People repeat that but what is it based on? Most of the population, including most people who have economic stability and freedom, have not had STEM jobs and very likely will not have STEM jobs.

More importantly, college is about much more than job training. College prepares people to be adults in every way, not to be a resource for corporations.

Only 2% of Bangladeshis go to college. Are the rest not adults? Indeed, I’d say the opposite is true. Apart from job training, the main function of college in America seems to be extending adolescence and deferring dealing with the real world. 18 year olds in Bangladesh are a lot more “adult” than many college-educated 30-somethings.

> 18 year olds in Bangladesh are a lot more “adult”

Imagine an 18 year old in the US. They could go to college and learn more about the world, themselves, etc., or get a menial job, an apartment, and become more adult. In fact, any learning or training is about investing in the future. Any investment is about current sacrifice (time, money, etc.) for better future returns.

We could also ask the same question - and it was asked, by prior generations - about 12 year olds, who could become adults and work in coal mines. People used to get married at that age too. In Judaism, 13 year old males technically become adults by completing their Bar Mitzvahs (obviously an ancient tradition). Were they better off? Was our society better off? Is there some benefit to achieving adulthood sooner?

Taking it further, kids who lack effective parenting, either through accident or neglect, often grow up fast. And lacking that time to be kids, to learn and explore and grow themselves, costs them for the rest of their lives. I grew a lot in high school and college, and I would have missed so much if I had to be a full-fledged adult then.

The argument that prior generations lacked college educations and therefore future ones have nothing to gain, or that it's an insult to prior generations to say there is something to gain, seem very flawed for obvious reasons. It's wrong that so many people in Bangledesh, who are just as able to grow and benefit, are denied the opportunity and those benefits.

Let's keep building and improving a world so that they, like so many others over the last several decades, become the first in their families to benefit from college.

I’ve heard of others talk up the college experience, but I fail to see what’s so special about it. What exactly did I miss in my development? How exactly am I different (besides having a 4-6 year head-start in the working world)?

Parties and friends are also made outside of campus, in the adult world. Working a job at a young age and having to be responsible for yourself builds life skills early. Some of which, my college-educated friends are still having trouble building well into their 30’s. I know some that are terrified of “growing up”: they keep earning degrees or still in their 2nd masters program, accumulating debt that is clearly unsustainable. Many are in fields that inside the sheltered and honestly, kind of bizarre world of academia look nothing like what actually happens in the real world, and they are in for a very rude awakening when that house of cards comes tumbling down.

Every time I meet someone who went to college, if you’re in the same job as them without having a degree, the default response is “but I got the experience”. Part of me thinks this is some kind of rationalization so they don’t have to accept the fact that they might have just been swindled and could have just as easily did what I did and get the same outcome.

I went back to school after a decade of web development, and learned a ton. I think I’m a much better developer than I would have been had I learned only what I thought I needed for my job (could be wrong about that, but I don’t think I am). I’ve also worked with plenty of people without degrees who were better developers than me, but to a person, I think they would have greatly benefited from a broader theoretical foundation than what they built through self directed learning.

One thing you should think about is that rationalization likely applies to you just as much as it does to the college educated people you’re talking about.

I was in the college is useless boat before I went back and most of it was rationalizing my choices—plus a bit of feeling inferior.

It’s one thing to decide that college wasn’t the right decision for you (and maybe it wasn’t). It’s another entirely to write off everyone who went as suckers.

Yes, having dedicated time to focus on learning was great. But I was effective at that because I'd already learned to, well, learn, on my own, by homeschooling the latter half of high school (where I'd study, take CLEP tests).

College isn't for suckers, but the scholastic benefits of it can be gotten through other means (and should probably be done because a job you're interested in requires it, ideally in the confines of that job, like an apprenticeship in the trades). Many of the other purported benefits (social, etc) are BS.

The main benefit I can think of outside of that dedicated study time is being forced into more of a cultural milieu than I had experienced prior. I think that is important, but I also think that entirely depends on the school, just as it depends on the job, so I'm not sure that's entirely a college benefit so much as a "get into the city if you're living somewhere suburban or rural" benefit.

Where else will you get the direct access to expertise in all those fields, guiding you in what works/experiments/skills/etc to read/learn/acquire, answering questions personally, the massive labs and libraries, the students to study with.

As someone who has tried to study on my own at a serious level, I would say the opposite: Studying on my own is nothing like it. I am very jealous of those in college. I don't know which books and papers to read, how to contextualize them, what they have and lack; I have nobody to ask (Reddit and Stack Exchange being very poor substitutes); I lack access to resources that are far too expensive, JSTOR being a simple example, making much study very time-consuming or impossible. I regularly run into things, years later, that would have been introduced in the first day of class by an expert - I have an unknown but large quantity of blind spots.

That's kind of my point - the nature of "study on my own" is different than "can I find the resources I need to solve a particular problem". College is creating a problem of "pass this test" or "complete this assignment"; studying on your own, yes, you don't know where your blind spots are or where to begin, because you don't have a problem you're trying to solve. College provides you some, but they aren't fundamentally different than work problems. And while some classes may attempt to 'teach' the material, the ones where that was an effective use of my time (rather than just read the textbook, or those where class time was unrelated to the projects we were graded on) were definitely in the minority. YMMV.

You can ask a professor, or multiple ones. If the classes are within your major, the school will guide you. This part is a non-problem. You can also take several classes for a week or two, depending on the school, and see which ones suit your priorities.

> College provides you some, but they aren't fundamentally different than work problems.

Usually the opposite is said, that college problems are not at all like what you encounter in work, that students are unprepared for work problems and that professors don't understand them. College problems are crafted carefully for you to acquire knowledge and skills; work problems are crafted to avoid having you learn, because that takes extra time.

> And while some classes may attempt to 'teach' the material, the ones where that was an effective use of my time (rather than just read the textbook, or those where class time was unrelated to the projects we were graded on) were definitely in the minority. YMMV.

I think this is not realistic for most people. It's also possible you missed a lot without the professor's context and expertise. In anything, would you rather just read a book or have access to an expert mentor? There's no question IME.

Maybe it depends on the courses, which I'm starting to suspect explains a lot of the response at HN: Were you in a STEM field, particularly T or E?

Conversely I learned functional programming, multiple languages and new CS concepts, fault tolerant system design, and system architecture skills, all in the context of a short period of work.

Of course it’s possible, but the number of people who have the discipline/inclination to get through a degree’s worth (or even a significant fraction of a degree’s worth) of education on their own is very small. Small enough that if the reason you’re skipping college is because you think you can/will learn everything they can teach you on your own, you’re most likely kidding yourself.

With self directed learning it’s also shockingly easy to develop huge blind spots that you have no idea you have.

> and should probably be done because a job you're interested in requires it

I’ve personally benefited a good deal from taking the year of physics I was forced to take, despite no job having ever required it.

The same goes for all the papers I had to write in non CS classes.

Regarding the assertions: Of course, one anecdoctal experience says nothing about a population, and in the population, career and other outcomes are far better for college graduates.

We are all by not knowing what we missed and, as you say about others, to rationalize our choices. Framing the question - always the most powerful mode of argument - by saying someone meets the standard (i.e., you are happy in your life), so why do something else, makes any possible alternative useless. What good is a winning lottery ticket either? But the question is, what are the different sets of outcomes from each alternative choice? Each alternative, such as college, makes us better off in some ways, worse off in others - and that includes impacting things that the other alternatives don't touch.

You're defining the question as if college benefits are social life and speed of acquiring adult life skills and responsibilities. If those are someone's aims, I'd agree - don't go! College is about critical thinking skills, knowledge, and learning skills, which last a lifetime. Are your thinking skills so good that they can't be improved? Do you have nothing to learn? Not me. How do improve those things? Imagine studying with an expert who not only guides you in what to study, but explains the works based many other works, context, etc.; answers your questions regularly, person-to-person, in their office and via computer; pushes you to see dimensions and angles that you didn't know about, and to do it at a high level; and reviews your understanding and gives you feedback. And then it would be great to do that with others studying the same thing. And if the study needs it, if they provided other resources: A huge library of other works and every reseach paper ever written (along with experts in each field that help you discover excellent, relevant materials); labs with specialized equipment; etc. etc.

If college didn't exist for learning, it would be too good to be invented.

Also, don't you want to learn about yourself, the world, etc.? What you read on the Internet is so far removed from the quality of knowledge, it's laughable, and it's tragic.

> I know some that are terrified of “growing up”

> sheltered and honestly, kind of bizarre world of academia

These are well-worn stereotypes. People inside and outside school have trouble growing up; handling a college workload is no joke - much harder than early jobs, which often are 40 hours and not challenging (many service jobs). And academia is no more bizarre than other industries. You should see what goes on in SV or on Wall Street if you want bizarre.

Yes, I'm saying that you personally - and your dog too - are an ignorant, uneducated, menial worker, who can't count higher than 10 without your toes, while I can count to 1024.

With that out of the way, can we actually talk about something valuable? I see lots of people trying to shut down a reasoned discussion that challenges the orthodoxy (which currently on HN is, college is a waste of time).

Did I use that word right?

I would be interested in people's experiences, good and bad, with having (not) gone to college, and serious analysis - everyone seems to be trying to shut down any serious discussion and exploration.

I went to college and I've had many times that I wished I'd studied harder. I've also wished at times that I skipped college then and went later in life, when I would benefit far more. I haven't wished that I didn't go; I learned so much that forms my understanding of the world, my thinking skills, etc.; I would be a different person without it. You can't tell me that I didn't benefit greatly from college but I'm just one person. But can you tell anyone that they studied for four years, hard, and didn't learn much? That's a big stretch for anyone; you need to learn enough to pass ~32 classes at various college levels, and that's a minimum.

Many people say here that 'I didn't go and I'm fine'. Fine isn't the question; nobody said we'd die without it, but that's not our standard for our choices. Each path leads to different collections of outcomes, better and worse and completely different, and we have blind spots about what the other path could be like (having no experience of it). Maybe college emphasizes different skills, develops different tools, with different advantages and disadvantages, as an example of how that would work.

I also wonder how much HN readers think of or have experienced STEM only. The humanities is more important (unpopular, I know, and both are essential IMHO); it addresses the most critical issues in the world and life, the ones beyond quantitative understanding, which is most of them.

I watched a bunch of Shakespeare plays recently, fictionalized histories of Rome and England [0]. From them you learn more about our current society and humanity in general, including today's crazy disfuntion, the mis/disinformation and people's responses, than from all the quantitative research combined; art is a mirror that looks into ourselves. And as objects of another human being's creation, they are incredibly inspirational and beautiful. I'm wiser and have grown since a week ago. Would I turn to Shakespeare and get so much from the plays without studying literature in college? I doubt it, though that's just me.

