(Saying this as someone who never finished college/university, largely because I was trying to pay for it myself and couldn't make it work.)
[1]https://www.spiegel.de/start/ausbildung-im-handwerk-in-den-k...
However, there is a huge problem in school funding. The fact that school funding is primarily local means that poor neighborhoods get bad schools. That is a huge problem. We definitely should make funding of schools more egalitarian. Eliminating local funding in favor of state funding would do a lot for the public school system I think. But I also think giving parents more choice in schooling would also be a big win.
School funding is actually not as inegalitarian as you might have been led to believe - federal & state funding usually makes up for the differences in property tax funding, we're often spending more $/kid at these bad schools.
> There's a difference between outlawing enforcement of segregation by law and enforcing laws requiring people to go to schools they may not want their kids to go to. I think calling the second "finishing" the first is misleading.
The distinction you're making is between de jure segregation and de facto segregation, both of which are constitutional violations.
Source? I'm surprised to hear that.
> The distinction you're making is between de jure segregation and de facto segregation, both of which are constitutional violations.
I disagree. It is not a consitutional violation for black people to live near each other and go to schools with each other. People segregate themselves socially all the time, for better or worse, and it has nothing to do with the constitution. It would be incredibly dubious to suggest that forcing people to integrate socially would be an appropriate government action - especially if done over a long period of time.
In the top spending districts there are two extremely good districts and the rest (esp. Baltimore and hawaii) are generally well known as terrible.
LAUSD spent 18k/pupil, and Chicago spent 16k, both terrible districtd... Don't know what they are not on there
Perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that they cost so much. The common factor between these districts is rampant political corruption (Baltimore spent millions on a plasma-tv-for-hq scandal, la and NYC burn millions on lawsuits for not firing child rapists, etc)...
Eliminating rubber rooms is finally coming to NYC:
Why isn't state funding wide enough?
The politics around education funding are mudled because governments love to put stipulations around receiving funding, so they can control the recipients. I would agree with those who don't want the federal government to take more control over how education happens. But I could be convinced of federal funding of schools. Of course, both of these things already happen to a (large) degree.
I lived in Cambridge, MA, and they have successfully desegregated their schools with a similar approach that kept transportation very low and remained a popular plan with most parents (75% approval income over $100k, ~95% approval income under $75k).
In another place I lived, the top public magnet school was ~95% black. White parents pretty much universally refused to send their kids there, but would send their kids to a different magnet that was further away.
The "underlying socioeconomic realities" are often overstated compared to the unfortunate, but big reason that we don't like to talk about, which is lots of parents (to some extent, understandably) are afraid to send their kids to a school where they would be in the racial minority.
Schools are now as segregated as they were in 1976, which represents a backtracking from the peak in 1988. That represents an erosion of will more than a vastly changed socioeconomic reality.
Ah, that is interesting. In my district (and state, AFAIK), school assignment is completely out of the hands of the parents, with some narrow exceptions.
I fully admit to having a narrow view on this, my state is not especially diverse, with more than 75% white and 2% black. So most of our school segregation, if it's fair to call it that, is completely socioeconomic even if the students are largely the same race.
Meanwhile we're lowering standards and just passing every kid we can, for 'fairness'
If you set high standards and allowed only those who pass them to advance to the next grade, graduate HS etc. then you'd end up with clear racial disparities.
I don't want to get into a discussion about what's the cause of these disparities and who's fault they are. But, based on available data on e.g. SAT scores, we'd have Asian Americans doing the best, followed by whites, and with blacks at the bottom.
It'd provoke a flurry of media debate and negative attention on everyone involved. These people cannot fix the problem itself, at least not fully and certainly not quickly. But they can change standards to make it look like everyone is doing well. After all if you lower standards enough everyone will meet them.
It's a real problem and these incentives aren't going to change. Any solution will have to acknowledge and address them, not pretend that they don't exist and that incompetent or weak-minded politicians are to blame.
> This may show up as lots of superfluous/unreproducible papers and journals many not even based on the scientific method.
seems very STEM-centric. It sounds like you're saying academia outside of the realm of science is useless which I completely disagree with.
As you continue, you must ignore more independent variables to conduct an experiment. By the time you get to social sciences where you're doing self reported survey studies on your sensation of gender acceptance, you cant really call it science anymore.
Not saying its useless, but ir absolutely should not be treated with the same level of reverence and trust as the harder sciences. People act like the government should be making policy decisions based on psychology thesis papers, or that id you disagree with some purple haired feminism professor, you are a science "denier."
