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Comment by OJFord | Hacker News Reader

Unpopular opinion: there should be fewer people going to university. The educational inflation has been immense, and many jobs simply do not (fundamentally I mean) require so much. That ought to be ok.

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.

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I'll counter with a different unpopular opinion. Specialized vocational training should be viewed separately from continued cultural education and continued cultural education should be much more accessible. After you get out of high school you should choose a vocationally oriented educational institution to learn about whatever specialized field you've chosen, whether that's decades of medicine training, a year or so of CS training or a few years of trades training - then, for the rest of your life, cultural education programs discussing higher abstract mathematics, philosophy, advanced literacy, political science and other liberal arts, should be available as ongoing pursuits that are ingested ala carte. This is drastically different from our current educational system and the cynics among us will happily point out that implementing something like that overnight would probably just defund education in the current system but I think that'd be a much nicer way to approach life and I think it's reflected in how much continuing education content exists both modern stuff like youtube and more traditional tv shows (including nature shows and things like Cosmos). Modern web based learning (everything from SkillShare which is more vocational to Khan Academy and Harvard's online lectures) are making continuing education more accessible, but we need more! Learning is an activity that should be actively engaged for your entire life!

People like to point at folks working at Mickey D's and opine on how their bachelor's degree is wasted, but if that bachelor's degree came with philosophy courses that taught you self-worth and empathy that helps you raise to a management position that creates a nice working environment for a half a dozen people then I think that is a fine use of education. Learning for learning sake is valuable enough and it doesn't need to be itemized about how much "value" (always framed in terms of vocational training) that it creates for society.

> continued cultural education

Mao Zedong did something similar to this during the great leap forward. He hoped it would have a similar effect on the peasant rice farmers as you hope for the McDonald's workers.

Don't conflate the two.

Education is one of the very few things in life that can’t be taken away from you. By anyone.

> then, for the rest of your life, cultural education programs discussing higher abstract mathematics, philosophy, advanced literacy, political science and other liberal arts, should be available as ongoing pursuits that are ingested ala carte.

Did you read this part? I personally see more value in lifelong liberal-arts education at a slower pace than the mismatched system we have.

That you throw in higher math as cultural instead of vocational just shows your own biases. I routinely use things I learned doing a PhD in physics in my code because mathematical abstractions really speed things up. Lumping something as useful as group theory with something as trivial as Shakespeare does a disservice to both.

I'm confused about what you are suggesting. Standard university math would still be taught to people in professions that use it as part of their vocational education, and basic university math like group theory will be eventually taught to people in professions that don't use it. Wouldn't that be an advantage over the status quo?

> something as trivial as Shakespeare

Please tell me you are being ironic? I’m no particular fan of Shakespeare, but to call his work trivial and to ignore the impact he had on western culture is… short sighted at best.

At the time Shakespeare wrote there were maybe half a million literate people who spoke English. Today there are more literate people who speak English in Fort Worth, Texas. The only reason to think Shakespeare is anything but a middling writer of the winning English dialect is cultural snobbery.

> After you get out of high school you should choose a vocationally oriented educational institution to learn about whatever specialized field you've chosen

I didn’t know what I wanted to do for a career until I was almost done with graduate school (I have a bachelors in history, a bachelors in linguistics, and a masters in educational psychology - I’ve worked as a professional programmer for nearly 25 years). My kids have gone to college, but they didn’t know what they wanted to do either. My oldest daughter is a semester from graduating and has finally decided what she actually wants to do - in a field wholly divorced from her undergraduate degree. So now she is applying to graduate programs. Frankly, none of my kids college bound friends knew what they wanted to do until they were almost graduated. It seems to me that many of us learn what we want to do by being exposed to many different things in the college environment. But it takes years and sort of floundering to figure that out.