[0] Without knowing the reader's experience with the Bard, let me recommend Julius Caesar especially, also Henry VI Part 2 and Part 3, and of course their sequel, Richard III. Richard II is good too. I'd skip Henry VI Part 1 but read a synopsis as context for Part 2: Part 1 is clearly substandard IMHO and, it turns out, is believed to be mostly written by a collaborator, Christopher Marlowe. It does constrast the difference between an excellent playwright of their day using the same forms and an all-time genius of character and language.

There also isn't a single person on HN who has a American STEM degree who has only experienced STEM. Nearly all STEM college degrees require a significant portion of classes to be humanities (the reverse is not true for humanities majors as they can graduate having never taken any real science or math classes), and every single high school graduate has spent 13 years studying the humanities, including Shakespeare which is a part of most high school English curriculums. What you view as naivety is actually an opinion born from experience.

We must stand on the shoulders of giants; you can't reinvent all the wheels, all the insights, all the knowledge and tools created by all the humans in history by yourself. Why would you? Economic specialization, including in literature, yields talented experts who learn all those things for you (they don't reinvent the wheels either, or just one or two), and unless you think you know everything, you can learn a lot from them.

> everything you describe about Shakespeare also applies to Star Wars. The prequel trilogy is a fictionalized account of the fall of the Roman Republic, and is just as useful for learning about history as Julius Caesar is.

Imagine two or ten or a hundred pieces of media that fictionalize the fall of the Roman Republic. Because they refer to the same real-life history, are all of the stories therefore of equal value (and in the same ways)? That doesn't follow at all. One could be complete BS, the other transcendent genius.

The value of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, and of Star Wars, are not learning history. I've never heard someone credit Star Wars as a resource for that before now, nor Shakespeare for that matter. Read a history book. Shakespeare uses the historical setting to talk about humanity, to - like most great art - talk about ourselves, to hold up a mirror to ourselves that looks inside. To learn about ourselves, now.

I enjoy and learn from plenty of sci-fi, including parts of Star Wars (not the prequal trilogy!). Nothing I've encountered is on the same planet as Shakespeare, but that's an impossible standard. Shakespeare was popular when alive, but is also more popular than everyone since, and in languages around the world. The works of Shakespeare are not just pop culture or nothing is more than pop culture (and then we have to differentiate between pop cultural forms so the term means nothing). Einstein and many others have studied physics; their work is not all of the same value.

> the reverse is not true for humanities majors as they can graduate having never taken any real science or math classes

That's not my experience! My experience is that STEM majors usually take lightweight humanities-for-STEM-students (apparently some think they are taking the heavyweight stuff), and humanities majors usually take STEM-for-humanities majors. I almost never saw a STEM major in high-level humanities classes (and in fairness, it would be very difficult without the prerequisites of knowledge and skill - they wouldn't know much of what was being talked about or how to address it), and I almost never saw a humanities major in high-level STEM classes, for similar reasons.

And IME both sets of majors thought there was little purpose to taking the other. 'Why are you doing that?'

In the original post I replied to, you said:

>From [Shakespeare] you learn more about our current society and humanity in general, including today's crazy disfuntion, the mis/disinformation and people's responses, than from all the quantitative research combined; art is a mirror that looks into ourselves. And as objects of another human being's creation, they are incredibly inspirational and beautiful. I'm wiser and have grown since a week ago. Would I turn to Shakespeare and get so much from the plays without studying literature in college? I doubt it, though that's just me.

The plot of the prequels revolves around Palpatine's manipulations to destroy democracy and gain absolute control over the Republic. He does so by manipulating people like the CIS/Trade Federation with misinformation and promising to take care of their legitimate grievances. He gets them to start a war, which is legitimized through a complex legal system but immoral and unjust in reality. He then uses this war to justify the creation of an army loyal to him, which he later uses to seize power. It doesn't take a genius to realize how lessons learned from the movies could be applied to real life, in the same manner that you described Shakespeare's plays doing for you. Shakespeare doesn't talk about misinformation or modern society's disfunction directly, you inferred that, and there is nothing stopping someone from drawing similar life lessons from more modern material. It's the entire concept of allegories/fables which are thousands of years old!

I noticed that you didn't make a single argument about why Shakespeare is above being pop culture; you only asserted that it is somehow better. Since future humanities students won't have grown up viewing Star Wars as plebian content, it is possible that they will worship Star Wars the same way present day ones worship Shakespeare, Dickens, and many other historical writers who wrote for primarily to entertain. Your casual dismissal of the prequels while implying that you like the original trilogy also doesn't bode well for your argument that university education in the humanities is useful for being able to analyze and draw conclusions from literature, since the prequels have a much more complex plot and fleshed out world than the originals do. The movies have just as deep of a story as any Shakespeare play and one can draw any of the conclusions you mentioned from them, and in fact many do even without having the "proper" education. There are no analysis skills that one gains from a university humanities education, which is also likely why you didn't list any of the "tools" the "giants" have created.

A humanities education is definitely not necessary, and possibly even determinantal, to address the "critical issues in the world and life, the ones beyond quantitative understanding, which is most of them", and to think otherwise is to think that being a member of an expensive book club makes you qualified to rule the world.

An experienced developer looks at code and forms perceptions 100x faster and more accurately than someone without expertise. Their brain is wired differently by their experiences, and they look for and pick out patterns, process their meaning, and understand them, all in moments without conscious thought. Similarly, someone with expertise in wine can perceive far more in a glass than someone who doesn't. I'm mostly in the latter group; often I don't know the difference.

But that doesn't imply that no difference exists; reality doesn't exist or not because I perceive it. I have no doubt that those differences exist and that the person with expertise gets far more out of that glass than I do, sees far more color and detail and shapes and images, and I take the gap between my experience and theirs as a signal that it's a fruitful territory for learning. If I denied that, and things like it, I would wall myself off from much learning.

But I can watch Shakespeare and see far more than most people who haven't studied and learned literature and arts more generally. In case you think it, I don't worship William Shakespeare, I love the works. Shakespeare is not a god and the plays are not scripture that I've been instructed to praise, but Shakespeare is just a person - like HN commenters - who made something incredible, and my experience has led me to the same response as so many others over 400 years.

I don't know if I'd go so far as to say that it is the other "main function" but ohhh boy does this need to be discussed more. I know a few people that seemingly couldn't break out of college. College gives a clear path forward for years, each time you're admitted into a program. Give that up and what do you have? For the people I know, the answer to that question is a minimum wage job outside of their field of study.

It's discussed all the time, for decades.

> I know a few people that seemingly couldn't break out of college.

Many people have trouble moving forward, regardless of college.

But that’s orthogonal to my point. If I were looking for people to rebuild America (or even just maintain it) I’d much rather have adults like your mom (or my mom) than the children graduating from American colleges these days.

My mom flipped the order, working until she had us, then taking about a decade off her career and doing an MS in Computer Science in the meanwhile, before returning to her career.

on the STEM subject, teens good at math are never teacher's favorites, instead they're called nerds and some are even isolated from the rest, it's quite the opposite in Asia, or even in Europe. That's the root cause we need import so many STEMs from overseas, the culture smothered STEM from K-12. K-12 is anything but success IMHO.

middle school kids are more keen about their gender or identities, or how awful US was in the past, or their hair color...high school students must show how caring they're to the community or everyone must be some leader somehow while the truth is that they can barely take care of themselves without parents' caring, for academics nowadays SAT/ACT/school-ranking/etc are either racism or unfair...I will stop here.

A road to hell.

Meanwhile many jobs are trying to sell themselves not through a TC that would let one hit these markers, but through football tables, pizza parties, drinks and other social outings. Not to hate on fun activities, but it sure does feel like trying to keep young adults in a perpetual student lifestyle when you keep the booze but not give them the wage to advance in life.

There are plenty of young adults who want to grow up, meeting a ridiculous amount of resistance.

Today those jobs are held by adults, expecting to be able to raise a family on it. Teenagers rarely have jobs, their first job waits until after they graduate from college.

Let's not cover up bad systems because a few individuals rise to the artificial challenge and bite through.

For various reasons (safety regulation, emissions requirements, minimum wage not keeping up with inflation, insurance outpacing inflation, cash for clunkers etc…) it’s now almost impossible to afford a car working a few hours at McDonald’s.

There’s also far more fast food restaurants per capita than there used to be, and food service/retail make up a larger part of the economy in general.

To top it off, the age of the average American has increased almost 10 years since 1960, so there are just fewer kids to do the jobs.

We sure had fun shredding tires with it. I was lucky to survive the accident that terminated it.

I remember at 18 signing up for 5 years in the Navy. I'd say that is pretty adult. If it isn't, you should consider contacting your senator about raising the age of enlistment.

The ones that do sign up, though, grow up fast.

All the more reason to contact your Senator. Lower the drinking age or make the age of enlistment higher. Adult enough to decide to become a sacrificial pawn, but not adult enough to drink a beer.

More than once he'd announced in class that he was grading the class on a curve, but me separately.

Suffice to say we didn't get along.

What was his public reason for doing so?

Apparently, I was pretty obnoxious in high school. It took me far too long to learn this. (And to learn when not to speak my opinion.) I would have been well served if I had swallowed pride and asked teachers (and peers) for some perspective on how my attitude was, frankly, self destructive.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/9tk0jw/w...

my kids are still in k-12, nothing has really changed for them though.

A good interpretation of humans generally is 'giant baby monkeys', in that we have curiosity and openness consistent with juveniles but not with most adult animals.

>on the STEM subject, teens good at math are never teacher's favorites, instead they're called nerds and some are even isolated from the rest,

This doesn't bear any resemblance to my experience of a not-so-special US public school in the 2000s.

I'm not saying your comment is without valid points, but you are throwing the baby out with the bathwater on your attitude about childhood.

It persists into the professional space, just look at how infantilizing Silicon Valley became, trying to turn the workplace into a playpen complete with propeller head hats.

Instead of playing foosball and gaming online, we should be playing cards and drinking like previous generations?

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/age-dependency-ratio-old?...

Do you genuinely believe this stuff that youre typing? I know that conservative medias say this and use it as a boogeyman to get themselves into power, but do you truly believe it? Ive worked with elementary, middle, and high school kids for the last 5 years, in an area that conservatives constantly make fun of and call awful things, but none of that is even close to the reality.

Kids know that gay people exist (and are okay with that), and they know that they might want to look or act differently than they wouldve been forced to in the past.

