, yes, you don't know where your blind spots are or where to begin, because you don't have a problem you're trying to solve. College provides you some, but they aren't fundamentally different than work problems. And while some classes may attempt to 'teach' the material, the ones where that was an effective use of my time (rather than just read the textbook, or those where class time was unrelated to the projects we were graded on) were definitely in the minority. YMMV.
You can ask a professor, or multiple ones. If the classes are within your major, the school will guide you. This part is a non-problem. You can also take several classes for a week or two, depending on the school, and see which ones suit your priorities.
> College provides you some, but they aren't fundamentally different than work problems.
Usually the opposite is said, that college problems are not at all like what you encounter in work, that students are unprepared for work problems and that professors don't understand them. College problems are crafted carefully for you to acquire knowledge and skills; work problems are crafted to avoid having you learn, because that takes extra time.
> And while some classes may attempt to 'teach' the material, the ones where that was an effective use of my time (rather than just read the textbook, or those where class time was unrelated to the projects we were graded on) were definitely in the minority. YMMV.
I think this is not realistic for most people. It's also possible you missed a lot without the professor's context and expertise. In anything, would you rather just read a book or have access to an expert mentor? There's no question IME.
Maybe it depends on the courses, which I'm starting to suspect explains a lot of the response at HN: Were you in a STEM field, particularly T or E?
Conversely I learned functional programming, multiple languages and new CS concepts, fault tolerant system design, and system architecture skills, all in the context of a short period of work.
Regarding the assertions: Of course, one anecdoctal experience says nothing about a population, and in the population, career and other outcomes are far better for college graduates.
We are all by not knowing what we missed and, as you say about others, to rationalize our choices. Framing the question - always the most powerful mode of argument - by saying someone meets the standard (i.e., you are happy in your life), so why do something else, makes any possible alternative useless. What good is a winning lottery ticket either? But the question is, what are the different sets of outcomes from each alternative choice? Each alternative, such as college, makes us better off in some ways, worse off in others - and that includes impacting things that the other alternatives don't touch.
You're defining the question as if college benefits are social life and speed of acquiring adult life skills and responsibilities. If those are someone's aims, I'd agree - don't go! College is about critical thinking skills, knowledge, and learning skills, which last a lifetime. Are your thinking skills so good that they can't be improved? Do you have nothing to learn? Not me. How do improve those things? Imagine studying with an expert who not only guides you in what to study, but explains the works based many other works, context, etc.; answers your questions regularly, person-to-person, in their office and via computer; pushes you to see dimensions and angles that you didn't know about, and to do it at a high level; and reviews your understanding and gives you feedback. And then it would be great to do that with others studying the same thing. And if the study needs it, if they provided other resources: A huge library of other works and every reseach paper ever written (along with experts in each field that help you discover excellent, relevant materials); labs with specialized equipment; etc. etc.
If college didn't exist for learning, it would be too good to be invented.
Also, don't you want to learn about yourself, the world, etc.? What you read on the Internet is so far removed from the quality of knowledge, it's laughable, and it's tragic.
> I know some that are terrified of “growing up”
> sheltered and honestly, kind of bizarre world of academia
These are well-worn stereotypes. People inside and outside school have trouble growing up; handling a college workload is no joke - much harder than early jobs, which often are 40 hours and not challenging (many service jobs). And academia is no more bizarre than other industries. You should see what goes on in SV or on Wall Street if you want bizarre.
Yes, I'm saying that you personally - and your dog too - are an ignorant, uneducated, menial worker, who can't count higher than 10 without your toes, while I can count to 1024.
With that out of the way, can we actually talk about something valuable? I see lots of people trying to shut down a reasoned discussion that challenges the orthodoxy (which currently on HN is, college is a waste of time).
Did I use that word right?
I would be interested in people's experiences, good and bad, with having (not) gone to college, and serious analysis - everyone seems to be trying to shut down any serious discussion and exploration.
I went to college and I've had many times that I wished I'd studied harder. I've also wished at times that I skipped college then and went later in life, when I would benefit far more. I haven't wished that I didn't go; I learned so much that forms my understanding of the world, my thinking skills, etc.; I would be a different person without it. You can't tell me that I didn't benefit greatly from college but I'm just one person. But can you tell anyone that they studied for four years, hard, and didn't learn much? That's a big stretch for anyone; you need to learn enough to pass ~32 classes at various college levels, and that's a minimum.
Many people say here that 'I didn't go and I'm fine'. Fine isn't the question; nobody said we'd die without it, but that's not our standard for our choices. Each path leads to different collections of outcomes, better and worse and completely different, and we have blind spots about what the other path could be like (having no experience of it). Maybe college emphasizes different skills, develops different tools, with different advantages and disadvantages, as an example of how that would work.
I also wonder how much HN readers think of or have experienced STEM only. The humanities is more important (unpopular, I know, and both are essential IMHO); it addresses the most critical issues in the world and life, the ones beyond quantitative understanding, which is most of them.
I watched a bunch of Shakespeare plays recently, fictionalized histories of Rome and England [0]. From them you learn more about our current society and humanity in general, including today's crazy disfuntion, the mis/disinformation and people's responses, than from all the quantitative research combined; art is a mirror that looks into ourselves. And as objects of another human being's creation, they are incredibly inspirational and beautiful. I'm wiser and have grown since a week ago. Would I turn to Shakespeare and get so much from the plays without studying literature in college? I doubt it, though that's just me.
[0] Without knowing the reader's experience with the Bard, let me recommend Julius Caesar especially, also Henry VI Part 2 and Part 3, and of course their sequel, Richard III. Richard II is good too. I'd skip Henry VI Part 1 but read a synopsis as context for Part 2: Part 1 is clearly substandard IMHO and, it turns out, is believed to be mostly written by a collaborator, Christopher Marlowe. It does constrast the difference between an excellent playwright of their day using the same forms and an all-time genius of character and language.
There also isn't a single person on HN who has a American STEM degree who has only experienced STEM. Nearly all STEM college degrees require a significant portion of classes to be humanities (the reverse is not true for humanities majors as they can graduate having never taken any real science or math classes), and every single high school graduate has spent 13 years studying the humanities, including Shakespeare which is a part of most high school English curriculums. What you view as naivety is actually an opinion born from experience.
We must stand on the shoulders of giants; you can't reinvent all the wheels, all the insights, all the knowledge and tools created by all the humans in history by yourself. Why would you? Economic specialization, including in literature, yields talented experts who learn all those things for you (they don't reinvent the wheels either, or just one or two), and unless you think you know everything, you can learn a lot from them.
> everything you describe about Shakespeare also applies to Star Wars. The prequel trilogy is a fictionalized account of the fall of the Roman Republic, and is just as useful for learning about history as Julius Caesar is.
Imagine two or ten or a hundred pieces of media that fictionalize the fall of the Roman Republic. Because they refer to the same real-life history, are all of the stories therefore of equal value (and in the same ways)? That doesn't follow at all. One could be complete BS, the other transcendent genius.
The value of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, and of Star Wars, are not learning history. I've never heard someone credit Star Wars as a resource for that before now, nor Shakespeare for that matter. Read a history book. Shakespeare uses the historical setting to talk about humanity, to - like most great art - talk about ourselves, to hold up a mirror to ourselves that looks inside. To learn about ourselves, now.
I enjoy and learn from plenty of sci-fi, including parts of Star Wars (not the prequal trilogy!). Nothing I've encountered is on the same planet as Shakespeare, but that's an impossible standard. Shakespeare was popular when alive, but is also more popular than everyone since, and in languages around the world. The works of Shakespeare are not just pop culture or nothing is more than pop culture (and then we have to differentiate between pop cultural forms so the term means nothing). Einstein and many others have studied physics; their work is not all of the same value.
> the reverse is not true for humanities majors as they can graduate having never taken any real science or math classes
That's not my experience! My experience is that STEM majors usually take lightweight humanities-for-STEM-students (apparently some think they are taking the heavyweight stuff), and humanities majors usually take STEM-for-humanities majors. I almost never saw a STEM major in high-level humanities classes (and in fairness, it would be very difficult without the prerequisites of knowledge and skill - they wouldn't know much of what was being talked about or how to address it), and I almost never saw a humanities major in high-level STEM classes, for similar reasons.
And IME both sets of majors thought there was little purpose to taking the other. 'Why are you doing that?'
In the original post I replied to, you said:
>From [Shakespeare] you learn more about our current society and humanity in general, including today's crazy disfuntion, the mis/disinformation and people's responses, than from all the quantitative research combined; art is a mirror that looks into ourselves. And as objects of another human being's creation, they are incredibly inspirational and beautiful. I'm wiser and have grown since a week ago. Would I turn to Shakespeare and get so much from the plays without studying literature in college? I doubt it, though that's just me.
The plot of the prequels revolves around Palpatine's manipulations to destroy democracy and gain absolute control over the Republic. He does so by manipulating people like the CIS/Trade Federation with misinformation and promising to take care of their legitimate grievances. He gets them to start a war, which is legitimized through a complex legal system but immoral and unjust in reality. He then uses this war to justify the creation of an army loyal to him, which he later uses to seize power. It doesn't take a genius to realize how lessons learned from the movies could be applied to real life, in the same manner that you described Shakespeare's plays doing for you. Shakespeare doesn't talk about misinformation or modern society's disfunction directly, you inferred that, and there is nothing stopping someone from drawing similar life lessons from more modern material. It's the entire concept of allegories/fables which are thousands of years old!
I noticed that you didn't make a single argument about why Shakespeare is above being pop culture; you only asserted that it is somehow better. Since future humanities students won't have grown up viewing Star Wars as plebian content, it is possible that they will worship Star Wars the same way present day ones worship Shakespeare, Dickens, and many other historical writers who wrote for primarily to entertain. Your casual dismissal of the prequels while implying that you like the original trilogy also doesn't bode well for your argument that university education in the humanities is useful for being able to analyze and draw conclusions from literature, since the prequels have a much more complex plot and fleshed out world than the originals do. The movies have just as deep of a story as any Shakespeare play and one can draw any of the conclusions you mentioned from them, and in fact many do even without having the "proper" education. There are no analysis skills that one gains from a university humanities education, which is also likely why you didn't list any of the "tools" the "giants" have created.
A humanities education is definitely not necessary, and possibly even determinantal, to address the "critical issues in the world and life, the ones beyond quantitative understanding, which is most of them", and to think otherwise is to think that being a member of an expensive book club makes you qualified to rule the world.
An experienced developer looks at code and forms perceptions 100x faster and more accurately than someone without expertise. Their brain is wired differently by their experiences, and they look for and pick out patterns, process their meaning, and understand them, all in moments without conscious thought. Similarly, someone with expertise in wine can perceive far more in a glass than someone who doesn't. I'm mostly in the latter group; often I don't know the difference.
But that doesn't imply that no difference exists; reality doesn't exist or not because I perceive it. I have no doubt that those differences exist and that the person with expertise gets far more out of that glass than I do, sees far more color and detail and shapes and images, and I take the gap between my experience and theirs as a signal that it's a fruitful territory for learning. If I denied that, and things like it, I would wall myself off from much learning.
But I can watch Shakespeare and see far more than most people who haven't studied and learned literature and arts more generally. In case you think it, I don't worship William Shakespeare, I love the works. Shakespeare is not a god and the plays are not scripture that I've been instructed to praise, but Shakespeare is just a person - like HN commenters - who made something incredible, and my experience has led me to the same response as so many others over 400 years.
on the STEM subject, teens good at math are never teacher's favorites, instead they're called nerds and some are even isolated from the rest, it's quite the opposite in Asia, or even in Europe. That's the root cause we need import so many STEMs from overseas, the culture smothered STEM from K-12. K-12 is anything but success IMHO.
middle school kids are more keen about their gender or identities, or how awful US was in the past, or their hair color...high school students must show how caring they're to the community or everyone must be some leader somehow while the truth is that they can barely take care of themselves without parents' caring, for academics nowadays SAT/ACT/school-ranking/etc are either racism or unfair...I will stop here.
A road to hell.
Meanwhile many jobs are trying to sell themselves not through a TC that would let one hit these markers, but through football tables, pizza parties, drinks and other social outings. Not to hate on fun activities, but it sure does feel like trying to keep young adults in a perpetual student lifestyle when you keep the booze but not give them the wage to advance in life.
There are plenty of young adults who want to grow up, meeting a ridiculous amount of resistance.
Today those jobs are held by adults, expecting to be able to raise a family on it. Teenagers rarely have jobs, their first job waits until after they graduate from college.
Let's not cover up bad systems because a few individuals rise to the artificial challenge and bite through.
I remember at 18 signing up for 5 years in the Navy. I'd say that is pretty adult. If it isn't, you should consider contacting your senator about raising the age of enlistment.
The ones that do sign up, though, grow up fast.
All the more reason to contact your Senator. Lower the drinking age or make the age of enlistment higher. Adult enough to decide to become a sacrificial pawn, but not adult enough to drink a beer.
For various reasons (safety regulation, emissions requirements, minimum wage not keeping up with inflation, insurance outpacing inflation, cash for clunkers etc…) it’s now almost impossible to afford a car working a few hours at McDonald’s.
There’s also far more fast food restaurants per capita than there used to be, and food service/retail make up a larger part of the economy in general.
To top it off, the age of the average American has increased almost 10 years since 1960, so there are just fewer kids to do the jobs.
We sure had fun shredding tires with it. I was lucky to survive the accident that terminated it.
More than once he'd announced in class that he was grading the class on a curve, but me separately.
Suffice to say we didn't get along.
What was his public reason for doing so?
Apparently, I was pretty obnoxious in high school. It took me far too long to learn this. (And to learn when not to speak my opinion.) I would have been well served if I had swallowed pride and asked teachers (and peers) for some perspective on how my attitude was, frankly, self destructive.
A good interpretation of humans generally is 'giant baby monkeys', in that we have curiosity and openness consistent with juveniles but not with most adult animals.
>on the STEM subject, teens good at math are never teacher's favorites, instead they're called nerds and some are even isolated from the rest,
This doesn't bear any resemblance to my experience of a not-so-special US public school in the 2000s.
I'm not saying your comment is without valid points, but you are throwing the baby out with the bathwater on your attitude about childhood.
It persists into the professional space, just look at how infantilizing Silicon Valley became, trying to turn the workplace into a playpen complete with propeller head hats.
Instead of playing foosball and gaming online, we should be playing cards and drinking like previous generations?
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/9tk0jw/w...
my kids are still in k-12, nothing has really changed for them though.
Do you genuinely believe this stuff that youre typing? I know that conservative medias say this and use it as a boogeyman to get themselves into power, but do you truly believe it? Ive worked with elementary, middle, and high school kids for the last 5 years, in an area that conservatives constantly make fun of and call awful things, but none of that is even close to the reality.
Kids know that gay people exist (and are okay with that), and they know that they might want to look or act differently than they wouldve been forced to in the past.
Kids today are significantly more accepting of tech and STEM subjects than they were even just a few years ago. Its significantly more common and accepted to play video games, kids are interested in video and picture editing because of social media (like TikTok), and they are increasingly tech literate. None of these boogeyman topics you claim are true, but they are continually parroted by people who want to move our education system backwards.
And as a side note, > high school students must show how caring they're to the community
I personally think this is a great thing. We should encourage more community involvement with young people, especially things that help out disadvantaged community members and educate them about our government. Im surprised someone who parrots the original phrases from your comment would be against something like being caring in your community.
my high school kids told me they are aware of those sensitive gender subjects at middle school and they feel it's more frequent these days.
