Against Tulip Subsidies | Hacker News Reader

Against Tulip Subsidies

slatestarcodex.com

83 pointsevanpw83 comments

Everyone who's looked into this issue knows the solution is to use examinations rather than education - a degree should be given if you can pass some stringent examinations regardless of how the knowledge got into your head. You separate instruction from assessment and the incentives work out much, much better. And the cost goes way, way down.

However, we are stuck in this horrible equilbrium and I don't see much hope of getting out. Scott has a post on these awful equilbriua called Meditations on Moloch that's pretty depressing:http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

I can see one way of maybe getting out of this. If one nice country was to implement this examination-based approach and then offer citizinship to those who score very well on a "general degree examination" (basically an intelligence test) they might be able to setup a brain-drain dynamic that would maybe push us out of this awfulness.

Said country could even subsidise the very brightest with the equivalent of a signing bonus. Even a permanent no-strings-attached basic income for the brightest of the bright would be very cheap as they're so rare, and may be worth it for the positive externalities as they're the type of people who build new industries. "We'll pay you to live, work, learn, and be credentialed here" may be enough to dull the luster of the ivies.

Examinations are just a proxy measure (like grades in general). They have historically been used for logistic reasons, many of which no longer exist (or are much less compelling). They stick around for the same reason that everything else sticks around in academia: Because It Has Always Been So (another example: lectures).

A portfolio of actual work is much better than an examination. A github repo with a bunch of actual working code in it is much better than an hour of writing pseudocode on a whiteboard.

Of course they are a proxy, but they are much better and cheaper proxies. I was assuming that credentialism would remain - examination-based degrees make credentialism much less costly.

Cheaper? Certainly. Better? That's debatable.

I don't see any compelling reason for thinking that the degree of knowledge that can be measured on a one hour (or even a five hour) exam is comparable to the degree of knowledge that can be measured from a larger body of work (whether that work represents continuing interaction between an instructor and student over the course of a semester, or a self-directed large-scale portfolio project).

I'm probably showing my age here, but in the heyday of Novell there was a phenomenon called the "paper CNE". The military has long referred to those who've gone through an abbreviated officer training process as "ninety day wonders" (not a compliment). Other examples abound.

When I'm hiring for a startup, I look for someone who can do the job well. When I used to be hiring for a large multi-national, I was more interested in someone who could do the job and put up with a certain (large) amount of institutional bullshit.

A high GPA from a challenging school is a "signal" for just that very thing.

Part of what follows is edited from a WSJ column from 2007...

Most of us would agree that most professional jobs require a basic intellectual aptitude. And what has changed since the 1970s is that the court has developed a body of law that prevents employers from directly screening for such aptitude. The landmark case was Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971). A black coal miner claimed discrimination because his employer required a high-school diploma and an intelligence test as prerequisites for promotion to a more skilled position. The court ruled 8-0 in the miner's favor. "Good intent or absence of discriminatory intent does not redeem employment procedures or testing mechanisms that operate as 'built-in headwinds' for minority groups," Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote.

This became known as the "disparate impact" test, and it applies only in employment law. Colleges and universities remain free to use aptitude tests, and elite institutions in particular lean heavily on exams such as the SAT in deciding whom to admit. For a prospective employee, obtaining a college degree is a very expensive way of showing that he has, in effect, passed an IQ test.

But why are employers able to get away with requiring a degree without running afoul of Griggs? Because colleges and universities -- again, especially elite ones -- go out of their way to discriminate in favor of minorities. By admitting blacks and Hispanics with much lower SAT scores than their white and Asian classmates, purportedly in order to promote "diversity," these institutions launder the exam of its disparity.

Thus the higher-education industry and corporate employers have formed a symbiotic relationship in which the former profits by acting as the latter's gatekeeper and shield against civil-rights lawsuits. Little wonder that in 2003, when the Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of discriminatory admissions policies at the University of Michigan, 65 Fortune 500 companies filed a friend-of-the-court brief urging that they be upheld.

What is happening now, though, is that now that everyone "needs" a degree to get a job - standards for entry, getting good grades and graduating are being lowered. And subsidies kick in (OP's article's point). There is even a push now to lower the standards for the bar exam. This is crucial because part of competition between legal degree programs is % of graduates able to pass that bar. With lowering the bar for entry and grades, the percentage drops. Which looks bad. Instead of fixing the problem, they are trying to fix the optics.

What I am worried about w/ any certification-only program is exactly this same phenomenon. The signal of the certificate and the truth of the certificate diverge as the bars are lowered. People stop treating it as a trustworthy signal.

Employers, reasonably, want people who can do the job or learn how to do the job. And there are a lot of candidates to work through. If you can't test them and if the degrees -- or certificates -- are worthless signals, then ... I don't know where we end up.

this is a good point, which also raises the question of how desirable a job with a large multinational really is, especially is your role in that multinational almost explictly requires "put(ting) up with a certain (large) amount of institutional bullshit"

that 'bullshit' isn't just a hassel, its a drag on your professional productivity and growth as well

Agreed. Mostly.

As a young engineer working at Motorola semiconductor, I would have agreed completely. As a somewhat older technology professional working with Amex, I became somewhat less sure. They were super organized about the way they went about cross-stakeholder large project meetings.

As dilbert-esque as it can all become, I'm not sure that the opposite is a good thing either.

I went to a small engineering college, but simple things like getting up and going to class (where attendance was counted) and getting your work done by the deadline seemed to be a stretch for my many of my freshman (and some sophomore) year classmates. Being reliable and getting stuff done on time isn't "just institutional bullshit".

And, I would argue that sitting through meetings with customers may sometimes seem like a waste of time, but the occasional nuggets of gold make it worth it. To me, anyway.

EDIT: Since neither Motorola, nor Freescale (Motorola SPS) are around any more, your point about large multinationals is definitely 'heard'. Still, I wouldn't mind doing an extended gig at Toyota or GE Power Systems.

