I think you make a good point, but your numbers seem way off. What countries are you aware of that even get close to 60-80% of completed college education? The list below shows the highest at 61% for Canada (between the ages of 35-44) [1]. But that list is also including things like community college, trade schools, and other forms of professional development. It seems to me that a much more accurate range is something like 25-40% for most developed countries.

I think what is really going on with degrees being a poor investment, is that most degrees don't actually teach valuable skills or they do and the students just don't actually put in the necessary work to achieve those skills. Instead treating it as a game of how to pass while putting in as little work as possible. That was at least my experience TAing computer science courses. Most students were just not mature enough to value the education that was being offered.

EDIT: A more generous interpretation to the students would be that they were simply jaded after a lack luster and uninspiring high school education plus a similar experience in probably many of the college classes they were taking.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_...

> students just don't actually put in the necessary work to achieve those skills

While obviously this does happen, I think degrees do teach valuable skills and many students put in obscene levels of work to learn the material, resulting in ever-increasing competition for basically every facet of the job market - from university admissions all the way through job interviews. To me the issue isn’t students not understanding the true value of their education (and who could blame them? How is a 20 year old to know why their professor planned things out the way he did or why they are not learning Python as the blogosphere insists?). The real issue is that - like the article said - the benefits of this extra work seem marginal. Either way you will be competing against hundreds for entry level software development jobs with the greatest discriminator being referrals and prior industry experience. Whether you put in 8 extra hours a week to truly understand Dijkstra doesn’t get you much in the way of an interview.

Yes, you are correct, I was quite far off with the numbers,not quite sure why I thought it was so high.

> If back in the day,it used to be 10-20% tops, now in some countries it's as high as 60-80%, while at the same time competing for jobs that often don't require such education to start with.

The change is because employers love degrees... they prove that a job applicant can reliably get out of bed and do quality work in a timely fashion (and thus reduce the risk for the employer to hire someone who turns out to be a "bad fit", have mental health issues etc.), and especially the IT degrees have a large part of knowledge transfer and training in them that the employer doesn't have to pay for like in a classic apprenticeship.

Academia should be a place for science and those interested in advancing it, not for employers to save costs on vetting and training (by placing the burden on the government and/or the students)!

> Academia should be a place for science and those interested in advancing it

Any place in it for the Arts?

Which is a good thing. More high educated people is better. Back in the days only a handful of people with the right background were able to study. Yes it might diminish the value of a degree. Now actual additional skills and experience are needed to stand out. I am totally fine with this. Gone are the days of arrogant students thinking their degree is automatically bring them wealth (ok not entirely true in lots of countries). But still. We are heading into the right (not always perfect) direction.

It's a catastrophe. Academics have always grossly oversold their own importance and the "value" of what they teach.

The most valuable education is at the primary level (0 to 10 years old); then secondary (to 18); and tertiary education hardly has any effect whatsoever.

By the point you're an adult, you aren't being "moulded" into anything, you're merely acquiring particular useful bits of knowledge that only have value if you're going to use them.

What we have now is people spending tens of thousands to avoid earning money for several years; and thereby avoiding acquiring useful skills.

And this is an economic catastrophe which burdens everyone in society and grossly misdirects public funds.

I would be very supportive of an 12mo "generic higher learning skills" programmes being deployed at this scale. ie., something closer to a teenager-to-gradscheme transition programme which could include higher-level generic maths, writing, humanities, etc. skills.

However what we have now is a gigantic tulip-style bubble that needs bursting or else we will continue to needlessly in-debt the next generations of people.

The emperor really has no clothes on: your* degree really was a waste of money....

(* perhaps less so for HN readers )

> and tertiary education hardly has any effect whatsoever.

This is the education I use all the time to make money. It matters that I can write and do arithmetic, but my entire career is based on what I learned after the age of 18.

Everyone's job relates to skills acquired post-18, necessarily so. The question is what role a university plays in that; and whether it actually provides those skills. Or whether, for example, the job itself can.

I started programming as a child, and used this irc-gained knowledge and self-study to earn money till c. 26.

I studied physics during. Much of what I make money with now was gained via MIT/Stanford/et al. initially on iTunes U, and latterly on youtube -- both during my apparent "attendance" at university; and for years afterwards.

It would have been entirely possible for me to skip my entire university experience and still have the postgrad level of knowledge I have now: as almost all of it was gained via free lecture courses.

You might say I'm cheating here: the content is still provided by some universities. Sure.

The question remains whether even for the very high end, this process needs years at university; and whether all of them need to repeat it. Let alone how meaningless the process is on the low-end.

I have been offered a PhD in a highly technical area (which I declined) -- and I can assure you nearly everything which landed me in that position had little to do with whatever my university "did". I barely attended.

