I agree that college financing is out of control, but that doesn’t mean a college education is a waste of time. Secondary education was once the domain of rich kids too, but we changed that and the long term value to the world is obvious. Financing public goods is a solvable problem.

It seems pretty reasonable to me that as human society grows more complex and specialized, humans would benefit from more education.

A degree doesn’t just steal value in terms of money, which puts you tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of compounding debt, but it also steals your time, and indoctrinates you into a top-down style of learning. Your time, the most valuable asset in the world, could be spent solving real problems in the real world. The whole system is a scam, and I’m truly sorry for those who have fallen for it.

My advice would be to cut your losses and get into entrepreneurship or work for a company that interests you ASAP. Life is too short to participate in someone else’s profit centered system of learning (Doctors and Lawyers excepted, but only because the level of gatekeeping in those fields is so high and perverted, and backed by government, that learning only via apprenticeship has literally been outlawed)

Within a couple of years of starting my CS degree, I was far better at programming than every hobbyist programmer I've met. I didn't have many opportunities out of school. I was from a poor country town that topped the state crime statistics. I know my mum hadn't finished high school and I don't think my father did either. I joined the military, got a trade and went to university at 30 as a single father working full time. University changed my life for the better, gave me a lot of tools and made me much more valuable.

I can’t imagine I would have developed the concept of LTI systems outside of academia (EE), nor realized how much of signal processing tasks can be deconstructed to just convolutions or correlations, but these modes of thinking have proved powerful in my early career and especially as a hobbyist.

When in the workforce one can pick up a skill/s, from a technical institutes or college extension programs. These programs focus directly on educating for an area focus with relevant industry experience and problem sets.

Reasons are more than I can cover in one post - gatekeeping is real, very super real in most well paid jobs. Nobody hires new accountants, managers, electricians, architects, any kind of engineers, and many more without school. Nobody is going to give them expertise coming from job required to grow. Not all jobs are learnable just from online tutorials and books. You don't want to have your house built by guy who aced some online architecture test but has no degree, do you.

You were lucky and seemingly very talented. That is great, but not a usable advice for maybe 95% of the folks. I don't like how things are, but currently they are like that all around the world and there is no change coming soon.

That's not really the primary problem I think, I gladly would. But what I would like even more is an entity (probably a company) that has enough assets that if something goes wrong with the house I can get compensation from them. And this company probably isn't going to hire that guy. That's where the actual problem is.

This is a highly questionable assertion, given that these firms largely recruit candidates from CS degree programs to staff their most cutting edge projects.

The point is, it's silly to condemn the value of college by waving around employment in a company that is well-known for recruiting from top-tier universities.

Computer science is still a young field with low-hanging fruit everywhere, all you need is a very bright person who knows the basics to make meaningful contributions on cutting edge projects because the "cutting-edge" isn't that sharp yet.

It's not just them either, there are tons of non-FAANG jobs that pay very well and do cool things, that recruit recent grads. There isn't even consensus in the industry that further education is valuable; sometimes people don't even trust those that go this route (I think this is a bit harsh, but it's due to bad anecdotal experience).

Straight out of college, I was hired to write code in a language that didn't even exist when I started college. Why? Because those companies rely on students learning more than just "language A". They want quick-learning generalists who can pivot to any tech or language if there is a need. And I can safely say, I definitely learned all of that stuff in college, and I am very thankful for the very solid understanding of CS fundamentals that have carried me in the industry over the years.

The very best case for the non-college trajectory which is that you were able to work on real, cutting edge problems from your entry into the workforce and had the discipline to learn the important parts of CS fundamentals required to work on them.

The very worst case of college education - doing only the required for the degree, no side projects, industrial placements, or advanced topics.

Yes, a good autodidact doing genuinely interesting work is going to be a more valuable contributor at 22 than someone who has spent the last four years doing a CS degree by the numbers. That's not a good example because those are two different people. Many people who enter the tech workforce at 18 may spend years doing paint-by-numbers business applications using a single set of tools, those people aren't going to FAANG jobs.

While focusing on developing marketable skills should be the top priority of students, there are a lot of other values that a college experience provides.

College has an entrance barrier and is very disconnected to the outside world, so it has a strong signal effect.

Also consider this: with four years of college time, you can get two career educations with real life industry experience and come with much less cost.