> I didn’t know what I wanted to do for a career until I was almost done with graduate school (I have a bachelors in history, a bachelors in linguistics, and a masters in educational psychology - I’ve worked as a professional programmer for nearly 25 years). My kids have gone to college, but they didn’t know what they wanted to do either. My oldest daughter is a semester from graduating and has finally decided what she actually wants to do - in a field wholly divorced from her undergraduate degree.

This is why I strongly advocate for taking a gap year - or 2 or 5. Kids need experience - broad real world experience being exposed to lots of different things - in order to determine what turns their crank and rises to the level that they (a) know what they are getting into and (b) actually want to do it for (possibly) the rest of their lives.

This focus on moving from birth to career in one unbroken path increases the odds that people commit the sunk cost fallacy - with their life! - continuing to pursue something only because they started doing so without really knowing themselves. What a silly waste of this one and only magical life.

I actually did take a 2 year gap before starting college (I was a few months shy of 28 years old when I graduated with my masters). It didn’t help.

But the opposite is also kinda true. I was pretty sure that I wanted to do software when I was 15 and then I had to sit through a lot more stuff to be able to study that, that was basically my main motivator to finish our equivalent of high school (bit more complicated here in Germany, to be able to go to uni I had to finish my 13 years of schools, or go a very complicated route of exiting school at 16, do a 3 year vocational training (that could have been application development), to go back to school for 1-2 years, with no time saved. But yeah, could've just done work then and not go to uni, but I wanted to learn).

I think, and this is all set in the very different educational system, that if there was an education track purely devoted to vocational learning that it'd be perfectly socially acceptable to delay enrolling until it's relevant to you or to re-enroll later if you'd benefit from different vocational skills.

I'm a CS major myself but when I first entered university I was pursuing a degree in statistics and had hardly done any computer programming at all in high school - I was computer literate and played plenty of games but programming had never been accessible or interesting until I started using SASS and then moved on to more powerful languages.

Not a perfect system but the Folkuniversitet in some parts of Sweden provides similar education to what you envision here.

They have both vocational courses (business, economics, IT, healthcare, etc.) as well as courses in humanities, arts (including performing arts, and writing) and so on.

You can take courses whenever you want, or apply for a longer vocational education.

That is giving way too much credit to liberal arts. In theory they might be good, but in practice there is nothing to connect it to reality (if you are a shitty philosopher, you can make your self sound effective; if you are a shitty mathematician, others will point out that your proofs do not work).

If you want me to take the liberal arts seriously, you're going to have to show how they can be held to the same kind of standard that we hold, say, physics to.

Worse, you also simultaneously managed to insult half your audience. I attended a CS only university. I did not have one hour of history class. Not one hour was spent on anthropology, physics or language study except as necessary for our compiler classes.

If you cut out the lesser useful classes, such as anything having to do with user interface design, then maybe you could've gotten a year out of it. That will still have taken me four years, to get that CS degree.

I'm so confused at how you managed to be insulted by the parent comment. Someone else finding value in liberal arts education is not an attack on those that don't.

physics has its own class of problems in that theoretical physics can spout any nonsense it wants as long as the testing to verify if it is correct or not is suitably expensive as to ensure it doesn't happen and the math is reasonably complex. it's not on the same scale of rampant bullshitism that is going on in the arts programs, where thousands of people have made entire careers out of generalizing marxism from the domain of labor to all the other domains of social interaction, physicists would have gotten that done in a flurry of papers over two weeks and moved on to something else more abstract and difficult to verify level of truth.

> there should be fewer people going to university

Strong disagree. This is a rational response to seeing what higher education in the US has become, but it doesn't have to be that way.

What we need is a tertiary education model that seeks to refine critical thinking, awareness of the world, and a funnel into degrees with practical job outcomes - for those that seek them.

Other countries have this model, particularly in Europe, where college isn't a requirement for employment, but a benefit none-the-less.

Refining critical thing and awareness of the world only seems necessary due to deficiencies in the public education system. High school is a joke and we should fix that rather than suggest everyone needs to get a collage degree.

