It's inarguable that bachelor's degrees had real vocational utility in the last few decades (despite the memes).
A variety of degrees from a state school (with in-state tuition) would lead to good, white collar employement along with modest loans (if any) so there was clear ROI.
The commodification of education will eventually make it useless. Universal, bespoke education is the ideal, but it's usually prohibitively expensive.
As you get beyond those basics you have to become an expert in something that there are few experts in. McDonald's success is mostly based on their ability to take you from zero to a productive crew member fast. It takes many years to make a brain surgeon, in large part because we haven't commodified it - if we needed more we should (but since the world doesn't really need many it isn't worth it)
If you want a system that appeals to a plurality, and leaves the rest behind, commodification will deliver just that.
Eventually you get to a level where the answer hasn't been taught much and so there is no standard, but that only happens late in your education.
Of course education itself needs more research. "learning styles" was debunked last I heard, but is there some variation that says some people need different teaching? Is there a better way to teach things? However if you are not involved in this research you should be teaching in standard ways that have been proven to work.
I get the idea we want a more educated population that can better make decisions. But the biggest way the populace makes poor decisions is they are economically illiterate, and they don't really understand how the government works. We should probably spend more time teaching this in high school and a typical degree spends very little time teaching these subjects.
But in order to solve this problem you would have to overhaul our educational system and right now we have a party invested in destroying it so that it produces voters more aligned with their groupthink.
But supply and demand happen in every economy, even those without money and even post-scarcity sci-fi. And unintended consequences are just a thing everywhere.
Unless "unintended consequences" was shorthand for "if you hurt stock market investors that's bad for the country", of course.
It's a nice suggestion, but it's one that isn't supported by the evidence. Even controlling for other factors, a college degree makes more productive workers. And given that it's controlling for other factors, "selection bias" becomes a hard argument to make. STEMbros get real arrogant about their degrees (I have one; I've seen it first hand), but like it or not the person with an English degree still learned a lot of useful skills.
Going to uni to major in a specific career is how you get screwed when available careers change.
I'd like to see this study. Most of the data I've seen that is pro-college still has massive confounds.
Two twins graduate high school. One gets a crappy copywriting job, and spends her free time reading books on how to write better, and specifically how to do copywriting. The other gets an English degree. I'm not nearly as confident as you are the one with the English degree is going to be a better copywriter.
I don't disagree you can learn skills, but cognitive science literature solidly shows far transfer is not a thing, and when it is it's incredibly inefficient. i.e. Reading the great works of Russian literature might make you a better copywriter but at a vastly slower pace than writing copy, or reading a book on copywriting.
If your job told you that you had to pay 10k to study French poetry for 6 months without pay, would you happy for the opportunity to a more well rounded thinker?
That's unrealistic.
1. That's just one subject.
2. Semesters and/or quarters are not 6 months.
3. Most colleges don't charge $10K for one subject for 6 months.
My college intake class had 60 enter in the first year, and I was paying $2000 out of pocket a semester. Only about a quarter got the paper in the end; the rest either withdrew or flunked out. And from what I understand, 75% starting but failing to achieve a degree isn't atypical for that course.
What happens to those students? The ones that take on debt and then realize far too late that they can't handle the workload and have nothing to show for it but student debt, years of lost income, and no degree to show for it?
And even for those of us that made it though, I'm... still uncertain it was worth the price. Not just in dollars.
Well for a high school grad today, most likely the opportunity cost is minimum wage service sector jobs. Those "temporary" jobs are also really easy to get stuck in for life. That's not a good life.
>Only about a quarter got the paper in the end; the rest either withdrew or flunked out. And from what I understand, 75% starting but failing to achieve a degree isn't atypical for that course. What happens to those students? The ones that take on debt and then realize far too late that they can't handle the workload and have nothing to show for it but student debt, years of lost income, and no degree to show for it?
