The World Might Be Better Off Without College for Everyone (2018)

But even students treat it as such. Many of the people I know went to get a degree because they believed "they had to", not because of an intrinsic desire to learn. And if all involved believe that it is about getting a qualification for some career, then that is what it will become.

>when higher education in the UK was fully-funded by the state the resulting degrees, regardless of the subject(s) studied, were far more valuable in the job market

Rarity is the actual important thing here. If a significant portion of students have some degree it will be inherently irrelevant. Education has been continually broadened, making it more and more irrelevant. In the past a university degree was an enormous signifier, now it is "expected" in the job market, even if irrelevant.

When was that, exactly?

Maybe the problem is just that when 1% of the population is educated, they can all be in the top 1%, and when 100% is, they can't all even be above average?

I was excited for actual learning and education but what I found was a bureaucratic box checking exercise.

That's not to say that learning didn't occur or that individual professors or students didn't care about learning. It's just to say that the 'system' of Universities didn't care all that much about learning, or at the very least it was not the primary objective of the system.

Something like the ability to follow procedures, conformity, compliance, etc. seemed to be the point. Or perhaps the primary purpose of Universities seems to be to perpetuate the existence of the University.

The real value of University for me was networking and job opportunities (which are a kind of networking).

Does it seem fair to you that they should subsidise the education of people smarter than them? For those people to learn subjects that don't contribute as much to the economy (ie. are able to contribute less toward paying for future students to study)?

It's easy to say education is an end in itself when you're the beneficiary of it and some poor schmuck is paying the bill.

Even getting STEM degrees, I found the actual education lacking and many courses I had to take pointless.

I did learn some stuff. Learned slightly more in grad school. But I did the degrees because I knew I needed to check boxes for my future.

And yet, everyone views education as a means to get a job, with Philosophy, Literature, and History only being good to get a job as a professor or teacher.

The real problem holding back education is that once you finish university, you must get a job to survive, and that everyone who hires a university graduate expects them to know the basics of the job they will be doing, not to require years of training for the base work.

Even if college is free, people who will have to work for a living have to compare three-four years of unproductive higher education to spending those same years in vocational training or working or getting a job-friendly degree. And most will decide that they can't afford to learn what might maybe make them better people, they have to learn something to make them better workers.

What I’ve always found a little tragically comic (I’m not sure what the English description for “tragikomisk” it is, I have a non classical STEM degree after all) about it is how reactive it always is. They’re focusing on STEM education and cutting the “softer” stuff. Exactly because of some cost/benefit analysis as you point out and this time they are even shortening the length it takes to get the post bachelor degrees. They’re doing it because there is a demand for educated STEM people, and they want more young people to get a desired degree faster. What I find “comical” about it though is that I’m old enough to remember when China first started to become a economic superpower and there suddenly was an extreme demand for people who had studied Chinese. Again, sort of reacting to this, the politicians exploded the funding for Chinese resulting in a bunch of people who 5-10 years later couldn’t find jobs because China had filled the gap with English speaking translators.

If our politicians are constantly adjusting our higher education to what has been in demand for the previous 5 years, then we’re always going to be educating the wrong people. Even if you think the focus on STEM is a good idea, and it probably is, what we need right now are mathematicians and not the “softer” IT educations we needed 5 years ago. Meaning even though our government focused heavily on meeting the IT demands that blew up when the digitalisation really sped up in Denmark 10 years ago, we now find ourselves in a world where we severely lack people with an education that can be used for AI/ML because those lines weren’t the STEM educations that were focused on 5-10 years ago.

I get the want to meddle, but I do wonder if maybe leaving higher education to the universities (and the students) wasn’t the better option as none of us can predict the future. At least not outside how we’re likely going to need more or whatever they de-prioritise.

This is the first time they’ve shortened the higher education though. I wonder how that will work out. There is a demand for more of what we are making now, but is giving more people a worse education faster really going to meet that demand? Or are we just fucking over a few generations before we realise the mistake?

Far too many cultures conflate collecting credentials with a constructive education. A low-key advantage of US culture is that they care far less about educational credentials than most cultures in most contexts; people motivated to educate themselves outside formal processes are given proper consideration.

