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But if you don't take out loans, you almost certainly guarantee failure to reach the top of the pyramid.

So we're stuck with two bad choices. Either people take a risk on loans, or the academic pyramid becomes populated with only those with burnable wealth.

As a society, we have a third option: fund education as a public good.

I feel like the third option should be: not conflating credentials with education or ability.

Education is a funded public good, I won't say well funded, but funded nonetheless. Credentials are not a well funded public good, and shouldn't be in my opinion.

Not all education should be funded. Some subjects are in more demand, results in more jobs, and produce greater benefit to society. Government also should not offer loans, but rather grants to make education affordable.

Credentials should actually be something we should want to protect the general public.

Without credentials, how are non-experts able to tell real experts from charlatans?

I realize we don't seem to mind that in software, but software is still a new field, so even though it's known to have a lot of shoddy snake oil peddlers, people still put up with the situation. For now.

But for the most part, when any of use needs to hire an expert, if there were no credentials, what would we do? Count on our ability to somehow suss out expertise without actually having anything resembling expertise in the field? Word of mouth and hope for the best? Set a war chest aside for the inevitable lengthy lawsuits because surely selection will fail often?

I have friends that insist that acupuncture and chiro-mancy are medicine and not magic. But when I visit a physician, I like to know they're credentialed and have passed through accredited institutions.

Education wasn't always solely or even mainly about earning credentials. It's only when industry offset their responsibilities to train new employees to universities (and thus the taxpayer in publicly funded education), that suddenly education became entirely about getting a corresponding job and getting a piece of paper.

If you think of education as a public utility, something that unequivocally raises the standard of living, then it becomes about forming a population of educated and informed citizens who can, amongst other things, participate in democracy a lot more effectively.

Then what is the point of credentials? How do we prove a level of competency without having to test every single person, in depth, every single interview?

>or the academic pyramid becomes populated with only those with burnable wealth.

yes, but it doesn't reasonable that people should ruin themselves out of - what? Some patriotic duty to keep American schools egalitarian?

the people taking risk on loans are making a bad decision for themselves, the academic pyramid population problem is a bad decision for society.

> the people taking risk on loans are making a bad decision for themselves

Everyone in the world takes risks. Can you say it was a bad decision for the people who took the risk, took out loans, and eventually became tenured professors?

Of course in retrospect it feels like a bad decision for those who didn't become tenure track professors, but nobody knows in advance who will beat the odds and who won't.

> Can you say it was a bad decision for the people who took the risk, took out loans, and eventually became tenured professors?

Yes. A decision can only be evaluated using what is known at the time, not what is later known in hindsight. Betting on an inside straight in poker is a bad bet, even if in one particular instance you got the card needed.

Ok, as long as you're willing to admit by this same logic that basically every billionaire in the world made a series of bad decisions that don't deserve to be celebrated.

How do you know in advance, as a 20something, that you're doctor material, or lawyer material, until you actually go through med school or law school?

What exactly is the "safe" route in life, Nostradamus?

First, I don't celebrate billionaires for their survivorship bias. Second, there isn't a safe route, but we as society can avoid putting up additional hazards.

As a 20-something, without going through med school or law school, you don't know if it's something you want to do. As a society, we want this hypothetical 20-something to go to med school or law school to find out. Therefore, we should make failure be an acceptable outcome, minimizing the risk for the potential student. In this case, that means publicly funding their education, such that dropping out doesn't place the student with a massive debt.

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For context on the PhD probabilities, a professor will typically be supervising 3-4 students at any given time. A professor's career is typically about 30-40 years, and the duration of a PhD program is about 4-6 years. Therefore, over the course of a professor's career, they will supervise around 25-ish freshly minted PhDs. With an average 2% annual population growth, the population will roughly double over that time period.

So on average, a professor will produce about 25 PhDs, after which there will be one empty position due to the professor retiring, and one new position due to a larger need for professors. Two spots for 25 people is not a good bet, if you do a PhD program will the goal of becoming a professor.

> there isn't a safe route

That's my point. You want to talk about personal "bad decisions", but what's a "good decision" and why, given that all of the lucrative careers require a series of risks in order to enter the field and become successful in it?

> we as society can avoid putting up additional hazards

Agreed, but I wasn't arguing against that, just against the criticism of individuals for having personal ambition and taking risks.

there will of course be a subset of people for whom the loans will be a very good risk, of those people some will fail despite it being a good risk - the unlucky.

there will be a subset of people for whom the loans are a bad risk but some of them will succeed - the lucky. It seems unlikely there would be many lucky in such a hotly contested area.

But most of the subset of people for whom the loans are a bad risk will fail.

> or the academic pyramid becomes populated with only those with burnable wealth.

I've got bad news, it already largely is like that. Maybe not via the person themself, but typically by their spouse then.

The most sensible option is that we remove academic credentials from job qualifications entirely. We’ve increasingly introduced non-credentialed ways to learn, and we have non-credentialed ways to determine what a candidate can do. So why are academic credentials related to our job applications at all? Why continue to enforce the whole miserable, class-hierarchy-reinforcing, metriculative education system at all?

The most straightforward option we have is to fund true public education, without credentials or metriculation. Simple, public class-by-class grades and recommended tests would suffice, and could be done with nothing more than HTTPS servers and .edu domains. We have no need for all the other cruft keeping people uneducated.

> now where's my reward I was promised?"