They're fucked, but at least they know where they stand. They should know their chances with the standardized testing somewhat. You definitely shouldn't go to college if you don't have the aptitude or motivation, but you should go to some sort of trade school: electrical, carpentry, plumber, etc. The safest path to college is graduated study, community college for the AA, then full blown university for the last two. At least you get an AA degree, and if you can't handle community college, at least it isn't very expensive.
>And even for those of us that made it though, I'm... still uncertain it was worth the price. Not just in dollars.
The value proposition is pretty muddied with the negligent inflation of tuition over the past few decades, that is a certainty. Unless you are Ivy League, any college will do. I'm fortunate to live in a state where tuition for public college is on the lower end.
Why are you assuming they would fair any better in trade school?
Maybe they do, maybe they don't, but if they find themselves in service work, they should do anything they can to not be in that position. Some people just don't have any other options due to aptitude or attitude, so that's where they stay. That's not a great place to be in the US for the limited existence we have on Earth.
Something I learned in high school sports, particularly wrestling, is you have to always work to improve your position. That lesson holds very true in life.
I do not regret any of the classes I took. I learned something from all of them. And it's not putting a rosy shine on something I was forced to do. I genuinely appreciate being well-rounded and knowing many things. It made me a better person.
If people just want to learn core skills, get a technical degree like a certificate or associates. That's why those things exist. You can do a 6 month certificate in coding at my local community college if your goal is just to go work and not learn things other than that.
I don't care what you "look at it like." I car what the actual statistics demonstrate. Facts don't care about your feelings.
Im not totally sure I could tell you most of what I even took let alone what I learned in those classes.
Maybe right after college there's a window of a couple years.
No one really values the intangible personal development that comes with education. If they did I'd have 5 friends who went back for a second degree to enrich themselves instead of 0.
This is definitely true. I think pre-graduate college is pretty eye opening, at least when I went. In most high schools, they just cover the top layer of knowledge; in college they go quite a bit deeper. "They never taught us that in high school," is a saying that applies.
Equally likely, the kid just didn't pay attention.
Yes. A broad, liberal arts education made me a better, more informed citizen. One might even say I know more than the current President (certainly his supporters) about tariffs, what affects the price of eggs, etc.
“Yes but I’m right and they’re wrong” — When you’re 49% of the population, it doesn’t matter.
Remember the cost of all this is absolutely massive. Mostly the 4 years of lost time.
I left uni almost 20 years ago, but one year of my tuition was about 1000USD at the time, something I could easily afford with a part time job. I'm sure the cost is higher now, but I would have thought it is still orders of magnitude cheaper than in the UK or the US. Germany subsidizes university tuition fees for a huge percentage of students, and adds a monthly stipend for expenses and free public transport while enrolled in uni.
Your point is valid, challenging the worth/cost of higher education. But I think it is the cost part what is broken in some parts of the world, not necessarily the worth part.
Sometimes the purpose of central government is to make a negative ROI into a positive one, because there are greater purpose than the return
We already have a way to discuss that benefit, it's the political process. Doing politics IS figuring out the benefits.
You don’t have to tie the benefits to money, but you do need to understand that there is a cost, some of which is money, and the benefits should be worth it if you’re going to be doing it. Who pays the money is a secondary concern to that.
Calculable.
> What's the "ROI" of creating beautiful works of art, or producing great culture?
The academy doesn’t do this anymore and hasn’t for more than half a century.
> What's the "ROI" of happiness?
Is there any evidence to suggest college graduates are happier which account for differences in childhood socioeconomic status, lifetime earning potential, and similar confounding factors?
> Sometimes the purpose of central government is to make a negative ROI into a positive one, because there are greater purpose than the return
While I agree with you in principle, this rationale can be used as a cover for bad policy. You take a measure that is widely accepted as an indication of worth, and then insist that the system’s failure to produce that indication of worth may actually just indicate that it’s providing an intangible goodness that cannot be measured nor accounted for (beauty, happiness, etc.).
