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Comment by naveen99 | Hacker News Reader

reducing money flowing into higher education industry would reduce overall education levels of the population. I don’t think you really want the population to be less educated. Go see what life is like in places with lower levels of education. College is expensive for those people. You don’t want that.

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Given that we know that there can be multiple types of intelligence and that college only tests a small fraction of those types - are you comfortable with this binary framing? That the only way to go is up (in years of education)? There's no alternate model, different framing, etc. to educating a populace outside of these two choices?

Please - let's approach this question with an open mind - there are plenty of alternative approaches worth considering just from other parts of the globe.

Germany, for example, has much less money flowing into education than the US. They seem plenty educated enough to me.

Germany spends roughly the same annually through post-secondary (normalized by total population) and that amounts to a higher percentage of GDP to support a lower per capita student count at all grade levels. They do have a lower population and thus lower absolute spending, but that shouldn't be relevant.

Interesting. What are your sources?

What kind of spending are you talking about? Total spending (both private and public), or just official government spending?

I agree that all comparisons should be done on a per capita basis or as a proportion of GDP.

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