Google will show you some data points, e.g. Gen Z (from 1995+) has close to 20% claiming to be LGBT+. Things changed a lot.
I'm neither a liberal or conservative, I consider myself independent.
The next generation should not tether themselves at all to what is in our comfort zones; if they aren't going far beyond them, they aren't thinking for themselves. When I was young I remember thinking that the old people were jaded, corrupt, and didn't even try to address their ignorance - and now that I'm 'old', I can see I was right! With power has come all those things - not a commitment to truth, but disdain for being made to learn anything. God I hope the next generation doesn't follow or accomodate us. And to this day, some people I know in the prior generation still don't understand things that are normal to us now as adults, because we grew up with them. I know some that won't wear blue jeans because they see jeans as a symbol of a challenging culture.
They say progress happens one funeral at a time! :)
The numbers are vastly higher than scientific estimates of how many people are in these groups. That suggests it’s become a form of self expression, which is just a way of denying reality.
> We did plenty that was shocking and new to our parents, and equally mocked - do you remember?
Who is “we?” Millennials, as a group, are the good kids compared to baby boomers. They have less sex, do less drugs, etc.
> How absurdly narrow-minded our parents seemed? We were mostly right too.
Our parents started down this road of self expression and denying the realities of life. Mostly they sobered up after the drug binges of the 1960s, but left millennials poorly positioned to handle the real world. We are lucky to live in a society our grandparents built, because I don’t think we could build that society again today.
> The next generation should not tether themselves at all to what is in our comfort zones; if they aren't going far beyond them, they aren't thinking for themselves.
The realities of human existence don’t change so fast. The basic mechanics of American life aren’t much different today compared to 1989. If people are rushing past the comfort zones of their parents, that means they’re increasingly living in a delusion detached from reality.
> When I was young I remember thinking that the old people were jaded, corrupt, and didn't even try to address their ignorance - and now that I'm 'old', I can see I was right!
People’s brains don’t fully develop until they’re 25. So if you believe the same things now as you did when you were young…
I thought the data was based on surveys of how people identify themselves, which only shows that identification has changed with time. Maybe fluid gender identity is a stage of development that has been denied before; who knows? Why do you have to tell these people what to do with their lives?
Self-expression is denying reality? I don't know what that means, what one has to do with the other. One way of looking at it is that what is inside you is part of reality; you are part of reality. Anyway, you are criticizing middle schoolers for denying reality?
Again, why do you have to tell them what to do, what to feel? Who are you to do it?
> ...
The rest is mostly your self-expression, not some objective reality. You are welcome to it, of course.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/age-dependency-ratio-old?...
Nah, no on is going to isolate you for being good at math. Literally, that does not happen. Isolation of kids that cant fit it does happen and some of those are good at math. But, the "being good at math" part is not what gets them isolated. It is the other stuff and behaviors, roughly in the "poor social skills" (may include "have hard time being assertive about own boundaries") that gets you isolated.
I don't know if I'd go so far as to say that it is the other "main function" but ohhh boy does this need to be discussed more. I know a few people that seemingly couldn't break out of college. College gives a clear path forward for years, each time you're admitted into a program. Give that up and what do you have? For the people I know, the answer to that question is a minimum wage job outside of their field of study.
It's discussed all the time, for decades.
> I know a few people that seemingly couldn't break out of college.
Many people have trouble moving forward, regardless of college.
1. They complain that they have to cook
2. They complain that they have to do laundry.
3. They complain they have to iron their clothes.
4. They complain they have to tidy up the apartments.
5. They mostly care about sports, movies, and if they're not religious, getting drunk. Of course, that's not necessarily true for those that go to top universities for their PhDs, but those are the minority, in any case.
6. They boast about how great it was that they didn't take humanities in their undergrad. Talking to them, it's also clear they have little understanding of the arts.
I've also met some very responsible, intellectual Bangladeshis.
There are problem people in every society.
Most people think college prepares them to be resource for corporation, or some other things. Your college education coincides with your formative years, but from my exp, college has nothing to do with growing as an adult. It's mainly moving out of your hometown and work your part time job and start planning your life.
They do? And if they do, is it true? Who are we talking about? High school students? People who read HN?
> from my exp, college has nothing to do with growing as an adult. It's mainly moving out of your hometown and work your part time job and start planning your life.
That's too bad. There is so much more going on. What about all the knowledge and critical thinking skills, from science and stats, to addressing the bigger questions in the humanities and social sciences?
Again you keep making the argument that university is the only place where you can learn how to think, which is a pretty basic human skill. If that was true, then it's a dangerous system that needs to be fixed, not something to celebrate.
I said "was true" because I didn't know that the government installed locks on books and encrypting mechanisms on the internet and public libraries so that they are only accessible from universities.
> Only activists have opinions...
That's not what I said, but you certainly did say that adult means that you HAVE TO think about those things, in some particular way that is taught in an university.
Adult to me just means you can take care of people other than yourself. Of course it's a subjective definition, but a teenager can read books/go to university and have sophisticated thoughts about the world, that doesn't make them mature.
Here is something to consider though: why is it that you only study critical thinking, scientific method or whatever at the age 18? Why do kids have to fuck around for years, apparently unable to think, before "university"? Why should they? What are they before that? mindless primates?
I didn't say that (provide a link?), though I do happen to think that adults do have to be responsible for others, as you say, and the bigger issues are big because they impact those responsibilities. The rest is your own ideas.
At college, you learn that there is no one right way to think, and also the very narrow limits of your own mind.
> a teenager can read books/go to university and have sophisticated thoughts about the world, that doesn't make them mature.
Right, college is about knowledge and thinking skills, not so much maturity (but it helps there too). For maturity, get married and work in a coal mine at 13 years old.
> why is it that you only study critical thinking, scientific method or whatever at the age 18? Why do kids have to fuck around for years
Hmmm ... I had science classes, and was taught to think critically, before college, but not nearly on the same level. Why do people not learn more complex things earlier? Why not teach graduate level physics to 6 year olds?
Again with this "at college" rhetoric. I guess if you don't go to college, you will be a bigot, on top of having no critical thinking and being an absolutely selfish individual
> For maturity, get married and work in a coal mine at 13 years old
Did college teach you this stellar argument?
Engineering programs are widely considered to be difficult to complete in 4 years. Where do you get 2 years?
Also, after my sophomore year in college, I was not nearly well-educated enough (whatever 'enough' means); I would wildly approximate that I learned 70% in the last two years. Much of freshman year was just adjusting to college, learning how to write at a college level, etc.
But most importantly, you are still focusing on college as job training, and as I imply in the GGP, specific skill training is just a side benefit. If corporations want job training, they can provide and pay for it themselves. College for the student, not the corporation.
Two, I don't think someone needs a full engineering degree to become productive. Writing my own compiler was a blast, and gave me some real insight into how computers work under the hood. But if our goal is to improve the earning potential of young adults with the minimum financial burden, I wouldn't be teaching compilers. I'd be teaching how to spin up cloud services, the network stack, and modern web dev.
College is for the student. But it also costs the student a boatload of money. If we want to give the student the best bang for their buck, approaching it as a form of job training would be more effective. Sure, companies could pay for that training. But they're not and colleges fulfill this role, and insist on tacking on a bunch of other requirements that don't really do much to help the student's job prospects.
Humanities are more important than STEM. Humanities deal with the world and yourself on issues that aren't quantifiable, which is most of the issues in life and in the world, including at work.
> if our goal is to improve the earning potential of young adults with the minimum financial burden
Again, life is much, much more than jobs - you are much, much more than what you do for some corporation - and early jobs are the least important ones. It's all so absorbed in the corporate perspective: your only value, your existence, is for serving the corporation. And it puts people permanently in that class, as servents rather than as the powerful - the citizens of a democracy, to whom the corporations report.
I think if more people studied the humanities, it would be brazenly obvious. It's craven on the part of the powerful and corporations.
This is just middle-class religious belief. And a good one, because middle-class professional people have to reproduce themselves every generation, so they have to center credentialism or fall to working class or poverty.
If you're born rich, it's easy to die rich; if you're born poor, it's easy to die poor; if you're born middle-class, remaining middle-class is a battle for credentials.
What generation? In my parents' generation, a secretary could get good health insurance for their family and retire with a pension. Today, someone new hired into that role would struggle to afford rent or health insurance for just themselves, and retirement is out of the question.
I think there is a relative amount of middle class wealth left that hides the fact that many modern jobs do not pay middle class compensation anymore. There are a lot of house poor people that might have the trappings of middle class life, but they're on life support.
In many places, to live a middle class lifestyle from 40 years ago would require young workers without assets to earn six figure incomes. Even in "affordable" places, incomes required for a middle class lifestyle are approaching six figures, as well. I'm certainly not one of those people who think STEM is the be-all and end-all solution to anything, but STEM jobs often put workers in the six figure income range.
> a secretary could get good health insurance for their family and retire with a pension. Today, someone new hired into that role would struggle to afford rent or health insurance for just themselves, and retirement is out of the question.
While I agree that wages haven't advanced outside of a the very few, secretaries aren't a good example. Computerization has made most of those skills obsolete.
Also, just because someone is doing a menial work it does not mean that they should not have a access to higher education. Especially since there's not enough of higher valued jobs for everyone. Educated worker has higher job mobility and is able to respond quickly to shifting business needs.
Well, a worker with a college degree has higher job mobility. The worker being educated may be orthogonal. And I'm not sure if becoming educated increases one's ability to respond quickly to shifting business needs.
And it's also part of the problem, as I see it. Decades ago, one could switch industries or fields much more easily because of the lack of expectation of a specific college degree. Today one is much more "locked out" of other fields if they don't have that degree, and people feel trapped because they see no path to a higher paying career without taking on a ton of loans and risk to go to college (for the first time or for another degree).
I think we need to be honest with ourselves and acknowledge a lot (but not all) of higher education is arbitrary gatekeeping, and it's long past time to rein in the "arbitrary" part.
I agree completely, and I didn't mean to imply otherwise.
I never went to college to get a STEM degree to be a resource for anybody. I went because I imagined myself being Tom Swift.
Of course, Elon Musk turned into a real life Tom Swift!
Seriously, Musk came into a ton of money in the dot-com era, knew how to maintain that money because of his background, seems to be a capable hands-on project manager and natural self-marketing. You surely know people smarter than him who didn't acquire the mass amounts of money required to do what he does; I certainly do.
No 10-year olds are talking about how to become a savvy financial engineer like Jack Welch at GE, but they are talking about rockets and electric cars thanks to Musk.
LOL. C'mon, Musk builds rockets, electric cars, robot trucks, and tunnel boring machines. How much more Tom Swift can one get? Ok, Ok, I admit he hasn't yet built a Jetmarine or an Atomic Earth Blaster.
> You surely know people smarter than him who didn't acquire the mass amounts of money
I've never met Musk, so cannot attest personally to his smarts. But I've met plenty of very smart people.
But smarts alone simply isn't good enough to do what Musk does. You'll also need:
1. excitement
2. interest
3. drive
4. willingness to try impossible things
5. perseverance in the face of enormous obstacles
6. a thick skin for being laughed at
7. a willingness to continue in spite of withering criticism and vomit
Besides, although Musk was born into wealth, there's no evidence on his wikipedia page that he had access to it:
"working odd jobs at a farm and lumber-mill" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk
"Musk says that before the company became successful, he could not afford an apartment and instead rented an office and slept on the couch and showered at the YMCA, and shared one computer with his brother."
He made his initial money on an internet startup. Nothing wrong with that.
Got any evidence of this beyond what his estranged father said?
no
Have you ever met someone fresh out of college? Let's be real, if they didn't do something before or during that wasn't college, they are arguably less qualified to do anything than an average person who didn't. Wew, they've memorized how to traverse a graph, or something something roman emperors
Ironically, college starts preparing people to be adults at age 18, where in most jurisdictions in the US, you are already an adult.
This can't be good because it suggests that 30%+ of the adult population aren't prepared to be adults.
For now. Let's look at young people though. They're indicative of the future.
Outside of finance and STEM, it's really hard to see a clear and reliable path to prosperity for a 20-something year old. Perhaps some trades as well.
What's even worse is that the paths to prosperity seems to get narrower and narrower by the year.
What does a computer science student take in their first year? In year 1, in my hometown's university, through year 1, a student takes Linear Algebra, Calculus, Human-Machine interaction, Computer Hardware Fundamentals, Electrical engineering fundamentals, Intro to programming, Logic, Discrete Math, Discrete Automata, Numerical Methods, and intro to software engineering. Very different from an American University that might have 1 or 2 years worth of cross-major electives.
This is not unique to computing: A 1st year med students (which you get to start at 18), is going to be crushed under a pile of biology, biostatistics, cytology, anatomy and the like. Literature? Philosophy? History? You better have taken those in high school if you wanted to learn them, because college has no time for you to decide what you want to do with your life.
I am not going to try to figure out which system is better in the short or the long run, but it makes it pretty clear that college in the US is nowhere near close to universal in western countries, even after we take away the unique financial challenges the US gives college students.
College as STEM job training is absurd and clearly a failure. As you say, it's about much more than job training, but I would argue it doesn't even do that. Hell, it makes applicants worse somehow.
I’m not sure I agree. We could open more research labs, and dramatically increase the number of positions in STEM.
We could double or quadruple the number of teachers, and if we got even a small increase in the number of highly successful students who can do original work in research or STEM it would make all our lives better.
We could increase the number of nurse practitioners who could do basic medicine like fixing broken bones and treating common illnesses.
There’s room to add lots more mechanical and robotics engineers, and a lot of that work requires more spatial reasoning skills than math, despite what one might think. A lot of people who we wouldn’t think of as STEM oriented can do and enjoy those jobs.
In a real free-market scenario, would'nt those PhD programs be drastically reduced?
I suspect this is because this physics PhD program is providing an implicit signalling function, that the fellow out of this program is worth more than the ave college guy - doing the same programming job - because he proved himself on more complex study materials.
Academic physics research is not very useful economically, since we've figured out most of the stuff that will ever contribute to engineering needs -- building stuff that real people benefit from -- in our lifetimes. Not all! But most.
Mechanical/structural/chemical/etc. engineering on the other hand (a.k.a. physics and chemistry applied to real world problems) are very well-compensated skill-sets.
I mean, take a look at the next "who's hiring" page. Ad supported webapps seem pretty well represented.
> Academic physics research is not very useful economically, since we've figured out most of the stuff that will ever contribute to engineering needs -- building stuff that real people benefit from -- in our lifetimes. Not all! But most.
My phone lasts a day on a battery because we've managed to turn off the CPU as much as possible - we've got a supercomputer in our pocket that we can't use at its full capacity because battery technology isn't advancing. Academic physics research is not very useful economically because we've defined "useful economically" as "able to be converted into profits within 2-5yrs", and unfortunately we did that about 20 years ago, so the whole thing's sorta running on fumes right now.
This is hackernews. The organization that founded this site has mostly made its billions by investing in web properties. They are branching out these days, but that's the demographic.
> battery technology isn't advancing. Academic physics research is not very useful economically because we've defined "useful economically" as "able to be converted into profits within 2-5yrs", and unfortunately we did that about 20 years ago, so the whole thing's sorta running on fumes right now.