College also increasingly ties in industry experience with in-class experience as companies are only willing to take on interns that are currently studying at colleges they're partnered with. Not to mention the way people use it as a networking opportunity and a chance to try out new things before having to dedicate themselves to a career they might despise.

Democracies depend on voters who are lucid, informed and rational. Modern technological civilization provides so much, and in very abstract ways, that it is non-optional that people be able to understand, or know they don't understand, massive swathes of broad-reaching ideas and concepts. Because democracies say "choose a candidate to represent you on all these things".

And you genuinely believe modern colleges provide this?

To the extent that viewpoints not part of the accepted doctrine are presented, they are presented poorly and without passion.

I think that’s exactly right. Reading primary sources is much more complicated than reading undergrad-level sources: you need to read not just the source, but enough supporting material to understand the context the source was writing in, competing movements and how they were viewed at the time, etc. You simply don’t have time in a one-semester course on, say, political thought in the 19th century, to dive into the details of any one particular movement, be it abolitionism, women’s suffrage, or anything else. The scope of these questions is enormous, and whatever primary sources a student is likely to find will have tremendous selection bias, because the student won’t even know what sources they’re ignoring or what context they might be missing.

Part of the professor’s job in undergraduate courses is to give the lay of the land. And if an enterprising student decides to put in the primary source work, to not let that one student derail the conversation into hyperfocusing on a single topic, while hopefully also preventing the student from getting hopelessly lost.

Or George Mason U's Mercatus Institute, headed by Tyler Cohen -- one of the larger investments in schools made by the Koch Bros. There are lots of others.

The academic bubble has grown and shifted over the years, this is evident to most people i know who can peek outside their academic circles. Academia is slowly moving itself to irrelevance

...depending on both the student and the career.

Many tech jobs require not much more than literacy, 6th grade algebra, and a tiny bit of grit. Most smart middle schoolers could make mid five figures slinging PHP part time. I did in early high school, and I'm not particularly smart or hard working.

But there are many jobs, even in relatively easy fields like programming, where nonnegative productivity requires years of practice.

Not mine. Went to two Universities - both taught students to regurgitate what lecturers taught. Anything beyond that meant low marks.

That narrative is totally destroyed by knowledge retention studies. It's one of the few things in life where the data is completely unequivocal: people don't keep what they don't use, and most people use almost none of what they learned in college. (I predict anybody who disagrees will be a STEM major in a STEM job, i.e. extremely unrepresentative of former college students at large.)

Getting a college degree requires one to work with large amounts of information. Even if you retain none of those facts and figures later in life, you can still retain facility at working with information. And that is much more important to long-term success than how much you memorize.

While I think those types of classes should still exist, they shouldn't be used as an artificial financial and time barrier to getting a decent job.

If this weren’t the case, just hire people who dropped out during senior year for a wonderful discount. They got 7/8s the education!

For example, I learned how to conjugate verbs in foreign languages, and algorithms with O(n) vs O(log n) in computer science.

Then later in a foriegn country I expanded my my vocabulary. On the job, I learned about version control, how to read other people's code and how to fix bugs.

The issue is that it's a waste of time for people who will never use it for anything. If you spend four years to get a BS and then find a career as a factory worker, it was a waste of time -- the education is worth less to you than the cost in time it took from you.

This comes from subsidies causing oversupply. If you're going to actually be a doctor or an engineer then a college degree is worthwhile. But some people are going to be retail clerks and factory workers. Just blindly sending everyone to college because Everyone Should Go To College is wasting their time and the taxpayer's money.

This economist has looked at economic research on the effects of education, such as:

* How well students retain information

* How well students apply their knowledge in contexts outside of the classroom

* How much college graduates make versus how much someone makes after dropping out of school at the last minute

* How much more productive nations are after educating large swaths of their population

* How many companies outright tell their new hires that the knowledge they gained in school needs to be forgotten, and that they need to start learning everything from scratch.

And the conclusion Caplan comes to is that college education is a social signal, i.o.w. it's a zero-sum game where getting a college degree comes at the expense of everyone else with a college degree since the signal is degraded and is not as special as it once was.

The WSJ article linked up at the top is literally about how factory work increasingly requires professional education like a college degree.

But does the job really require a degree in order to do it, or is it only the employer that requires the degree, as a filter, because now they can get away with it as a result of the oversupply of college degrees?

