Higher ed is like employer based health insurance in that they are both weird path dependent historical accidents.
People want cheap healthcare, and it got shoehorned into an odd employer fringe benefit system that really is not at all related healthcare in any intrinsic way.
People want job training, and it got shoehorned into extra departments at liberal arts universities intended as aristocrat finishing schools. Job training really has little to no relationship to liberal arts.
And now both those two systems are failing to deliver those benefits because those benefits which were initially afterthought add-ons have outgrown the institutions that were their hosts. It's akin to a parasitic vine that is now much larger than the tree it grew on and is crushing it under its weight. Both will die as a result.
This view seems to be common, but I think it misses what incredible alchemy comes from making people who come in for “job training” (like I did) spend 4 years in close proximity with research, academic freedom, liberal arts, and at least an attempt at some kind of intellectual idealism separate from economic incentive. It’s peanut butter and chocolate that has served democracy and its people well by having a middle class that is not just productive, but truly educated. It’s weird and it has problems, but it’s also wonderful, and we should not try to sever the two so we can more “efficiently” crank out credentials.
That's historical revisionism. The percentage of American adults over age 25 who have a college degree was only 20% as recently as 1990. When America was truly at the top of the world in the 1950s and 1960s, it was under 10%. A high fraction of college attendance is better correlated with the 21st century decline in America's situation.
I think widening the aperture outside the USA shows how big societal progress has come out of universities of the type we now recognize, starting with 1800s Germany. Even within the USA, the technological and social progress that percolated on universities had big impacts beyond the people actually enrolled and were essential in providing the basis for the employment of many other Americans.
Finally, it’s worth qualifying the idea of America’s decline. The USA is still THE powerhouse economy of the world. We have huge problems with unequal distribution and things are seriously politically messed up, but in terms of raw productivity, we are doing gangbusters. And solving the political and inequality issues call for a more educated populace, not less.
Germany is a great example of how you don’t need most of the population enrolled in universities.
> The USA is still THE powerhouse economy of the world.
The US was a powerhouse economy when it could build the world’s largest navy almost overnight. Since the 1980s, the U.S. economy has become highly financialized. It’s disputed how much American economic dominance is real versus on paper today.
I agree with you, but if the US truly has the best military (and it does 100x) then when push comes to shove, the US will destroy anyone who tries to undermine it. Very dangerous game to oppose it. Being able to construct things quickly is important, but if the US can militarily seize nearly every country on earth in days, the power is not necessarily where the kit is located
The US military isn't that scary; the evidence to date is that it's ability to destroy counties ends somewhere around Iran's strength. The modelling I've seen is that any US-China war will take place in Asia and China will probably win it unless the US gets a lot of help (always possible). And the US has already been undermined by the likes of China, Russia and India and there isn't a lot they can do about it in the short term. They certainly don't have a military option to use against that grouping. At least not one that hasn't already been used in the case of Russia and failed to coerce them into cooperating.
>The US military isn't that scary; the evidence to date is that it's ability to destroy counties ends somewhere around Iran's strength.
The US military's "ability" is very contextual - for instance, the US could easily obliterate Iran with a MIRV or two, but for various geopolitical reasons they choose not to. Likewise, the US navy is of limited use against Iran due to the literal mountain range between their only coastline and the bulk of their landmass (and population), much of which is quite mountainous.
America doesn't and shouldn't fight China or Russia alone, so I don't know why we're talking about that.
Russia is basically on its way out as a military power. It can't even conquer Ukraine.
As for China, you don't fight China alone. What do you think military bases in Japan are for? Anyway, for the world's sake, China shouldn't start a war, but sometime you just can't stop stupid.
If you take nukes off the table, the U.S. doesn’t have a 100x military advantage. If China seriously mobilized its industrial capability, the U.S. may not have even a 2x advantage.
Remember that, right before World War II, the US didn’t even have a top-10 military, having demobilized it after World War I. It’s vast industrial capacity is what enabled it to build a larger military than all of Europe combined within a few years.
The US was also much more unified at the time. That’s the thing about history: Like economy, it’s human matter, and you could reproduce and experiment twice and get completely different result because your systems are not isolated in location or time.
You cannot keep a good military for very long when you enter the economic decline stage, this has been proven by every empire in history.
>things are seriously politically messed up
I would argue universities played a big role here. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=social+justice...
The theory of "elite overproduction" suggests that if you train too many aspirants for the same few elite jobs, they will foment instability in order to get the jobs they feel entitled to. That's what happened when we tried to get everyone going to college.
What am I supposed to do with my ethnic studies degree, aside from DEI consulting? Why would I want my DEI consulting to actually solve the underlying problem, if it puts me out of a job? Don't forget, I have a lot of student loans now! This isn't a small issue for me.
The left-extremists say "you need to give me a job in order to make your team more diverse". The right-extremists say "you need to give me a job because the deep state is corrupt, it's time to make america great again". Basically using extremist politics as a trick for getting elite roles.
That's because they are "elite" in their credentials, not actually elite in their competences/qualities.
By definition you cannot have an elite that is comprised of a large part of the population. The problem is that education institutions have an incentive to bring in more and more people for the money and the power it affords them but that's completely contradictory to the goal of production elite individuals.
A true elite is only possible if you select for the top individuals each year and it cannot be determined solely by the capacity to pay for the school.
A good implementation would use qualities from both US and EU style institutions: education at no cost but very selective process that only accept around 5% of each generation. Otherwise you are just wasting money/ressources on people that will never pay back, whether it is paid by the taxpayer in the EU or by the individual/family in the US is an implementation detail.
And when it comes to "liberal arts" education, in a world where information is extremely cheap/free, it makes absolutely no sense. It was always about credentialism. The reality is that it was about assigning a fake value to people who are kinda useless. The primary selection features are obedience and industriousness which are not necessarily valuable qualities if they are not focused on worthwhile goals but it's very useful for the powers in place. Anybody knows that working hard isn't that desirable when the objectives are not useful. But this is exactly why we get DEI and other dysfunctional policies/systems.
What specifically are you calling revisionism? I don't see anything in their post that's tied to these numbers.
They said it's good. They didn't say it matches the best decades of the economy.
> The percentage of American adults over age 25 who have a college degree was only 20% as recently as 1990. When America was truly at the top of the world in the 1950s and 1960s, it was under 10%.
Due to automation and the great advance of technology, the floor for most jobs has risen such that the skills/knowledge that a 1950s school dropout had would be insufficient for anything but the most menial jobs today.
Outside of a few sectors like agricultural or physical service labor, our economy just doesn't need less educated people anymore.
That doesn't mean everyone needs a 4 year degree, but to make a sustainable living at least a degree from a trade or service school focused on some advanced technician skill is required, and that must be followed by apprenticeship and licensing. In the end, it requires as much time as University, but might cost less if the education is at a public community college.
Community colleges are the best existing institution we have to fill the gap. They are too wedded to the university model though. Credit hours, semesters, discrete courses, administrative overhead, the whole works, minus much of the campus life dressing.
Hell I applaud even boot camps for trying to fill it, for all their faults. At least they tried something slightly different.
Our immigration policies pretty strongly indicate we still need those less educated people doing work, we just don’t want to pay anything resembling reasonable wages for such.
I agree that our system relies heavily on uneducated migrants for menial labor.
However, uneducated people in the 1950s regularly got jobs in factories that paid enough for a single income to support a family.
That opportunity for uneducated Americans won't come back, regardless of our immigration policies.
Hard disagree. Most useful skill and knowledge is still learned on the job. The "education" is just a selection process. And not only it is a pretty bad one, it is extremely costly.
> When America was truly at the top of the world in the 1950s and 1960s
You mean when so much of the rest of the world was poorly educated either not very industrialized yet or had their industrial base destroyed by the war? Easy for the US to be "on top" then.
But I much prefer the better educated America that came after that, even if wasn't as "at the top of the world" - though I'm really not sure who else you could be referring to that could be more on top.
US had highest per capita GDP in the world in 1913, before Europe's first, and second, self destructions. The US would have been on top in the in 1950s and 1960s no matter what. Just by scale, resources, and economic system.
Correlation-only is sloppy analysis.
The inheritors and descendants of those that directly created the problem are screaming at the colleges as the problem.
But that’s ass backwards: Create the long-term financial opportunity and the college problem will disappear overnight.
The correlation is because rational actors will follow the only leads available to make money, survive, and raise a family.
Edit: I edited the tone, slightly.
The reason for US economic domination starting in the 50s is the fact that society and infrastructure in the rest of the developed world had been utterly devastated by the second World War. The rate of college education is utterly irrelevant.
are you saying that your kids should not go to college? okay, now do you see why your statistic is meaningless, even if it is true? who answers “yes” to the first question? (hardly anyone).
A minor nit. "Should not" is on a path from "don't have to" and "can chose not to"
When the fintech boom in the 80s and 90s kicked off, quants aside, many had zero tertiary education. The benefit of a university then became access to social circles, and a bit of spreadsheets. I have friends who worked in this sector, and the associated industries wiring it up and nobody cared about your degree if you weren't dining with merchant bankers.
I think the WH is proving at best education is marginal value to hucksters.
Most of the world has severed the two. A lot of what you'd consider key parts of the university experience just doesn't exist in most of Europe or the highly developed parts of Asia. In practice, it's attaching job training to a very, very expensive resort, regardless of who is paying for it. It's pretty nice, in the very same sense that spending 4 years in a beach resort ls also great, but one needs to be absurdly wealthy to choose this model if an equivalent was available without all the features that most of the world has abandoned. The US system would already have been in trouble years ago if it didn't have a government license for being the safest, more reliable way to immigrate into the US. Get rid of the F1 practical training to work visa pipeline, and see many US institutions in serious economic trouble. We can keep trying to keep it working as-is by pushing other people's money into the expensive vacation environment, but without major subsidies, we are already seeing more people realize that the risks are way too high when you have to get loans to attend. There is no idealism separate from economic incentive in institutions that charge 60K per year, plus often a whole lot more for mandatory on-campus housing, without financial aid.
But as it's normal with failing institutions, they'll be extended, kicking and screaming, until they completely collapse instead of reform, like almost every other country in the world already has.
> Most of the world has severed the two
Yes, and the US system is the envy of the world and is responsible for the overwhelming majority of wealth generated in the US over the past few decades.
I'm not sure how that's an argument against the US Higher Ed system.
Edit: The real issue you seem to be pointing to is the cost of attending universities in the US. There are 2 parts to this. 1 is the costs of running a university, and the other is the cost that is paid by the student.
Most of the rest of the world subsidizes student tuition so students dont pay much out of pocket. The US, OTOH, has been consistently reducing govt support for student tuition. Even worse, it's been pushing students into taking loans that unlike most other loans cannot be discharged during bankruptcy. And even though students aren't required to start paying back those loans until they graduate, they do start collecting interest from day 1, which means a student has picked up a significant burden simply from the interest on the loans they received to pay for their freshman tuition, when they graduate.
These are all issues with the US system of financing education as opposed to the actual liberal arts education system.
> Yes, and the US system is the envy of the world and is responsible for the overwhelming majority of wealth generated in the US over the past few decades
The benefits of the U.S. university system aren’t generated by average people taking a debt-financed 4 year vacation. They are generated by the same subset of people who would still be attending university even in a scaled down system that sent far fewer people to college.
In your view the benefits of university are that rich people go there? Did I somehow completely misunderstand?
Envy of the world due to network effects and inertia, not due to any inherent superiority of our model. There are some good parts of our model, don't get me wrong, but they do not explain the status of the US system at all.
I don’t see how you can be so confident in that. It’s not at all straightforward to tease apart all the factors.
>Most of the rest of the world subsidizes student tuition so students dont pay much out of pocket.
And they also severely restrict who can attend university. Of course this is a non-starter in the current US political environment.
> Yes, and the US system is the envy of the world
Where in the world have you polled?? because this is categorically opposite to my experience discussing the US college system
I dunno, google any university ranking and you will find the top ten has many from the US?