Ultimately this is a function of poor education, and hivemind thinking caused by our inundation with news and various media.
But yeah, my point is STEM (in its colloquial usage) is really all that can be considered science and people tend to mistake any academic paper or public persona for science or a scientist respectively, and that just isn't so.
Sorry for the rant.
There are really two issues here which get conflated. First, social life is complex, people aren't like atoms, and all our explanations are gross simplifications. Second, yes, there's a lot of bullshit social science out there. But there's also some real social science, and it can address important issues.
Accrediting boards who demand proof that all departments produce relevant scholarly work are also to blame for the situation, as it leads to a proliferation of write-only journals that will publish any word salad that can be convincingly proven to be in dialogue with contemporary scholarship.
As someone who recovered from a mild case of being a STEMlord in college, grandiose claims of unearned self-importance are what turned me off from literature classes. I was always down to take a class in history, philosophy, or music if my schedule had an opening for that semester, but I took the minimum I could get away with in languages & literature.
Part of the problem is that English departments insist they are important because they “teach you how to be fully human”, which induces eye rolls: it’s like how the Quality Inn having the word “quality” in its name is unintentionally ironic. I still don’t know if the Dead Poets Society was meant as a satire of self-important literature classes or as a genuine homage to them.
At least the way it was taught when I was in high school, poetry was either cheesy rhymes or was the literary equivalent of debugging someone else’s code golf. It wasn’t until I discovered the authors Mark Danielewski and Christian Bök that I understood the joy in playing with language for its own sake.
Took a class on Shakespeare centered around recreating the plays as they were meant to be played, and the historical context they were played in. Fascinating stuff, and a lot less susceptible to pure rhetorical analysis nonsense.
I always find this funny to read, because that's more or less what happened to me. I was originally very interested in philosophy and the classics, but I just couldn't keep up with the reading and paper assignments. I'm not a bad writer in general, but I'm terrible at writing academic papers. I picked CS/math because I was tired of staring at a blank word document and slowly panicking for a week. with CS/math, I could just sit down and start making progress immediately on a problem set or coding project.
I see the point of what you're saying though. there's a limit to how rigorous an english class can practically be. the difference between bad and mediocre writing is mostly mechanics. but what's the difference between good and great writing? I doubt the "experts" could even agree, let alone come up with a rubric for grading papers.
When I was young I believed things outside of the sciences and math were useless. As I've grown older, I realize the tremendous value of the arts, humanities, and other studies. They're just not as obviously functional or as easily quantifiable and much of this work is difficult. These studies help us think as humans and not machines. Yes, they can be gamed by disingenuous and often do get low rewards in society, but they're not inherently useless disciplines. The other studies provide much value to what makes life worth living, IMO.
Literature, art, the human state. I love science, don't get me wrong, but I also enjoy the rest.
It’s not that you cannot, it’t about the likelihood.
What percentage of laywers, politicians, and economists are worth more than STEM graduates?
How much relative power does each sector have?
[1] Technically a social science, certainly not a hardcore STEM subject.
It kinda sounds like you don't know what the humanities are.
Just to be clear, you're both kind of right, but I take objection to your overly aggressive stance on this where you rebut and accuse without providing any sort of evidence.
The mistake was assuming "going to college" was the goal and not "learning something useful." Too many kids spend years of their life and earnings studying completely useless degrees.
> Maybe the incentives focused universities on creating more "education" so they could rake in the cash made readily available through government subsidies targeting those who could not complete STEM degrees.
Nail, head, yep.
Viewing non-stem stubjects as a lesser course for "those who could not complete STEM degrees" is simultaneously idiotic and elitist, which is pretty impressive.
I also completely disagree with the naive assumption that non-vocational degrees are "useless degrees", there is a big difference between something being "useless" and you, personally, not understanding the use.
If you take a moment to revisit my post, you'll notice I never mentioned difficulty. I'm well aware that some non-STEM degrees are incredibly complex and I make no claim to any ability in those areas for myself.
I also never made any value judgement about courses being "greater" or "lesser". That's a subjective call and ymmv.
I absolutely don't discount all non-STEM degrees as being 'useless' and there's plenty of insight and wisdom to be had from people with a deep understanding of history, or comparative culture, or any number of fields.