Anyway, the article is clear that increasingly automated factory work requires more educated and independent employees.

This is starting to happen in retail too. Thanks to self-checkout machines, there are now more employees in the pharmacy at a local CVS than in the rest of the store combined.

Suppose that people with a degree are significantly less likely to quit shortly after you've spent a lot of money training them on your equipment, regardless of whether what they studied in college has any application to the job. If you have to pay the person with a degree a lot more money then maybe it isn't worth it just for that, but if everybody gets degrees and there is an oversupply such that there are more people with degrees than jobs that actually require them, now maybe you can get someone with a degree for a low enough price to be worth requiring it.

> Anyway, the article is clear that increasingly automated factory work requires more educated and independent employees.

That's just the signaling value again. They're not looking for someone with knowledge of GAAP or materials science or economics, they're looking for someone with the proven capacity to earn a degree by studying those things, because it implies they can also learn to run the machines well.

If not as many people had degrees then it wouldn't be worth paying the premium for one of the people who do, and then people who are going to be machine operators don't have to burn four years of their lives and incur significant student debt just to engage in signaling behavior. Instead the employers would have to bear the (lower, but unsubsidized) cost of more attrition as a result of not having the degree to use as an early filter against low quality employees.

Seems reasonable to me. I'd love a better method for quantifying the value of education, too. It's too easy for Big Ed to argue how college is essential as they jack up the prices.

Cost structure of college

Cost structure of healthcare

Mass incarceration (actual cost + lost GDP etc.)

If we fixed those 3, or at least dramatically reduced their impact, we would unlock 30+ years of growth. Its basically free money, just sitting there, waiting for someone to restructure each of them.

Transportation and infrastructure are broken requiring private car ownership and whose design holds back community and local growth around the country (in transit and in broken water, electric, and internet monopolies).

Agriculture is also super broken with subsidies for unhealthy corn syrup, half of food wasted, huge meat subsidies, an industry dependent on undocumented labor, etc.

Really they all come back to planned bad incentives - housing is regulated to be cost prohitive and NIMBYed, all infrastructure is deeply controlled to protect encumbant oligarchs, prison industrial complex is lobbied by the prison supply chain and police forces. It all comes back to politicians acting in the interest of few over the many contextualized over many circumstances. And that can only happen if they are unaccountable, which is the root problem to fix.

I guess they could be saying that among the remaining third of the population, the Californians are still unhealthy even if not overweight while the French are healthy. Seems unlikely to be true, though.

Even if you qualify, there is limit to how total many section 8s are given out. So there is a waiting list of several years, during which time you must still qualify.

You can not just sign up on that waiting list. There are small windows open at random a few days a year when they will accept names.

No leasor is required to accept section 8 people and very few do. So even if you get a section 8 voucher, you still need a lot of luck to find a place.

Thus the streets are paved with homeless.

Paying for the Party is a good book that explores this modern issue.

wasn't there an article trending on HN a few hours ago about the 2T$ for Afghanistan?

With Germany, in contrast, the priority was to get us up and running as a democratic society. Mostly this was a side effect of needing a stronghold against Communist-Russia dominated GDR, but still - had the US gone through with de-industrialization of Germany as some plans wanted to, Germany would have been in chaos again.

Did Vietnam and Korea not happen? Plenty of nation building going on there. Vietnam failed because peacekeeping isn't the same as peacemaking. The Nazi fought to the last man (or close to it) and were beaten down completely; the Japanese were nuked into submission. Both of those are not or were not options in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, where there was/is still strong opposition backed by foreign powers.

> There was no plan on how to fix/rebuild the country after the threat (Taliban/Saddam)

Afghanistan wasn't intended to be a long term fix, just chase out the Taliban, kill Osama, and let the Northern Alliance take over. That didn't work out so well. Nation building is also a lot easier when the nations were already global empires; Afghanistan is still having a hard time catching up to the 20th century.

Iraq was a deliberate failure in this regard, and troop numbers were kept deliberately low to more easily sell the operation to the public.

Secondly, I'd love to see some real data on college as a misallocation of resources. Everything ive seen would suggest the opposite. The "college experience" is kinda the height of a true free market place for ideas and people leave better for it. The government should be funding more for education, not cutting people off from it.

