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Comment by cutler | Hacker News Reader

Despite the author's 40 years in education he still doesn't get it. Education is an end in itself not a job qualification. You can only grok this if you have lived in a country in which higher education is/was fully funded by the state. As soon as it becomes a cost/benefit exercise the original ideal behind education is lost and subjects such as Philosophy, Literature and History appear to be a waste of time and money. Ironically, 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 than the more vocational degrees which today saddle students with £50k of debt. A society which doesn't value education as an investment is a society in decline. The same can also be said about a nation's health service.

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The price is not really the determining factor. In my country for example, each university has hundreds of free spots payed by the state for top students, and even the other spots are almost free compared to American or British education (maybe 1k euro per year or so).

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.

The aforementioned less-useful degrees open a lot more doors than that, particularly administrative and managerial, plus opportunities to make a lateral move into a graduate program or otherwise post-grad training opportunity in a subject with more practical utility.

Any college degree is valuable for getting a higher-paying career but the cost (both direct and opportunity) of going to college paired with bad luck or poor performance afterward may nevertheless make it a bad bet.

More vocational programs (even in STEM and "knowledge worker" domains) are a good idea, better than trying to use universities for that purpose, but the lack of prestige appears to be a problem and many of the current options in this space are borderline or outright scams with low-quality education run by very much for-profit entities.

In the UK polytechnics used to fulfill this role and they did it well as long as the sector was well funded. Once the cost accountancy rot set-in under Thatcher every higher education institution became desperate to be re-classified as a university for fear of losing custom from the new breed of students with loans to spend. As I said, once you tie education to the job market the ideal is lost and there is no place in the world for Literature, Philosophy, Sociology, History etc.

>Education is an end in itself not a job qualification.

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.

>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.

They're responding rationally to a fucked up employment market that erroneously views education as an employee production pipeline.

If those perverse incentives disappeared, we'd see students more able to study what they want, not what's marketable on a resume.

Very few people, even in the west, are so privileged that they can spend years of time on full time education with no chance of economic gain.

If the perverse incentives of employers demanding significant amounts of ultimately meaningless education, people wouldn't go to universities. They would just go directly into training for a job (which has been the human norm up until a few decades ago).

Both views can still coexist.

Parents can view higher education as a social badge, and the students as something they have to go through, yet get valuable and life changing insights as they go through the courses.

Anecdotally the courses that were the most interesting and left an impression on me where auxiliary units we could choose from to fill a unit quota to graduate. The very low expectations kinda helped choose courses that didn't sound super useful, only to realize afterwards why they mattered.

I thought it was random luck, but looking at how the graduation system is set and the way the teachers organized these courses, it was obvious after the fact that the university put a lot of effort into getting students to touch subjects they didn't understand as important.

If there had been no industrial revolution, we would all still be farming with minimal formal education, not going to Oxbridge.

So?

That doesn't match my experience getting an education in University.

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).

I think your experience is due to the effects of what’s cited in the comment - college has lost it’s way and been taken over by economics and metrics rather than learning.

My experience as a neurodivergent who didn't last two semesters in college, is that the administration is basically an obstacle to actual learning actually occurring.

The real value of University for me was having the freedom to read extensively both within and outside the degree curriculum. My family were working-class but education was fully-funded which affected how I used my time. Sure, there were also many students who viewed the whole process as preparation for a career but some of us took it as an opportunity to explore intellectually.

Not everyone is smart enough to get into degrees studying philosophy, literature, and history. Some people instead get jobs as cashiers or plumbers.

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.

Why shouldn't they? You say it as if educating a portion of the population has no wider benefit to the rest of society beyond the individual benefit to the students who are educated. Is it not a good idea to have trained doctors when you fall ill? Do you plan on sending your kids to school? Maybe you should support educating some teachers. Do you want to live and work in buildings that won't fall down? Hmm, maybe it would be a good idea to have a few engineers around. Of course there is some benefit to the educated individuals too and hence perhaps they should contribute to their training. But to claim society has no strategic incentive to subsidise the costs is just nonsense. If nothing else, they are likely to contribute more on average in terms of taxation in future .

They shouldn't support it because the point of the government is to act on behalf of the society as a whole. Many problems need money: healthcare, transportation, energy, disaster prevention etc. Without the market's price mechanism, in this context represented by the job prospects after graduation, it's very difficult to know how much should be spent paying philosophy and gender studies teachers. We'd be preventing an efficient allocation of resources potentially killing people in the process.

Additionally, while many people have a genuine interest in these topics (and should buy themselves books, or pay their own philosophy college course), many young adults will be happy signing up for this "education" to avoid making hard decisions for their lives (such as getting a plumbing degree). In this case, the government is financing a sort of young adult daycare and party service.

My parents had been paying taxes since they entered the job market in their mid-teens so I feel no guilt in recovering some of what they contributed.

We currently see a lot of “reforming” in our higher education here in Denmark. There are likely many reasons for this, one being that it’s one of the areas that’s relatively “free” for politicians to do something with in that there won’t be a public backlash, but obviously they’re mainly doing it because they believe in the stuff they do.

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?

"tragicomic" works just fine in English.

Amusing that philosophy always ends up in these hypothetical lists of "less useful" degrees. At least when I was in college 15 years ago, it was topping many lists of most sought out degrees in business magazines, because problem solving is a pretty solid cross-industry skillset.