I've had this thought before, that high school should be good enough to not require higher education. However I think as I've grown older I recognize that public education in the US primarily serves as day care and secondarily as an education. This is why schools have gifted programs, some students are there to learn and they are encouraged to go as far as they can, but some students are just there because its compulsory. I don't have a solution, just an observation.

Yes - it is a daycare. However - maybe we improve it from a daycare to a place of learning. That’s why we could make high school more intensive and less daycare like.

I agree with the intent, but I don't believe simply improving schools (what does that even mean? higher teacher salaries? higher standards? more funding?) will improve overall societal education. Where I grew up (Georgia, USA), there were several incentives to doing well in school:

- Your driver's license was revoked if had too many unexcused absences

- State scholarships were only available above a certain GPA

- The state academic summer camp program was only available if you were selected by your teachers based on your performance

Only one of these incentives applied to the general population, the rest only applied to motivated college-bound students. I believe we should have more incentives for all students to learn in school that affect the students instead of the school. If you punish the schools for the student's performance, you'll get the current US education system. Some ideas:

- Performance-based tuition or school lunch prices: The range cannot be too high or people will, rightly, complain that this negatively affects poor people. Make it something small but symbolic.

- A personalized excise tax on parents based on the child's school performance. Again, don't make it too large, just large enough.

- Reintroduce recess and socialization opportunities for students during school based on performance. If people start skipping, suspend their driver's license.

Honestly, American Grades 10-12 are a waste. Sure, you learn some important fundamentals for college but outside of that meh.

At least in my experience I would have far preferred being able to jump straight into college and have gotten the first 2 or so years out of the way in lieu of whatever passes for high school education. I would be far ahead of where I am and have benefited much more from the opportunity, but today you can only do such a thing by getting your GED (with parental permission) and being an incredibly driven and self-promoting autodidact with a lot of parental support.

It's a farce.

Counter point, i found those grades as great prep for college. I took mostly AP courses. I was able to test into Calculus 3 at my university and found university to be quite easy.

Grades 4, 5, and 6 were a waste. Literally the same content for three years that could have been covered in half a term.

We need better self-paced systems.

> High school is a joke and we should fix that rather than suggest everyone needs to get a college degree.

If the school leaving age has been raised to 18 you need to have something for everyone up to the age of 18 to do, or at least 90% of the people. There are a lot of people who are capable of passing a test for the bottom quintile of 18 year olds at 14.

Quality, rigour, universality, uniformity. Choose.

Many systems have multiple paths for a high school equivalency, this lets a higher standard exist than than bottom 10%.

> Strong disagree.

I did say it was an 'unpopular opinion'!

> This is a rational response to seeing what higher education in the US has become [...] What we need is [...] Other countries have this model, particularly in Europe [...]

For what it's worth, I'm writing from the UK.

A degree ('college') certainly isn't required 'for employment' here, but it's increasingly (over decades) so, or de facto so because so many applicants have a degree having spilled over from not getting the job that was more relevant to (and did require) it.

College isn’t a requirement for employment in the US. The percentage of people with a college degree in the US ranks about mid pack compared to countries in Europe.

I do suspect that there are cultural differences in how people view those without college degrees in the US. I don’t know about the EU but in the US, people tend to look down on trades, even if they are well paid and skilled jobs.

If you genuinely put an effort into refining your critical thinking, you should have no problem getting a return on your investment on any publicly subsidized university. Plenty of jobs demand strong critical thinking or writing skills, but don't have require any specialized knowledge that you'd learn in college.

According to the author, people used to go to college to simply get drunk, and implied that this changed, so I view this as a positive change.

College would also be more affordable if schools weren't making dorms and cafeterias that compete with 5 Star Hotel experiences.

It'd be an improvement if this were the case- if the money was actually being spent on the students.

Generally speaking, the huge expense for any large purveyor of education is actually the administration reaping the outsized rewards. Paying themselves $150-$500k USD/yr, and simultaneously creating unnecessarily large yet low-impact organizations. This strategy soaks up every last penny.