University rankings have pretty much nothing to do with how well they teach students, only their research output. And good researchers aren’t automatically good teachers ( and vice versa).
google, lol, marketing doesnt make a university good.
> Yes, and the US system is the envy of the world and is responsible for the overwhelming majority of wealth generated in the US over the past few decades.
Can you elaborate on this a bit? It's very easy to read uncharitably without further elaboration and reads pretty delusional as is.
The education system to be envied by the rest of the world is Norway's model.
The F1 issue is absolutely real. Foreign students have been the secret sauce in keeping prices lower for US students for a long time now. Trump 1 and now Trump 2 presidencies have created financial crises at most universities just by making vague anti immigration gestures without even materially changing student visas. Presidents and provosts routinely make desperate oversea sales pitches to try to gin up the pipeline. I know of one major state university whose entire financial existence depends on visas from a few companies in Hyderabad.
> have created financial crises at most universities
Those multi-billion dollar endowments are fine man, don't worry about them, they're not running out.
Vague isn't the word I would use to describe Trump's anti immigration gestures.
It's not sustainable to sell a product that most people only buy because they were trying to buy something else (or because they're forced to for societal reasons).
That sort of approach is exactly why "Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost" (as the title states)! People are wising up to the truth, and now it's harming the credibility of the system as a whole.
Colleges used to be much more affordable even though they covered liberal arts and engineering together.
Are all colleges unaffordable? Do all colleges require engineering students to take liberal arts? Maybe this isn't universal, maybe it's just that prestigious colleges all have strong liberal arts programs, either out of tradition or because it's required for being seen as prestigious.
Liberal arts courses arguably are still helpful for building general language and reasoning skills.
On the whole though, it does seem strange that I paid the same for a graduate level stats course and a freshman history course, even though the former taught me about five times as much.
> It's not sustainable to sell a product that most people only buy because they were trying to buy something else (or because they're forced to for societal reasons).
Like a car in the United States, outside of perhaps five metro areas?
Everything's a societal reason from some angle. We've probably tilted a bit too hard towards college as a universal path, but I think the median college-degree-required job would still tell you that they're trying to find people who value education and learning for its own sake. The best doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc. are the intellectually curious ones who don't see education as a burden.
You went from "median" job/employer to "best" employee in high value/pay/education roles. These best employee's don't want to work in the "median college-degree-required job", they likely have done some significant post-grad studies and have also likely been saddled with more debt thus requiring their high paying career outcome just to avoid collapse of their personal finances.
I think the median 4 year college graduate going after the "median college-degree-required job", did not care much about their studies at all. They slogged through it hung over from the night before. College was a social experience and gave them a sports team to root for on Saturday. It let them extend their childhood and eschew responsibilities for a few more years.
We have this weird cultural thing in the US where we put super high expectations on education systems but we actually don't value education. We value the social clout and whatnot. Public schools are a prime example, parents are the problem. Make your kids do homework! Take away the video games/phone/tablet/wifi/whatever. It translates to college as, do just what is necessary to get a degree. Often the bare minimum, etc. Cheating runs rampant and so on. It manifests itself in so many ways. Just a core part of youth right now is much more interested in being an influencer, popular, a good athlete, no sorry good athletes are a dime a dozen - you need to be an elite athlete, etc. Being a bookworm or just studious simply isn't seen as cool, it has no social reward, quite the opposite in fact.
This might not apply to many students at ivy and top schools, but I'd argue it's certainly the median for the nation's college students the past few decades maybe longer. I think colleges allow it to happen. They don't grade as harshly as they used to, they have dumbed down the courses, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if the "median undergrad" education was more on par with the "median high school" education from a few decades ago.
I think the rigid nature of other systems leads to more promising people being eliminated early on. America was always more fluid: the country of Homer Simpson: A guy that got second chance after second chance and with his own way of doing things(which others like Frank Grimes find absurd), managed to make something of himself.
Applying this logic to college, schools used to be more strict yes but there was always leeway for students to chart their own path to success, it never really felt like Asia or Europe's systems where they place you in a bucket early on and thats it you are in there for life.
I graduated with an Engineering degree in the early 2010s and let me tell you, I really did do the bare minimum in a bunch of classes. It led me to tinker with junk computers that the school discarded which led me to dedicated school space in a lab to experiment which led to my first job and general success. Looking back not studying harder led to more trouble later on but the path still worked out because I jumped at some opportunities due to that path. If I were in asia, I would have probably not even be admitted or permanently weeded out after my first academic probation warning instead of being a decently successful software developer.
> Just a core part of youth right now is much more interested in being an influencer, popular, a good athlete, no sorry good athletes are a dime a dozen
Before that people dreamed of becoming a hollywood actor. It was the number one desired career for years. The bar is much lower for trying your luck at being a successful influencer than becoming an actor. The end result will be the same, many will try and flame out and then go do something else.
>Being a bookworm or just studious simply isn't seen as cool, it has no social reward, quite the opposite in fact.
You sound like you are thinking of the 1990s as your context. These days after movies the The Social Network, one of the most desired careers is in software development. This goal requires people to expend much more effort than prior generations pursuing other desired careers and many more kids are doing it! Techies are the boss now.
I definitely like the flexibility our system provides. I changed majors a couple times before I found what I could tolerate (can't say it's a passion). I do not think the kids today are as comparable to the kids of yester*. I think in past, people desired those things in a day dreamy way, but knew it wasn't realistic. They also knew they'd get disciplined for poor grades; perhaps even harshly. We just culturally have really relaxed on being stern parents and I feel we have transitioned to wanting to be friends with our kids. That's a great thing too but it needs a balance IMO, there are advantages to being stern. But we're a nation of lazy parents who have high expectations of teachers, but don't pay them, and won't even help them out at home by being a parent and taking responsibility for our kids. (My rant on this topic is too verbose for HN but I firmly believe it's lazy parenting at the core of how we view education systems performance/lack of)
> Techies are the boss now
I think it's more accurate to say that more socially adept people have infiltrated the tech scene due to the loot. Sure tech no longer equates to nerd like it did back then, and bullying is managed differently now, but let's not pretend that the same type of kids that were into tech back then are ruling the world today. The normalization of tech has opened it up to average joe's that wouldn't have touched it back then due to the social stigma it had. This is why I chose the words "bookworm" and "studious" because those things do not necessarily mean tech. But kids that value their studies over their social lives, or just like to have conversations about something more intellectual than video games and the trending tiktoks, are still likely outside the fold whatever the contemporary take on that is. Social norms, bullying, cliques have all changed but being a teenager in a group setting isn't yet a democratic affair.
> I think it's more accurate to say that more socially adept people have infiltrated the tech scene due to the loot.
Yep, it's all about status, money and power chasing. Nothing taught me this more than getting an iPhone before everyone else in France (wasn't yet available, imported). Before that I had weird phones and proto-smartphone that costed as much but nobody cared. But the iPhone was cool and desirable and automagically I became more desirable. Before that nobody gave a shit about my technology interest and it wasn't for the lack of trying to discuss it at large.
Then sell it to doctors, lawyers, and engineers. Those fields aren't really the issue.
It's an interesting combo, but after working for a decade in higher ed, there is a real division and enmity between the liberal arts and sciences and the "career" programs. The latter is seen as an illegitimate degree mill. The former as a freeloader that does not pull its weight financially. It is an uneasy partnership of convenience.
It’s absolutely an uneasy partnership. But my goodness the benefits of having rubbed shoulders with people studying forensics, entomology, philosophy, pure math, and agriculture were enormous. If I had gone to a school composed exclusively of engineers and other careerists, how much narrower would my world have been? And bringing in ideas from other areas of study has been so powerful in both my life and my career.
I had the impression that liberal arts students were highly profitable for universities, because they had no expensive labs.
It depends highly on logistics like class size. Many programs brag about small class sizes, which are great for students but anathema to university bean counters. These programs often try to subsidize the small program specific courses with huge gen ed courses, making the whole student body effectively subsidize these underperforming programs. Real nasty fights occur over which courses to include in the gen ed program because every department wants a piece of that pie to prop up their poor numbers. And this dynamic is definitely much worse in humanities.
Edit: also instructor composition, meaning the proportion of instructors in a program who are senior/tenured vs new vs adjuncts. Class size and instructor salary are nearly the whole equation.
This comment would make more sense if more than ~38% of the country had a college degree. Can you really make the argument that college is truly a middle class concept if not even half of the populations has a bachelor's degree? I guess if you include community college which has really helped to serve the downtrodden get on their dream paths then I guess it makes more sense?
Middle class doesn’t necessarily mean average or median class, but rather some life style bar where you aren’t struggling even if you can’t afford many luxuries. In India, for example, the middle class is small (definitely not average!) but growing.
Having a college education could totally be an indicator for middle class even if most people didn’t have one.
Academic freedom? Where has that existed in the last 20 years?
What they crank out today suffers from grade inflation. No longer is 'C' the average grade. Kids and parents who pay over 100k for their diploma all demand above average grades. It's not as bad as presenting a diploma from a Caribbean diploma mill, but they're not what they used to be.
Agreed completely on this. I almost wonder if it’d be more palatable to add a grade above A, like a Japanese style “S”.
That already exists, it's called an A+.
American high schools are already doing a form of this, with certain classes earning more than a 4.0 score in GPA calculations. 5.0 is quite common now, with 6.0 and even 7.0 scores on individual classes being possible.
Thanks, I thought this was a very insightful comment that helped me think about the problem differently.
I would add, though, that I think "co-op universities" have a good solution. That is, places like Northeastern and Drexel when the undergrad program is 5-ish years and a good portion of that time is working in paid co-op positions. This ensures that students graduate with at least some real-world experience in their field but still get the benefit of classroom study and the full college experience.
Obligatory uwaterloo plug. I didn't even end up graduating after 3 years of compsci but still ended up with almost two years of work experience. Colleagues in my early career were still paying down student debt while I had already paid for tuition out of pocket, not with tax dollars.
Funny too, because I had a philosophy professor there who talked about how the university is not a vocational school, but a place one goes to enrich the mind and become a more worldly citizen.
Plenty of colleges and universities started as job training. The Morrill land grant colleges were founded to study mechanical and agricultural arts, and that was over 150 years ago. Many of those are now the top state schools in the USA.
The job training you get at 20 is often obsolete when you're 40. For example, many women of my parents' generation trained for jobs in the textile industry. But eventually the jobs disappeared, as Finland got too wealthy. A bit more abstract education would have made it easier for them to find a new career.
But not too abstract. From my point of view, the weird parts of the American educational system are the high school and the college. Everyone is supposed to choose the academic track. I'm more used to systems with separate academic and vocational tracks in both secondary and tertiary education.
There are certain advantages to having separate academic and vocational tracks, but that tends to lock out late bloomers. Quite a few of prominent US scientists and business leaders didn't have good grades going into secondary school.
economies and national policies are complex. only the most straightforward things, like ending patriarchy, wars and modifying interest rates, have firm evidence of causing this or that thing on a national scale. nobody knows if so and so nuanced educational policy really matters in an intellectually honest way.
> People want job training, and it got shoehorned into extra departments at liberal arts universities intended as aristocrat finishing schools
I really wish the computer science degrees and even online courses spent like 30 mins on the history of computer science.
The entire existence of this field has been dependent on those non job-training liberal arts degrees.
Schools typically have no space to squeeze it in. Here is a typical pathway for a CS student: https://catalog.njit.edu/undergraduate/computing-sciences/co...
A 4 year cs degree dumps you into heavy math, physics, and intro CS + Data structures in your first year to weed people out who cant cut it.
Second year teaches fundamentals of CS (discrete math, concept of languages, understanding algorithms at least at a basic level).
Third year is filled with more practical fundamentals (OS, DB, computer architecture + field specific courses the student wants).