Kids today are significantly more accepting of tech and STEM subjects than they were even just a few years ago. Its significantly more common and accepted to play video games, kids are interested in video and picture editing because of social media (like TikTok), and they are increasingly tech literate. None of these boogeyman topics you claim are true, but they are continually parroted by people who want to move our education system backwards.

And as a side note, > high school students must show how caring they're to the community

I personally think this is a great thing. We should encourage more community involvement with young people, especially things that help out disadvantaged community members and educate them about our government. Im surprised someone who parrots the original phrases from your comment would be against something like being caring in your community.

my high school kids told me they are aware of those sensitive gender subjects at middle school and they feel it's more frequent these days.

Google will show you some data points, e.g. Gen Z (from 1995+) has close to 20% claiming to be LGBT+. Things changed a lot.

I'm neither a liberal or conservative, I consider myself independent.

The next generation should not tether themselves at all to what is in our comfort zones; if they aren't going far beyond them, they aren't thinking for themselves. When I was young I remember thinking that the old people were jaded, corrupt, and didn't even try to address their ignorance - and now that I'm 'old', I can see I was right! With power has come all those things - not a commitment to truth, but disdain for being made to learn anything. God I hope the next generation doesn't follow or accomodate us. And to this day, some people I know in the prior generation still don't understand things that are normal to us now as adults, because we grew up with them. I know some that won't wear blue jeans because they see jeans as a symbol of a challenging culture.

They say progress happens one funeral at a time! :)

The numbers are vastly higher than scientific estimates of how many people are in these groups. That suggests it’s become a form of self expression, which is just a way of denying reality.

> We did plenty that was shocking and new to our parents, and equally mocked - do you remember?

Who is “we?” Millennials, as a group, are the good kids compared to baby boomers. They have less sex, do less drugs, etc.

> How absurdly narrow-minded our parents seemed? We were mostly right too.

Our parents started down this road of self expression and denying the realities of life. Mostly they sobered up after the drug binges of the 1960s, but left millennials poorly positioned to handle the real world. We are lucky to live in a society our grandparents built, because I don’t think we could build that society again today.

> The next generation should not tether themselves at all to what is in our comfort zones; if they aren't going far beyond them, they aren't thinking for themselves.

The realities of human existence don’t change so fast. The basic mechanics of American life aren’t much different today compared to 1989. If people are rushing past the comfort zones of their parents, that means they’re increasingly living in a delusion detached from reality.

> When I was young I remember thinking that the old people were jaded, corrupt, and didn't even try to address their ignorance - and now that I'm 'old', I can see I was right!

People’s brains don’t fully develop until they’re 25. So if you believe the same things now as you did when you were young…

I thought the data was based on surveys of how people identify themselves, which only shows that identification has changed with time. Maybe fluid gender identity is a stage of development that has been denied before; who knows? Why do you have to tell these people what to do with their lives?

Self-expression is denying reality? I don't know what that means, what one has to do with the other. One way of looking at it is that what is inside you is part of reality; you are part of reality. Anyway, you are criticizing middle schoolers for denying reality?

Again, why do you have to tell them what to do, what to feel? Who are you to do it?

> ...

The rest is mostly your self-expression, not some objective reality. You are welcome to it, of course.

Nah, no on is going to isolate you for being good at math. Literally, that does not happen. Isolation of kids that cant fit it does happen and some of those are good at math. But, the "being good at math" part is not what gets them isolated. It is the other stuff and behaviors, roughly in the "poor social skills" (may include "have hard time being assertive about own boundaries") that gets you isolated.

There are many ways to prepare an individual for that responsibility. In western nations, that is often done more through a formal educational program than through the community and family.

This also isn't a "you must have X amount of civic responsibility" as different societies are looking for adults to have different amounts of responsibility within that society.

While American college is to an extent the deferment of responsibility, in many cases it is also the exposure to a wider range of cultures than one experienced up through high school. It is that exposure to other people and culture - learning to get along with a roommate or doing your own laundry in a gradual process that college presents.

In that respect, it is not a deferment of dealing with the real world, but rather a gradual introduction to the broader world. While the 18 year old American may be able to do unskilled labor and get along (tolerably) with siblings, being able to work in an office or understand that the upbringing of the driver of the carpool isn't the same as yours - that comes from that exposure to other people and cultures.

We're already doing a pretty terrible job educating people and it shows. How much worse does it get when its outsourced to the 'community'? Communities in the US (and everywhere) are fragmented, class stratified, religiously bound structures that we have seen the detriment of when it comes to civic participation. Just check out the IG page of any former evangelical or mormon female.

A secular democracy requires education and time to participate in civic and civil society. That education must imho be grounded in not just how to think, but also the history of humanity. Otherwise we are signing ourselves up for a return to much darker days.

1. They complain that they have to cook

2. They complain that they have to do laundry.

3. They complain they have to iron their clothes.

4. They complain they have to tidy up the apartments.

5. They mostly care about sports, movies, and if they're not religious, getting drunk. Of course, that's not necessarily true for those that go to top universities for their PhDs, but those are the minority, in any case.

6. They boast about how great it was that they didn't take humanities in their undergrad. Talking to them, it's also clear they have little understanding of the arts.

I've also met some very responsible, intellectual Bangladeshis.

There are problem people in every society.

What generation? In my parents' generation, a secretary could get good health insurance for their family and retire with a pension. Today, someone new hired into that role would struggle to afford rent or health insurance for just themselves, and retirement is out of the question.

I think there is a relative amount of middle class wealth left that hides the fact that many modern jobs do not pay middle class compensation anymore. There are a lot of house poor people that might have the trappings of middle class life, but they're on life support.

In many places, to live a middle class lifestyle from 40 years ago would require young workers without assets to earn six figure incomes. Even in "affordable" places, incomes required for a middle class lifestyle are approaching six figures, as well. I'm certainly not one of those people who think STEM is the be-all and end-all solution to anything, but STEM jobs often put workers in the six figure income range.

> a secretary could get good health insurance for their family and retire with a pension. Today, someone new hired into that role would struggle to afford rent or health insurance for just themselves, and retirement is out of the question.

While I agree that wages haven't advanced outside of a the very few, secretaries aren't a good example. Computerization has made most of those skills obsolete.

This is just middle-class religious belief. And a good one, because middle-class professional people have to reproduce themselves every generation, so they have to center credentialism or fall to working class or poverty.

If you're born rich, it's easy to die rich; if you're born poor, it's easy to die poor; if you're born middle-class, remaining middle-class is a battle for credentials.

The "preparing to be an adult" value decayed exponentially for me. The first year staying in halls with my peers was extremely valuable. The rest of the years were not so valuable.

Also, this value was 95% social. There was very little that uni itself taught me about being an adult.

I learned so much, I cannot imagine having only the knowledge and intellectual skills that I had from high school.

Regarding knowledge and intellectual skills, the vast majority of my knowledge gained in the last ~5 years has been from self-teaching or exploring things I found interesting and I think I developed far more intellectual skills from doing that than going to university.

University felt extremely intellectually restrictive to me. You were given a ton of material that you needed to learn at a surface level to pass tests. There was little room for exploration and deep understanding within courses.

Most of the material did not seem like it was going to be useful for me. I don't like learning for the sake of it, I prefer to try and focus on usefulness.

Why do I need to learn about how to draw structures in isometric and oblique or understand CPU registers when I have absolutely zero interest in those things and never want to do that kind of work?

Because "foundational knowledge" or something, even though the vast majority of people will never use the vast majority of the knowledge they learn. I've asked my friends who completed degrees how much of the information from their degree they use at work and it's practically nothing.

Being able to get 1.5 years' experience in paid internships when I was at Drexel was also hugely valuable towards kick-starting my post-college career without adding additional classes.

In the humanities, learning in depth (to express it superficially), exploration, and learning the skills of how to learn in those ways, is fundamental; it's the point. Try a humanities program - you would love it!

From my perspective most faculty add very little value, so in terms of learning and exploration there's not much point in paying boatloads of money to attend when I could go through the material (Or similar) myself if I'm interested.

> I'm highly skeptical of university's value-add

This new social trend - which suits the reactionary movement very well (which doesn't mean you are a reactionary - is really tragic. We are just destroying so much in instututions and potential, so many years and resources lost, and mostly just to destroy things. It's not hard to grasp that knowledge and learning move us forward, and it's better with experts.

With people online you can at least vet them well and have access to their knowledge and advice. Even though it's not the same as a mentor I think learning from an expert online is better than having a mediocre mentor.

> It's not hard to grasp that knowledge and learning move us forward, and it's better with experts

I agree knowledge and learning are important, but I no longer feel like university is the primary place for that unless you want to go into academia. Internet communities feel like better environments than university at this point.

This doesn't feel like a purposeful destruction of university through a social trend though. The institutions are destroying themselves.

Yes, generally speaking. And they were better prepared than people from the 1840s, who mostly were illiterate (no universal education), lost most of their kids at a young age, etc. If you spend zero years preparing for something and I spend four (or 12 and 16 years), I'm going to be better prepared most likely. There are diminishing marginal returns at some point, but college is qualitatively very different than high school.

This question comes up many times, as if it's a personal insult to people without college degrees. Let's imagine it does insult them (which I don't think it does); should we reject all progress for ourselves because others don't have access to it and might be offended? You have access to the Interet and I don't - are you saying you are better than me? The Internet is useless! And now we don't want to offend people in the 1930s? There are things other people have done that benefitted their lives, and that I missed out on - good for them!

This is not an answer to a “in what way” question. I will grant you that elementary school teaching people to read, write and basic arithmetics, does indeed inculcate skills very important in adult life, but from there to argue that a marginal year of education gives you some marginal amount of human capital, only shows how weak your argument is: it’s completely useless without trying to quantify the actual learning. What if a year of college actually reduces a day’s worth of useful stuff? What a waste of time it would be, and yet totally compatible with your argument.

And, it might be of interest to you, that the last month of 12th year of education, and last month of 16th year “teaches” a lot more useful stuff than the previous 4 years in terms of how it translates to increased success in adult life, as studies show. This is actually obvious to everyone, that obtaining diploma is worth more than 4 years worth of learning, but the point is that education is not about learning.

> it’s completely useless without trying to quantify the actual learning

Most things in life can't be quantified, yet aren't useless.

> the last month of 12th year of education, and last month of 16th year “teaches” a lot more useful stuff than the previous 4 years in terms of how it translates to increased success in adult life, as studies show

What studies?

No, I just raised this as a response to your comment claiming people in 1840 America were "mostly illiterate"[1]: I was talking about reading and writing, because you were talking about literacy, and I do agree that it is valuable to teach people basic literacy and numeracy. In no way my comment above implies that I question the value of education past 5th grade.

