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.
> 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 this is a textbook example of correlation not implying causality. The US was awarded a unique competitive advantage with WW2, which allowed it to become the world's hegemon. Much of the reason that the US was able to preserve it's status was how it managed to leverage that competitive advantage to fuel it's economical and technological development to build up and retain a competitive advantage. This was only made possible by its investment in higher education and R&D, which is a big factor behind the progress in the 1950s and 1960s you're lauding. Things like the GI bill are renowned by the huge impact it had on the tech industry.
The US never managed to shake off its anti-intellectual bias, and has this irrational belief that ladder-pulling is somehow conflated with the cream always rising to the top, but if anything it's preventing their domestic talent from fulfilling their potential.
The U.S. was already the richest country in the world per capita by 1880–even at the peak of the British Empire. Most of its military achievements during the war—building up the world’s largest Navy and airforce from almost nothing within a couple of years—was a product of the industrial economy that already existed before the war.
America’s preference for common wisdom over book learning is a strength, not a weakness. Formal education filters for risk averse, process and credential-oriented people. And you need some of those people, but you don’t want your society to be like India where you worship credentials and degrees like religion.
The GI bill isn’t a counterpoint. GI’s still had to gain admissions at a time when colleges were far more selective than today: https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2024/01/23/why_college... (undergraduate IQs fell from 119 in 1939 to just 102 in 2022). So you created a filter that was extremely rigorous. It supported college education for people who were both significantly smarter than average, and also had served in the military—the Marcus Aurelius type.
>The US was awarded a unique competitive advantage with WW2, which allowed it to become the world's hegemon.
That advantage was: being the only country that wasn't ravaged by war, and that profited for a while by trading with every faction.
Some of countries were also severly kneecapped by US betrayal of promises, made by allies - to restore pre-war borders, and handover of them to USSR - that means less competition.
That also lead to US dollar becoming world's reserve currency, which may have affected the measured drop afterwards.
There are so many factors involved in that that attributing it to just investment in higher education and GI bill is a gross oversimplification, so is previous post's attribution of the drop afterwards.
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.
In terms of dubious financialized metrics of productivity, i.e. debt + fx driven growth. Which is valid indicator, but also the same inflated indicator that suggests 2025 tertiary that cost 200% 1980 tertiary (income/inflation adjusted) is somehow more productive and not parasitic. The entire problem is spreadsheet doing gangbusters is dependenant on increasingly inequitable CoL extraction to prop up GDP flows. US economy would appear much less powerhouse if not for all the disproportionate financiailization/rent extraction from inelastic sectors (rent/education/health etc) aggregated over past 40 years over functionally comparable value goods/services.
Exactly. In <pick random developing nation that isn't too poor> a man who wants to construct a septic for a house pays a man with backhoe who understands the nuances to make it happen. Concrete and diesel are bought, etc, etc, etc. Let's say $5k USD added to GDP.
In US same thing happens. But the man is compelled by threat of law to pay for engineering studies, permits, as are the man with the backhoe and the man making the concrete, etc, etc. $10k is added to GDP.
Has anymore wealth actually been created tho?
You can argue there's a difference because the latter septic is superior because on average they fail less and there's some amortized cost to that but if you're arguing about marginal differences in the face of an integer multiple you've kind of already lost.
This generalizes to just about all products and services. No more value is being created. There's just a bunch of hands in the pot that look like value if you squint and apply motivated spreadsheet magic.
I haven't been in a car accident for 15 years, not even fender benders, that doesn't mean I shouldn't take insurance.
As someone from a random developing nation car accidents deliver crippling debt and destroy lives there frequently because insurance is not mandatory.
The developing nation blindly ignore the externalities of not having insurance (instead of spreading the cost throughout society, only a few people bear the brunt of it, usually the ones least equipped to handle it), so your example is great only if you assume its fine to continue to beat down the poor. There's a reason developed nations have developed such "red tape" and the anti-vaccine movement here in the US is finding out what happens when the red tape is removed.
You can appeal to emotion all you want but it's a very simple calculation. Heck, health insurance (in the US) serves a pretty obvious counterpoint.
Amortized cost of insurance vs amortized cost of not. Say nothing about how incentives get fucked all to hell by breaking things across many parties (principal agent problem) and the money distorts things.
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
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 most important fact, that people overlook, is that its industrial capacity was never bombed during the war, and Pearl Harbour was the only time the country got directly attacked.
So Australia & New Zealand are the next superpowers.
I remember when I was around middle school or early high school, I attended a geopolitical simulation at MIT that wargamed out a crisis between major world powers, and that was the exact result. New Zealand won, in alliance with Australia. They were able to invest heavily in technology while everyone else was nuking each other, and then ended up with space lasers or whatever the endgame tech was while everyone else ended up back in the stone age.
As an Australian, I have the suspicion that the decline of industry in the last couple of decades has done a lot of damage to that capability.
We've lost oil refineries, steelworks, consumer car manufacturing, and we lack much shipbuilding and aerospace. We have a lot of mines, which curse us with success: it's not economically efficient to smelt ore when you could be digging up even more of it instead.
Reminds me of how I used to play Risk (which I now consider to be one of the worst designed games in a similar fashion to Monopoly) when I'd sit in Australia and just keep building troops until other players weaken themselves with fighting. Of course it helps that there's just a single position to defend Australia and as it's the smallest continent, people usually aim to attack elsewhere.
“Modern” risk boards have Australia with 3 borders to defend including the normal and addingcross-map Argentina to New Zealand and Japan to Philippines (I believe this map comes from a risk computer game)
> Pearl Harbour was the only time the country got directly attacked.
Uh, which country again was it?
(Edit: -4, really? Damn, people are salty about actually knowing history versus going against the US public school system's propaganda that "We (royal) were attacked". In reality, the occupier forces, the US military, were attacked, having deposed the government at the behest of Sanford Dole, of pineapple infamy.
But the simple bumper sticker slogan "Remember Pearl Harbor", short circuits and somehow gets people to ignore history at the behest of ruthless hegemonic expansion and irrational patriotism.)
Your arguments are irrelevant at best and whataboutism at worst because the Japanese were specifically attacking the US Navy as they saw it as a threat to their own expansion plans - which were far worse than anything the US did, even compared to the worst parts of Native American policies (which were very, very bad). The Japanese saw Hawaii as a US territory to attack. Whether or how Hawaii became a US territory is a complete non sequitur in the context of World War 2.
There's nobody outside of hardcore Japanese nationalists that see any of their actions as countering US expansionism.
In 1887, King Kalākaua was forced to accept a new constitution after a coup d'état by the Honolulu Rifles, a volunteer military unit recruited from American settlers. Queen Liliʻuokalani, who succeeded Kalākaua in 1891, tried to abrogate the new constitution. She was subsequently overthrown in a 1893 coup engineered by the Committee of Safety (run by Sanford Dole), a group of Hawaiian subjects who were mostly of American descent, and supported by the U.S. military. The Committee of Safety dissolved the kingdom and established the Republic of Hawaii, intending for the U.S. to annex the islands, which it did on July 7, 1898, via the Newlands Resolution. Hawaii became part of the U.S. as the Territory of Hawaii until it became a U.S. state in 1959.
On geopolitical scale, you either need to have big guns or big friends. No one has any true right to any land. If you don't have the foresight to recognize that, you probably don't have a place in the future.
This isn't even something only cold imperialist superpowers adopt. Hawaii itself was populated with warring chiefdoms that were killing each other and taking land for centuries before a bigger fish showed up. Small fish happily eating smaller fish but then upset when they get eaten...
Hawai'i became a territory of the United States on April 30, 1900. It had been US territory for 40 years. One can point to the US doing bad things to make that the state of affairs, but it was decidedly US territory for a long time at that point. It seems you need to learn history, or you're just being willfully obtuse about things.
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.
Were we? Or is that just after the fact revisionism that makes things "easy"
If Europe had managed to keep it together a few more years the US may very well have had a bunch of communism adjacent social strife and FDR may have died a deposed tyrant.
We were certainly more unified on certain broad cultural and values axis, but things were still very divided.
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.
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.
I think very few, if any, countries in the world would be stronger than what we turned Ukraine into. You have a massive army being replenished by a constant slew of bodies, to the point of forcefully dragging people in off the streets, and then being armed with hundreds of billions of dollars in Western arms. But what gives Ukraine a particular superpower is their logistics.
Most people don't realize is that war is essentially a giant deadly game of logistics, and so the typical plan for Russia would be to simply destroy the logistics pipelines arming Ukraine. But thanks to the people 100% responsible for maintaining Ukraine's military managing to maintain a strategically accepted neutrality, it's impossible to fundamentally disrupt their logistics pipeline outside of small scale black ops stuff.
So that has turned this war into a war of attrition where Russia is advancing slowly, but mostly setting the goal as essentially having Ukraine simply run out of Ukrainians. And they seem to be succeeding. Once the real death tolls for this war are revealed, people are going to be shocked. You don't need to drag in people off the streets, close your borders, and continually lower the enlistment age (in a country with a severe demographic crisis) if you're not suffering catastrophic losses, especially since as the amount of territory you have to defend decreases, you need fewer soldiers to maintain the same defensive density.
For Ukraine, war deaths would likely be a footnote compared to emigration when a new census is eventually completed (I don't mean to sound cavalier, but am trying to put things into perspective). An estimated 20% of their population has left since the start of the full scale invasion - ~10 million people - by now they've settled into new lives abroad (my 8 year old daughter's class here in Canada has 3 kids from Ukraine alone).
Ukraine is going to have some painful demographic issues to deal with when the dust settles (and I am cheering for them!).
Once the war ends and both sides can start clarifying their troop classifications. There's always going to be uncertainty because an MIA could be dead, or it could be some guy who successfully deserted and started a new life for himself somewhere. But as both sides return captured troops, exchange bodies, and so on - everything will be made much more clear. And there will also be less political motivation to lie.
This is a false equivalence. The United States was not trying to “conquer” those countries in the territorial sense that Russia attempted with Ukraine. Those conflicts were limited political or counterinsurgency objectives fought under strict constraints, often without public support, and with no intention of annexation. Comparing that to a conventional invasion aimed at seizing and absorbing a neighbor’s territory is analytically inaccurate.
US did defeat Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. And indirectly Syria by supporting the insurgency (and we had bases in that Country). It is also worth noting that the US and South Vietnam had effectively contained the North by 1973. The Paris Peace Accords ended direct US involvement and the North violated those terms two years later when it launched a full-scale conventional invasion. South Vietnam collapsed only after the US withdrew military support. Same with Afghanistan. Iraq is flourishing without Saddam and without war. It toppled Saddam’s regime in weeks, and the country now has an elected government, functioning institutions, and no US occupation. Whatever its internal challenges, Iraq is not a case where the US attempted and failed to annex territory. It demonstrates that these were limited political interventions, not conquest wars.
In March 2022 Russia occupied 27% of Ukraine. They have now lost much of their artillery tanks and then army and now control 19% of Ukraine while their oil refineries blow up, and recently tankers. I'm not sure the conquest is going quite to plan.
> Russia will conquer Ukraine, any other prediction at this point is absurd.
Are you sure? They are advancing, sure, put look what they paid for to achieve this: 300k dead, 700k wounded, depletion of their souvereign wealth fund, 20%+ inflation, lower oil production and so on.
Unfortunately, yes. USA is doing everything but openly support Russia at this point too. It could have been different if Ukraine got proper support, but instead it is being undermined.
Europe could do more, but at least most states dont play for Russia (Hungary and Slovakia excepted).
I think we may be at peak Trump though which will limit his power to bail out Putin. The midterms won't go well, the Epstein stuff is embarrassing, the Republicans are starting to get unruly.
I think literally nobody knows the price either side is paying right now. And I do mean literally, including Trump, Putin, and Zelensky. The fog of war applies to participants, let alone outsiders who are basing our views on figures and claims that obviously going to be driven heavily by propaganda.
But beyond this, I don't think this war is about Ukraine anymore than a war in Taiwan will be about Taiwan. It's little more than a proxy for hegemony in both cases. Russia did not want NATO parked in their Achille's heel of the Ukrainian flatlands. NATO did, and we pushed forward against endless threats of it being a redline, essentially as a means of indirectly imposing our will on Russia and establishing a hierarchy of dominance.
And similarly, for those that don't the Taiwan-China history - the Mao led Chinese revolution was a success. The existing government of mainland China fled to Taiwan where they brutally oppressed the locals, in an era known as the 'white terror' [1], and established power through 40 years of martial law. And of course we backed them, solely to use them as a weapon against China, because geopolitics.
This is why these wars are so important for the participants. The US couldn't care less about Ukraine, but withdrawing without ruining our ability to militarily threaten other peer or near peer countries is difficult. And similarly the last thing Russia needs is more land, but if they never act on claims of red lines, then they can never expect their interests to be considered in the case of a conflict in interests between them and the West.
I don't agree on the Russia Ukraine motivations. Ukraine is not part of NATO and was not going to become part of NATO. There were already two NATO countries bordering Russia near Moscow and St P if NATO had wanted to invade which they had no thoughts of doing. Russia lies constantly on this stuff. I think they basically regarded Ukraine their land as part of the Russian empire they were restoring.
It's not about immediate intentions, but about strategic options. Imagine Russia decided to form a military alliance with Mexico with the expected intention of deploying weapons on the Mexican border. If Mexico agreed to this, it would take approximately 0 seconds before the US invaded them under some whimsical pretext (drug gangs probably) and overthrew their government to prevent this. In fact this is, more or less, what the Cuban Missile Crisis was where we were willing to bring the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation over it, and that was an even lighter weight version of this event since there isn't even a land route from Cuba to the US obviously!
But in this scenario would you think Russia deploying weapons in Mexico is a precursor to them invading? Or that the US would be worried about that? Obviously not. Neither was Cuba. But it gives an adversarial power a tremendous strategic edge, while you get less than nothing out of it since it reduces your 'power' in the relative strategic balance of countries.
I still think Ukraine wasn't primarily about Russia's military security though. I mean the US/Nato could stick missiles in Estonia if they wanted.
It may have been about political security. If Ukraine which is basically at least part Russian had become a prosperous democracy on Russia's doorstep it would make it harder for Putin to justify his autocracy. In fact that one may come to pass.
Thank you for repeating Russian propaganda. But the truth is that Ukraine is sovereign nation and has every right to decide their future and give a fuck about Russia feelings. Russia is the aggressor and blaming anything on NATO is laughable propaganda.
Perhaps the objective isn't to conquer the whole of the Ukraine, but only most of it, leaving the western parts independent.
This seems to be pushed as the right approach wrt the Ukraine in Alexander Dugin's Foundations of Geopolitics, which apparently is used as the source for Russia's current "Eurasianist" geopolitical doctrine:
Not trying to be the world's policeman would allow tremendous downsizing of the military and its associated expense.
Decoupling and isolation is a very rational response if nuclear proliferation is going to accelerate, in order to avoid having entangling alliances pull the country into a nuclear equivalent of the first World War.
"World's policeman", that's what you tell little kids America was doing. America didn't invade Iraq or Afghanistan for world peace. There were strong economic and strategic motives behind those invasions.
Strategic motivation? If one assumes the US is going to be globally involved, yes, but that's begging the question.
Economic motivation? Not so much now, with the US being a dominant oil producer, and with petroleum itself losing importance. Even then, it's questionable if this could justify the full cost of the US military.
I think the original motivation was two fold: it was a combination of some sort of moral obligation to defend the "free world" from authoritarians, and (after WW2) a desire to keep small countries (and recent WW2 enemies) from deciding their only option for defense was their own nuclear deterrent.
Are you expecting Ukraine to ultimately buckle and collapse if the war of logistics continues for long enough?
It doesn't seem like Russia has the will, or potentially the capability, to actually conquer Ukraine rather than squat on some of their land and hope to move their border.
>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.
If we're assuming a nuclear war then the US military is comparable to a bunch of other militarys. And the "various geopolitical reasons", on examination, includes possible outcomes like the US being pummelled through the stone age and out the other side, or more mild ones like New York being flattened. It isn't really much of an option in any foreseeable scenario where their goose isn't already being cooked.
So yes they are scary, but they aren't that scary relatively speaking. We've left the brief era where the US could exert military supremacy over the globe and it is ambiguous who has the "best" military among the major powers [0]. Militarys are generally a tool for self-destruction anyway so the term is a bit ambiguous, most of the big empires fall because they get too enamoured with military solutions over economic and diplomatic excellence.
[0] Does the US military even perform to spec? There is clearly a lot of corruption and I've seen it described on HN as a disguised welfare program.
Re: US military quality, it's both. Massively corrupt jobs program on the weapons acquisition side, combined with an incredibly effective devolved leadership structure on the logistics and combat side. Tested frequently over the last few decades. The bet in favor of them is that the weapons corruption gets sorted out once it really needs to be.
The US is the second largest manufacturing power, the largest economic power and the largest military power, but those things aren't even what makes it a scary threat.
There are things that make up the US that vastly increase its potential for self-organization when it is given an organizing principle. Yes, dynamism has taken a hit over the decades, but there are also a lot of aimless purposeless people right now that do have an appetite for purpose if given one.
Major modern countries today have red lines defined that they won't cross in order to keep the peace. Russia says don't attack Moscow or otherwise attempt to replace their government or they will nuke you. Nukes do change the structure of future wars between nuclear powers, which might actually make some aspects of it less extreme.
If Ukraine had nukes, they could have a red line like, "If you keep hitting hospitals and schools, we will nuke you. Powerplants and railroads we understand, but if you show us with your actions that you have no mercy for the weak and innocent, we will end you." Instead, they have nothing of the sort.
All the US has to do is wait for the enemy to make catastrophic moral failures and it's game over, because it rallies the people, the companies, the innovative talent, the allies, etc to reject it with force. It crystallizes the purpose.
We are energy independent and are advancing even more ways to expand the dimensions of that. You can't destroy our government, because we'll just recreate it.
We're forcing our allies to become more independent, because they got too soft and we need them hardened up. That only makes the US stronger, because strong allies are better for all of us. It makes us a better deterrent against war happening in the first place.
Meanwhile China is surrounded by countries that dislike it and don't trust it. Giving Canada and Mexico tough love is no comparison to the fundamental failures in the relationships China has with its neighbors in their region.
India is far more US aligned than with China, regardless of tensions. Neither North Korea nor Russia trust China, but they are forced to deal with it despite the buddy-buddy optics.
Failing to benefit from so many possible optimizations at the basic strategic level in their local region, any confidence in a favorable outcome for the CCP seems misplaced. Their failings probably cascade down into the other levels of preparation as well.
“Forcing our allies to become more independent” is a HILARIOUS way to say “we’re destroying our allied relationships, reducing our intelligence capabilities and the chances that they would form a coalition with us in any armed conflict”.
I’m just imagining someone getting a divorce saying they’re “teaching their spouse the value of independence”.
India has been gently aligning [0, 1] with the Russia-China bloc that the US has been encouraging to form over the last couple of years. Nothing crazy but that looks like undermining the US to me. It certainly isn't supporting US policy and the US has been trying to pressure them over it without much success.
Could China attack US? Why would US try to attack China in asia? Not an expert but that feels like losing proposition. I think people confuse proxy wars with wars. US is under no threat of being actually attacked.
It counts as an attack, but how close was US to actually being taken over? Usually when you fight a war the real risk is that you cease to exist as a country. I know nothing about war strategy, but seems to me US is in a great position as long as you get along with Canada and Mexico.
> And the US has already been undermined by the likes of China, Russia and India
With respect, Russia is being decimated (literally, at least the "big fortresses" that Russia has been gnawing at for months such as Pokrovsk have insane loss rates) by Ukraine's army who are mostly using donated shoddy Soviet-era remainders and decades old Western surplus.
If the US were to wage actual war with modern technology against either Russia or China (whose arms are based off of Soviet designs and stolen American plans), there is no chance in hell either would be able to do much against the US.
India is different but they're at least a democracy that's reasonably worth calling it that (despite Modi doing his best to dismantle it). I don't see any attempts of India to project power anywhere other than in its immediate neighborhood (i.e. the border disputes with Pakistan and China). They're no threat.
Replace the word US in this paragraph with Nazi Germany and the issue with this statement becomes apparent. If the only way you can maintain power is via physical force over others then you're a bully and it won't be long until others unite against you. The US may have the best military in the world but it does not have the ability to take on the entire globe. It's previous status actually came from the fact people used to look up to and admire it - something that has been steadily declining for quite some time now. Growing up, I used to think the US was the coolest place on Earth. Yesterday, I felt sick watching a video on YouTube about how an estimated 1500 people are living in the flood tunnels of Las Vegas and routinely die whenever there is heavy rain. Every place has problems, but you can't just shout "We're the best country on Earth" anymore and have people believe you when on a daily basis the world is seeing so much evidence to the contrary.
> Yesterday, I felt sick watching a video on YouTube about how an estimated 1500 people are living in the flood tunnels of Las Vegas and routinely die whenever there is heavy rain.
> The USA is still THE powerhouse economy of the world.