Finally the fourth year pieces everything together with more advanced versions of prior topics (algorithms for example) + repeated practical applications of all the concepts from years 1-3 to hopefully put the student on at least an 'ok' footing post graduation.
I guess you can try to make the first lecture or two in CS101 about the history but most students don't even know if they want to pursue this journey. Would talking about Alan Turing's history really be appropriate in that class? I don't know really.
> I really wish the computer science degrees and even online courses spent like 30 mins on the history of computer science.
Completely agree here. This would fall under the umbrella of liberal arts, which a lot of CS-only folks seem to find little to no value in.
Most concepts in computer science--especially when it comes to programming--are fairly easy to learn if you're good at learning. Reading something and understanding it to the point that you can write a proper college level essay about it trains that muscle, which is a different skill than rote memorization.
It didn't get shoe horned. Before college degrees proliferated, employers had entrance exams and were expected to train people. A supreme court decision found this to be racist. Companies could be held liable so most companies stopped that and demanded a 'fair' credential. Then everyone had to go to college
This one case isn't the full story, but I firmly believe that it is a big deal.
See https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/401/424/ for the case.
The problem is that any hiring test that blacks and whites pass at different rates, is presumed racist. Never mind that the real issue might be that the blacks went to worse schools and received a worse education. Never mind that there is a big body of research showing that ability tests are a more effective way to hire good employees than interviews. If the ratio of blacks to whites hired is different than the ratio that apply, you are presumed to be racist and in violation of the Civil Rights Act.
So a company that needs to hire literate people can no longer, as used to be standard, allow high school students to apply and give them a literacy test. But they can require college.
Therefore college has become a job requirement for a plethora of jobs whose actual requirement is "literate". Jobs that people used to be able to do out of high school, and jobs that could still be done by plenty of high school graduates. That this has become so ubiquitous lead to an increased demand for college. Which is one of the factors driving tuition up.
(My suspicion is that an ability test would lead to a less racist outcome than requiring college. Why? Because minority families struggle more to afford college.)
All of this is because academia and educational institutions have a tremendous amount of power this way. They can select for ideological compliance instead of actual competence. And this is a desirable property for the rulers because they can weed out those who are likely to destabilise them if they were able to show a valuable alternate path by example.
Why spend so much money on an "education" if you could become successful by simple being competent. The tech sector was like that at first, but then came the degree requirement and the HR ladies. It was a short run and now they are very mad that some people became successful without needing to bow to the dominant ideology.
> (My suspicion is that an ability test would lead to a less racist outcome than requiring college. Why? Because minority families struggle more to afford college.)
This might have been true when the United States was mostly white, and "minority" specifically referred to the black population who was mostly descended from slaves brought to the US mainland pre-1808, or to an even small number of native Americans. Today, when the US population is significantly more ethnically diverse, and "minority" just means "anyone nonwhite, regardless of where they came from or what their family history is", there's a lot more variation in exactly how ability to afford college correlates with ethnicity.
You'll occasionally see people point out that requiring a college degree has all the same legal problems as requiring a hiring exam does. And those people are correct in terms of the judgments that impose our terrible precedents. They're all just as negative on degree requirements as they are on performance requirements.
But as a matter of empirical reality, our enforcement system declines to prosecute employers who require degrees, because requiring degrees is morally good and requiring exams is morally bad.
The rules about what's allowed don't actually derive from the law. We have laws that forbid everything, accompanied by selective prosecution of only the things that certain people disapprove of.
and yet ... that's not what the case you referenced says at all. Justia's own summary, from your link:
> Even if there is no discriminatory intent, an employer may not use a job requirement that functionally excludes members of a certain race if it has no relation to measuring performance of job duties. Testing or measuring procedures cannot be determinative in employment decisions unless they have some connection to the job.
(emphasis mine)
>The problem is that any hiring test that blacks and whites pass at different rates, is presumed racist. Never mind that the real issue might be that the blacks went to worse schools and received a worse education.
Your first sentence is the result of bigotry against those with "enhanced" melanin content, not the cause.
The cause is laid out in your second sentence.
Resolve the systemic bigotry (not just against those with enhanced melanin content, but against those with the least resources as, at least in the US, most schools are paid for by local property taxes, making the poorest areas the ones with the worst schools) and put us all on a level playing field and we'll be a much fairer society IMNSHO.
You're agreeing with them. Keep reading their comment to understand why that didn't matter.
At least the good part about the US situation is that people are still free to choose for themselves. The cost isn't redirected to the whole population at large via taxation. In the EU it's much worse, because the same reality is materialising, but it is still advertised as "free". Of course, this is the path to a form of soft communism and all systems are becoming dysfunctional and unable to create real value at the same time. The "solution" has been to create ever more taxation and even more debt that is to be paid by the next generation.
It seems that the US will course correct but the EU seems to be declining into authoritarianism and proto-communism.
I was told in college that the US system of healthcare being tied to your employer was the result of companies looking for fringe benefits to offer when tax rates were at their highest for the high income group.
However I can’t find evidence of that now that I’m looking so if someone could confirm one way or the other that this was true or not, I’d appreciate it
It started during WW II when the US government put wage and price controls in place so that companies could not compete for employees by offering higher wages. So they competed for employees instead by offering employer-paid healthcare as a benefit. Then after the war, when the wage and price controls were repealed, the employer-paid healthcare system, instead of going away, kept getting more elaborate.
As with a lot of things, such as vacation time, Americans seem to prefer to provide certain social goods as employer benefits because that way it seems more like a reward for competitive merit, which one can show off as a status symbol, than like a universal social good.
Maybe some psychos think of it that way, but no one I have ever met, at least not regarding insurance. Some fringe benefits like unlimited vacation, free lunch, etc, maybe I can agree.
Well maybe it was once prestigious to show off your Aetna card, now its a sign of embarrassment.
I guess todays 'cool perk' is something like free lunch or allowing dogs at work. I think the "Unlimited Vacation" scam has unraveled at this point.
Yes it is true and is sort of the subject of my original post. One of those things I learned in college ironically and is now background knowledge I can't source.
> People want cheap healthcare, and it got shoehorned into an odd employer fringe benefit system that really is not at all related healthcare in any intrinsic way.
Healthcare costs, and hence health insurance premiums, are the same with or without an employer intermediary. The only difference is with an employer intermediary, the insured gets to pay their premium with pre-tax income. The cost of the health insurance is still felt by the employer (shown in box 12 of code DD of everyone’s W-2), and seen by the employee in the form of smaller raises, or higher premiums/deductibles/oop max, or worse networks.
>People want job training, and it got shoehorned into extra departments at liberal arts universities intended as aristocrat finishing schools. Job training really has little to no relationship to liberal arts.
Job training didn’t get shoehorned, a cheap filtering mechanism for people worth betting on to be a good hire got shoehorned. But that filter simultaneously got worse and more expensive over time, making it a bad purchase for most students and bad signal for employers.
> Healthcare costs, and hence health insurance premiums, are the same with or without an employer intermediary.
If you read the fine print of a health "insurance" plan at a large company, you might discover healthcare costs are directly covered by the employer and the insurance company just administers the plan according to "set rules".
In practice, this operates as blame as a service.
American health insurance is insurance in name only - picture health insurance models laid on top of your car:
Imagine your car gets totaled. Your insurer says, "Hey, we're going to pay out $25K for your vehicle. So you have a $1,000 deductible, so that's $24,000, and then your copay for a total loss is $2,000, so that brings us down to $22,000. For total losses, your coinsurance as your contribution for your vehicle coverage is 20%, which is $5,000, so here's a check for $17,000. But that's only if you're buying a Hyundai, otherwise the vehicle is out of network and you'll get a check for $8,500 instead."
> If you read the fine print of a health "insurance" plan at a large company, you might discover healthcare costs are directly covered by the employer and the insurance company just administers the plan according to "set rules".
Generally this is done by a TPA (third party administrator). In many ways you can do as you wish, but as insurers have already done the actuarial work, it's generally easier to use a plan and tweak it if desired (like "Give us this plan but pay for 1 massage/week") versus having to figure that out yourself.
Sure, but the doctors/medicine/hospitals/liability are not any cheaper.
So the healthcare isn’t cheap, but the employer is able to gain more control over their employees by tying a piece of their non employee life to the employer creating more friction to prevent people from shopping for jobs with higher pay, and the employee is getting a small tax benefit.
Yes, but the same insurance company will screw with your coverage depending on your employer.
My mom's plan randomly denied my medications all the time as a student. My current job's plan always provides coverage.
Both were the same insurance company, but she's in a different field with a more stingy employer.
It's especially fun if your employer is in a field with an aging employee population--like higher ed ironically. The insurer gives the same premium rate to all employees, meaning everyone is in the same risk pool. The old and or unhealthy employees make insurance more expensive for everyone at the employer. I've had situations where the exact same insurance plan cost two hugely different amounts of money after switching employers just because of average employee age differences. Really quite perverse.
Which gives employers incentive to illegally discriminate against older job candidates but good luck proving it at any specific employer.
The employer pays a large portion of the employee premiums. As a result the employee is further indentured to the employer because they cannot leave without depriving themselves and family of health care. And it further obfuscates the actual cost of health care. And then the tax code makes this bizarre setup the privileged happy path.
Right, the federal tax code is structured to give advantages to employer sponsored health plans. But it doesn't have to be that way. A better approach would be to eliminate those plans and force everyone to purchase individual or family plans through state ACA marketplaces using pre-tax dollars.
Not sure why the down votes. Severing health insurance from employers would be a huge win. It's just such a massive task that the efforts to address it like Obamacare aren't enough even remotely.
Or, just provide 'basic healthcare' as a human right (and service for being taxed) and make ALL plans on top of that luxury services.
Wouldn't you like to STOP the insanity of "picking" a plan every year (or more) and also end the billing nightmare by just making it all single payer (the government of the people, for the people)?
> Healthcare costs [...] The only difference is with an employer intermediary, [...]
That's missing the biggest problem, which is that the employer gets a free chance to extort the employee in all sorts of illegal ways lest they be cut off and die.
Wage theft is perhaps the biggest-value type of crime every year (sources disagree, but it's certainly higher than many), and that's only one kind of illegal thing employers do when they have all the leverage.
> Job training didn’t get shoehorned, a cheap filtering mechanism for people worth betting on to be a good hire got shoehorned
While it may not be optimal, there is plenty of training/learning that happens in colleges.
The intermediary in healthcare makes a significant difference, as, by going through employers and using insurance, the US market is quite fragmented, and there is minimal alignment pushing prices down. The US healthcare provider doesn't get more business by providing a better cost/benefit ratio: It's easier to splurge, and get business via an expensive, comfortable-ish service.
When one then compares US facilities to foreign ones, it's trivially easy to see that many parts of the system just look different, which comes from the perverse incentives of going through employers that aren't big enough to actually push down on providers' prices at all. Both truly private, low insurance systems and universal healthcare systems end up having much better incentives, and therefore lower prices, regardless of who is paying for them.
We get something similar when you compare US universities to those in Continental Europe. It's clear that over there, the finishing school component is so vestigial as to be practically invisible, whole the focus is a filtering mechanism that attempts to teach something. Go look at, say, Spain's universities and see how many open electives are there, or how many university-wide general requirements exist (0). Each degree is basically an independent unit, and chances are you'll never visit a building from a different school. Undeclared majors? Nope. Significant number of students living on campus? Nope. Sports teams, offering scholarships? Nothing of the sort. This also leads to much lower prices to the school itself, regardless of whether it's all paid by taxes or students.
I don't disagree with your major points but note that Spanish university course syllabi are determined centrally and are identical across Universities which seems incredibly bizarre to me.
The downward "is it worth it" trend over the last 12 years is partly due to the continued upward climb of college tuition. Some schools are now at $100,000/yr for tuition, room, and board. In order for this to be "worth the cost" they would have to have a strongly positive expected value in terms of future earnings.