That said, I do in fact question value of state-organized mass education past 5th grade as it currently exist, yes. To be clear, I'm not questioning the value of learning things past 5th grade, but rather the way we pretend people learn things today.

> Most things in life can't be quantified, yet aren't useless.

If you decompose the syntax of the sentence you're referring to, you'll find that the "useless" in it does not refer to "education", but rather to your argument: it is useless to argue that "X is good for you, so extra 4-8 years doing X is worth it", unless you can quantify exactly how good X in fact is for you, and how good extra 4-8 years of doing X would be.

Say, imagine X to be "learning to play a musical instrument": it's probably worthwhile for everyone to spend some time doing that, but the idea that everyone needs to spend at least 12 years of their lifes, and most people should spend 4 on top of that, is rather ludicrous. How do you know that regular schooling is not exactly liked that, without trying to quantify it? You don't.

> What studies?

The Google Scholar keyword for you to familiarize yourself with the rather substantial literature on the topic is "sheepskin effect".

[1] - you are very much wrong that Americans in 1840 were mostly illiterate, by the way: literacy in US was historically always very high, and by mid 1800s, large majority was already literate, despite lack of federally-mandated government schooling. This is a legacy of English heritage, where majority of male Englishmen were already literate in mid 1600s. They did not get there through top-down state-organized schooling, it was mostly a bottom-up effort, where local Church played huge role.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kettering_University

Even worst than than that. Ford was a huge anti-Semite and one of his papers had major influence over Hitler who then went on to genocide millions of Jews. Dude was for sure an asshole. He also fired workers who drank or gambled during their off time and had company men who raided homes of his workers.

Unintuitively, harder lives don't make people tougher. Intuitively, they make people more exhausted and traumatized. Look at how functional people were back then when they were elderly (though that could be due to other aspects of health). Look at anyone who has had a hard life; they wear down.

Similarly, children, contrary to some pop politico-psychology, generally grow stronger if they feel safer. Unsafe kids are scared to face the world and often never develop an inner sense of security. Trauma leaves wounds that sometimes never heal. Safe kids feel like they can brave the world, and they internalize that sense of safety that their parents model and give them.

People repeat that but what is it based on?

Most of the adult population have not gone to college but somehow manage to become functioning adults.

We can't do better? Functioning is our only standard? We could go back to the Middle Ages, or be hunter-gatherers, where for 95% of homo sapien history probably most adults were 'functioning'.

You don't define what adult means. You don't say or imply what ways college would help you become a better one.

For what I would define as "adult", which is understanding the realities of life outside the shelter of their family infrastructure, I would argue most colleges don't really further a student's self-reliance in that way.

If anything, they create another, different reality bubble which is again popped when they are dropped into to the actual real world, often with a mountain of debt. This is the point at which, in my opinion, where someone learns to become an adult.

Does learning new information and skills help one become a better functioning adults? Of course. But college doesn't have a monopoly on being the way to acquire information and skills.

As the price of education in the US continues to increase (for no good reason, other than people can get loans to pay it), college will increasingly fail the cost/benefit analysis for a lot occupations.

As an aside, your attitude seems to imply that you think people who have not gone to college are lesser in some way. I would apply some critical analysis to that.

That's what we're seeing now. Understanding where that led last time is useful.

In the 19th century, nobody had that all much firepower. Battles were local. When that changed, the routine minor wars of the 19th century turned into World War One.

> In the 19th century, nobody had that all much firepower. Battles were local.

Knowing some history of Napoleon, for example, would help too. :) But yes, your general point is taken. And then 25 years later, WWII ...

Engineering programs are widely considered to be difficult to complete in 4 years. Where do you get 2 years?

Also, after my sophomore year in college, I was not nearly well-educated enough (whatever 'enough' means); I would wildly approximate that I learned 70% in the last two years. Much of freshman year was just adjusting to college, learning how to write at a college level, etc.

But most importantly, you are still focusing on college as job training, and as I imply in the GGP, specific skill training is just a side benefit. If corporations want job training, they can provide and pay for it themselves. College for the student, not the corporation.

Two, I don't think someone needs a full engineering degree to become productive. Writing my own compiler was a blast, and gave me some real insight into how computers work under the hood. But if our goal is to improve the earning potential of young adults with the minimum financial burden, I wouldn't be teaching compilers. I'd be teaching how to spin up cloud services, the network stack, and modern web dev.

College is for the student. But it also costs the student a boatload of money. If we want to give the student the best bang for their buck, approaching it as a form of job training would be more effective. Sure, companies could pay for that training. But they're not and colleges fulfill this role, and insist on tacking on a bunch of other requirements that don't really do much to help the student's job prospects.

Humanities are more important than STEM. Humanities deal with the world and yourself on issues that aren't quantifiable, which is most of the issues in life and in the world, including at work.

> if our goal is to improve the earning potential of young adults with the minimum financial burden

Again, life is much, much more than jobs - you are much, much more than what you do for some corporation - and early jobs are the least important ones. It's all so absorbed in the corporate perspective: your only value, your existence, is for serving the corporation. And it puts people permanently in that class, as servents rather than as the powerful - the citizens of a democracy, to whom the corporations report.

I think if more people studied the humanities, it would be brazenly obvious. It's craven on the part of the powerful and corporations.

What does a computer science student take in their first year? In year 1, in my hometown's university, through year 1, a student takes Linear Algebra, Calculus, Human-Machine interaction, Computer Hardware Fundamentals, Electrical engineering fundamentals, Intro to programming, Logic, Discrete Math, Discrete Automata, Numerical Methods, and intro to software engineering. Very different from an American University that might have 1 or 2 years worth of cross-major electives.

This is not unique to computing: A 1st year med students (which you get to start at 18), is going to be crushed under a pile of biology, biostatistics, cytology, anatomy and the like. Literature? Philosophy? History? You better have taken those in high school if you wanted to learn them, because college has no time for you to decide what you want to do with your life.

I am not going to try to figure out which system is better in the short or the long run, but it makes it pretty clear that college in the US is nowhere near close to universal in western countries, even after we take away the unique financial challenges the US gives college students.

Have you ever met someone fresh out of college? Let's be real, if they didn't do something before or during that wasn't college, they are arguably less qualified to do anything than an average person who didn't. Wew, they've memorized how to traverse a graph, or something something roman emperors

Most people think college prepares them to be resource for corporation, or some other things. Your college education coincides with your formative years, but from my exp, college has nothing to do with growing as an adult. It's mainly moving out of your hometown and work your part time job and start planning your life.

They do? And if they do, is it true? Who are we talking about? High school students? People who read HN?

> from my exp, college has nothing to do with growing as an adult. It's mainly moving out of your hometown and work your part time job and start planning your life.

That's too bad. There is so much more going on. What about all the knowledge and critical thinking skills, from science and stats, to addressing the bigger questions in the humanities and social sciences?

Again you keep making the argument that university is the only place where you can learn how to think, which is a pretty basic human skill. If that was true, then it's a dangerous system that needs to be fixed, not something to celebrate.

I said "was true" because I didn't know that the government installed locks on books and encrypting mechanisms on the internet and public libraries so that they are only accessible from universities.

> Only activists have opinions...

That's not what I said, but you certainly did say that adult means that you HAVE TO think about those things, in some particular way that is taught in an university.

Adult to me just means you can take care of people other than yourself. Of course it's a subjective definition, but a teenager can read books/go to university and have sophisticated thoughts about the world, that doesn't make them mature.

Here is something to consider though: why is it that you only study critical thinking, scientific method or whatever at the age 18? Why do kids have to fuck around for years, apparently unable to think, before "university"? Why should they? What are they before that? mindless primates?

I didn't say that (provide a link?), though I do happen to think that adults do have to be responsible for others, as you say, and the bigger issues are big because they impact those responsibilities. The rest is your own ideas.

At college, you learn that there is no one right way to think, and also the very narrow limits of your own mind.

> a teenager can read books/go to university and have sophisticated thoughts about the world, that doesn't make them mature.

Right, college is about knowledge and thinking skills, not so much maturity (but it helps there too). For maturity, get married and work in a coal mine at 13 years old.

> why is it that you only study critical thinking, scientific method or whatever at the age 18? Why do kids have to fuck around for years

Hmmm ... I had science classes, and was taught to think critically, before college, but not nearly on the same level. Why do people not learn more complex things earlier? Why not teach graduate level physics to 6 year olds?

Again with this "at college" rhetoric. I guess if you don't go to college, you will be a bigot, on top of having no critical thinking and being an absolutely selfish individual

> For maturity, get married and work in a coal mine at 13 years old

Did college teach you this stellar argument?

Also, just because someone is doing a menial work it does not mean that they should not have a access to higher education. Especially since there's not enough of higher valued jobs for everyone. Educated worker has higher job mobility and is able to respond quickly to shifting business needs.

Well, a worker with a college degree has higher job mobility. The worker being educated may be orthogonal. And I'm not sure if becoming educated increases one's ability to respond quickly to shifting business needs.

And it's also part of the problem, as I see it. Decades ago, one could switch industries or fields much more easily because of the lack of expectation of a specific college degree. Today one is much more "locked out" of other fields if they don't have that degree, and people feel trapped because they see no path to a higher paying career without taking on a ton of loans and risk to go to college (for the first time or for another degree).

I think we need to be honest with ourselves and acknowledge a lot (but not all) of higher education is arbitrary gatekeeping, and it's long past time to rein in the "arbitrary" part.

I agree completely, and I didn't mean to imply otherwise.

College as STEM job training is absurd and clearly a failure. As you say, it's about much more than job training, but I would argue it doesn't even do that. Hell, it makes applicants worse somehow.

I’m all for setting the minimum wage for farm workers at $25/hr. Within 2-3 years every manual farm worker will be replaced by a machine, and we’ll all be better off for it.

Well, not the manual workers, temporarily. But then we’ll have to deal with the problem of unemployment honestly rather than leaving make-work jobs around.

The real problem is machines can't replace those jobs or they would have. 25/h would mean very high prices for local food so everything will come via imports.

It is a problem for them. They wouldn't come if it weren't economically advantageous to do so. Losing those jobs leaves them worse off, at least in the short term.

Oh yeah you think the only thing between us and a fully automated robot-run future is labor market conditions? The perfect robot slaves will not be forthcoming for quite awhile. We will have to settle for human slaves, or in modern times, immigrants totally reliant on their employer and without the normal rights afforded citizens for our low prices. I sympathize with libertarian and capitalist ideals but I find it disturbing that the agricultural and energy base of the US economy is anything but free market.

This can't be good because it suggests that 30%+ of the adult population aren't prepared to be adults.

As If you have to go to college to become an adult.