> Other countries have this model, particularly in Europe, where college isn't a requirement for employment, but a benefit none-the-less.

If anything, European companies are more credentialist when it comes to degrees than their USA equivalents.

The European model is better simply because it's free-to-cheap for the student.

> What we need is a tertiary education model that seeks to refine critical thinking, awareness of the world, and a funnel into degrees with practical job outcomes

This was the purpose of a University education, and the reason most degrees have a component that is liberal arts even in STEM.

Unfortunately, liberal arts colleges have become indoctrination camps for fringe views rather than honest explorations of all aspects of society. In particular Sociology as a science seems to be to blame for this. Going through school I never felt like I was being indoctrinated in my philosophy courses, but I certainly felt that way taking the mandatory "culture" classes.

Which fringe views are those?

We can start with anti-racism (the movement lead by Kendi) which is prominent in these schools. Refer to my post history for why Kendi is a racist bigot. We can talk about women's studies courses which have universally become megaphones for fringe third wave feminist ideas. Ideas like denying the suffering of men, or suggesting that something like misandry is not real. We can talk about how these fringe actors also go above and beyond to divert attention away from Men's issues such as child support (and the subsequent criminal punishment associated), the lack of "male abortion", etc.

For example, the women's studies course I was forced to take to graduate made me feel like a sack of shit of even being alive for a full semester. It wasn't "shedding the light" on anything. It was literally a woman standing in front of the class and telling men they are worthless. This isn't hyperbole. We had to write apology letters to pass (if we were white, and male). Other non-white, non-male students got to write about their "experiences" with white-dominated patriarchy. There was nothing to learn in this class except how far the lunatic fringe has penetrated academia, and this was over a decade ago.

Other ideas in the running for fringe include fringe economic ideas (reparations paid based on skin color) or full-on communist indoctrination like we have seen in various private liberal arts schools like Reed.

I know your post is in bad faith so I don't intend to reply any further since these radical actors in these programs have made national headlines since 2013. Suffice it to say that the ideas of the radical left are ever present in an area that should have sufficient coverage of all ideas. This is a problem, as the arts are no longer "liberal". They simply function as political indoctrination.

That has not been my experience in university, it also makes me sad that you assume my question is in bad faith

We have a saying:

"Learn a craft to survive and letters to not be stolen from."

You don't want a democratic society lacking or with subpar education. Do you prefer your neighbor voting for the future of the economy, your kids, your long term state goals to be well educated or lacking education. And a lot of populism is based on tricking your constituents with statistics.

But even then: we need skilled workers. Looking 10-20 years ahead, what is the ratio of unskilled/skilled jobs that we need? I would argue the ratio is dropping. And if it isn't, one can always do an unskilled job with a graduate degree. Not so much the other way around. At least if you want to compete globally.

I see your point. But I think doing some back of the envelope in my head it doesn't work in the long run and is bad for the democracy.

The US does have a pricing social issue, but that is not true for the UK from my understanding (outsider, from other part of Europe). My 2c anyways.

Edit: fixed typos

> I have, don't regret, and would recommend a degree for my job in software engineering, that's not what I'm talking about.

Same, although I'd add the caveat that you should be interested in the subject to study this. It's a miserable career for those that pick it for the jobs.

I don't think it's a miserable career for uninterested people. It's a miserable college degree for uninterested people, doing algorithms problem sets and such, but afterwards, you can make money doing mentally unchallenging things, like simple CRUD apps or maintenance of a ghastly complicated in-house software.

University should be cheap to attend (we want educated citizens) but jobs that don’t require a degree credential shouldn’t be able to mandate one.

> jobs that don’t require a degree credential shouldn’t be able to mandate one

Are these not circular dependencies? Other than the few professions that require degrees by law, this is more of an operational decision than anything.

