Comment by michaelochurch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by michaelochurch | Hacker News Reader

I think that what's driving "the tuition explosion" is the declining demand for labor due to technological unemployment as it meets the social demand that people participate in paid work. It's not going to go away. Basic income would improve the situation, but we're still a generation away from attitudes changing.

The fact is that it's socially unacceptable to be unemployed for more than a few months, and so people who can't find jobs are then told to go back to school. This would be basically OK (with me, at any rate; but I have a stronger-than-average work ethic) except for the fact that, for some of them, it's on their fucking dime that they don't fucking have.

The price of social acceptability and the difference between having a chance at a career versus being written off as a loser forever is going to be very high, and will increase without bounds if the availability of credit increases in tandem.

A major part of the problem is that universities are no longer non-profit in any meaningful way. They have top administrators making high-six and seven-figure incomes, they evaluate professors based on their fundraising ability rather than their teaching or their contribution to the community, and the cling to the prestige of their non-profit status in order to keep for-profit education a ghetto because if it weren't that way, the likeness of movements on stage would embarrass them.

I don't know how to solve this. The demand for labor is so low in this world (or, perhaps, the supply is too high because society mandates that people work to have an income, being averse even in most liberal countries-- and not for bad reasons-- to redistribution) that people are now expected to do years of preparatory labor at negative pay.

Consider a profitable business. Its workers need X dollars to survive, and the company can sell goods for Y, where Y > X. If there are a lot of workers and they all negotiate individually with the company, standard competitive market theory says that they will end up charging about X for their services, as any worker will eventually be displaced by someone who is willing to accept a tiny bit less pay.

If the workers form a cartel, their rational policy is to charge about Y -- they cannot charge more than that without driving the company out of business.

Labor unions are basically such a cartel. When they were ascendant in the mid-20th-century, the American middle class was vibrant, there were lots of low-skill jobs which provided good income.

With globalization, the business can now simply move its operations to a country where workers are poorer, regulations on environmental and workplace conditions are laxer, and organization is illegal. This has two effects: X gets smaller, and wages become close to X.

Globalization has some good effects -- increasing the world's total wealth by letting countries specialize in what they're good at, and reducing the probability of conflict by making countries more interdependent.

But the part few people in our corporate-owned governments want to talk about is that the price of these good things is, in effect, redistributing much of the wealth generated by companies from workers to owners.

I do think that eventually automation will become the bigger threat. The end-game will be a point where robots and completely automated systems create all the food, clothing and shelter needed for all of humanity, and nobody needs to work in order to maintain the infrastructure to provide for everyone's physical survival and a basic modern lifestyle.

In order to get to the end-game where nobody works, we will have to pass through a point where, say, 50% of the people have to work -- and it seems like determining which half works, and what sort of accounting is used to justify the non-working half's resource consumption, is a recipe for revolution. Because it's a point that's so far away from what our institutions and culture have been set up to deal with.

> The fact is that it's socially unacceptable to be unemployed for more than a few months, and so people who can't find jobs are then told to go back to school.

But is the majority of the growth in college-goers due to non-traditional students (those not starting a BS program right after high school)? My impression is that it's mostly due to an increasing number of high school graduates going to college. I would guess they're much more likely to get government loans as well.

Somehow, we've gotten to the point that it is expected that everyone with a pulse is supposed to get a four year degree, regardless of ability to complete the studies necessary, or whether there is any demand for the skills taught by that degree. If you've taken on tens of thousands of dollars of debt, to spend five or six years to struggle through a degree you couldn't really hack, only to find that the skills taught by your degree are relevant to approximately 0 jobs that are available, you've either got to find something lucrative quick, and work like a mule, or settle into the shit service economy and resign yourself to spinning your wheels for the rest of your life.

The ugly fact that can't be mentioned is that college isn't for everybody. The uglier fact is that there isn't a ton of work left out there that can support a $40k lower-middle class income for those that don't have the capabilities to get through a rigorous college degree. They also tend to be hard, dangerous, dirty jobs that you can't realistically expect to keep doing once you lose your strength, youth, and health working them for 15-20 years. Also a problem, is that those who took that route sometimes didn't make it to 40, often not 50, and those that managed to hit 60 or 62 and could retire on Social Security almost invariably croaked shortly thereafter.

So, if there's a limitless fount of money to go to college, and there little realistic chance of a comfortable life without a college degree, and everything that you are programmed to believe through your primary education tells you that you need to go to college, then everybody is going to make an attempt at going to college. And then 40% wash out the first semester, another 20% after the first year, another 20% bounce around majors, take on extra debt, but eventually finish, 10% make poor choices and choose degrees with marginal prospects, and maybe 10% make it through the wringer with an acceptable GPA, and employable major, in four years or less.

Also, with unlimited money available to marginal students, the market expands to provide supply for that demand, and schools of marginal quality cater to the marginal students, offering watered-down programs. However, it doesn't seem like the watered-down quality ever equates to much of a watered-down price; there are many mediocre private colleges that are 75% of the tuition cost of a top-tier school, not to mention out-of-state tuition rates at public universities. So the general signal of having a college degree becomes starkly gradiated by where that degree comes from.

Maybe if you had to qualify for student loans similar to the way you need to qualify for a mortgage, it'd be a better system, as far as not saddling people with worthless degrees and mountains of debt. Aptitude tests a la credit reports. Having to justify the future earnings the degree would confer versus price similar to not being able to take on a mortgage to buy a property at vastly more than it is assessed.

Maybe if companies need college-educated workers in certain fields, they could sign contracts to fund that education, in exchange for binding employment for X years. Yeah, that is indentured servitude...

> Somehow, we've gotten to the point that it is expected that everyone with a pulse is supposed to get a four year degree, regardless of ability to complete the studies necessary

The official taboo on the idea that a person might exist who lacks that ability isn't helping here.

Isn't it only companies who find unemployment unacceptable? From my personal experience, people I know who have been unemployed for extended periods do not get ostracized, so "socially" unacceptable might be too general.

That depends. I quit my job about a year ago to work on my own thing, and sometimes people think I am a weirdo. I am based in Spain, so a bit different from what you might have in the US in communities of young programmers.

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