A lot of college programs seem like their purpose is for some very wealthy and sheltered children to become “cultured”, but that is completely unrelated to the skills needed to be a functioning adult or to take significant responsibilities in your life.

College and university were never supposed to be about job training. They were supposed to teach one how to learn so you could become a lifelong learner and continue your own education in any field you chose to pursue and to use those skills to benefit the society at large so that everyone can benefit from an increasing understanding of the world.

Instead, what we have now, is an increasing focus on becoming a corporate employee, who devotes their life to marketing and selling products that society doesn’t need and are in fact increasingly destroying society and harming individual rights and lessening opportunity with each iteration. A higher education is increasingly designed for specialized corporate tasks that do not improve society and fail to solve the most pressing problems at hand.

Look at the marvels modern democracy has created with a population that mostly wasn’t college educated. Does democracy work better today, with vastly higher college graduation rates, than it did 30 years ago?

Also, I have two step siblings in college and they aren’t learning any of those things. They’re learning fantasies that make them less well-equipped to deal with reality than their parents and grandparents who didn’t go to college.

I see little benefit in discussing how things should be instead of what they are. There are clearly forces that pivoted universities towards what they are today, telling people what university should be isn't gonna fix anything.

More importantly, who decided university is the only place you could learn this, or that you could not become a life long learner long before going to university?

It seems that institutional education is precisely what gives people the impression that there is such a thing as "stop learning" aka graduation.

What makes you say they are that, and for everyone, and from everyone's perception? Because lots of people say it on HN? Because lots of people say it anywhere? Does that make it true?

And if it is true, it changed once, why can't it change again? Through these discussions is how society changes - and it will change, one way or another.

> who decided university is the only place you could learn this, or that you could not become a life long learner long before going to university?

It seems like universities are the best place to learn, given the obvious resources? If I want to learn about history, it would be good to have experts in history, books about history, other people studying history, etc.?

That would be true prior to the internet and/or digitalization of resources.

Today, a kid in the 3rd world country can access those very same resources. Whats left is the value of the credential - accepted in the marketplace.

They cannot access the experts to mentor them and teach them, they can't access much of scholarly work, which is in expensive books and research papers.

I'm not a child and not in a 3rd world country; I've been through higher education, and seriously studying anything is inefficient and impossible - I simply can't catch up with the expertise of professors in selecting the media and understanding it.

who said it can't? It will be changed by looking into the mirror and fix the incentives or whatever that corrupted higher education. Not by preaching people how they should invest their time and efforts. Preaching only works in churchs.

Universities that stifle dissenting opinions are the best place to learn? Interesting.

There are plenty of online resources these days with active communities where you can learn from peers without fear of being penalized by your peers or an ideologically captured professor who will fail you for not toeing the idealogical line.

> ideologically captured professor who will fail you for not toeing the idealogical line

It's a baseless accusation against nobody.

> you can learn from peers

Peers are no substitue for experts. If I want to become a doctor, I need to learn from professors of medicine, not peers. Who would hire your 'peers' to teach a course in whatever you want to learn? Who would ask their advice?

College campuses have gone through severe idealogical capture, so the idea that going through a 4-year degree leads to a well informed populace is laughable.

I would argue that a 4-year peace corps posting in an improvised country would lead to a better informed population than any liberal arts education.

Reactionaries repeat that over and over, which is their most common tactic for any issue. But reptition is not truth, as we have learned well in the Internet age, though that hasn't stopped people from repeating it. Also, the reactionaries main objection seems to be that their own ideology isn't taught (including things like denial of climate change and racism); they insist they are a non-ideological norm and everything else is ideology, again through repetition. Academia requires proof; it's not a place of equity for bad ideas. It's also a place that disrespects the current establishment; again, no ideas get special treatment.

Tell that to Judith Butler.

It's sad that so many comments like this are dismissive, and therefore not much reason or argument is put behind them, making them very thin.

You can be an adult with no education or training at all, and for most of human history, that's what happened. Is that our standard? Just 'be' an adult? Why have any schooling?

Ironically, college starts preparing people to be adults at age 18, where in most jurisdictions in the US, you are already an adult.

For now. Let's look at young people though. They're indicative of the future.

Outside of finance and STEM, it's really hard to see a clear and reliable path to prosperity for a 20-something year old. Perhaps some trades as well.

What's even worse is that the paths to prosperity seems to get narrower and narrower by the year.

no

I never went to college to get a STEM degree to be a resource for anybody. I went because I imagined myself being Tom Swift.

Of course, Elon Musk turned into a real life Tom Swift!

Seriously, Musk came into a ton of money in the dot-com era, knew how to maintain that money because of his background, seems to be a capable hands-on project manager and natural self-marketing. You surely know people smarter than him who didn't acquire the mass amounts of money required to do what he does; I certainly do.

No 10-year olds are talking about how to become a savvy financial engineer like Jack Welch at GE, but they are talking about rockets and electric cars thanks to Musk.

LOL. C'mon, Musk builds rockets, electric cars, robot trucks, and tunnel boring machines. How much more Tom Swift can one get? Ok, Ok, I admit he hasn't yet built a Jetmarine or an Atomic Earth Blaster.

> You surely know people smarter than him who didn't acquire the mass amounts of money

I've never met Musk, so cannot attest personally to his smarts. But I've met plenty of very smart people.

But smarts alone simply isn't good enough to do what Musk does. You'll also need:

1. excitement

2. interest

3. drive

4. willingness to try impossible things

5. perseverance in the face of enormous obstacles

6. a thick skin for being laughed at

7. a willingness to continue in spite of withering criticism and vomit

Besides, although Musk was born into wealth, there's no evidence on his wikipedia page that he had access to it:

"working odd jobs at a farm and lumber-mill" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk

"Musk says that before the company became successful, he could not afford an apartment and instead rented an office and slept on the couch and showered at the YMCA, and shared one computer with his brother."

He made his initial money on an internet startup. Nothing wrong with that.

Got any evidence of this beyond what his estranged father said?

In a real free-market scenario, would'nt those PhD programs be drastically reduced?

I suspect this is because this physics PhD program is providing an implicit signalling function, that the fellow out of this program is worth more than the ave college guy - doing the same programming job - because he proved himself on more complex study materials.

Academic physics research is not very useful economically, since we've figured out most of the stuff that will ever contribute to engineering needs -- building stuff that real people benefit from -- in our lifetimes. Not all! But most.

Mechanical/structural/chemical/etc. engineering on the other hand (a.k.a. physics and chemistry applied to real world problems) are very well-compensated skill-sets.

I mean, take a look at the next "who's hiring" page. Ad supported webapps seem pretty well represented.

> Academic physics research is not very useful economically, since we've figured out most of the stuff that will ever contribute to engineering needs -- building stuff that real people benefit from -- in our lifetimes. Not all! But most.

My phone lasts a day on a battery because we've managed to turn off the CPU as much as possible - we've got a supercomputer in our pocket that we can't use at its full capacity because battery technology isn't advancing. Academic physics research is not very useful economically because we've defined "useful economically" as "able to be converted into profits within 2-5yrs", and unfortunately we did that about 20 years ago, so the whole thing's sorta running on fumes right now.

This is hackernews. The organization that founded this site has mostly made its billions by investing in web properties. They are branching out these days, but that's the demographic.

> battery technology isn't advancing. Academic physics research is not very useful economically because we've defined "useful economically" as "able to be converted into profits within 2-5yrs", and unfortunately we did that about 20 years ago, so the whole thing's sorta running on fumes right now.

If I'm understanding the claim, we aren't doing enough battery R&D, so battery technology advancement is slow? First off, I don't think most physics labs are researching anything even remotely useful to improving batteries. But for the ones that are, let's do fund them.

Second, battery technology is and has been advancing rapidly. See for example the slide in the presentation on the following website ("Battery cell energy densities have almost tripled since 2010 [as of 2020]"):

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/05/eternally-five-years...

That being said, it's far from clear that we are spending less than the optimal amount on battery R&D (the current amount is many billions of dollars per year -- Samsung alone spend ~$1B on research and development for just electric vehicle batteries in 2020). How much do you think we are spending? How much more should we spend?

The problem is, we don't know which ones those are. We won't know, until the discoveries and advancements they make are refined to the point where they can produce batteries.

That's my point - the actual work that needs to happen to make something new that can be put into an "economically useful" product happens 20-30 years beforehand. That's what we need to fund.

> "Battery cell energy densities have almost tripled since 2010 [as of 2020]"

We have a different definition of "rapidly", and a different definition of need. Battery density is the single largest brake on the day-to-day usefulness of electronic devices right now. 3x is nothing. 10x is better, 100x is what we probably need.

I think we probably disagree on two points. First, it seems unlikely that it is even physically possible to beat current lithium ion energy density by 100x. That would imply batteries that are 2x as energy dense as gasoline. I think there's pretty good reason to believe that is not possible -- i.e. there is no easily reversible configuration of atoms that will yield that level of density.

Even if it were physically possible, I doubt that we'd be there today even if we had bent the entire productive capacity of the planet to this problem excluding all others for the last thirty years. You can't make a baby in a month even if you have nine willing mothers to be.

If you're inclined to strengthen the argument you're presenting here, I have one suggestion. If there is widespread underfunding of battery or precursor research, experts in the field are probably talking about this fact. You should be able to find some talk by a respected academic showing that particular worthy ideas likely to add value that aren't being researched for lack of funds. Another option would be to demonstrate that recent advances in battery technology resulted from blue-sky research in the past of the kind that 1. isn't being funded today and 2. could not reasonably have been foreseen to lead to improvements in battery energy density.

(I should also just point out that the whole thesis that we have stopped funding basic research is not even true, see here: https://www.aaas.org/sites/default/files/2020-05/FunctionNON... -- general science funding, after adjusting for inflation, has increased substantially over time.)

I also question your estimate of the importance of energy density, but that's a secondary issue, since I think your views on how fast the technology could be developed are unrealistic under any spending scenario.

Just looking at some quick stats, a little more than half of all STEM occupations are outside of "Computer Occupations", though that one chunk is by far the largest single chunk. And far from the entirety of "Computer Occupations" is ad-supported web apps.

https://www.rclco.com/publication/2021-stem-job-growth-index...

There are a lot of fucking engineers (traditional engineers - based on the definition of 20-30 years ago) out there, and a great many of them make a solid living off it. Most of them simply do their job in relative obscurity compared to the computer workers these days.

How are both of these true? If a job pays poorly, doesn't that suggest there are many people willing and able to do those jobs, relative to the need for the job to be done?

Maybe this results from some market distortion? But AFAIK the main market distortion in the farming industry is the opposite: subsidies that make farming more attractive than it would be, which would tend to increase farm workers' equilibrium wages.