So in other words:

“We don’t need formal schooling beyond middle school because everyone can learn job skills as a child, and then self-study graduate level material from books and youtube and do independent PhD-level research with no funding, structure, or support.”

This argument strongly reminds me of the guy I met who claimed nobody needs a paid job because they can just scavenge free food from restaurant garbage bins.

I used my case to question how central the university needs to be in any process of skill acquisition: high-end, or low-end.

I wasn't answering the question; I was asking it.

It is still clearly the case the university has a role. I just do not think we have caught up to how well employers can train their employees; how well even highly advanced skills can be acquired; how very very recent advancements (youtube, etc.) can provide a good-quality education; and so on.

In an age where meaningful professional development can be made without the university, there is a serious question to be asked: how many will meaningfully benefit from the university system? (And: how many are meaningfully harmed?).

The answer, in both cases, is surely: some.

This is a very valid and important point. I'm involved in tech training for the company I work for, and during lockdown we've provided a lot of material as videos and self-study documents.

A lot of those have got very good, and we have to ask ourselves what value we add to the learning process. It's still something we're discussing, and it's definitely led us to alter how we think about training (and out of our safe areas!)

You add value by modelling thought process to the learners, as you solve problems which are relevant to them.

Consider: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCs5OvhV9S4 or anything of this kind.

And ask: what is David doing as the narrator (of his own thought process) ?

"it worked for me so it must work for everyone"

I think many people do enjoy university as an environment where like minded people are there to share different ideas. Just as a zoom meeting is no replacement for real meeting, i don't think sitting through MIT youtube channels is the same as actually attending MIT.

> I don't think sitting through MIT youtube channels is the same as actually attending MIT.

There's an increasingly large number of second tier school admins that are making the opposite bet (more online programs, wider admission pool, commuter and all-online certificates). My bet is that in the next 20 years we'll see an even bigger gap between the online crowd and the few in-person institutions that will remain.

> Or whether, for example, the job itself can.

Employers can sponsor degrees, it's still efficient to have specialised educators.

The issue here is that if students fund their own education, they have "skin in the game", and don't rely on employers to gatekeep these roles.

That said, maybe an education tied to an actual job offer would be best; there are too many un-economic degrees given to 18yos - it might be best if the risk in an education was only put on an individual who was already older and somewhat financially secure.

Interesting points, and I concur. The best takeaway from university was some of the friends and connections, in both cases as involved in the same field as I am. Good people to know.

Though, I'm sure the need for good friends and connections could be provided in other ways whilst studying. All things are subject to change and needs will be met if they're important enough.

> This is the education I use all the time to make money.

I'm curious what your degree is in and what you do. My degrees (undergraduate and graduate) were in CS, and I've been employed as a computer programmer my whole life. It's rare to nonexistent that I actually do something for work that I was specifically taught to do by a university professor; there's a pervasive belief here on HN and elsewhere that a CS degree is useless for a programming job (a smaller minority might even suggest that a CS degree disqualifies you from being capable of programming computers professionally). Since I can't say that I learned how to, say, debug a program, or construct a SQL statement, or isolate a performance issue, or diagnose a network connection problem in college, the only counter I have to this viewpoint is that college exposed me to more general problem-solving techniques that are more abstract but broadly useful. Of course, I'll never know if I'd have been just as effective a programmer without ever having set foot in a college or not.

Now we've got "Invest in students" programs that amount to indentures: how long before those are "a success from private finance we must make public for the children" and worse?

When do our societies ever look at the silly shit they're into and say "this shit is silly, let's stop it"? The Civil Rights movement maybe... Usually tho it comes to doubling down on the silly until something else breaks.

> The emperor really has no clothes on: your* degree really was a waste of money....

I mean... my degree is why I can work in the United States and has been (and will continue to be) worth an unbelievable amount of money.

More seriously though, a university education can be very valuable (we can measure the wage premium [1]), but the cost matters. A 4 year degree at in-state state school prices is almost always worth it (provided you graduate). It is difficult to tease out how much of the value is selection effects vs. signaling vs. credentialism vs. networking vs. exposure to challenge/opportunity vs. skills vs. knowledge vs. stepping stone to a professional degree (medicine/law/engineering/nursing). Thinking about my own experience, obviously the credential was a huge deal, but so was my school's co-op program that got me my first software jobs, and there are still classes that shaped the way I think to this day [2].

Where things go off the rails is when people think they can buy their way into the upper classes by getting a degree from a prestigious school (and spend way too much doing so), or people get snookered by for profit colleges or people who don't have a good chance of completing get pressured into going to a four year program and end up with the debt, but not the credential (you mostly don't get partial credit).

You could argue that the wage premium is just class discrimination through credentialism. Maybe it is... but then that's the thing that needs to be dismantled. As an individual if you have a good shot at finishing a 4 year degree and can afford it, you should probably play the game unless you happen to have much better options.