I'm not going to read this entire study just to respond to a single comment, but according to ChatGPT, the answer to your question is yes.
https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.25.1.159
https://chatgpt.com/share/67e5793f-e284-800f-8bb4-ebd340e4c9...
"Yes, the evidence strongly suggests that schooling has nonpecuniary benefits like increased happiness, beyond what can be explained by income or family background. But the authors remain cautious and emphasize the need for further causal research."
It will also be interesting to see what happens now that Europe has to get real about defense spending instead of freeloading on US security guarantees. Since defense spending is going up there's going to be a lot of political pressure to cut higher education.
To an extent this also applies in the USA. Public universities in most states have relatively low tuition (although still higher than their European equivalents) for in-state students. But they are unable to meet market demand, so many students take out loans to pay tuition at lower-tier private universities.
Realistically maybe we reform community college to be the required thing instead of traditional undergrad, since the cost and length is more comparable.
in fact i would say I don't know how much additional value an associates' holds in that context, and maybe we just merge the two concepts. I haven't ever really seen a posting that is okay with just an associate's.
Here’s a pointed take on it from one of New Zealand’s successful businessmen: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/education/the-art-of-business-...
This may have been some policymakers' intent, but it never really became that. Universities and colleges resisted being seen as mere vocational schools, and refused to modify curricula for that purpose. You'd see all sorts of academic arguments about how teaching them to do a job would be wrong, that they should still be teaching them to "think" and have heavy course loads of liberal arts.
So parents and guidance counselors may have thought of it as vocational school, while getting the high-class university experience (as best someone of middling academic achievement can manage that) along with the high-class university tuition bills. Well, the guidance counselors didn't get the bills. Nor, in many cases, the parents.
>It's not sustainable, and just forgiving the debt only will make it
It's ok. We don't have to sustain it. The demographic implosion is well under way. We are at the point where elementary schools are closing (and everyone's making up excuses for this, so we can pretend that it's for any other reason than a demographic implosion).
>and less aligned with actual results we desire (useful workers).
At any point in history, most of the output from workers went (indirectly) back to the workers. If 98% of the workforce did agricultural work, this was because 98% or nearly enough of 98% of food was needed to feed those workers. Same for any product, no matter how tangible or abstract. Sure, there are exceptions... if people worked in a diamond mine it wasn't so diamonds would go to diamond miners.
If they don't need workers for the relatively small amount of food that is consumed by some small group, if they don't need workers for making garments (or building buildings, or any other thing) for the relatively amount of those products consumed by some small group, then they don't much need useful workers at all. Most of humanity is obsolete, or at least would be considered so if you belonged to a small group like that.
Not all software is like webshit boilerplate.
American higher education is expensive, because you chose to defund public universities. And because you have an unhealthy obsession with rankings and top universities. Those are the things you need to change more than education itself.
There's this and also the massive budgets for college sports and fancy student housing that make it worse.
???
We are not machines of production. We are human beings, we deserve to learn stuff that doesn't help us produce.
If I want to learn how to do something, I want to be educated in that. There should be education available for that, but for knowledge workers, there largely isn't; instead, university has been hijacked to fill that role. In the trades there are schools dedicated to learning these topics and they work well at helping people learn to work effectively.
Universities should be a place of higher learning and research - those are really important too. The struggle in universities today is that they are expected to be both and those things aren't really compatible. That's why you get research professors begrudgingly teaching undergraduate courses.
We need an alternative to universities for learning the trades that knowledge workers tend to do.
However, when similar fields of study are available in both types of institutes, employers almost universally prefer graduates from research universities.
So yea, surprise that once again it comes down to companies that don't want to pay for the talent they yearn for.
The point of teaching useful skills is so people can be helpful to other people. While coded as right wing this is fundamentally pro-social. Finding a useful and needed place for yourself in society tends to result in more stable families, communities and mental health.
Spending decades indulging your own ego tends to do the opposite.