That might be true for markets in the abstract but the market for farm labor is distorted in several ways. One is due to historical reasons farm labor is treated differently from other labor categories and the end result is many of those workers have fewer protections. The second is, as others mentioned, many cannot seek other work due to lack of documentation. In effect becoming a captive labor force with limited ability to advocate for itself.

As an aside, whenever markets display aberrant behavior in the real world, it pays to look for the distortions. They're usually not hard to spot.

Regarding farm labor having fewer protections. In general, labour protections can be distortion-creating (e.g. a minimum wage) or distortion-busting (e.g. rules that ensure people are paid on time).

Regarding the captive labor force: this might be bad for non citizens (and humanity overall), but it seems like it's good for US citizens, who benefit from increased (unlimited?) supply of farm labor, reducing upward pressure on food prices.

If I've understood the above correctly, it seems that 'we need farm workers' isn't an actual problem that needs a solution (from the perspective of US citizens or, by extension, the US government).

What have I missed?

No. This notion of relentless competition is insane. One school district was paying a janitor barely a living wage. The standard response was "he could improve himself / get a degree, and find a better job. That shifts all blame on him an ignored the fact that the district expects to pay a non living wage for that position, they'll just find someone else if he left.

I will say this. Both my grandfathers were farmers. One worked his whole life and died broke. The other invested what he could, and never worked the land a day in my life (that I can remember). He once said that he didnt make his money farming, meaning it was from saving and investing. He rented his land, barn, and equipment to others.

IMHO investing is really close to renting (yes, I have some investments). SaaS is rent. Loaning money is rent. We increasingly live in a world where or renters and owners and people who do the most actual work are the least valued. It's still not a rebuttal, just a general observation that things aren't "fair" for some definitions of "fair". This situation is a societal choice and doesnt have to be that way. I'm not sure what a better way looks like though.

Yes, feel free to say that farmers are payed low. But it remains the same that if they are paid this low, then we don't really need more farmers entering the industry.

Instead hopefully less people will join that industry.

https://research.newamericaneconomy.org/report/immigration-a...

Or it suggests that labor doesn't flow through the system as easily as the theory assumes it does, or that the theory assumes incorrect things about the world, or that it's just wrong on the face of it in a whole lot of actual real world cases. As the biologists say, it's usually not the lab mouse who's wrong.

Any ideas?

Basically, you've got a pile of short-sighted, emotional apes, often operating under conditions of stress or duress, with imperfect information and a planning system that's effectively hijacking stress responses designed to respond to actual flesh & blood predators to evaluate interest rates. All that indicates to me that the cohabitation of "we can't find workers" and "no, we're not raising wages" is maybe less surprising than theory would suggest.

Specific to what's happening in the farm labor market, I'd suspect there's a lot of interplay between the immigration system being pretty broken and farm owners being on the whole kind of crappy businessmen that leads to this particular market distortion.

Have I understood correctly?

You are correct -- this is an awful notion. Plumbers, HVAC technicians, electricians, bricklayers, joiners, framers, builders, are the people who build and maintain the real world, and we need to raise the status of these (and others, forgive me for not listing them all) professions, which take just as long if not longer in which to get qualified, and recognize the dedication to professional standards and the entrepreneurial attitude required to be successful in their respective trade and to bring up the next generation of tradespeople via apprenticeships. * In fact, when you add it all up it meets or exceeds the work put into an undergraduate degree, and yet we don't value it the same.

If you're going to college, you could do worse than to begin getting qualified in a trade on the side -- at worst, you'll learn some widely-transferable practical skills.

* One might also note how much of the above is missing or done badly in the software industry.

I googled around a bit to grab some numbers. I think the below supports the idea that the trades mentioned by GP have median earning numbers very close to the median earning numbers for a full time worker in the United States, maybe a touch less if we grouped all the trades together.

The demand question is less clear to me. The BLS source implies less demand (measured by job growth) in general for the trades than the "average" demand growth for jobs in the US.

The U.S. Census Bureau lists the annual real median earnings at $41,535 in 2020 for all workers with earnings[4] and lists the annual median earnings at $56,287 in 2020 for people who worked full-time, year round. [1]

  Plumber - median $56,330, demand growth, slower than average [2]
  HVAC tech - median $50,590, demand growth, slower than average [3]
  Electrician - median $56,900, demand growth average (actually 9%) [4]
  Framer(Carpenter) - median $49,520, demand growth, slower than average [5]
  Bricklayer(Mason) - median $47,710, declining demand. [6]
  Software engineer - median $110,140, demand growth, higher than average [7]

It gets interesting trying to generally compare demand for STEM to the trades. The BLS estimates about 84,700 openings for electricians per year for the next decade. Contrast that to, for example, chemists - the BLS estimate there is 9,100 positions per year. I didn't find a really great source for the number of BS degrees awarded per year to Chemistry majors, but numbers seemed to be between 14,000 and 17,000 per year.

When I think about supply and demand in careers, it seems to me that STEM is weird. People say "STEM is harder and just worth more in the end" but there seems to me, based on the numbers, for there to be a large "winners take all" effect. But it's hard to measure how many BS in Chemistry holders go to medical school, law school, or take project managment jobs versus being baristas in your local coffee shop. I did find one source that implied the highest percentage of graduates with "Physical Science" degrees (which includes chemistry graduates) at 8.5% work in post-secondary education.

One thing I know for sure - my organization (academic medical research) often hires post-docs that start at a little less than the US median earnings for full-time workers. And there seems to be a lot of competition for those post-doc roles. Salaries do go up over time.

  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States
  [2] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/plumbers-pipefitters-and-steamfitters.htm
  [3] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/installation-maintenance-and-repair/heating-air-conditioning-and-refrigeration-mechanics-and-installers.htm
  [4] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/electricians.htm
  [5] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/carpenters.htm
  [6] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/brickmasons-blockmasons-and-stonemasons.htm
  [7] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/software-developers.htm

Only one person (the oldest one) from my like 20-30ppl circle within age range of 20-30 gets close to IT salaries, that's ridiculous

in most cases it is around 40% (around 2 minimal wages) of my *nothing special* salary by IT standards (4.5 minimal wages), people with better cards get 7-10 minimal wages here, top people like 15-20+

and they see no reasonably easy way to jump higher (e.g within one or two years)

I can't honestly recommend anything but IT to anyone that can put a lot of effort (while mentioning all bad things ofc)

Plumbers doing fancy installs, not plunging toilets, over $100/hr. Huge demand, not nearly enough workers.

Some of the trades pay very, very, well.

Heck live in nannies working 8 hour shifts don't have to pay for housing and they pull in 60k-80k.

I know a woman running her own cat nail cutting service who is making good money and looking to hire help.

It baffles me that our markets are so inefficient that it’s 125% more effective for me to take time off my ‘highly skilled’ engineering job to do ‘low skilled’ renovation/repair work myself.

I can only imagine all of the inefficiency comes from teams of salesmen/project managers/owners who suck all of value out.

But still how do they get away with such bad deals? Are people so pigeonholed that they can’t imagine doing the work themselves? Is getting bonded/licensed/whatever other paperwork is required to compete with these sleazy companies that difficult? I’m sure a lot of people wouldn’t mind learning how to install drain systems for $125/hr minus overhead.

If you want something done right, you gotta do it yourself.

I have noticed though that the large brand name plumbers are the most expensive. I think it's because they're mandated to upsell on any call. I hired one for $100 to replace some shower fixtures. But he spent 2 hours both figuring out what else he could do, and writing it all up and putting it in their database.

On that list of things was replacing the water pressure regulator. For $1500. It's a $300 part, and it screws on and off. Or you could buy a $100 restoration kit instead.

I was also recently quoted $1100 to replace two toilets. Not including the toilets. Looking online it should take 1-2 hours per toilet for an experienced plumber, and around $50-100 to dispose of each. So that's, at best, $200-$250 per hour. My hourly earnings after taxes are about $50. So I both learned how to, and replaced, the toilets in about 4 hours.

Disposing of the old toilet, eh, that is a bit more work depending on how far your local dump is.

In the 3-county rural area where I've spent most of my time recently, we have 3 Lowes, 2 Home Depots, a Menard's, multiple Orschelns and Tractor Supplies, and probably fifty smaller hardware stores and lumber yards. This is many thousands of commercial square feet basically devoted to home improvement, for an area with fewer than 140,000 residents. If it were possible to hire this sort of work without significant expense, the home supply market would be very different.

I'm not criticizing any carpenters or plumbers here. Their work is naturally seasonal and cyclical, and our society DGAF about people with that sort of work. If an electrician would wire your new bedroom for less than $3,000, he wouldn't be able to afford $1,000/month for medical insurance for his family, at least not every month of the year.

It’s worse than that. Even when you try to hire Americans, it’ll turn out that only the salesman/owner are legally working. The actual work is almost exclusively done by immigrants being paid exploitative wages.

It’s frustrating that there is actually money in the industry but such a small amount reaches the laborers.

I don’t think it’s particularly baffling. A large class of jobs, including the trades and so-called “low skilled” professions, are in very high demand - which indicates that what they do is valuable to a lot of people - and while you could theoretically do their job yourself, many people simply don’t want to “get their hands dirty.”

In my opinion that’s a good thing by the way. People who do jobs that are important for us and few people want to do should be paid accordingly.

Someone on Nextdoor was confused about how to "add those jack things" to the ethernet cables in her prewired house. I spent a few minutes linking her to YT videos and an article so she could do it herself. No response, but a few weeks later someone else PM'd me: "Wanna make a couple bucks?"

Ignoring the tone-deafness of that question: yes, low voltage wiring quotes are ridiculous, but it's also one of the easiest DIY projects you can do if have an attic or crawlspace. I installed four access points through my attic and a UAP-AC-M-PRO-US for backyard coverage.

>to have an advantage that other people do not know about:

(without that last part)

Double the number of large quality state universities.

Re-index public university tuition to what they were in 2000 + inflation. Mandate that funding comes with X number increase in tenured professors.

Re-instate public funding for state universities to what it was in 2000 + inflation.

A supply/demand imbalance is in effect, and bloat has taken hold on top of that.

Yes building new 20k student universities takes time, but in 20 years these problems will be solved.

The problem in the US is that "community college" is seen as a lower grade qualification that people "settled" for, instead of an educational focused institutional with bare bones and no immoral mandatory tie-ins (e.g. first year mandatory high price accommodations/gyms/meal plans, etc).

I understand community colleges have a lot of problems too (e.g. low educator pay and conditions). I'm just pointing out that everyone thinks that a European University is 1:1 with the city-colleges of the US, when in reality they're often nothing that fancy and pretty bare-bones.