College costs an insane amount of money in the States. I'm not sure more money is the answer. The government should be pushing ways to make it cheaper. Ceasing to guarantee public student loans and making private debt more easily dischargeable in bankruptcy would be a great start.

Turn off the money firehose and colleges will return to their core competencies - teaching and research - instead of building football stadiums, basketball arenas, and doing other stuff that's irrelevant to a good education. They may also differentiate by having tuition prices better reflect costs and future job prospects. So for example art, writing, polisci, history degrees may cost way less than engineering, science or medical degrees. Making community-college-to-state-college transfers easier would be another thing to try.

Basically there are many things one could do to expand access to college, and leave students better off, without spending more tax money.

Are there too many people who get in to Ivy League schools just to party? Sure. But fixing that problem—which I agree is worth fixing—need not involve burning higher education to the ground and depriving those who are actually going to get use out of it.

Within Ivy League schools there are a ton of (very bright!) kids who get a degree just to have a credential they use to punch their ticket at a bank or consulting shop. And outside the Ivy League there are tons of kids who get a degree, spend a lot of time partying, to get a job they could have done without the degree. All told, probably a majority of people who get a degree today don’t need one. (Back when we sent a man to the moon only 10% of Americans had a college degree. It probably never needs to get higher than that.)

There is a place for public funding of college. We need engineers, doctors, even writers and journalists. And we need to address the plight of people from disadvantaged backgrounds. But I suspect you could get most of the economic benefits with a targeted system that gave out full ride scholarships based on merit, need, and plan of study, instead of making college into grades 13-16 as we have today.

Reminds me of something I recently read. iirc, it was some local news story regarding a college student at a nearby state university. I remember someone asked him his plans after college and he replied something about wanting to start a landscaping business. I wondered why the hell someone would bother with all that debt for something that they could have started years ago.

Did studying by yourself at the library really require being enrolled in a university though? I mean which part of this education is not indefinitely scalable? Pretty much only the personal attention of a professor. Did you require the personal attention of a professor to learn PLT? Somehow I don't think so.

>Before learning PLT I thought that the C type system was all anyone needed.

Using C for a while would've fixed that for you, too.

He's talking about working on Rust, not working in Rust. A Rust compiler, with its borrowing/type-checking, is an order of magnitude more complicated than one for C.

Plenty of people meet their co-founders, find their passion, pivot their lives entirely during the time; even if the only activities a student takes are "drinking/sex/video games/partying" they're probably out making connections that end up serving them pretty well interms of employment/relationships.

Restricting access just so some group youve determined "doesn't deserve it" is elitist to the extreme. I'd much rather have 5% ( or more)of my income go to funding state run education rather than subsidizing my extracurriculars (which ironically are way more drinking/sex/video games/partying than I ever had time for in college).

As to being elitist: subsidizing college is a handout to people who are already pretty well off. The people who need help the most aren’t going to college. I’d very much like to see colleges defunded and that money redirected to social services for kids in high-need communities.

In today's system if you can afford university with no debt you're very well off and it's probably a wash since the funds are coming largely out of your taxes (ie just about everyone that works in US tech and comments on this forum). The biggest winners are middle class families that can prepare their children for college but can't pay for it; but again, helping one group doesn't mean that it's no longer possible to help another group.

I can't see how restricting higher education back to the days when the hyper rich gathered to circle jerk about how much of the classics they've memorized helps in anyway (other than give all of us already educated in the workforce a lovely gate against the next generation).

Meanwhile, if university education really is mostly a vacation for wealthy young adults, then funding it is regressive, because no matter how directly accessible you make it financially, it's still tilted towards the wealthy because they have the means to forego 4 years of income to attend, and because they're better prepared to apply and take advantage of it in the first place.

A dollar spent on accessible college is just a dollar that can't be spent else where not necessarily a dollar taken from another services. Despite what some people might lead you to believe, taxes can be raised to pay for things (usually disproportionately affecting those wealthy people you're so concerned about getting a handout).

[0]https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/the-college-payoff/

You can disagree, and then make your case, but you have to make it on the merits, not with mic-drop logic.

Note that my side already has a highly instructive example to argue from: the mortgage interest tax deduction, which turned out to be expensive, distortive, and highly regressive.

At best, it could be close to that if you chose the right major and friends. But the majority experience seemed closer to binge drinking, cheating on homework assignments, and wasting time in class by asking the professor if X was going to be on the test.