And a positive EV isn't sufficient. It would also need to have a very low chance of negative EV. Otherwise people would be crazy to sink $400,000 into a degree that might or might not leave their child with better job prospects in the future.
Of course, only the wealthy pay full price for college, but when you ask people if college is worth the cost, they may be anchored to those prices even if their own kids would end up paying less.
Better than asking "is college worth the cost," and getting into ROI calculations per major is asking "could we provide a similar (or better) educational and social experience at a fraction of the cost"? To that the answer is yes.
Many (most?) people go to college primarily for the piece of paper, not for the educational and social experience.
And resultingly, if you do go to college and immerse yourself in the educational experience, you come out with superpowers compared to your peers.
Getting companies to see those superpowers in a hiring pipeline of course is a different story
Do American colleges not give degree grades? In the UK your degree class (grade) is moderately important for your first job
American colleges give out a GPA, which used to mean something but has now been inflated to the point of meaninglessness. 60% of my college class 10 years ago had a 3.5/4 or higher. The median grade at Harvard is an A. I am told that since COVID, B grades and below now require a written explanation by the professor at several schools.
> The median grade at Harvard is an A
It’s been 20 years or so since my knowledge was up-to-date, but Oxbridge undergrads used to bitterly complain that their 2:2 (grade C I guess?) wasn’t seen as equivalent to getting a 1st(A?) or 2:1(B) from other good UK unis by graduate schemes and large employers.
Oxbridge workload seemed to be significantly higher for most undergrad degrees than it was at other unis, and the feeling was that an essay a week was required that would have been equivalent to a term’s work at other unis. I only ever heard the Oxbridge side of this, however.
Given that the bar for getting into Harvard is rather high these days, shouldn't we expect the median grade in Harvard to be fairly high? If C students aren't allowed into Harvard these days, doesn't it make sense they aren't giving out Cs?
Wouldn't a C in Harvard mean "average for a Harvard student"?
oh my sweet summer child.
Harvard was one of the leaders of the charge in terms of grade inflation back 20ish years ago
A bit of context on that grading question here. It was interesting to me that grading has gone through a couple waves of inflation over the decades: https://unintendedconsequenc.es/what-i-talk-about-when-i-tal...
I've interviewed Harvard CS grads for SWE roles at big tech who couldn't write a working program for fizzbuzz, for defanging an IP address, or for reversing words in a sentence, in a language of their choice, with leetcode's provided instructions, in half an hour, with unlimited attempts, gentle coaching from me, and the ability to use the internet to search for anything that isn't a direct solution (e.g. syntax).
Yes, more than one.
Either the bar for getting into Harvard cannot possibly be as high as it's made out to be, someone's figured out how to completely defeat degree-validation service providers, or Harvard is happy to churn out a nonzero number of students wholly unprepared for meeting extremely basic expectations for the prototypical job of their chosen degree.
>Harvard is happy to churn out a nonzero number of students wholly unprepared for meeting extremely basic expectations for the prototypical job of their chosen degree
From one of my professors who did their graduate work at an Ivy, apparently there are a lot of rich kids who can't be failed because their parents donate so much money to the school. But I don't think Harvard has ever had the best undergraduate reputation (among the Ivies), its more well known for its grad/professional programs.
If you don’t cram for leetcode, you won’t pass a leetcode interview. It takes some kids a few interviews to figure that out, even they are from elite school like MIT. You were just their learning experience.
I get the impression you latched on to the word leetcode and took away something very different
FizzBuzz, reversing a sentence -- this is programming your way out of a wet paper bag, not elite and esoteric skills that need advanced study and cramming
Similar concept. You have them do some task like fizzbuzz to see if they can program stuff on the fly that they would never need to do in real life. You practice that since school doesn't prepare you for that unless you do ACM programming contests or something. The interview demands this to see if the candidate is capable of cramming for the interview, which correlates with the effort, ability they could put into the job, not with what the skills they actually apply on the job, which are hard to measure in a one hour interview slot anyways.
If someone doesn't know how to reverse words in a sentence they are absolutely not qualified to be a programmer. Yes they probably won't do this exact task often, but this is like a doctor that can't distinguish heart from the liver. It tells you something has gone horribly wrong.
If you can't solve FizzBuzz in half an hour with a language of your choice while being able to look up syntax, your problem isn't that you failed to cram for leetcode, it's that you don't know how to write code.
There's nothing inherently wrong with not being able to write code, but you probably shouldn't be applying for software engineering roles where the main responsibility of the job is ultimately to write working code.
Just to be clear I have no problem passing these interviews, I just spent a few weeks cramming leetcode and got a job at Google. Leetcode wasn’t the main reason I was hired, but it was a filter that I had to get through (I’ve never been given fizzbuzz before, but I assume that is just because it’s no longer in style and hasn’t been for more than a decade). You just don’t throw yourself into on the fly coding, you practice them because your competition has and you will look bad if you don’t. Let’s not pretend that any of us are ready to do alien dictionary at the spur of a moment, or thats a useful skill for our role.
The only entity that has ever cared about my college GPA has been other colleges when I signed up for grad school. And even in that case it is just a "stat check" in gamer parlance. 3.0 or greater, yes. Lower, no. That kind of thing.
Zero employers have ever asked to see my college GPA after graduating almost 17 years ago.
As prices for college go up, the student is more of a customer than anything, and therefore the pressure to raise grades goes up. Who is going to go to a college where people tend to need an extra year to graduate, when each year is 60k? Or one where only the top 5% of a class gets a top grade?
You are already seeing grade inflation in the UK too: Go look at the percentage of first class degrees over time.
The only place where a modern US university can be used as a filter is in their own admissions, where they can still be pretty stringent. Harvard could fill their class 6 times with people that are basically indistinguishable from their freshman class, so just getting into the right university already shows that you must have had some skill and maturity by the time you were a junior in high school.
This is also why hiring juniors is so difficult nowadays for software: Having successfully finished a CS degree at most universities says nothing about your ability to write any code at all, or analyze any complex situation. And with the advent of leetcode training, it's not as if you can now tell who happens to be good because they remember their algorithms and data structure classes really well. You have no idea of how good the new grad is going to be when they show to the interview, and even those that pass might not be all that great in practice, as they might just have spent 3 months memorizing interview questions like an automaton.
All serious applicants have the maximum grade, in the US system.
I don’t think this is strictly true, but I do think it’s true that college GPA is not a differentiating factor.
Yes but it is not standardized at all. Every college has its own way of doing things. Even every degree or school within a university can be different in how they handle grades. Some places put every student on a curve, so that a particular distribution of grades is always enforced. Some places operate on more of a pass/fail basis - often this is done for the first couple years to avoid measuring students when they’re adjusting to a new lifestyle (meaning partying a lot). Some places tend to give out easy grades. So you cannot compare students across different degrees and colleges.
This is the dumbest idea ever because it forces students to take easy classes instead of interesting ones.
> it forces students to take easy classes instead of interesting ones
The UK system doesn't really let students choose which classes to take
You can provide the piece of paper at a fraction of the cost too. Nearly all of Europe does, I believe.
Did Europe find a cheat code that gets free $$$ for education?
Nothing is free - once you graduate you are hit with 50% tax that gets back all you "free" tuition costs many, many times over.
Not saying education should not be subsidized via taxes (I think it's good overall), but it's not free at all - the price is just hidden and spread out over many years (similar to student loans but less visible).
The taxation is conditional on earning enough income though, which aligns incentives better.
Europe has a much lower expenditure per student compared to the US.
https://www.aei.org/articles/the-crazy-amount-america-spends...
It does. In large part due to Baumol's cost disease - higher overall incomes in productive sector like tech drive up costs for sector with low productivity growth - so professors and admin staff in US make 2x salaries compared to Europe (cost of living adjusted). Also, have you seen EU student amenities and dorm sizes?
Is it necessary for there to be student amenities paid for by the school? Why should tuition pay for a bunch of ancillary nice-to-haves instead of, ya know, the education?
It's not. But apparently that's what most American students demand and universities supply to satisfy the demand.
Public schools shouldn't oblige and instead offer the lower cost option. The market will then sort this issue out in a few years. Right now its public = expensive and private = absurdly expensive
EU universities, the amenities are quite meager, as they should be. But for dorms it’s usually single occupancy. Unlike the US where you’re expect to have roommates.
The roommates thing is just part of the socialization of US universities, since many kids are not living anywhere near home and if they aren't forced to become close friends with someone by, say, sleeping right next to them, they often go a little nuts. By the time you are an upperclassman you are generally given your own room or you live off campus.
I'm trying to follow you. I don't get how Baumol's has a higher degree of effectiveness in the US than it does in the EU? Are you saying there are more tech companies and therefore tech roles in the US than EU and thus those drive up non-tech wages even though they aren't as productive?
Exactly
I call bullshit on this.
There are lots of reasons why US academics earn so much more than their european counterparts, but the income level of US tech employees is not high on the list, if it is on the list at all.
Also, Baumol's doesn't predict that wages in low productivity growth sectors will rise, it merely notes that the costs in such sectors do not fall, which means that whatever the sector produces (good, services, art etc) become relatively more expensive compared to other production. This is why it appears to cost so much to see the symphony orchestra, even in Cincinnati - it's not that the players all make a ton of money, it's that their productivity is flat, so the costs of the performance appear to rise relative to, say, toothpaste.
When you break down how budgets have changed, the two biggest drivers of tuition increases are the growth of administration, and fancy amenities like sports facilities.
The cost of the person in front of the blackboard has not been increasing.
The cost of the person in front of the blackboard has been steadily going down; those people have been complaining about this for decades.
Ok, the prior link was comparing it to EU though, so perhaps costs for professors there went down even more, as professors make less there compared to US
When used in a social context, "free" has a different meaning than in many other contexts. It does not mean, for example, "there is no cost for this thing". Rather, it means "the person receiving this thing is not responsible for paying the costs associated with it (at least not at the time)".
Free health care doesn't mean "nobody gets paid to provide health care", it means "patients do not pay for health at the point of service".
If you'd prefer that we use some other term to describe this, please suggest it. I do find it interesting that the Scottish NHS uses "No fees at point of service" as part of their branding (or did, back in 2019).
From what I understand European education and degree programs are typically much more structured and narrow, and thus finish a lot faster. A student who finishes K-Ph.D. in the US will have a lot more breadth of exposure than such a student in most of Europe, if I recall what I read on the topic a while ago correctly.
Was it much more subsidized in the US when it was much cheaper, though?
I'd reword the question: "was college paid for via higher income taxes for graduates (and others) or via a more direct approach of student loan taking?". I believe the latter but I don't see the fundamental difference. It's the same student loan but hidden from sight, as it's packaged as higher tax %
> don't see the fundamental difference
You're kidding. The former means all higher net worth individuals to take on both the cost (via taxes) and the benefit (a well-trained workforce for businesses, well-paid, highly taxed contributors for the state, an educated populace of voters, graduates with stable work and in-demand skills). The latter is another example of America's "Everyone for themselves" theme, with students bearing the entire cost of their education, while the graduate, public, state, and businesses reap the benefit.
If the benefits are spread so widely, why shouldn't the cost be?
The students bear costs but no benefit to themselves? No higher wages?
My point is that it doesn't matter in principle if one takes a loan and pays it down over time vs. one is taxed at much higher % and that tax "pays down" a phantom student loan of "free" education.
It does introduce a risk and hence the incentive for loan takers to choose their degree wisely though. Which should lead to better allocation of labor but at a cost of some personal risk.
I actually included the graduate as a beneficiary ("a well-paid, highly taxed contributor" or "the graduate" in the counter), but more importantly:
The entirety of society benefits from a well-educated populace. That's one reason even those without children pay for public education.
Following that, if everyone benefits, why is the graduate taking on all the risk (via a non-dischargeable student loan) instead of spreading the risk across the entirety of society?
Ok, I overlooked that.