Things look decidedly different if you exclude the ad companies (Google, Meta, ...) and associated shovel sellers, see the WaPo article about the S&P 493 from a few days ago.
Not to discount physical infrastructure, but the world is quite digital these days and being at the absolute top of the software + associated techs economy is nothing to sniff at.
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.
Information is not culture. Universities teach culture - moral attitudes. They don't just transfer information.
This applies to science and engineering as much as it applies to the arts, but you need a good education to understand what "morality" means in this context.
The collapse of the West started when the old Enlightenment morality - education of all kinds as a collective good - was replaced by the MBA culture of greed and vapid narcissism.
DEI was a weak and ineffectual response to that. The dysfunction goes far deeper, and universities are now a vector of it rather than a bulwark against it.
> Why would I want my DEI consulting to actually solve the underlying problem
This applies to any consulting. Normally you want to solve a problem, because there's another thousand of companies that need similar problem solved. You don't get many people coming into a company with an immediate "I'm going to try to not improve anything" plan.
> The left-extremists say "you need to give me a job in order to make your team more diverse".
This is seriously weird even as a misrepresentation. The extreme left is for changing diversity overall rather than just "give me a job". (If we actually go extreme left, it would be closer to "we've got enough resources for everyone to not need jobs to survive" anyway)
The overproduction issue is interesting, but it really didn't need the exaggerated caricatures as examples.
The correlation is backwards. America’s mid-20th-century dominance was not the result of having only about 10 percent college graduates. It came from unique post–World War II advantages: intact industrial capacity, massive federal investment like the GI Bill, NSF, DARPA, and the interstate highway system, and the fact that global competitors were rebuilding from destruction. The GI Bill greatly expanded access to higher education and economists widely credit it with boosting productivity, innovation, and the growth of the middle class. Rising college attainment in the 1990s and 2000s coincides with globalization, offshoring, and wage stagnation, which makes this a correlation problem rather than evidence that more education causes national decline.
It was 10% of the US population who went to college before the GI bill, which then doubled to 20% over a decade following the war. Now >50% have post secondary. 70% attempt post-secondary after high school
Before WW2 only about 40% of people completed high school, now it’s at 90%
Those numbers actually back up the point. The jump in education after WWII happened during the biggest boom years the US ever had. The rise to 40 percent college grads happened much later, during globalization and offshoring. So the slowdown is about the economy changing, not people getting more education. It is just a bad correlation.
Right, there was clearly much more capacity for advanced education with the rise of technology (farming advancements, medicine, electronics etc) that started before WW2
There is something to the point about needing a correction in post secondary education and making university again a specialized place rather than the catch all default generalized institutions. Where 70% of the population tries to waits 3-5yrs+ to enter the workforce in exchange for lots of debt. A debt heavily incentivized by cheap gov backed loans, subsidies, credential inflation, and very profitable immigration schemes.
Sure, there are real issues with cost, debt, and credential creep, but that does not change the basic point: the expansion of education itself was a net positive for decades. The problems we have now come from financing, policy choices, and a labor market that shifted under globalization. Blaming education levels for broader economic or social trends just mixes up the cause and effect.
> 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.
Sorry to say that I don't think the post-WWII boom had anything to do with sound economic policies, but rather the chance fact that the United States was the only industrialized nation unravaged by war and capable of capturing a major share of global economic spending because of that.
So... I wouldn't look too nostalgically backwards for policy guidance when we have an entirely different set of geopolitical circumstances.
> The inheritors and descendants of those that directly created the problem are screaming at the colleges as the problem
Not to mention rank-and-file American conservatives who see universities as bastions of liberal thought/power, and create threadbare, post-hoc arguments as to why universities have to be dismantled or politically reeducated when partisanship has to be disguised.
Anthropology and communications saw no registered Republicans. English, Sociology, and Art departments had a ratio of around 40:1 Democrat professors Republican professors, whereas in technical fields the ratio drops considerably to only 1.6:1 in engineering, and around 5:1 for economics, chemistry, and mathematics.
Langbert notes:
> The political registration of full-time, Ph.D.-holding professors in top-tier liberal arts colleges is overwhelmingly Democratic. Indeed, faculty political affiliations at 39 percent of the colleges in my sample are Republican free—having zero Republicans.
> When asked for their political identities on a scale of “very liberal” to “very conservative,” 23.2% of respondents identified as “very liberal,” 38.53% identified as “somewhat liberal,” 24.48% identified as moderates or centrists, 9.92% identified as “somewhat conservative” and 3.87% identified as “very conservative.”
> Across 14 departments in the Social Sciences and Humanities, the report identified 312 Democrat faculty (88%) and only 4 Republicans (1.1%), a ratio of around 78 to 1.
> The conservatives are right about the partisan bias of universities
Yes - and?
Police forces and catholic churches skew conservative, but I figure it's an emergent property based on the self-selected group who join the respective organizations plus some exposure to new ideas.
You seem like you expect political "neutrality", but if you look at at any institution, you'll find "bias": theatre fook, country music, poets, small Business owners, baristas , farmers, CxOs, software engineers tend to lean one way or another on average. The battle is not to establish political neutrality everywhere, but selective against universities because the staff & students leans left. I'm yet to hear conservatives complain about the political bias in the Fraternal Order of Police or the FBI.
Looking at history, every nascent autocracy takes aim at independent intellectuals, like clockwork. First to be neutralized is the opposition, then the press, then the intellectuals in higher education.
> I figure it's an emergent property based on the self-selected group who join the respective organizations plus some exposure to new ideas.
There are plenty of conservatives interested in anthropology; there’s no reason to think they’ve self-selected out of the pool, so then we have to consider if conservatives enter the field but are exposed to new ideas such that none remain conservatives for long (this seems unlikely), or that these departments have been taken over by people who explicitly use their influence within these departments to promote certain narratives; this is far more likely as they have been explicitly stating that this is what they are doing for decades now.
This theory is further corroborated by where you see this bias; it’s the least pronounced in quantitative, technical fields (mathematics, engineering, chemistry), and most pronounced in fields that are almost completely qualitative.
> or that these departments have been taken over by people who explicitly use their influence within these departments to promote certain narratives
What mechanisms do these department heads use to suppress conservative viewpoints in research? While politics in academia can be vicious, it's never a grand conspiracy like you think it is, it's typically, and depressingly petty issues and grudges.
Being interested is not the same as being competent.
Conservatism is not a doctrine of competence. Experience shows time and again that conservatives can't think, can't plan, and can't govern. They act in emotional and purely self-interested ways to promote rigid hierarchies, and are reliably surprised by consequences that are obvious and predictable to rational educated actors.
Is this a problem? We expect universities to have a pro-truth, pro-reality, pro-knowledge bias, which are things the Republican party overtly rejects. We could expect that Republicans might not make it to universities as often, or they might not want to attend, or they might cease being Republicans upon learning facts and logic. None of this would be surprising and none of this would necessarily be a problem by itself.
> Not to mention rank-and-file American conservatives who see universities as bastions of liberal thought/power
To be fair, they kind of are. In the 20th century there were conservative academics at elite universities and they've since largely been excommunicated as heretics. Which has been a mistake, because then the people who would have agreed with them instead reject academia as a whole and latch on to demagogues, which is so much worse.
This is not true. Whole conservative departments do well and exist. Moreover, whole ideologically pure christian conservative universities exist. Literally kicking off students for "infractions" that go against evangelical orthodoxy.
Some people got off due to sexual harassment not being as cool as before, history and sociology started to study women and minorities. The problem is that conservatives see that just existing as a threat. If the history is not biased their way, they feel like victims.
Being segregated into different universities is exactly the thing you need not to happen, and your attitude is the exemplification of the problem. Who is going to feel welcome if their concerns are blindly maligned as prejudiced and in bad faith by default?
It is not like liberals would created religious colleges. Religious colleges were created by evangelicals and they have rules that explicitly punish things like "woman having male visitor" or "being gay" or "not being religious". If what you want is ideological purity of evangelical Christianity, then yes, you have to create own institution. Which is exactly what conservatives did.
Because it is extremely valid for other institutions and students to NOT be subject to the above. They were not kicked off other universities and less radical Christians still go there. Issue was that other universities did not punished non conservative thought and behavior enough. These conservatives do not want to share space with other nor to welcome anyone except those who are as conservative as them.
Your argument is typical "up is down and down is up" reversal. Conservatives want to create their own segregated spaces, because places that accept and tolerate non conservatives are just not acceptable to them. Somehow that is framed as problem with those other places not accepting conservatives (meaning not punishing non conservatives enough).
> 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.
That is absolutely untrue - a large part of the jobs were either outsourced and/or automated to be trivial, but a large part is essentially barely made easier by technology - food service, all the jobs necessary for running and building infrastructure, homes etc. is only changing very slowly due to technology - this is due to the nature of the fields, even if there were rapid advancement in plumbing (there weren't) in the past few decades, most of the buildings are standing and rebuilding them makes little sense - same with water treatment facilities, power plants etc.
In fact I would argue in some ways society is even less capable today - the percentage of people skilled in the trades is much lower, so it would be much harder to rebuild from scratch.
> 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.
I love to point this out to anti-welfare people and make them blue screen. Especially when they're not willing to acknowledge unethical solutions, such as euthanizing the stupid or acknowledging that not having welfare for an unemployable population shits things up for the rest of society.
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.
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.
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.
While it's true that it was possible to support a family on a single unskilled laborer income in the '50s, their standard of living was far below anything most people would accept today.
A single income family in US with the husband working at a factory in fifties and sixties could afford a home with washing machine, dish washer, TV and a phone. Surely the home was smaller, but it was easier to clean, the TV screen was tiny, but then the family can go to a cinema. There was no internet, but for information one could go to the library. So how it was far below what people in US could accept today?
There are certainly a few people that would accept it, look at the whole "tiny home" and "van life" phenomena. It's possible that more would, if smaller houses were available. Builders make much more profit on larger houses though.
I guess apartment living is closer to what people had post-war, but everybody wants to buy a house to get in the real estate gravy train.
Depends how you measure, surely. They had less TVs and computers and prepackaged food, the same amount of sunlight, and more freedom (as measured by average income to rent ratio).
It’s likely that automation is about to turn the world on its ear vis-a-vis low skilled employment. The cost of human sustenance and care is surprisingly high compared to electricity, steel, carbon fiber, and silicon.
People can operate heavy equipment and even fly planes without a fancy sounding degree, so I don't think some stupid office job is so complex that a HS grad can't handle it.
The problem is that almost everyone is now expected to get a degree which necessarily devalues the whole thing.
It is now necessary to get a doctorate if you want to really signal academic prowess, but that comes with an incredibly high opportunity and personal cost.
Society really needs to just accept that just over half of the population is never going to maka a good doctor, engineer, physicist, etc. and that is perfectly OK.
We readily understand that very few people can become professional athletes and don’t think any less of those that can’t.
> A high fraction of college attendance is better correlated with the 21st century decline in America's situation.
You’re basically arguing that having more uneducated people is better. If that were the case, why did most of the world bend western and American in the latter 20th century culturally?
The problems now are that we have a super-old man and a bunch of others with super-old ideas at the helm, and as a whole none are both wise and caring. I say this as a middle-aged gen-X’r.
The missing ingredient is that no one fucking cares about anyone other than themselves. It’s not a problem that we need to solve by dumbing people down. I’d argue that we’re not educated enough.
> You’re basically arguing that having more uneducated people is better.
Are you arguing that having more people educated in a narrow range of topics is necessarily better? In the USA in the 1950s I would suggest there were more people who knew how to make machine tools or even food.
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.
> A high fraction of college attendance is better correlated with the 21st century decline in America's situation.
Correlation != causation, but let’s go the correlation route and see where it goes…
China had correlation between higher-ed and economic growth, so I think you’re just trying to make an argument to support a fascist dictator who doesn’t want to be the dumbest person in the room.
The decline in Christianity, rise in apathy, rise of industry in other countries, offensive wars, rise of entertainment culture, etc. are correlated also.
One could also argue that the rise of uneducated conservatives was associated with U.S. decline.
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.
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.
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.
From European perspective US system is a joke. All built on even bigger joke of high school. Which fails to teach students what they need in general education. And thus you get some weird "general" education irrelevancy being part of degree. Not to even mention how Master's level is not the standard most aim towards.
> 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.
It’s unpopular to say, but a disproportionate amount of value is of course derived from people who are both educated and have immediate access to resources to fully exploit that education as well as the risk tolerance to innovate in the process, and the social status to build strong trust and social bonds with other similarly prepared people…so although it pains me to say it, yes?
It is certainly plausible that the most benefit to society comes from people that are both educated and empowered.
Whether the cost of that empowerment > the burden outsourced to society, well, that is another discussion.
Perhaps more on point, because I definitely think we can find examples of this in practice, it’s perhaps more truthy and also more actionable to say that college provides its optimal outcomes when it serves people who have intrinsic gifts that are empowered by knowledge. Sometimes these gifts are resources, but often these gifts are cognitive brilliance. Either one is like oxidiser for the fuel of knowledge, but especially brilliance when given resources.
I’m pretty sure that for the majority of college graduates, aside from its social signalling value, the amount of their secondary education that directly benefits them in their life could fit in a couple of years of summer school or a year of community college.
A quarter million dollars in debt is a tragic price to pay for a couple thousand dollars of educational utility. A system that requires a social signal 100x more costly than the value it represents is externalising that cost onto everyone, and the only benefits flow to financiers and the moneyed class.
Aside from educational titles (as opposed to capabilities) society is generally sensible regarding the cost of symbols vs the reality they facade.
We recognise the ridiculousness of people owing $90,000 for a truck when they live in a dilapidated trailer on a rented lot. We understand that a man who lives hand to mouth but wears a half of kilogram of gold around his neck is probably not making the best life decisions. We ridicule the faux-intellectual with their ridiculously stilted props. But somehow, we are convinced to dress up our children like heirs to the crown and send them to finishing school for their jobs in retail. It’s a profound mis-investment.
It’s also worth noting that it is way more expensive to provide an education to the intellectual proles than it is to educate brilliant and hungry minds. We are shovelling money (distilled human effort) into a furnace of misery in the service of vanity.
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).
The US made a big shift from public financing via grants to public financing via loans. During the same period there was a ton of information/propaganda disseminated about how much more lifetime income college grads made vs high school grads. The companies making these loans are doing very well.
If I believed in conspiracy theories I might think this was all planned.
In my country the only restriction for university is that you have a highschool diploma.
Getting into the medical faculty is harder because the government does pay for everything and training doctors is expensive- for those the university picks the best and brightest.
The government also has programs in place to send out students to Harvard and MIT as the future elite of the nation.
> 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.
> 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 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.
I'm not talking about Ivy schools. I mean regional state and private schools that educate the majority of people who attend college. These do not have multi billion dollar endowments unless you are summing them all up.
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.
Liberal arts is a huge grab bag of courses with varying rigor, quality, appeal and difficulty.
One of the best courses I had in college was a metalworking course during which I learned to weld.
But like many (engineering) students, for most of the liberal arts credit, I went with stuff where I could get the best possible grade with the least possible work.
> Do all colleges require engineering students to take liberal arts?
15 credit hours of liberal arts education isn't why college in the US is so expensive, and if one pays attention, they might even learn something from it.
If nothing else, you'll learn how to read and write.
> 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.
>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.
Ok you do make a good point about people coming into tech for the money. It was quite a recent phenomenon. About 15 years ago I was finishing at my engineering focused university and my CS department was considered loser ville. Only the deeply passionate people wanted to enroll in that program. Everyone else went into Engineering or the sciences. Fast forward a few years later, and they are the largest department in the university. We are at the tail end of a massive bubble and its possible that if AI sticks around or the tech industry cannot support these valuations, its likely that high salary gigs will become scarce. I guess we will then see if this field grew because most people genuinely wanted to be here vs people just looking for dollar signs.
>This is why I chose the words "bookworm" and "studious" because those things do not necessarily mean tech.
Yeah I'd imagine those kids would have gone into Engineering or similar fields instead. They really arent the people I was talking about. I considered the social structure growing up to be the "jocks" at one end of the social spectrum and the "techies" at the other end with a massive amount of regular people in the middle.
If you take these middle people and just filter for B average grades or higher, these middle people wouldn't necessarily consider tech because it just wasn't really a 24 hour lifestyle thing for highschool kids in the 2000s. Yeah we had computers and video games but for most people, computers were that beige box in the den you'd play with once in a while, not a career. I recall in high school (mid 2000s) coding was offered and they couldn't even fill the entire class. The only course computer related that had any relevance was graphic design. The industry really expanded post iPhone when computing became a 24/7 lifestyle. In my opinion thats when the normies started considering computing as a career because it now impacted them directly.
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.
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.
The real issue is we've largely abandoned the public university from a funding standpoint. Now the costs of a public institution is beyond the ability for many Americans to pay. The unstable job market has led many to believe the risks outweigh the rewards.
> 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.
For me it was the opposite. I came into college full of academic curiosity, and left completely burnt out by a system that cares about grades and proving knowledge much more than the pursuit of knowledge.
If you can't prove knowledge gained, would that not indicate that the pursuit was fruitless?
Regardless of your endpoint in that pursuit, you should have gained intermediate foundational knowledge along the way, even if you haven't arrived at your endpoint.
If you cannot show mastery of that intermediate knowledge, then any kind of journey for knowledge would have failed.
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.
The middle class is something in between the capitalist class and the working class, it's badly defined.
If you're in the capital class, you're getting your income from the assets you own. If you're in the working class, you're getting your income from working.
I've heard multiple definitions for a middle class, eiher one that owns some capital in the form of rental apartments or stocks, or that the middle class has a decenr amount of discretionary income.
Personally I don't think the middle class is that useful of a term to make sense of the economy. I also have a feeling that people like the term middle class because it muddies the waters when it comes to understanding the relationship between capital and labor.
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.
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.
That's a very ideological take, especially this part:
> It’s peanut butter and chocolate that has served democracy and its people well
Most people are now saying in polls it didn't serve them well! You're disagreeing with the majority of people's lived experiences. And of those who say it was worth it, a lot will be people in denial. Nobody wants to rack up huge debts and then admit it was a mistake. If you were to somehow measure how many people it has actually served poorly, instead of whether people admit it served them poorly, the numbers would be worse.
And serving democracy? No way! The Biden presidency stressed democracy by illegally attempting to bail liberal arts majors out of their debts, an extreme violation of the social contract. And arguing this stuff served people well when they're telling you right out that it didn't, is the kind of anti-democratic attitude that liberal arts colleges incubate in their student body. It's a big reason they're now openly loathed by so many people.
A good example of the problem is when you claim the academy has "some kind of intellectual idealism separate from economic incentive". There is no "separate from economic incentive". Anywhere, ever. For an adult to have such a belief is like still believing Santa Claus is real. It's economic incentives that have led to these professors creating a flood of non-replicable research using unscientific methods. Publish more papers = get promoted, even if the claims are false. So they publish lots of false papers. Incentives = outcomes, always.
Professors brainwashing people at vulnerable stages of their lives into believing false things about human nature is the number one reason why politics is so polarized, why democracy is so stressed all the time and it's so difficult to get anything done. It can easily take decades for people to learn that it isn't true and sometimes they never learn at all (like, because they went into academia themselves).
Friend, go to a community theatre production and you will find people engaged in something for which there is no economic incentive. Or learning a new language after retirement. Or playing church softball. There’s more to life than money, and there’s good in the world dollars can’t capture.
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.
Job training is a lot more than learning how to use equipment. It's about showing up on time, dealing with coworkers and being a productive member of a team. That's best learned on the job and is a big reason people don't like new grads. Its like going out on a date with someone that has never had a girlfriend. Let someone else break them in and screen them.
Higher ed unfortunately almost desocializes a lot of people. They live in a bubble and become insufferable obsessed with politics and social issues that are disruptive and inappropriate in the workplace
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
That course has 28 credits in first year, 3 of which are spent on computer science (arguably 3 more on "Roadmap to Computing"). Second year has a little more. Third and fourth year are heavy on CS/SE topics, but still have some time allocated to others.
I don't disagree with students learning Calculus and Statistics and even Physics as part of a CS course, and I think it's excellent that they take at least two courses in English composition. But you can't look at that four-year curriculum and say nothing could possibly be cut (turned into an elective) in favour of a History of Computers module.
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.
Funnily enough there is a parasitic vine in Australian rain forests that kills its host and then thrives.
It grows completely around the tree and creates its own trunk on the outside. The tree underneath eventually cannot get any nutrients in its sap and dies. The vine then feeds on the tree as it rots away on the inside.
There is indeed a mismatch between the traditional de jure mission of the university and the de facto mission it has today.
What is the university traditionally for? Education. What curriculum is most quintessentially constitutive of education? The liberal arts (traditionally understood, not the flakey pot-smoking/Dead Poets Society counterfeit). What is the purpose of the liberal arts? The free man.
What is the mission of the university today? Job training (putting to the side the question of how well it actually accomplishes this end). What are jobs? The servile arts.
There’s the heart of the contradiction. The university has a split personality that has rendered it bad at education and bad at job training, and to add insult to injury, it charges you Ritz prices for Motel 6 service.