And yet I still feel it's a grave disservice to tell the average high school student that they should go to university for the sake of it, even if that means specializing in glazing techniques in 14th century French pottery or whatever other navel-gazing pursuit, while your insane U.S. tuition fees are extracted from them.
I was mainly focusing on the line "targeting those who could not complete STEM degrees", which seems to heavily imply that the non-stem options are a lesser choice for those for whom stem is too difficult.
1) STEM admissions require vastly higher GPA's, SAT/GRE scores, and admit a smaller fraction of applicants.
https://www.admissionreport.com/university-of-cambridge
(10% of 1330 applicants accepted for Computer Science, 60% of 57 applicants accepted for BA Classics)
2) STEM graduates earn more.
https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2016/dp-pd/dt...
(72k/85k median/mean for STEM in Canada, 56k/69k for non-STEM)
3) Most STEM undergrad programs require students to take roughly half of their credits in non-STEM subjects, which they pass just fine, but non-STEM students are not required to learn about chemistry, electrical circuits, etc.
4) Math and compsci departments split (read: simplify) intro courses like "Statistics" into separate courses for STEM vs non-STEM students, for obvious reasons. I've never seen gender studies simplified for STEM students.
> if you tried to push me as an undergrad through a philosophy or history or literature degree or whatever I'd probably fail.
Ridiculous. I'm calling out your false modesty. If you obviously had enough intelligence and work ethic to get a PhD (any doctorate, but especially math), and then gainfully work as a physicist, you obviously could have passed any other 4-year undergrad program in any field. Undergrad is a low bar to clear.
---
One more note on this topic: when comparing fields/careers like this, I don't find it useful to look at how difficult things are for the top performers. Everything is super competitive at the very top level. Is it harder to be a Fields medalist or a Formula 1 driver? I don't know; there's literally only a handful of genius/superhuman people at that level. But looking at the median level, ask people if they would rather take a math test or a driving test and the results will be predictable.
Under such guidelines it is quite "useless" to, say, spend a decade studying Akkadian. But our understanding of the past would be so much poorer without people willing to engage with Assyriology. I'd like to see STEM-maximalists argue that one engineering field or another is somehow more difficult than ANE studies.
The organization and its agents bear no consequence for mistakes in the allocation. It has no means to compare value or incentive to do so. The system evolves according to the "iron law of bureaucracy" as a perfect rent-seeking apparatus.
It's nice to imagine everyone having enough, or maybe that everyone is "equal." But you can't save anyone from their choices.
That's not nice. It's prison.
If you know how to optimize human life for a given group of agreeable people, go for it. For the rest of us, no means no.
Of course, it doesn't follow that they have a right to be considered researchers or publish papers afterwards, and the plethora of bad research may be a real problem. However, it should be noted that academic pseudosciences are not a new phenomenon, and they have sometimes been much more destructive than some of today's examples. Race science, phrenology, medicine in the time of bloodletting and others have been respected academic pursuits created by elites, not the result of anything like over-education.
Maybe a better system in modern times would be a combination of mentoring with official recommendations and travel (to broaden horizons).
Those classes covered things which I have never encountered in my _trade_, but which formatively affected my views on how one should treat others (or treat oneself). I feel like the stereotypical "liberal arts" education, in which one studies things that are not just focused on your trade, has an intrinsic value which is hard to articulate.
Of course not everyone is autodidactic so the path is not for everyone, but it is indeed quite possible to acquire this kind of knowledge/humanity outside of the university structure.
Alternatively: everyone should read the classics.
Also sometimes it's just cool to have the guy who wrote the textbook be your professor.
- Someone who knows those books to explain and lead discussions about them.
- A place to hold those meetings.
- Some kind of accountability for actually doing the readings, writing the papers, and internalizing some understanding.
That costs a little more than $1.50 but it has no right to cost $150k. It's not like graduate student wages are expensive.
When my children get old enough I hope to attend with them. I had the great fortune to experience a Great Books program for 2-3 years in high school (a pet project of a teacher who fought tooth and nail to fund that class) and consider it a formative experience.
Just to point out that much like working at a high level in tech, a degree is actually not a hard pre-requisite to having an understanding of the humanities, ethics, etc.
Also just like STEM, many will absolutely benefit from the structure of a university setting.
I just couldn’t resist the Good Will Hunting quote.
I think when you send "everyone" to college, it's going to be no different for them than high school was for "everyone" (and for the smart kids in their less-special subjects): chug through the tedium with as little of your brain as possible, while away the hours and the months until you get to something you actually care about. That's a reasonable way to warehouse teenagers while their parents are at work, but 18-22 year olds could plausibly be doing something else.