If I'm understanding the claim, we aren't doing enough battery R&D, so battery technology advancement is slow? First off, I don't think most physics labs are researching anything even remotely useful to improving batteries. But for the ones that are, let's do fund them.
Second, battery technology is and has been advancing rapidly. See for example the slide in the presentation on the following website ("Battery cell energy densities have almost tripled since 2010 [as of 2020]"):
https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/05/eternally-five-years...
That being said, it's far from clear that we are spending less than the optimal amount on battery R&D (the current amount is many billions of dollars per year -- Samsung alone spend ~$1B on research and development for just electric vehicle batteries in 2020). How much do you think we are spending? How much more should we spend?
The problem is, we don't know which ones those are. We won't know, until the discoveries and advancements they make are refined to the point where they can produce batteries.
That's my point - the actual work that needs to happen to make something new that can be put into an "economically useful" product happens 20-30 years beforehand. That's what we need to fund.
> "Battery cell energy densities have almost tripled since 2010 [as of 2020]"
We have a different definition of "rapidly", and a different definition of need. Battery density is the single largest brake on the day-to-day usefulness of electronic devices right now. 3x is nothing. 10x is better, 100x is what we probably need.
I think we probably disagree on two points. First, it seems unlikely that it is even physically possible to beat current lithium ion energy density by 100x. That would imply batteries that are 2x as energy dense as gasoline. I think there's pretty good reason to believe that is not possible -- i.e. there is no easily reversible configuration of atoms that will yield that level of density.
Even if it were physically possible, I doubt that we'd be there today even if we had bent the entire productive capacity of the planet to this problem excluding all others for the last thirty years. You can't make a baby in a month even if you have nine willing mothers to be.
If you're inclined to strengthen the argument you're presenting here, I have one suggestion. If there is widespread underfunding of battery or precursor research, experts in the field are probably talking about this fact. You should be able to find some talk by a respected academic showing that particular worthy ideas likely to add value that aren't being researched for lack of funds. Another option would be to demonstrate that recent advances in battery technology resulted from blue-sky research in the past of the kind that 1. isn't being funded today and 2. could not reasonably have been foreseen to lead to improvements in battery energy density.
(I should also just point out that the whole thesis that we have stopped funding basic research is not even true, see here: https://www.aaas.org/sites/default/files/2020-05/FunctionNON... -- general science funding, after adjusting for inflation, has increased substantially over time.)
I also question your estimate of the importance of energy density, but that's a secondary issue, since I think your views on how fast the technology could be developed are unrealistic under any spending scenario.
Just looking at some quick stats, a little more than half of all STEM occupations are outside of "Computer Occupations", though that one chunk is by far the largest single chunk. And far from the entirety of "Computer Occupations" is ad-supported web apps.
https://www.rclco.com/publication/2021-stem-job-growth-index...
There are a lot of fucking engineers (traditional engineers - based on the definition of 20-30 years ago) out there, and a great many of them make a solid living off it. Most of them simply do their job in relative obscurity compared to the computer workers these days.
https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/average-credit-card-debt-hou...
Turns out she was racking up 10's of thousands of dollars of credit card debt and skimping on necessities -- literally eating Ramen noodles at home and food she scavenged from friends at the mall, she wasn't paying her gas bill and got cut off after she accumulated over $3000 of unpaid bills (in the winter she heated only the bedroom of her apartment with a space heater), etc. It all started falling apart when she got pneumonia and was off work for a few weeks and couldn't pay any of her bills.
She had some of the accoutrements of a high standard of living, but was still very much living in poverty. She's living with her mom now and working on paying down the debt.
Most farm jobs are STEM. The non-STEM aspects of agriculture were mostly automated away centuries ago. You'll notice that farming went from ~90% of the workforce to ~2% over that time.
There exists some remaining small scale stuff that hasn't justified the cost of automation, but at the small scale it will be a long time before automation does pencil out. Robots don't work for free.
You are correct -- this is an awful notion. Plumbers, HVAC technicians, electricians, bricklayers, joiners, framers, builders, are the people who build and maintain the real world, and we need to raise the status of these (and others, forgive me for not listing them all) professions, which take just as long if not longer in which to get qualified, and recognize the dedication to professional standards and the entrepreneurial attitude required to be successful in their respective trade and to bring up the next generation of tradespeople via apprenticeships. * In fact, when you add it all up it meets or exceeds the work put into an undergraduate degree, and yet we don't value it the same.
If you're going to college, you could do worse than to begin getting qualified in a trade on the side -- at worst, you'll learn some widely-transferable practical skills.
* One might also note how much of the above is missing or done badly in the software industry.
I googled around a bit to grab some numbers. I think the below supports the idea that the trades mentioned by GP have median earning numbers very close to the median earning numbers for a full time worker in the United States, maybe a touch less if we grouped all the trades together.
The demand question is less clear to me. The BLS source implies less demand (measured by job growth) in general for the trades than the "average" demand growth for jobs in the US.
The U.S. Census Bureau lists the annual real median earnings at $41,535 in 2020 for all workers with earnings[4] and lists the annual median earnings at $56,287 in 2020 for people who worked full-time, year round. [1]
Plumber - median $56,330, demand growth, slower than average [2]
HVAC tech - median $50,590, demand growth, slower than average [3]
Electrician - median $56,900, demand growth average (actually 9%) [4]
Framer(Carpenter) - median $49,520, demand growth, slower than average [5]
Bricklayer(Mason) - median $47,710, declining demand. [6]
Software engineer - median $110,140, demand growth, higher than average [7]
It gets interesting trying to generally compare demand for STEM to the trades. The BLS estimates about 84,700 openings for electricians per year for the next decade. Contrast that to, for example, chemists - the BLS estimate there is 9,100 positions per year. I didn't find a really great source for the number of BS degrees awarded per year to Chemistry majors, but numbers seemed to be between 14,000 and 17,000 per year.
When I think about supply and demand in careers, it seems to me that STEM is weird. People say "STEM is harder and just worth more in the end" but there seems to me, based on the numbers, for there to be a large "winners take all" effect. But it's hard to measure how many BS in Chemistry holders go to medical school, law school, or take project managment jobs versus being baristas in your local coffee shop. I did find one source that implied the highest percentage of graduates with "Physical Science" degrees (which includes chemistry graduates) at 8.5% work in post-secondary education.
One thing I know for sure - my organization (academic medical research) often hires post-docs that start at a little less than the US median earnings for full-time workers. And there seems to be a lot of competition for those post-doc roles. Salaries do go up over time.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States
[2] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/plumbers-pipefitters-and-steamfitters.htm
[3] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/installation-maintenance-and-repair/heating-air-conditioning-and-refrigeration-mechanics-and-installers.htm
[4] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/electricians.htm
[5] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/carpenters.htm
[6] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/brickmasons-blockmasons-and-stonemasons.htm
[7] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/software-developers.htmDo we, though? As a farmer and software developer, I struggle to find enough farm work to do. I'd take on more work if I could. Everyone and their brother wants to be farmers, though, so there is hot competition and a lot of us end up with only a small piece of the pie.
Per hour it pays more than software. There just aren't that many hours. I would likely be apporaching poverty relying on my farm income alone, but it is also very little work, so maybe that's economically rational?
Five acres is a great lifestyle and some nice tax benefits, but not a career.
Still not a career, perhaps, but that's kind of the point here. I could easily handle thousands of acres if it were my career. However, obtaining thousands of acres to work is effectively impossible. Every other farmer is also desperately trying to get their hands on those acres.
If we want farming to be a viable, full-time career for people then we need far fewer people involved in the industry, not more.
Why STEM and not tradesmen? Plenty of decent trade jobs out there that can lead to serious $$$ if you're hard-working and competent enough to manage self-employment.
Nothing against farmers, just would like to see the real picture.
In any case, if farmers are needed and still don't get paid, there has to be a reason, and it presumably isn't the markets.
Until the STEM workers figure out a way to completely automate food production, anyway.
It's similar to the debate around onshoring manufacturing. There is a clear and simple (not easy, simple) way we can have more blue-collar workers making livable wages in the United States, despite that livable wage requirement being much higher than what other countries require to produce the same goods - improve either the quality of the outputs or the productivity of each laborer. My understanding is this is how Germany held such a strong position in manufacturing for years - by doing things better. It's also why one of the most direct blue-collar paths to a six-figure salary in the U.S. is machine shop work, because the U.S. has, in some regions, maintained the ability to produce parts that cannot be produced more cheaply elsewhere, by developing and maintaining a highly skilled workforce and the tools to support them within that particular sector.
Put in the negative sense - I would be curious to know what the average profit generated by an average farmworker is these days, after both internal and external expenses are taken into account, and how much slack there is between the wages they are currently earning and that profit. My understanding from family-owned / smaller operations is that running a farm in 2022 is really hard and really expensive, and that there isn't a whole lot of slack there right now.
Of course, there is a solution other than increasing productivity - a giant mess of regulatory and fiscal policy that, in direct and indirect ways, subsidizes the industry in a way that makes paying farm workers a livable wage tenable in a way a truly free market would not bear. And those policies are reasonable and even desirable within certain frameworks, and furthermore may be necessary as an interim step toward increased productivity. But wouldn't it be better for America to be able to subsidize a whole bunch of six-figure salaries not simply because that is what people need to live (i.e., that it is a public good to have six-figure salaries, and so we will take on public cost to ensure they exist), but because we have a whole bunch of people that generate six-figures annually in productivity?
Obviously, this is all empirically justifiable or refutable, so if I'm totally off my rocker qualitatively and if there's something offensive here like, "each farmworker actually generates $1.1MM/yr in pretax profit for the average farm employer", then let's frame all that out and legislate til the cows come home. And once they're home, too.
It seems the SAT is increasingly considered "racist" because it reveals racial disparities in learning. What's next? Get rid of the driver's license test because it turns that white kids pass it at a higher rate than black kids?
Sam mentions that schools could down-weight the SAT but should still consider it. Why don't schools want to do that? My guess: if they have mediocre scores on record for a kid, then admitting him means reporting those scores to USNews. They'd rather not know that the kid has a score that would bring down their average.
> It seems the SAT is increasingly considered "racist" because it reveals racial disparities in learning. What's next? Get rid of the driver's license test because it turns that white kids pass it at a higher rate than black kids?
the SAT's a way of laundering discrepancies in generational wealth, which is indeed due to racist public policy as well as racist private actions. it may be intended not that way, but that's how it functions.
so what's next would be removing other methods of laundering racist public policy and racist private action. probably drivers' licenses would not show up on that list, and your assertion that it might is so ridiculous that it's hard to believe you're examining this topic with good faith.
Wealthy students do score better than poor students on the SAT. Do you know who also scores well? Students who study very hard, including poor students. If you get rid of the SAT then the poor students will find it harder to stand out. The rich kids will have ghost-written essays and extracurriculars. They won't be hurt at all.
> so what's next would be removing other methods of laundering racist public policy and racist private action. probably drivers' licenses would not show up on that list, and your assertion that it might is so ridiculous that it's hard to believe you're examining this topic with good faith.
I have never heard someone say that disparate impacts only matter if there is a laundering of wealth or public policies or private actions. Where have you seen this distinction drawn?
But what are SATs being replaced with? "holistic admissions"? A poor kid can prepare for the SAT by studying his ass off, with mostly free/cheap materials from the internet. How can you do the same with "extracurriculars" (eg. going to africa to dig a well) and "hobbies" (going the country club every week)?
Other fun alternatives, just outright auction off certain number of admission slots. Or just award slots randomly to all applicants.
First, a meta-point about questions like “why doesn’t the US have policy X Y or Z”: The US is essentially set up to be ungovernable by design (any meaningful reform requires the cooperation of both major political parties, a situation that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the developed world), you can’t really find rational reasons for most policies.
I notice this a lot, actually: the fundamental thing Europeans miss about the US is they think “a rule exists, thus it must be there on purpose”, because in your countries, unlike in the US, you have functioning parliaments and governments that can change laws as necessary.
Anyway, the US arrived at its education system, as with most things, through a long and largely random process. The catalyst for the weird non-academic admissions standards in particular is well-documented to have been pure anti-Semitism: college administrators felt that with purely academic admissions standards, too many Jews were being admitted.
So a field specific exam doesn’t really work.
And, besides that, would be opposed by the exact same people opposing the SAT.
this is a ludicrous modern reinterpretation of SAT testing.. sure, testing has lots of downsides.. linking it to "wealth laundering" is your own obsessions showing IMO
I'm not aware of data on SAT scores and family net worth, but there is plenty of data on SAT scores and family income. Controlling for income doesn't come close to accounting for racial gaps; the richest black kids barely do better than the poorest white kids.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ezekiel-Dixon-Roman/pub...
It would be useful if people said why they trust whatever they are linking to. Random stuff on the Internet isn't worth the time.
I'm sorry, but who are you and why should I trust your reasons to trust other people?
Judge the content for yourself.
IMHO the onus to establish an assertion (as a general term) is on the person making it:
1. Imagine I post an assertion, 'the moon is made of blue cheese', and it's read by 20 people. Should all 20 do the research themselves? That's much less efficient than my doing it - I already know where I got it, it's my claim, and it's 1/20th the labor.
2. Think of all the assertions you read: Do you have time to research them all?
3. The Internet is filled with information, mostly BS. I don't have time for even a fraction of the accurate info. If we had 1% of the info, but it was backed by credible research, it would be no loss in info (nobody can process even 1%) and great gain.
Finally, people can't judge content it unless they have expertise in the domain. There is plenty of research showing that to be true - that fact is fundamental to misinformation and disinformation, even something as simple as paid Amazon reviews - and it's easy to observe. Think of something in which you have expertise, like your profession: Could you persuade a non-expert? I could persuade one of almost anything, it seems; they just have no idea what are the questions, the facts (beyond a very limited range), or the answers.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/17/us/columbia-university-ra...
Before the exam, I couldn't understand why the higher income kids were paying for SAT training classes. What is the point of scoring 1600 if 800 could get you in the "best" school. It would have interfered with my after school job anyway.
To add further, I thought MIT was just DeVry for rich people but otherwise equivalent and that only black kids get scholarships (ironic since I am Latino). Are things different now ? Are most kids from lower socio-economic backgrounds still clueless about the college admissions process, the difference between colleges, and scholarships. It seems like that is the part that needs to be fixed and eliminating SATs is shortsighted.
[0] - https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/sat/whats-on-the-test/stru...
https://www.prepscholar.com/sat/s/colleges/MIT-SAT-scores-GP...
Reading and Writing 730-780, Math 780-800
When Covid hit, schools in poor communities tried to implement distance learning and discovered that only half (for example, in one city which I don't remember) of families had a desktop or laptop for the student to use - probably those kids aren't going to become programmers. Programming classes are non-existent, at least based on limited knowledge - seriously, look up the programming classes in a nearby poor school district.
If anything most of the high school counselors in predominantly poor and black schools just don’t push very hard. They would tell you MIT was too far of a reach. They would tell you the best you could hope for was a private local, community college, or public state university. Who would ever consider Devry and MIT as equivalent?
The downvotes are the aggressive reactionary tide through HN, that rises and falls. Your personal observation suggests that some 'progressive' action might be valuable, that there's a systemic problem, and therefore it is shut down.
Don't stop telling it please. We need more voices from the real world here.
> they didn’t need to lie about it to still be untrue and absurd
What basis do you have for saying it's untrue?