There are some narrow fields I would point to - Doctors being chief among them - that probably legitimately require extensive training.... for us normal plebs though I'd put forth an argument that degrees are pretty unnecessary. The vocational side of degrees is basically a way to get a jump start on skills acquisition (and avoid learning bad habits or wasting time) but, as I've mentioned elsewhere, I honestly don't think this training should be bundled into cultural education.

College degrees in the US are overwhelmingly not vocational in nature, they are primarily issued by liberal arts institutions. While there aren’t any legal requirements for a degree for nearly any office worker (for example), employers want formally educated workers for a variety of real operational reasons.

Doctors is a good example of people who don't need college. In Europe they go right to med school from HS. And nobody seems to think their docs are any worse than ours.

A better future will not come pass by reducing access to education. In fact it's the opposite; we need to increase access, especially for adults.

To fix and address the current challenges, the current institutional structure needs to be changed.

I think we should normalize the idea that community colleges and remedial education is okay. Had a hard time with Algebra in High School? That's okay, you can take that, and you can work your way up to Differential Equations in the same place! For a fraction of a price of a four year school!

Yeah but were is the profit in that. Community college doesn’t enrich anyone

Competence is very much a secondary priority of universities whose primary goal is a demonstration of loyalty.

All college students are double majoring in Ideology, as demonstrated by their ability to conform for four years. This in turn unlocks a host of professions only accessible to Ideology majors: bureaucracies, paper pushers, journalists, NGOs, HR, teachers, etc. The extra patient and above-average smart ones can sit through more college and get better deals in finance, medicine, law, and science (although society is definitely losing out on the most competent people in these fields, because they are constitutionally unable to sit through 8 years of Ideology).

There are very few arenas were raw competence is needed badly enough and results can't be faked, even in the short term, that begrudgingly, people with no Ideology certifications are allowed to operate: engineers are the ones with the highest wealth potential of these. I'd bet that most engineers are successful in spite of college, many would choose to skip it if they could get a do-over, and the best engineers have the lowest opinion of higher education.

We don't need more low skill workers. We need more doctors, more nurses, more medical technicians, we need more plumbers, more electricians, more software developers, more engineers, and more teachers teaching all these things.

In addition to universities sucking more we've also scaled back on training people throughout the economy. Heck, we're running out of pilots for airplanes and there's no plan to train more.

We've got a hungry generation of young adults with desire to do more but society hasn't provided the means for them to succeed. We failed to invest in the future.

There are a lot of scholarships and special programs for those jobs missing people - but we need it expanded and maybe setup on a federal level.

In my experience, it seems like it's very hard to get into some programs despite the job demand. There's either a lack of resources to make spaces available or it is gatekeeping.

”The average American doesn’t care about college or universities at all. They resent education, and they consider professors a bunch of freeloaders who get summers off ”

And yet, the percentage of the population with a bachelors degree or higher isn't much different between the US and EU.

> they consider professors a bunch of freeloaders who get summers off

When you go through 4 years for your undergraduate and your professor does the very barest minimum to teach the class, provides no help, defers constantly to their GAs, etc it's hard to not come to this conclusion. While it may not be true in general my experience is not much different than average and I can count the number of actual good, thought provoking, professors I've had on exactly 1 hand.

I understand the point of tenure but the dose makes the poison. Tenure should have a way to be taken under these circumstances. Otherwise, it provides an ivory tower from which a barely capable professor rests their laurels. The result, of course, is a vastly negative view of professors and academia in general.

I wish the average American really believed this; it is entirely correct.

How many of these jobs will be left in 50 years due to automation? 100? The capital required to automate a lot of these jobs is declining and wages are rising, at some point they're going to intersect.

It seems disingenuous to say, on the one hand, "tech is going to disrupt industries and people just need to deal with it" but on the other hand "education to acquire higher skills should be restricted to the elite few."

I agree. I went to a good school and got a degree that did absolutely nothing for me career wise. Ended up just self teaching myself programming and made a great career as a software engineer for a magnitude cheaper than my college education.