The idea of universal education was never sensible. “Democratization” leads to mediocrity, because now market forces demand you satisfy the customer. You fail everyone by doing this. You get people that are uneducated (despite what they fancy themselves to be) and poorly trained for work, and on top of that, burdened by crushing debt. What a great start to adult life!
I propose that the first fundamental change needs to occur first in primary education, which is generally quite poor. Try teaching the basic liberal arts in primary schools (some adaptation of the trivium/quadrivium). Then, either after high school or by bifurcating high school into university-bound and trade-bound tracks, you choose one or the other track. In general, the majority should be in the trade track (where “trade” includes more that just plumbing or construction or whatever, but also vast swathes of what we put people through universities for for no justifiable reason).
Then we unsaddle the university of its job-training duties. Instead, you have apprenticeships and technical schools and so on to prepare people for their occupations. The university is stripped of anything that weakens its mission as educating institution. Valuable ancillary activities are spun off into, say, technical institutes.
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
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.)
> (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.
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.
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.
They worked at a power plant, a place where dumb mistakes can cause explosions and kill people. The power plant wasn't racist and hired blacks into the labor department, but because it was just manual labor that department paid worse than the other more technical departments.
When SCOTUS found against the power company they sent a clear message that merely being a technical, safety-critical job was an insufficient basis to establish a need to test people for intelligence. And as it's hard to argue that testing isn't needed for people who could cause massive power outages but is for <job X>, that was widely interpreted to ban such aptitude testing for any kind of job.
>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.
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.
Another way to see it is to ask why a company should be able to reap the labour benefits of their workers and then force other people to pay for their basic needs?
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.
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.
As a Canadian, for all the faults of our healthcare system, the fact that I don't have to stick with a job to maintain healthcare for myself or my family is a massive amount of freedom I take for granted.
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, 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".
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.
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.
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.
> American health insurance is insurance in name only - picture health insurance models laid on top of your car:
Health insurance is more insurance than car insurance in the US. There is a legal out of pocket maximum of $17k or so, and networks don’t matter for emergency situations. In fact, people get millions of dollars of healthcare from health insurance whereas auto insurance provides a maximum of $500k after which you have to use umbrella insurance.
Health insurance premiums are not insurance premiums, because legally, health insurance sellers cannot underwrite the health risks. Legally, young and healthy people have to subsidize old and sick, via age rating factor caps (3x and even 1x in NY and 2x in MA), and not being able to price pre existing conditions.
Which means health insurance premiums are mostly a tax if you are healthy and less than 50 years old or so, especially if you don’t plan on giving birth that year.
Auto insurance premiums are insurance, because the insurer is pricing your risk of loss, based on your driving history/driving distance/location/etc.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
The EU is aggressively neoliberal or liberal-conservative, and that is the reason universities have begun to be more expensive. It's related to austerity, privatization, the aggressive revision of tax codes, and New Public Management.
The left has not been popular in the EU since the 70s, which is why this development has gotten increasingly aggresive in the last few decades. You cannot seriously suggest that the EU has moved left in any meaningful way. The EU commission is currently trying to implement that every new regulation can only pass once an old regulation can be removed. It's a neoliberal dream, where the amount of regulation can only go down, and public funds are allocated to private companies more and more.
This is especially true for universities, where public funding programs for research has begun to be funneled to startups instead of research groups.
> where public funding programs for research has begun to be funneled to startups instead of research groups.
It is darkly amusing that in one post you claim "the left has not been popular since the 70s" whilst admitting that the EU is centrally planning new companies. That's very much the sort of thing the left did in the 1970s.
> You cannot seriously suggest that the EU has moved left in any meaningful way ... the EU commission is currently trying to implement that every new regulation can only pass once an old regulation can be removed.
And who believes they'll really do it? They only got to that point after ignoring decades of warnings from the right that their left wing approach would crush their own economic power, which it did.
It's a common enough claim that "the left" refers to exactly the same set of ideas that it did in 1930, and therefore that no modern entity is left wing. But this is spurious. There are still left wing people and groups, that claim to be so and nobody disagrees with them.
All that happened is that as left wing economics became discredited over the course of the 20th century the left became better at obfuscating what they were doing. After the working classes disappointed by not rising up in revolution, the concept of equality shifted to be about gender and race instead. The EU doesn't want to openly nationalize industries, but is really keen on feminism, regulation and mass third world migration.
And economically, the left didn't need to obfuscate much. The gap between heavy regulation and nationalization is small. CEOs get to pretend that they're still in charge, but with no strong commitment to private property rights they're ultimately just transient administrators and there's not much reason to sign up for the stresses of being one. So - no startups.
Centrally planning? My guy, the EU is not founding companies, it is giving existing companies subsidies. The profits of those companies will not be public, they are private.
Nationalization and regularization are both on the decline. The opposite has happened: privatization of state monopolies and deregulatization.
I also think it's hilarious that you think a) the EU is feminist, and b) that feminism is leftist. What you are describing is liberalism, a right wing political position.
And even the liberal right is losing ground to the conservative right. The EU commission is far more conservative than it ever has been, and hard-right parties are in government in at least six EU countries (see e.g., https://www.politico.eu/article/mapped-europe-far-right-gove...), with conservative governments elsewhere. This is a strict break with tradition, where the extreme right has been excluded from European governments by consensus of other parties ever since the second world war.
Your beliefs are not aligned with reality. I am also personally in the middle of this research money refunnelling, I can vouch forst hand that research money is being funneled to startups and other private companies, while austerity measures are hitting hard across the EU.
I find this stage is more important for social development than intellectual development. An early adult stage where you go some place away from home in a relatively easy, same aged social experience, with people of diverse backgrounds is a net social good.
There are other ways of getting the same thing. Like if your country has some kind of compulsory service.
But maybe let’s stop pretending college is just about the intellectual stuff and see it as a social good.
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.
There's a simple and effective escape hatch: study abroad. Europe, Australia, South America, Canada even. Some countries are more affordable than others but the most expensive (by far) option is staying in the US.
From the point of view of developing your brain, leaving your country is a free education in itself. There is also the effect of embedding yourself in a network of expats made up of the best and brightest from countries all over the world. That all comes on top of the education you receive. And if you are less in it for the intellectual stuff and are more into drinking and partying, college life in the US is pretty lame compared to some university towns across the world. Cheaper, wilder, better.
There is an actually easy an effective escape hatch right here in the US:
Community college to state school path.
You can get a full bachelors degree for ~$35k. All four years, $35k. Not per year. Full degree. $35k.
And that's before any scholarships or grants.
Kids and parents are just insane though, and want to flex about the college they are going to from day one. Its become a ritualistic practice with social shame attached to going to community school.
I can vouch for studying abroad. But can you get loans and scholarships for it as easily as studying at home? Even if the university is free you must pay for food and housing.
Studying abroad in Canada is not nearly as affordable. Tuition alone for international students here is exorbitant ($40,000/year and up). We don’t give any subsidies whatsoever for international students. Instead, we use their tuition fees to subsidize the tuition of our domestic students.
> 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.
They’re paying less, but they can also only afford to pay less.
I went to college with many people who were paying heavily reduced tuition rates and it was still a significant financial burden for them.
So even if the expected value of the degree is high in the long run, the downside risk is immediate financial ruin.
It is also worth noting that the non-wealthy pay for higher education in two ways: first through tuition, and second through the taxes required to fund the very programs that provided their "discount."
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.
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.
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?
Yeah, and they made a push to rein it in back in the early aughts. As with all things grade inflation, what goes down, must come back up. I'm sure we'll be back here in 20 years having the same conversation.
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.
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.
I agree that some random leetcode-hard problem is not a good indicator, but if you can’t write fizzbuzz or can’t sum an array of integers, you’ve given me important data about your skills as a programmer on that day.
Yeah, LeetCode interviews are their own weird universe. Even smart people get wrecked until they realize you have to treat it like an exam. Most failures aren’t about ability, it’s just pattern recall under pressure. I’ve passed some rounds I had no business passing just because I stayed calm. StealthCoder helped me a bit there since it keeps me from blanking during the actual interview.
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.
I'd agree with you 100% if these were Leetcode mediums and hards. They were not, these were quite literally the easiest LC easies I could find.
While my career involves writing code, I am not a SWE, I have never done any formal leetcode prep, and I have no formal education in technology beyond a high school CS class. I have no college degree whatsoever, not even an associate's degree.
I had a rule I stuck to when doing these interviews (which were for a SWE role) that felt very fair to me - I would not give these candidates any problem I couldn't solve in the same circumstances.
For reference, in the allotted time, one such candidate spent a good chunk of their time reading up on JS if/then syntax on w3schools. As I watched, I reminded them they could use any language they wanted, if they were more comfortable or familiar with others, and this Harvard CS grad declined, stating JS was their "strongest" language.
My best guess about these cases were rich kids / legacy admissions that weren't allowed to be failed for political reasons.
>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.
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.
I've worked a lot with Oxbridge and Ivy League folks and there is nothing particularly special about them. An Oxbridge degrees bestows an out-of-the-box premium personal brand, as you've demonstrated, as well as the social network, but not superior ability, in my experience
When I graduated, ahem, a few decades ago, the main difference between Oxbridge (maths graduates) and non-Oxbridge, specifically the Cambridge Maths Tripos, was that is was teaching the same content it had for the previous decades, whereas the maths courses at mine, and other 'Russell Group' universities had been dumbed down for the first couple of years. You could reach the same level as previous graduates by the final year, but you had to take a new additional course.
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.
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.
I partied my way through an easy major with nothing to do with my job. The people who didn't have no "superpowers" that I don't. The degree is a bunch of status signalling bullshit.
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.
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?
What is obvious and what would be hugely socially useful would be to have a completely online, completely free accredited option for degrees that don't need labs. That would cause downward pressure on all of tuition outside the top universities.
The price of college at this point is a ridiculous value proposition to the average student. Who cares about the top students and the most gifted people. They will be fine regardless. The average student is getting crushed and ripped off blind.
Ripping off entire generations of young people is really stupid and is going to have devastating long run social consequences.
That's easily solved with labor market reform. First implement federal and state law that requires every worker performing any profession to have a college degree in that field.
Then companies are evaluated on how much work is produced in their business (for example by revenue), and they have to either contract the equivalent number of people with college degrees, or even better - license the degree from a college graduate. This can also be used to pay for tuition. The student gets a mortgage that pays for her education when she enters college, and then the lender has the right to part of either her salary, or the licensing fee for her degree to companies that need it, or to people who need it.
Let's say a chef who hasn't gone to culinary college, he can pay a culinary college graduate 20% of his salary to use their degree, which is a professional license. Or a company needing programmers. They can hire immigrants or an AI to program, and pay licensing fees to computer science graduates who have the degree.
Think what I thriving market for banks, investors, and insurance companies! They will be able to package these licenses and offer them on the market to individual workers or to companies for competitive and efficient rates. The college student of course gets rewarded as well, as they can rent out their degree, or even sell it. So a good student can get several degrees, and have a very good income from both his own work and from degree licensing fees. Of course we'll make sure that students belonging to an oppressed class be allowed to license their one degree to several places at the same time.
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.
That's not exactly true. Funnily enough, you are extremely dependent on your sociological background.
If you come from a poor family and do very well, you'll get a full ride for sure. But if you do well but come from a well-off family that refuse to pay for your education, you are fucked. It's only university attendance that is (mostly) free. you still need to finance housing and life costs.
Since most good universities are in expensive cities and student loans are not much of a thing, it is an extremely selective process that targets both class standing (from a money standpoint) and parental implication.
There was a study on one of the most selective school in France and actually diversity of background has gone down in the last 20 years.
Europe is highly politicised and it was always about selecting for ideologically compatible behavior. Otherwise education wouldn't need so much government intervention/support, even if said education would be paid for by the taxpayer (everyone could get some amounts of credits, that they could spend on their institution of choice).
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
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).
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?
Because schools are in competition with one another to attract students (who have the ability to broadcast applications to multiple schools). The campus life factor is a major part of a student’s decision.
Put yourself into the student’s shoes. If you had the choice between two schools of otherwise roughly equal academic reputation but one offered luxurious residences while the other housed students like medieval monks, which would you choose?
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?
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.
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.
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 %
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?
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)
This can only be true if the society gets richer over timer from this process.
Considering that EU has actually become poorer and the gap is becoming larger every year passing, your theory of benefits from a well-educated populace is not well funded.
In the EU, the risk has been loaded onto everyone but the benefits are meager at best, and inexistent in practice.
This is the typical problem of socialist system where everyone bear the cost but the benefits are only distributed to those in power or those who could manipulate the system for their own benefits.
If that wasn't true, France wouldn't be in the political turmoil and economic disaster that it is today. Unsurprisingly, France has been dominated by marxist adjacent ideologies, co-opted by the "resistants", the real winners of WW2. The US won on the ground but largely lost the ideological battle, we are now seeing the result of that invisible battleground.
> 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.
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.
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.
Supply and demand. It's no surprise that when we had 10% of people going to university in the 1960's and now we have over 38.8% [1] that the economic value of a degree seems to be getting watered down.
No different than any other form of inflation from the government blowing on the fire (subsidizing with money) without adding any actual fuel (intrinsic value). Just like housing and healthcare.
A degree isn't SUPPOSED to be an arbitrary differentiator. It's supposed to signal that you know a certain thing because you studied it for 4 years. Whether that's currently true in America I couldn't say.
The problem is the funneling of dispassionate kids into college who just pick something and then game their way as much as possible to that piece of paper.
Employers want passionate and self-motivated workers, instead they have gotten a mountain of applicants who routinely forget everything they crammed the moment the test is over.
College is still worth it for maybe the top 100 schools especially well-funded state schools. Why? Because people still get hired based on such a connection alone. Think about Waterloo. It’s a mediocre school with a strong pipeline to SV. You wanna end up at SV but didn’t study hard in high school or just weren’t smart enough for MIT/Stanford? Go to Waterloo.
It seems mainly to be about cost, as opposed to opportunity. College tuition inflation is insane.
When it came time for me, I couldn’t even come close to affording college (in 1981). Long story, but there were many challenges to address.
I didn’t want to accept financial support from my family (see “long story,” above), but I did let them co-sign a government-backed student loan for $6,000, for a two-year, full-time trade school (which seemed outrageously expensive, back then).
Took ten years to repay, but I never regretted it.
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.
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.
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.
The correct way to do it is to utilize high school dual credit or dual enrollment offerings. Then you can shave off a year or two of college but still be eligible for freshman scholarships. Often cheaper than community college too.
Well, I’ll elaborate as a Gen-Xer; what you describe about financial aid was the exact same scenario we faced.
You are conflating the “exceptional” kid coming out if HS who is offered full rides (who clearly should take advantage of that and go straight into university with that full ride) with an average student who will have to pay for some or all of college. For the latter, community college for 2 years was and still is a good idea.
I think the point is that you need to feel out the options available, which are fairly unique to each kid based on geography and grades and parents and extra curriculars, not just take a one size fits all approach of going to community college.
>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.
Many private colleges like Rice cover 100% of costs for all students with parents under a fairly high salary. Almost 40% of MIT students have financial aid that's equal or greater than their tuition. This is starting to get more and more common for elite colleges and universities.
I got a full ride plus stipend to a pretty good but not great school, but one of the things I wish my parents pushed me on harder was applying to schools like MIT where I didn't bother applying because I didn't want to be saddled with debt. This was a couple decades back, and it's so much easier to get a full ride now if you can make it in (admittedly much harder now).
My point isn't to write off community college. It's that a talented and accomplished high schooler should set their sights higher because the old idea that all these elite colleges are unaffordable is rapidly changing.
Also, I am not sure if you know people taking CC courses recently, but they are often taught in a way that gives you what you paid for at $0. Prerecorded canned lectures, infuriating and curiosity crushing online worksheets, etc. I know multiple people who were excited to do free CC when it was made free for older (30+) students whose academic aims were immediately stamped out within one semester because there was no college instruction. Just endless online worksheets. These things exist in other higher ed paths too, but truly not to the extent that I've witnessed.
I understand where you are coming from in regards to elite university. Certainly if a student can get admitted into an ivy league they should at least inquire about eligible aid packages. I would assume someone with the intellect to get admitted there would put in the work to explore all options.
Ivy league is a shrinking circle of spots and does not represent the majority of where exceptionally talented students go to as a result. Lets just take the example I cited with the top 15% of high school students in each high school in NJ would likely exceed the available spots at all Ivy Leagues. You mentioned public institutions in your original message. States have programs in place to ensure exceptional students are taken care of.
>Also, I am not sure if you know people taking CC courses recently, but they are often taught in a way that gives you what you paid for at $0. Prerecorded canned lectures, infuriating and curiosity crushing online worksheets, etc. I know multiple people who were excited to do free CC when it was made free for older (30+) students whose academic aims were immediately stamped out within one semester because there was no college instruction. Just endless online worksheets. These things exist in other higher ed paths too, but truly not to the extent that I've witnessed.
I was admitted to an Engineering school but due to severe health issues with family, I was forced to move closer and enroll in community college so I have gone through this experience in a unique way (Enrolled at University -> Transfered to CC -> Transferred back to University).
This was ~15 years ago but during that time all the teachers at the CC had Masters degrees in their field and also had additional teaching credentials(some had PHDs).
I found that instruction was very focused on ensuring students learned material vs my experience at my public Research based university where either TAs taught courses or professors focused on their research would reluctantly lecture as a requirement.
I will concede that instruction in subjects like Math/Physics were not of the same caliber as university only because while CCs tended to give examinations consisting of hard versions of the practice problems assigned as homework, my Engineering university expected me to to deeply understand the material and would give very unique problems during the common exams that test the deeper understanding vs just technique.
I am surprised to hear the anecdote that you expressed as that wouldn't pass muster with the university accreditation bodies as well as the admissions departments of the public universities that renew the "transfer agreements" with the CCs. In NJ there is a requirement of a minimum standard of instruction needed or else the receiving university has the right to reject course credit from the CC and rescind transfer agreements. The universities know who comes from the CCs and they are assessing academic performance of those students. For example Rutgers does this with some CC in their CS classes as the subject material is not 1:1(they are offered as general elective credit instead so still allows the student to not fall too behind).
Let me ask you was this anecdote occuring during COVID? Maybe that accounts for the strange online instruction?
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.
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.
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).
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.
>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.
Here is my made up guess: The average university graduate will do better without degree than the current non-grad averages.
You are making the assumption that it all boils down to the degree (the difference in income). This can't be possible (maybe a majority of it, but not all of it). There are other factors (like being from a middle-class, higher IQ, etc.) that selects for going to Uni. and this has effect later on income.
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.
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
I would not assume earning that much for 43 years.
Why pay to get a degree in the US when you are competing for jobs not based on merit or qualifications? I can see why those in h1b’d industries like cs don’t see any point, and those are the industries where the most jobs and money have historically been. As goes the STEM labor market so goes the market for stuff like accounting, communications, sociology. A fair and secure labor market is a necessary condition for higher education to pay off. American workers compete for jobs with a global workforce, therefore American universities must be cost competitive with those in India, China, etc…. Tenure is like tarrifs, the cost of protectionism is paid by the consumer.
I work for a small Us-based med-tech company that is growing. We are paring down our offshore devs and hiring only US based devs now. I can assure you that if you have a good school on your resume it puts you at the top of the list. All things being equal, if you went to University of Vermont (like I did) and and someone else when to Harvard, you better believe I'm interviewing the Harvard kid first.
>Why pay to get a degree in the US when you are competing for jobs not based on merit or qualifications?
This is one of those things that people just say and while of course there are issues with our current system, this provably false and patently absurd. Do you not do a technical interview for new devs? You don't check their merit or qualifications? You just do a lottery? It's frustrating to hear comments like this because it reeks of people thinking they're so smart while ignoring reality.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Yeah I never get what these other comments are talking about with college not being useful. I basically learned my profession in college and now hire people who have done the same thing.
Maybe one thing to keep in mind is that there are a big range of colleges in the US. If you go to a poorly regarded party school then probably you have a good time and maybe even get some useful connections out of it, but the main advantage is presumably being able to check the ‘college degree’ box when applying to relatively ordinary jobs. If you go to Harvard then (a) you pay much less if you have limited means and (b) your future prospects are probably significantly better from the experience (this is a bit complicated – a lot of the good outcomes are due to capable and ambitious inputs so the direct benefit of the degree is more limited).
It is easy to read something about one subset of universities while subconsciously thinking of a different subset (eg all universities vs well-known / highly regarded / similar ones to your own).
When some survey says that people no longer see the value in the degree, it obviously doesn’t mean that no college is worth it.
Another thing: a lot of recent wage growth was in the lower end of the income distribution so better alternatives is part of the decreased desirability of college.
The signalling hypothesis (of Bryan Caplan [1]) lurks within your two premises. Neither the poorly regarded party school nor Harvard add much in the way of human capital. What both do is act as honest signals of intelligence, ability, conscientiousness, and resourcefulness (including family resources). These are extremely valuable indicators for prospective employers who are otherwise prohibited (by law) from asking or testing these directly and punished (through wasted wages, training costs, benefits) for making a mistake.