That is hearsay.
> What basis do you have for saying it's untrue?
I was pointing out that it could be untrue without needing to be a lie. As to the “basis” for my saying it is untrue, I’ve been over that.
Why do you say that?
The minimum score for the SAT if you do nothing is 400, not 600.
Average SAT Score of admitted students: 1525
It sounds absurd to you, but isn't that your own ignorance? You weren't there; they were. I've heard many tell similar stories. Again, look in the NY Times from a few years ago; elite colleges not only accept it, but have tried to mitigate it.
> one that actually sounds realistic
Isn't this just saying that it agrees with what you already believe?
Or my experience.
Of course, perhaps schools in poor areas really are pushing the children hard to go to extraordinary heights and it’s just the fault of poor people for being so damned useless that they ignore it or fail.
Or, perhaps, there’s a middle ground to be found, but I doubt it includes people who no one would describe as bright being unaware of the scores they need to enter the next stage of education, if that’s what they desire.
That's not how I understood it - are we talking about the same comment. I understood the commenter to be saying that their school didn't give students the resources to understand and apply to top colleges, including basic understanding of colleges (e.g., who MIT is) and the admissions process. Are we talking about the same comment?
The comment that you paraphrase is, I agree, absurd!
There's been a lot of research and work on that, though I don't know what progress has been made. You can find NY Times articles from a few years ago.
> eliminating SATs is shortsighted
Why does the above make SATs any better? They don't predict college outcomes, and they are structured and written in ways that favor wealth, thus providing bad data on students (other than their wealth). Why use them?
Getting rid of SATs from my perspective sounds like a fantastic idea.
> Getting rid of SATs from my perspective sounds like a fantastic idea.
There are two types of standardized tests. The first kind you reference measures the school. They are not used for college admissions. They can affect school funding.
The second type of test measures the student. Sometimes a school will report those numbers. But they do not affect the funding a school gets.
Getting rid of the SAT would have zero effect on contingent funding for schools.
Consider this: if the schools weren't dependent on the test scores, then they could use that same energy-for-testing to teach their students methods for improving their SAT scores. I genuinely doubt they'll switch energy, but the fact remains that the requirement to game a test-well-or-lose-funding system by necessity removes education opportunity for students in order to focus on the tests over education, especially for schools in lower income areas because they stand to suffer the most. We're relying on a system that ensures that people stay where they are. Now, if there isn't a correlation between lost education opportunity and SAT scores, then you might be right, but...
Edit: This article goes into the problem in the context of No Child Left Behind and confirms my point: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/03/...
Your immediate parent comment indicates that if school testing were eliminated then students would improve their SAT scores. I agree with that. But it is beside the point. This thread is about whether the SAT should be eliminated, not whether school testing should be eliminated.
At the end, you start to make a point about correlation between "lost education opportunity" and SAT scores. But my reading is that you're saying there's a correlation between LEO and SAT scores. Are you saying it's a positive correlation? Or are you saying students are spending time prepping for SATs, and what they are learning there is negatively correlated with actual learning?
I am trying to understand what you mean. Are you advocating elimination of the SAT? If so, why?
So, I'm opposed to standardized tests, in general, as a strong measure for capability because of their tendency to force the focus of schools on testing over education and in doing so, deep and localized problems are reinforced. I gave the example of my own school, because the school barely touched on the SAT since the focus was, by necessity, focused on the ACT. The SAT was an afterthought. For the teachers, it was a legitimate existential crisis if the ACT wasn't taught well, while the SAT was effectively irrelevant to them.
A large body of students don't know how important the SAT is, nor whether or how they should push themselves to test well -- we weren't taught that because of a shift in priorities. In some ways, both tests were expressed as on the same level of importance, despite the ACT not mattering in the slightest to the future of the individual student, leading to confusion by students about what is actually important.
For schools that the SAT isn't an afterthought, the SAT might make sense, but in doing so, we are culturally prioritizing the reinforcement of already-strong communities while simultaneously continuing to weaken already weak communities.
In other words, a proxy besides the SAT should be sought after, at least while we have so many broken systems and wildly different implementations of incentive systems in-place. I don't know what that proxy is.
The ACT and SAT are two tests used for college admissions. If you take one, you don't need to take the other.
> despite the ACT not mattering in the slightest to the future of the individual student
The ACT is used for college admissions. Are you thinking of a different test?
It sounds like you have an issue with the teach-to-the-test mentality and the fact that "the test" isn't the SAT. I understand the concern that students are pulled in too many directions. But according to what you've written "the test" is the ACT. That is a substitute for the SAT. They are only being pulled in one direction. It is the direction that will help get them into college.
[1]: https://www.cvccworks.edu/Downloads/HarrisonBergeronByKurtVo...
Any teacher who puts this on the syllabus today would be fired for doing a racism.
Could you provide an example of that claim? Usually the SAT is considered discriminatory because the way the testing is done favors wealthy, well-educated people, and gives negative results for equally talented people who lack those advantages. Colleges have found that the SAT is excluding a large part of the talent pool.
Also, SAT scores do not correlate well at all with college outcomes.
Why then use the SAT?
The alternatives, such as essays, are even more highly correlated with wealth: https://cepa.stanford.edu/content/essay-content-strongly-rel...
As to predicting outcomes, that’s largely due to score compression (the students at any given school are in a narrow score range). Folks across the score range aren’t being compared with each other in class performance. But look at the LSAT, where all students from different schools take the same bar exam. LSAT is highly predictive of bar exam performance. Students who score less than 150 (on a 120-180 scale) are virtually guaranteed to fail the bar.
> Colleges have found that the SAT is excluding a large part of the talent pool.
No, colleges have found that the SAT produces racial demographics they don’t like. Poor white kids have been excluded by the SAT for nearly a century and colleges never took action in response to that.
Source? Or do you mean "taking LSAT at the same time as taking the bar for fun"? Because LSAT is typically done before you enter law school, while you take the bar after you get out.
Where does that come from, other than repetition?
> look at the LSAT
I'm not talking about the LSAT (and bar exam performance isn't a meaningful indicator of much - the great majority of aspiring lawyers pass their bar exams).
> Poor white kids have been excluded by the SAT for nearly a century and colleges never took action in response to that.
If that's true (and I don't know that it is, especially on the scale of what has happened to blacks), what does that does that have to do with racism against black kids?
It seems everyone's great effort is not to address racism, but to deny it, against incredible evidence. Look at this entire discussion. It's incredible the effort that goes into denying racism, rather than doing something about it. Reactionary politics has swept the US and HN.
Doctors that share a racial and cultural with their patients are able to provide better care. It's been seen in multiple studies that elder African American women are more likely to follow the advice of the doctor if the doctor shared their background. There is little controversy around the fact that diversity leads to improved health outcomes ( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8675280/ / https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w24787/w247... )
Similar trends can be seen in other fields. So affirmative action is not just good because it is the morally right thing to do, but also because it is the more practical solution quite often.
Let me guess that you’re white.
Explain why Asians and Hispanics live longer than whites despite most doctors being white?
Conversely, are you suggesting all those Indian doctors all over rural America should be replaced with white doctors?
I sought to note the particular and unique plight of African Americans. I came upon this picture of Ruby Bridges a month ago: https://i.imgur.com/SSRsywY.png and I got to reading what became of her, and I found this recent picture of her: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7c/Ruby_Bri... that's that little girl who put up with a lot of shit just to attend the same school as white girls -- and she doesn't even look that old in this recent pic! The idea that we don't have to do anything to make up for denying the black man and woman the right to drink from the same fountain as the white man and woman, to attend the same school only a few decades ago is deeply unsettling, as the auspices of privilege reverberate down the generations, so do the weighted anchors of un-privilege.
In that vein, I think the argument you seem to be converging toward is not very strong because we have a special select of Asians and Hispanics, they are a special bunch to have taken the initiative to leave everything behind and immigrate elsewhere for a better life, likely they were moneyed enough to make the move, likely they had a strong social support networks as indeed Hispanic&Asian households do, better eating habits, probably more active, etc.
> Where does that come from, other than repetition?
You started out talking about socioeconomic status, but by the end of your post you admitted getting rid of the SAT is an effort to “address racism.” People think getting rid of the SAT is about race and not class because proponents of the policies admit as much.
> I'm not talking about the LSAT
The SAT and LSAT are very similar both in content and distribution of outcomes.
> (and bar exam performance isn't a meaningful indicator of much - the great majority of aspiring lawyers pass their bar exams).
Half the people who take the LSAT are excluded from even attending law school based largely on LSAT score. Students with lower LSAT scores are at high risk of failing their classes or failing the bar: http://outsidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2018/01/using-ls....
> If that's true (and I don't know that it is, especially on the scale of what has happened to blacks)
The SAT is highly correlated with socioeconomic status. And most poor people are white.
> what does that does that have to do with racism against black kids?
Is the SAT “racist” or is it biased against people with low socioeconomic status? Two quite different things.
As to what’s “reactionary” or not, you should try recalibrating your bubble. The majority of white, Asian, Hispanic, and Black people oppose the practice of using race as a consideration in school admissions: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/25/most-americ.... They also say test scores and grades should be the main factors for admissions. The “race progressives” are a minority even among minority groups.
If you take it away, colleges will happily admit loads of "well-rounded" students with tons of expensive extracurriculars. They will be racially as balanced as possible, but their family incomes will all be very high. The kid from a poor broken home who somehow managed to score 1400 on the SAT will lose their best shot at standing out.
I think taking away the SAT as criteria will actually enhance racial bias through subjective measures - than the flip
What makes you say that the SAT is the best option for poor applicants?
The idea that the SAT is inherently biased against poorer students is controversial. AFAIK, the evidence for this requires advanced statistical analysis and expert interpretation and isn't widely accepted as definitive. Even among those experts who accept this evidence, there doesn't seem to be any clear sense of what is causing this bias or what can be done about it. It simply isn't the case that the SAT has some glaring bias that can easily be rectified, like questions assuming knowledge of water polo and horseback riding. Student skills in things like reading and math do not exist in a vacuum, but depend on prior exposure and knowledge, which robustly correlates with family/neighborhood/school environment and thus socioeconomic status. Efforts to create tests that are completely independent of those things have not produced useful results.
Quality studies show that the benefit of test prep is modest to moderate, on the order of 30-100 points, and almost all of the benefit is achieved within 8 hours of preparation. Even that benefit is not widely accepted as simply retaking the test can increase scores by 60 points. [1] There is no evidence that expensive private tutoring leads to better outcomes than self-study with free alternatives such as Khan Academy. [2]
> What makes you say that the SAT is the best option for poor applicants?
It's helpful to look at it more as the "least bad" than the "best" -- we need to stop focusing exclusively on the issues with the SAT and think about the actual alternatives. For example, essays, extracurriculars, and prestigious brand-name private school affiliations are all valued by prestigious colleges, and can be bought legally and very easily by rich families. It is much harder to buy a high SAT score. To buy a high SAT score, a family could pay someone to impersonate their child, but this is very risky as the recent Varsity Blues scandal showed.
Suppose we put ourselves in the shoes of a bright-but-poor high school student. We need a way to make ourselves stand out. We can sign up with Khan Academy or download some SAT prep materials at the public library and prepare for a few hours... or we can try to get into an expensive private school, get a private college essay consultant, join a rich-kid sport, take a trip to Africa, and other things that rich kids do to burnish their applications. Which of these seems more practical to you?
If you look at the criticism of the SAT from universities, I think you'll find that they are mostly interested in attacking the SAT in isolation, not comparing with the alternatives. Comparing with the alternatives would require shedding light on their opaque and subjective admissions processes and the way in which those processes favor the rich. On the contrary, research suggests that leveraging standardized tests, and increasing participation in them, tends to open doors for poor students relative to status quo [4][5].
It's interesting that they are so favorable to a change which will make their processes even more subjective and opaque, especially given their history of using subjective and opaque processes to exclude undesirable minorities (yesterday Jews [3], today Asians). Although they have proven themselves untrustworthy, they are not interested in increasing transparency and objectivity of admissions processes. I think we should be hesitant to accept their reports and recommendations as being in completely good faith, given their strong interest in (and consistently observed behavior of) recruiting as wealthy a class as possible each year.
[1] https://slate.com/technology/2019/04/sat-prep-courses-do-the...
[2] https://www.seattletimes.com/explore/special-sections/sat-pr...
[3] https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/dobbin/files/2007_asq_kara...
[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/10/upshot/why-talented-black...
[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/14/upshot/how-universal-coll...
I believe a lot of problems that the SAT's used to have were fixed over the years? It's somewhat of a moving target.
And if you can't make any standardized test that's fair, why is that?
The actor's bearing on stage seemed ______; her movements were natural and her technique _____
A. unremitting...blasé B. fluid...tentative C. unstudied...contrived D. eclectic...uniform E. grandiose...controlled
Apparently 8% more black students answered this question correctly than white students, and it was never moved from a potential question into the real test. The allegation is that the racial outcome of the question is the cause of its never making it onto the SAT.
I think it never made it because the question is bad. None of the answers makes much sense (the correct answer is apparently C).
1: http://www.jayrosner.com/publication-onwhitepreferences.html
Every option has either 2 words that make no sense, or one word that makes no sense with "her movements were natural" and one that does. Only option C has two words which make sense with both. This question is just basic English comprehension and should be on every exam.
Every single question carefully preselected to appear on the test favors whites over blacks.
Any claim of racism - even raised by an expert who has done detailed research, in a society with overwhelming evidence of it historically and now, and in higher education admissions in particular - is always dismissed.
I worked in edtech analytics for a while where SAT among other factors were correlated with student success. SAT scores correlate with graduation rates, college GPA, job placement. Most elite universities also tend to receive applicants with higher SAT scores (A no brainer)
> Most elite universities also tend to receive applicants with higher SAT scores
Many don't use SAT scores anymore.
What is that based on, and how do you define academic skills? It may reflect how much time and money you can spend on test prep courses (time is also a problem for poor students who tend to have jobs, take care of siblings for parents with multiple jobs and no day care, etc.). It may reflect test-taking skills in general, which aren't skills of value.
It sounds like maybe money would have been the limiting factor in your case but I don’t know.
You really believe that? I find it extremely hard to believe that the distribution of intelligence for engineering roles at a FAANG company is the same as that of the general population.
It seems far more likely that the distribution is shifted 10-15 points to the right.
Neglectful parents are common.
There are levels to this. I’m same as OP in terms of “looked like they could’ve gone to MIT” but was born in the wrong family. Ended up going to University of Washington after doing some community college - so it’s not like I went to the worst school in the world. But it was a long journey to get there and I do work at a target company now. Again, a very long journey… That could’ve been changed by just an interview or something else entirely.
The main reason for failing education is not money, it's family attitude towards education. Educational parents get better results than rich parents. Look at how the Asian group is faring. In fact having too rich parents is pulling down the kids.
Yes, that's all we ever did in the trailer parks.
There was a video (perhaps even from kurzgesagt) which describes how critical it is for our society to allow as many people as easy access to knowledge as possible and not only for obvious reasons but also to increase the chance for all of us that the hidden genius is finding a cure for cancer.
You can even study for free in Germany as an non German. You know what happens? Those people might stay in Germany and make Germany a better country.
Imagine a world were we compete globally with the best education system. Let's allow more people to shape our future.
https://www.mygermanuniversity.com/universities
You are a little bit limited by what you like to study if you don't speak German as not every university offers a bachelor in English but it's doable.