It is a cost/benefit exercise. It always has been. If the pro-higher-education crowd wants to pretend otherwise, then not only are they deluded but their political influence is disastrous and we need to find a way to blunt it.

Not only can we not afford it (the cost has gone up at some absurdly fast rate that makes inflation look cuddly), but the very trends in higher education that cause the cost to spiral out of control are themselves on an upwards trajectory.

You're not doing anyone any favors peddling this nonsense. The later starts to adult life affect people negatively. The student debt is more than any ordinary burden, it is a boat anchor chained to everyone's neck. And it doesn't even guarantee most of these people a career. None of them sit in their cardboard box underneath the overpass in between their 5 part-time jobs thinking "gee, I can't file bankruptcy for my $170,000 in student debt, but at least I got a B+ in my undergrad philsophy class, that's what's really important".

> Ironically, when higher education in the UK was fully-funded by the state the resulting degrees,

When its population was what fraction of its current population? When it was fully-funded for those who could make the cut, and all the other chavs were tossed out to try to make some sort of life in the working class? And don't think I'm picking on the UK here, it's the same all over.

> regardless of the subject(s) studied, were far more valuable in the job market

When 5% of the population gets a university degree, that's a useful filter to decide who you want managing the other 95%. When 45% (or 75%, or 100% like you like to daydream about) have a university degree, it's not useful at all. You can no longer determine who should be in the managerial class by who has a degree and who doesn't. You need to use a different metric.

And they do. They use different metrics now. And oh, that managerial class thing... that's about the only one still around. Not much left in the way of working class jobs.

> A society which doesn't value education as an investment is a society in decline.

If it's an investment, why would you waste that on a bunch of people who will never pay off?

So expect to hear the Koch Industries position from this source.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/05/us/koch-donors-george-mas...

Obviously you then want to couple with it some more specific skills, but it's sort of like doing your core workout to get a solid base before worrying about specific muscle groups. Or taking a computer science curriculum before worrying about learning a specific language without any foundation in how the machine actually does, well, anything.

Literature, art history...yes, a bit less widespread in their ability to make you suited for at least many professions. Though worth remembering "schola" is an ancient Greek root meaning "leisure," and yes, just because something isn't inherently going to return a profit directly doesn't mean it's worth discarding entirely.

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

Moving away from home and doing some vocational training/apprenticeship works just as well. Especially since you actually get payed for your education and can actually be independent, instead of your parents paying for you.

Let's say that you are a college or university in the US. You want more students, right? You sort of need them, if enrollment drops off you lose money any number of ways, and the perception that you're a bad school makes enrollment drop off even more in some vicious circle.

So you make the college prettier. The campus gets bigger gardens and fountains. New shiny buildings. Dorms get bigger, you're no longer stuffing 4 freshmen into broom closets with bookshelves masquerading as bunks. They start to resemble every year more and more some sort of resort or spa.

How do you pay for this? You raise tuition. You add more fees. The students like it, and they're not really paying for it (not yet, in that way that young people always seem to think debt is like free money instead of an obscene trap into debt bondage). And you're hiring massive numbers now of people whose job it is just to manage this stuff (and to manage the people who manage this stuff).

But all the other schools are doing this too, so it's an arms race. And you have to do this, because if you act cost-conscious, people take it as a sign of low-quality.

Even if we turn around the perverse incentives that caused this, it does not fix the problem. Universities have been gorging themselves gluttonous on all of this, and now their costs are too high to roll it back. They've got too much staff, too many buildings that won't amortize for years. And god help if anyone were to suggest they dip into the endowments for any of this (even if they were game, what would Wall Street think of that sort of withdrawal?).

Not to mention, as bad as "everyone should go to college" is, what's left for those who wouldn't if we trimmed that back? Up until the 1970s or so, you'd go to work at the factory in your little town that would become part of the rust belt a decade or two later. That even (sort of) held in some places up to the early 1990s.

What are these kids supposed to do? On r/antiwork, they're always complaining about how no one can afford to live on a Starbucks or Dollar General job. There's a mismatch between the employment these people need, and the sort of employment that is available. And no reasonable way to shrink that gap.