[1] Eg. $640/week median college vs. high school in Q4 2020: https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2018/07/is-college-still-wor...

[2] The crash course in epistemology in my Evolutionary Biology class, the complementary rationalism of my Discrete Mathematics Course, the Econ 101 perspective from Introduction to Micro-Economics. Not to mention the tour of data-structures and algorithms from my Computer Science classes so I can do leet code interviews :). Maybe I could have picked the stuff up on my own, but would I have if I was working in a factory back home?

That seems like a naive assessment of an education model that is failing across multiple dimensions of analysis. It saddles many students with crippling debt. It monopolises some of the most productive years of a persons life studying subjects often of minimal practical value to their future careers. It drains public funding and resources.

You say more highly educated people is better as if its a truism, it doesn't seem so clear to me. I don't see why, for example, someone spending their early 20s in an apprenticeship, doing vocational training or in an industry learning on the job is inherently worse for them or society than receiving a higher education.

Just about the only unambiguous positive I can see in university is the chance to grow and learn as a young person in a social setting, freshly independent of parents. But surely there are more efficient approaches that could be employed here.

> studying subjects often of minimal practical value to their future careers

the fact that these subjects offer minimal value should mean that the loan taken to study them should not have been taken. If the student likes the subject, and would be willing to pay, then so be it. But to borrow money, off the back of tax payers, to study a useless subject, is basically folly on the part of the administration approving those loans.

I for one am glad the system is not like this. I don’t not think our society as a whole would be better if the only thing we approved were studies of subjects with lucrative careers. While I do not understand Gender Studies , I appreciate those who are willing to study more about us and the phenomenons we silly little humans do.

I'm studying for another batchelors with the Open University in the UK. It's a good institution and I completed my computing masters with them a few years ago. I'm studing for fun, not for career. I'm so disappointed to see my peers spend most of their time discussing how to get grant funding, which parts of the taught course they can safely skip and how to formally complain about a tutor that has given them poor feedback for poor effort is just depressing.

>> More high educated people is better.

I'd be happy with people being simply 'educated'. Too many people barely graduated high school, lack all kinds of skills, have poor reading/writing abilities.

> Which is a good thing. More high educated people is better

That's a dangerous statement in isolation.

For a country with a median income of $35k, imposing debts worth $200k for degrees with questionable employability and no clear resolution (Can't pay off, can't default) is insanely dangerous.

Education is also not a monolith. Some careers need education, in that gaining skills in the profession requires a degree of instruction or apprenticeship (Medicine, Pure Sciences, Engineering etc). But a large number of them end up being paper pushers or knowledge from a single course or learn everything on their first job. For this second cohort, education can be burden with terrible payoff.

A lot of educational fields are also entirely unemployable. This includes 3 type of professions:

1. Pyramid schemes - where the only real job is in instruction of the next generation.

2. Priest - where they create a dogma that mandates them as essential in the system, but have no use in isolation.

3. Professional disk golfer - where there is only 1 employable position, and about a million wannabes.

As of now, progressive society is pushing people to consider all kinds of professions as equal. However, the equivalency is flawed. The risk/reward ratio of getting educated varies massively across professions. It can vary from a ticket to the upper-middle-class to being entirely useless equivalent to homeopath or hucksterism in terms of unsubstantiated merit.

The university system was never created for everyone to get educated. The concept has existed only post GI-bill and seemed to work in a Boomer-era post scarcity America. (Nothing that worked well in America from 1950-1980 should be taken as an example that can be replicated. It was a special time in history. It would be like trying to be Saudi prince without an oil well in your backyard)

I am strongly in favor of higher education for all. However, it needs to either be fully distanced from the present university mafia or the universities must be compelled to produce economically productive graduates across their various offerings. Universities sell a financial product. It is about time we see their variables-controlled return on investment with th fine grained granularity that we evaluate any other financial product. Lest we get stuck with sub-prime graduates bundled into funds that are considered AAA because there are a large enough number of them in it.

> Universities sell a financial product

No, they do not. Universities offer undergraduate education to school leavers. Both schools and universities bend over backwards to inform prospective students on the fit between degrees and careers. Students pursue degrees with poor career options despite advice and the offerings in the humanities are shrinking.

A feature you overlooked is how bad the graduate employment market is for even the degrees most favoured by employers.

I mean strictly speaking the business model of the very top universities is identical to that of a hedge fund. But I suppose you could argue that doesn't apply to the entire category of institutions.

The quip about Yale being a hedge fund was funny before the financial crisis and in a loose sense some of the wealthiest colleges in the US seem to behave like an educational frosting on an asset-maximising endowment.