If there is no money in something, then it's assumed there is no value. It's the American way.
You would only get those same problems if you made college mandatory, as well as free.
A real commitment to a policy of free tertiary education would also expand the availability of trade schools not just universities.
This is part of the proposal of progressives. They always emphasized the freedom for a student to choose between trade school or community college, and then move on to a public 4 year school if they chose to do so.
Public education in the US is the most well-funded per student you can find anywhere. Yet somehow it doesn't translate into top-tier teachers nor top-tier outcomes. It's almost like giving huge amounts of money to unaccountable bureaucrats doesn't solve problems.
Most of the people attending Hauptschule don't attend university [0]. In some regions 60% of the children attend it. Aren't you concerned that the person who could discover the cure for cancer is in Hauptschule right now?
Imagine a Germany in which the rest of your life isn't determined at age ten.
Also, the average attendance for Hauptschule is <10% [1]. Wouldn’t you agree that at least 10% of kids would benefit from having an education experience more tailored to their needs instead of building resentment for education by being forced to sit through terribly boring lessons with the nerds knowing the answer for everything?
[1]: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulsystem_in_Deutschland#Sch...
Do you know how many people in Hauptschule make it to university?
> Also, the average attendance for Hauptschule is <10% [1].
I must acknowledge I thought it was 25%, it must've changed in recent years.
> Wouldn’t you agree that at least 10% ...
Thank you for the question. I buy the thesis of the Case against education by which university is a waste of time for most people, nevertheless it's hard for me to stigmatize a percentage of the population by not allowing them to waste their time there as well with their former ten year old smarter classmates.
I went to Realschule, made a 3 year apprenticeship as a software engineer and went for 2 further years to bos.
I'm now able to study.
Why do you think that? Genuinely curious.
What you imply here is entierly untrue. I know lots of people that made their Abitur after having been to the Haupt- or Realschule first. That is not to say that the school system doesn't have its problems -- it clearly has -- but you are painting a picture that is not rooted in reality.
Having lived in Europe for 30+ years, I have never heard of this outside higher education at very famous institutions, e.g. Stanford, Harvard, MIT.
In fact, primary and secondary schools in the US are usually seen as quite insufficient.
> This is for developer positions I would expect it different if you are hiring line cooks.
I’m a lead engineer myself.
Again, I yet have to find anyone in Europe who would have primary and secondary education in the US in high consideration. In fact, after traveling in Asia, I had somewhat the same experience: top US universities were highly valued, but anything below that was mostly dismissed.
That is an extremely large percentage if the candidate pool was chosen at random. That would be surprising in Europe.
Anyway, I didn’t say it was surprising, but it is rare.
> US people study abroad too. It’s very common and tech people tend to pick US because it’s heavy in tech.
Sure. But there is a difference between hiring US nationals abroad, who likely would be US educated, and US educated Portuguese or German nationals, who are a very small minority of the population, and that’s what I was asking.
^And then our public school had some funded, hidden exchange with Geelong Grammar school :)
Personally at that role it was an English role so I only took from their US education that they can function in an English environment. I didn’t give two shits about their Carnegie Mellon masters.
I have no clue if your education system is better or ours.
It's just that we think multiple choice tests are easier than free form.
By "free" I think what you are trying to say is that in Germany working class people, the majority of whom don't go to college, pay for rich kids to go to college, rather than having those people pay for themselves.
I think we haven't seen at least a partial collapse only because most American companies are bad at hiring, bad at investing in workers, and bad at keeping them. But imagine a company where programmers are happy and tend to say for years. That company might do just as well, or perhaps better, running an in-house boot camp and apprenticeship program as by hiring new grads.
Can you provide more context for this? How is the cost of teaching a STEM student higher than the cost of a liberal arts student? The classrooms are roughly the same. STEM student labs might be more expensive to manage, but that equipment is/(can be?) funded by research grants.
While there are a massive number of private liberal arts schools, there are relatively few private STEM schools. Most STEM degrees come from public university that are significantly cheaper than private universities.
Hence why I said "overhead from research grants."
(1) Many grants have a mentorship / training / giving-back component. This is one of the merit-based criteria NSF reviews on.
(2) Research grants have overhead which feeds back into general budgets. At elite schools, this is about 2/3 of the money. A typical split might be 1/3 to the department, 1/3 to the school, and 1/3 to the project. It's kind of a financial scam. Nominally, these cover buildings and admin time. Practically, these feed into general budgets which do include labs and teaching. Corruptly, a lot of the money gets funnelled in creative ways to improve professor's lives through fancy faculty clubs, get-aways, and in some cases, creative (but legal) embezzlement with money ending in people's pockets.
One conversation that stuck was the me:
Back when I was in school, one of my mandarin teachers wanted to offer a "business mandarin" course outside of the general language program geared towards business students who might need basic fluency in a corporate setting. The school denied him because there wasn't a budget for it, which struck me as asinine at the time as it wasn't like there would be students who weren't paying tuition for the course anyway. The school had rooms available, and students have to buy all the materials the class would need anyway.
I think the kind of longitudinal studies needed combined with a small “treatment” group make this kind of investigation as hard to do as a nutritional study.
Speaking only for STEM, an elite STEM program gives the student access to a bigger variety of upperclassman courses; compare the available course list for a community college vs a large university and the difference is quite noticeable. The better programs also provide access to better equipment and advising; e.g., various University of California campuses have their own on-site chip fabrication labs. If the career trajectory you're planning benefits from those advanced courses, going to the better STEM programs is going to help tremendously. If not, well, they don't but that's hardly the institution's fault; they aren't choosing who to send your resume to, you are.
(As an aside, I use the word "access" very intentionally; educational institutions don't "confer" anything. Students get access to resources and opportunities and they choose which to take. It's entirely possible to do the minimum to fulfill requirements; for example, I chose easy courses to do the minimum fulfill my humanities requirements because it wasn't where my interests lay.)
[1] For the curious, it was the notion of comparative advantage, which was counterintuitive for me too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage
I do think that on top of that, they add value because students can be given more challenging and stimulating coursework. The difference in Math education between a top college and a college with loose entry requirements is staggering - we're talking people doing hard proofs freshman year vs. undergrad seniors taking upper level math courses that don't even have proofs, just computation.
'Elite' state schools (GA Tech, Michigan State? Etc) probably have excellent ROI.
Expensive, not really elite schools are probably not worth it on average, but again, cost varies highly, so ...
> For most students, the salary boost from going to a super-selective school is “generally indistinguishable from zero” after adjusting for student characteristics, such as test scores. In other words, if Mike and Drew have the same SAT scores and apply to the same colleges, but Mike gets into Harvard and Drew doesn’t, they can still expect to earn the same income throughout their careers. Despite Harvard’s international fame and energetic alumni outreach, somebody like Mike would not experience an observable “Harvard effect.” Dale and Krueger even found that the average SAT scores of all the schools a student applies to is a more powerful predictor of success than the school that student actually attends.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/does-it-ma...
That’s not “education” directly, but does suggest an extremely strong applicant pool selection effect is happening.
I came away thinking that parental influence is the most important factor. If your child is well-nurtured enough to be within a crap shoot of selection for an elite institution, it probably doesn't really matter if they get in or not, they'll be successful regardless (for mysterious reasons that may be interesting to know, but don't really matter).
As such, it's better not to make your kid focus on "getting in" (which is a suspect goal for many reasons), but instead on trying their best to realize their full potential.
The highest cost seems to be for good-but-not-best institutions that have some specific niche/selling point for them but are not particularly selective and will accept almost anyone who will pay their price.
Like, if some school wants to build a reputation for having the best scientists or lawyers then they have to be somewhat selective with respect to performance and have very competitive admissions, but you also need to ensure that the particular young students with most potential can actually afford to study there; but if a school just wants to provide a good education in X and does not care who will enroll, they can just ramp up the fees until the applicants filter themselves out.
Even for a place like MIT/Caltech?
Even the way you ask the question shows that you consider them somehow different. Probably better. Which presumably means that "better" people go there or teach there. So that's better networking.
And the fact that you know them by name as better places shows better brand.
OTOH, it may be easier and cheaper to make an agreement with their local community college.
I think what makes the discussion hard is that people say 'college' and mean wildly different things. The author seemed to mean elite colleges in some comments, overall statistics in others, and for-profits in others. I think there are very different problems in different sectors.
I'm not saying don't do it, or that the status quo is good. But I don't think your suggestion really addresses the problem that got us here, the problem that we've subsidized an expensive signaling game (cf Bryan Caplan's The case against education).
> Ignoring his political axe-grinding
This was gratuitous. I didn't even see any politics in the thread.
Degrees cost companies through increased wages. Student loans get paid somehow, after all.
> This was gratuitous. I didn't even see any politics in the thread.
You not seeing things is not the same as things not existing. I do see it, and wanted to focus this bit of discussion on the question of degree value, not the assorted other stuff there.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics)#Job-mar... for the model behind my comment.
You’re a hiring manager choosing between Alice and Bob. Alice has a degree, Bob doesn’t; you estimate they’ll be equally productive, and it’s common knowledge that your competitors will judge them the same. Do you offer Bob less, since he doesn’t have student loans to pay off? You can if you like, but then Bob will go work for your competitor.
> You not seeing things is not the same as things not existing. I do see it, and wanted to focus this bit of discussion on the question of degree value, not the assorted other stuff there.
You can mention having further disagreements without making it a gratuitous diss.
I personally build my hiring processes to be relatively blind to elite status signals. But interviewees tell me that's pretty unusual.
> You can mention having further disagreements without making it a gratuitous diss.
I believe it was both accurate and necessary to divert the replies away from the politics. And given that you can't even find the politics, I don't understand why you consider it necessary to appoint yourself my editor.
I'm not at all asking whether Alice with a degree gets better offers than Alice without a degree. We both say she does. At the time we're checking in, Alice's degree is a sunk cost. Your proposal is not: it's extra company investment in the non-degreed after hiring.
> can't even find the politics
Are you sure you want to emphasize anyone's reading ability in this conversation?
And accusing someone of political axe-grinding is a funny way to discourage replies about politics. You could've said, for instance, "Leaving aside any politics here..." That would help engender healthier discourse here on HN.
I also didn't hire you as my editor, so perhaps you can just apply your advice on comity to your own work and leave me be.
Comity is not the same as healthy discourse. Objecting to a cheap shot is not hiring myself as your editor. I do agree on ending the thread here.
It's not like other industries haven't already solved this problem. Law firms will finance your law school and make you pay them back if you leave the firm.
Meanwhile, I have zero qualms about hiring high school grads with a github who can talk about the base language intelligently, let alone frameworks like spring.
Though, the most surprising thing to me was needing to provide a privilege statement in order to speak at the college event.
How the hell can anyone provide any sort of nuanced insight into the privilege and challenges they faced in a "disclosure"? It reeks of enacting a miniature struggle session to undermine the speaker before they even have a chance to talk.
Maybe the Long March through Institutions was real...
That's not a bad thing (to a point) when the entry-level qualification takes a massive amount of time, intense effort, and money to get; it's very important that they manage it so there's no oversupply. If you don't, then you'll have disasters like US legal education has been.
Society needs a lot of doctors. It doesn't need any english lit PhDs. Not to say the latter isn't without benefit.
Parents on 3rd world countries know that education is still the safest way to a higher standard of living (not guaranteed though).
There are no shortcuts to gain knowledge (degrees, training, self-taught, etc.). It is hard to vet someone if that person has not been through accredited programs - professional scammers can even fool interviewers.
Aside from this, there is a big difference: would you trust a doctor to cure you without a medical degree? There is your answer.
It depends.
I had a recurring issue with pain and numbness in my elbow for a few years. I went to all sorts of well credentialed doctors, and every diagnosis they gave ended up being wrong. The person who cracked the case ended up being a random doctor at a hole in the wall clinic that had been the first person available to get an ear infection checked out. I mentioned my symptoms offhand while we were chatting, and he cracked it in about 3 minutes - nerve damage from leaning my elbow on my standing desk. He had a lot of practical experience with occupational related injuries, including nerve damage from poor fitting safety gear, etc. It wasn't his degree that let him find the root cause of my issue, but practical experience.
On the other hand, there's lots of diseases where doctors need to keep up on the latest advancements in research, etc. I don't really know how this works - is it trade journals? Do all doctors in fields like this regularly read them, or papers on NCBI? Does a college degree help here? I don't know. I also don't know if I fundamentally disbelieve that someone couldn't be just as effective in these areas through a more practical learning approach than a college degree, either. But I'm not sure that I believe it, either.
Medicine is a big field and not all parts of it - from my experience on the receiving end, at least - seem to require all the same skills to be successful.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30738763
It's a poetic mission statement for an endeavor which seems to jive with Hotz’s recognition that such a school must be physical and beautiful. However, scratch away the veneer, Hotz suggests in a recent blog post, and one finds that those behind UATX “are either straight up supporters of Power or naive political children.” He points to Joe Lonsdale, Sam Altman, and Marc Andreessen, all of whom “are very successful in the current system.”
“This is not a counter-elite!” Hotz continues. “This is a spin off of the exact same BS that’s everywhere. NGO awards and fake status signaling markers.”
I call those "liberals." /s
Good luck being able to practice engineering if you haven't got a degree! The licensing bodies for professions won't care a fig about your life experience.
People who can actually do it have done it for a lab or a business, and then get accredited.
My impression of the engineering degree is that it's basically a certificate in being able to deep dive into... something. Whether that's actual bridges or financial derivatives or trading systems, a degree basically says you haven't given up on some large pile of math-heavy topics, so an employer should bet on you being able to learn their thing. It's also the case that there isn't enough time to learn a whole business, so really it's testing that you stuck with the introductory parts of a wide variety of techie things.
I've worked as an engineering manager for both professional engineers and non-degreed technicians / technologists. My observation (such as it is) is that the degreed engineers had a stronger framework to be able to connect ideas and learn new skills. On the other hand, technologists were able to do tasks just as well as engineers but had trouble generalizing the concepts.
Importantly, the degree (combined with professional guidance) also helps you appreciate the things you don't know. For example, a geotechnical engineer may be perfectly able to assess an abutment or design a blast but they wouldn't certify a dam foundation and would reach out for help in doing so.
It's probably worth sharing that I hated my undergraduate education with a burning passion. I've only recently begun to appreciate it more -- turns out those old farts who did the accreditation might have known a thing or two about what you need to know later in your career.
I say this as someone who went to a school with highly ranked humanities programs. My business communication class taught me more about communication than any rhetoric/history/media studies class. My high school AP English Language class taught me more about persuasive writing than any writing class in college.
If undergrad humanities programs are to be taken seriously they need to drastically increase their rigor and actually instill skills in their students.
Liberal arts schools are not and never have been vocational training institutions. They are academic in nature.
I went to a school that had top ranked humanities departments across the board. There is zero desire for rigor in any humanities courses or departments. It's a way for people to show up to class and get a degree without effort so they can party all day.
In my experience at a large state school, students could sign up for rigorous humanities courses if they wanted to. (e.g. by avoiding the 'popular' courses in auditorium rooms, etc.). Although it's a bit of a shame that it's not universal, and that the student culture often demands "the easy gen-eds"
At the end of the day, I think this is a cultural problem in some humanities departments. It's not unheard of for some STEM departments to fail 50% of their incoming students. I guess the appetite to hold the same standard in other departments just isn't there?