Indeed, this may be the central error of the Universitas - originally the Universitas was a union of teachers who did not create, give or mark the exams - usually for admission to careers in law - because that was the exclusive province of the Catholic Church. "Universitas" was and is just the latin word for "guild" - any guild.

Once the professors began in effect, to judge their own work, relevance and competence (along with their students' qualities) the jig was up. The union has become the company as well, so of course it's expensive and largely worthless.

I take a more classical view on University: It never should be "job training". It should be about general life enrichment, beyond-industry research, philosophy about the world and its workings, and broadening horizons.

Sure, people who went through that (ie, independently interested in, was recommended in or could afford it, and succeeded) tended to be more capable people. Let's roughly compare it to becoming an Eagle Scout or a Navy Seal in terms of a generally impressive life accomplishment. Shuffling everybody through the same system is useless, wastes everybody's time and money, and devalues the magic paper gotten in the end.

Many skilled professions require training, and specific training institutions are all well and good. But let's not confuse training to become a mechanical engineer or doctor as being equivalent in an employment eligibility sense to more enrichment-oriented university degrees. The latter being required to get a sales/front-desk/entry-level position is a burgeoning and absolutely needless weight on our entire society. Conflating the former with the more heady University worldview is also odd, and eliminates eligibility for those who would be great in their field but are not that compatible with academia.

He somewhat address this in the article. Would as many people pay the substantial cost of college merely for the "life enrichment".

His argument on this point is short enough that it's worth just quoting entire:

> (Yes, it is nice to have college for non-economic reasons too, but let’s be honest – if there were no such institution as college, would you, totally for non-economic reasons, suggest the government pay poor people $100,000 to get a degree in Medieval History? Also, anything not related to job-getting can be done three times as quickly by just reading a book.)

Personally, I'd say yes to his question - and indeed, this is a question, not an argument; and it's a question that presumes a knee-jerk reaction against Medieval History majors...

Gross world product has been growing along an exponential function for some time, and machines are threatening to allow us to be comfortable even if we don't work as much as we physically can. Maybe giving everyone some years in their youth to enrich their lives would be a good way to organize the economy once it's a viable option. Maybe a lot of people agree with this, and in wealthier nations it's ~just~ now close to being within reach, but it isn't quite there, so what we're feeling would be considered friction in the transition.

> Would as many people pay the substantial cost of college merely for the "life enrichment".

"Life enrichment" isn't (just) an ends unto itself. Coming to terms with the magnitude of one's own ignorance is well worth a year or two of sunk opportunity cost. Read through the failed startup post-mortems posted here yesterday.

And there's also real value in the ability to polish a piece of writing (for technical people) or a cursory understanding of the technical work that goes into the product (for business/marketing people).

Edit: In general, conflating students with customers leads to messed up conclusions and backwards priorities.

>"Life enrichment" isn't (just) an ends unto itself. Coming to terms with the magnitude of one's own ignorance is well worth a year or two of sunk opportunity cost. Read through the failed startup post-mortems posted here yesterday.

So then it is possible to learn about your ignorance without college?

Edit: more broadly, I don't think it's wrong to say "college teaches you what you don't know!", but it is misleading. Life teaches you unknown unknowns.

The structure of a university is not uniquely suited for teach you that; its comparative advantage lies in teaching knowledge that you just can't learn in practice because because of the theoretical background needed to piece together the big picture. That's not the same thing as unknown unknowns, and to whatever extent it teaches those is not because it's uniquely optimal to teach them.

Of course. In another thread I called this the Einstein fallacy, and in pervades discussions of higher education in the US.

It's far more likely that you'll know what you don't know (and how to learn it) if you invest two years of time learning enough about other fields to know where you need to consult an expert.

(as an aside, the portion of my post you quoted has nothing to do with what you're saying? I'm willing to bet many of those people both had college degrees and also "wasted" a hell of a lot more VC capital than the cost of a degree. College is not a panacea for unknown unknowns (it's not a panacea for anything), but those are illustrative examples of how not knowing something can cost a tremendous amount of money and opportunity.)

edit re your edit: I don't think the value of depth in a technical area is really up for debate (except for maybe in CS where some people seem to think there's nothing more to software engineering than low-throughput CRUD apps). Even the article concedes that point. The question is whether the rest of college is useful. We'll agree to disagree on studying fields in which you don't have expertise being a good mechanism for learning when you're over your head.

>(as an aside, the portion of my post you quoted has nothing to do with what you're saying

It was a case of people learning unknown unknowns outside of college.

>We'll agree to disagree on studying fields in which you don't have expertise being a good mechanism for learning when you're over your head.

I didn't say that it's a bad mechanism, just that it's not especially better than the kind of learning your pick up in life normally (eg the startups you cited), without blowing $50k in opportunity costs per year.

One problem with this approach is that most people consider "life enrichment" to be courses that are biased towards their own political viewpoint. Conservatives want students to have a basis in the history, literature and philosophy of Western Civilization. Liberals want to teach students to think "critically", i.e. to view Western Civilization through the lens of oppression and racism (and all other ism's).

I'm a liberal, and I got a BA in History from Berkeley. I studied European and American diplomatic history, with an emphasis on war. I mostly took classes on modern European and American history and classical European history. I urge others to take almost exactly the same courses at Berkeley. I currently read mostly American and European history, science, and literature.

One of my non-history courses at Berkeley was focused on Western Civilization and its construction of isms to frame the world in a manner more beneficial to the West. Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism, Taoism - all defined against Christianity, which isn't an ism. Islam has had the political mobility and prowess to break the bonds of the conservative thinkers placing an ism on their lives. Sikhi is trying to do the same. That was probably the most liberally militant course I took at Berkeley.

> It should be about general life enrichment

This is a view that rich people can afford to hold. Poor or middle class people cannot reasonably afford to pay four years of opportunity cost, plus tuition, for "general life enrichment."

The Ireland control serves well here too. Are Irish medical doctors, and indeed all European doctors, less "enriched" than American ones? I'm very skeptical of this idea, but if you could propose some metric that would allow us to evaluate the question, that might be helpful.