College is absolutely just a continuation of high school for most people, and I'm afraid it's going to become even worse as the demands for free college get louder.

Asking a high school student, especially one that likely grew up in a small town with limited exposure to people careers, and ideas, to go into an uncaring workforce essentially unable to pivot for the rest of their lives sounds heartbreaking. I strongly believe that my opportunity should be available to every person.

As a side bar I think this probably should start way earlier than college; more well run state boarding schools would be a huge life line to high performing students stifled by their geography.

There’s also been some follow on studies that look for differences in the effect depending on race and gender

[1]https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C32&q=Kru...

So you think 63% of the population under 34 are either illiterate or unconscientious?

University did take a chunk of my life that I would have liked to be earning money and growing my family. But it was a much better experience, and made me a much better person than when I was surrounded by ignorant and bitter men working in the trades as a commercial electrician.

It just chaps me that employers immediately think (in my case) 14 years of professional working experience is worth less than being able to APA format your paper and temporarily remember stuff for a test between rounds of beer pong.

The (arguable) "mis-" part is that while it's normal for some property to be worth more than others, and the housing market is functioning as it should given the parameters, we have chosen to make the supply highly inelastic in desirable places with predictable outcome.

Four Silicon Valley companies -- including Apple and Google -- have agreed to pay $415 million to settle an antitrust lawsuit that accused the companies of conspiring not to hire away each other's employees.

True, and it's exploitative in a Marxist sense.

> transferring vast amounts of middle class wealth to the education sector

Confusing to me. Who are the institutions most benefitting from this? Are they not simply the _financial_ institutions furnishing the liquidity? I am not seeing the towering edu-monopolists' gravitational pull warping markets and other economic realities.

> In the US, it's probably the greatest misallocation of resources outside of our health industry.

There are a few others, such as the Military-Industrial Complex, the Prison-Industrial Complex (Militarization of Police, War on Drugs, etc.), Monocrop Agriculture chewing through our ecological endowment, etc.

Take an example of catering to veteran students. Previously, many schools had a single person who was the veteran liaison as a side duty and not their primary function. When the post 9/11 GI Bill promised much more money for service members, colleges responded by having entire dedicated teams to help veterans navigate school. From the outside this may look like admin bloat to some, but for the college it actually does add value by helping attract students and guaranteed tuition payments. In a perfect world, that increase in students would ideally offset the salary for those positions, but I'm not sure if that happens. Please note that I'm not necessarily saying that's a bad thing, it just highlights that "wealth admins" may be providing something considered valuable to the university. Multiply that by all the various special interest groups and the number of administrative personnel can grow quite fast.

Note: Actually, I have no idea, but that is what my mind immediately went to when hearing provost.

A few years ago, there was a widely publicized article about University of Florida getting rid of their CS programs while simultaneously expanding their English/History programs.

Do you have a source for this. This is possibly one of the dumbest things I've heard coming from a university.

The US Federal Government is providing 90%+ of the liquidity. What benefit is it gaining?

A perpetual (young) underclass and whose legal status is favourable, thus tax requirements are firmly intact, but whose job opportunities for social mobility are ever diminishing, should make that obvious. Cheap, local sourced labour is critical to a consumer-driven, service sector economy: which the US is.

The limited manufacturing that does take place in the US is increasingly automated away, and the maintenance, deployment, installing and management of said equipment is limited in both scope and capacity, but could also be learned as an apprentice as it was done for millennia for other of man's highly coveted crafts. University requirements are a subsidy for an industry, much like Insurance was after WWII--they sought to inflate a needless sector of the economy.

No, the US Federal Reserve loans the US Government (treasury) money at interest which is then the basis for its ever increasing debt ceiling; the US government itself has the sole monopoly as having the Reserve Currency of the World (USD), with the largest Military and the biggest pollution based footprint on the World to maintain its inflation based petro-dollar.

They already won. This is merely about keeping the system in place, this the 'American Century' these plutocrats extolled and sold generations on can be viewed as such: they went from exploiting black slaves to being indiscriminate and targeting the youth and poor. Debt is the tool, and its effective.

I really can't understand how you guys in the Valley can just ignore all the homeless so effectively (many are really young) that you cannot see how obvious it all is; I guess being in a place modeled on affording its affluent residents a permanent state of infantile distraction must work.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/educ...