In the past it was much cheaper to train people on the job because wages and benefits were much lower. Higher education has driven up wages and benefit costs (through inflation and cost disease), thus cementing higher education’s position as a gatekeeper.
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
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.
The author neglects to observe that doubling tuition over 30 years equates to only a 2.35% inflation rate. That sounds pretty close to the US inflation rate during that time, so increases in tuition cost have been held in check pretty well.
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.
The question actually asks "...worth the cost because people have a better chance to get a good job and earn more money over their lifetime".
The value of college to me was mostly social and intellectual, not economic. It's an irreplicable experience. There's certainly some logic to skipping that experience, but I couldn't recommend it.
I’m not in CS, so maybe it’s different, but I don’t know how we can expect to get skilled biologists, mechanical engineers, psychologists, etc without something that’s very similar to the 4-year degree.
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.
I’m still heavily subscribed to the idea that global access to social media ruined the kids’ expectations. Everything else is downstream effects of unrealized expectations.
In Chinese/Japanese cultures, role models and parental influence on education is still pretty huge. Japan is changing a bit, but I think school systems are still strict enough to keep it up. China is still a beast of its own.
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.
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.
There was a user here a few months ago trying to promote his startup. He was being somewhat obnoxious when people offered criticism so I looked him up and found he was some 21 year old kid. Profile read:
> Founder & CEO of Nitrility which is the world's first music licensing marketplace working with over a billion $ in assets from 80K rightsholders.
> Age 21 as of August, high school diploma (Rutgers Prep), college dropout (UIUC), grew up in Somerset NJ, 2 time founder with 1 exit at age 18, 2400 rated chess player, former top tennis player, Forbes Technology Council.
> Usually you will find me in NYC, LA, or SF.
The dropout thing struck me because it was such an obvious attempt to try to appear to be the Mark Zuckerberg style figure that this kid desperately wanted others to believe he was. I’ve been seeing a ton of these kids claiming to have had exits before they even graduated high school, and even though I know they’re lying, I’ve been browsing here long enough that I would probably have believed them if I hadn’t picked up on it being a social media trend.
> 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.
It would be interesting to see if the job prospects of American students and perception of the value of the degrees were to change if they were to eliminate the 15% discount that employers get for hiring foreign graduates (via OPT) by not having to pay FICA taxes.
When the unemployment rate for fresh American college grads is the same or higher than those without a degree, it does not make a compelling case for spending all of that money and time on a degree.
IIRC Mark Andreessen once said colleges esp ivy league ones, simplify the job of recruiters by acting as filters. Saves them the bother. So they attached lots of value.
I guess that's true even now but in a perverse sort of way. As markers of indoctrination and unsuitability for productive corporate roles.
Employers probably decided to avoid them.
That's not fair to a large number of students but the old system of colleges being markers of intelligence, suitability etc was not fair to large number of others either..
Do you know any employers actively avoiding students from Ivy-league colleges?
I agree that colleges have acted as filters, but the value of degrees has been deflated, even in Ivy leagues, because they’re easier and more common. I think a degree still acts as a filter though; getting a job is hard with a degree but nearly impossible without.
EDIT: There’s the Thiel fellowship, which requires not having a degree, but I’m not aware of other such opportunities. Early work experience looks better to some employers than university, but that requires getting a job in the first place.
I don't know about actively avoiding, but I have worked for multiple companies in London who prefer not to hire at the 'top' end of candidates (hence hiring me!), because they'll cost more and can have cultural issues like not be very fun people or thinking themselves to be above the self-taught and weird-career guys who didn't get a first from Imperial.
There's lot of anecdotal chatter and also mainstream media coverage on this.. It's a genuine concern.
But bigger issue is in USA where general jobless numbers are lower, with several sectors facing shortages, why is there the issue of grad unemployment at all.
The correct answer is important because politicians are filling the vacuum with false narratives to suit their base.
I was a hiring manager at a company that didn’t recruit from top universities for strategic reasons. In short we were smaller and a startup so it would have been difficult to compete. As we grew we had a presence at university job fairs but still avoided the top schools.
Similarly we avoided engineers from the Bay Area due to cost concerns.
The company was also a pioneer in the distributed work environment. A decade before Covid. So that opened a huge market for recruitment at that time.
IMO most of the stuffs in colleges can be self taught nowadays so the only two benefits are 1) that piece of paper and 2) networking. And good network only exists for certain colleges so for the majority out there it’s just that piece of paper.
Yeah that’s true. But a paid education doesn’t provide too much motivation anyway. College education is stuffed with unnecessary courses not everyone needs but you have to take anyway.
Like any business. The only valuable thing is that paper and network (that is if it’s a top 50 school).
The course I took on Literature of the Apocalypse, in fall of 1999, is probably one you would say is unnecessary. It has proven quite valuable as I learned how to read a lot, a lot more quickly. I learned how to write quickly as well. I also learned a lot about an important aspect of our cultural and political context, as western society is dominated by doomsday cults (especially the atheistic ones, everyone’s got a utopia they are trying to sell in order to get you to sacrifice your life for them).
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.
If we’re talking about social costs and social benefits then it does matter. Different countries can have wildly different costs for delivering the same education, an education whose value to society (or lack thereof) needs to be taken into account.
Whether an education is paid for by loans or by higher taxes, the cost is ultimately borne by someone. In neither case is it free and in both cases its cost-benefit difference should be scrutinized.
> 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.
That’s irrelevant to the point the grandparent comment was making, which is that these resources don’t just fall out of the sky and that “I got it for free and I liked getting it for free,” isn’t a good basis for policy.
> "Free" doesn't mean "has no cost paid by anyone" and never has in these discussions.
Calling these programs “free” obfuscates the issue because there are people (even college-educated people) who genuinely believe the government can just make something appear from nothing; they genuinely don’t understand that the resources have to come from somewhere, which means someone else who does not necessarily benefit from the program pays for it now or those benefitting from the program have to pay for it later.
> Apologies if English isn't your first language.
I would encourage you to review the site guidelines. These kinds of quips are discouraged here.
…but there is cost to the student or their family. The difference being that paying for it or not is not an option. You can’t just say “I won’t go to uni, so I won’t pay for it”
By this definition, nothing is "free"; there is always some cost, whether financial or otherwise. It's an absurd bit of pedantry that does nothing but derail discussion. Free tuition is free at the point of sale to the student, just like the interstate I drive on sometimes is free to use as compared to the toll roads, even though my taxes paid for both. It's not complicated terminology.
The student does not participate in a transaction that involves paying money in exchange for education. Taxes are collected and allocated as seen fit by the state. Students and others pay their taxes, but taxes are not directly transactional.
At the same time many families got a single room with shared anemities. Even people in skilled positions. Just because they got assigned to some factory which management didnt have as good connections. Or preferred to pocket more than take care of workers. Or didn’t ended up in some location where central government was putting in extra resources to make it more desirable.
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.
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.
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.
You have better employment options only if there are not enough people with degrees. If you give everybody the option of obtaining a degree then nobody is better off. In fact those at the bottom of the barrel end up in an even worse position.
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.
Construction, a few trades… Help me, I've run out of ideas without resorting to "Walmart Greeter".
Most of those jobs went overseas a long time ago. Short of the couple I could think of, the rest of the jobs remaining that don't require some advanced education don't pay a "living wage".
I'd love to see the US have a vocational "track" beginning in high school again. But that also requires we have the jobs for them when they graduate.
If you've ever worked at a random Fortune 500 company and looked around the office at people whose pinned apps are "Outlook, Powerpoint, Excel", those are jobs that can easily be done if you're moderately smart and learn a few things on the job. You have a reasonably well-defined set of goals, projects, and meetings, and you just have to talk to other people and move numbers around in Excel, then put them into Powerpoint and set up meetings in Outlook to discuss. There are millions of these jobs, and you can get extremely senior once you just learn the business of your company (which would never be taught in college). You don't need a college degree for these. A friend of mine is a senior executive at a large insurance company and does just fine at their job with no degree. Given, they got into that job decades ago when degrees weren't required, and worked their way up, but the same could be done now if employers let people be hired based not on degree but on an apprenticeship or similar trial period.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
While Western countries are making education increasingly private, expensive, and accessible only to the elite, in China, free education accessible to all is training engineers who then go on to work for companies that outperform those of other countries.
Education in modern times is only about training and certifying workforce so that employers can easily filter the prospective employees.
If that training and certification can be made available via other easier means, that's the end of brick-mortar universities with grand campuses. The dinosaur has to evolve into a bird.
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.
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.
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.
truth told nothing in American society is truly worth the cost. especially with rampant inflation.
we've allowed capitalists and rent-seekers into our educational system and it's nigh impossible to root them out. same goes for healthcare, housing, etc.
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.
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.
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.
You don't think tradespeople are contientious, intelligent, or productive? That's the whole trouble with this filtering signal. It's bogus and has created elitism around professions that are just as hard if not harder than pushing computer keys.
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
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.
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.
The 4-year college isn’t a bad system but it has been asked to do a job for which it wasn’t intended. Many people just want an opportunity to develop useful skills within the context of a modern corporate business. Modern corporate businesses want a way to filter and sort potential employees for skills and readiness.
The four-year college isn’t good at either of these as it wasn’t intended for this. I don’t think the trade school model is quite right for this (there’s lots of soft skills to be learned) but it’s closer than the 4-year.
"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."
Polls really need to start adding filter questions like "Do vaccines work?" "Did humans evolve from small mammals?" because some people not believing something works is actually a positive signal.
Are there problems in Higher Ed? Almost certainly. Are changes to the situation driven by the "vaccines don't work crowd" likely to make things even worse for everyone? Oh yes.
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.
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.
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.
I will give you an upvote to offset the negative expressions. I've heard of at least one instance at a very well known Bay Area university in such a class.
From what was described to me, and I trust this person to not misrepresent their experience, was that they were essentially told 'hi, cis white male, sit down and don't say a damn thing, this isn't your place to talk'. And then go on to essentially present a curriculum that was essentially a myriad of thinly-veiled misandry, compounded by extremely clear classroom rules/culture where any opposition was decidedly unwanted by the lecturers.
I'm the first to champion equal rights and equal opportunity, but that that sort of thing was going on in higher ed left a bad taste in my mouth.
When I see posts like this, it reminds me of when I went to community college. I was working towards an associate degree to transfer to a larger university which saved both money and allowed me to bypass some of the admission issues. One of the classes I was taking was a Gen Ed class around the philosophy of religion. I was an especially strong atheist at the time, and this class involved a well-rounded discussion and examination of religions from across the world as well as debates around our religious beliefs.
By the end of the class I had softened on my stance a bit (though still an atheist), and I saw multiple Christians get up, walk out of the class mid-lecture and never come back. Not all of them mind you, but a few of them took such great offense at the class even mentioning other religions that they left, and some really couldn't handle any sort of debate or discussion.
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?
> You seriously dropped out because you didn't like one class?
No. The university added other "studies" courses to my requirements that contributed to my decision. After taking gender studies, I knew I could not tolerate the other "studies" courses the university was suddenly demanding—which were not required when I first started.
> Which university
The University of Utah
> which year was this
2014
> what was your major
Computer Science
> what happened with your education and/or career after you dropped out?
I still have 8 classes left. Nothing happened to my career.
> And what precisely do you mean by "castigated," in your specific case?
One of our guest speakers was a man with autogynephilia—a man who derives sexual pleasure from dressing like a woman.
In a follow-up discussion, I committed the "sins" of referring to him as a man, and saying things like he is not a woman, and there are only two sexes.
My instructor and some students went scorched earth on me over these elementary facts. They made it quite clear that the only acceptable narrative was that, because he "identifies" as a woman, he is a woman.
This is just one example of the kind of "thinking" that went on in this course. I don't like it when I'm told what I must think. As I said before, that's indoctrination, not education.
> In a follow-up discussion, I committed the "sins" of referring to him as a man, and saying things like he is not a woman, and there are only two sexes.
Sincere question: Why were you not able to just think "Oh, ok, some people do this and feel this way." and then just move on? I'm not sure why these particular things needed to be discussed.
I don’t understand this thing you do in the US of forcing you to do completely unrelated courses. You want to study computers and they put you through liberal arts or gender studies bullshit that is basically worthless. Why?
According to the University of Utah Computer Science Undergraduate Student Handbook 2014-2015, "Students must take two intellectual explorations courses in each: fine arts (FF), humanities (HF), and social sciences (BF). Two of these six courses must be upper division – one should meet the diversity (DV) requirement and one should meet the international (IR) requirement" and "The diversity (DV) requirement can be satisfied by taking a course from an approved list as part of the intellectual explorations courses." So, there was only one required diversity course, from a list of courses, meaning that gender studies was not specifically mandated. If you took gender studies to satisfy the diversity requirement, it was because you chose gender studies, which seems like an odd choice, given your beliefs. In any case, you would not have to take multiple diversity courses.
> I still have 8 classes left. Nothing happened to my career.
I'm not sure exactly what you mean. As a result of dropping out, do you not have a career in computing? Alternatively, did dropping out without getting a computer science degree not harm your career at all, and if it didn't, then why were you spending time and money ("I refused to spend another dollar of my hard-earned money") to get a degree?
In a later comment, you say:
> this was the beginning of why I personally no longer thought a college degree was worth the cost.
> sitting through courses where I was not allowed to openly debate the ideas being presented to me.
I'm confused here. For you, is the monetary value of a college degree to openly debate ideas in class? And if so, why did you major in computer science, as opposed to philosophy, for example, which is known for open debate of ideas in class, unlike computer science?
> My instructor and some students went scorched earth on me
Scorched earth is a metaphor. It's not in this case an accurate and informative description of reality. I suspect you just mean that you got criticized, which is exactly what you asked for: an open debate of ideas. The use of hyperbolic phrases like "castigated" and "scorched earth" does not make your comments plausible.
> One of our guest speakers was a man with autogynephilia—a man who derives sexual pleasure from dressing like a woman.
> In a follow-up discussion, I committed the "sins" of referring to him as a man, and saying things like he is not a woman, and there are only two sexes.
Now I definitely agree with the other poster that this sounds made up, or at the very least you are significantly embellishing the story in such a way to completely ruin your own credibility.
The guy told us he was married, with children, and that he had a separate apartment where he "lived like a woman" most weekends. He lived that way because his wife didn't like it when he dressed like a woman around her. He said he was intensely aroused by wearing pantyhose and skirts, in particular.
That may sound "significantly embellished" to you, but I assure you it is not.
Regardless of what you, or anyone else here, would like to believe about my credibility, this was the beginning of why I personally no longer thought a college degree was worth the cost. I refused to spend another dollar of my hard-earned money sitting through courses where I was not allowed to openly debate the ideas being presented to me.
I'm sorry but this timeline and story makes zero sense. For reference, 2014 is about a year before gay marriage was fully legalized in the US and reasonably before the whole trans rights movement started being a lot more public. I went to college in a deep blue state and had practically little to no interaction with any transgender folks, both in my gen eds classes and just overall at that same time period. Someone arriving as a guest speaker and talking in the way you've mentioned would've instantly made headlines in 2014, especially since at least one student would've complained and made it a bigger issue which as far as I can tell it doesn't exist. Nor are there any mentions of said guest speaker, and colleges are generally very public about this sort of thing.
I understand that you had a different experience, but you seem to be committing the "argument from incredulity" logical fallacy.[0] What I described may not have happened to you, but it did happen—regardless of whether the timeline or details makes any sense to you.
Do you have any thoughts about the cost of college degrees being worth the cost? That's ultimately what prompted me to comment.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
"I'm being short-changed!" claims rich minority whose high pay even fresh out of university leads to SF rents being unafordable by key workers.
Irony is, that doesn't prevent such sentiments as yours leading to people like Trump. I had a chance to live in the USA years back, I'm glad I didn't bother to take it.
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.
When immigration is a leading factor on why the modern college graduate has less marketability in the workforce, leading them to believe the ROI on their degree is not worth it compared to generations past, you really should have expected it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 this is a textbook example of correlation not implying causality. The US was awarded a unique competitive advantage with WW2, which allowed it to become the world's hegemon. Much of the reason that the US was able to preserve it's status was how it managed to leverage that competitive advantage to fuel it's economical and technological development to build up and retain a competitive advantage. This was only made possible by its investment in higher education and R&D, which is a big factor behind the progress in the 1950s and 1960s you're lauding. Things like the GI bill are renowned by the huge impact it had on the tech industry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Rock
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Kleiner
The US never managed to shake off its anti-intellectual bias, and has this irrational belief that ladder-pulling is somehow conflated with the cream always rising to the top, but if anything it's preventing their domestic talent from fulfilling their potential.
The U.S. was already the richest country in the world per capita by 1880–even at the peak of the British Empire. Most of its military achievements during the war—building up the world’s largest Navy and airforce from almost nothing within a couple of years—was a product of the industrial economy that already existed before the war.
America’s preference for common wisdom over book learning is a strength, not a weakness. Formal education filters for risk averse, process and credential-oriented people. And you need some of those people, but you don’t want your society to be like India where you worship credentials and degrees like religion.
The GI bill isn’t a counterpoint. GI’s still had to gain admissions at a time when colleges were far more selective than today: https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2024/01/23/why_college... (undergraduate IQs fell from 119 in 1939 to just 102 in 2022). So you created a filter that was extremely rigorous. It supported college education for people who were both significantly smarter than average, and also had served in the military—the Marcus Aurelius type.
>The US was awarded a unique competitive advantage with WW2, which allowed it to become the world's hegemon.
That advantage was: being the only country that wasn't ravaged by war, and that profited for a while by trading with every faction.
Some of countries were also severly kneecapped by US betrayal of promises, made by allies - to restore pre-war borders, and handover of them to USSR - that means less competition.
That also lead to US dollar becoming world's reserve currency, which may have affected the measured drop afterwards.
There are so many factors involved in that that attributing it to just investment in higher education and GI bill is a gross oversimplification, so is previous post's attribution of the drop afterwards.
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.
> in terms of raw productivity
In terms of dubious financialized metrics of productivity, i.e. debt + fx driven growth. Which is valid indicator, but also the same inflated indicator that suggests 2025 tertiary that cost 200% 1980 tertiary (income/inflation adjusted) is somehow more productive and not parasitic. The entire problem is spreadsheet doing gangbusters is dependenant on increasingly inequitable CoL extraction to prop up GDP flows. US economy would appear much less powerhouse if not for all the disproportionate financiailization/rent extraction from inelastic sectors (rent/education/health etc) aggregated over past 40 years over functionally comparable value goods/services.
Exactly. In <pick random developing nation that isn't too poor> a man who wants to construct a septic for a house pays a man with backhoe who understands the nuances to make it happen. Concrete and diesel are bought, etc, etc, etc. Let's say $5k USD added to GDP.
In US same thing happens. But the man is compelled by threat of law to pay for engineering studies, permits, as are the man with the backhoe and the man making the concrete, etc, etc. $10k is added to GDP.
Has anymore wealth actually been created tho?
You can argue there's a difference because the latter septic is superior because on average they fail less and there's some amortized cost to that but if you're arguing about marginal differences in the face of an integer multiple you've kind of already lost.
This generalizes to just about all products and services. No more value is being created. There's just a bunch of hands in the pot that look like value if you squint and apply motivated spreadsheet magic.
I haven't been in a car accident for 15 years, not even fender benders, that doesn't mean I shouldn't take insurance.
As someone from a random developing nation car accidents deliver crippling debt and destroy lives there frequently because insurance is not mandatory.
The developing nation blindly ignore the externalities of not having insurance (instead of spreading the cost throughout society, only a few people bear the brunt of it, usually the ones least equipped to handle it), so your example is great only if you assume its fine to continue to beat down the poor. There's a reason developed nations have developed such "red tape" and the anti-vaccine movement here in the US is finding out what happens when the red tape is removed.
You can appeal to emotion all you want but it's a very simple calculation. Heck, health insurance (in the US) serves a pretty obvious counterpoint.
Amortized cost of insurance vs amortized cost of not. Say nothing about how incentives get fucked all to hell by breaking things across many parties (principal agent problem) and the money distorts things.
[dead]
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
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 most important fact, that people overlook, is that its industrial capacity was never bombed during the war, and Pearl Harbour was the only time the country got directly attacked.
So Australia & New Zealand are the next superpowers.
I remember when I was around middle school or early high school, I attended a geopolitical simulation at MIT that wargamed out a crisis between major world powers, and that was the exact result. New Zealand won, in alliance with Australia. They were able to invest heavily in technology while everyone else was nuking each other, and then ended up with space lasers or whatever the endgame tech was while everyone else ended up back in the stone age.
As an Australian, I have the suspicion that the decline of industry in the last couple of decades has done a lot of damage to that capability.
We've lost oil refineries, steelworks, consumer car manufacturing, and we lack much shipbuilding and aerospace. We have a lot of mines, which curse us with success: it's not economically efficient to smelt ore when you could be digging up even more of it instead.