If there are any similar institutions in the UK, they are the wealthiest Oxbridge colleges. The students at these places do not so much think their degrees are overpriced.

Yale's former CIO is regarded as an incredibly successful investment manager in general.

That joke was far more true than people think -- the Yale model is now common in institutional investment.

Few oxbridge colleges are anywhere near as wealthy in comparison, and a lot have gigantic white elephants with their grade I listed buildings that are falling apart.

I don't keep up on the exact rankings of the Oxbridge colleges, but there is a huge difference in the wealth of the richest colleges from the average of the rest.

Long before Yale, King's College Cambridge pioneered sophisticated investment management: Keynes turned around the college's assets on the 1930s during the Great Depression to become level with the traditionally wealthiest Cambridge college, Trinity, which had long had vast property assets.

https://www.nber.org/papers/w20421

> Universities sell a financial product

> No they do not.

Then why are student loans (in the US) the only loans not dischargable in bankruptcy? If I live like an irresponsable asshole, run up credit card debt right and left, buy a car and who knows what else I can't afford and it finally catches up to me, I can just throw up my hands and say "Ok, you've got me. Bankruptcy." They'll take my fancy stuff, my credit takes a hit, and I can move on with my life with a clean slate.

On the other hand, if I try to improve myself and my community by getting educated to get a good job, go into debt doing so, and then can't repay the debt because the good jobs the university promised aren't actually there, I can NEVER GET RID OF THAT DEBT. It will literally follow me until the day I die. Why? Because Universities are mostly a scam, and the people running them know it. If they had any faith in the education they were providing, they would put their money where their mouth was and let people discharge the loans if needed. Almost everything in the modern era has a "Satisfaction or your money back" guarantee, except education. The reason is that they have no faith in the product they're selling.

>Both schools and universities bend over backwards to inform prospective students on the fit between degrees and careers.

On the contrary, there was a whole industry, the for profit college industry, that existed solely by lying about the viability of the education they provided. Thankfully those have largely collapsed now, but the ordinary college world is hardly any better. As just one example, nearly all of them trumpet the well-worn graphs showing the connection between college education and increasing income, despite those graphs being blatant lies (income goes up among college graduates because most people from rich families go to college, not because college makes you more employable).

There was a time, post WWII, that college was a no-brainer. That time is long past. And it's amazing how much of the population is still hypnotized into believing, and ardently defending, the idea that college is still a good idea for anyone who isn't already rich. Young people's futures are being destroyed. The future of many nations is being destroyed. Huge amounts of public funds are being wasted. And yet people still keep defending the scam.

If you came from a well-off family, went to college, and got a great job related to your degree, great. Understand that most college attendees are not you. Most are middle-class or lower, desperately trying to find some way to avoid working in the service industry for the rest of their lives. And most will fail, with a debt burden that is modest to you, but devastating to them.

> Then why are student loans (in the US) the only loans not dischargable in bankruptcy?

In the US, the loans are overwhelmingly made through the Federal system, not by universities.

Nonsense. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... : 34% of the EU population 25-54 years old has completed education to ISCED levels 5-8, and level 5 isn't even university (depends on what you call 'university', but an academic bachelor's is level 6.)

Additionally, in my (relatively) highly educated country (The Netherlands), selection for university starts in primary school, where about 20% is assigned ('given the advice of going to') to the type of secundary education that prepares students for university. So I think it's fair to estimate that a university education for 20% of the population is realistic, and I have no reason to believe this would be significantly (10 percent points higher or lower) elsewhere in the Union.

Perhaps the point was never to educate, but to differentiate. Peeling off the top 10% has it's own value.

The optimal university contains only an admissions office.

And a big bank account for deposits. When you want to hire someone that can show off their $100k+ proof-of-burn, you probably need to pay them well. They’ve demonstrated that being paid in peanuts won’t cut it. They mean business.

Who manages departmental needs for majors that require equipment (STEM) and audits the expenses? Who hires and does a Background check of these auditors and admission officials and professors?

I have often felt this. The skills learned are of little direct value, but the qualification is signalling enough. I mean how much different for a middle management position is I got accepted to Harvard and I graduated from Harvard.

"The Case Against Education" by Bryan Caplan lays out exactly this argument:

"Caplan argues that the primary function of education is not to enhance students' skills but to certify their intelligence, conscientiousness, and conformity—attributes that are valued by employers. He ultimately estimates that approximately 80% of individuals' return to education is the result of signaling, with the remainder due to human capital accumulation."

Both much of the Eurozone and the UK have particularly poor situations for young graduates because of the economically contractive way both handled the last financial crisis.

The UK has compounded the situation by increasing debt for students, structured student load repayment so that payments kick in at an income threshold, and then embarked on the Brexit adventure.

It's a mistake to look at the supply of graduates without looking at the changes in the graduate labour market.