Could you realistically get room and board down below $8K/year with more spartan dormitories and meal plans? Maybe, but not by much I don't think.

https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college

On the other hand, if your goal is to churn as many bodies out as possible with degrees, it's a pretty big waste of money. We could ship in frozen tyson chicken from China or whatever and just deep fry it as dinner, and turn the dorms into pod hotels or something.

Of course that goes from ideal to complete dystopia, but if that's your goal... lol.

As Bronn of the Blackwater said, “it’s all [housing policy] in the end”.

As far I can tell there aren't capacity issues to get accredited education at the undergrad level. The prices are driven by student loan availability and the need for investment in amenities for colleges to attract students.

Increasing the number of universities might worsen the problem due to the latter needing to redouble investments to attract students.

Does the US have colleges that choose to attract students with lower prices instead?

>We really need farm workers, and most of them live in poverty. I love having more engineers, scientists, and doctors, but we desperately need non-STEM work to be a viable option

This is basically a non-problem because of the supply/demand mechanics of the labor market. If farm workers' job gets sufficiently bad from a value proposition perspective, then people will leave the occupation and employers would be forced to pay higher wages to attract workers.

Serious question - have you ever been poor? Are you aware that sometimes people have to work at shitty jobs because they have no other options? And, if employers really would "be forced to pay higher wages" as you claim, why are all the restaurants in my city still short staffed?

I'm not claiming to have a solution but claiming "the market will fix it" seems like such a cop-out, like telling someone god will take care of it.

OP was talking about the problem from a practical perspective (ie. "We really need farm workers", presumably worried about a future where there aren't enough farm workers and we starve or something), and I was addressing that in the same way. Your objection seems to be from a humanitarian perspective (ie. how can we provide a minimum standard of living to non-STEM workers?), which is valid concern, but ultimately not relevant to the original problem.

>And, if employers really would "be forced to pay higher wages" as you claim, why are all the restaurants in my city still short staffed?

combination of:

1. stubbornness/price stickiness

2. belief that it's better to hold out in the short term and wait for the labor supply to return, then it is to give out pay raises now. Wages are sticky, which mean wage hikes would turn into ongoing expenses into the future.

3. belief that the raising wages would raise prices, which would decrease demand and ultimately make the business worse off.

>I'm not claiming to have a solution but claiming "the market will fix it" seems like such a cop-out, like telling someone god will take care of it.

The market seems to be working just fine in my area. Some restaurants have shut down. Some have raised prices. Some have decreased service. Which is the right approach? I don't know. The restaurants that took the right approach will win out in the end. In the meanwhile I'm still able to eat out.

If the owners were competent, the businesses might have grown to the point where the enterprise isn't so much an extension of the owner's personality. A small restaurant's style extrapolates strongly from the owner's quirks - whether they feel they make enough money, they're disorganised, they're under stress going without leave or getting hit by taxes at the worst times. I figure they're the ones most likely to hold wages down almost out of angst because they themselves feel hard done by. "Why should that teenager get $15/hr?! I have the risk of the lease. I started this business! I got $5/hr when I was a kid!" I'd bet this is a solid factor in local restaurants.

Once a business is large enough to have a tier or two under the owner, I suspect this buffer helps. I notice this separation a lot when working directly with an owner versus with their marketing person. The latter has to uphold their end of the relationship with me or they'll get fired. The owner meanwhile can miss deadlines and forget to write copy and so on, and usually their worst case is they keep flying by the seat of their pants. If their business fails, it's usually much later and harder to tie to specific issues along the way.

What you're really arguing isn't that the market will sort things out to someone's satisfaction, you're just saying the market is a jungle and whatever survives survives.

I suppose it's "not working" if by "not working" you mean "behaves exactly like economics 101 models that assume rational actors". But as it relates to this context, business are reacting approximately in the way we would expect, albeit with some delay/hesitancy. Average pay has gone up in the past few months, for instance.

>What you're really arguing isn't that the market will sort things out to someone's satisfaction, you're just saying the market is a jungle and whatever survives survives.

I don't argue that because it's not clear what "satisfaction" entails. If you mean the optimal choice every time, I don't think you'll find any free market advocate who would make that claim. In the meantime, I'm pretty satisfied. I can still eat out, and I have the choice between "higher wages but more expensive" restaurants and "lower wages but worse service" restaurants. It's not really clear right now which is the best choice here (eg. maybe I'd rather accept reduced/worse service than pay more), so letting consumers as a whole decide seems like the best course of action.

Wouldn't the standard response to that be that it's not really a free market, and if it were made more free then such inefficiencies would be less likely to occur?

What does it contribute?

The absolutism was in no one believes it, by the way.

By the principle of charity, I don't expect anyone to believe nonsensical things.

> By the principle of charity, I don't expect anyone to believe nonsensical things.

You're not being charitable, if you were you wouldn't have begun with hyperbole, then moving the goalposts when challenged, and now cherry picking. You don't seem interested in any case but the one you already favour.

I make "absolute" or even "hyperbolic" statements because I'd like to learn something. If I'm wrong, some example to that effect may easily be provided. In doing so, I'm letting someone else win all the internet points because I care more about learning than about internet points. As you observe upthread, a statement in such form can be shown to be wrong "with barely any effort". I invite you, if you please, to expend that small amount of effort. However, absolute statements can't simply be assumed to be wrong. Absolute statements exist that are absolutely true. "Any living human will die if deprived of oxygen."

I grant that you've already expended a smaller amount of effort, to somewhat imply that you yourself (or perhaps others not present in this thread?) believe that less regulation of labor markets leads to higher pay, but in the absence of any relevant example that implication is itself suspect. We know that some people believe silly things, and some other people claim to believe silly things that correspond to their particular psychological commitments (this seems common in the context of religion), but those beliefs and claims do not prove their silly objects.

They are. Farmer suicides over the past 10 years have skyrocketed. Farmers are committing suicide at twice the rate of combat veterans. [1]

I'm afraid I can't take your comment seriously as a dispassionate economic analysis since it lacks even basic empathy for people caught in this ongoing trainwreck of "supply/demand" mechanics.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/06/why-are-amer...

The free market might as well be a religion for some people. Nothing (not even historical facts) is enough evidence for it to not be the answers to all economic issues.

Also, there are lots of US tech people here - with overly inflated salaries compared to approximately everyone else. And everyone knows those winning the game have a tendency to lose empathy and think the game is fair, no matter how much evidence against it.

Aside from their lack of empathy and the ignoring of the distortion of the supply of labour happening that makes the "non-problem" an actual problem, what is incorrect about pointing out that supply and demand are, if not the most fundamental factor then close to it, in a market?

Monopolies have historically shit all over the notion that supply and demand is a good model to use for the market.

Much like most economic models, there are underlying assumptions about it that make it bad at actually predicting the real world. Things like perfectly competitive markets (haha), prices being adjustable (haha) and the forces that act on supply/demand being rational (extra hahaha).

There are lots and lots of cases where it fails, like the housing bubble, administered prices and wages.

Still, it might as well be a religion. Afterall, people can say it is close to a most fundamental law about markets with a straight face (despite it failling all the time).

What I would counter is that it that we can see that free markets work preferably to monopolised ones, or any of the other ones you've provided where selfish intervention of one kind or another has interfered with supply or demand.

All those cases I mentioned came arose under one of the most (maybe the most?) free market of modernity.

No. I don't believe you're trying to create a straw man intentionally but if you're going to jump from black to white, and a large jump at that, then it produces the same outcome all the same.

this false dichotomy between monopoly and its precursor is non sequitur.

Ignoring the fallacious teleological argument, I'm happy to rely on Wikipedia for this as this is basic knowledge:

> In economics, a free market is a system in which the prices for goods and services are self-regulated by buyers and sellers negotiating in an open market without market coercions.

What are market coercions?

> Examples of such prohibited market coercions include: economic privilege, *monopolies*, and artificial scarcities.

And even then, you're usually required to live within reasonable driving distance of the office. You don't make enough to buy a place. At least half your salary post-tax probably goes to rent. So yeah, you've got a few bucks in the bank probably, but it's not like you're saving up to buy your third Porsche or something lol.

It's also important to distinguish between farm workers (hired hands) and the business owners.

But the point that you and others are missing is that if farm works sucks, and pays low, then that means we should not be sending more people to become farmers.

The point you are missing is that jobs that suck still have to be done. If we ship many the low/medium skill jobs over seas and then automate many of the remaining ones, what are those people to do? Surely if they were able to get a higher paying job that didn't suck they would have done so.

The better solution is to make sure we appropriately value tasks that are necessary and have some level of potential self sufficiency should we find ourselves in a global event like conflict, famine, etc. Not to mention, the non-industrial farms are generally better for animals and the environment. This shouldn't be a race to the bottom.

I am not saying that we need to retrain all existing farmers. Instead, I am saying that we should simply discourage more people going into that industry, instead of what the original poster was claiming, which is that we'd need more people there.

> The point you are missing is that jobs that suck still have to be done

We don't need more people in that industry, no. We can have less in that industry.

> what are those people to do

At a very minimum we shouldn't be adding more problems by encourage more people to go into these bad jobs, is the point though. That would just make things worse.

As an escape valve for independents we could have them post a sufficiently large bond that will come due in the event of farm failure and bail them out.

Laissez-faire markets are also bad at taking negative externalities into account. Food being too expensive to afford in the stores while it's also rotting in the fields (which has happened in my state multiple times on the last few decades) is really bad. Children not being being effectively taught because teachers are quitting due to burnout and terrible wages is really bad. I don't think it's sufficient to shrug out hands and say "it'll work itself out" when we can actively see very these kinds of detrimental problems

The market for teachers, at least in the US, is not a 'laissez-faire market'.

Whatever that means. In Alabama the low wages and poor working conditions have now led to a grave teacher shortage. The government's solution? Suspend teacher certification. To use graphic imagery: the talent pool is full of piss, let's open it to the incontinents!

This suggests 'teacher certification' isn't effective at distinguishing between good and bad teachers.

"Suspend teacher certification"

If 'teacher certification' isn't useful for distinguishing good/bad teachers, then removing the requirement may be a good idea.

"In Alabama"

It's hard to fire bad teachers in Alabama. If you're a principal in an Alabama public school, you can't just give a poorly performing teachers 2-4 weeks' notice, freeing up the money to hire someone new. Look up 'Alabama teacher tenure'.

And what's this obsession with firing people? You can get rid of subpar performers, but the rapid turnover isn't going to improve the average unless you manage to hire and retain above average performers. In the long run, it's a supply issue, and the revolving door model is going to do nothing about the subpar supply.