This is a view that rich people can afford to hold. Poor or middle class people cannot reasonably afford to pay four years of opportunity cost, plus tuition, for "general life enrichment."

...In countries that don't subsidize higher education to a point where this isn't a problem.

We can debate whether the cost to society is worth it, but just because something is out-of-reach in the status quo doesn't mean it's impossible.

Even in those countries, you are giving up four years of wages. The only reason any ordinary person does that is because they expect to get something out of it beyond mere life enrichment.

Such as enough exposure to both the real world and opportunities for extended reflection thereupon to appreciate the extreme unlikelihood of being able to distinguish between "mere enrichment" and "crucial background knowledge that made the difference between success and failure" 2, 3, or 4 decades out?

The "enrichment" model isn't premised on "job training doesn't matter". It's premised on the realization that it's impossible to know what you don't know but might need to know for a job that you'll have in 2 decades but doesn't exist yet.

Examples abound of Mathematics majors who make tremendous contributions to industries they never studied formally. Many people who never obtain a deep theoretical knowledge of a field do well in life because the usefulness their industry knowledge just happens to outlive them.

If you consider this argument fully, It's hard to defend retirement - or anything else people do without profit motives.

I'm listening to music without any expectation of profit, giving up time I could spend making money. I consider this life enrichment. Actually, besides opportunity costs, I paid literal cash money to be able to do this.

You're not forgoing four years of wages, and taking out an undischargeable house-sized loan to listen to that music though -- that's the point.

That is, the problem isn't that "enrichment is bad", or that everything must have a monetary return, but that "it's not a high enough priority at that point in the typical such person's life to spend that much on it" if it were just an issue of enrichment.

It's like the Burdian's Ass scenario, except the donkey starves while learning the most enlightened way to choose a bale of hay to eat.

Most people do not put higher education in the same category as retirement, they see it as a means to an end.

Retirement is generally taken once you have "enough". I suppose you could argue that college is simply pushing back retirement -- taking some of that self enrichment time early -- but that is not a good analysis. See, when you retire, you already have obtained. When you enter university, you merely hope to.

The music analogy you tried makes no sense to me. You cannot work 24/7. You are not in any reasonable sense forgoing wages you could have earned by listening to music. If you quit your job to listen to music eight hours a day for four years, I would argue that you are either a fool or very wealthy, and I don't think I'd find many to disagree with me.

Social Security. Medicare. Tax breaks for certain types of saving/investing. Tax breaks of property ownership.

The government subsidizes retirement in a plethora of ways.

I seldom refer to knowledge I gained from university classes. It was an important signaling device and a great time socially, but it was not an efficient use of my time as far as preparing to be successful in my career.

I would be surprised if there isn't a good alternative to higher education for bright kids 10 years from now, but I don't think it will have anything to do with legislation.

I still get a lot out of the systems approach to engineering from my university classes. Still, this is something that could be taught in weeks instead of years.

The knowledge you gain is only part of it. You also learn how to learn by thinking critically.

So yea, that course on how to fabricate a diode using 1990's technology, wasn't useful, but when I had to learn how to manufacture NAND flash using current technology learning it wasn't nearly as hard.

People have a hard time separating the value of an entrenched institution from whether it's a good value. More school is often good, but that doesn't make it a good deal.

Every time the discussion of cs degrees comes up here it's followed by an avalanche of people saying how college gave them this and that and then a story about the one idiot they used to work with who didn't go to college.

I went to two years of community college and have never had student loan debt. I've worked on harder problems than many cs grads have. I've gone farther and actually retained more knowledge. I got a great deal taking the path I've followed.

So, this whole thing is an attempt do argue against Bernie Sanders proposed universal free college tuition by comparing it to a country that offers free college tuition and is used as an example of a better system by the author?

Yeah and his analogy is plain wrong. Bernie Sanders is saying to make the tulips free, not to give everybody enough money to buy them..

It's not wrong. Making something free means paying for it in a transparent fashion.

Bernie Sanders is not talking about changing the institutional structure of college such that it somehow has no cost to provide. He is talking about the government paying that cost on behalf of students.

I agree with free education, by the way. We currently spend our budgets on much less useful things. But let's be honest about what it means and how it works.

Yes it is wrong, paying the cost of education at cost (for a government), or paying students to pay market prices (inflated by perception of value) is a huge difference. Which do you think Bernie Sanders was implying?

Bernie is not suggesting nationalizing all american colleges. That would be absurd.

In real life there are more possibilities in between 0 and 1.. Also look at how its done in other countries. Apparently americans can go to Germany to study for free in a recent article. Absurd indeed.

You do understand that all of those options require someone to pay for the services? I don't know why we're still having a conversation about this. An institution with employees costs money, unless the institution is entirely comprised of volunteers (in which case the volunteers are paying with their time).

Germany pays.

Bernie's plan is to pay institutions.

That's all well and good, but that's what it is.

"Making college free" is identical in every meaningful way to giving everyone who wants to buy it enough money to buy it.

Not necessarily. Imagine two scenarios:

"Here's the government school. Anyone can go there for free."

"Here's $50,000. Spend it at any school you want."

Without advocating one or the other, it's clear that these scenarios are not going to produce the same results at all.

In fact, there's been a great deal of debate about whether or not the second scenario ("school vouchers") is a good idea.

It is not so clear, actually, and the example of the K-12 public schools actaully shows it. Nominally, anyone can go to "the government school", but some are better run than others, and bestow more benefits on the students, and you end up moving the bidding war/arms race right over to "whatever mechanism the school uses to decide who goes there".

In the US, that usually means it spills over onto home prices in the best school districts. So, you get the same sorting of students, the same differential education, but people blow their budgets a different way.

This is not much different from the subsidized result.

(You may object: "But the schools can just sort by merit." Well, a) your previous comment said that it's not so easy to find a test that does so, and b) that's just another mode for the arms race: spending money on ways to game/hack the tests: cf, SAT prep courses.)