I'm apparently living deep underneath bedrock and/or have spent too much time worrying about [EDITED] "weird math"
When and where/how did the "helpful to other people == coded as right wing" happen? And does that mean people are finding fault in the first half because of the second?
Right-wing coded: Practical education, Hard skills/trades, having children, personal responsibility, entrepreneurship, exurban community orientation, traditional morality/religion, decentralization (less elite control), bad aesthetic taste, low emotional intelligence, etc.
Left-wing coded: Aspirational education, Universities, staying single into your 30s, personal irresponsibility (victimhood), artistic ego pursuit, urban orientation, performative morality/religion (climate doomerism, veganism, social justice-ism), centralization (more elite control), good aesthetic taste, high emotional intelligence, etc
Prompt: { Someone posted this:
The current zeitgeist according to chatgpt in the west: Right-wing coded: Practical education, Hard skills/trades, having children, personal responsibility, entrepreneurship, exurban community orientation, traditional morality/religion, decentralization (less elite control), bad aesthetic taste, low emotional intelligence, etc.
Left-wing coded: Aspirational education, Universities, staying single into your 30s, personal irresponsibility (victimhood), artistic ego pursuit, urban orientation, performative morality/religion (climate doomerism, veganism, social justice-ism), centralization (more elite control), good aesthetic taste, high emotional intelligence, etc
Does this sound like something you'd say, chatgpt? }
ChatGPT: { No, that post is not an accurate reflection of how I analyze political or cultural dynamics. It presents a highly polarized and caricatured view of different ideologies, using broad generalizations and subjective judgments rather than a nuanced or objective perspective.
If I were to discuss cultural or political trends, I would aim for a more balanced approach, recognizing the complexities and overlaps between different worldviews rather than reducing them to a list of traits with implicit value judgments. Real social and political identities are more fluid and context-dependent than what that post suggests. }
Response: { Can you expand on how it's a polarized and caricatured view? }
ChatGPT: { 1. Using Broad Generalizations It treats political ideologies as monolithic and assigns rigid, opposing characteristics to "right-wing" and "left-wing" identities. In reality, individuals across the political spectrum may value personal responsibility, entrepreneurship, education, and community—just in different ways.
2. Assigning Subjective Value Judgments The post implies that one side has positive traits (e.g., "practical," "hard-working," "responsible") while the other is marked by negative traits (e.g., "egotistical," "performative," "irresponsible"). This makes it less of an analysis and more of a partisan framing.
3. Over-Simplifying Political and Cultural Attitudes Not everyone fits neatly into the categories presented. There are libertarians, centrists, populists, progressives, social conservatives, classical liberals, and many more who defy these stereotypes.
4. Framing Complex Issues as Binary Opposites Instead of acknowledging nuance, the post forces everything into a binary left vs. right framework, when in reality, people’s values often overlap.
Conclusion The post is more of a stereotyped narrative than an accurate representation of political and cultural trends. It distorts reality by exaggerating differences, dismissing complexity, and reinforcing partisan divisions rather than fostering real understanding. }
Really fascinating stuff if you ask me.
Fascinating indeed.
There are statues that I go by every day that generate zero revenue for the city, but they make getting around town just a little bit nicer. Nobody is coming to this city to see these statues, so they don't drive tourist revenue. They're just there and nice to look at.
The artists made some money, but there's no return on investment in straight dollars for the city that commissioned these works. And yet it is valuable to society.
...every social structure throughout time. An educated populace is more likely to be successful in achieving goals than re-learning from nothing.
> It's a worldview that necessitates only teaching what leads to a job.
Since education is generally funded, it makes sense that subjects are self-reinforcing. "Worldview" is, contextually, an anthropomorphism of a social process. The cause, not the effect, is people doing what people prefer to do. There's nothing outside of society pushing. People still make art, to their parents' chagrin.