Universities have been around for a long time. They're some of the oldest institutions in contemporary civilization, and they're increasing in importance. They've survived upheavals that overshadow anything in our lifetimes. So I've been skeptical of prediction of its demise.
Still, there are serious problems with modern academics and higher education, and the doomsayers have some valid points. So I've thought it's possible.
After the pandemic though I wasn't sure so much about their imminent demise anymore. Students really wanted to return due to the social value it provided. It's not like institutions started collapsing.
I think it would require holders of wealth to shift in the status markers they value. So far it's still one of the primary ones.
Sure, if you can ace leetcode like an olympiad, you can become a L7 at FAANG. However, if you are a MBA from San Jose state, you would be working as a financial analyst. However, if you are a Stanford MBA, you would be a SVP.
Top tier firms in PE, VC, IC, and top tier consulting companies still go for elite colleges. Why? That is the path to c-level positions (not leetcode). Same thing for big law. Same thing goes for Washington consensus (the cesspool of Beltway), where pedigree matters.
Ethics aside, I rather have a smart person in charge rather than the opposite
I have definitely seen hiring managers lean very hard on pedigree so they didn't have to do the actual work of evaluating candidates. It was basically the same deal with a lot of certifications, like Scrum/Agile and Java certs.
I also think that your bucketing people such that Harvard = smart and state school = "the opposite" is a great example of the problem. Personally, I'd always rather work with somebody who has had to work their way up, as they tend to have a more balanced perspective.
[1] E.g.: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/07/harvards-freshman-class-is-m...
As a business, you bet your risks against the person who has been vetted vs. the unproven one.
And anyway, you're again, not very smartly, ignoring the point that a fancy degree doesn't correlate particularly well with smartness, so the whole intelligence thing is a bit of a sideshow to the actual discussion here.
Simply having 1/3 of Harvard admissions being legacy does not disprove that those who go to Ivy Leagues are not intelligent. On the contrary, studies show that IQ is highly genetic (up to 80%). So it is just reasonable for admission offices to accept students based on family ties
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ#cite_note-B...
There is also a correlation between IQ, general intelligence and SAT scores (a requirement for admissions), despite what the media portrays.
FYI: Media is manipulated to create controversy and get views. Scientific studies are not perfect, but has far lower cases due to the peer review process, except for privately funded research
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC6963451/#B...
But what you're really dodging is the question of how much the very narrow sort characteristic tested by IQ really matters for hiring. I get that you think it's super important. Probably because you see yourself there. But as somebody in the top 1% of IQ scores, I'm telling you it's not a great way to select employees, and in many circumstances it can correlate negatively. You can use it for hiring if you want, and if you work for a competitor, I encourage you to. But I sure won't.
Employment is a separate matter, the follow up will be if leadership or management competence (different) is tied to intelligence and elite school attendance.
My life is great, I am not trying to complain.
Elsewhere you asked for proof. There is plenty of proof that income is the best predictor for attending an ivy league school.
Here is an article from harvard: https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2020/06/at-home-with-harvard...
Harvard has almost as many students from the nation’s top 0.1 percent highest-income families as from the bottom 20 percent.
So, the issue is not one of smartness, as Harvard itself says in its reports, since majority of their applicants are smart anyway. That's how the filtering works for the super elite, and the 'servants' of this super elite--and this 'servant' class also also elite as well. Here, I am not using 'servant' in pejorative sense, but in the sense that one who works for super elite end up making millions a year.
1. School loan debts aren't ideal and we should look for ways to eliminate them permanently. It's ridiculous that american students have to start their adult lives with so much debt. However, the fact that so many students are willing to go into debt for college shows that they there is tremendous demand for college education. My alma mater has continuously raised tuition ( far higher than inflation ) and also increased enrollment and yet have no problem finding students. Even if they doubled the tuition, they would have no problem meeting their enrollment goals. The domestic and international demand for US college education is simply too great for it to collapse any time soon.
2. I've never worked with anyone in tech who didn't have at least some college education. Maybe the college education wasn't in CS, but they all had some college education. So the idea that tech companies are going to hire people without some college education seems suspect to me.
3. It's blatantly obvious colleges are discriminating against asian students to a ridiculous degree and white students to some degree as well. It should stop but I don't see how that would collapse US college education? Asian and white students still want and are going to get a college education.
4. Stopping standardized testing is also ridiculous. It shouldn't be the only factor in admissions, but certainly we need some form standardized testing in the mix. Admissions should be given more data to work with, not less. But once again, I fail to see how this would collapse US college education.
I have worked with some, but they were the type who could succeed in college if they had reason to. Whereas a lot of the population simply cannot hack the academic rigor, and these people tend to struggle in the workplace for the same reason.
I expect what he is trying to say, which is something we've known for a long time, is that college looks good by the numbers only because it does a good job of filtering out those destined to fail, so to speak. If we take it to the logical extreme, we know someone with, say, down syndrome is unlikely to go to college and unlikely do well in the workplace and we understand that it is their disability that produces that outcome, not because they didn't 'pull up their bootstraps' and work hard. The same idea applies across the continuum of the population.
What employers want are the people on the right side of that continuum. The people born to be successful. Coupled with the social pressure for the capable to attend college, meaning that most people on the right side attend, it has served as a really good proxy for employers to evaluate. However, tech has found even more reliable methods for determining where one sits on said continuum, so that's where things are starting to break down. In terms of people, tech is incredibly small potatoes in the grand scheme of things, though. It's not clear if other industries have figured out the same.
All that said, at this point, college has become religion. Even if we can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is entirely useless, people will still want to spend their life savings on it to satisfy their inner craving for a sense of meaning in the same way that other religions attract that mindset. A collapse is laughable. That is like saying that Christianity will collapse because businesses no longer require you to pledge your allegiance to God.
But, "collapsing"? Universities are one of the most long-lived types of institutions known to humankind. Oxford was founded in 1096. I suspect they will be around quite a lot longer.
US universities famously have different priorities, compared to their European counterparts.
TBH I don't think it's clear what he's suggesting.
Also, just because someone is doing a menial work it does not mean that they should not have a access to higher education. Especially since there's not enough of higher valued jobs for everyone and to assure worker mobility.
A return to the way it was from 1096-1969 would absolutely be properly labeled a collapse.
> The fact that this has been so tolerated speaks volumes.
Tolerated? It's been encouraged for at least two decades, under the name "affirmative action".
When the pool of qualified applicants is 3x your available positions, it seems to make sense to me to attempt to match the population makeup of the United States at large when selecting from that pool, since otherwise you're more or less going to do it randomly.
Helping one group of people does not mean hurting another group of people; life is not zero sum, and pretending like getting admitted to Harvard or not is the only metric in this conversation is ridiculous. There are approximately zero children, Asian or otherwise, whose only shot is to get into Harvard or not go to college at all.
Being denied admission to Harvard due to a luck-of-the-draw is not discrimination, it's a lottery. Sam Altman may have a larger point, but the Harvard discrimination case is not an argument that supports that point.
I'm not talking about Harvard specifically (I don't even know what case you're talking about), this is just the normal state of colleges in the US.
There is no stack rank of qualified candidates for a collegiate cohort, because it is not a precise or accurate process.
There are more students who apply to Harvard each year with perfect SAT scores and who are valedictorians than there are openings in a given Harvard cohort.
Improving campus diversity helps the kids too, as it exposes them to a more representative group of people that they're likely to encounter into the world, rather than one or a few massively overrepresented groups to the exclusion of other, less resource-available and marginalized groups. It makes the school better at preparing kids for post-college life.
Getting into Harvard, for the people who would do well at Harvard, is only one of many potential successful life paths for those kids. I think it's well past time we stop pretending like it's either Harvard or the streets.
Besides, if you're so disgusted by racism, you should be in support of trying to correct for it, not opposed. Doing nothing (what you suggested by applying "randomness") is how the current racist systems continue to thrive. Doing nothing is what the racists want, so they can keep on being racist, and holding down the "inferior" races (as they see it).
Picking candidates based on their race is called "racism". You don't "undo societal damage" against one race by being racist against other races.
>> Besides, if you're so disgusted by racism, you should be in support of trying to correct for it, not opposed.
You correct racism by making society race-blind, not by flipping the direction of racist policies.
Acknowledging the racism of others is not the same as supporting ideas or policies that promote one racial group as superior in any way to any other racial group.
You can not correct racism by making society race blind, but you can perpetuate racism that way! Why do you think the racists prefer we remain at the status quo?
There is no substantive difference between what you’re suggesting here and what a white supremacist would suggest in the same situation, having already successfully poisoned the well for minorities in the US.
Worthless to argue against, since you're not willing to entertain subtleties or nuance, and totally against the spirit of HN, but not much I can do about it except stop replying to you.
“We use public documents from the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard University lawsuit to examine admissions preferences for recruited athletes, legacies, those on the dean’s interest list, and children of faculty and staff (ALDCs). More than 43% of white admits are ALDC; the share for African American, Asian American, and Hispanics is less than 16%. Our model of admissions shows that roughly three-quarters of white ALDC admits would have been rejected absent their ALDC status. Removing preferences for athletes and legacies would significantly alter the racial distribution of admitted students away from whites.”
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/713744
Plus, as a percentage of student population, Asian Americans are over represented at elite colleges. Both Black and Hispanic Americans have seen their representation decrease over the last 40 years. Asian Americas, in relative terms of US population, hold 4-5x the seats in top colleges. In some case 10x!
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/24/us/affirmativ...
But yeah, let’s blame the 4% black population at UCLA, or the 8% at Harvard for taking Asian Americans deserved spot. Oh, and probably 2-3 % of all black admits are international students.
How about the focus be on expanding school capacity? College admission rates have hit all time lows because of increased competition and a failure to increase capacity.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-pandemic-ivy-league-accep...
Its pretty ridiculously that in 1980 most Ivy League schools had admission rates between 20 and 30%. Low admission rates are not a sign of good health for our education system.
Unfortunately, the "double pell" movement means people paying out of pocket are soon going to have to pay double.
What a coincidence, that the average degree costs the average student loan package.
Stop subsidizing education. Let the market forces actually allow for a fair price discovery, or else that college degree is as valuable in a sense as crypto is...its intrinsic value - use case - job improvement prospects, multiplied by a coefficient of speculation.
I say this as someone who has had a massive impact on the student aid lifecycle, and yet didn't go to college myself, because ironically, wasn't able to fill out the FAFSA form.
I'm not talking about the obvious exceptions like medicine or law (though even that can be done as a conversion rather than an undergrad degree) or anything else where you literally need the paper that says you can do it. I'm also not talking about becoming a researcher, where obvious you need to know a bit of X to become a professor of X. I'm talking about the vast number of degrees that are not job specific. Business, economics, history, literature, and so on with humanities, but also math, chemistry, physics, and biology.
There is no real reason an employer would care what you studied, because as a new graduate your job is to learn the business. Whether you were interested in one thing or another in college doesn't matter much, the main line is between math-tech stuff and not-math-tech stuff. Employers who reckon their work is techie will gravitate towards those graduates, while others will be open to anyone.
All the degree signals is that you somehow gathered yourself and read a bunch of books and solved a bunch of questions. That's somehow supposed to be evidence that you can learn their business.
Of course the problem is there's plenty of people who instead of learning Krebs cycle could just go directly into finance or accounting or any number of jobs without jumping through the hoops. The issue is that college has become a destination for so many smart kids, it's hard to imagine a smart kid who skips it. So absolutely everyone feels they need to go to college, and absolutely every employer thinks they need to hire just college grads.
In terms of helping the economy, it's really not efficient. Everyone has to sit around for three or four years when they really want to be working, and everyone who can't find the money/time to do it is cut out from middle class aspirational jobs.
>[...]
>In terms of helping the economy, it's really not efficient. Everyone has to sit around for three or four years when they really want to be working, and everyone who can't find the money/time to do it is cut out from middle class aspirational jobs.
What's the alternative? Like you said yourself, employers want some sort of signal that you're reasonably smart and can put the work in. You can't really replace that with a 6 month bootcamp.
Everyone else sits at home and just learns the stuff and does the exams while driving an uber. It will take a lot less time to just jump the math hoops than to do four years of half holidays, eg my total university time was actually 96 weeks but spread over 4 years. So a couple of years of doing that and people can see you can learn stuff.
All that does is test whether you know the content, which you said yourself "doesn't teach you anything you need to know at a job". It doesn't tell the employer whether you can handle 4 years of assignments and showing up labs/tutorials. I suppose you could add those back, but then we're back to square one when it comes to the university experience.
In the end there's just no way a course in some science can substitute for a job in business, so if you're going to use a course as your hurdle, why not just do a short one?
You could also just say we'll have fewer students. That way businesses will have to choose between high school grads. But as it is now, very few people will want to be that guy who doesn't have a degree.
Being educated does not get you a job. Being educated is step one.
You also need to have:
* a workplace that exists
* the soft skills required to interact in that workplace
* and ability to apply your education
I agree the current debt-based solution is bad. But there is more to life than efficiency and numbers.
If you went to school more than 5 years ago it is entirely different. Classes are held online, even on campus. Almost everything is done digitally and online.
Student suicide, depression are sky rocketing. COVID rules have completely changed how campus living works - students would rather be on TikTok than be forced to wear masks or get forcibly "quarantined" (legal jail cell). Yes, that is real, it goes on every day. Students are not allowed to protest universities, the law in all states is written in such a way that you have no tenant rights, no representation, and the University can do as they please. They reap the benefits of a private org (predatory contracts) while socializing the cost (grants/loans)
That money from housing and tuition is absorbed into a black hole, it is not used for student programs. It is not used to improve education. We cannot get basic equipment. We cannot provide a proper education.
Universities have been overrun by blue types that are now forcing even more unnecessary and politically motivated classes, promoting activism and specific kinds of beliefs as if they are academic. They're cherry picking academic knowledge for what aligns to their politics.
The core competencies are underfunded, students don't receive the help they need, and are overshadowed by the admins shiny new false humanities programs.
Students this summer will go homeless because they cannot pay for summer housing. Uni housing charges exorbant artificial pricing well above market. Again, private profits, social costs.
Students cannot afford an education, and even those that do don't get a quality education outside of a few top universities. This is unsustainable, but various beliefs prevent us from doing the right thing - defunding.
We need a mass firing and reorganization of American education.
The worst part of the twitter as a long form platform is when a single idea extends beyond the limitations of a single tweet.
Long form is a much better format for comprehensive ideas, but the "this is something I want to comment on" isn't there and the engagement on the comment and comments on the comments rarely exists in those formats.
Medium's "highlight" and "respond" functionality is a rather poor implementation of that desired ability (the discoverability beyond the "top highlight" is difficult for other users) ... and then there's that whole "upgrade to read more" problem.
And beyond that, there's the bit that twitter has a large number of users - trying to traverse Wordpress pings and comment moderation... ugh.
Unfortunately, twitter is the best place that offers users, aggregation, no $ needed, comment on sentence, and the opportunity for engagement of followers.
I couldn’t care much less about VC or crypto-bro brain farts like the linked post, although historians writing about this period probably will be, if only to write cautionary tales. But there’s a lot of deeply interesting expertise that’s been crammed into this godawful format, especially during fraught times like the pandemic and the current Ukraine invasion. I can only guess that the experts in question assume that Twitter will be the format with the widest reach, although I have to doubt that will always be true. If the Internet Archive comes up with a project specifically targeted at archiving Twitter threads as coherent artifacts, I for one would be happy to earmark a donation for that.