The same dynamic has happened for all previous kinds of subsidies to higher education: the amount the government pays for (or provides for free) becomes the new baseline, and people have to spend more money to distinguish themselves the unwashed masses who also go that education. Previously, a high school degree was enough, but now college is. With Sanders's plan (regardless of "free school" vs "pay your tuition"), we may end up at "Sorry, everyone needs a Master's now."

Like the site argues, the result of the subsidies is that everyone has to do the same things they did without it, but you also blow a lot of money unnecessarily.

You can't make things free by magic. Someone has to pay for them.

I've just searched what are now 58 comments for the phrase "prisoner's dilemma" and got zero hits. WHAT!

Higher Education is now a prisoner's dilemma, and that's really the point of the tulip article, even if he didn't use the phrase. Rational actors will want their children to have a college education and then higher degrees, even though everyone choosing that makes society worse off, not better off. Classic prisoner's dilemma. (Also a "Tragedy of the Commons", I would argue.)

Perhaps the most profound argument against our present system of higher education is that despite his philosophy degree (and I'm guessing at least 70 or 80 other degrees amongst the commentators) neither the author nor anyone else has said the two words "prisoner's dilemma." It's a simple concept, taught in every University, most undergraduates supposedly know what it is, and yet nobody can manage to recognize a gargantuan real world example! (I have yet to see the term PD applied to this subject in other media, either.) Time to scrap them crenellated white towers.

The top post [1] mentions the "Meditations on Moloch" post, which is basically a generalization of the PD/Tragedy of the Commons/arms race. I assume most posters are aware of the relevant dynamic.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9671686

PD shows up as one of ten examples of traps in that long article. Note too that not every local minima is going to be a PD, or even close! Equilibria are sometimes now confused with PDs, due to the publicity given to Nash's Equilibrium, but that's a popular confusion.

Let's assume the situation with higher education is a prisoner's dilemma. I, as a player, decide not to go to college (cooperate), while everyone else decides to go to college (defect), resulting in me paying a sucker's payoff since my opportunities are reduced while those of everyone else are expanded. So far so good. Next, I decide to go to college while everyone else also goes to college (defect & defect), I pay a not insubstantial amount of money, as does everyone else. So far so good. But I manage to get a job as a software engineer at Google making $125k/year while several of Everyone-Else-in-the-World only get jobs as clerks at 7-Eleven, making $15k/year. So, the punishment scenario doesn't pan out since I didn't have a sucker's payoff while several others in the world did. That's okay. Let's keep going. Next, I decide not to go to college while everyone else decides not to go to college (cooperate & cooperate). All of a sudden, there are thousands of recently fired professors, instructors, deans, janitors, cooks, etc. on the job market. I can't find a job along with many others of my generation who decided not to go to college. Many of us have a sucker's payoff during the reward scenario.

The situation with education is not a prisoner's dilemma. Q.E.D.

The situation with education is not a tragedy of the commons. There is no central, collective resource that is being exploited by individuals for their own benefit, without regard for the future of the resource. Now, there might be a tragedy of the commons if higher education was universally free and everyone decided to pursue higher education endlessly, with new institutions popping up continuously, which would dry up the treasury and halt the program of universally free higher education. But there is no universally free education.

The situation with education is extremely complex, with a variety of intricacies and unknown unknowns. It can't be distilled into a game or an aphorism.

This is a misunderstanding of prisoner's dilemma, knagra - you're assuming that PDs have to be nearly identical to the original example, but actually only the relative outcomes matter to the definition, not an absolute gain or loss. You don't have to be punished, just get a worse result than cooperation/communication could have given you despite both parties acting rationally. And that's exactly the case (now, not I think 100 years ago) with higher education. Foregoing degrees for individual study or other alternative education (such as apprenticeship) and exams would cost everyone less, and result in a better result even for those who did well, in your retelling, by going to university. The economy wouldn't be hurt, it would gain, and those who filled the jobs now requiring unnecessary years of education could also be paid more, not just owe less. The only way to escape the PD classification is to deny the central thesis of Thiel and the Tulip article's author; and assert that higher education is not truly inefficient, so there are no great economic inefficiencies. A hard path by now, it seems to me! So QNED, after all.

To drive the point home, it's entirely possible to construct a PD with all outcomes being rewards, all outcomes being punishments, or a mixture of the two. You don't need prisoner's, see-through mirrors in an interrogation room, or prison sentences, or other punishments in order to create a prisoner's dilemma. Very complex situations can be prisoner's dilemma's, the bibliography of addumbrations of the concept is immense. Perhaps you mean that this is not ONLY a PD. But no-one ever thought, I've never entertained the notion that "PD" was a full description of any situation. Instead, it points out obvious inefficiencies despite individual rationality -precisely the "No Tulip Subsidies" author's point.

I demonstrated that you could still get a worse result with mutual cooperation than you could with mutual defection, which violates the T > R > P > S condition for the dilemma to be a prisoner's dilemma in the strong sense. I demonstrated that at least two of the four possibilities are unpredictable. Mutual cooperation doesn't necessarily give you a better result than mutual defection. Mutual cooperation could give you a much worse result than cooperating while the other player defects. For example, you could get a college degree like everyone else and end up working at McDonald's with $50k in debt through mutual cooperation. But you could also just work at McDonald's without getting a college degree (and the $50k in debt) while everyone else gets a college degree.

QED, sir.

Here's a link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma#Generalize...

I also wanted to say that several million people would be jobless if everyone decided not to go to college come August. The economy would be shocked by an influx of unemployed professors, etc. That would be a much worse state, relatively, than if some people continued to go to college, as I argued in my first comment.

And there are indeed many valid prisoner's dilemmas in the natural sciences. A clear one I recall is the example of grooming others that Dawkins offered in The Selfish Gene.

We could try the "Unincorporated Man" (aka equity-based) approach to paying for higher ed: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/04/unincorporated-man.htm...