I think that's fair that risk should be more spread. Comes at a cost of people choosing degrees more frivolously though and wasting their time and everyone's money
I'd like to push back on "useless" degrees here, as well. The idea that degrees that leave graduates struggling to pay their bills (especially with student loans factored in) are worse than degrees that maximize income is bad for society. Not every job that is good for society pays well - if they did, educators would be better paid, and many executives would not be compensated as well as they are.
Some degrees are less in-demand (at time of graduation) economically, but a well-educated populace that can apply critical thinking and remember lessons from history, can be its own reward. Notably, pushing for a population completely lacking these skills is an excellent way to topple a democracy over time.
The pay is determined by supply and demand, apparently there is a relatively large supply of educators (many just enjoy it despite low pay) relative to the demand.
I see your point on broader benefits, however, those are largely speculative while a shortage of e.g. doctors has very direct and concrete costs to the society.
On prior point regarding spreading risks - would you say government should bail out failed entrepreneurs? Because that is very similar in principle (taking risk, benefit for society)
> The students bear costs but no benefit to themselves? No higher wages?
Nobody said the student achieves no benefit. We keep saying that the student does not capture all the benefit of their own education in higher wages, but bears the entire cost.
That's also true for entrepreneurs, right?
That's what taxes are for. Subsidizing public good.
Affordable access to good education is a good outcome from the heavy taxation I pay.
For sure. The main benefit is that it allows smart, hardworking but poor students to get a degree and utilize their brainpower productively for the benefit of all. That's great.
Just don't say it's "free" - those who get the education pay back all they got via taxes (which in it's end effect are like paying down a student loan).
Just going to point out that this is semantic hair-splitting that usually comes from opponents of governments providing for the social welfare. Not saying you're doing that, but it's a thing that happens.
And nobody thinks free education doesn't cost anything, just like people don't think the military doesn't cost anything. Somehow, though, there is endless trillions for "defense", and a little moth flies out of the wallet when it's for something that doesn't involve drones.
Absolutely. I never would say it is "free". But in many ways it is a matter of what one values.
I had opportunities to move to the US and likely make 2x-3x what I make here and pay less taxes. I chose moving to Europe instead. It is the sort of society I prefer to live in.
Free at point of consumption. Anybody with half a brain understands that’s what’s meant when somebody says “free” education or “free” healthcare.
> You can provide the piece of paper at a fraction of the cost
This isn’t socially useful.
And what we're doing now is? Telling 17-year-olds to take on six figures of debt and then replacing them with ChatGPT while making it impossible to discharge their debt?
Just because Comp Sci and many STEM degrees in general are losing value does not mean that university overall is not worthwhile.
That doesn't have prestige value. Prestige comes from scarcity and the ability to exclude the lower caste.
If people want to play those exclusivity games that's up to them. What's wrong is asking the taxpayer to fund it under the false mask that the entire product is education.
The scarcity in Europe (at least the two countries I'm familiar with) comes from a standardized test. If you don't do well on the test, you don't go to college.
America used to do that, but Jewish students started taking (and doing well on) the test, and later Black and Asian students had the audacity to be brilliant too. This led to America's "holistic" college admissions process.
For what it's worth, the USA isn't unique in adapting admissions to reject an unwanted minority. The most interesting mechanism has to be Moscow State University's Jewish Problems: https://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1556
Most prestigous colleges are profitable and don't need the funding or the tuition
Which strongly suggests that one reason 4-year degrees have lost value, is the piece of paper has lost value. Because of (most?) people only getting a degree for the paper.
Two improvements then: Degrees that earn the reputation of not being given for anything less than excellence in studies. Where the earned reputation is used both to discourage the non-serious, and enhance the value of the degree.
And of course, bring down the costs. Create a high octane alumni network to match. Foster an opinionated high work ethic, college-as-daycare / party-scene repellent culture. Anything and everything rethought from scratch.
For instance, why are degrees based on years? Why so standardized when neither students or jobs are? Why not a skill chart that can be custom traversed per student - with students expected to move on whenever they choose to, or have a good opportunity. A high percentage of students leaving for good jobs after just one year would be a win.
For just one slice of education, to start.
As with anything complex, start with something small and focused. Like a low population cutting edge practice/research AI school. Start from scratch with the thing that is new, challenging and in high demand.
Then expand into other fast changing, high demand areas. Keep figuring out better ways, keep taking on more, keep reducing costs, as long as all three of those efforts tradeoffs are compatible.
I think most people (namely high school seniors) go to college for neither. They go because that was the expectation, and was assumed to be at least approximately productive path.
While arguably that's indirectly 'for the piece of paper', I'd argue the pleasant experience is a factor too, even if not quoted as such. i.e. if it was a purely rational, economic choice (my interpretation of going to college just for the degree) we'd see higher enrollment in high-ROI majors.
I agree the answer is “yes”. But I think people are also forgetting that the reason college was a useful thing to pay for, was it was effective in differentiating between someone who was highly capable and someone who wasn’t. In a world where anyone can get a degree by simply spending enough time and money, there’s no real differentiation happening. Even if someone gets a degree, their fundamental competency (I guess I’m talking about something like IQ) is going to be whatever it is. And so it’s going to be hard to find jobs and the perceived value goes down.
Total cost of ownership is 4 years x $15k-$25k (for a cheap public school) + missed income from working that same four years ($35k x 4 years). This is equal to $220k +/- $20k of lost money.
Now compare this to income differential. Starting grad income is $80k(?). At 4% raise per year compared to 3.5% raise per year for a non-college employee. Over 43 years.
My math comes out to the college grad is still making more money despite the initial sunk cost.
The numbers look very different for a private school, which could run up to $100k for tuition, room, and board. It is almost unimaginable that attending a private college could have a positive expected value at that cost. For one thing, the incoming students will typically have stellar credentials and abilities. This means that they would not have the average outcome of a high school grad who gets no further education.
If I were faced with spending $100k/yr for my kid to go to college, I would strongly consider offering 5 tranches of $50,000 that we would together invest in business ideas over the next 5 years. Humanities and social sciences could be learned in parallel, while trying to launch businesses that bring value to the world.
The lessons learned would not be the same as those one learns in college, and the social aspects would be very different/lacking. This would clearly not work for all teenagers, but for some, it could be a much better opportunity and use of funds.
People who can afford themselves going to private schools have a reason why they prefer spending 100ks vs less. Prestige schools gets you a prestige job so "It is almost unimaginable that attending a private college could have a positive expected value at that cost" isn't necessarily true.
The thing is, prestige and cost do not go hand in hand. The most expensive schools are not the most prestigious. I think Vanderbilt was the first school to hit the ignominious milestone of $100,000/yr, and they're not Ivy League, Ivy+, or perhaps even Ivy++ (if such a classification existed).
Anecdotally my wife came very close to finishing a 4 year degree but ultimately did not for various reasons (she comes from a very disadvantaged family...) and not having one has been a major burden or blocker for her pursuing all kinds of jobs. I am hoping to help her finish, but it is hard to restart later in life and lots of past credits will probably be lost or not count anymore due to various academic bureaucracy roadblocks.
And the opposite is true as well. I had a friend who had no idea how to market her labor, uncomfortable even with the idea of making a linkedin profile. She has an undergraduate degree, she did eventually find something, but it was a tiresome process. On the other hand, I had just finished a Master's degree, I had made up a linkedin profile to apply to a startup I thought looked interesting--no response, but, about a month later a recruiter messaged me on linkedin to work a short term contract that turned into the job I have now. There was practically no effort on my part for a job search.
Yep, I've seen this with a lot of my friends who did a similar thing. HR employees screening you out alone is a huge problem.
I have some middle and upper middle class gen X and older friends giving their children TERRIBLE advice about how degrees aren't worth it anymore and you get more out of getting started in your career ASAP than spending 4 years in school. The problem is that a BS now is like a high school diploma when they grew up, and if you don't have one, then in all likelihood, you will struggle to not be downwardly mobile, as it's the new middle class gatekeeping tool.
People should NOT listen to anyone over 45-50 or so who tells them college isn't necessary. Those people grew up in a world that no longer exists.
Another example of bad gen X / boomer advice is to knock out core credits in community college and transfer to university later. They don't understand that your only shot at getting significant scholarships and financial aid is when you enter as a 1st time freshman. I know someone with brilliant kids who made National Merit Scholar this year who is already setting their kids aims low by advising them to do this when there are so many good universities, both private and state, where their kids have a good shot at getting a full ride.
>Another example of bad gen X / boomer advice is to knock out core credits in community college and transfer to university later. They don't understand that your only shot at getting significant scholarships and financial aid is when you enter as a 1st time freshman. I know someone with brilliant kids who made National Merit Scholar this year who is already setting their kids aims low by advising them to do this when there are so many good universities, both private and state, where their kids have a good shot at getting a full ride.
I'll have to push back on this. I'll give NJ as an example but other states have similar systems. In NJ If you are in the top 15% of your graduating school you are covered for full tuition provided for the first two years at community college. You are also given a guaranteed spot at whatever public college/program you want. (EDIT: I am not sure if this is still the case im trying to sift through the documentation but now I think it may also require minimum GPA in CC) Imagine getting that university degree and starting your professional career with potentially 0 debt.
Furthermore a variation of this program extends to families making less than 65k. If you meet that criteria. The community college degree is 0$. From there you are given a course schedule that if you follow will transfer 1:1 to a university and if you do well academically there you can be eligible for reduced or waived tuition at the public college of your choosing. This system helps people who did poorly in high school or just didnt make the cut aid wise get a second chance at tuition free college.
If you make more than 65k, you still get reduced tuition on some sliding scale. And again excellent grades translates to more savings.
At least for NJ, Community college really sets many people up for an excellent start in their career by not having any college debt.
> The problem is that a BS now is like a high school diploma when they grew up
> gen X / boomer
Those 2 generations aren't even remotely close in terms of shared experience of what high school diploma was like when they grew up.
This assumes that every college grad is guaranteed a decent starting income. It seems that on average new grads are struggling more now than they used to to get jobs in their fields, especially higher paying jobs. And that perception is probably magnified by internet horror stories such as every 3rd post on r/cscareers.
Yes this kind of math doesn’t make sense in places and industries where pay is not high and job prospects are difficult. Like liberal arts. Or third world countries.
And that is the point: do the math that assesses the incomes correctly and many people won’t see as college as sensible for those professions.
Assuming a grad income of $80k is an insane starting assumption. MAYBE you’re making that in software (good luck getting your foot in the door).
Any other industry? Biology? Social sciences? Academia? Manufacturing?
I struggle to think of anything other than finance that has a shot of STARTING at $80k. Hell I didn’t hit $80k in software industry until ~3 years in and I thought I was (I indeed WAS) very lucky.
Academia at $80k? After a PhD, sure. There may be some grad programs where you get a stipend north of $60k, but those are probably located in very HCoL places, so you can be assured you won't be saving anything.
>Assuming a grad income of $80k is an insane starting assumption.
It doesn't really matter if you consider it to be insane. The studies on this stuff always compare averages to averages, and average college grads do better in the long run no matter how optimistically you cook the books to make the inverse seem likely.
> average college grads do better in the long run no matter how optimistically you cook the books to make the inverse seem likely
This is far from true when you consider the selection bias of who goes to college, and the sheepskin effect.
Your numbers seem to be a couple years out of date, or maybe you're (no offense) living in an economic backwater like Florida where salaries are severely depressed due to the tourism effect.
The base salaries for Entry level SWE roles are in the $80k-100k range nationally [0].
Additionally, most finance roles start in that ranges, though high finance has starting salaries comparable to Big Tech new grad.
Even Biotech new grad salaries tend to be in the $60k-80k range.
Same with manufacturing engineering roles [1]
[0] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/levels/entry-leve...
[1] - https://www.salary.com/research/salary/alternate/entry-manuf...
> like Florida
If Florida is "backwater", then so is most of the rest of the country outside of a handful of overpriced cities where earning 80k is required to be able to afford a room in an apartment - not the whole apartment, and certainly not buying one.