These people deserve more without question, but at the end of the day if this is their reaction they didn't look forward far enough.

It's a slightly less bad decision than people who decide to try to become professional athletes. You're subjecting yourself to getting treated like absolute shit for a half a chance at a mediocre job.

I do not understand why anyone would ever choose to be an acedemic, at least one at any institution that has this sort of crazy imbalances of applicants and positions, because whenever that happens you don't get in on skill, you almost always get in based on some form of nepotism or politics, and that culture slowly destroys all organizations it's involved with.

> It's a slightly less bad decision than people who decide to try to become professional athletes.

Tell that to the professional athletes.

> at least one at any institution that has this sort of crazy imbalances of applicants and positions

Every institution has that imbalance. That's not particularly relevant, because grad students don't typically get jobs at their alma mater.

>> It's a slightly less bad decision than people who decide to try to become professional athletes.

> Tell that to the professional athletes.

I think the point they were trying to make is that you should talk not to professional athletes, but to those who tried to become one. Those who became professional athletes is just a tiny subset of those who tried. And within that, there is an even smaller subset of those who actually made it worth it for them (in terms of career earnings, getting out without debilitating lifelong injuries, etc.).

In a similar vein, you shouldn't be talking to Brad Pitt as a way to gauge your decision to become an actor, you should be talking to someone a bit more representative of the pool of those who tried to become actors (aka those who failed to get there, which is the vast majority).

It's not a question of advice. Of course take a wide variety of advice.

The question is whether it's a "bad decision" to pursue a highly competitive field, despite knowing the odds are against you, if you think you might have the talent to make it. I'm not convinced that it's a bad decision. Risky? Yes. Bad? That's debatable.

Did Brad Pitt make a bad decision? According to the logic that a big risk is never worth it, then he made a bad decision. But I don't agree with that. And I don't agree that failed actors necessarily made a bad decision either.

As I stated in another comment, there is no safe, guaranteed path in life. It's risk all the way down. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35196444

Should nobody ever become an actor? Nobody an athlete? Nobody a philosopher? Or are you going to say, only those kids born into wealth? In other words, non-wealthy kids don't ever get to have any ambition?

Thanks for elaborating, I actually fully agree with the points you've made here.

I am so tired of hearing people telling others "the safe ways" of moving forward. If you actually know the risk and knowingly take it, I respect it a lot, regardless off how it pans out.

And I believe that optimizing for entirely "risk-minimizing" choices is a path to mediocrity and feeling unsatisfied in the long-term (and, often enough, limiting your overall potential heavily), as well as missing out on tons of opportunities.

Mind you, there is nothing wrong with mediocrity, but a lot of people who end up going down that path end up there unwillingly and, commonly, due to having an almost zero-tolerance risk aversion.

> I do not understand why anyone would ever choose to be an acedemic,...

When you're young and don't know enough it's easy to look up to the "smartest" people you know at the time, which are often your teachers and other university celebrities. And while at college, if you don't have any serious plans, masters and so forth seems like easy options going forward. Your university mentors will even make you believe it is a good choice. Been there myself. I regret it. Surrounded by academics while my friends and relatives are just "normal", I had a very one-sided worldview.

On the bright side, I think more are quitting the academe recently, realizing it is not worth it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26414881

You can do a BS and work in the industry. Nobody forces you to get a job in the academia.

_Someone_ needs to get jobs in the academia, otherwise after a generation we will not have anyone to train and offer those BS degrees.

Or should we only allow those with plenty of capital to pursue academia?

Oh, um, many classes are taught by adjuncts and grad students now. PIs don't teach anymore, it's seen as a punishment for failure to get grant money.

I think in the example case she was trying to get a job in the teaching industry, not necessarily teaching ed students in academia. At least that was my read on it.

> You can do a BS and work in the industry.

There's no philosophy industry.

Which is one of the reasons sane people suggest not getting a philosophy degree.

One studies because of curiosity, not because of money.

One has to eat. Curiosity and money can go hand in hand. I've learned things out of curiosity but those things helped me build a career, have an income, feed me and my children. There's nothing bad in gaining money.

> One has to eat.

Philosophy grads are eating. I'm about to eat breakfast. Let's not exaggerate the situation. The issue here isn't that grad students are starving or homeless.

But nobody pursues a philosophy degree for the money.

It's a question of personal values and what one wants out of life. Many people of a philosophical predilection would find it unfulfilling, a waste, "insane", to devote themselves to wealth maximization.

>It's a question of personal values and what one wants out of life. Many people of a philosophical predilection would find it unfulfilling, a waste, "insane", to devote themselves to wealth maximization.

Arguably, If your goal in life is to be happy, from a philosophical perspective, maximizing wealth is a valid way to do it.

From a philosophical perspective, if your goal in life is to be happy, you will find it to be temporary at best or illusory. Better to strive for a meaningful life, with all the highs and lows that come with it. You have 70-80 years on this planet, is dying with the most toys the most fulfilling life you can think of?

>You have 70-80 years on this planet, is dying with the most toys the most fulfilling life you can think of?

No, but wealth can free your time to do what you wish. It can enable you to do things that are harder to do without said wealth.

You seem to be contradicting yourself. I want to pursue a philosophy degree, but you say no, I should pursue wealth maximization instead. Then you say wealth can free my time to do what I wish, but what I wish is to pursue a philosophy degree.

>There's no philosophy industry.

You can work in the diversity industry. As a chief diversity officer, for example.