Instead of paying with loan money or hoping for grants, anyone could go if they will give up (for example) 10% of all future income (this is not the same as "income-based repayment.") Instead, a system like this would have whoever is buying the shares (I'd prefer it be universities themselves) give you a full ride (not just tuition, but books, room and board, transport, food, etc.) and you'd pay them out of your gross income after you graduate. The big difference is that just about anyone who is willing to give up the percentage could get it. Sticker shock and rising bills do not come into play. Right now, you're at the mercy of the financial aid system and all its fickleness (relatives make too much/too little, you have too many/too few assets, you are in a high CoL area and loans don't cover anywhere near what you need, the amount they're willing to give you shifts with the political winds, etc.)

The advantages of this system are that you would never have to worry about your relatives being able to fund you; you wouldn't need to work while going to school; you would not need to reapply each year and hope you get enough; and there's no issues with bankruptcy or anything else (the obligation would be non-dischargeable, just like now, but since it's a percentage, the sting is much less.) Instead, the money would all be there the whole time.

On the investor side, it would be like VC: most people would produce standard returns (let's say 5-15k a year), while a few Elon Musks and Larry Ellisons would return billions - I'm sure many universities would be happy to occasionally get one of those.

In any case, there's no way it could be /worse/ than the system we have now.

10% of all future income

The general idea is interesting, but this is an insane amount of money for most college graduates, who would be far better off with even unsubsidised loans.

Percentage is definitely up for debate. Maybe MIT/Harvard/Stanford could do 8-10% and University of Whatever could do 4%. Or maybe they could vary it based on projected likely future earnings or some other factors. In any case, if the option was there, I'm sure many would take it. I would.

The author was doing great right up until the last paragraph. His proposed solution is silly because it makes no distinction between jobs for which a university education is essential and those for which it is irrelevant. Then there is also the large grey area in between, in which a university education in certain fields might be useful but not essential. What he would do is abolish the right of those professions in which such an education is essential from applying the same standard he lauds earlier: that physicians must attend medical school. For engineers, a university education with a specialty in engineering is exactly what medical school is to physicians.

Many people here believe that a university education is not required to be a computer programmer, and I agree. But programmer is a vocation, like plumber or firefighter; it requires specialized skills and experience to do well but does not require a university education. If you spent 3 months learning one language and one or two common frameworks for making e-commerce sites, you are reasonably qualified to work on e-commerce sites for companies that use that language and framework. However, being a programmer and being an engineer are not the same; an engineer has been educated both more broadly and more deeply, and should be capable of solving larger and more difficult problems, designing whole systems, and in general should have the education and experience to understand new problems more thoroughly. It's the difference between the architect who designs a building (or one of its systems) and the construction crew who erects it. Both are essential, but they have (properly) different qualifications.

There are many other fields where some sort of education is required. I agree that many of those fields conveniently piggyback on university education (usually with a particular field of study requirement) when other similar mechanisms might do as well. But the notion that such an education is universally irrelevant is absurd.

If the author wants people without university education to be paid as much as people with it, the solution is not legislation. Instead, he should hire them.

His proposed solution is silly because it makes no distinction between jobs for which a university education is essential and those for which it is irrelevant.

His solution is to evaluate people as people, not by external indicators. If it so difficult to tell if someone has a university education or not without having to explicitly ask, then perhaps it isn't as essential as you seem to think?

> If it so difficult to tell if someone has a university education or not without having to explicitly ask, then perhaps it isn't as essential as you seem to think?

It is trivially easy to think up questions that any Computer Science student from a non-crappy university will be able to answer, but someone without a degree probably will likely not be able to answer. Just pick a particularly challenging problem off of an Algorithms or Linear Algebra final and hand them a textbook and an hour.

The question is how to ask questions that matter for a particular job. If the job is hacking out an e-commerce site, it's really easy. If the job is designing a distributed system for real-time processing of data at 100s of GB/s of data that nobody has tried processing at that speed before, the single set of questions that tell you whether this person is competent is far less obvious. What you really need is to engage with the person in weeks or months worth of examinations on various subjects. Fortunately, university courses have midterms and finals that do exactly this.

"If the job is designing a distributed system for real-time processing of data at 100s of GB/s of data that nobody has tried processing at that speed before, the single set of questions that tell you whether this person is competent is far less obvious. ... Fortunately, university courses have midterms and finals that do exactly this."

But solving problems that nobody has solved before is the kind of job that's usually filled by senior developers, not by recent graduates. By the time you have 5-10 years of work experience, the things you learned during your working career probably play a much more important role than the stuff you learned in college. If I've spent the last ten years actually designing distributed systems, why does it matter whether I've gone to college or not?

> But solving problems that nobody has solved before is the kind of job that's usually filled by senior developers

> By the time you have 5-10 years of work experience, the things you learned during your working career probably play a much more important role than the stuff you learned in college

I submit these two quotes are not contradictions, but are at least in tension.

In general, 5 years hacking out code doesn't prepare you to write code that's mathematics heavy or design systems that require careful mathematical analysis.

> If I've spent the last ten years actually designing distributed systems, why does it matter whether I've gone to college or not?

It doesn't. But I bet I can pay a fresh CMU/MIT grad less, and that they'll be able to figure things out.

"But I bet I can pay a fresh CMU/MIT grad less, and that they'll be able to figure things out."

Sure, but it could take them much longer to figure it out. College work doesn't really prepare people to work on cutting-edge problems that nobody has solved before. Problems assigned to undergrad CS majors are generally straightforward applications of what was taught in the course, and the professors already know the solutions and how much work they involve (e.g., an assignment due in two weeks is known to be possible to complete in two weeks of effort).

"In general, 5 years hacking out code doesn't prepare you to write code that's mathematics heavy or design systems that require careful mathematical analysis."

How many CS grads have had experience with mathematically oriented code? The only math I remember doing in my CS classes was in theoretical courses like Algorithms, and that mostly involved proving things rather than writing code.

If you are able to trivially weed out those who do not have a CS degree, and having a CS degree carries with it the necessary skills to do an previously unattempted processing task, then doesn't the former naturally solve the latter?