I mean yea, they absolutely are economically speaking - especially when looking at where new grad college educated jobs are located [0].
Heck, most states have fallen into a technical recession [1]. Florida is weird simply because of how much tourism and retirement adjacent industries skew it's economy (eg. Elderly care, primary care, etc) - in fact, healthcare services (as in elderly care, hospice care, and homecare) is the only non-skilled industry that is seeing a significant expansion in the US.
I personally along with HN, other VCs, and PE funds have been actively following the MSO space for a couple years now because of this boom.
And I say this as someone who kinda likes Florida (Dr Philips reminds me and moreso the missus of bougie gated communities back in ASEAN - it's a nice place for us to Fat FIRE).
[0] - https://www.axios.com/local/denver/2025/02/28/white-collar-w...
[1] - https://www.ft.com/content/e9be3e3f-2efe-42f7-b2d2-8ab3efea2...
I'm not sure where your numbers come from. In my region job prospects are not much better for a liberal arts grad than a high school graduate, and much, much worse than someone with a trades education.
Reminiscent of this thread talking about undergraduate-level students mailing it in: https://bsky.app/profile/jesbattis.bsky.social/post/3m6pvvko...
Is this not rational behavior? If, through grade inflation, the only thing that matters to an employer is what school you went to and that you completed it (the sheepskin effect), then isn't the correct optimization to reduce wasting time on levers that won't make any practical difference in the end?
Sure sure, there's the love of learning and the formation of the well-rounded modern individual, but most people are much more pragmatic than that.
They need to get in, get the piece of paper for the least effort, get a job. Everything they need can be taught on the job or asked to ChatGPT most likely anyway.
A Case Against Education https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691174655/th... was prophetic of this phenomenon years ago.
> If, through grade inflation, the only thing that matters to an employer is what school you went to and that you completed it (the sheepskin effect), then isn't the correct optimization to reduce wasting time on levers that won't make any practical difference in the end?
The reason I don't think this is rational at all is the amount of work needed to "look good for employers" isn't really that far off from the amount of work needed to understand and learn the info well in the first place.
I used to do a lot of college hiring for software devs. We did on-campus recruiting at a bunch of top universities, so sure, the school you went to is inherently one factor in our hiring process. But we also definitely cared about the grades you got, especially in core CS courses. Most importantly, my on-campus interviews were focused on things that someone should have learned in their data structures and/or algorithms course (but used examples that were as "real world" as possible). If you didn't actually understand the material, we weren't going to hire you.
>Is this not rational behavior?
If you think the purpose of an education is literally nothing more than the diploma, then yeah sure.
If you think that I'm interviewing you for an entry SWE job (yes, we do this still) and you think I'm going to hire you because you hyperoptimized a compsci degree to minimize the work and learning you had to do and maximized your GPA, then you're going to blow the interview and wind up another person on reddit scratching your head wondering why these mean companies just don't want to give you your $125k software dev job.
Obviously, you don't need a degree to learn enough to convince me that you'll be a productive member of our team (or at least good enough in the short term and productive after a few months). But in my experience, the ones who half ass and ChatGPT their way through college are almost never brilliant polymaths. In my experience as a student years back and my experience interviewing graduates now, those students breezed through their courses and sought out more challenging learning opportunities such as accelerated graduate courses, impressive work within student organizations (for example, winning CTFs competitions with their school's computer security group), etc. And that all shows up on resumes and in interviews in a way that's night and day vs the ones who got tricked into thinking that the only purpose of an education is to get a paper.
I'm with you. In their position I did the most of the educational opportunity I had, but then I didn't live in a world where people told me my job would soon cease to exist thanks to Claude and I spent every waking out flipping through short form videos. I can't relate to what that does to you.
Completely unironically your best bet is to get into a good college, then do the minimum work needed to graduate and spend al the rest of the time networking (read: partying).
Yep, meet as many people as you can who might later give you a job or ask you to join their startup. Meet a potential spouse, you're in the same social class, about the same age, probably similar interests. You are alumni of the same institution. Do sports, drink beers, learn social skills.
I went to uni to learn to learn. It helped that it was free, but it was a rigorous education with formal proofs (starting in week 1), proper research, scientific writing etc. Very few people will learn that outside universities, and, while not strictly needed for most jobs, it really helps as a tool to shut 'talkers' up to this day. Socially it was good as well; got my first and second project for my tiny company I set up in uni from the father's of two study mates: the first project was 100k, the second 1.6m (both guilders at time), so there is that; I would have never known these people otherwise.
Maybe, just maybe, universities shouldn't cost a fortune?..
Americans attend college as a (1) rite of passage and to some extent (2) to have access to an influence network of peers and alumni. For elite universities, it's conceivable that #2 provides some real opportunity.
But in general #1 dominates the dollars spent on this experience and it's really too bad.
Only because that's what college has become. I loved studying my field for four years, free of most of the vicissitudes of life that would otherwise prevent me from being able to focus on an education. I guarantee you a lot of people would like to get a degree simply for the sake of learning, and to become a better person. Hell, I'd take a few classes if it didn't cost like $800 per credit hour. This whole "college as job training" thing is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and none of the innocent people subjected to it are particularly happy with the situation. They are not, crucially, in a position to change that.
I also studied something I found fascinating, but I also had friends that I still talk to and meet up with today. Its both possible to enjoy your studies and have a social life.
reason (3) is social signaling.
elite schools aren't only desirable because they set you up with big opportunities. they are the way for high-school overachievers to signal to everybody how smart and good they are.
elite schools could probably make bank if they just sold a stamp-of-approval from their admissions committees that just said "you are smart enough to get admitted, but were not lucky enough to win the lottery of being given a seat".
100%, but it's even worse than that. "X got into Stanford" is the new "X is a Stanford graduate" because of grade dilution - and admissions dilution has soured even the former.
> Americans attend college as a (1) rite of passage and to some extent (2) to have access to an influence network of peers and alumni. For elite universities, it's conceivable that #2 provides some real opportunity.
I believe the primary reason is to attain credentials in pursuit of access to more lucrative employment prospects. I think your 1 and 2 are both significant factors, but they are quite far behind the pursuit of credentials.
Meanwhile, China is churning out STEM graduates at breakneck pace. Sure, not every single one is Nobel prize material, but 7 mainland China universities are now in Times' top 100, and another 5 Hong Kong ones as well.
As the article says, this change in opinion has been very big and very recent. Don't expect universities to sit still and do nothing.
I see several possible reactions. One is to do what Georgia Tech and U Texas are doing -- to offer online degrees for MUCH reduced cost, like $10k. Will such 30 credit MS degree programs (that don't require BS first) replace 120 credit BS degrees? That makes a lot of sense to me.
The popularity of residential degree programs may be ending, due to insanely high cost and the need to retrain often as AI automation changes the employment picture rapidly and unpredictably.
> Don't expect universities to sit still and do nothing.
> The popularity of residential degree programs may be ending, due to insanely high cost.
I think the problem is that universities _have_ been changing in the direction of _delivering less_ at the same time that they cost more. The article cites public schools doubling tuition in inflation-adjusted terms since 1995, but simultaneously:
- student-faulty ratios have gotten worse
- schools use under-paid adjuncts for a larger share of classes
- good schools often trade on the research record of faculty, but the success of those prominent faculty often mean they can get course buyouts / releases, so they're not teaching anyway
- much has been published about administrative bloat in universities but for example see 2010 vs 2021 numbers here https://www.usnews.com/education/articles/one-culprit-in-ris...
Rather than trying to make new online offerings, I think schools need to lean out their staff, and cut back on programs that don't have to do with instruction. Even better would be if federal funding eligibility was tied to schools demonstrating that at least X% of their budget goes to instruction, where that X should ratchet up over time.
Dedicated grad schools that are separate from, but affiliated with, dedicated undergrad schools. Those teaching at the dedicated undergrad schools will be hired for their ability to focus on foundational teaching, with research programs designed to involve undergraduate student researchers in genuine research, while still providing publication opportunities and genuine advancement of the art.
My degree was 5 years back in the day. Was it worth it? Maybe, probably. But these days people seem to get a bachelor's and a master's in 5 years, and it kind of pisses me off to have that CV disadvantage when my degree could have effectively been that (the last two years were full of electives to choose a narrower specialization, and was much more research-y).
There is no way that you got that degree recent enough such that the years matter. An undergrad/master degree really only matters for the first, perhaps second job. After that, your experience and ability is what matters.
Don't forget it's free in some countries. My degree was 100% free. And don't tell me it wasn't. There has been a lot of free stuff in post-Soviet era. In Soviet Union people had more than most of the folks who are pretty much jobless and desperate now at the moment. My family gotten free 3br apartments from government. My mom and dad were high school teachers.
Nothing the government provides is free. It's paid for with taxes that are forcefully collected and would have been spent or invested privately otherwise. I'm not someone who's against taxes but it's a myth and propaganda that the government can just magically provide free stuff. I'm ok with the government providing things but I want them to be honest about what the costs are.
They are being honest, you're just being pedantic. The fact that everyone pays taxes which ultimately pay for e.g. socialized health care/insurance or college-level education doesn't alter the fact that for the person receiving it, said good comes with no invoice, which is a conventional meaning of "free".
The fact that paying taxes is required of all members of the community that organizes, collects and distributes resources in this way doesn't change the relationship between the person and the service at the point of service.
>Nothing the government provides is free.
Yes it is. "Free" doesn't mean "has no cost paid by anyone" and never has in these discussions. It means "at no cost to the student".
Apologies if English isn't your first language.
This is worrisome. College experience does provide unique benefits compared to self-learning.
But in the long term it seems to destroy the ability to self-learn; the vast majority of graduates go out of their way to avoid acquiring any new academic knowledge after graduation. College (aside from phd programs) fails at teaching people how to learn.
I’m really shocked that everyone is running to cyclical industrial/construction type jobs that are great in an economic expansion, but awful in a downturn.
*some
I feel the same fallacies happen with money and degrees:
- People with more money live better lives, so let's just print/hand out money and everyone will live a better life!
- People with college degrees live better lives, so let's just push more people through college and everyone will live better lives!
In both cases, of course, completely missing the underlying reasons money/college degrees provide(d) better lives.
It's hard to believe that any single person in government truly thinks printing money will increase resources or that more easily handing out college degrees will automatically make everyone better off. So I don't fully understand how this happens, perhaps pandering to the electorate.
It's a prime example of the tragedy of the commons and there's honestly not much that can be done because of how competition on the supply side of the labor market works; for employers, a degree is no longer a differentiator among candidates.
Consider the contraposition.
• Poor people live shorter, unhealthier lives.
• Without a college degree, your employment options are diminished.
It's fine to trash "handing out money" or "pushing more people through college" but then what is left is: there's nothing we can do for poor people.
Make money not a consideration in applying for college? Not by handing out whatever the universities are asking for of course, but by giving them a fixed $X per student.
That might have worked if we had established that right after WWII, but it would never get off the ground now. The current system is too entrenched.
You have a president that’s willing to wage war on institutions of higher learning. If anything this is the only time it’s even been remotely possible.
Of course there is. You can just hire them and train them. Most positions don't require college degrees. Everything you need to know for most jobs you learned in high school. At most you need a certificate program of some kind.
The good news it that you don't need to hand out money or degrees. See, some people have an inordinate, obscene amount of money, and they would be able to lead full, happy, fulfilling lives if some of that money went to help people who have very little. Because if you're making $30,000 per year working at a gas station, and you lose that income, you're basically screwed. But if you make millions of dollars every year, you won't really miss a small portion of that. You'll be just fine.
So you just need to sort of move wealth around such that it is less egregiously unequal. Oh, and states can fund universities like they did a few decades ago. :) Win-win! Poorer people get to participate more freely in society, with more opportunities, and you don't have to print any extra money.
The difference is that printing money creates more money, but doesn't create any more stuff. College degrees (theoretically) create more educated people. If you just "hand out" degrees, that doesn't happen, but if you actually teach people, then it does.