The situation of forced subjects, is not rigid. There is education for other subjects; almost everything or anything that meets some arbitrary qualifiers. Crystals, dog breeding, board game design? Humans tend to share knowledge (even when it's wrong). There's no shortage of learning in subjects that aren't primary subjects in some accredited college.
The question is always who is footing the bill while you find yourself? Education that leads to productive vocations can arguably have some public funding because that gets paid back in taxes, etc. If you're paying for expanding your own horizons through education, then sure, have at it.
Charging the government $50k a year to force hungover 18 year olds to plagiarize essays at 7:45am before class to get a required credit benefits no one.
I disagree. I get food from the supermarket, my roof is built by someone else, unlimited water from the faucet. This stuff isn't coming for free, it is other peoples work. Of course i want to learn something useful to contribute back. But western societies don't seem to have a "We need X people with Y skillset" institution. If someone came to me like, "we need a welder to produce $needed_thing" then i would have put my skill points into that.
We had this structure with apprenticeships. Companies were the ones to say "we need x people with Y mindset". And they can pay to foster those people and mindsets.
But they abandoned that because they didn't want to fit the bill for their own workforce. They instead put up with mediocre welders they kinda sorta train for 6 months and maybe the good ones stay. Great model for society.
Exactly. Privatize profits. Socialize costs.
We do, it's called the price of labor. We currently need highly educated healthcare professionals like a forest fire needs rain. These wages are literally off the chart:
BLS list: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/highest-paying.htm
Another list: https://www.careeronestop.org/Toolkit/Wages/highest-paying-c...
Everyone wins, right? You know, except university administrators and lenders.
It's likely also partly why the west moved away from contract-based knowledge work and towards full-time work... It decouples the product of one's labor from its costs (salary) and it makes managers' lives easier as it gives them much more flexibility and less pressure with regard to how they measure and rank employee productivity. If costs were proportional to output, managers would pay a lot more attention to efficiency as their paychecks would depend on that efficiency.
Instead, managers' paychecks and career prospects are mostly based on political nonsense like how many people are working under them; literally creating an incentive for inefficiency.
Historical point you've completely missed. You used to be able to declare bankruptcy and discharge this debt until very recently. This was not "decided" this was a trap sprung on the working class at a time when blue collar labor was almost entirely off shored.
> and just forgiving the debt only will make it all more expensive
That's why you discharge the debt instead. This is an institutional failure. They knowingly pumped a market at tax payer expense. The hair cut is theirs to take.
> You used to be able to declare bankruptcy and discharge this debt until very recently.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bankruptcy_Abuse_Prevention_an...
Maybe. But what I think would help more is a broader focus on lifelong learning. Both on the job on company [dt]ime, and outside of work.
In many places you can take evening classes for languages, or hobby-classes like embroidery or goldsmithing. Even programming. But there are very few places where you can take maths classes after hours.
There's also, imo, way too much focus on degrees and not enough focus on competences. Some time ago I tried to register for some postgrad level classes, without any intention of using them for a certificate or whatever, but I was rejected for not having the right degree.
I obviously think the computer science degree is full of useful skills unlike a lot of degrees, but it's nothing I couldn't have got elsewhere.
With a kid in university I am torn because I know that having a degree actually means nothing in the job market, not like it used to.
If that's high school, then it's useless, both as a signal, but also just because, you know, nobody is learning anything. You pretty much have to have some other place for smart people to demonstrate that they're smart.
1. Personal knowledge management
2. Digital literacy
3. Calling bullshit in the age of big data (this is an actual course, freely available on youtube)
It then became a vocational degree for the working class, despite being completely detached from useful skills for a wide swathes of degrees. The only value is that you could talk the talk and become a member of the professional managerial class if you impressed the right hiring committee/individual.
In spite of this, we decided the working class should take out crippling loans to pay for this degree, and be in debt for the rest of their working life.
It's not sustainable, and just forgiving the debt only will make it all more expensive and less aligned with actual results we desire (useful workers).