Reminds me of how I used to play Risk (which I now consider to be one of the worst designed games in a similar fashion to Monopoly) when I'd sit in Australia and just keep building troops until other players weaken themselves with fighting. Of course it helps that there's just a single position to defend Australia and as it's the smallest continent, people usually aim to attack elsewhere.
“Modern” risk boards have Australia with 3 borders to defend including the normal and addingcross-map Argentina to New Zealand and Japan to Philippines (I believe this map comes from a risk computer game)
When was Pearl Harbor attacked by Japan?
Now, when did Hawai'i become a state?
And when and by whom was their king deposed?
> Pearl Harbour was the only time the country got directly attacked.
Uh, which country again was it?
(Edit: -4, really? Damn, people are salty about actually knowing history versus going against the US public school system's propaganda that "We (royal) were attacked". In reality, the occupier forces, the US military, were attacked, having deposed the government at the behest of Sanford Dole, of pineapple infamy.
But the simple bumper sticker slogan "Remember Pearl Harbor", short circuits and somehow gets people to ignore history at the behest of ruthless hegemonic expansion and irrational patriotism.)
Your arguments are irrelevant at best and whataboutism at worst because the Japanese were specifically attacking the US Navy as they saw it as a threat to their own expansion plans - which were far worse than anything the US did, even compared to the worst parts of Native American policies (which were very, very bad). The Japanese saw Hawaii as a US territory to attack. Whether or how Hawaii became a US territory is a complete non sequitur in the context of World War 2.
There's nobody outside of hardcore Japanese nationalists that see any of their actions as countering US expansionism.
Hawaii was a US territory as was Alaska (which was also attacked). As is Puerto Rico today.
An occupied territory, sure. The Japanese only attacked the occupiers (USA). They didn't go after any of the native peoples' cities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_Kingdom
In 1887, King Kalākaua was forced to accept a new constitution after a coup d'état by the Honolulu Rifles, a volunteer military unit recruited from American settlers. Queen Liliʻuokalani, who succeeded Kalākaua in 1891, tried to abrogate the new constitution. She was subsequently overthrown in a 1893 coup engineered by the Committee of Safety (run by Sanford Dole), a group of Hawaiian subjects who were mostly of American descent, and supported by the U.S. military. The Committee of Safety dissolved the kingdom and established the Republic of Hawaii, intending for the U.S. to annex the islands, which it did on July 7, 1898, via the Newlands Resolution. Hawaii became part of the U.S. as the Territory of Hawaii until it became a U.S. state in 1959.
On geopolitical scale, you either need to have big guns or big friends. No one has any true right to any land. If you don't have the foresight to recognize that, you probably don't have a place in the future.
This isn't even something only cold imperialist superpowers adopt. Hawaii itself was populated with warring chiefdoms that were killing each other and taking land for centuries before a bigger fish showed up. Small fish happily eating smaller fish but then upset when they get eaten...
> Uh, which country again was it?
Hawai'i became a territory of the United States on April 30, 1900. It had been US territory for 40 years. One can point to the US doing bad things to make that the state of affairs, but it was decidedly US territory for a long time at that point. It seems you need to learn history, or you're just being willfully obtuse about things.
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.
>The US was also much more unified at the time
Were we? Or is that just after the fact revisionism that makes things "easy"
If Europe had managed to keep it together a few more years the US may very well have had a bunch of communism adjacent social strife and FDR may have died a deposed tyrant.
We were certainly more unified on certain broad cultural and values axis, but things were still very divided.
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.
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.
I think very few, if any, countries in the world would be stronger than what we turned Ukraine into. You have a massive army being replenished by a constant slew of bodies, to the point of forcefully dragging people in off the streets, and then being armed with hundreds of billions of dollars in Western arms. But what gives Ukraine a particular superpower is their logistics.
Most people don't realize is that war is essentially a giant deadly game of logistics, and so the typical plan for Russia would be to simply destroy the logistics pipelines arming Ukraine. But thanks to the people 100% responsible for maintaining Ukraine's military managing to maintain a strategically accepted neutrality, it's impossible to fundamentally disrupt their logistics pipeline outside of small scale black ops stuff.
So that has turned this war into a war of attrition where Russia is advancing slowly, but mostly setting the goal as essentially having Ukraine simply run out of Ukrainians. And they seem to be succeeding. Once the real death tolls for this war are revealed, people are going to be shocked. You don't need to drag in people off the streets, close your borders, and continually lower the enlistment age (in a country with a severe demographic crisis) if you're not suffering catastrophic losses, especially since as the amount of territory you have to defend decreases, you need fewer soldiers to maintain the same defensive density.
When would the real death tolls be revealed? When Ukraine does a census?
For Ukraine, war deaths would likely be a footnote compared to emigration when a new census is eventually completed (I don't mean to sound cavalier, but am trying to put things into perspective). An estimated 20% of their population has left since the start of the full scale invasion - ~10 million people - by now they've settled into new lives abroad (my 8 year old daughter's class here in Canada has 3 kids from Ukraine alone).
Ukraine is going to have some painful demographic issues to deal with when the dust settles (and I am cheering for them!).
Once the war ends and both sides can start clarifying their troop classifications. There's always going to be uncertainty because an MIA could be dead, or it could be some guy who successfully deserted and started a new life for himself somewhere. But as both sides return captured troops, exchange bodies, and so on - everything will be made much more clear. And there will also be less political motivation to lie.
Do you think Ukraine has more casualties than Russia? Or is it simply that Ukraine had a smaller population to begin with?
Okay, as Devil's Advocate, you could say the same about the US. It was unable to conquer Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq or Syria.
This is a false equivalence. The United States was not trying to “conquer” those countries in the territorial sense that Russia attempted with Ukraine. Those conflicts were limited political or counterinsurgency objectives fought under strict constraints, often without public support, and with no intention of annexation. Comparing that to a conventional invasion aimed at seizing and absorbing a neighbor’s territory is analytically inaccurate.
US did defeat Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. And indirectly Syria by supporting the insurgency (and we had bases in that Country). It is also worth noting that the US and South Vietnam had effectively contained the North by 1973. The Paris Peace Accords ended direct US involvement and the North violated those terms two years later when it launched a full-scale conventional invasion. South Vietnam collapsed only after the US withdrew military support. Same with Afghanistan. Iraq is flourishing without Saddam and without war. It toppled Saddam’s regime in weeks, and the country now has an elected government, functioning institutions, and no US occupation. Whatever its internal challenges, Iraq is not a case where the US attempted and failed to annex territory. It demonstrates that these were limited political interventions, not conquest wars.
I'd also add that the Vietnamese LOVE the US.
China hasn't started a war since the 1970s.
America is on a isolation downward spiral.
Russia will conquer Ukraine, any other prediction at this point is absurd.
See point one, America is alone now, it will take decades to repair the damage.
In March 2022 Russia occupied 27% of Ukraine. They have now lost much of their artillery tanks and then army and now control 19% of Ukraine while their oil refineries blow up, and recently tankers. I'm not sure the conquest is going quite to plan.
> Russia will conquer Ukraine, any other prediction at this point is absurd.
Are you sure? They are advancing, sure, put look what they paid for to achieve this: 300k dead, 700k wounded, depletion of their souvereign wealth fund, 20%+ inflation, lower oil production and so on.
Yeah, it wouldn't be a bad bet to wager this is going to be a Pyrrhic victory for Russia.
Unfortunately, yes. USA is doing everything but openly support Russia at this point too. It could have been different if Ukraine got proper support, but instead it is being undermined.
Europe could do more, but at least most states dont play for Russia (Hungary and Slovakia excepted).
I think we may be at peak Trump though which will limit his power to bail out Putin. The midterms won't go well, the Epstein stuff is embarrassing, the Republicans are starting to get unruly.
I think literally nobody knows the price either side is paying right now. And I do mean literally, including Trump, Putin, and Zelensky. The fog of war applies to participants, let alone outsiders who are basing our views on figures and claims that obviously going to be driven heavily by propaganda.
But beyond this, I don't think this war is about Ukraine anymore than a war in Taiwan will be about Taiwan. It's little more than a proxy for hegemony in both cases. Russia did not want NATO parked in their Achille's heel of the Ukrainian flatlands. NATO did, and we pushed forward against endless threats of it being a redline, essentially as a means of indirectly imposing our will on Russia and establishing a hierarchy of dominance.
And similarly, for those that don't the Taiwan-China history - the Mao led Chinese revolution was a success. The existing government of mainland China fled to Taiwan where they brutally oppressed the locals, in an era known as the 'white terror' [1], and established power through 40 years of martial law. And of course we backed them, solely to use them as a weapon against China, because geopolitics.
This is why these wars are so important for the participants. The US couldn't care less about Ukraine, but withdrawing without ruining our ability to militarily threaten other peer or near peer countries is difficult. And similarly the last thing Russia needs is more land, but if they never act on claims of red lines, then they can never expect their interests to be considered in the case of a conflict in interests between them and the West.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Terror_(Taiwan)
I don't agree on the Russia Ukraine motivations. Ukraine is not part of NATO and was not going to become part of NATO. There were already two NATO countries bordering Russia near Moscow and St P if NATO had wanted to invade which they had no thoughts of doing. Russia lies constantly on this stuff. I think they basically regarded Ukraine their land as part of the Russian empire they were restoring.
It's not about immediate intentions, but about strategic options. Imagine Russia decided to form a military alliance with Mexico with the expected intention of deploying weapons on the Mexican border. If Mexico agreed to this, it would take approximately 0 seconds before the US invaded them under some whimsical pretext (drug gangs probably) and overthrew their government to prevent this. In fact this is, more or less, what the Cuban Missile Crisis was where we were willing to bring the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation over it, and that was an even lighter weight version of this event since there isn't even a land route from Cuba to the US obviously!
But in this scenario would you think Russia deploying weapons in Mexico is a precursor to them invading? Or that the US would be worried about that? Obviously not. Neither was Cuba. But it gives an adversarial power a tremendous strategic edge, while you get less than nothing out of it since it reduces your 'power' in the relative strategic balance of countries.
I still think Ukraine wasn't primarily about Russia's military security though. I mean the US/Nato could stick missiles in Estonia if they wanted.
It may have been about political security. If Ukraine which is basically at least part Russian had become a prosperous democracy on Russia's doorstep it would make it harder for Putin to justify his autocracy. In fact that one may come to pass.
Thank you for repeating Russian propaganda. But the truth is that Ukraine is sovereign nation and has every right to decide their future and give a fuck about Russia feelings. Russia is the aggressor and blaming anything on NATO is laughable propaganda.
> Russia will conquer Ukraine
Perhaps the objective isn't to conquer the whole of the Ukraine, but only most of it, leaving the western parts independent.
This seems to be pushed as the right approach wrt the Ukraine in Alexander Dugin's Foundations of Geopolitics, which apparently is used as the source for Russia's current "Eurasianist" geopolitical doctrine:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics
Some would dispute the "downward" part there.
Not trying to be the world's policeman would allow tremendous downsizing of the military and its associated expense.
Decoupling and isolation is a very rational response if nuclear proliferation is going to accelerate, in order to avoid having entangling alliances pull the country into a nuclear equivalent of the first World War.
"World's policeman", that's what you tell little kids America was doing. America didn't invade Iraq or Afghanistan for world peace. There were strong economic and strategic motives behind those invasions.
At the same time, soft power is also vanishing.
Strategic motivation? If one assumes the US is going to be globally involved, yes, but that's begging the question.
Economic motivation? Not so much now, with the US being a dominant oil producer, and with petroleum itself losing importance. Even then, it's questionable if this could justify the full cost of the US military.
I think the original motivation was two fold: it was a combination of some sort of moral obligation to defend the "free world" from authoritarians, and (after WW2) a desire to keep small countries (and recent WW2 enemies) from deciding their only option for defense was their own nuclear deterrent.
I don't see much evidence that's the US wants to defend the world from authoritarians. Some of their closest allies are authoritarian countries.
"strong economic and strategic motive" behind Afghanistan? They did it to get Bin Laden basically.
America are like a slightly corrupt and violent world police.
So they invaded Afghanistan to grab a Saudi national hanging out in Pakistan?
Mostly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghanistan#US_invasion_and_Is...
Apparently the invasion was Oct 2001 and Bin Laden hiked over into Pakistan in Dec 2001
Are you expecting Ukraine to ultimately buckle and collapse if the war of logistics continues for long enough?
It doesn't seem like Russia has the will, or potentially the capability, to actually conquer Ukraine rather than squat on some of their land and hope to move their border.
>Russia will conquer Ukraine, any other prediction at this point is absurd.
They have been moving across Ukraine at a literal snails pace.
Russia is on the same spiral, but further ahead. They're going down together. The US has some chance of pulling out of the nose dive, but it's slim.
They may or may not take Europe and Ukraine with them.
China is better placed to survive, but has its own structural issues.
>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.
If we're assuming a nuclear war then the US military is comparable to a bunch of other militarys. And the "various geopolitical reasons", on examination, includes possible outcomes like the US being pummelled through the stone age and out the other side, or more mild ones like New York being flattened. It isn't really much of an option in any foreseeable scenario where their goose isn't already being cooked.
So yes they are scary, but they aren't that scary relatively speaking. We've left the brief era where the US could exert military supremacy over the globe and it is ambiguous who has the "best" military among the major powers [0]. Militarys are generally a tool for self-destruction anyway so the term is a bit ambiguous, most of the big empires fall because they get too enamoured with military solutions over economic and diplomatic excellence.
[0] Does the US military even perform to spec? There is clearly a lot of corruption and I've seen it described on HN as a disguised welfare program.
Re: US military quality, it's both. Massively corrupt jobs program on the weapons acquisition side, combined with an incredibly effective devolved leadership structure on the logistics and combat side. Tested frequently over the last few decades. The bet in favor of them is that the weapons corruption gets sorted out once it really needs to be.
The US is the second largest manufacturing power, the largest economic power and the largest military power, but those things aren't even what makes it a scary threat.
There are things that make up the US that vastly increase its potential for self-organization when it is given an organizing principle. Yes, dynamism has taken a hit over the decades, but there are also a lot of aimless purposeless people right now that do have an appetite for purpose if given one.
Major modern countries today have red lines defined that they won't cross in order to keep the peace. Russia says don't attack Moscow or otherwise attempt to replace their government or they will nuke you. Nukes do change the structure of future wars between nuclear powers, which might actually make some aspects of it less extreme.
If Ukraine had nukes, they could have a red line like, "If you keep hitting hospitals and schools, we will nuke you. Powerplants and railroads we understand, but if you show us with your actions that you have no mercy for the weak and innocent, we will end you." Instead, they have nothing of the sort.
All the US has to do is wait for the enemy to make catastrophic moral failures and it's game over, because it rallies the people, the companies, the innovative talent, the allies, etc to reject it with force. It crystallizes the purpose.
We are energy independent and are advancing even more ways to expand the dimensions of that. You can't destroy our government, because we'll just recreate it.
We're forcing our allies to become more independent, because they got too soft and we need them hardened up. That only makes the US stronger, because strong allies are better for all of us. It makes us a better deterrent against war happening in the first place.
Meanwhile China is surrounded by countries that dislike it and don't trust it. Giving Canada and Mexico tough love is no comparison to the fundamental failures in the relationships China has with its neighbors in their region.
India is far more US aligned than with China, regardless of tensions. Neither North Korea nor Russia trust China, but they are forced to deal with it despite the buddy-buddy optics.
Failing to benefit from so many possible optimizations at the basic strategic level in their local region, any confidence in a favorable outcome for the CCP seems misplaced. Their failings probably cascade down into the other levels of preparation as well.
“Forcing our allies to become more independent” is a HILARIOUS way to say “we’re destroying our allied relationships, reducing our intelligence capabilities and the chances that they would form a coalition with us in any armed conflict”.
I’m just imagining someone getting a divorce saying they’re “teaching their spouse the value of independence”.
Military action is an extension of politics.
US politics do not support all out war against foreign nations at this point in time hence the half wars.
This goes for most first world nations.
> the evidence to date is that it's ability to destroy counties ends somewhere around Iran's strength.
Only if Geneva enters the equation.
> the US has already been undermined by the likes of China, Russia and India
What is India doing on this list?
India has been gently aligning [0, 1] with the Russia-China bloc that the US has been encouraging to form over the last couple of years. Nothing crazy but that looks like undermining the US to me. It certainly isn't supporting US policy and the US has been trying to pressure them over it without much success.
[0] https://www.nationalheraldindia.com/national/explained-ahead...
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/9/16/india-joined-belaru...
Could China attack US? Why would US try to attack China in asia? Not an expert but that feels like losing proposition. I think people confuse proxy wars with wars. US is under no threat of being actually attacked.
old chinese proverb: Suffering is living, happiness is death(生于忧患，死于安乐)
You could ask the same question about Japan attacking America but they did do it.
If they think conflict is inevitable then they may well feel they will get an upper hand by moving first.
It counts as an attack, but how close was US to actually being taken over? Usually when you fight a war the real risk is that you cease to exist as a country. I know nothing about war strategy, but seems to me US is in a great position as long as you get along with Canada and Mexico.
> And the US has already been undermined by the likes of China, Russia and India
With respect, Russia is being decimated (literally, at least the "big fortresses" that Russia has been gnawing at for months such as Pokrovsk have insane loss rates) by Ukraine's army who are mostly using donated shoddy Soviet-era remainders and decades old Western surplus.
If the US were to wage actual war with modern technology against either Russia or China (whose arms are based off of Soviet designs and stolen American plans), there is no chance in hell either would be able to do much against the US.
India is different but they're at least a democracy that's reasonably worth calling it that (despite Modi doing his best to dismantle it). I don't see any attempts of India to project power anywhere other than in its immediate neighborhood (i.e. the border disputes with Pakistan and China). They're no threat.
Replace the word US in this paragraph with Nazi Germany and the issue with this statement becomes apparent. If the only way you can maintain power is via physical force over others then you're a bully and it won't be long until others unite against you. The US may have the best military in the world but it does not have the ability to take on the entire globe. It's previous status actually came from the fact people used to look up to and admire it - something that has been steadily declining for quite some time now. Growing up, I used to think the US was the coolest place on Earth. Yesterday, I felt sick watching a video on YouTube about how an estimated 1500 people are living in the flood tunnels of Las Vegas and routinely die whenever there is heavy rain. Every place has problems, but you can't just shout "We're the best country on Earth" anymore and have people believe you when on a daily basis the world is seeing so much evidence to the contrary.
> Yesterday, I felt sick watching a video on YouTube about how an estimated 1500 people are living in the flood tunnels of Las Vegas and routinely die whenever there is heavy rain.
I didn't know about this. Can you share a link?
https://youtu.be/7MkAs99O1LQ
The US military is as clueless as any other (except those two) about combat in the age of disposable drones.
100x and yet it only took a couple of decades to replace the Taliban with the Taliban.
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.
> The USA is still THE powerhouse economy of the world.
Things look decidedly different if you exclude the ad companies (Google, Meta, ...) and associated shovel sellers, see the WaPo article about the S&P 493 from a few days ago.
Not to discount physical infrastructure, but the world is quite digital these days and being at the absolute top of the software + associated techs economy is nothing to sniff at.
>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.
Information is not culture. Universities teach culture - moral attitudes. They don't just transfer information.
This applies to science and engineering as much as it applies to the arts, but you need a good education to understand what "morality" means in this context.
The collapse of the West started when the old Enlightenment morality - education of all kinds as a collective good - was replaced by the MBA culture of greed and vapid narcissism.
DEI was a weak and ineffectual response to that. The dysfunction goes far deeper, and universities are now a vector of it rather than a bulwark against it.
The chemistry department teaches culture? nonsense.
It gets incidentally taught whether it's on the syllabus or not.
Everything humans do is about culture. (Not to be confused with the arts.)
> Why would I want my DEI consulting to actually solve the underlying problem
This applies to any consulting. Normally you want to solve a problem, because there's another thousand of companies that need similar problem solved. You don't get many people coming into a company with an immediate "I'm going to try to not improve anything" plan.
> The left-extremists say "you need to give me a job in order to make your team more diverse".
This is seriously weird even as a misrepresentation. The extreme left is for changing diversity overall rather than just "give me a job". (If we actually go extreme left, it would be closer to "we've got enough resources for everyone to not need jobs to survive" anyway)
The overproduction issue is interesting, but it really didn't need the exaggerated caricatures as examples.
The correlation is backwards. America’s mid-20th-century dominance was not the result of having only about 10 percent college graduates. It came from unique post–World War II advantages: intact industrial capacity, massive federal investment like the GI Bill, NSF, DARPA, and the interstate highway system, and the fact that global competitors were rebuilding from destruction. The GI Bill greatly expanded access to higher education and economists widely credit it with boosting productivity, innovation, and the growth of the middle class. Rising college attainment in the 1990s and 2000s coincides with globalization, offshoring, and wage stagnation, which makes this a correlation problem rather than evidence that more education causes national decline.