I agree with you.
The problem is that many young Americans for the past 30+ years has been told that a bachelor’s degree is the prerequisite for a job that pays well enough to afford a middle class lifestyle, which I’ll define as being able to afford owning a home in a safe neighborhood and being able to provide for a household without living paycheck-to-paycheck.
What happens when a large number of college graduates enter a tough hiring market while they have five- (or even six-) figure student loan balances? It’s one thing to work at McDonald’s debt-free with a high school diploma; it’s another thing to end up at McDonald’s with tens of thousands of dollars in debt with a bachelor’s degree.
Of course, there’s more to going to college than career prospects, and there’s also the reality that no one is owed a job. Still, given the amount of adults struggling with paying off their student loans, it’s no wonder more people are reevaluating the economic value of going to college.
All this states is expensive degrees aren't worth it, not paid for education.
> The problem is that many young Americans for the past 30+ years has been told that a bachelor’s degree is the prerequisite for a job that pays well enough to afford a middle class lifestyle, which I’ll define as being able to afford owning a home in a safe neighborhood and being able to provide for a household without living paycheck-to-paycheck.
Told by who?
My anecdote isn't quite the same, but it's along the lines of many adults, not just one's parents: While in high school I constantly got the message on how important it was to stay in school and graduate with a high school diploma. Ironically I passed up the chance to have an associate's degree before my 18th birthday, because I absorbed this message so well that I prioritized high school graduation over the A.S.. It was years later (round about the time I finally finished that A.S. at the age of 29) that I realized the message hadn't been meant for me, but for the students who were at risk of dropping out of high school.
Well for starters, perhaps the older homeowners who live in safe neighborhoods and provide for [young Americans] without living paycheck-to-paycheck.
Their parents.
Yeah that's unfortunate then, America has changed so much in the past 10-15 years that advice that was worth following for the previous generation is just totally useless for the current circumstances. I don't think the parents had bad intentions though, they were just overly-optimistic in assuming the prosperity they enjoyed would continue indefinitely.
> they were just overly-optimistic in assuming the prosperity they enjoyed would continue indefinitely.
What worries me is how they came to believe this in spite of the last 10-15 years of change in the country…while possibly raising around 3 generations of high school graduates throughout.
Educated people are the way they are due to a particular personality that they have. They are curious and self driven. Many educated people have no formal education. You cannot teach a personality.
That's not to say other personalities are less worthwhile... It's just that we have emphasized one kind of personality as the ultimate one and then are surprised that -- after maxing out opportunities for those already suited towards that personality -- a saturation point is reached and future effort has marginal gains.
What's wonderful about comprehensive universities is that there's a program that can excite the interest of almost every personality.
And even if that wasn't the case, education in general actually speaks to a variety of personalities: The self-motivated learner, the self-improver, the intellectual explorer, the goal-oriented achiever, the rules-based structure seeker.
I like to call this degree inflation.
Almost nobody seem to see college as a place where people can develop the skills to learn itself? Did it get that bad?
It doesn't matter that I didn't remember how to do real analysis, but I had that class, and I learned it at some point, the process itself is exactly what happens in work - we'll learn new things, use it for some time, and then almost forget it to learn the next thing.
It doesn't have to be college, but there are a lot less opportunity, freedom and guidance to do so elsewhere.
Developing skills to learn is great but when one is struggling to pay for housing, food, and other essentials then that becomes a luxury that fewer and fewer can afford.
Most of you here assume the "Human Capital" model (i.e. you pay to acquire skills), but that entirely misses the actual point of a college degree! 2001 Nobel Prize went for demonstrating that college is basically a quarter million dollar IQ and Marshmallow Test. It's a filtering mechanism that allows employers to tell who is smart and conscientious enough to be productive at work.
Offering education to more and more people via reduced cost mass online courses, lowering entry requirements or similar approaches will only erode the signalling value of a degree further.
Those degrees also don't lead to the jobs they want. My former boss would hire people with degrees in, to do basic admin tasks. I quit because a they hired a guy to be my manager, with a lawyer degree and paid him $20k more than me, to do the same job. But he would spend the whole day on his phone. I'm in a new job, hiring people, and I'm not looking at degrees when it's for a dispatch role.
That's the sad outcome of everyone getting _some_ degree in recent years. Something like 50 years ago 10% had college degree, now it's close to 50%. Meanwhile population IQ score stayed rather stable while willingness to work hard declined. So of course the quality of employees with degrees has dropped and hence the degree is no longer a good signal to employers
Doesn’t help when leaders are trashing it and classifying things as not “professional” to further put up more barriers to entry. Along with the constant attacks about them being indoctrination centers, pulling funding for being too liberal, or not pro-Israel enough, or whatever else this administration has officially been able to strongarm many institutions about.
There is nothing a college can teach you that you cannot learn for free online. The social environment can be replicated for free. You're not paying six figures for an education, you're paying six figures for exactly two things:
1. Someone to write lesson plans for you
2. A piece of paper that tells the world you are capable of conforming with the sometimes-frustrating impositions of an institution for 4 years without making too much of a fuss in the process
What you need is the exams! Maybe $1000 to sit a bunch of paper or computer based exams in a hall. Teach yourself beforehand.
The problem is that no one can really articulate what the point of higher education is.
If it were job training it would have to actually train students for jobs. But neither is that "academic" in any sense of the word nor actually practical in any way. University trains people to be research scientists in the hope this helps them do some later job.
If the goal were training students to be academics, then degree requirements for most jobs are absolutely nonsensical and universities admitting large percentages of the population would be extremely counterproductive.
If the goal were a continued education to create "well rounded" people, then why give that task to university professors and create a social environment where this is the least likely thing to happen?
If the goal is networking, then why do all that academic research stuff? Just play sports throughout the day.
I’d feel better about not recommending college for everybody if our high schools were more rigorous. I personally feel that the Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate curricula should be the minimum for high schoolers to graduate, since an education at this level provides well-rounded knowledge that gives students the skills necessary to survive in a 21st-century developed economy.
However, many high school students don’t have the opportunity to take such classes, and there are also many high school students who struggled in elementary and middle school.
I was a high school student in California during the first half of the 2000s. California used to have the High School Exit Exam, which was mandatory to graduate from high school. The test focused on English grammar, reading comprehension, and algebra. I took the exam in 10th grade, and I felt it was easy. So easy, in fact, that I believed eighth graders shouldn’t have much difficulty passing the exam.
However, there were many students who weren’t able to pass the exam, even with multiple attempts. Eventually the state got rid of the test. I don’t know if educational outcomes improved in the immediate aftermath, but UC San Diego’s study on remedial math shows that our high schools are inadequate at preparing students not only for college, but for life in our modern economy.
Of course, to fix high schools, we also need to fix our elementary and middle schools. This goes beyond the classroom; this also involves addressing the cost-of-living crisis. It’s hard for kids to thrive in school when they have parents who need to work heroic hours to make ends meet, and this doesn’t include the kids who have to deal with homelessness and other unstable living situations.
How about just not inflating grades?
They're wonderful but, yes, the cost is out of control.
Higher education delivers a fantastic ROI for the country as a whole. The people who benefit most from a strong economy are the wealthy. So tax them more. And put that money towards lowering the cost of education. Win-win-win.
Because they are not. If I was 18 years old right now, I'd be going into a trade of some sort. No debt, immediately earning a decent amount of money. AI will push even more kids towards this route.
I'm Irish. The state paid me to go to university, and I've paid it back many times over in taxes.
Whenever I hear about the cost of degrees in the US I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.
It doesn't make sense, it's entirely inhumane and predatory to loan that kind of money to a teenager, and there's no way I would ever have gotten a degree if I lived there.
I tried being in debt once, for a far more modest amount than a US degree, and it weighed on my subconscious the entire time.
I think we, as a society, put way too much emphasis on everyone going to a four-year college and now everyone has a degree and they’re basically useless.
A lot of people would likely have been better off going to a trade school or going into a trade apprenticeship.
Parents should focus on helping their kids figure out what they want to do and developing a path to achieve it. The path may take them to university, a trade, or something else.
With AI, h1b, other visa workers, and outsourcing it makes sense they see it as a waste. Those things aren’t going to change, either.
1 in 8 incoming freshmen at UCSD (a leading institution in the states) cant solve "x + 5 = 3 + 7"... Why would I pay 30k a year or whatever it is to get a degree from somewhere like that?
Illiterate incoming freshman are the product of the public middle and high school systems, not the university system.
For reference:
> Beginning in Fall 2022, the number of students placed into Math 2 began to grow rapidly. Math 2 was first created in 2016, and it was originally designed to be a remedial math course serving a very small number of first-year students (less than 100 students a year or around 1% of the incoming class) who were not prepared to start in our standard precalculus courses [...] In Fall 2024, the numbers of students placing into Math 2 and 3B surged further, with over 900 students in the combined Math 2 and 3B population, representing an alarming 12.5% of the incoming first-year class (compared to under 1% of the first-year students testing into these courses prior to 2021).
https://senate.ucsd.edu/media/740347/sawg-report-on-admissio...
These are students that even middling American public schools would have failed to pass from high school in decades past, or would have later failed to meet standardized test requirements prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.
> Illiterate incoming freshman are the product of the public middle and high school systems, not the university system.
That doesn't matter for the op's point. Students starting from this base won't get good in 4 years.
What does your (dubious) example have to do with the quality of post-secondary education? If it has any relevance, it's for the quality of secondary education.
I wish it were dubious. I recently worked with 11th grade Algebra 2 students in New Mexico and found exactly that, and worse. Most couldn't begin to do algebra because they couldn't do simple addition and subtraction. Out of a class of 24 there were two who were arguably ready for it. But everyone is moved forward anyway. I understand your skepticism because I was shocked by it. The teachers said it all went down the drain during Covid and has not recovered.
It must severely limit what they can learn in college.
If a university's administration overlooks a complete failure of the student selection process, it's easy to imagine that it may well overlook a complete failure of the professor selection process. The price of admission is also way too steep to wind up being the peer of mental 8th graders.
Is it a failure of the process? The selection process is to pick people who willing to pay, not who can solve equations.
It's a failure for higher education, yes.
If the college would accept someone like that, they probably don't aim to take their students to a very high level.
This is incorrect. It's 1 in ~50. Still bad!
8.5% of incoming freshmen place in Math 2. 25% of a class of Math 2 students could (EDIT: couldn't) answer 7+2=_+6
8.5% x 25% is about 2%, so 1 in 50.
Shouldn't that be 8.5% x 75% since you want the percent who could not answer it?
Sorry, typo. I meant 25% couldn't answer it.
The more important question is do they learn to solve it, fail out, or just get pushed through?
One of those is a bad outcome, but the other 2 are fine.
At my liberal arts and sciences college about 10 years ago my entry level biology teacher straight up said to the class that if people are having trouble with some of this math on the board to go home and learn algebra tonight.
None of those are "fine". The problem is that such students aren't college material and shouldn't be admitted in the first place.
If standards aren't lowered and they're just failed out, that's fine eventually, but I would prefer it to be fine from day 1.
My roommate can solve this. And he just turned 6. I gave him today some equations with two unknowns....
Why the Downvote? It is true.
I can’t do a standing backflip. This is a true statement and contributes the same amount to a discussion about higher education in the US as “I know a kid that can do algebra”
what does it add to the conversation? The fact that incoming UCSD freshman cannot solve the problem is being brought up as a failure. That this six year old can solve it does nothing to address the issue of UCSD students being unable to solve a problem that we all expect them to. It it as if you are a stoichastic parrot, bringing up a fact that, yes, it happens to be true, because it is nearby on some vector space. Hence the downvotes.
What do you do add to the discussion?
It's due to your username; they think you're a troll.
Well. I love Beijing. But I am not Chinese, nor do I currently live in China. Unfortunately.
It may come across as bragging to some. You can decide if that is fair.