The author does not seem to have a problem with testing for the presence of skills, like your algorithm question, but making an assumption that someone does not have skills based on their race, gender, sexual preference, or credentials is where he takes issue.

> but making an assumption that someone does not have skills based on their race, gender, sexual preference, or credentials is where he takes issue.

This is answered entirely in my original post. Adequately testing for the presence of skills might take weeks or months of testing, which is a prohibitive cost. Fortunately, a huge portion of the potential employees I have to interview already took those tests throughout their coursework, and I can pretty well trust the quality of the tests they took based on the institution they went to (unlike SAT/credential/GRE-style tests, which are too easy to game). Why should I blow thousands of dollars in my time testing the others? How is that fair to me? And why would I assume someone who never took a math course after highschool is going to be able to work on my linear-algebra-heavy software library?

Also, lopping university degrees and other credentials into a list of protected classes is insulting. A degree is something that is earned and requires time and effort on the part of the student. It's expensive sometimes, but it's also a lot of work (assuming it's a good university)

> Adequately testing for the presence of skills might take weeks or months of testing

So it is not trivial to test for the presence of a CS degree? I'm left confused as this contradicts your earlier post.

> A degree is something that is earned and requires time and effort on the part of the student.

On the flip side, is it not insulting to someone who put in that time and effort via non-traditional means to be passed over because you metaphorically "didn't like the color of their skin"?

> So it is not trivial to test for the presence of a CS degree?

It is trivial to test for the presence of a CS degree. The bulk of a CS degree can be a necessary but not sufficient qualification for a job. Testing for just the extra stuff is far easier than testing for everything.

This isn't rocket science.

(And no, discriminating based on credentials is not tantamount to racism. I would have hopes the problems with this analogy were fairly obvious...)

I'm sure I'm just misunderstanding you, but the logic doesn't seem to follow. If you can trivially test for a CS degree then you already have all the other testing that comes with a CS degree by association. Why would you take weeks or months to test everything in a CS degree when you already know a CS degree is present via your trivial test?

> And no, discriminating based on credentials is not tantamount to racism.

You are, however, judging someone's abilities on their outward appearance even though in our hypothetical situation the person is equally skilled as anyone else. It may not be racism exactly, but still morally wrong for many reasons. That should be fairly obvious.

@randomdata -- "trivial" isn't "free". The test I proposed adds an extra hour of in-person interview time per candidate, and also substantially increases the number of viable candidates.

> It may not be racism exactly, but still morally wrong for many reasons. That should be fairly obvious.

Comparing discriminating based upon whether someone did four years of audited work with racism is... a somewhat extreme position, to say the least.

You may not think that college is "real work". You're welcome to your opinion. But I assure you that a university degree at many universities does require a lot of work, and that this work is difficult enough and audited well enough that it warrants consideration in hiring decisions.

A degree is NOT something anyone is born with. It is something many people work very hard to earn.

To put a finer point on it: is it OK to discriminate based upon prior industry experience? Because I consider a degree from a top uni better preparation "work" preparation for many jobs than X years writing web apps.

Is it OK to discriminate against doctors who don't have MDs?

Or am I supposed to give everyone who submits a job application the benefit of an interview, and sink my business in the process?

> A degree is NOT something anyone is born with. It is something many people work very hard to earn.

But, again, you are automatically discounting everyone who worked equally hard to acquire their skills just because they don't have the right piece of paper. That is exactly the same as rejecting a female candidate on the assumption that because she is female, she probably doesn't have the necessary skills – and statistically speaking, in this case you'd be right – the number of female CS graduates is significantly lower than men.

So, if you're just playing the numbers game like you suggested at the beginning of your post, then why not reject all women?

> then why not reject all women?

Because there is often a CAUSAL link between the degree and the set of qualifications relevant and related to the job at hand. The link between skill and gender is not CAUSAL.

You're pretending like there's no causal link between education and capability. You are wrong. Period. Hiring someone based upon degree is absolutely no different from hiring someone based upon whether they have prior work experience.

Need someone to work on a team? Deliver some production-quality CRUD? You could test these directly for every single candidate in an interview. Or you could hire someone with prior web dev experience and a letter from the previous employer or a portfolio that directly and immediately witnesses the requisite knowledge and skills. Everyone does the latter (or uses some other signal to weed out who they interview) because the former is a stupid waste of resources.

Need someone who can model a system using some ODEs (this afternoon, not in 6 weeks after wasting you money taking a MOOC on company time)? Making tweaks to a library for processing large matrices? You could give every single candidate a pop quiz on ODEs or Linear Algebra. Or you could hire someone with a degree and high grades in those courses that directly and immediately witnesses for requisite knowledge.

Another way of saying this: Degrees are direct witnesses of relevant skills, not merely signals or correlated values.

Of course there are other direct witnesses. But there is never anything remotely morally questionable about taking into account the presence or absence of any direct witness of capability during hiring. Including degrees.

> The link between skill and gender is not CAUSAL.

I'm not sure it is relevant to the discussion. The question was asked in the context of your concern about the overhead of interviewing people. You are using a degree as a simple filter, and gender is equally applicable in that regard. Statistically, for our aforementioned example, a suitable candidate will be found in the male population of applicants due to the reasons we already discussed.

So, why bother wasting your time and associated costs also interviewing women when you can be reasonably confident that the male candidates will provide someone suitable? It is very possible that a great employee lies in that group of women, and it is very possible that a great employee lies in those without degrees, but you have made it clear that you don't have time to evaluate them all.

> You're pretending like there's no causal link between education and capability. You are wrong. Period.

I'm getting a distinct impression that you haven't fully understood my comments. That may very well be my failing, but this becomes a completely pointless discussion if that persists.

> Hiring someone based upon degree is absolutely no different from hiring someone based upon whether they have prior work experience.

Absolutely not true. What you are essentially saying is that even among those who have prior experience, you will only hire those whose experience came from Google or Microsoft. There are a number of practical reasons why a perfectly suitable candidate is unable to work at either of those companies before working for you, even though they do come with relevant experience from somewhere else.