What year did that right begin?
No, they don't.
We should also be pouring money into early childhood development. We should setup community centers for expecting/new mothers. Women can go to these community centers for support, education, and to be with other mothers.
I'm very curious about this line of thought, as it seems to have become very popular in the blogospher over the past year or two.
What are the consequences of "elite overproduction"? I'm curious what the implications of this line of thought are.
Generally, I think more education is better than less - I am wrong to think that?
My personal hypothesis is that this fear of elite overproduction is being generated by existing professionals who are afraid an increasing supply of educated workers reducing their negotiating position/compensation.
80% of students go to a school where over half of applicants are accepted. Yes, these schools definitely are centers of, frankly, liberal idealism and free-spiritedness. But I think that would be the case in any system where young people are pretty unsupervised and have lots of time to read and study (or party). In my experience though, they aren't factories for elites in the common sense of that word. They're just a reflection of how you need much more training to be competitive in the job market today.
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/04/harvar...
It might be better to adopt a model similar to the German or Swiss, in which people follow different tracks depending on their skills and interests, and not everyone goes to college, instead a lot of people go to trades schools. Of course for that to work in the US a huge societal change would need to happen first or alongside.
The pay of which jobs? The ones that require a college degree or not.
> Not because of competition but because not all jobs require a college degree
And are the number and prospects of these jobs increasing or decreasing?
I also find this whole conflation of having a college degree and being an elite silly. The problem seems much less to be that we have too many educated people and seems much more that wealth is concentrated by the small subset of wealthy people who "got here first" and then get the compounding returns.
Underemployment, leading to...
Long term student debts, leading to...
Fewer people starting families
I agree that this is a problem, and to the extent that we make it too easy for 18 year olds to take out massive amounts of debt, that is bad.
But I feel like many of the people arguing about "elite overproduction" would be opposed to something like making all public schools free or just free community college.
that's the economic side of the argument anyway. I partially agree with what you said further up the chain, that education is a value unto itself. but it depends on what kind of education is actually being obtained. imo, a four year program that focuses on one main area and requires a smattering of intro-level courses in others isn't worth that much if you don't end up getting a job related to that area of focus. I guess if the major was interesting to you, that's something, but was it worth four to six years of your life?
I don't see that as a bad thing. Of course they won't be elites when overproduced but its output, when looking at the big picture, will be positive. If you're so with your view why stop at universities then? Why educate the masses at all? Why not have classes of educated and uneducated people?
There are broad benefits to having an educated society, this rhetoric about 'elite overproduction' has classist/snobbish undertones, in my view.
Hm, is it? My guess is that government spending on college probably is probably a net positive investment in terms of revenue for the govt due to downstream growth, likely also lowers the cost to do other things in industry.
There is extensive evidence that further public spending on healthcare does not have a size-able impact on outcomes, unfortunately. [0]
> the level of resources devoted to it can be spent to better effect elsewhere
But why the focus on education? Why not increase, say, inheritance taxation and then use it to fund those additional things? Couldn't we make better use of the resources our society devotes towards making sure that the kids of rich parents are also rich?
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAND_Health_Insurance_Experime... You really can't beat social science research like this and the followup in 2010.
> lots of university departments that were superfluous, producing nothing that was actually benefitting society
Who's to decide precisely what does and doesn't benefit society? More so, how can you decide in advance which line of inquiry will prove fruitful and which won't? Shouldn't you cast a broad net, especially when it comes to academia?
> government subsidies targeting those who could not complete STEM degrees
This, I'm sure, varies greatly between countries. But why do you think there's such a clear hierarchy of academic topics? It's quite dismissive of entire fields to assume that the people who are involved with them are simply STEM drop-outs.
As a side note I would also have to say that lumping together science, engineering and mathematics doesn't make much sense to me - this observation is not targeted at the parent, it's just a general peeve I have.
> Have we reached a state of elite-overproduction?
What would the alternative be? Back to the aristocracy, or to something like the Gilded Age or Belle Epoque?
> Colleges are really just real estate speculation businesses that also incidentally give you a degree in dentistry or whatever.
If that’s true, wouldn’t it explain why colleges do things that don’t make sense for education?
0 - Well There’s Your Problem Podcast, Episode 71
> Colleges are really just real estate speculation businesses that also incidentally give you a degree in dentistry or whatever.