Well, if someone feels extremely inferior, true.
Many mothers claim their child is gifted. In this case, I believe it. It is not my son, unfortunately. I am just in a roommate situation.
I give him math challenges sometimes. Today I started introducing equations with 2 unknowns.
My father taught me simple algebra when I was around 8 using puzzles.
You'd go to UCSD if you could solve that equation, and want to learn to do more. (If you can't solve the equation, UCSD is a very expensive way to learn how.)
I think the more relevant question is, why would you go to grade school and high school at institutions that produce graduates like that?
> why would you go to grade school and high school at institutions that produce graduates like that?
Do you not know how U.S. K-12 public schools are funded by local property taxes, which means the quality of a child's education is a direct causal relationship of the wealth of their neighborhood?
Why don't these children just grow up in richer neighborhoods?
Do you not know that the US is a Federal system and there are (at minimum) 50 different ways that schools are funded?
California's schools (for instance) aren't funded by local taxes, they're funded by the state and allocated funding based on a formula[1] of performance, need, population, etc. They can be augmented by local taxes, but in practice that's rare as the wealthy just avoid the system altogether; instead, opting for private institutions.
That's at least 12% of the population that is not funded in the manner you outline.
Equity remains a valid criticism of LCFF in California specifically.
For one unremarkable observation in this area, see the following think tank report:
> States often commission cost studies to establish the level of funding required to help students meet state standards. LPI analyzed five of the more recent of these studies [...] All of these studies recommended additional weighted funding to support English learners and students considered "at-risk," which was most often defined by a measure of family income and also included other factors [...] The recommended weights for English learners in these studies ranged from 15% to 40% of the base grant level in each state. The recommended weights for at-risk students ranged from 30% to 81%. Compared to the recommended funding in these states, the LCFF’s supplemental grant weight of 20% is at the lower end of the recommended range of weights for English learners and below the range of weights for at-risk students.
The quality of an education isn't proportional to the amount of money spent; learning is remarkably cheap if a school wants to focus on outcomes. There's a bit of give in where the teacher sits on the bumpkin-genius scale (although even then, the range of salaries isn't that wide in the big picture).
Although forcing the funding to go through a collective rather than letting people choose a school and pay on in individual basis would probably deliver a pretty serious blow to the quality.
The top end may not be limited by money, but the bottom of education is, especially when it comes to public k-12 schools.
I doubt most people would even believe the differences until they saw them, I wouldn't of believed public school could vary that much until I personally saw it. Going from some middling school with a half dozen rich properties around, versus a truly poor rural school, showed me how true it is. The better middle school was teaching topics that the poor rural school didn't even broach until senior year. Our civics book from the late 2000s talked about the civil rights movement as an ongoing and building issue too keep an eye on, and half the school books had kid's grandparents name signed in them. Our calculus class, which was downgraded to pre-calc after a few years because so many kids failed college calc entrance exams, had a teacher bragging about how it only took her 3 tries to pass calc 102 in order to qualify for that teaching position. You certainly didn't get very many good teachers when they pay was that far below the national median wage, and it was sad to watch them struggle to afford things as simple as whiteboard markers, or copy paper in order to print student assignments on, because yes the school couldn't afford and didn't supply copy paper for teachers to print assignments on other than a literal single ream of paper to last the entire year.
The school system is downstream broader social issues here. It can be shockingly expensive to deal with the various behavioral problems that disproportionately impact students from lower income communities. Students from stable homes with available and invested parents practically teach themselves.
All those downstream effects from a functional social security service.
Most are overpaying in taxes for what they are getting.
Not to mention single/families without kids and seniors that still pay for school districts.
Fear not - the American school system was built on and holds fast to the supposition that the affluent should be able to avoid any unwanted exposure to the problems of those less fortunate than themselves.
San Francisco USD’s lottery system has entered the chat
No shit, half the people who got college degrees are in debt over it and mostly just lost out on prime years of their life doing busy work for little to zero benefit. Was my class about pre-colombian society interesting? Yes. Has that knowledge helped me in any way related to my job or career or life? No. It certainly wasn't worth the thousands of dollars it costs to take that class to meet some arbitrary requirements. I could of gotten the same knowledge and enjoyment from watching some youtube videos or reading the published book that class was 95% based on.
"Adjusted for inflation" concept is broken in this instance.
One of the reasons why inflation is so high is because college costs have skyrocketed, so citing that they have increased after taking into inflation is like circular logic.
Banks lent an unlimited amount of money to students because they knew they couldn't discharge the debt in bankruptcy, and the schools jacked up prices because they knew students had the money. College costs more than doubled in a 10 years period but the services or even the number of students enrolled didn't even get without a ballpark of doubling. They just enriched themselves off student loans.
The only way to fix this is to let student loans be dischargeable from bankruptcy again, and let banks and colleges take the fall. Right now it's another instance of us peons playing a game of "heads you win, tails i lose."
Universities survived half a millenium being networking grounds for the upper class, and they will survive another millenium being networking grounds for the upper class
The last century will be a mere footnote in a case study of folly, where 100% of the university's problems came from dealing with the underclass at all with a side helping of federal funny money. It will be comedic relief amongst starry eyed business majors, waiting to satisfy a condition of their trust fund
The employment sector's decision to require degrees is mere happenstance and something that sector will need to reconcile on its own.
Someone should turn that comment into a Twilight Zone episode...
We wake up tomorrow to a world where universities never existed.
No cultivation of Copernicus, Newton, Einstein...
So we're stuck mostly with 1000 year old technology.
Objectively, universities function as indoctrination centers that lower the reproductive rate of the most intelligent in the population. They take women away from their support networks/family, preoccupy them for four of their most fertile years, and then saddle them with debt that ties them up for another five to ten years. It's horribly dysgenic. At a minimum, pregnancy during college should be encouraged, there should be free daycare, and the college loan racket should be blown into a million tiny pieces.
I dropped out after my university added various "studies" courses to the required list.
I took just one such course—gender studies—which was utterly abysmal. There was zero tolerance for debating ideas or considering opposing viewpoints. You either assimilated with the group think, or you were castigated for your heresy. It was indoctrination, not education.
Which viewpoint did you oppose? It matters.
If it was "Women should be allowed to vote" I can understand the teachers reluctance to engage in debate.
You may have had a bad instructor. I don't think I've ever been in a class where I couldn't do some genuine questioning, but of course I didn't always feel the need to do so.
Edit to add: Also, you failed to learn the lesson that you can't always quit in the face of tyranny. Did you never have a history or civics class in high school?
But were any of your classes gender studies?
No. I had one that had something to do with anthropology though.
I have a hard time believing this story. You seriously dropped out because you didn't like one class? That doesn't seem to show much fortitude.
Which university, which year was this, what was your major, and what happened with your education and/or career after you dropped out?
And what precisely do you mean by "castigated," in your specific case?
My kids will still go to a four-year university, but for the education and experience, not for any vocational aspirations. I have no delusions about the marketability of an undergraduate degree.
A happy side effect of that university degree was a more rounded education, which now many young adults will be missing out on. The downstream effects could be catastrophic.
> A happy side effect of that university degree was a more rounded education, which now many young adults will be missing out on.
Absolutely! So many people bemoan taking general Ed classes, but knowing the basics about economics, literature, science, art, math, history is valuable if you want to think critically about the world.
Why do you need to pay to go to college to learn the basics of all these subjects? The same information is available for free online.
Teaching is a deliberate act, and it cannot be replaced by a Google AI summary.
> Teaching is a deliberate act
The issue isn't teaching, it's learning. I don't think it's at all obvious that being taught by college professors is the best way to learn that material.
> a Google AI summary
That's not the online material I was referring to. Many universities have their course materials available for free online. Not to mention other online learning sites.
most teachers these days use google (or another AI) and before AI they just used google. few exceptions of course but on the large you are imagining some utopia education which no longer exists. I pay insane amount of money to send me kid to private school and she still gets more education at home by wide margin than at school
>> but knowing the basics about economics, literature, science, art, math, history is valuable if you want to think critically about the world.
Sure if that is relevant to what your goals in life are. I chose to get an education that was tightly coupled with the outcome I wanted.
That’s kind of my point. Everyone wants to narrowly focus on what will bring them the most value as quickly as possible. Being educated in a wide array of subjects doesn’t seem useful at first, but it actually makes you a better communicator, and citizen.
Also, knowing a little about a lot of things doesn’t preclude you from being an expert in your field.
Agreed. Going to college for the social experience and for generally learning about the world is effectively a luxury good now. For people who just want a path to stable employment, the ROI on college no longer makes sense at all.
I think our society’s obsession with thinking of everything in terms of ROI is destructive.
I suggest they live in on-campus dorms, at least the first couple of years: a cultural broadening experience like no other.
Employers just hire experienced h1bs instead, they won’t leave after being trained, no reason to hire an American
There are ~700k h1bs out of ~157 million American jobs. So about 99.6% of jobs in America are held by Americans and 0.4% by h1bs.
Now do the tech industry (high paying American jobs)
Why is tech high paying exactly? Maybe low supply of qualified labor? Maybe that can be solved with qualified immigration? We can call such a program H1B, for example, and it would benefit the American economy overall at the cost of slightly reducing compensation fir the already extremely highly paying tech jobs.
@crossbody that makes too much sense though
> Now do the tech industry
Do you have numbers? If you don’t, the appropriate baseline is population.
Are convenience stores getting h1bs for their shelf stockers? How the hell is the baseline population an appropriate metric for evaluating a niche role?
And Americans leave because employers will just replace them with offshoring and h1bs to save money. It's a self perpetuating cycle. Loyalty goes both ways. Employees finally realized that they should be treating employers like employers have always treated employees. That's capitalism.
Oh good, I was worried this thread wouldn't have any anti-immigrant sentiment.
The h1b program can essentially be eliminated tomorrow. Trump could theoretically make h1b visas non-transferable, charge a high annual renewal, etc.
Trump could cancel H1B but most likely he won't. If for no other reason than as a favour to his billionaire friends. They are more important than the popular idea of America first, American jobs etc. here Trump literally says we need H1B because we need talent, and USA doesn't have the talent. Not a good look for a supposedly America first president.. https://youtu.be/U2XUNKcKtx0?si=GOFyMGxqUIbyGD6T
The pendulum swings. College was only for the elite. Then it slowly expanded until it got to the point of, “everyone should go to college, doesn’t matter what you study.” Now it’s swinging back. Hopefully we manage to get to a reasonable place and not go all the way back to college only being for elites.
What's the point? You're either going to be replaced by AI or a robot (or both) anyway.
College degrees now have negative value for hiring. A company wanting to hire a reliable and competent worker will avoid college graduates.
Seems like you’re hurting some feelings.
I’m a manager in a unique field where people come in with many educational levels. There is little correlation between educational credentials and job performance. A variety of previous jobs and having lived a few different places seems to correlate more with performance.
Sure, get the high school dropout to build your bridge for you. See how well that non-traditional hire works out.
Becoming a Professional Engineer requires four years experience under the guidance of an already licensed engineer and passing a rigorous exam. No fresh college graduate is qualified to design bridges, same as the high school dropout.
My comment is generalizing, as is the thread subject. It has been a downwards moving trend, and for young workers I will say that a college degree is now a negative factor. But that doesn't define the candidate.
Also: Any positive or negative effect of a college degree is either amplified or moderated by candidates self-selecting. A candidate who greatly values their college degree will seek out employers who do the same, and vice-versa.
I guess so mostly foreign students and the wealthier folks can get them? Doesn’t seem like a win, but with AI taking jobs, who knows
Obviously if you want to learn, there has never been as many resources as today for free with YouTube and other stuff. College remains only relevant for the piece of paper and networking and the four-year party experience.
I encourage everyone to read how Economists think about education: Spencer’s Job Market Signaling paper.
https://www.sfu.ca/~allen/Spence.pdf
It’s not just about learning skills, but it’s a natural and rational mechanism to filter talents.