Girls in Yoga Pants Explain the Higher Education Apocalypse

There's been some good progress in the UK with apprenticeship schemes, and I'd like there to be more of it. (I have, don't regret, and would recommend a degree for my job in software engineering, that's not what I'm talking about.) I think it would be better for the economy; better for innovation, to have more people working sooner where professional qualifications aren't beneficial.

If nothing else, affordable college was a holding tank for America’s youth. We kept them occupied and entertained.

This fundamentally misunderstands economics. There isn’t a fixed lump of labor that we want to save up for our favorite people.

We don’t want to warehouse adults because it’s doubly destructive. The students are out of the labor market not producing anything and the people babysitting them aren’t producing anything either. That makes us all poorer.

Instead the yoga pants were completely non sequitur to the article. They are actually the reason I stopped reading the article since it was clearly pointless.

I'd look at breaking it out into 3 separate areas.

1. Foundations (1-2 years). This is a course offered which introduces students to the basics of areas they're interested in. Students can learn about many different areas to study or work in, as well as understand what the requirements of Academia are (essay writing, research, studies, etc).

Once Foundations are done, you split out into either..

A. Apprenticeships, Technical Institutions, Polytechnics: Created by industry leaders, board members are those who have worked in the industry, trainers are those who have worked in the industry recently and are limited to tenures of no more than 2 years - but they get paid more than they would in their roles.

Course length depends on field. For example if you were to become a Software Engineer, probably 18 months is enough. Medicine on the other hand will be more aligned to current expectations.

B. Academia, University: Created by those who want to write and study the field, but not work in it primarily. These will occasionally work with folks in the industry to try new research. These are usually primarily publicly funded.

Right now, the institutions who run and advertise B are the majority - but pretend to operate and work for A. Which is bullshit, but they are incentivized to continue operating that way by the government, by their board and by their own corporate institutions.

I don't care. I'm happy about it actually. We are going through a transformation with regard to our relationship with information. Libraries, copyright, higher learning institutions, $100 text books, professors teaching, your kid getting roughed up by the school resource officer, $60k degrees in English followed by the Starbucks job, smoking in the boys' room, they're all going the way of the dinosaur, and it's very exciting. It's exciting because the gatekeepers are being destroyed, the rent seekers are going hungry, education and information are the same thing, equally accessible to everyone. However, nobody is going to show you your path, chart it for you, not anymore. You can learn anything you want, anything at all, for free, with nobody's permission, but you've got to figure out what to learn by yourself. It is a revolution in self actuation, from now on you'll be what you make of yourself. Of course, it's always been that way, they lied to you when they told you they knew better or that there was a shortcut, but at least it's not a secret anymore. So go out into the world and do whatever the fuck you want, there's never been a better time to do it than now.

> Meanwhile, we’ve systematically defunded classrooms... It has consequences... Professors like me have to fill articles like this with yoga photos to keep people’s attention. And it's only going to get worse. Our politicians are going to get dumber. Our youth are going to get more restless and desperate. Misinformation is going to get more outlandish. That’s our future, as predicted by the movie Idiocracy.

In other words, she did it for the clicks. It's either a mildly clever rhetorical device or rage-inducing clickbait, depending on where you fall on the "easily angered" spectrum.

My part time internship paid my college and living expenses.

Not all my profs were great, but I had the space to explore on my own.

What's not to like? Sure, I came out of that $2,000 in debt, but I paid that off from my new gig in one payment the second it was about to start accruing interest.

I'd argue that the keystone to the downfall of higher education is the cost, full stop. Other problems? Yes, of course. But fix the cost, and these problems lose most of their effect.

States do give less than they used to, but the federal government gives more. The combination of the two is increasing, slowly, after suffering during the Great Recession. Third-party funding has also increased, by the way.

This to say that I don't think the reason fewer people are going to college is because there's less money in higher education. Funding is a factor, but the lack of state funding doesn't explain the poor choices schools make with that money.

So if they managed to screw an entire generation with high debt because "of course college is required for a good life in the US", great! If the next generation can't afford it and has to take lower-paying jobs, great! And now we got abortion nixed, so there will be more desperate kids having kids. Great - they'll take any job we offer at the lowest rate possible!

The US doesn't want a good education system.

I suppose that the form of this argument itself could be mimicking the anti-intellectualism that the article decries, much like the acknowledged use of the stock photos to attract&retain attention.

I do find the article interesting but an editor would be useful since lines like these cast doubt on the rest of the article. Interesting none the less, and oddly I don’t even the yoga pics.

        -- B. F. Skinner

This article creates heat and smoke but not much illumination - motivation without direction. Irony here is both the epitaph and murderer of citizen education and culture being lamented.

Rome the Republic gave rise to consummate ironists, and the correspondingly detached professional classes allowed Imperial Rome to flourish. Must we follow?

Yes, tech bears some responsibility (and credit) both for the means of production and the incentive influences on consumers, workers, and investors. But the question is, what would make a difference?

Stock options have been mostly successful at getting people to work together, as have reputation privileges on forums like this. But those might just be noise in the signal of vast profits or continuous attention highs.

No incentives really distinguish good from bad: profit and reputation work just as well for the black market and poorly-managed companies. In response companies try to adopt an ethos of operational efficiency or mission-orientation, but ethos devolves to signaling and tribalism.

My experience is that the only countervailing force is the formative lifeboat experience: when young having to work intensely together on things that matter, often losing some people as a result. This happened writ large in WWI and WWII, as soldiers came back guilt-ridden and dedicated to humbly building society (* ok relatively speaking), but it also happens in the small in college, just helping each other figure out what to do and how to learn what you need (with the sadness of watching some of your friends get lost). Somehow having worked together and suffered and lost makes you less inclined to take advantage of others, even when you can. (fwiw I believe there's a recent article on the sense of guilt being a distinguishing attribute of a leader.)

Political apathy, the great resignation, opting out of college (or lacking grit or work ethic or ...), people are detaching from systems they find toxic (some would say challenging): competition with foreign engineers or immigrant workers, cultural assimilation, political discussion of any sort, etc. If human relations are disciplined by exit (when consensual) or voice (when exit is not an option), high utilization rates of both mechanisms indicate that relations aren't good, largely because of forces introduced by tech.

No one would recommend a real lifeboat experience if you can avoid it, and they're not a scalable response in any case. However, I think they help, and I think college can deliver that, if it's 2-4 year residential, in-person, small-classes with a strong element of student self-governance culminating in the selection of a career as a life's work. The curriculum should expand attention spans, critical thinking, diversity of friend groups, and (above all) a sense of responsibility for the effects of your own actions on yourself and others, and the sense of agency and ownership, where you realize you can make a difference.

Obviously, college should not support or reward cheating, cramming for exams, collecting credentials, social isolation, marketable skills trumping professional judgment, privilege networks, decomposed learning, etc.

Tech's influence on education should not be to scale horizontally but vertically. If the article is right that education is contracting demographically and burdened with bureaucracy, it has the two characteristics that make it ripe for tech disruption -- not by scaling single classes to world audiences, but by making small intensive environments economically feasible and enriching.

For heaven's sake, the next generation has to be grounded enough to manage climate collapse, authoritarianism, and technology-driven disruption. It's the least we can do for them!