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Comment by robertlagrant | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised it didn't do more than touch on probably the biggest reason: we already pay a huge amount for education out of taxes, so the educational budgets are allocated by bureaucrats, and not by education consumers (or their parents).

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I think you're missing the fundamental mechanic here.

Spence signalling[1] won the econ Nobel back in 2001. It says that the cost of signalling in a market for imperfect information ends on the one emitting the signal.

For education and jobs, the signal is your degree (hence the huge career difference between dropping out one week before getting a degree and completing). The cost of the degree will fall on the student.

The employer can easily diminish the hiring problem by pre-sorting applicants by education. Students know there is a large difference in career outcomes between university education required jobs and the ones below that.

Colleges want to extract as close to 100% of this lifetime earning difference as they can.

The main question at this point in education research is "how much" signalling is a component of education versus actually teaching skills.

For tech, almost no certificate provides a comparable signal to a real degree.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics)

I think another huge factor is that you are making a prediction on the future value of your degree over the next 40-50 years as a 17 year old who is probably more focused on succeeding socially and sexually. You add in the student loans that may or may not be forgiven at some time in the future and the free market is not in play. Same with Healthcare, insurance clouds all free market mechanics.

I'm a huge capitalist and I think we need to be honest about where capitalism isn't working. It's always due to free market mechanics being removed from the equation by layers of obscurity. I don't know the right answer but this shit is not working

A 17 year old focusing on succeeding socially and sexually is still really incentivized to go to college! People have tons of friends and sex at even the nerdiest college.

Exactly my point, it's not a purely financial decision. It's barely a financial decision.

I've been a student at my local university for 19 years now, most of that part time. Sometimes I end up with degrees, other times not. When I'm taking classes that are either too niche or too hard to be on the easiest path towards a degree, it's fantastic.

But if my wanderings take me in a direction which is on the easiest path to a degree (sometimes necessary because the things I want to take have prerequisites that I'd rather not get waived) it's like I've entered some parallel dimension where I'm the only one who is willing to engage with the content. Like wow these kids are getting nothing out of this besides a grade.

So it sounds like we agree that it's not working, though I suspect we'd disagree about how much capitalism belongs in the solution.

Blah blah blah. This is way forest-for-trees stuff.

I work in higher ed and have used this stuff forever. What OP said is simpler and closer to the easier answer.

The person PAYING isn't the consumer; the actual consumer (me and the students) have very little say or influence in how these things work.

If you wanted to make effective, I don't know, mops, you'd INTERVIEW JANITORS AND GET THEIR FEEDBACK, and somehow make that feedback actually matter.

This industry DOESNT DO THAT.

Agree. Although I encountered an interesting who-are-the-users? issue when I was involved in using simulations to support training. The people buying the systems did at least understand they they should consult the users when writing their (so-called) user requirements. But who were the users? Three categories were identified: The students themselves, the instructors and the 'customers' of the training system - the people who had to 'employ' the students when trained. After a lot of discussion, they picked the instructors as the main users, and wrote the requirements for the training system with them in mind.

It worked, sort of. But what was overlooked was that the individuals who spent most actual screen time with the systems were the courseware developers. They had to build the training scenarios, which involved a lot of faffing around in the virtual world to create content that would support specific training objectives. The courseware devs, using the completed system, reckoned on an hour of dev time to build five minutes of useful training in the sim. One of the reasons it was so slow was that the courseware devs (think of them as level designers in a gaming context) had very few tools to help them build the scenario, e.g. to check map inter-visibility. The system devs had created some great tools for the instructors (e.g. after action review) but they had pretty much failed to consider how many different training scenarios were needed to keep the training relevant over time, and thus the relative importance of scenario dev tools.

If students are getting degrees to get hired, maybe it's the companies that are the consumer? Unless you're going for your own enlightenment, but I think that's a privilege reserved for rich kids.

Again, you're getting too abstract. It's US, the teachers first. Then perhaps the students as well.

Yes, in particular for PreK-12 schools here in the States. Here in NJ nearly all board members know little or nothing about education, but are elected as popularity contest. Superintendents get paid big salaries and are often severely under qualified. There is a lot of bureaucracy created by this.

Many companies that target PreK-12 also know there is a lot of incompetent admins with boat loads of cash. Pricing gouging is very common.

People are shocked when they learn about 70% of property tax bills goes to the school district, not the municipality or county.

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