Re: #2 getting rid of underperformers helps you hire good teachers (because, unless you fire someone, you have no money to hire someone new), and retain good ones (because, if you're a good teacher, you're not going to want to work somewhere where your students' other teachers are bad).

I've said it already - it's not the best students that go to work in teaching. You can fire a low performer, but chances are that the replacement is just as bad. It's a supply issue, a training issue and a culture issue - the anti-intellectualism in large swathes of the population really doesn't help matters.

This may be true, but it's the result of how the system is set up and, in particular, the interaction between:

a) politicians

b) teachers and teachers unions

c) school district leaders

d) school district administration staff

e) students

In most systems, group (e) is the one with the least power. Their parents may be able to vote for school board members, but these elections are infrequent, and the way to get elected is not by being an advocate for students, but by aligning with a particular political party, or getting the support of teachers unions.

Parents cannot easily opt out of that system. In Alabama, per pupil spending is ~$10k/year. This distorts the market: a parochial school that costs $10k/year to run cannot compete with a public school that costs $10k/year to run, even if the former better. Because in one case the marginal cost to the parent is $0.

It comes back to what I said at the start of our conversation: The market for teachers, at least in the US, is not a 'laissez-faire market'.

But, with regard to public education systems in the US:

- it's definitely true that some people 'attempt to blame low quality of a system on individuals'

- it's not generally true that this leads to firing (of teachers)

If you want to know more about some of the problems, you might enjoy the documentary 'Waiting for "Superman"': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_%22Superman%22

That’s exactly what’s happening. With a steady flow of cheap labor to take these jobs, the wages for them will remain stagnant. It makes perfect sense for low income workers to be complaining about immigrants taking their jobs because that’s exactly what happens.

Cut off illegal immigration for a few years and watch as the price of all unskilled labor increases. It’s basic supply and demand.

The ones at the top generally don’t care because the people coming in are not competing for their jobs. And they arguably benefit from the cheap low end labor through lower prices for staples and even luxuries like landscapers and nannies.

Even that is changing with remote work and offshoring. I don’t know if it will take five years or a decade, but the so called knowledge workers who don’t sock away their savings now are in for a rude awakening when their own paper pushing jobs get replaced.

For knowledge workers who want to work from home, the end result will be competing on a global market against workers from developing countries who can afford to do the same work for less. We already see this on various freelancing platforms where it's only a viable side gig for those in places with a low cost of living.

At the end of the day, workers need some kind of protection against these movements, by putting local workers first and managing immigration to protect the middle and working classes. The problem is that we have a political class who have gotten rich on the back of removing such protections, because they're also business owners and property investors.

Nothing I said precludes aid for these people, to ensure a minimum standard of living. I'm just pointing out the implied consequences of not making "non-STEM work to be a viable option", isn't we run out of farmers and we all starve because the market will correct it long before the number of farmers drop dangerously low.

>All the while people complain about immigrants crossing the border and "taking their jobs".

I don't get it. Just a few sentences ago you implied that the jobs are crap, and that people are "forced to do these jobs or starve", yet here you're implying that we should allow "immigrants crossing the border" to take those crap jobs?

>Graduating high school seniors aren't lining up to mow grass or pick fruit or work as a meat packer for $15/hour. They want to come out of college to a 6 figure job with no skills or training.

People don't want hard jobs and want easy money. Can you really blame them for that? Also, the solution to this, as mentioned in the previous comment is to raise wages.

>A lot of people coming out of school with out a tech or medical disposition would be best served by picking a trade. We have a shortage already and it is only going to get worse. Running a 3 person plumbing company could easily compete with most tech jobs.

In other words, the market is working as intended, by making jobs more lucrative because there's a shortage?

You’ll have to back-up that assertion.

Supply/demand mechanisms fail the labor market badly. By law of supply and demand, professions introduce artificial scarcity to boost their income; and the market responds either through some combination of: Immigration, automation, consolidation (less businesses), cut-corners

Farming has aspects of all three, and it’s a major national risk.

> If farm workers' job gets sufficiently bad from a value proposition perspective, then people will leave the occupation and employers would be forced to pay higher wages to attract workers.

Is this really applicable to this context? In other words, are farming jobs really going to get to a point where the pay is $10M a year, and people only take the job for a year and then never work another day? Considering that being a farmer has basically no barrier to entry, I doubt it will get to that point. Not to mention, if farm labor was really that expensive, so would the cost of living, so those would be FIRE farm workers would have to come back to pay the increased food bill.

Every mechanism has regimes in which it fails. 'Supply and demand' isn't always the answer any more than 'mongodb' or 'rust' are always the answer.

Care to breakdown the costs?

It´s going to be a fuckin´mess, 4 dudes richer and everyone else screwed

How will the four people get richer if the food they create is priced so high that no one can buy it?

I get this is deeply economic and philosophical, but it’s an interesting thought experiment.

Taking this to its logical end, the owners of said farms will get richer as the general population earns less on average (due to their labour no longer being needed).

Either that or everyone else gets fed up and violently overthrows them. It could, perhaps, be avoided with higher taxes on the rich, but the rich have the most influence over the tax code.

>We really need farm workers

But point maken

How so? Sustainable farming has nothing to do with a man vs machine doing the labor. Moral as in we need to make sure people can keep doing this job or what kind of argument are you even making? I'd rather see improved social safety nets and job training then some appeal to history that people need to work the fields because we've always done that.

Modern industrial farming practices, designed to optimize agricultural output per unit of labor, are an ecological and environmental travesty. They require the widespread use of pesticides and toxic fertilizers that are decimating the biosphere. Monocropping unsustainably degrades soil quality. And the large contiguous areas used for industrial agricultural operations are extremely disruptive to wildlife.

The most obvious solution to the above is an agricultural system with many more, much smaller farms, where human beings do the work currently done by machines and chemicals.

i suspect the amount of money that farms would need to pay workers to fix these shortages would drive all producers into bankruptcy

Their meager wage increase is not worth uprooting your entire life just for 2 months or less of work unless you are sending that money back to a country where a dollar goes much farther. They need far more than just add 2 bucks to an already way underpaid job to not only attract workers now but keep them around and available for following years.

>i suspect the amount of money that farms would need to pay workers to fix these shortages would drive all producers into bankruptcy

I definitely think it's the latter rather than the former. Producers being driven to bankruptcy is an issue, but that seems like it's something that's going to happen regardless if we made "non-STEM work to be a viable option". At the end of the day, if it's a shitty job, then you'll have to pay more to get people to show up.

I’m not sure I agree. We could open more research labs, and dramatically increase the number of positions in STEM.

We could double or quadruple the number of teachers, and if we got even a small increase in the number of highly successful students who can do original work in research or STEM it would make all our lives better.

We could increase the number of nurse practitioners who could do basic medicine like fixing broken bones and treating common illnesses.

There’s room to add lots more mechanical and robotics engineers, and a lot of that work requires more spatial reasoning skills than math, despite what one might think. A lot of people who we wouldn’t think of as STEM oriented can do and enjoy those jobs.

Do we, though? As a farmer and software developer, I struggle to find enough farm work to do. I'd take on more work if I could. Everyone and their brother wants to be farmers, though, so there is hot competition and a lot of us end up with only a small piece of the pie.

Per hour it pays more than software. There just aren't that many hours. I would likely be apporaching poverty relying on my farm income alone, but it is also very little work, so maybe that's economically rational?

Five acres is a great lifestyle and some nice tax benefits, but not a career.

Still not a career, perhaps, but that's kind of the point here. I could easily handle thousands of acres if it were my career. However, obtaining thousands of acres to work is effectively impossible. Every other farmer is also desperately trying to get their hands on those acres.

If we want farming to be a viable, full-time career for people then we need far fewer people involved in the industry, not more.

https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/average-credit-card-debt-hou...

Turns out she was racking up 10's of thousands of dollars of credit card debt and skimping on necessities -- literally eating Ramen noodles at home and food she scavenged from friends at the mall, she wasn't paying her gas bill and got cut off after she accumulated over $3000 of unpaid bills (in the winter she heated only the bedroom of her apartment with a space heater), etc. It all started falling apart when she got pneumonia and was off work for a few weeks and couldn't pay any of her bills.

She had some of the accoutrements of a high standard of living, but was still very much living in poverty. She's living with her mom now and working on paying down the debt.

It's similar to the debate around onshoring manufacturing. There is a clear and simple (not easy, simple) way we can have more blue-collar workers making livable wages in the United States, despite that livable wage requirement being much higher than what other countries require to produce the same goods - improve either the quality of the outputs or the productivity of each laborer. My understanding is this is how Germany held such a strong position in manufacturing for years - by doing things better. It's also why one of the most direct blue-collar paths to a six-figure salary in the U.S. is machine shop work, because the U.S. has, in some regions, maintained the ability to produce parts that cannot be produced more cheaply elsewhere, by developing and maintaining a highly skilled workforce and the tools to support them within that particular sector.

Put in the negative sense - I would be curious to know what the average profit generated by an average farmworker is these days, after both internal and external expenses are taken into account, and how much slack there is between the wages they are currently earning and that profit. My understanding from family-owned / smaller operations is that running a farm in 2022 is really hard and really expensive, and that there isn't a whole lot of slack there right now.

Of course, there is a solution other than increasing productivity - a giant mess of regulatory and fiscal policy that, in direct and indirect ways, subsidizes the industry in a way that makes paying farm workers a livable wage tenable in a way a truly free market would not bear. And those policies are reasonable and even desirable within certain frameworks, and furthermore may be necessary as an interim step toward increased productivity. But wouldn't it be better for America to be able to subsidize a whole bunch of six-figure salaries not simply because that is what people need to live (i.e., that it is a public good to have six-figure salaries, and so we will take on public cost to ensure they exist), but because we have a whole bunch of people that generate six-figures annually in productivity?

Obviously, this is all empirically justifiable or refutable, so if I'm totally off my rocker qualitatively and if there's something offensive here like, "each farmworker actually generates $1.1MM/yr in pretax profit for the average farm employer", then let's frame all that out and legislate til the cows come home. And once they're home, too.

Most farm jobs are STEM. The non-STEM aspects of agriculture were mostly automated away centuries ago. You'll notice that farming went from ~90% of the workforce to ~2% over that time.

There exists some remaining small scale stuff that hasn't justified the cost of automation, but at the small scale it will be a long time before automation does pencil out. Robots don't work for free.

Why STEM and not tradesmen? Plenty of decent trade jobs out there that can lead to serious $$$ if you're hard-working and competent enough to manage self-employment.

Until the STEM workers figure out a way to completely automate food production, anyway.

Nothing against farmers, just would like to see the real picture.

In any case, if farmers are needed and still don't get paid, there has to be a reason, and it presumably isn't the markets.