Wouldn't that follow from the fact that there are way more people concerned with the state of education (because everyone must be educated) than there are people who have ideas for far fetched science research and companies? Education is viewed (rightly in my opinion) as an intrinsic good. Somebody's far fetched idea for a company isn't.

Well, it could be equally appreciated if all those humans longing for better/cheaper education realized how much better their life because they can learn literally anything for free with a tap/click because someone runs Google/YT, which to take off required some growth capital (an ironic example in this context, yes)

They don't underappreciate capital in that case, they underappreciate the value of online education for various reasons (doubts about quality being one), the weight of tradition on higher education, and the fact that many (perhaps even most) people who go into higher education want a degree to show prospective employers (this is of course itself showing the appreciation and necessity of playing the capital game in their lives).

A handful of far-fetched ideas have added more economic value to the world than every diploma combined. I’m not sure we could even assign a dollar value to crazy ideas like satellites or the internet because the positive externalities they’ve created are so far-reaching.

Crazy ideas a lot harder to evaluate, and a lot riskier, but they’re definitely not less valuable.

The crazy ideas you cite as examples came from people with diplomas.

Can substitute airplanes[0] and computer games/graphics[1], though if we have to be that pedantic I found a couple names[2] in the history of satellites section of wikipedia that don't seem to have formal education beyond a military technical school.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers#Early_career_a...

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carmack#Early_life

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konstantin_Tsiolkovsky and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Poto%C4%8Dnik

Of course you can find examples of people who didn't get a diploma and had significant inventions, there are a few truly smart and totally self-motivated people in the world! Using Carmack & the Wright Brothers doesn't actually support what @elliekelly claimed above, nor contradict my comment. The claim made above that inventions outweigh education economically is a false proposition for starters, but it's also a claim that is going to be extremely tough to back up because (my claim is) inventions are statistically correlated with education, and not just a little. I think if you stack up all the important inventions, you'll find a vast, vast majority of the inventors have diplomas, and that major inventions by people with little to no formal education beyond childhood are relatively rare.

I'll back up my claim with a little bit of data...

"Beyond R&D spending, a crucial input into producing patents is education. Contrary to the stereotype of the college-dropout entrepreneur, innovation—at least as measured by high-quality patent activity—is almost exclusively accomplished by people with advanced degrees. Most often, this entails some amount of education beyond an undergraduate degree: 45 percent of triadic patent holders hold a PhD, MD, or equivalent degree, and 70 percent have at least a master’s degree. Only 23 percent completed only a bachelor’s degree, and 7 percent have not completed a four-year degree.

"Patent holders are substantially more educated than the rest of the population. Only 3 percent of the adult U.S. population has a professional or doctoral degree, but 45 percent of patent holders hold a degree at that level. And, while more than 90 percent of patent holders have at least a bachelor’s degree, just 27 percent of the overall population does. The importance of education in innovative activity highlights some of the broader spillovers to the economy from an educated workforce." [1]

(emphasis mine)

[1] https://www.hamiltonproject.org/charts/most_inventors_have_g...

https://voxeu.org/article/does-education-lead-more-innovatio...

http://www2.itif.org/2016-demographics-of-innovation.pdf

That's a lot of rhetoric, but I don't know if your response is any more substantive. At least if we're talking about college degrees rather than high school diplomas, OP may be correct: https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-American-adults-had...

We sent a man to the moon in 1969. At the time, half of Americans didn't have a high school diploma, and just 10% had a college degree. In the 1940s and early 1950s, when we broke the sound barrier and invented nuclear power, maybe 7% of Americans had a college degree, and just a third had a high school diploma.

Do you think the same society that did those things couldn't have invented the Internet and Facebook? It's not clear to me that college diplomas are adding value. I think a society with universal K-10 education, plus a handful of people getting college degrees in areas that really require it (medicine, engineering) could build pretty much anything a society can build. They might build even more--they wouldn't be wasting a big chunk of their youth in school.

> Do you think the same society that did those things couldn't have invented the Internet and Facebook?

Society didn't invent those things. People with the education conveyed from a college degree did. As was almost every notable invention and discovery of the past 80 years.

This is not controversial.

> > Do you think the same society that did those things couldn't have invented the Internet and Facebook?

> Society didn't invent those things. People with the education conveyed from a college degree did.

But Zuckerberg famously doesn't have a college degree so that can't possibly be the case...

And off the top of my head I'd also call the Apple computer and MS-DOS "notable" but that's just my personal (and apparently controversial) opinion.

Sure. The question. Is what is the benefit of sending the other 95% of people to college? Those people were certainly educated enough to operate the economy that underpinned and made those achievements possible.

I’m equally shocked by the fact that people value so much fictional piece of papers that are mostly borderline scams. I would exclude from that list only a handful of unis such as oxbridge, mit, Harvard and Stanford