It was 10% of the US population who went to college before the GI bill, which then doubled to 20% over a decade following the war. Now >50% have post secondary. 70% attempt post-secondary after high school
Before WW2 only about 40% of people completed high school, now it’s at 90%
Those numbers actually back up the point. The jump in education after WWII happened during the biggest boom years the US ever had. The rise to 40 percent college grads happened much later, during globalization and offshoring. So the slowdown is about the economy changing, not people getting more education. It is just a bad correlation.
Right, there was clearly much more capacity for advanced education with the rise of technology (farming advancements, medicine, electronics etc) that started before WW2
There is something to the point about needing a correction in post secondary education and making university again a specialized place rather than the catch all default generalized institutions. Where 70% of the population tries to waits 3-5yrs+ to enter the workforce in exchange for lots of debt. A debt heavily incentivized by cheap gov backed loans, subsidies, credential inflation, and very profitable immigration schemes.
Sure, there are real issues with cost, debt, and credential creep, but that does not change the basic point: the expansion of education itself was a net positive for decades. The problems we have now come from financing, policy choices, and a labor market that shifted under globalization. Blaming education levels for broader economic or social trends just mixes up the cause and effect.
> 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.
Sorry to say that I don't think the post-WWII boom had anything to do with sound economic policies, but rather the chance fact that the United States was the only industrialized nation unravaged by war and capable of capturing a major share of global economic spending because of that.
So... I wouldn't look too nostalgically backwards for policy guidance when we have an entirely different set of geopolitical circumstances.
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 inheritors and descendants of those that directly created the problem are screaming at the colleges as the problem
Not to mention rank-and-file American conservatives who see universities as bastions of liberal thought/power, and create threadbare, post-hoc arguments as to why universities have to be dismantled or politically reeducated when partisanship has to be disguised.
> when partisanship has to be disguised.
The conservatives are right about the partisan bias of universities. See this survey by Mitchell Langbert.
https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/31/2/homogenous_the_p...
Anthropology and communications saw no registered Republicans. English, Sociology, and Art departments had a ratio of around 40:1 Democrat professors Republican professors, whereas in technical fields the ratio drops considerably to only 1.6:1 in engineering, and around 5:1 for economics, chemistry, and mathematics.
Langbert notes:
> The political registration of full-time, Ph.D.-holding professors in top-tier liberal arts colleges is overwhelmingly Democratic. Indeed, faculty political affiliations at 39 percent of the colleges in my sample are Republican free—having zero Republicans.
Duke: https://dukechronicle.com/article/duke-university-faculty-su...
> When asked for their political identities on a scale of “very liberal” to “very conservative,” 23.2% of respondents identified as “very liberal,” 38.53% identified as “somewhat liberal,” 24.48% identified as moderates or centrists, 9.92% identified as “somewhat conservative” and 3.87% identified as “very conservative.”
Yale: https://buckleyinstitute.com/faculty-political-diversity-rep...
> Across 14 departments in the Social Sciences and Humanities, the report identified 312 Democrat faculty (88%) and only 4 Republicans (1.1%), a ratio of around 78 to 1.
> The conservatives are right about the partisan bias of universities
Yes - and? Police forces and catholic churches skew conservative, but I figure it's an emergent property based on the self-selected group who join the respective organizations plus some exposure to new ideas.
You seem like you expect political "neutrality", but if you look at at any institution, you'll find "bias": theatre fook, country music, poets, small Business owners, baristas , farmers, CxOs, software engineers tend to lean one way or another on average. The battle is not to establish political neutrality everywhere, but selective against universities because the staff & students leans left. I'm yet to hear conservatives complain about the political bias in the Fraternal Order of Police or the FBI.
Looking at history, every nascent autocracy takes aim at independent intellectuals, like clockwork. First to be neutralized is the opposition, then the press, then the intellectuals in higher education.
> I figure it's an emergent property based on the self-selected group who join the respective organizations plus some exposure to new ideas.
There are plenty of conservatives interested in anthropology; there’s no reason to think they’ve self-selected out of the pool, so then we have to consider if conservatives enter the field but are exposed to new ideas such that none remain conservatives for long (this seems unlikely), or that these departments have been taken over by people who explicitly use their influence within these departments to promote certain narratives; this is far more likely as they have been explicitly stating that this is what they are doing for decades now.
This theory is further corroborated by where you see this bias; it’s the least pronounced in quantitative, technical fields (mathematics, engineering, chemistry), and most pronounced in fields that are almost completely qualitative.
> or that these departments have been taken over by people who explicitly use their influence within these departments to promote certain narratives
What mechanisms do these department heads use to suppress conservative viewpoints in research? While politics in academia can be vicious, it's never a grand conspiracy like you think it is, it's typically, and depressingly petty issues and grudges.
Being interested is not the same as being competent.
Conservatism is not a doctrine of competence. Experience shows time and again that conservatives can't think, can't plan, and can't govern. They act in emotional and purely self-interested ways to promote rigid hierarchies, and are reliably surprised by consequences that are obvious and predictable to rational educated actors.
Brexit. Anti-vax campaigns. Anti-masking. Racism. "Lowering corporate taxes makes everyone richer."
All delusional, all emotionally motivated, all predictable failures with terrible consequences.
I've seen this exact claim in the NYT and it doesn't hold muster.
You're just othering.
The organizations we're talking about aren't diverse, inclusive or representative.
Nor is conservativatism a Western only thing.
Is this a problem? We expect universities to have a pro-truth, pro-reality, pro-knowledge bias, which are things the Republican party overtly rejects. We could expect that Republicans might not make it to universities as often, or they might not want to attend, or they might cease being Republicans upon learning facts and logic. None of this would be surprising and none of this would necessarily be a problem by itself.
> We expect universities to have a pro-truth, pro-reality, pro-knowledge bias
And yet they are far from that. Lots of finger-in-ears, "la-la-la-I can't hear you" behaviour from universities in US/west past decade for sure.
> Not to mention rank-and-file American conservatives who see universities as bastions of liberal thought/power
To be fair, they kind of are. In the 20th century there were conservative academics at elite universities and they've since largely been excommunicated as heretics. Which has been a mistake, because then the people who would have agreed with them instead reject academia as a whole and latch on to demagogues, which is so much worse.
This is not true. Whole conservative departments do well and exist. Moreover, whole ideologically pure christian conservative universities exist. Literally kicking off students for "infractions" that go against evangelical orthodoxy.
Some people got off due to sexual harassment not being as cool as before, history and sociology started to study women and minorities. The problem is that conservatives see that just existing as a threat. If the history is not biased their way, they feel like victims.
Being segregated into different universities is exactly the thing you need not to happen, and your attitude is the exemplification of the problem. Who is going to feel welcome if their concerns are blindly maligned as prejudiced and in bad faith by default?
It is not like liberals would created religious colleges. Religious colleges were created by evangelicals and they have rules that explicitly punish things like "woman having male visitor" or "being gay" or "not being religious". If what you want is ideological purity of evangelical Christianity, then yes, you have to create own institution. Which is exactly what conservatives did.
Because it is extremely valid for other institutions and students to NOT be subject to the above. They were not kicked off other universities and less radical Christians still go there. Issue was that other universities did not punished non conservative thought and behavior enough. These conservatives do not want to share space with other nor to welcome anyone except those who are as conservative as them.
Your argument is typical "up is down and down is up" reversal. Conservatives want to create their own segregated spaces, because places that accept and tolerate non conservatives are just not acceptable to them. Somehow that is framed as problem with those other places not accepting conservatives (meaning not punishing non conservatives enough).
This is nonsense though.
When academics were pushed out of Soviet and Chinese universities they had to leave to other locations or stop being productive.
The fact they can set up their own schools is a plus in the USA.
The disparate impact is clear.
> 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.
That is absolutely untrue - a large part of the jobs were either outsourced and/or automated to be trivial, but a large part is essentially barely made easier by technology - food service, all the jobs necessary for running and building infrastructure, homes etc. is only changing very slowly due to technology - this is due to the nature of the fields, even if there were rapid advancement in plumbing (there weren't) in the past few decades, most of the buildings are standing and rebuilding them makes little sense - same with water treatment facilities, power plants etc.
In fact I would argue in some ways society is even less capable today - the percentage of people skilled in the trades is much lower, so it would be much harder to rebuild from scratch.
> 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.
I love to point this out to anti-welfare people and make them blue screen. Especially when they're not willing to acknowledge unethical solutions, such as euthanizing the stupid or acknowledging that not having welfare for an unemployable population shits things up for the rest of society.
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.
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.
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.
While it's true that it was possible to support a family on a single unskilled laborer income in the '50s, their standard of living was far below anything most people would accept today.
>While it's true that it was possible to support a family on a single unskilled laborer income in the '50s
I'm not even sure that is true. Poverty in the US was higher in the fifties and sixties.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#/...
A single income family in US with the husband working at a factory in fifties and sixties could afford a home with washing machine, dish washer, TV and a phone. Surely the home was smaller, but it was easier to clean, the TV screen was tiny, but then the family can go to a cinema. There was no internet, but for information one could go to the library. So how it was far below what people in US could accept today?
There are certainly a few people that would accept it, look at the whole "tiny home" and "van life" phenomena. It's possible that more would, if smaller houses were available. Builders make much more profit on larger houses though.
I guess apartment living is closer to what people had post-war, but everybody wants to buy a house to get in the real estate gravy train.
Depends how you measure, surely. They had less TVs and computers and prepackaged food, the same amount of sunlight, and more freedom (as measured by average income to rent ratio).
It’s likely that automation is about to turn the world on its ear vis-a-vis low skilled employment. The cost of human sustenance and care is surprisingly high compared to electricity, steel, carbon fiber, and silicon.
People can operate heavy equipment and even fly planes without a fancy sounding degree, so I don't think some stupid office job is so complex that a HS grad can't handle it.
The problem is that almost everyone is now expected to get a degree which necessarily devalues the whole thing.
It is now necessary to get a doctorate if you want to really signal academic prowess, but that comes with an incredibly high opportunity and personal cost.
Society really needs to just accept that just over half of the population is never going to maka a good doctor, engineer, physicist, etc. and that is perfectly OK. We readily understand that very few people can become professional athletes and don’t think any less of those that can’t.
> A high fraction of college attendance is better correlated with the 21st century decline in America's situation.
You’re basically arguing that having more uneducated people is better. If that were the case, why did most of the world bend western and American in the latter 20th century culturally?
The problems now are that we have a super-old man and a bunch of others with super-old ideas at the helm, and as a whole none are both wise and caring. I say this as a middle-aged gen-X’r.
The missing ingredient is that no one fucking cares about anyone other than themselves. It’s not a problem that we need to solve by dumbing people down. I’d argue that we’re not educated enough.
>You’re basically arguing that having more uneducated people is better.
"I love the poorly educated"
~our current president.
> You’re basically arguing that having more uneducated people is better.
Are you arguing that having more people educated in a narrow range of topics is necessarily better? In the USA in the 1950s I would suggest there were more people who knew how to make machine tools or even food.
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.
Today’s college is yesterday’s high school though
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.
> A high fraction of college attendance is better correlated with the 21st century decline in America's situation.
Correlation != causation, but let’s go the correlation route and see where it goes…
China had correlation between higher-ed and economic growth, so I think you’re just trying to make an argument to support a fascist dictator who doesn’t want to be the dumbest person in the room.
The decline in Christianity, rise in apathy, rise of industry in other countries, offensive wars, rise of entertainment culture, etc. are correlated also.
One could also argue that the rise of uneducated conservatives was associated with U.S. decline.
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.
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.
From European perspective US system is a joke. All built on even bigger joke of high school. Which fails to teach students what they need in general education. And thus you get some weird "general" education irrelevancy being part of degree. Not to even mention how Master's level is not the standard most aim towards.
> 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?
It’s unpopular to say, but a disproportionate amount of value is of course derived from people who are both educated and have immediate access to resources to fully exploit that education as well as the risk tolerance to innovate in the process, and the social status to build strong trust and social bonds with other similarly prepared people…so although it pains me to say it, yes?
It is certainly plausible that the most benefit to society comes from people that are both educated and empowered.
Whether the cost of that empowerment > the burden outsourced to society, well, that is another discussion.
Perhaps more on point, because I definitely think we can find examples of this in practice, it’s perhaps more truthy and also more actionable to say that college provides its optimal outcomes when it serves people who have intrinsic gifts that are empowered by knowledge. Sometimes these gifts are resources, but often these gifts are cognitive brilliance. Either one is like oxidiser for the fuel of knowledge, but especially brilliance when given resources.
I’m pretty sure that for the majority of college graduates, aside from its social signalling value, the amount of their secondary education that directly benefits them in their life could fit in a couple of years of summer school or a year of community college.
A quarter million dollars in debt is a tragic price to pay for a couple thousand dollars of educational utility. A system that requires a social signal 100x more costly than the value it represents is externalising that cost onto everyone, and the only benefits flow to financiers and the moneyed class.
Aside from educational titles (as opposed to capabilities) society is generally sensible regarding the cost of symbols vs the reality they facade.
We recognise the ridiculousness of people owing $90,000 for a truck when they live in a dilapidated trailer on a rented lot. We understand that a man who lives hand to mouth but wears a half of kilogram of gold around his neck is probably not making the best life decisions. We ridicule the faux-intellectual with their ridiculously stilted props. But somehow, we are convinced to dress up our children like heirs to the crown and send them to finishing school for their jobs in retail. It’s a profound mis-investment.
It’s also worth noting that it is way more expensive to provide an education to the intellectual proles than it is to educate brilliant and hungry minds. We are shovelling money (distilled human effort) into a furnace of misery in the service of vanity.
> 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.
The US made a big shift from public financing via grants to public financing via loans. During the same period there was a ton of information/propaganda disseminated about how much more lifetime income college grads made vs high school grads. The companies making these loans are doing very well.
If I believed in conspiracy theories I might think this was all planned.
>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.
In my country the only restriction for university is that you have a highschool diploma.
Getting into the medical faculty is harder because the government does pay for everything and training doctors is expensive- for those the university picks the best and brightest.
The government also has programs in place to send out students to Harvard and MIT as the future elite of the nation.
The education system to be envied by the rest of the world is Norway's model.
> 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.
> 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
Citation needed on both counts
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.
Vague isn't the word I would use to describe Trump's anti immigration gestures.
True, but with respect to the university visa system at least it is pretty vague. The ICE stuff is not targeting Chinese and Indian uni students.
> Trump 1 and now Trump 2 presidencies have created financial crises at most universities
Worst financial crisis at any university was probably caused by himself at his own scam Trump University, long before he become president.
> 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.
I'm not talking about Ivy schools. I mean regional state and private schools that educate the majority of people who attend college. These do not have multi billion dollar endowments unless you are summing them all up.
At 4% a billion dollars yields 40 million per year, if you have 1000 staff that's 40k each, barely pays a salary.
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.
Liberal arts is a huge grab bag of courses with varying rigor, quality, appeal and difficulty.
One of the best courses I had in college was a metalworking course during which I learned to weld.
But like many (engineering) students, for most of the liberal arts credit, I went with stuff where I could get the best possible grade with the least possible work.
I did too, but still managed to gain a lifelong appreciation for live theatre.
> Do all colleges require engineering students to take liberal arts?
15 credit hours of liberal arts education isn't why college in the US is so expensive, and if one pays attention, they might even learn something from it.
If nothing else, you'll learn how to read and write.
> 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?
What do you suggest people were trying to buy, instead of cars?
The post is saying that you are forced to buy a car everywhere except 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.
>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.
Ok you do make a good point about people coming into tech for the money. It was quite a recent phenomenon. About 15 years ago I was finishing at my engineering focused university and my CS department was considered loser ville. Only the deeply passionate people wanted to enroll in that program. Everyone else went into Engineering or the sciences. Fast forward a few years later, and they are the largest department in the university. We are at the tail end of a massive bubble and its possible that if AI sticks around or the tech industry cannot support these valuations, its likely that high salary gigs will become scarce. I guess we will then see if this field grew because most people genuinely wanted to be here vs people just looking for dollar signs.
>This is why I chose the words "bookworm" and "studious" because those things do not necessarily mean tech.
Yeah I'd imagine those kids would have gone into Engineering or similar fields instead. They really arent the people I was talking about. I considered the social structure growing up to be the "jocks" at one end of the social spectrum and the "techies" at the other end with a massive amount of regular people in the middle.
If you take these middle people and just filter for B average grades or higher, these middle people wouldn't necessarily consider tech because it just wasn't really a 24 hour lifestyle thing for highschool kids in the 2000s. Yeah we had computers and video games but for most people, computers were that beige box in the den you'd play with once in a while, not a career. I recall in high school (mid 2000s) coding was offered and they couldn't even fill the entire class. The only course computer related that had any relevance was graphic design. The industry really expanded post iPhone when computing became a 24/7 lifestyle. In my opinion thats when the normies started considering computing as a career because it now impacted them directly.
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.
The real issue is we've largely abandoned the public university from a funding standpoint. Now the costs of a public institution is beyond the ability for many Americans to pay. The unstable job market has led many to believe the risks outweigh the rewards.
> 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.
For me it was the opposite. I came into college full of academic curiosity, and left completely burnt out by a system that cares about grades and proving knowledge much more than the pursuit of knowledge.
If you can't prove knowledge gained, would that not indicate that the pursuit was fruitless?
Regardless of your endpoint in that pursuit, you should have gained intermediate foundational knowledge along the way, even if you haven't arrived at your endpoint.
If you cannot show mastery of that intermediate knowledge, then any kind of journey for knowledge would have failed.
"if you can't prove something, then it isn't true" is an obvious logical fallacy.
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.
The middle class is something in between the capitalist class and the working class, it's badly defined.
If you're in the capital class, you're getting your income from the assets you own. If you're in the working class, you're getting your income from working.
I've heard multiple definitions for a middle class, eiher one that owns some capital in the form of rental apartments or stocks, or that the middle class has a decenr amount of discretionary income.
Personally I don't think the middle class is that useful of a term to make sense of the economy. I also have a feeling that people like the term middle class because it muddies the waters when it comes to understanding the relationship between capital and labor.
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.
Academic freedom? Where has that existed in the last 20 years?
That's a very ideological take, especially this part:
> It’s peanut butter and chocolate that has served democracy and its people well
Most people are now saying in polls it didn't serve them well! You're disagreeing with the majority of people's lived experiences. And of those who say it was worth it, a lot will be people in denial. Nobody wants to rack up huge debts and then admit it was a mistake. If you were to somehow measure how many people it has actually served poorly, instead of whether people admit it served them poorly, the numbers would be worse.
And serving democracy? No way! The Biden presidency stressed democracy by illegally attempting to bail liberal arts majors out of their debts, an extreme violation of the social contract. And arguing this stuff served people well when they're telling you right out that it didn't, is the kind of anti-democratic attitude that liberal arts colleges incubate in their student body. It's a big reason they're now openly loathed by so many people.
A good example of the problem is when you claim the academy has "some kind of intellectual idealism separate from economic incentive". There is no "separate from economic incentive". Anywhere, ever. For an adult to have such a belief is like still believing Santa Claus is real. It's economic incentives that have led to these professors creating a flood of non-replicable research using unscientific methods. Publish more papers = get promoted, even if the claims are false. So they publish lots of false papers. Incentives = outcomes, always.
Professors brainwashing people at vulnerable stages of their lives into believing false things about human nature is the number one reason why politics is so polarized, why democracy is so stressed all the time and it's so difficult to get anything done. It can easily take decades for people to learn that it isn't true and sometimes they never learn at all (like, because they went into academia themselves).
Friend, go to a community theatre production and you will find people engaged in something for which there is no economic incentive. Or learning a new language after retirement. Or playing church softball. There’s more to life than money, and there’s good in the world dollars can’t capture.
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.
Job training is a lot more than learning how to use equipment. It's about showing up on time, dealing with coworkers and being a productive member of a team. That's best learned on the job and is a big reason people don't like new grads. Its like going out on a date with someone that has never had a girlfriend. Let someone else break them in and screen them.
Higher ed unfortunately almost desocializes a lot of people. They live in a bubble and become insufferable obsessed with politics and social issues that are disruptive and inappropriate in the workplace
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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...
That course has 28 credits in first year, 3 of which are spent on computer science (arguably 3 more on "Roadmap to Computing"). Second year has a little more. Third and fourth year are heavy on CS/SE topics, but still have some time allocated to others.
I don't disagree with students learning Calculus and Statistics and even Physics as part of a CS course, and I think it's excellent that they take at least two courses in English composition. But you can't look at that four-year curriculum and say nothing could possibly be cut (turned into an elective) in favour of a History of Computers module.
How has the existence of the computing industry depended on baristas with Women's Studies degrees?
Because the history I know has it being 99% created by men with engineering skills doing paid work for large corporations.
Steve Jobs taking Calligraphy [1] comes to mind
[1] https://youtu.be/UF8uR6Z6KLc?si=339qOh2AlIr5QC2f&t=204
> I really wish the computer science degrees and even online courses spent like 30 mins on the history of computer science.
The uni I went to did, in multiple classes, to the point where you could almost predict the "war story" you were about to be told :D
"People want cheap healthcare"
This has a lot to do with what a country wants. Many countries show this is possible; the USA prefers a profit-based system where everyone pays a lot.
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.