Why would that incentivize colleges to enroll more students? How does college as real estate speculation business work?
even our signal processing wiring, with each lopsided neuron merging many inputs into a single output, is biased toward obligate compression.
such contextualization does indeed impair portability...
That's quite materialistic take - I think the jury is still out on whether mind is inseparable from material reality (even if we treat it only as an emergent phenomena)
Instead, consider that survival is almost always one of the main goals of any larger organization. That happens for a variety of personal, individual reasons: job security, reputation halos, personal networks, etc. But in the end, it translates into organizations taking actions simply to survive. And since one of the best ways to survive is to grow, taking actions to grow.
This is true for everything from charities that take care of the poor and sick to for-profit corporations to government agencies. And, of course, universities.
So why does a university spend a ton of money on renovating their football stadium? Simple, it makes alums happier (more donations), it looks better on televised games (enhanced reputation), etc. It helps the university survive.
Drexel university is spearheading the gentrification of west Philadelphia.
They paid tens of millions for a dirty old tire shop.
They require the first three years of your degree to be spent in overpriced uni owned housing.
The chancellor makes one of the highest salaries in the us.
That's the only example I can really think of
The nominal purpose - education - becomes more of a marketing exercise than the primary concern.
> What if the incentives created lots of university departments that were superfluous, producing nothing that was actually benefitting society.
I would say that those are two completely independent issues, that just look alike because of policy.
Now, about the actual subject, I'm not sure. The knowledge one gets at higher education brings a lot of possibilities too. It's not all signaling. An educated society is supposed to create wealth by itself, and this seems to happen on practice. I would look elsewhere for the origins of our current economic stagnation.
I think the problem with this line of thinking is that since the US is a highly-developed country, we depend on having a well-educated, highly productive workforce in order to maintain our economy. The US is no longer a place where you have large numbers of people working in huge low-tech factories, for example, because the productivity of those factories does not afford the living standards of a highly-developed country. Instead, developed countries perform R & D and need highly-skilled workforces. To the extent we have manufacturing, it tends to be highly-automated advanced processes. Again, automation is enabling high worker productivity here.
It seems like the issue may be misallocation of the education being produced, not too much education in general.
This is where the idea of a "Gentleman's C" comes from. You see, their lives were already pretty well set out. You made connections, graduated, and then went to work for your father or uncle, or your father or uncle's firm; or, married the daughter of a well-to-do family and went to work for your father-in-law.
But there has long been an egalitarian and meritocratic strain in the United States, and after WWII, as a way of saying thank you to those who had saved the world from Hitler, the GI Bill was started. This was a great success.
The GI Bill made it possible for older, generally more mature, and generally more motivated individuals to attend college. Interestingly, the "gentlemen" students, the anecdote goes, used to complain about these people as "DAB's": Damn Average Busters. Those on the GI Bill weren't satisfied with grades of C (whether real or given with a wink).
Now, here I break from the history to my own opinion. The former GI's were a special cohort. To identify them as merely middle and working class people benefiting from college, and from there to imagine that all (or nearly all) middle and working class young people could benefit from college just does not follow.
But, whether or not one follows from the other, it's a wonderful thing for a politician to promise, and just the kind of thing people want to believe. Promising to send the children of your constituents to trade school just doesn't have the same ring to it. So, it became college for everybody.
From here, I can pick up with what you're saying, and add that what you're saying jibes with what Allan Bloom said, way back in 1987, with his Closing of the American Mind. Bloom argued that middle class people are far more practical, economically — not having well-to-do fathers, uncles, and father-in-laws to fall back on; and because of that, colleges had to retool to become far more practical. In other words, many of the new degrees — at least at first — were closer to the aims of trade schools than traditional liberal arts curriculums. It seems like things were like that for a while.
Where I think it gets worse is that government money has created a bubble in higher education, a bubble that has created degrees which I term luxury degrees. These degrees are neither traditional college curriculums or glorified trade school syllabi. These are the so-called "navel gazing" or "basket weaving" courses. Maybe, if you were rich and lacked the ability to take over the family business, your rich parents might send you off to study one of these luxury majors, and that might make some kind of sense. Maybe you'd still meet a nice girl or boy, and then fall back on your trust fund. In any case, it would be their money and their business; and, in any case, how much of that sort of thing would there be? But spending taxpayer money to fund these courses of study and produce these degree holders is ludicrous. It is gross malinvestment, plain and simple.