- You only get one chance to be 18 - 22 years old. College is a great way to improve your appreciation of culture, society, and build social skills, prior to taking a full time job.
- I know many youngsters here will likely have a problem with this -- but the average 18 year old has some intellectual and emotional maturing to do. This can happen via the social and academic challenges of college. In fact, the best colleges will sell this over any practical skills.
Work life can be a grind, even for someone with their dream job. When was the last time you had a chance to try your hand at literary criticism, or game theory, or learning a new language? How did it go the first time you had to ask for help with an intellectual problem? (Probably a distant thought in the minds of the average senior developer). How about the last time you had to cooperate with several people you dislike? College is a good place to get started with these things.
Just to be a contrarian (on HN, of all places!), I'm in my late twenties and know a couple of people who are at least a little bit bitter/regretful that they spent their early twenties learning game theory and literary criticism rather than how to function as an adult.
https://educationdata.org/student-loan-debt-statistics#:~:te....
Companies are using college diplomas as the new high school - even some help desk jobs prefer college students or recent graduates now. It seems like almost all companies require a college degree for even slightly senior positions - a high school graduate will be very limited in career progression. Degrees are now a necessary but not sufficient condition for most people.
As far as price, most U.S. states have an excellent public university system - you would have to be insane to pay private school prices for anything but a top 5 university.
1. https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691122946/on...
Private non-profit universities are essentially run by their tenures faculty. At prestigious universities the focus is primarily research. Everything they do should be in the eyes of this stakeholder group.
The “undergraduate experience” exists as a profit center to fund the tenured faculty. Sports teams and fancy dorms (and binge drinking) are more important (and easier to quantify) to the buyers of education than educational quality so that’s where the investment goes. Buyers will choose “facilities and brand” over education enough to keep the schools looking elite. As long as admissions grades and test scores are high enough, the rest doesn’t matter. (The kids will succeed in life anyway)
At “for profit” universities just replace the tenured faculty with shareholders. Same model just no pretense of research.
For 2nd and 3rd tier universities it’s similar but with much less money to go around. (Less endowment and tuition)
Layer onto this that the government is guaranteeing the bill and you have no incentive for the folks in charge to change their behavior.
As a society we can say we are tired of being on the hook, but until that happens there is a lot of inertia to overcome. That’s why we didn’t see a mass collapse of universities in any of the last 4 recessions.
Nonsense. They're run by their boards and by professional administrators. The faculty have been steadily losing real influence since the MBAs started getting involved in universities in the 1980s. (Universities at the big level are basically holding companies managing assets called an Endowment that just happen to hold classes)
Research, however, directly brings in money through grants, and "better" research faculty publish more and bring in more grant money.
The incentives are very straightforward and the universities are responding to them.
If NIH, DOD, etc., had a metric on grant applications asking what percentage of department faculty were in full-time professional teaching positions (not adjuncts, educators with no research expectation, often called "Professor of Practice") targeting ≥20%, this ship would right itself in a couple of years.
* Forgiving student debt is an endless political cycle, promising to piss off anyone who has either paid off their large debt without forgiveness (raises hand - five figures (think 1990s luxury car) between my wife and I) or didn't acquire the debt in the first place (self-funded or scholarships).
* Standardized test scores going away: Read the fine print (I implemented this policy in code). The test scores went away for admissions. You can get in without standardized test scores. However, public and private scholarships are still tied to standardized test scores. Funding agreements (I was involved in maintaining the university's implementation of these) from private donors or public sources have mostly not been altered. Rhetorical: Are standardized tests really going away?
* Tech hiring without degrees: Culture and HR fit is important here. Does HR, protecting the company from itself, quietly screen and discard resumes without necessary keywords? This is an effective way to remove non-degree holding candidates.
* Alternatives: Yes, we (in the United States) do need them. We have needed them for at least 30 years. Politically, all we ever really seem to get are NEETs and High-Schools-With-Smoking-Areas.
I like that Mr. Altman's thinking of alternatives. Please share them. I want to see a successful implementation. My job, and the way I define it, relies on making it possible for as many to dream as possible. I support widening the number of paths to dream as possible. I believe that this is not a zero-sum game.
As for price, there is already an economic force that will cause interesting swings ahead. In my circles, it is called a demographic cliff. My university is already seeing it and has made short term changes. I foresee many small universities and colleges closing and merging. Eventually, when shrinkage cannot happen any longer, the price of services (tuition and fees) will be lowered. Just in time for the current administrative overhead to retire.
Many of my CS and physics professors were “famous” but also great professors. In contrast, I thought most of my math professors were terrible. As they were bad at teaching, I simply assumed they must have been good at research.
Case in point: https://futurism.com/the-byte/university-professor-unpaid
That being said, I have some reservations about the college admissions process and I think this Twitter thread addresses it well. In particular, I think there is an ongoing trend to eliminate standardized tests in favor of more "subjective" and "holistic" measurements like your essays and extracurriculars. While I think it's perfectly fine to have students write about themselves and their achievements, I think it's still way too integral to the admissions process and there needs to be more balance. Personally, when I wrote my essays, even though I was trying to be authentic and I did write about experiences that were meaningful to me, I always felt as if it wasn't enough. I just kept wondering, "what are they looking for?" And I couldn't really get a good grasp of whether what I was writing was "good" or not. To me, the essays completely obscure the nature of the admissions process because no college can clearly tell you what they want. Hell, even some admissions officers seem to dodge the question when you ask them what they look for in an essay (or they provide really vague answers). I think it's silly to make the essays so critical to the process when they clearly don't allow anyone to extrapolate concrete things about a person's abilities or skills. Many smart people I know were rejected from universities that I think they should have gotten into even though they easily would fit in and thrive in those places.
By the end of the college admissions process, even though I was happy with the college I got into, I honestly felt a little jaded. Sure, I'm happy that I got in, but I feel as if I couldn't properly communicate my skills to the admissions officers. It just makes me feel as if your skills matter less than your ability to impress people. Maybe it was naïve of me to think that it would be different in an academic institution compared to the corporate world, but it is a little disheartening in the end.
I know a lot of people will disagree with this, but this post resonated with me and I felt that I needed to share my thoughts.
1) The subreddit of my alma mater has been full of posts venting anxiety, depression, trouble with financial aid, trouble making friends, frustration with administration, etc for years now, exacerbated by COVID. While that may not be representative of the whole undergrad population, I can't help but be reminded of Thiel's line from Zero to One "Why are we doing this to ourselves?"
2) I'm now seeing not only friends without bachelors degrees get well-paying CS jobs with "engineer" titles & equity comp, but even some in mechanical engineering!
3) When I was in undergrad, half of my upper div classes were so abysmal that I figured the staff who cared enough to keep the enterprise going were fighting a losing battle. A complete rewrite would be better than an in place one. "Death is the best invention of life" and we should try the creative destruction of capitalism/evolution instead of holding the oldest institutions in the highest regard.
I don't have much of a clue what the future will look like by the time I have kids of college age, but I do not think particularly highly of what we've got now.
College is a net good, but do it on the cheap. Unless you plan to attend a top law school, no one cares about your undergrad.
Community College students can still transfer into UCLA or other top schools. Hell, community college was good for me since I was able to take out student loans and get the hell away from my family.
No more evictions for me! Even if you don't finish college, it's a great deal. I was at 6 figures before I graduated.
Very few degrees offer this type of wage at graduation. Not everyone wants to build software. Although I agree with your general point to attend cheaper schools until it matters (eg graduate level and want to be a professor or lawyer).
If you have horrible family like my own college is one of the very few options you have. If anything the FASA process needs to do more to accommodate people who don't really have families.
The calls for student loan forgiveness ignore the good these loans do. At 18 you can do so many stupid things, taking out a loan isn't the worst. If that loan gets you put of a volitile situation max it out
All that aside, I don't know that Sam Altman is the most effective person to deliver this message, since it's sort of a cliched thing for someone in his role to say. It's especially cringe-y since he's seasoned his thread with a culture war appeal.
Is this not like Ford saying "ICE Vehicles have a long future" - It's clearly bias and its truth has no basis in fact. The "Student Loan" crisis, is a US crisis. Where as the university system is a global one. So you're really saying that the US will stop doing Higher Education, while the rest of the world continues? That feels like a bad move.
Is the problem with the US College system an educational one or a financial one? Seems like the latter, which means the solution isn't to stop the former.
"The halo effect (sometimes called the halo error) is the tendency for positive impressions of a person, company, brand or product in one area to positively influence one's opinion or feelings in other areas."
It appears as though a certain party has determined that it is preferable if their constituents remain illiterate and are doing everything in their power to push laws and regulations that do just that.
In Arizona, Florida, and Indiana, students have to seek permission from parents before being taught about “human sexuality”. Local pressures against “critical race theory” have led to educators self-censoring, districts abandoning equity initiatives. In at least 10 states, legislators have proposed bills that would require administrators to list every book, reading, and activity that teachers use in their lessons, a process that educators argue would be cumbersome and expensive.
A lot of people are concerned with a growing concentration of wealth in the top 1%; however, I think an even more concerning problem will be the growing inequality we see with those that are learned, and those that are not.
It is clear what one side wants. And it is not a good outcome for any of us.
It is no surprise that many scream about it.
“Monocultures suck. It's hard to know how many of the stories about ridiculous stuff happening on campuses to believe, but even if a small fraction of them are true, these are clearly no longer places hyperfocused on learning.”
It starts with negative priming. Though he has not and will not do any work to actually suggest colleges are monocultures, he throws it out there. Then he invites you to think of negative stories, and suggests some of them are probably true. In a complete non-sequitur (it must be, because he has not actually defined a premise, just asked his audience to imagine one), he provides a conclusion. But even there, to deflect criticism he moves the goalposts, implying that to be successful, colleges should be “hyperfocused.”
Sadly, the further in your career you go, the more it becomes pertinent who you know, and how many people in your network succeeded and can pull strings for you.
It's not everything, but it's these breaks that often separate the smash successes and the grinders-for-life.
Getting drunk and party and studying for 4 years is a durable way to build bonds.
Hopefully most schools begin to focus on trades, and the Harvard / Princetons of the world just openly accept they're not for learning.
What do you tell the upper middle class families that didn't buy a bigger house or pad their investment accounts so that they could help put 3 of their kids through schools? My parents spent at least $200k on undergrad education between me and my siblings (UVA, Cornell, UW-Madison).
Did they make the wrong decision? Should they have saddled us with debt? At 10% (ie: S&P AAR) that would net $600,000! When America becomes a place where you're punished for having invested in your children, it becomes a place where you will no longer want to live.
It's completely untenable and anyone proposing it is ignoring the massive opportunity cost that has been incurred by people that played by the rules, pursued useful degrees, and made the responsible decision to stretch their means to do so.
Two questions:
1. What do you think my opportunity cost was, and 2. How much do you think I lost by not pursuing an education at a university worthy of my accomplishments to that point?
You have a very entitled point of view from where I sit.
I think most universities are scams and FWIW I made a point to literally only apply to two schools: UW Madison (in-state) and Minnesota (in-state reciprocity agreement) because I knew I’d get in and I saw what it cost my parents for my siblings to go out of state. I did a semester at a community college, too.
1. Your opportunity cost is debatable. I took 15 years of market return on the lump sum of tuition/boarding/books cost as an example. It would be about the same for you, assuming you spent ~$75k on your education between rent and supplies and food and tuition.
2. I don’t think you lost out on anything meaningful unless it was MIT, Harvard, or Stanford that you would have gone to instead.
- daycare is on average around $2k per month per child where I live.
- outside of tech, almost no companies pay for parental leave. At most, they are obligated to hold your position, but no pay is required. This is especially true if you or your spouse work in the healthcare field. It’s absolutely mind blowing how poorly employees are treated by their employers in the healthcare industry.
- childcare tax credits are an absolute joke. From the $32k in childcare I paid for last year, I got a $1,600 credit…
- once you have kids, your health insurance costs will be astronomical unless you’re lucky enough to work at a company that provides good insurance. In my situation, I run a small tech company where we don’t provide HC insurance (too costly atm). My wife works in healthcare. Our insurance is beyond a joke. Thousands per month with a $20k deductible. It’s hell.
- once your kids are in school they’re taught very little useful skills. It’s mostly an exercise in obedience and conformist thinking.
- once your child graduates high school they have the option to either take out hundreds of thousand of dollars in federally backed loans if they’re lucky enough to have parents that don’t make enough money. If they have middle class parents they’ll have to rely on even worse loans from private lenders.
So would I expect the US to punish middle class parents that foot the bill for their child’s college? Yes. The US hates the middle class, as much as they hate children.
For whatever reason, the USA is extremely hostile to having kids.
Um
> Currently, student loan debt at graduation is an estimated $31,100.
Yes. The average US college graduate has under $40K in debt. If you're able to get into a networking school for the upper class like Cornell you're able to get a full ride at a state university. UVA and UW-Madison means at most one of three children went to college in state, on in state tuition.
It's perfectly fine to choose the university to go to based on prestige but paying for a network is not morally superior to going to a less good university on a full scholarship, or doing two years at a community college and transferring to a state flagship for the last two years. Making expensive choices to chase status, a zero sum game, isn't eveil. Neitehr should it be encouraged.
> Yes
You’re not actually answering the question I posed. My question was, assuming XYZ amount of dollars are going to be spent on education, did they make the right or the wrong decision by making sacrifices to pay for their kids instead of letting/forcing their kids to take out loans?
The question you answered was, “should a lot of money be spent on education in the first place?”. And sure, I’d agree, we all should have gone to community college for 2 years and then the state flagship, that would have been the most cost effective, bang-for-buck solution. I was the in-state kid, and also the youngest, and that’s not a coincidence; I saw what it cost my dad.
My point is that if there’s a suspension of contract law, regardless of whether you’ve spent a lot or a little on education, you’re punishing those who budgeted for it and rewarding those that didn’t. Whether it’s a lot of money or a little money, you’re fucking over the honest people.
I'm sure they'll be itching to move to a new country where their children can spend another $200k on their grandchildren.
That's one thing that never made any sense to me. I get it. I really do. But I've never seen any compelling, realistic answer to "And then what?". This only solves the problem of the HUGE number of people with crushing loan debt now. I get it, I really, really do. But... then what? What about the next decade? It's not getting any better.
The most important word in this is "realistic".
That's a big problem solved. We can also solve other problems. Nothing requires us to solve all of them at the same time.
You might get everyone to pony up the money to bail everyone out who is currently mired in college debt. It's a much tougher sell to get us to pony up the money forever.
The crisis in US college education is a crisis of elite overproduction, along with a concurrent increase in economic inequality and the disappearance of the middle class. A college education is a requirement to enter or stay in the professional-managerial class (PMC), and avoid the increasing immiseration of the working class in the US. That's why people are willing to spend so much money on it. The problem is that the PMC is shrinking as their jobs are gradually eliminated and replaced with proletarianized ones: doctors with nurse practitioners and PAs, tenured professors with adjuncts. So the higher education system is overproducing PMC candidates who will either never work in their field, or will work in its non-PMC roles, and struggle to pay off the debt on a gamble that didn't work out. This, of course, makes PMC parents desperate to get their children into elite colleges, to make them competitive for the declining slots. This is, of course, over time, a losing strategy, but it's one that is short-sightedly rational.