Funnily enough there is a parasitic vine in Australian rain forests that kills its host and then thrives.
It grows completely around the tree and creates its own trunk on the outside. The tree underneath eventually cannot get any nutrients in its sap and dies. The vine then feeds on the tree as it rots away on the inside.
Eventually you have a hollow tree.
Very apt metaphor for the current situation.
There is indeed a mismatch between the traditional de jure mission of the university and the de facto mission it has today.
What is the university traditionally for? Education. What curriculum is most quintessentially constitutive of education? The liberal arts (traditionally understood, not the flakey pot-smoking/Dead Poets Society counterfeit). What is the purpose of the liberal arts? The free man.
What is the mission of the university today? Job training (putting to the side the question of how well it actually accomplishes this end). What are jobs? The servile arts.
There’s the heart of the contradiction. The university has a split personality that has rendered it bad at education and bad at job training, and to add insult to injury, it charges you Ritz prices for Motel 6 service.
The idea of universal education was never sensible. “Democratization” leads to mediocrity, because now market forces demand you satisfy the customer. You fail everyone by doing this. You get people that are uneducated (despite what they fancy themselves to be) and poorly trained for work, and on top of that, burdened by crushing debt. What a great start to adult life!
I propose that the first fundamental change needs to occur first in primary education, which is generally quite poor. Try teaching the basic liberal arts in primary schools (some adaptation of the trivium/quadrivium). Then, either after high school or by bifurcating high school into university-bound and trade-bound tracks, you choose one or the other track. In general, the majority should be in the trade track (where “trade” includes more that just plumbing or construction or whatever, but also vast swathes of what we put people through universities for for no justifiable reason).
Then we unsaddle the university of its job-training duties. Instead, you have apprenticeships and technical schools and so on to prepare people for their occupations. The university is stripped of anything that weakens its mission as educating institution. Valuable ancillary activities are spun off into, say, technical institutes.
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.)
> (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.
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.
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)
They worked at a power plant, a place where dumb mistakes can cause explosions and kill people. The power plant wasn't racist and hired blacks into the labor department, but because it was just manual labor that department paid worse than the other more technical departments.
When SCOTUS found against the power company they sent a clear message that merely being a technical, safety-critical job was an insufficient basis to establish a need to test people for intelligence. And as it's hard to argue that testing isn't needed for people who could cause massive power outages but is for <job X>, that was widely interpreted to ban such aptitude testing for any kind of job.
>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.
>You're agreeing with them. Keep reading their comment to understand why that didn't matter.
That's as may be, but my point was orthogonal to theirs and not meant as agreement or disagreement.
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.
Another way to see it is to ask why a company should be able to reap the labour benefits of their workers and then force other people to pay for their basic needs?
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.
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.
As a Canadian, for all the faults of our healthcare system, the fact that I don't have to stick with a job to maintain healthcare for myself or my family is a massive amount of freedom I take for granted.
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, 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.
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.
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.
> American health insurance is insurance in name only - picture health insurance models laid on top of your car:
Health insurance is more insurance than car insurance in the US. There is a legal out of pocket maximum of $17k or so, and networks don’t matter for emergency situations. In fact, people get millions of dollars of healthcare from health insurance whereas auto insurance provides a maximum of $500k after which you have to use umbrella insurance.
Health insurance premiums are not insurance premiums, because legally, health insurance sellers cannot underwrite the health risks. Legally, young and healthy people have to subsidize old and sick, via age rating factor caps (3x and even 1x in NY and 2x in MA), and not being able to price pre existing conditions.
Which means health insurance premiums are mostly a tax if you are healthy and less than 50 years old or so, especially if you don’t plan on giving birth that year.
Auto insurance premiums are insurance, because the insurer is pricing your risk of loss, based on your driving history/driving distance/location/etc.
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.
> 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.
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.
The EU is aggressively neoliberal or liberal-conservative, and that is the reason universities have begun to be more expensive. It's related to austerity, privatization, the aggressive revision of tax codes, and New Public Management.
The left has not been popular in the EU since the 70s, which is why this development has gotten increasingly aggresive in the last few decades. You cannot seriously suggest that the EU has moved left in any meaningful way. The EU commission is currently trying to implement that every new regulation can only pass once an old regulation can be removed. It's a neoliberal dream, where the amount of regulation can only go down, and public funds are allocated to private companies more and more.
This is especially true for universities, where public funding programs for research has begun to be funneled to startups instead of research groups.
> where public funding programs for research has begun to be funneled to startups instead of research groups.
It is darkly amusing that in one post you claim "the left has not been popular since the 70s" whilst admitting that the EU is centrally planning new companies. That's very much the sort of thing the left did in the 1970s.
> You cannot seriously suggest that the EU has moved left in any meaningful way ... the EU commission is currently trying to implement that every new regulation can only pass once an old regulation can be removed.
And who believes they'll really do it? They only got to that point after ignoring decades of warnings from the right that their left wing approach would crush their own economic power, which it did.
It's a common enough claim that "the left" refers to exactly the same set of ideas that it did in 1930, and therefore that no modern entity is left wing. But this is spurious. There are still left wing people and groups, that claim to be so and nobody disagrees with them.
All that happened is that as left wing economics became discredited over the course of the 20th century the left became better at obfuscating what they were doing. After the working classes disappointed by not rising up in revolution, the concept of equality shifted to be about gender and race instead. The EU doesn't want to openly nationalize industries, but is really keen on feminism, regulation and mass third world migration.
And economically, the left didn't need to obfuscate much. The gap between heavy regulation and nationalization is small. CEOs get to pretend that they're still in charge, but with no strong commitment to private property rights they're ultimately just transient administrators and there's not much reason to sign up for the stresses of being one. So - no startups.
Centrally planning? My guy, the EU is not founding companies, it is giving existing companies subsidies. The profits of those companies will not be public, they are private.
Nationalization and regularization are both on the decline. The opposite has happened: privatization of state monopolies and deregulatization.
I also think it's hilarious that you think a) the EU is feminist, and b) that feminism is leftist. What you are describing is liberalism, a right wing political position.
And even the liberal right is losing ground to the conservative right. The EU commission is far more conservative than it ever has been, and hard-right parties are in government in at least six EU countries (see e.g., https://www.politico.eu/article/mapped-europe-far-right-gove...), with conservative governments elsewhere. This is a strict break with tradition, where the extreme right has been excluded from European governments by consensus of other parties ever since the second world war.
Your beliefs are not aligned with reality. I am also personally in the middle of this research money refunnelling, I can vouch forst hand that research money is being funneled to startups and other private companies, while austerity measures are hitting hard across the EU.
I find this stage is more important for social development than intellectual development. An early adult stage where you go some place away from home in a relatively easy, same aged social experience, with people of diverse backgrounds is a net social good.
There are other ways of getting the same thing. Like if your country has some kind of compulsory service.
But maybe let’s stop pretending college is just about the intellectual stuff and see it as a social good.
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.
There's a simple and effective escape hatch: study abroad. Europe, Australia, South America, Canada even. Some countries are more affordable than others but the most expensive (by far) option is staying in the US.
From the point of view of developing your brain, leaving your country is a free education in itself. There is also the effect of embedding yourself in a network of expats made up of the best and brightest from countries all over the world. That all comes on top of the education you receive. And if you are less in it for the intellectual stuff and are more into drinking and partying, college life in the US is pretty lame compared to some university towns across the world. Cheaper, wilder, better.
There is an actually easy an effective escape hatch right here in the US:
Community college to state school path.
You can get a full bachelors degree for ~$35k. All four years, $35k. Not per year. Full degree. $35k.
And that's before any scholarships or grants.
Kids and parents are just insane though, and want to flex about the college they are going to from day one. Its become a ritualistic practice with social shame attached to going to community school.
Even though the end result is exactly the same.
I can vouch for studying abroad. But can you get loans and scholarships for it as easily as studying at home? Even if the university is free you must pay for food and housing.
Yes - for those coming from USA. Most colleges in EU are part of the US student loan program, through Netherlands appears to be dropping it
> Even if the university is free you must pay for food and housing.
A one-person apartment in the local halls of residence costs under €500/month here in DE. A room in a shared flat costs a lot less.
Studying abroad in Canada is not nearly as affordable. Tuition alone for international students here is exorbitant ($40,000/year and up). We don’t give any subsidies whatsoever for international students. Instead, we use their tuition fees to subsidize the tuition of our domestic students.
> 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.
They’re paying less, but they can also only afford to pay less.
I went to college with many people who were paying heavily reduced tuition rates and it was still a significant financial burden for them.
So even if the expected value of the degree is high in the long run, the downside risk is immediate financial ruin.
Correct.
It is also worth noting that the non-wealthy pay for higher education in two ways: first through tuition, and second through the taxes required to fund the very programs that provided their "discount."
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.
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
Yeah, and they made a push to rein it in back in the early aughts. As with all things grade inflation, what goes down, must come back up. I'm sure we'll be back here in 20 years having the same conversation.
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.
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.
In many languages, the basic version can be just one line of code, if you know the right libraries to leverage. C# leveraging Linq, for example:
What if the sentence is in Japanese (which doesn’t use spaces)?
I agree that some random leetcode-hard problem is not a good indicator, but if you can’t write fizzbuzz or can’t sum an array of integers, you’ve given me important data about your skills as a programmer on that day.
Yeah, LeetCode interviews are their own weird universe. Even smart people get wrecked until they realize you have to treat it like an exam. Most failures aren’t about ability, it’s just pattern recall under pressure. I’ve passed some rounds I had no business passing just because I stayed calm. StealthCoder helped me a bit there since it keeps me from blanking during the actual interview.
> FizzBuzz is now a "leetcode question"
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.
I'd agree with you 100% if these were Leetcode mediums and hards. They were not, these were quite literally the easiest LC easies I could find.
While my career involves writing code, I am not a SWE, I have never done any formal leetcode prep, and I have no formal education in technology beyond a high school CS class. I have no college degree whatsoever, not even an associate's degree.
I had a rule I stuck to when doing these interviews (which were for a SWE role) that felt very fair to me - I would not give these candidates any problem I couldn't solve in the same circumstances.
For reference, in the allotted time, one such candidate spent a good chunk of their time reading up on JS if/then syntax on w3schools. As I watched, I reminded them they could use any language they wanted, if they were more comfortable or familiar with others, and this Harvard CS grad declined, stating JS was their "strongest" language.
My best guess about these cases were rich kids / legacy admissions that weren't allowed to be failed for political reasons.
>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.
> 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.
I've worked a lot with Oxbridge and Ivy League folks and there is nothing particularly special about them. An Oxbridge degrees bestows an out-of-the-box premium personal brand, as you've demonstrated, as well as the social network, but not superior ability, in my experience
When I graduated, ahem, a few decades ago, the main difference between Oxbridge (maths graduates) and non-Oxbridge, specifically the Cambridge Maths Tripos, was that is was teaching the same content it had for the previous decades, whereas the maths courses at mine, and other 'Russell Group' universities had been dumbed down for the first couple of years. You could reach the same level as previous graduates by the final year, but you had to take a new additional course.
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
I partied my way through an easy major with nothing to do with my job. The people who didn't have no "superpowers" that I don't. The degree is a bunch of status signalling bullshit.
It sounds like you’ve rationalized your lazy work in college by convincing yourself it wouldn’t have made any difference if you had worked harder.
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.
You can provide the piece of paper at a fraction of the cost too. Nearly all of Europe does, I believe.
> 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?
What is obvious and what would be hugely socially useful would be to have a completely online, completely free accredited option for degrees that don't need labs. That would cause downward pressure on all of tuition outside the top universities.
The price of college at this point is a ridiculous value proposition to the average student. Who cares about the top students and the most gifted people. They will be fine regardless. The average student is getting crushed and ripped off blind.
Ripping off entire generations of young people is really stupid and is going to have devastating long run social consequences.
That's easily solved with labor market reform. First implement federal and state law that requires every worker performing any profession to have a college degree in that field.
Then companies are evaluated on how much work is produced in their business (for example by revenue), and they have to either contract the equivalent number of people with college degrees, or even better - license the degree from a college graduate. This can also be used to pay for tuition. The student gets a mortgage that pays for her education when she enters college, and then the lender has the right to part of either her salary, or the licensing fee for her degree to companies that need it, or to people who need it.
Let's say a chef who hasn't gone to culinary college, he can pay a culinary college graduate 20% of his salary to use their degree, which is a professional license. Or a company needing programmers. They can hire immigrants or an AI to program, and pay licensing fees to computer science graduates who have the degree.
Think what I thriving market for banks, investors, and insurance companies! They will be able to package these licenses and offer them on the market to individual workers or to companies for competitive and efficient rates. The college student of course gets rewarded as well, as they can rent out their degree, or even sell it. So a good student can get several degrees, and have a very good income from both his own work and from degree licensing fees. Of course we'll make sure that students belonging to an oppressed class be allowed to license their one degree to several places at the same time.
Just because Comp Sci and many STEM degrees in general are losing value does not mean that university overall is not worthwhile.
The question is not “does it provide any value whatsoever?” The question is “does a degree provide surplus value to society, given its costs?”
Does it really not, when many of the other degrees already lost their value a long time ago?
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.
That's not exactly true. Funnily enough, you are extremely dependent on your sociological background. If you come from a poor family and do very well, you'll get a full ride for sure. But if you do well but come from a well-off family that refuse to pay for your education, you are fucked. It's only university attendance that is (mostly) free. you still need to finance housing and life costs. Since most good universities are in expensive cities and student loans are not much of a thing, it is an extremely selective process that targets both class standing (from a money standpoint) and parental implication.
There was a study on one of the most selective school in France and actually diversity of background has gone down in the last 20 years. Europe is highly politicised and it was always about selecting for ideologically compatible behavior. Otherwise education wouldn't need so much government intervention/support, even if said education would be paid for by the taxpayer (everyone could get some amounts of credits, that they could spend on their institution of choice).
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
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).
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?
Because schools are in competition with one another to attract students (who have the ability to broadcast applications to multiple schools). The campus life factor is a major part of a student’s decision.
Put yourself into the student’s shoes. If you had the choice between two schools of otherwise roughly equal academic reputation but one offered luxurious residences while the other housed students like medieval monks, which would you choose?
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.
The taxation is conditional on earning enough income though, which aligns incentives better.
> once you graduate you are hit with 50% tax that gets back all you "free" tuition costs many, many times over.
This is plain false.
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)
This can only be true if the society gets richer over timer from this process. Considering that EU has actually become poorer and the gap is becoming larger every year passing, your theory of benefits from a well-educated populace is not well funded.
In the EU, the risk has been loaded onto everyone but the benefits are meager at best, and inexistent in practice. This is the typical problem of socialist system where everyone bear the cost but the benefits are only distributed to those in power or those who could manipulate the system for their own benefits.
If that wasn't true, France wouldn't be in the political turmoil and economic disaster that it is today. Unsurprisingly, France has been dominated by marxist adjacent ideologies, co-opted by the "resistants", the real winners of WW2. The US won on the ground but largely lost the ideological battle, we are now seeing the result of that invisible battleground.
> 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.
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.
The beauty and simplicity of common sense. Good comment.
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.
Supply and demand. It's no surprise that when we had 10% of people going to university in the 1960's and now we have over 38.8% [1] that the economic value of a degree seems to be getting watered down.
No different than any other form of inflation from the government blowing on the fire (subsidizing with money) without adding any actual fuel (intrinsic value). Just like housing and healthcare.
[1] https://educationdata.org/education-attainment-statistics#:~...
A degree isn't SUPPOSED to be an arbitrary differentiator. It's supposed to signal that you know a certain thing because you studied it for 4 years. Whether that's currently true in America I couldn't say.
The problem is the funneling of dispassionate kids into college who just pick something and then game their way as much as possible to that piece of paper.
Employers want passionate and self-motivated workers, instead they have gotten a mountain of applicants who routinely forget everything they crammed the moment the test is over.
College is still worth it for maybe the top 100 schools especially well-funded state schools. Why? Because people still get hired based on such a connection alone. Think about Waterloo. It’s a mediocre school with a strong pipeline to SV. You wanna end up at SV but didn’t study hard in high school or just weren’t smart enough for MIT/Stanford? Go to Waterloo.
It seems mainly to be about cost, as opposed to opportunity. College tuition inflation is insane.
When it came time for me, I couldn’t even come close to affording college (in 1981). Long story, but there were many challenges to address.
I didn’t want to accept financial support from my family (see “long story,” above), but I did let them co-sign a government-backed student loan for $6,000, for a two-year, full-time trade school (which seemed outrageously expensive, back then).
Took ten years to repay, but I never regretted it.
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.
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.
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.
> knock out core credits in community college
The correct way to do it is to utilize high school dual credit or dual enrollment offerings. Then you can shave off a year or two of college but still be eligible for freshman scholarships. Often cheaper than community college too.
> 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.
Well that specific example paragraph was about financial aid, not the value of a high school diploma, so I fail to see your point.
Well, I’ll elaborate as a Gen-Xer; what you describe about financial aid was the exact same scenario we faced.
You are conflating the “exceptional” kid coming out if HS who is offered full rides (who clearly should take advantage of that and go straight into university with that full ride) with an average student who will have to pay for some or all of college. For the latter, community college for 2 years was and still is a good idea.
I think the point is that you need to feel out the options available, which are fairly unique to each kid based on geography and grades and parents and extra curriculars, not just take a one size fits all approach of going to community college.
>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.
Many private colleges like Rice cover 100% of costs for all students with parents under a fairly high salary. Almost 40% of MIT students have financial aid that's equal or greater than their tuition. This is starting to get more and more common for elite colleges and universities.
I got a full ride plus stipend to a pretty good but not great school, but one of the things I wish my parents pushed me on harder was applying to schools like MIT where I didn't bother applying because I didn't want to be saddled with debt. This was a couple decades back, and it's so much easier to get a full ride now if you can make it in (admittedly much harder now).
My point isn't to write off community college. It's that a talented and accomplished high schooler should set their sights higher because the old idea that all these elite colleges are unaffordable is rapidly changing.
Also, I am not sure if you know people taking CC courses recently, but they are often taught in a way that gives you what you paid for at $0. Prerecorded canned lectures, infuriating and curiosity crushing online worksheets, etc. I know multiple people who were excited to do free CC when it was made free for older (30+) students whose academic aims were immediately stamped out within one semester because there was no college instruction. Just endless online worksheets. These things exist in other higher ed paths too, but truly not to the extent that I've witnessed.
I understand where you are coming from in regards to elite university. Certainly if a student can get admitted into an ivy league they should at least inquire about eligible aid packages. I would assume someone with the intellect to get admitted there would put in the work to explore all options.
Ivy league is a shrinking circle of spots and does not represent the majority of where exceptionally talented students go to as a result. Lets just take the example I cited with the top 15% of high school students in each high school in NJ would likely exceed the available spots at all Ivy Leagues. You mentioned public institutions in your original message. States have programs in place to ensure exceptional students are taken care of.
>Also, I am not sure if you know people taking CC courses recently, but they are often taught in a way that gives you what you paid for at $0. Prerecorded canned lectures, infuriating and curiosity crushing online worksheets, etc. I know multiple people who were excited to do free CC when it was made free for older (30+) students whose academic aims were immediately stamped out within one semester because there was no college instruction. Just endless online worksheets. These things exist in other higher ed paths too, but truly not to the extent that I've witnessed.
I was admitted to an Engineering school but due to severe health issues with family, I was forced to move closer and enroll in community college so I have gone through this experience in a unique way (Enrolled at University -> Transfered to CC -> Transferred back to University).
This was ~15 years ago but during that time all the teachers at the CC had Masters degrees in their field and also had additional teaching credentials(some had PHDs).
I found that instruction was very focused on ensuring students learned material vs my experience at my public Research based university where either TAs taught courses or professors focused on their research would reluctantly lecture as a requirement.
I will concede that instruction in subjects like Math/Physics were not of the same caliber as university only because while CCs tended to give examinations consisting of hard versions of the practice problems assigned as homework, my Engineering university expected me to to deeply understand the material and would give very unique problems during the common exams that test the deeper understanding vs just technique.
I am surprised to hear the anecdote that you expressed as that wouldn't pass muster with the university accreditation bodies as well as the admissions departments of the public universities that renew the "transfer agreements" with the CCs. In NJ there is a requirement of a minimum standard of instruction needed or else the receiving university has the right to reject course credit from the CC and rescind transfer agreements. The universities know who comes from the CCs and they are assessing academic performance of those students. For example Rutgers does this with some CC in their CS classes as the subject material is not 1:1(they are offered as general elective credit instead so still allows the student to not fall too behind).
Let me ask you was this anecdote occuring during COVID? Maybe that accounts for the strange online instruction?
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.
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.
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).
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.
>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.
Here is my made up guess: The average university graduate will do better without degree than the current non-grad averages.
You are making the assumption that it all boils down to the degree (the difference in income). This can't be possible (maybe a majority of it, but not all of it). There are other factors (like being from a middle-class, higher IQ, etc.) that selects for going to Uni. and this has effect later on income.
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.
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.
> 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.