This point is moot. You can think that if you want but it solves in no way the problems as described by OP. In the article, you can basically replace university with school and get the same result (perhaps at a very slightly lower level of gravity). I'm french and just went through education, the situation here is structurally the same. Buildings and furniture is shit; teacher are underpaid and overworked; tons are outright bad (missing field knowledge, missing child psychology understanding, missing basic philosophical concepts about school mission); lower management is under stress and career-oriented, higher management is short-term political and incompetent in the field, in the middle they are borderline corrupted / have mafia-like structure. This whole situation is generalized (one can even look at other public services like health or libraries which are very much taking the same path). So would you say less people should go to high-school? Or less to elementary school? Where do we stop?

Nope, imho it's pretty clear that there's an elephant in the room: public services are better run with long term stable funding (no need for tons, just what's needed) and completely independently of whatever the short term economic market incentives are. Some sprinkle of oversight from generalists and politics is good, but ffs let the people that actually do the thing decide the shape of it. I'm not telling bankers whom they should lend to. (But that's just my extremist pov /s).

ps: just to be clear, the actual acceptable part of your opinion is even acknowledged in the article, in the start of paragraph "We’re going to regret it." tldr: the current university focused on abstraction/math/erudition is stupid anyways. Yes it should go away (as a mainstream thing).

It is not an unpopular opinion, it is against the grain. Education is great for countries, but when it becomes a business it is better for the universities than for the country. For politicians, more education is good on paper, any politician that would say otherwise will be called a Nazi and cancelled.

The right mix of education is great for everyone, imbalances should be corrected and these days the pendulum is on the side of too many students for a cost that is too high.

Also really unpopular opinion, especially on HN: Today's Universities are political machines. It is not about education anymore.

I just got downvoted hard for that but it’s true. Both political and etiquette teaching. Teaches people what things are currently right and wrong to believe though very strong social pressure.

Not really. Most college graduates leaned towards the Republican Party until very recently.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2018/03/20/1-trends-in-...

What actually happened is that politics has changed significantly over the past 20 years.

For one example, go watch the 2000 presidential debate: many social issues were danced around in a delicate manner that certainly is not the case today. And the rhetoric is downright academic compared to the shit throwing that happens these days.

This is a strawman. In fact if you go search for actual leftists that don't just repeat keywords on social media you will find that most agree in some sense with what you just said (in the sense that the political situation is tons of superficiality). You cannot just put the spotlight on your weakest adversaries. This whole situation is because political education is at a general low level and universities are under pressure, hence even the leftists (just like everybody) are fighting hard with shortcuts/groupthink/.. inside their ranks.

ps: it's definitely not unpopular, it's a mainstream media talking point, but that's another story

I like how you pointed out a strawman in my argument with another strawman. Not every generalization is a strawman.

Sometimes, it is just simpler to state the truth and not beat about the bush. Today's Universities are insane and completely deranged.

If you want to know exactly how we got here, Marc Andreesen talks about it frequently about last 100 years of education evolution. Universities today are an insurance product with a bunch of brainwashing built into the scheme.

> I like how you pointed out a strawman in my argument with another strawman. Not every generalization is a strawman.

A strawman isn't about generalization it's about simplification of opponent points to the point that they make no sense. In which way did i simplify anything about your point with the aim of contradicting it? In fact imho i did the opposite: i took what i believe to be the actual valid core of it (superficiality etc) and said i agreed with it. Still you're not answering to my rebuttal: your initial point (1) contains no substance since anybody worth discussing with across the political spectrum agrees to some form of it (i do and OP most surely do as i pointed out, and seeing you cite andreesen we are definitely wide apart on the that spectrum, which in itself is ok) and (2) is part of a general pattern of passing opinions widely shared inside a well-known thought-school as being something "unpopular", which is a whole minefield of bogus concepts that get nice dialogues derailed into flames.

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