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.

If you need school to develop your education, you’ve already lost. This is the dichotomy of formal education: those that require it won’t benefit by virtue of the requirement and those that don’t won’t need it to become educated. Education is something you have to pursue for it to have much value. You can’t educate people that don’t care, and people that care are often quite capable of educating themselves. Is the purpose to chase credentials or to be a maximally functional human?

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.

I definitely agree, but I do think for a lot of subjects schools can provide benefits that are hard or impossible to find on your own, such as access to equipment and facilities, dialogue with peers and teachers, group activities, objective measurements of your progress etc.

Edit: the other commenter's example is a good one - you can certainly study medicine by yourself, but without access to labs, cadavers, and clinical training you'd have a tough time.

> people that care are often quite capable of educating themselves.

This is nonsense.

Have you ever been to a doctor that educated themselves?

That wasn’t phrased exactly right; the point is that those who benefit from formal education are those generally motivated to seek knowledge on their own. (Similar: it doesn’t matter what parenting book you read, the fact that you wanted to be a better parent makes you a good parent.)

Throwing masses of disinterested students through 4 years of classes doesn’t benefit them the way everyone hopes.

A doctor is not "educated" in the classic sense. He learns a trade -- but that is not "education."

The GP is correct; and your view of education is a good example of it.

>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 than the more vocational degrees which today saddle students with £50k of debt

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?

1979-83

Maybe it’s because of my learning style (I don’t do well with lecture-style formats), but I disagree. I love learning and have a couple degrees, had a full-ride (academic) to undergrad and only went to 50% of classes (was docked full letter grades in a few because of attendance and still graduated with a decent GPA).

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.

In this day and age a motivated 18+ year old adult has more than enough tools to actively pursue education outside a college setting while having a day job that pays. And this learning does not need to end after four years. So for most students college is just a transaction: a bachelor’s degree in exchange for some money and four years of their life. No point in passively receiving education (i.e. being indoctrinated) at college, when there are better learning tools outside.

Don't underestimate the social dimension of learning.

One other hypothesis I’ll throw out there is that part of the problem is that general education is seen as a phase that one goes through and then is done with. If you have stuff you want to study in an academic way, you better cover it while you’re at school. I went to undergrad for 5 years and still never had time for subjects like philosophy as much as I may have enjoyed it. The breath of human ideas is too vast to cover in the time we give for it.

What's stopping you learning about philosophy now? Do you not have time, not know where to start, or just don't have the motivation any more?

Or perhaps you are the one who doesn't get it? With so many books/courses/AI available online, you can learn for your entire life without needing to go to school for it as long as you have curiosity and movitivation. If your goal is to learn and get educated, you don't need college. College is mostly for getting a job and socialize with your peers(which is more important than most people think).

I don't think so. I think in almost all cases, there's a big difference of going through an entire advanced course on youtube and actually taking the class.

And most of that difference is fighting through the problem sets yourself (in STEM) and actually writing the essays (in the humanities). And feedback loop provided by grading in both cases.

When I learned quantum field theory for the first time, the course had 4 hours of lectures a week. But the problem set for the week took between 8 and 12 hours to solve - as a team (for me, it would have been close to impossible to solve solo, the discussions with peers while working the problem where vital).

I also ended up TA-ing that course the following year, and only after doing that I actually understood the material.

Would it be theoretically possible to learn the material from a youtube lecture and a pirated copy of the textbook? Of course. But I think even the majority of people who already have some formal education in the field would fail to do so.

Different era, different values.

> As soon as it becomes a cost/benefit exercise the original ideal behind education is lost and subjects such as Philosophy, Literature and History appear to be a waste of time and money.

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?

The UK's population has only increased 20% since 1980. As for "a bunch of people who will never pay off" you're back to education as a cost/benefit exercise. I know it can be hard to get out of this mindset but once upon a time there really was a culture of education for its own sake.

> you're back to education as a cost/benefit exercise.

In the real world that I live in, everything costs something. Only those who are insulated from the cost of things get to gibber absurdities like "this is more important than what it costs!".

Higher education isn't marginal. This isn't couch-cushion money. It either has to have a payoff, or it has to go away. It is imperative... making different choices won't prevent it going away, all you can affect is how much melodrama is stirred up when it does disappear.

He's a professor in the economics department at George Mason University. ("...founded in principles that stress the value of free markets in promoting peace and prosperity.") GMU is partially funded and controlled by the Koch foundations.[1] He is a research fellow at the Mercatus Center. ("Mercatus research focuses on how markets solve problems.") Mercatus is funded by the Koch family and Charles Koch is on the board. He is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute ("The vision of the Cato Institute is to create free, open, and civil societies founded on libertarian principles.") Cato was founded by Charles Koch, as the Koch Foundation.

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

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

The problem I have with degrees being handed out left and right is that it causes a deflation of a degree. And then we see ridiculous needs on job postings.

I completely agree with this sentiment. Capitalism, Democracy and a free society only works if the citizens are educated and healthy. Why do we even elect a government and pay our taxes then. We could go back to having Kings and the "educated" aristrocrats while all of us can grow wheat. Free access to education to all in a democratic society is mandatory. Put my taxes to good use for the future of my country. I don't need another F-16 but I will definitely need a large educated workforce in the future. Invest in people first, fighter jets can come second.

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