As a society, we have a third option: fund education as a public good.

I feel like the third option should be: not conflating credentials with education or ability.

Education is a funded public good, I won't say well funded, but funded nonetheless. Credentials are not a well funded public good, and shouldn't be in my opinion.

Not all education should be funded. Some subjects are in more demand, results in more jobs, and produce greater benefit to society. Government also should not offer loans, but rather grants to make education affordable.

Credentials should actually be something we should want to protect the general public.

Without credentials, how are non-experts able to tell real experts from charlatans?

I realize we don't seem to mind that in software, but software is still a new field, so even though it's known to have a lot of shoddy snake oil peddlers, people still put up with the situation. For now.

But for the most part, when any of use needs to hire an expert, if there were no credentials, what would we do? Count on our ability to somehow suss out expertise without actually having anything resembling expertise in the field? Word of mouth and hope for the best? Set a war chest aside for the inevitable lengthy lawsuits because surely selection will fail often?

I have friends that insist that acupuncture and chiro-mancy are medicine and not magic. But when I visit a physician, I like to know they're credentialed and have passed through accredited institutions.

Education wasn't always solely or even mainly about earning credentials. It's only when industry offset their responsibilities to train new employees to universities (and thus the taxpayer in publicly funded education), that suddenly education became entirely about getting a corresponding job and getting a piece of paper.

If you think of education as a public utility, something that unequivocally raises the standard of living, then it becomes about forming a population of educated and informed citizens who can, amongst other things, participate in democracy a lot more effectively.

Then what is the point of credentials? How do we prove a level of competency without having to test every single person, in depth, every single interview?

>or the academic pyramid becomes populated with only those with burnable wealth.

yes, but it doesn't reasonable that people should ruin themselves out of - what? Some patriotic duty to keep American schools egalitarian?

the people taking risk on loans are making a bad decision for themselves, the academic pyramid population problem is a bad decision for society.

> the people taking risk on loans are making a bad decision for themselves

Everyone in the world takes risks. Can you say it was a bad decision for the people who took the risk, took out loans, and eventually became tenured professors?

Of course in retrospect it feels like a bad decision for those who didn't become tenure track professors, but nobody knows in advance who will beat the odds and who won't.

> Can you say it was a bad decision for the people who took the risk, took out loans, and eventually became tenured professors?

Yes. A decision can only be evaluated using what is known at the time, not what is later known in hindsight. Betting on an inside straight in poker is a bad bet, even if in one particular instance you got the card needed.

Ok, as long as you're willing to admit by this same logic that basically every billionaire in the world made a series of bad decisions that don't deserve to be celebrated.

How do you know in advance, as a 20something, that you're doctor material, or lawyer material, until you actually go through med school or law school?

What exactly is the "safe" route in life, Nostradamus?

First, I don't celebrate billionaires for their survivorship bias. Second, there isn't a safe route, but we as society can avoid putting up additional hazards.

As a 20-something, without going through med school or law school, you don't know if it's something you want to do. As a society, we want this hypothetical 20-something to go to med school or law school to find out. Therefore, we should make failure be an acceptable outcome, minimizing the risk for the potential student. In this case, that means publicly funding their education, such that dropping out doesn't place the student with a massive debt.

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For context on the PhD probabilities, a professor will typically be supervising 3-4 students at any given time. A professor's career is typically about 30-40 years, and the duration of a PhD program is about 4-6 years. Therefore, over the course of a professor's career, they will supervise around 25-ish freshly minted PhDs. With an average 2% annual population growth, the population will roughly double over that time period.

So on average, a professor will produce about 25 PhDs, after which there will be one empty position due to the professor retiring, and one new position due to a larger need for professors. Two spots for 25 people is not a good bet, if you do a PhD program will the goal of becoming a professor.

> there isn't a safe route

That's my point. You want to talk about personal "bad decisions", but what's a "good decision" and why, given that all of the lucrative careers require a series of risks in order to enter the field and become successful in it?

> we as society can avoid putting up additional hazards

Agreed, but I wasn't arguing against that, just against the criticism of individuals for having personal ambition and taking risks.

I think their point is that certain careers are sufficiently important to society and the risks of failure so high that not enough people go into them, so it's a benefit to society to reduce the risk. More teachers, more doctors, more defense attorneys who can afford to work with the downtrodden.

there will of course be a subset of people for whom the loans will be a very good risk, of those people some will fail despite it being a good risk - the unlucky.

there will be a subset of people for whom the loans are a bad risk but some of them will succeed - the lucky. It seems unlikely there would be many lucky in such a hotly contested area.

But most of the subset of people for whom the loans are a bad risk will fail.

> or the academic pyramid becomes populated with only those with burnable wealth.

I've got bad news, it already largely is like that. Maybe not via the person themself, but typically by their spouse then.

The most sensible option is that we remove academic credentials from job qualifications entirely. We’ve increasingly introduced non-credentialed ways to learn, and we have non-credentialed ways to determine what a candidate can do. So why are academic credentials related to our job applications at all? Why continue to enforce the whole miserable, class-hierarchy-reinforcing, metriculative education system at all?

The most straightforward option we have is to fund true public education, without credentials or metriculation. Simple, public class-by-class grades and recommended tests would suffice, and could be done with nothing more than HTTPS servers and .edu domains. We have no need for all the other cruft keeping people uneducated.