I understand from your point of view why hiring from only past Google and Microsoft employees is desirable, but what about the people who were unable to work at those places? You really don't see the problem with that?

> You really don't see the problem with that?

I don't see a moral or ethical problem with it, no.

And the democratic consensus in most western countries agrees.

Choosing one applicant over another because of prior work history or education is just making informed decisions. Choosing on applicant over another because of their gender is illegal discrimination.

I understand you feel like people who don't have degrees deserve equal footing in the job market. But they don't, and business don't have any moral, ethical, or legal obligation to forego their own best interest and take bets on higher risk hires.

Basically your entire argument boils down to: "It is the status quo", which is not a very good reason for why we should avoid change.

There was a time when it was considered moral, ethical, and legal to hire based on gender and race. Can we assume you have no qualms going back to that so long as the democratic consensus agrees?

No, that is not my entire argument. (However, ASIDE: when every advanced nation disagrees with your view on morality or pragmatism, it does not mean you a wrong, but it does mean you should closely examine your line of reasoning for both pragmatism and consistency with reasonable and well-grounded moral standards. Of course the democratic consensus of all of these countries can be wrong, but it's worth taking pause. That's all. END ASIDE.)

Here is the argument that I have been expressing in various forms and you don't seem to understand or provide cogent counter-points to:

PRAGMATIC CLAIM: Employers are allowed to "discriminate"/select based upon non-intrinsic signals of characteristics relevant to the job at hand.

WARRANT: This is necessary for society/businesses to function because otherwise, it would be prohibitively expensive to hire people using anything other than coin-flips.

MORAL STANDARD I: In order to use a signal as the basis for a hiring decision it should be both a) non-intrinsic, and b) signal something relevant to the task at hand.

EDUCATION MEETS THIS MORAL STANDARD:

a) CLAIM: Education is non-intrinsic

WARRANT: It is something you seek out and work to earn, not something you are born with. (The issue of ensuring universal access is entirely separable (and something I support, btw).)

b) CLAIM: Education signals something relevant to the task at hand

WARRANT 1: Technical background is assured through testing in relevant coursework -- testing that you would have to (at great and impractical expense to the business) reproduce in order to make informed hiring decisions.

WARRANT 2: Education can also serve as a signal of necessary problem solving ability, communication skills, etc.

MORAL STANDARD II: Any moral constraints placed on the set of available signals should not make it prohibitively expensive for business to function.

EDUCATION MEETS MORAL STANDARD II: Because it's a cheap signal to use as an initial filter.

BANNING THE USE OF EDUCATION WOULD FAIL TO MEET MORAL STANDARD II: It would require companies to essentially require a comprehensive examination that is well-proctored etc, which is a pretty huge burden for the company and -- besides -- basically would amount to credentialing anyways because any reasonable firm would outsource this.

Other relevant claims:

CONSISTENCY CLAIM: There exist signals that meet both standards.

WARRANT: Education can be used to select a small number of applicants, and the cost for choosing among those should be marginal wrt the value-added by the employee.

CLAIM: These moral standards preclude the use of race/sex/age discrimination.

WARRANT: these are all intrinsic features that are explicitly forbidden

I also think that there is no practical way his solution could work, at least not with the laws the way they are. How would you ask people to explain gaps in their work history? Are you no longer allowed to consider why someone was unemployed for 4 or 5 consecutive years? Additionally, I don't think you can easily do general intelligence testing for a job. You have to be able to show that every question relates to job performance and that it does not cause a disproportionate impact on the hiring of people from protected classes.

> App Academy graduates compete for the same jobs as people who have taken computer science in college, a four year long, $200,000 undertaking.

No they don't. I have never once considered a recent bootcamp graduate to be equivalently talented and knowledgeable as a recent CS graduate. Their earnings difference certainly reflects this. (Try getting a job at Google as an "App Academy" graduate vs a fresh Stanford grad.)

>Try getting a job at Google as an "App Academy" graduate vs a fresh Stanford grad

I know of an App Academy graduate who went on to a job at Google.

> I know of an App Academy graduate who went on to a job at Google.

I'm not saying it's impossible. But it's significantly less probable.

"Less probable" is still competing for the same jobs. Perhaps not as well, but competing nonetheless.

I call this the Einstein fallacy. It says that quality Q is of questionable relevance/utility/value because there exist people without quality Q that do X, even though the vast majority of people who do X have quality Q. But that argument is kind of insane.

If you want a job at Google, you're much better off getting a degree from a good university. Anyone who says otherwise is delusional.

(EDIT: And no, App Academy graduates do not -- on balance -- compete for the same jobs as recent Stanford graduates. On balance, they compete for very different jobs and have far lower starting salaries. The existence of exceptional outliers is not a good basis for policy or decision making.)

(edit2: whoever just downvoted every single post I made on this article: the reply button is there for a reason :-) Otherwise, the early career salary for Stanford is $97,100. Are you saying that the average app academy graduate makes ~6 figures right after finishing the academy?)

>Are you saying that the average app academy graduate makes ~6 figures right after finishing the academy?

Yes. I know of a/A graduates who have accepted offers at $90k, $100k, and $115k. The $90k was their first offer, and the general reaction was that declining it in favor of continuing the search was probably higher value.

Average, which has been hammered home in three posts now. Anecdotes are non-answers.

Edit: Incidentally, according to App Academy's own numbers, they're about $10k behind Stanford in average salary (and, I'd argue, the comparison is apples and oranges to begin with. Stanford graduates are much more geographically distributed, that's noise. Many Stanford graduates will go on to graduate school, that's noise. Some a/A graduates already have a college degree or experience in another industry, that's noise. And so on.)