I would not assume earning that much for 43 years.
Why pay to get a degree in the US when you are competing for jobs not based on merit or qualifications? I can see why those in h1b’d industries like cs don’t see any point, and those are the industries where the most jobs and money have historically been. As goes the STEM labor market so goes the market for stuff like accounting, communications, sociology. A fair and secure labor market is a necessary condition for higher education to pay off. American workers compete for jobs with a global workforce, therefore American universities must be cost competitive with those in India, China, etc…. Tenure is like tarrifs, the cost of protectionism is paid by the consumer.
I work for a small Us-based med-tech company that is growing. We are paring down our offshore devs and hiring only US based devs now. I can assure you that if you have a good school on your resume it puts you at the top of the list. All things being equal, if you went to University of Vermont (like I did) and and someone else when to Harvard, you better believe I'm interviewing the Harvard kid first.
>Why pay to get a degree in the US when you are competing for jobs not based on merit or qualifications?
This is one of those things that people just say and while of course there are issues with our current system, this provably false and patently absurd. Do you not do a technical interview for new devs? You don't check their merit or qualifications? You just do a lottery? It's frustrating to hear comments like this because it reeks of people thinking they're so smart while ignoring reality.
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.
>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.
> 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.
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.
Yeah I never get what these other comments are talking about with college not being useful. I basically learned my profession in college and now hire people who have done the same thing.
Maybe one thing to keep in mind is that there are a big range of colleges in the US. If you go to a poorly regarded party school then probably you have a good time and maybe even get some useful connections out of it, but the main advantage is presumably being able to check the ‘college degree’ box when applying to relatively ordinary jobs. If you go to Harvard then (a) you pay much less if you have limited means and (b) your future prospects are probably significantly better from the experience (this is a bit complicated – a lot of the good outcomes are due to capable and ambitious inputs so the direct benefit of the degree is more limited).
It is easy to read something about one subset of universities while subconsciously thinking of a different subset (eg all universities vs well-known / highly regarded / similar ones to your own).
When some survey says that people no longer see the value in the degree, it obviously doesn’t mean that no college is worth it.
Another thing: a lot of recent wage growth was in the lower end of the income distribution so better alternatives is part of the decreased desirability of college.
The signalling hypothesis (of Bryan Caplan [1]) lurks within your two premises. Neither the poorly regarded party school nor Harvard add much in the way of human capital. What both do is act as honest signals of intelligence, ability, conscientiousness, and resourcefulness (including family resources). These are extremely valuable indicators for prospective employers who are otherwise prohibited (by law) from asking or testing these directly and punished (through wasted wages, training costs, benefits) for making a mistake.
In the past it was much cheaper to train people on the job because wages and benefits were much lower. Higher education has driven up wages and benefit costs (through inflation and cost disease), thus cementing higher education’s position as a gatekeeper.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education?wpr...
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.
The author neglects to observe that doubling tuition over 30 years equates to only a 2.35% inflation rate. That sounds pretty close to the US inflation rate during that time, so increases in tuition cost have been held in check pretty well.
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.
The question actually asks "...worth the cost because people have a better chance to get a good job and earn more money over their lifetime".
The value of college to me was mostly social and intellectual, not economic. It's an irreplicable experience. There's certainly some logic to skipping that experience, but I couldn't recommend it.
I’m not in CS, so maybe it’s different, but I don’t know how we can expect to get skilled biologists, mechanical engineers, psychologists, etc without something that’s very similar to the 4-year degree.
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.
I’m still heavily subscribed to the idea that global access to social media ruined the kids’ expectations. Everything else is downstream effects of unrealized expectations.
In Chinese/Japanese cultures, role models and parental influence on education is still pretty huge. Japan is changing a bit, but I think school systems are still strict enough to keep it up. China is still a beast of its own.
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.
There was a user here a few months ago trying to promote his startup. He was being somewhat obnoxious when people offered criticism so I looked him up and found he was some 21 year old kid. Profile read:
> Founder & CEO of Nitrility which is the world's first music licensing marketplace working with over a billion $ in assets from 80K rightsholders.
> Age 21 as of August, high school diploma (Rutgers Prep), college dropout (UIUC), grew up in Somerset NJ, 2 time founder with 1 exit at age 18, 2400 rated chess player, former top tennis player, Forbes Technology Council.
> Usually you will find me in NYC, LA, or SF.
The dropout thing struck me because it was such an obvious attempt to try to appear to be the Mark Zuckerberg style figure that this kid desperately wanted others to believe he was. I’ve been seeing a ton of these kids claiming to have had exits before they even graduated high school, and even though I know they’re lying, I’ve been browsing here long enough that I would probably have believed them if I hadn’t picked up on it being a social media trend.
They might have thought it would help them get a thiel fellowship
some of the students just really don't want to live with their parents anymore. Going to college is the most socially accepted way of doing that.
> 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.
Maybe, just maybe, universities shouldn't cost a fortune?..
It would be interesting to see if the job prospects of American students and perception of the value of the degrees were to change if they were to eliminate the 15% discount that employers get for hiring foreign graduates (via OPT) by not having to pay FICA taxes.
When the unemployment rate for fresh American college grads is the same or higher than those without a degree, it does not make a compelling case for spending all of that money and time on a degree.
IIRC Mark Andreessen once said colleges esp ivy league ones, simplify the job of recruiters by acting as filters. Saves them the bother. So they attached lots of value.
I guess that's true even now but in a perverse sort of way. As markers of indoctrination and unsuitability for productive corporate roles.
Employers probably decided to avoid them.
That's not fair to a large number of students but the old system of colleges being markers of intelligence, suitability etc was not fair to large number of others either..
Do you know any employers actively avoiding students from Ivy-league colleges?
I agree that colleges have acted as filters, but the value of degrees has been deflated, even in Ivy leagues, because they’re easier and more common. I think a degree still acts as a filter though; getting a job is hard with a degree but nearly impossible without.
EDIT: There’s the Thiel fellowship, which requires not having a degree, but I’m not aware of other such opportunities. Early work experience looks better to some employers than university, but that requires getting a job in the first place.
I don't know about actively avoiding, but I have worked for multiple companies in London who prefer not to hire at the 'top' end of candidates (hence hiring me!), because they'll cost more and can have cultural issues like not be very fun people or thinking themselves to be above the self-taught and weird-career guys who didn't get a first from Imperial.
There's lot of anecdotal chatter and also mainstream media coverage on this.. It's a genuine concern.
But bigger issue is in USA where general jobless numbers are lower, with several sectors facing shortages, why is there the issue of grad unemployment at all.
The correct answer is important because politicians are filling the vacuum with false narratives to suit their base.
I don't "know" that's why I said guess. I doubt if they'll ever say this. Even in today's USA.
But there's enough SM comments to make a guess.
I was a hiring manager at a company that didn’t recruit from top universities for strategic reasons. In short we were smaller and a startup so it would have been difficult to compete. As we grew we had a presence at university job fairs but still avoided the top schools.
Similarly we avoided engineers from the Bay Area due to cost concerns.
The company was also a pioneer in the distributed work environment. A decade before Covid. So that opened a huge market for recruitment at that time.
IMO most of the stuffs in colleges can be self taught nowadays so the only two benefits are 1) that piece of paper and 2) networking. And good network only exists for certain colleges so for the majority out there it’s just that piece of paper.
Most of stuffs can, indeed. But how many have actually done so?
Like most investments in yourself, you get out of it what you put into it.
Yeah that’s true. But a paid education doesn’t provide too much motivation anyway. College education is stuffed with unnecessary courses not everyone needs but you have to take anyway.
Like any business. The only valuable thing is that paper and network (that is if it’s a top 50 school).
I didn’t take a single unnecessary course.
The course I took on Literature of the Apocalypse, in fall of 1999, is probably one you would say is unnecessary. It has proven quite valuable as I learned how to read a lot, a lot more quickly. I learned how to write quickly as well. I also learned a lot about an important aspect of our cultural and political context, as western society is dominated by doomsday cults (especially the atheistic ones, everyone’s got a utopia they are trying to sell in order to get you to sacrifice your life for them).
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.
If we’re talking about social costs and social benefits then it does matter. Different countries can have wildly different costs for delivering the same education, an education whose value to society (or lack thereof) needs to be taken into account.
Whether an education is paid for by loans or by higher taxes, the cost is ultimately borne by someone. In neither case is it free and in both cases its cost-benefit difference should be scrutinized.
> 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.
That’s irrelevant to the point the grandparent comment was making, which is that these resources don’t just fall out of the sky and that “I got it for free and I liked getting it for free,” isn’t a good basis for policy.
>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.
> "Free" doesn't mean "has no cost paid by anyone" and never has in these discussions.
Calling these programs “free” obfuscates the issue because there are people (even college-educated people) who genuinely believe the government can just make something appear from nothing; they genuinely don’t understand that the resources have to come from somewhere, which means someone else who does not necessarily benefit from the program pays for it now or those benefitting from the program have to pay for it later.
> Apologies if English isn't your first language.
I would encourage you to review the site guidelines. These kinds of quips are discouraged here.
…but there is cost to the student or their family. The difference being that paying for it or not is not an option. You can’t just say “I won’t go to uni, so I won’t pay for it”
By this definition, nothing is "free"; there is always some cost, whether financial or otherwise. It's an absurd bit of pedantry that does nothing but derail discussion. Free tuition is free at the point of sale to the student, just like the interstate I drive on sometimes is free to use as compared to the toll roads, even though my taxes paid for both. It's not complicated terminology.
> It means "at no cost to the student".
and GP's whole point was that it is not at no cost to the student.
Apologies if reading comprehension isn't your strong suit.
The student does not participate in a transaction that involves paying money in exchange for education. Taxes are collected and allocated as seen fit by the state. Students and others pay their taxes, but taxes are not directly transactional.
Apologies if English isn't your first language.
> And don't tell me it wasn't.
It wasn’t, other people paid for it.
At the same time many families got a single room with shared anemities. Even people in skilled positions. Just because they got assigned to some factory which management didnt have as good connections. Or preferred to pocket more than take care of workers. Or didn’t ended up in some location where central government was putting in extra resources to make it more desirable.
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.
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.
You have better employment options only if there are not enough people with degrees. If you give everybody the option of obtaining a degree then nobody is better off. In fact those at the bottom of the barrel end up in an even worse position.
That assumes there are a large number of jobs that require no advanced education. Short of construction, those jobs flew overseas decades ago.
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.
Construction, a few trades… Help me, I've run out of ideas without resorting to "Walmart Greeter".
Most of those jobs went overseas a long time ago. Short of the couple I could think of, the rest of the jobs remaining that don't require some advanced education don't pay a "living wage".
I'd love to see the US have a vocational "track" beginning in high school again. But that also requires we have the jobs for them when they graduate.
If you've ever worked at a random Fortune 500 company and looked around the office at people whose pinned apps are "Outlook, Powerpoint, Excel", those are jobs that can easily be done if you're moderately smart and learn a few things on the job. You have a reasonably well-defined set of goals, projects, and meetings, and you just have to talk to other people and move numbers around in Excel, then put them into Powerpoint and set up meetings in Outlook to discuss. There are millions of these jobs, and you can get extremely senior once you just learn the business of your company (which would never be taught in college). You don't need a college degree for these. A friend of mine is a senior executive at a large insurance company and does just fine at their job with no degree. Given, they got into that job decades ago when degrees weren't required, and worked their way up, but the same could be done now if employers let people be hired based not on degree but on an apprenticeship or similar trial period.
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.
It isn’t in that it doesn’t guarantee a job, but not having one all but guarantees HR drones will discard your CV algorithmically.
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.
While Western countries are making education increasingly private, expensive, and accessible only to the elite, in China, free education accessible to all is training engineers who then go on to work for companies that outperform those of other countries.
Education in modern times is only about training and certifying workforce so that employers can easily filter the prospective employees.
If that training and certification can be made available via other easier means, that's the end of brick-mortar universities with grand campuses. The dinosaur has to evolve into a bird.
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.
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.
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.
truth told nothing in American society is truly worth the cost. especially with rampant inflation.
we've allowed capitalists and rent-seekers into our educational system and it's nigh impossible to root them out. same goes for healthcare, housing, etc.
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.
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.
In unrelated news: China graduates more engineers then ever before.
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.
You don't think tradespeople are contientious, intelligent, or productive? That's the whole trouble with this filtering signal. It's bogus and has created elitism around professions that are just as hard if not harder than pushing computer keys.
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
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?
We need to bring back apprenticeships. They are the most effective method of transferring knowledge.
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.
The 4-year college isn’t a bad system but it has been asked to do a job for which it wasn’t intended. Many people just want an opportunity to develop useful skills within the context of a modern corporate business. Modern corporate businesses want a way to filter and sort potential employees for skills and readiness.
The four-year college isn’t good at either of these as it wasn’t intended for this. I don’t think the trade school model is quite right for this (there’s lots of soft skills to be learned) but it’s closer than the 4-year.
"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."
Polls really need to start adding filter questions like "Do vaccines work?" "Did humans evolve from small mammals?" because some people not believing something works is actually a positive signal.
Are there problems in Higher Ed? Almost certainly. Are changes to the situation driven by the "vaccines don't work crowd" likely to make things even worse for everyone? Oh yes.
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.
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.
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.
I will give you an upvote to offset the negative expressions. I've heard of at least one instance at a very well known Bay Area university in such a class.
From what was described to me, and I trust this person to not misrepresent their experience, was that they were essentially told 'hi, cis white male, sit down and don't say a damn thing, this isn't your place to talk'. And then go on to essentially present a curriculum that was essentially a myriad of thinly-veiled misandry, compounded by extremely clear classroom rules/culture where any opposition was decidedly unwanted by the lecturers.
I'm the first to champion equal rights and equal opportunity, but that that sort of thing was going on in higher ed left a bad taste in my mouth.
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.
When I see posts like this, it reminds me of when I went to community college. I was working towards an associate degree to transfer to a larger university which saved both money and allowed me to bypass some of the admission issues. One of the classes I was taking was a Gen Ed class around the philosophy of religion. I was an especially strong atheist at the time, and this class involved a well-rounded discussion and examination of religions from across the world as well as debates around our religious beliefs.
By the end of the class I had softened on my stance a bit (though still an atheist), and I saw multiple Christians get up, walk out of the class mid-lecture and never come back. Not all of them mind you, but a few of them took such great offense at the class even mentioning other religions that they left, and some really couldn't handle any sort of debate or discussion.
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?
> You seriously dropped out because you didn't like one class?
No. The university added other "studies" courses to my requirements that contributed to my decision. After taking gender studies, I knew I could not tolerate the other "studies" courses the university was suddenly demanding—which were not required when I first started.
> Which university
The University of Utah
> which year was this
2014
> what was your major
Computer Science
> what happened with your education and/or career after you dropped out?
I still have 8 classes left. Nothing happened to my career.
> And what precisely do you mean by "castigated," in your specific case?
One of our guest speakers was a man with autogynephilia—a man who derives sexual pleasure from dressing like a woman.
In a follow-up discussion, I committed the "sins" of referring to him as a man, and saying things like he is not a woman, and there are only two sexes.
My instructor and some students went scorched earth on me over these elementary facts. They made it quite clear that the only acceptable narrative was that, because he "identifies" as a woman, he is a woman.
This is just one example of the kind of "thinking" that went on in this course. I don't like it when I'm told what I must think. As I said before, that's indoctrination, not education.
> I have a hard time believing this story.
Why? It's all true.
> In a follow-up discussion, I committed the "sins" of referring to him as a man, and saying things like he is not a woman, and there are only two sexes.
Sincere question: Why were you not able to just think "Oh, ok, some people do this and feel this way." and then just move on? I'm not sure why these particular things needed to be discussed.
I don’t understand this thing you do in the US of forcing you to do completely unrelated courses. You want to study computers and they put you through liberal arts or gender studies bullshit that is basically worthless. Why?
https://www-old.cs.utah.edu/docs/Undergraduate/UGHandbook_20...
According to the University of Utah Computer Science Undergraduate Student Handbook 2014-2015, "Students must take two intellectual explorations courses in each: fine arts (FF), humanities (HF), and social sciences (BF). Two of these six courses must be upper division – one should meet the diversity (DV) requirement and one should meet the international (IR) requirement" and "The diversity (DV) requirement can be satisfied by taking a course from an approved list as part of the intellectual explorations courses." So, there was only one required diversity course, from a list of courses, meaning that gender studies was not specifically mandated. If you took gender studies to satisfy the diversity requirement, it was because you chose gender studies, which seems like an odd choice, given your beliefs. In any case, you would not have to take multiple diversity courses.
> I still have 8 classes left. Nothing happened to my career.
I'm not sure exactly what you mean. As a result of dropping out, do you not have a career in computing? Alternatively, did dropping out without getting a computer science degree not harm your career at all, and if it didn't, then why were you spending time and money ("I refused to spend another dollar of my hard-earned money") to get a degree?
In a later comment, you say:
> this was the beginning of why I personally no longer thought a college degree was worth the cost.
> sitting through courses where I was not allowed to openly debate the ideas being presented to me.
I'm confused here. For you, is the monetary value of a college degree to openly debate ideas in class? And if so, why did you major in computer science, as opposed to philosophy, for example, which is known for open debate of ideas in class, unlike computer science?
> My instructor and some students went scorched earth on me
Scorched earth is a metaphor. It's not in this case an accurate and informative description of reality. I suspect you just mean that you got criticized, which is exactly what you asked for: an open debate of ideas. The use of hyperbolic phrases like "castigated" and "scorched earth" does not make your comments plausible.
> One of our guest speakers was a man with autogynephilia—a man who derives sexual pleasure from dressing like a woman.
> In a follow-up discussion, I committed the "sins" of referring to him as a man, and saying things like he is not a woman, and there are only two sexes.
Now I definitely agree with the other poster that this sounds made up, or at the very least you are significantly embellishing the story in such a way to completely ruin your own credibility.
> you are significantly embellishing the story
The guy told us he was married, with children, and that he had a separate apartment where he "lived like a woman" most weekends. He lived that way because his wife didn't like it when he dressed like a woman around her. He said he was intensely aroused by wearing pantyhose and skirts, in particular.
That may sound "significantly embellished" to you, but I assure you it is not.
Regardless of what you, or anyone else here, would like to believe about my credibility, this was the beginning of why I personally no longer thought a college degree was worth the cost. I refused to spend another dollar of my hard-earned money sitting through courses where I was not allowed to openly debate the ideas being presented to me.
I'm sorry but this timeline and story makes zero sense. For reference, 2014 is about a year before gay marriage was fully legalized in the US and reasonably before the whole trans rights movement started being a lot more public. I went to college in a deep blue state and had practically little to no interaction with any transgender folks, both in my gen eds classes and just overall at that same time period. Someone arriving as a guest speaker and talking in the way you've mentioned would've instantly made headlines in 2014, especially since at least one student would've complained and made it a bigger issue which as far as I can tell it doesn't exist. Nor are there any mentions of said guest speaker, and colleges are generally very public about this sort of thing.
I understand that you had a different experience, but you seem to be committing the "argument from incredulity" logical fallacy.[0] What I described may not have happened to you, but it did happen—regardless of whether the timeline or details makes any sense to you.
Do you have any thoughts about the cost of college degrees being worth the cost? That's ultimately what prompted me to comment.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_incredulity
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.
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.
> 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
> 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.
>> 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.
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.
1 - https://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/aa/lc/
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.
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED670929.pdf
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
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.
*some
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.
Ask the women if they want to be dependent purely on their family or man.
Four-year anything is not seen as worth the cost, when every platform firehoses you with stories about people who became billionaires in 7 months.
Being long degeneracy [1] is the number one strategy right now
1: https://oldcoinbad.com/p/long-degeneracy
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
> There is nothing a college can teach you that you cannot learn for free online.
This is trivially false outside of some math, CS and sweng. Even within IT learning networking at an above basic level requires a well equipped lab.
What you need is the exams! Maybe $1000 to sit a bunch of paper or computer based exams in a hall. Teach yourself beforehand.
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
Immigration is about short-changing the natives to make the billionaires wealthier, yes, we know.
People are also now learning this fact, which is why you’re getting unpalatable politicians elected.
"I'm being short-changed!" claims rich minority whose high pay even fresh out of university leads to SF rents being unafordable by key workers.
Irony is, that doesn't prevent such sentiments as yours leading to people like Trump. I had a chance to live in the USA years back, I'm glad I didn't bother to take it.
I didn’t say anything about tech workers.
Motte, Bailey. You responded in a thread about tech workers and H1Bs, on a tech forum.
> 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.
When immigration is a leading factor on why the modern college graduate has less marketability in the workforce, leading them to believe the ROI on their degree is not worth it compared to generations past, you really should have expected it.
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.
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
What's the point? You're either going to be replaced by AI or a robot (or both) anyway.
If by "AI" you mean "An Indian", I agree
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.
This was the intended result in the 80’s when Reagan destroyed public college subsidies.
White rich people hated competition from poor and brown people. That whole even playfield thing was their nightmare.
Ask the rich families if college degrees are still important. You’ll get a different answer.