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Comment by Nifty3929 | Hacker News Reader

Two big problems:

1. For most people and most degrees, college does not make one more useful to society.

2. Even for those people/degrees that do make people more useful, that doesn't mean society benefits from an unlimited number of them. For example, a math degree likely makes one more useful as a math teacher, but society does not have an unlimited need for math teachers.

We should stop encouraging people to go to college. It's a huge waste of societal resources, most particularly the years of life of the students themselves. How about go to work after high school, and then if you feel like you would benefit from additional formal education, then you go to college.

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Your points only hold in a pretty narrow view of what degrees do. There is a lot of value in:

1. Showing you can complete a 4 year project

2. Networking not only with professors, but also other students. You never know when you’ll need a dude who has a weird amount of skill in X, but if it’s in any way related to your field, you may have had classes together.

3. A place to spend a bit more time maturing

4. A place to pick up some skills that particularly interest you

5. A mixing of different economic classes, backgrounds, and outlooks, amid a relatively calm intellectual setting

6. Highly specialized and targeted education

And more. All of these make you more valuable to society, though that doesn’t have to be our only goal. We could also enjoy the generic enrichment of our citizens.

Having a highly educated population is a major competitive advantage for a society that materializes itself in more ways than I could ever hope to enumerate. We need to bring tuition down closer to what the educational portion of it actually costs and pump as many able people through college as possible. Engineers, waiters, cops, everyone.

All we need is an ultra cheap online accredited option. We can easily mass produce education at this point for almost nothing.

This would be hugely beneficial to society but there is obviously a lot of rent seeking and cartel like behavior by some in the network or we would already have something this obvious.

College grads average IQ had dropped from 119 in 1939 to 102 in 2022. For many jobs an IQ test would be sufficient to determine expected likelihood for long term success. College still teaches domain expertise but to a larger and less intelligent cohort - so I would attribute the lower value of degrees more to it's decreased relevance to general intelligence. Which would suggest the very thing to fix it would be through the use of IQ tests, but we're not allowed to do that.

IQ scoring is routinely adjusted so that 100 represents the mean. It should be expected that IQ scores for college grads trend towards 100 as higher percentages of the population go to college. University is also not designed to maximize standardized test scores the same way that public high school is. I would expect recency and intensity of math education to play a higher role in IQ scores than the specialized knowledge and exposure to the arts that comes from a college education.

Certainly expanding the cohort alone is sufficient to cause a drop in average IQ scores - which is exactly what I said. College is no longer a useful proxy for IQ score. I made no claim that college would cause IQ scores to increase and if they do play a role I don't think it is a very large one. Raw scores are fitted to a normal distribution but the IQ scores are normalized across time by comparing that distribution to other distributions. Certainly some processes for obtaining IQ scores can be more flawed than others.

There is a reverse Flynn effect (peaked for children born in 1975) so not only are average IQ scores lower for college grads but there has been a drop in IQ for the general population.

I see what you are saying, thank you. Personally, I would not rely on IQ scores for much, mainly because people have become increasingly specialized and I wouldn't expect specialized knowledge to translate well to a general intelligence test. It also does not seem as though other general forms of intelligence map well to IQ and it may even be arguably one of the less useful measures of intelligence outside of the extremes. e.g., I would expect a high school student in Calc 2 to crush me in a math test, but I would never go to them seeking life advice. I'm not married to this belief and could probably be swayed, but that is my current impression.

By my observation IQ correlates to anxiety disorders so often people with high IQs tend adopt risk adverse behaviors to minimize that anxiety and that undermines opportunities for success. People with really high IQs tend to end up on the spectrum and regularly burnout. Extremely gifted youngsters tend to end up with similar and often pretty severe health problems. So while I do agree that in general past success is a good indicator for future success and IQ is not the be all and end all, I would suggest that many high IQ people can be properly medicated to lead much more productive lives than currently do. And this difference would explain much of the residual lack of expected success.

So much of my growth and maturity came from University. It gives you the time, resources, and space to learn and unlearn in a supportive community environment. Provides a structured environment to meet others on a similar path. So many people that start work after highschool end up in a career track of life where work is the only thing they can imagine in life. It's hard to break out of that.

https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2025/median-weekly-earnings-by-...

If you want college degrees to not mean something, you'd need to stop paying people with college degrees more.

Note the high paying no-college jobs may also have filters like apprenticeships.

where I'm from, apprenticeships are not seen as a gatekeeping mechanism, but instead as an opportunity to learn something "useful" (aka some trade or craft) and get started with low or no pre-training - typically apprenticeships will start at age ~15 and take 3 years. Businesses are supported by state subsidies for educating apprentices.

It's not all rose petals but overall seems like a valid option for someone who can't/doesn't want to pursue a higher education career.

I think Americans are culturally afraid other people will take their jobs, so they love industry barriers to entry. Even when this means the only people working in a given field are all about to retire.

The hardcore version of this is labor unions of course, but the small version is occupational licensing for all kinds of small-time occupations like hairdressing.

They shouldn't worry so much, since Americans are also culturally afraid of any kind of job where you have to do X if they think they aren't an "X person", to the point they won't apply to do it for any amount of money. Applies to physical labor (farmworkers) as much as mental (anything where you have to do math).

I did go to work after high school, as a software engineer in fact.

Now I can't get a job, so I'm going to university.

Anyways, you don't get to tell me how valuable I am to society, that's disgusting behavior.

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