Requiring a degree for a job that doesn't utilize the information the acquisition of which the degree is meant to connote is clearly untenable. That's a given. The author is on point about market demands for higher education being inflated but is way off base about the value and role of education in society and economy, and his dismissal of Bernie Sanders's proposal for free higher education is similarly untenable. The main failing in the author's argument is a poor framing of the issue. The author assumes that the economy and society can be planned without acknowledging the social harm a planned economy and society will necessarily cause. Furthermore, the author assumes that our economy and society can be planned - a false assumption - and that the government's primary role is in planning the lives of its citizens rather than assuring their lives, liberty, and opportunity - a very dangerous one. The author frames education as a doorway to a career, when in truth it is more akin to a hallway allowing access to many more doors than are available without it. Worst of all, the author is completely incorrect about the main pressures causing a rise in the price of education.

Take the argument not to allow free education as per the Sanders proposal. To reduce it to absurdity, what impetus is there for us to educate plumbers beyond middle school (8th grade)? From what I know of the profession, most of the education they will utilize has already been acquired. What impetus is there for us to educate fast food workers beyond elementary school (6th grade)? From what I know of the profession, most of the education they will utilize has already been acquired. What reason at all is there to educate police officers? From what I know of the profession, they aim at POC regardless of whether there's a multiple homicide or a birthday party in progress; such simple instructions require no education.

The impetus is that we don't live in a planned economy and society. We don't know who will be what when, and we don't want to enforce that such decisions be made once and for all at any point in a person's life. A kid might want to be a fast food worker, like his dad, in 1st grade; a firefighter, like the men who recently saved his little sister from a house fire, in 6th grade; a police officer, to eradicate the drugs ruining his neighborhood, in 12th grade; a lawyer, to protect the poor renters like his parents from being evicted due to gentrification, as an undergrad; a software engineer, to his account book back into the black, when he fails to get into a law school. Individual lives are very chaotic and our expectations of what we want to do change throughout our lives. And in facilitating our ability to dynamically change course, education is the cornerstone. It's easy to look at the current occupation of a person and say, "You're a software engineer. You didn't need any of those Legal Studies courses or History courses or Latin-American studies courses.", but to do so is to dehumanize the person and her life experience, it is to discount her earlier hopes and dreams and ambitions, her current regrets and pains and struggle, it is to shrink wrap a person inside her professional title and place her on a supermarket shelf, deriding her "extra, useless" ingredients while doing so.

In this the author is also incorrect in distilling the value of education to the knowledge a degree or diploma is meant to proclaim. Education is also an experience. It's a breather while we choose course. Our economy is becoming so dynamic and unpredictable for such large sectors that during our middle years (30s-50s) and even soon after college, many of us change professions to more profitable sectors. And that's nothing to say about what we want to accomplish with our time on this planet. Those questions loom forever large on the horizon for much of our lives. College allows us to interact with thousands of others in a similar lost state. A college town is filled with mapmakers trying to see which way to go to "get there." Interacting with them gives a person the ability to see a little bit more of what her possibilities and potential can be. College helps those of us who are still lost after high school to get unlost. And even college is proving insufficient as a compass and square. Many, if not most, of us are still lost after college.

Moreover, we don't want to be living in a planned economy or society. We have done that before in the developed world, and much of the 2nd and 3rd world is doing that now. And along which lines would be plan our economy? Would we tie down youngsters to what they want to do at age 22? 18? 14? 12? 6? Would we force them to pursue their parents' profession? Answers to such questions are the basis of a very draconian government.

The "waste" of extra education is the price we must pay to allow ourselves varied opportunities and possibilities. Sanders is correct in urging the US to universally pay for higher education. Sanders's call is especially urgent to us as we are finding that many of us must go back to college or night classes much later in life to work for the remaining 10, 15, 20 years before the government will allow us to retire with enough in Social Security to live comfortably. Many middle-aged workers are finding themselves without work after the effects of the ongoing high tech revolution. Going or returning to college at the government's expense would allow them to take time and resources to direct their lives in a direction more desirable for them. In fact, Sanders's proposal, if it were to include living expenses as well as tuition, would be an excellent solution to homelessness. Not only would we be providing food and shelter, we would be providing a chance at a more meaningful life for those who deem it more meaningful and can't afford it.

The tech industry and its moguls are quite taken to pointing to a few outliers and saying that college is not essential, and to encourage college and high school students to drop out and pursue their dreams, entirely dismissing that those dreams might change in a year or even a month. The underlying assumption is that we magically know what to do with our lives at all times. But the truth is closer to most of us being lost throughout our lives. Dropping out and pursuing your life dream is great for those few for whom it works (Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos comes to mind), but the plan fails for a much greater number of us who end up going back to college anyway to improve our station in life at least.

I am suspicious as to whether the rising, oft frivolous degree requirements for many professions is due in part to a higher availability of such degrees. Why hire a high school graduate when you can get a more woman who graduated with a BA in History to do your firefighting? The woman holding the BA has demonstrated that she is smart and gets things done - at least enough to get a BA in History. If History BAs are applying, it should increase the requirements of getting the firefighting job. To turn the author's argument on its head, I assert that there is higher demand for education not because some jobs are requiring education when it is unnecessary, but because more of us are pursuing higher education to direct or re-stabilize our lives and some jobs are requiring education when it is unnecessary because it is becoming pore plentiful and readily available in our economy and society. And that's a good thing. People should be better educated, especially in the Liberal Arts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education) and Humanities. It would dramatically increase the quality of life for all of us. Or at least it would stop repeated isolated incidents of young Black men getting shot in this country.

As a last thought, I'm reminded of a recent NY Times (?) article posted on HN which ended with something akin to "Everyone is sure college isn't right for everyone, except their own kids."

Long post. Sorry for any mistakes.

Yeah, no thanks. I prefer doctors and lawyers that have gone to school rather than watching MOOC videos on a bus.

You missed the point. Doctors in the US take 4 years of generally medically-unrelated undergraduate schooling before they're allowed into medical school. Why not just allow them into medical school?

Actually the author forgets to mention that you can have any major to get in to medical school but many medical schools still require quite a few core courses you are expected to complete while in undergrad including two years of Chemistry, a year of math, physics and writing.

In the article, he explicitly compares American doctors with Irish doctors. They both go to school, but the Americans go for about three additional years. There is apparently no real difference in medical outcomes.

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