I don't think we're actually going to see a decline in credentialism, as @sama suggests is going on. I expect it to intensify, if anything. For the education pyramid scheme to collapse, there will have to be a fundamental reorientation of the economy and power structures in the US, which is to say, a collapse thereof.
Higher education is under increased financial pressure in the United States due to population decline; falling per pupil federal funding; and stagnated wages for the middle class.
In response colleges are increasing their endowment to secure their financial future and so that they may offer a larger average discount rate. Google any college or look at college niche and you will see an average net price paid significantly lower than the listed tuition price. This is a new development from a decade ago where most students paid full sticker price to go to college.
Now, I do agree that higher education is trying to do too much these days, but for that to change expectations would need to change.
College shopping is like car shopping. People say they want a simple practical car with good gas mileage at an affordable price, but then when it comes time to buy they are willing to pay a bit more for the nicer stereo, leather seats, CarPlay, etc, etc. Nowhere is this seen more than in the precipitous decline in community college enrollment compared to four year colleges.
This is what happens when we ban people from being able to declare bankruptcy.
I felt like it wasn’t my responsibility to prop up the bad financial decisions of complete strangers, nor encumber the family to more than half a million dollars in debt for 4 years so that they could see a fancy stadium on-campus.
And yet there’s still that nagging voice in my head that’s asking me if I’m gambling my kid’s future on a state college and a trade-school at 1/4th the cost.
I am trying to think what could have added to costs. The cost of research probably increased as the low hanging fruit are done and research in general is more involved now. May be the salaries grew in-line with the rest of the country.
Did the overall government funding fall over the decades?
Overall, I agree with Sam here, any peripheral gestures without addressing the root cause is pointless. But the current US political system has no aptitude to solve problems. In fact they have realized they want to ensure the other party fails so they can point and they in elections. Politics has become a perverse selfish game rather than about governance and people. The best they can do is enable companies to offer more loans and more ways to repay and that’s it.
Ultimately, money can buy you most things. However you test someone, their family wealth is more likely to result in better access to standard and additional education, possibly more exposure to other clever children/adults to encourage and teach you and a home life that is sometimes? more conducive to learning compared to the people at the bottom of the ladder.
You can't buy top-level intelligence but you can mostly buy your way into any insitution. Therefore, I think it is a straw man (as the OP says) to remove something that exists in life.
Sure, there are things like IQ tests which are supposed to be about objective intelligence but they are both too abstract to draw out whether an individual will actually do well in e.g. comp-sci or physics and can also be trained on.
- job training (like it or not, college grads are seen more favorably than non-grads, even in software engineering)
- socialization for young adults (I know many people who went to college in large part to make friends, and learning as a reason for going was treated as a smaller reason)
- research, etc
Colleges will remain here and for the foreseeable future, they are still very useful to many people. Altman is now at Open AI but I'm sure being YC's president for a while, Sam understands that YC has a vested interest in disrupting colleges, through investments like Lambda School (sorry, Bloom Tech).
The reason everything remains awful is because everyone is already acting in their best interest. The employers want the elite students, the elite students want degrees from elite universities, and all the other students want to look as close to “elite” as possible (by attending the most elite institution available to them)
Unless you tell motivated and well-connected teenagers they’re not allowed to attend Harvard or Yale, the prestige signal of Harvard and Yale will continue to live on, as yet another class of motivated and well connected 22 year olds graduate.
Short of government action (like make it illegal to discriminate in hiring based on which institution you graduated from?) I don’t see how that prestige signal (or the structure of incentives associated) goes away
College students have been protesting things since well before Sam Altman was born.
Librarian? Scientist? Firefighter? Cowboy? Shoes? Radiologist? College might be the way ... or the worst possible choice. Depends on you.
Makes no sense to invest a lot of time and $$$ without exposure to all of your options. Or to stick with something you don't like, when there are 1000 other things. Right now ... where do you turn to find out about them? It's crickets out there.
Assuming a completely unbiased and equal opportunity environment from birth until college (which obviously is not the situation, this just a hypothetical), wouldn't college admissions more or less be equal to the demographics of the state or nation?
The 2020 census results have 6% of respondents identifying as Asian or Asian-American. Obviously wealth disparities such as access to education create over and under representation for groups, but a 10x over-representation being "proper" seems a bit high to throw out there without some citations...
No, even if you took out all wealth disparities. Different demographics (this is a big generalization but that’s literally the question) value different things. And so those that value college would be overrepresented in college - same would apply in other competitive areas eg sport.
I guess it depends on how you classify a minority - e.g. population, education, gender, wealth, income, etc.
Asian-Americans are certainly one of the smallest demographic groups in the US, and even smaller if you split them further by the ethnicity they most identify with (Chinese-Americans, Japanese-Americans, Korean-Americans, etc.), but as far as UC's student population goes, they do represent the majority of students by a long shot at 40%. The next largest group is the Latino students at 30% of the population and then "white" students at 20%.
I've always seen that done in movies, but didn't actually think that was real. In Australia, AFAIK it's all computer ranked based on the performance of your last 2 years of high school - that's it.
> personal essay are surely more correlated and more hackable.
Exactly.
The sort-of counter-example is that "Tech jobs [..] are increasingly willing to hire with no degree". But strange that he of all people didn't add a statistic on that.
Am I missing something?
Standardized tests are a better solution than "holistic" admissions, which bias heavily for students who can afford to go to expensive summer camps, competitions, and volunteer in poor countries. At least standardized tests can be studied for even if you're poor.
I got a 99th percentile score on the SAT with just the typical prep books you find on Amazon (which I pirated) and self study and reflection on mistakes. If you keep blaming the system instead of holding people accountable for their own failures those underperforming high schools you mention will never become top scorers.
Around the idea that most of the value is around signalling to others (Via credentials), rather than what you learn.*
Certainly from talking to other people about their recent university education (UK), most people seem to agree that they leant & retained very little.
I can't help but wonder if for a lot of people an apprenticeship scheme would be better overall.
*Summarising a whole book in a sentence is rather difficult, and I surely didn't do it justice.
> I think specifically it is vulnerable to a preference cascade in the PMC, similar to the way that organized religion has also suffered from a preference cascade, and accordingly think a) less likely to be any one catalyst or reason its less relevant and b) can happen quickly.
https://mobile.twitter.com/patio11/status/150560506083470951...
PMC = professional managerial class
We started with Coronavirus, went into "The Great Resignation", and ended up at Ukraine. Fast-forward to student loan payments restarting, how many people will be able to afford it after all that? Assume they can afford it, how many would rather default?
A bubble, just waiting, patiently.
I mean, look at coding bootcamps and all of these online learning platforms, the market found a niche. I think the same would happen with colleges without the gravy train of student loans.
Have a 3 tiered system of free public, cheap private, and expensive private would serve everyone I think.
Also worth noting the obvious, this math isn't required in the industry but is used heavily in interviewing.
Source: am a dropout. Learning math was the hard part; coding and infra are the fun part.
Who does that send a bad message to and what is that bad message? I can clearly see the good message, but what's the bad one Sam was so keen to avoid?
IME, software/computer jobs used to be more a meritocracy. The current hiring shibboleths for class happened later, popularized by early Google.
Think we also need an alternative to schools.
The purpose of the debt forgiveness is precisely to transfer wealth to people who need it. Whether the institutions can be profitable or not without further government funding is practically immaterial. If the institution is doing a social good, it probably cannot be self-funding. In which case, yes, we will bail it out again. And again. And essentially just make higher education something that the state uses it's tax revenue to provide for it's constituents because they've decided that that is what they want.
Of course, the rich will pay disproportionately for that. But then, they have benefited disproportionately from living in the society. The institutions that provide "social good" for this small minority are already funding proprieties for the state which panders to their every need and whim. So why shouldn't actually socially beneficial institutions like schools and universities also be funded?
Who could possibly be baffled by this? Nobody, except for multi-millionaire tech-bros.
Debt forgiveness addresses a symptom, not the core issue. I support it because I’ve seen firsthand how much of a hole it’s left people who made bad choices as a high schooler in, but we can’t keep making the same mistakes that got us here in the first place.
Yours is a shittier take.
I agree government should fund education. Sam agrees, but it needs to come with a long term solution.
Canceling debt now has 2 issues.
1. The current proposal is extremely unfair to poor people who decided not to take a student loan. And I never see anyone address this unfairness.
2. It will skyrocket the tuition cost even more.
Are there a lot of people who are going to default? It sounds like a new 2008 all over again.
> (A personal anecdote: I was invited a few years ago to speak at a college but I was asked to give a 'privilege disclaimer', essentially stating that if I didn't look like I did I wouldn't have been able to succeed...
I don’t know how other people feel about this but personally when I see things like this I get extremely annoyed. What the disclaimer is actually saying is “white people can’t succeed on their own”. Don’t try to twist it because this is what it’s being implied. The implication of the disclaimer is “If you are white, you cannot succeed on your own, the only reason for your success is dumb luck”.
How is this different from saying “blacks can’t succeed on their own, if you see a successful one, that’s just dumb luck”. Please, tell me.
The whole discussion on “privilege” is ridiculous, racist, offensive and is nothing but a grift from losers too dumb and lazy for STEM who went to gender studies instead to make money.
But part of why people get into so much debt I think is because many people are taught from a very young age to "follow your dreams" and that they're special, an exception to the rule. Sure 95% of those who get a PhD in the humanities never get a tenured position but this time it's different.
At what point do the people taking out loans in fields with limited earning potential and the parents who fan the flames of this delusion share some of the responsibility? You are not special [1].
Why do people think the only valid outcome from a PhD is tenure in an academic institution?
Not that I disagree with many things that were said, but I'm wondering is this the prelude to him, or a YC startup, announcing an alternative to college?
I think this tells you a lot about the "continued adolescence" theory.
This could solve a lot of problem.
>Most of all, it's clearly a bad deal for many students, or we wouldn't have the student debt crisis.
People keep saying that, and it's not true.
The evidence still suggests college is a good deal
1. College loan debt has lower interest rates, more forbearance options and payment plans compared to consumer debt, like credit card or car loan debt. Credit card debt has very high interest rates. There needs to be more outrage about that, not student loan debt, which comparably has better terms.
2.Even adjusted for student loan debt and inflation, college grads today are earning more than than ever compared to non-grads, and compared to past college grads . The college wage premium is wider than ever and shows no signs of narrowing, even with Covid. This premium even applies to non-STEM fields and low-ranking colleges. The rise of online learning and remote learning has not put a dent in the premium. This is not too surprising: college courses, especially in STEM, are more rigorous than online videos/courses; and second, college attendance confers other attributes beyond learning, like contentiousness and maybe even conformity.
3. The college wage premium is 2-fold: higher wages and then higher returns from investing said wages in rapidly appreciating assets like stocks and real estate. The post-2009 bull market is the biggest and longest ever, even adjusted for inflation, for both stocks and real estate. The fed is hellbent on making stocks go up as much as possible, by keeping rates rock bottom and raising them very, very gradually even as inflation rips higher. Most calculations of the college wage premium only look at wages and not returns from investing said wages in the stock market and or real estate.
4. Small biz has high start-up costs and a high failure rate. Sure, if you have rich parents or can get VC backing, maybe give entrepreneurship a shot, but for everyone else, a professional, high-paying job, like at a FANG company, offers a much more reliable, consistent way of making money. Or investing that $ in the stock market. And even many tech founders have college degrees. Dropouts like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are more the exception than the norm. There many tons of people who have made 7 or even 8 figures with the college-to-STEM-job route. The FIRE movement is full of such individuals who have amassed large nest eggs in their 20s and 30s by doing this. For these people at least, college was certainty a good deal.
5. High school grads may have a 4-year head start compared to college grads, but this is negated by a higher unemployment rate.
6. What about cost of living in Silicon Valley? That too is not such a big deal (for people in STEM at least). A simple calculation shows that a job that pays $200k still has plenty of discretionary income to invest with, after subtracting expenses. Rent is the biggest expense, but still very small relative to monthly wages for a tech job. Buying a home offers way better returns anyway, and is doable with six figure salary. You can buy a home with 5-15% down. (I am assuming a single person household; costs will obviously go up if children are involved.)
https://greyenlightenment.com/2021/12/22/higher-ed-may-be-br...
>Cancelling student debt is good if it's tied to fixing the problem going forward, which means not offering it, or having the colleges be the guarantor, or ISAs, or something.
The problem is that 50% of students not finish college. They get all of the debt of having attended but none of the benefits of graduating. More effort needs to be made screening ppl who are unlikely to finish, as opposed to debt forgiveness. If anyone deserves to have debt forgiveness it's dropouts, who were compelled to go to college but for whatever reason were not suited for it. Student loan forgiveness will not solve this problem. Even if dropouts have their debts forgiven, they should ideally be doing something else.
Universities were largely started by people with convictions that there is universal knowledge or truth, and that the pursuit of that truth shapes people in ways that are highly beneficial to society. This is where the idea or peer review originated---no person can grasp the truth fully or comprehensively, thus to advance human knowledge peer review was necessary (Peer review, like higher education, is deeply broken). Today western culture has lost confidence that truth exists or can be found. One can see this by looking at some of the oldest universities' mottos, particularly by paying attention to how the mottos have changed and/or the informal mottos in use.
Harvard Motto [1636]: Veritas ("Truth"), but historically it was Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae ("Truth for Christ and Church").[1]
William & Mary [1693] (Who knows the original and current mottos - I didn't find them with a quick search), but the charter calls for founding "a certain place of universal study" for training Christian pastors and to educate youth.[2]
Yale University motto [1701]: Lux et veritas (Latin) אורים ותומים (Hebrew) Motto in English: Light and truth[3]
Princeton Motto [1746]: Dei Sub Numine Viget On seal: Vet[us] Nov[um] Testamentum Motto in English: Under God's Power She Flourishes On seal: Old Testament and New Testament Informal motto. In the Nation’s Service and the Service of Humanity[4]
So, I would say that university education has already collapsed, in the sense that its devolved from a mission of education in formative truth for life to its current amalgamation of gaining job/career skills, academic research, sports, elite networking, or party-years paid for by debt or parents.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Harvard_Universit...
[2] William & Mary's charter begins,
"Forasmuch as our well-beloved and faithful subjects, constituting the General Assembly of our Colony of Virginia, have had it in their minds, and have proposed to themselves, to the end that the Church of Virginia may be furnished with a seminary of ministers of the gospel, and that the youth may be piously educated in good letters and manners, and that the Christian faith may be propagated amongst the Western Indians, to the glory of Almighty God; to make, found and establish a certain place of universal study, or perpetual College of Divinity, Philosophy, Languages, and other good Arts and Sciences..."
https://web.archive.org/web/20080919125611/http://www.swem.w...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackfriedman/2018/10/01/student...
"I'm not as special as I thought I was and I was too lazy to figure out whether I could pay back what I borrowed even though I had the entire freaking internet to look that up for myself, so I'm going to throw a big fit."
Nobody cares.
Pay your debts or don't, but it's not going to change anything. That's not even civil disobedience. That's just entitlement.
I'm sure that'll work out great when they need to buy a house, or a car, or get a loan if they need to pay for extra medical expenses. The entire system is an abusive racket, but let's not pretend that people don't have options.