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Comment by dustbitying | Hacker News Reader

> Reduced need for education. Right now, about half of college graduates do jobs that don't require a college education. For many people, going to college is not cost-effective. That will increase.

you seem to implicitly assume that a college education is an unnecessary expense for most and that therefore, it shouldn't be really given away so readily. this suggests to me that you assume that the real purpose of college is job preparation. your reasoning makes sense from the perspective of a higher level institution (or corporation, or possibly a government) seeking to be as efficient as possible regardless of the impact on typical human individual's well-being.

college is not a 'factory' (or any sort of industry) that 'manufactures' workers for companies.

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These days, if you want to just "learn for learning's sake", or for self improvement, there are tons of free and cheap ways to get a good education.

The only reason people are willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars for college is that it is a credentialed degree that people think will open up career doors. We shouldn't beat around the bush on this fact.

Not only that, truly advancing into the depths of a subject, becoming a scholar and serious intellectual in the process, is a path reserved for but a few. The moment you force the masses into higher education as the default path that earlier justification of University as the forge of scholars becomes anachronistic and new justifications must be created.

You can't access expensive hardware on YouTube.

If you want to learn about chemistry or biology for learning's sake, good luck. Most autodidacts won't have space in their apartment for a -80C freezer or flammables cabinet, and their landlords might not approve the installation of a proper fume hood.

We have things very easy in software. The cost of iteration is low, you can fit a respectable laboratory in the space underneath your desk, and you're unlikely to accidentally poison or maim somebody if you screw up an unwise experiment. Not many fields have that luxury.

>These days, if you want to just "learn for learning's sake", or for self improvement, there are tons of free and cheap ways to get a good education

I agree, but you won't have a sheet of paper proving it. It's like that infamous scene from Good Will Hunting. Question is whether you want an easy way to PROVE you're educated. Which is what a license, certificate or diploma grants you.

The person you replied to already covers that in the following sentences.

Why else would you need to prove your education except for work?

In a hypothetical post-work era where people no longer build their reputation via career, it’s not hard to imagine group dynamics emerging such that education level is no longer a means to an end, but an end unto itself.

Essentially a new way to establish hierarchies.

Sure... if we ever get there, I could potentially see that.

But we're nowhere close to that. Also, if it's being used to establish hierarchies, I could still see that proof being important.

Maybe I misread your comment. All of this thread is speculative, including the speculation that degrees will become less and less relevant.

Getting “there” doesn’t happen overnight, but the point is that we are already heading there, and to the question “why get a degree if not for work”, I presented a potential future option.

> I could still see that proof being important.

This is key to the point I was trying to make. Essentially that the purpose of education may change over time, but the value of gaining an education will still be there in one form or another.

um. if you're just learning for learning's sake... why do you need to prove that to anyone?

For the same reason people care about official records when they participate in/compete in many activities, e.g. marathon runners care about their official run times, body builders the weight they are capable of lifting, chess players their ratings, video gamers their win/loss ratio, etc.

If learning is “merely” a diversion, I don’t see why people would think about it any differently. Whether or not it still makes sense for that proof to carry a six figure price tag is a separate conversation.

>college is not a 'factory' (or any sort of industry) that 'manufactures' workers

Unfortunately, the vocation focus of college has been a driving force since the early days of the industrial revolution, dating to the 1850s. The Morrill Land-Grant Act explicitly states that colleges (at least in the case of land grant schools) are there to train people for work:

>without excluding other scientific and classical studies and including military tactic, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in such manner as the legislatures of the States may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life.

I respect and value the other traditional purpose of college, but we can also acknowledge that these purposes can change as society does.

We have been framing it that way for a long time though. How many times have you heard someone talk about the average income of high school graduates vs college graduates as a reason to go to college? I agree with you though. Education should be about personal enrichment, not personal “enrichment”.

We have been framing it that way for a long time though.

Yes. That changed on February 28, 1967.[1][2]

[1] https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-day-the-purpose-of-col...

[2] https://archive.is/G11YT

Fussell (among others) blamed the GI Bill for a marked decline in the average quality of college education, and the diminution of what "college educated" meant (without further qualifiers).

The spike in demand drove a ton of "normal" schools (teachers' colleges) to become proper colleges and even universities, plus a bunch of new ones to pop up, but rather than increasing the supply of (previously) college-level education, it mostly created a kind of knock-off, lower-tier product—there just weren't enough excellent professors to meet demand, not enough good, experienced college administrators, not enough anything, including, arguably, students who were fit for college (as it had previously been) in the numbers that were now attending.

It seems like this sentiment is just a veiled form of elitism. One of the primary detractors when the GI Bill was being rolled out was University of Chicago of Chicago was Maynard Hutchins, who feared it would turn a campus into a shanty town of "hobos." He later walked that statement back and admitted that the veterans coming to schools ended up being higher quality students than the traditional variety.

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