Nothing is free - once you graduate you are hit with 50% tax that gets back all you "free" tuition costs many, many times over.
Not saying education should not be subsidized via taxes (I think it's good overall), but it's not free at all - the price is just hidden and spread out over many years (similar to student loans but less visible).
You're kidding. The former means all higher net worth individuals to take on both the cost (via taxes) and the benefit (a well-trained workforce for businesses, well-paid, highly taxed contributors for the state, an educated populace of voters, graduates with stable work and in-demand skills). The latter is another example of America's "Everyone for themselves" theme, with students bearing the entire cost of their education, while the graduate, public, state, and businesses reap the benefit.
If the benefits are spread so widely, why shouldn't the cost be?
My point is that it doesn't matter in principle if one takes a loan and pays it down over time vs. one is taxed at much higher % and that tax "pays down" a phantom student loan of "free" education.
It does introduce a risk and hence the incentive for loan takers to choose their degree wisely though. Which should lead to better allocation of labor but at a cost of some personal risk.
The entirety of society benefits from a well-educated populace. That's one reason even those without children pay for public education.
Following that, if everyone benefits, why is the graduate taking on all the risk (via a non-dischargeable student loan) instead of spreading the risk across the entirety of society?
I think that's fair that risk should be more spread. Comes at a cost of people choosing degrees more frivolously though and wasting their time and everyone's money
Some degrees are less in-demand (at time of graduation) economically, but a well-educated populace that can apply critical thinking and remember lessons from history, can be its own reward. Notably, pushing for a population completely lacking these skills is an excellent way to topple a democracy over time.
I see your point on broader benefits, however, those are largely speculative while a shortage of e.g. doctors has very direct and concrete costs to the society.
On prior point regarding spreading risks - would you say government should bail out failed entrepreneurs? Because that is very similar in principle (taking risk, benefit for society)
I'm not saying failed entrepreneurs should be bailed out, even if (through bankruptcy proceedings) they de-facto are. To your point though, they're given tax breaks by my government [0], which aligns with the goals we seem to have agreed are important and good for society at large.
Small businesses are given assistance when starting out and financially vulnerable; financial assistance that is paid for by all members of society, as we all reap the benefits of a stronger economy when they succeed. I'm not sure how one defends not extending the same courtesy to students.
In the EU, the risk has been loaded onto everyone but the benefits are meager at best, and inexistent in practice. This is the typical problem of socialist system where everyone bear the cost but the benefits are only distributed to those in power or those who could manipulate the system for their own benefits.
If that wasn't true, France wouldn't be in the political turmoil and economic disaster that it is today. Unsurprisingly, France has been dominated by marxist adjacent ideologies, co-opted by the "resistants", the real winners of WW2. The US won on the ground but largely lost the ideological battle, we are now seeing the result of that invisible battleground.
Nobody said the student achieves no benefit. We keep saying that the student does not capture all the benefit of their own education in higher wages, but bears the entire cost.
Affordable access to good education is a good outcome from the heavy taxation I pay.
Just don't say it's "free" - those who get the education pay back all they got via taxes (which in it's end effect are like paying down a student loan).
I had opportunities to move to the US and likely make 2x-3x what I make here and pay less taxes. I chose moving to Europe instead. It is the sort of society I prefer to live in.
And nobody thinks free education doesn't cost anything, just like people don't think the military doesn't cost anything. Somehow, though, there is endless trillions for "defense", and a little moth flies out of the wallet when it's for something that doesn't involve drones.
People with a degree: Get free education and free stipends, then get paid by the tax payers for the rest of their lives in their cushy government "jobs".
https://www.aei.org/articles/the-crazy-amount-america-spends...
There are lots of reasons why US academics earn so much more than their european counterparts, but the income level of US tech employees is not high on the list, if it is on the list at all.
Also, Baumol's doesn't predict that wages in low productivity growth sectors will rise, it merely notes that the costs in such sectors do not fall, which means that whatever the sector produces (good, services, art etc) become relatively more expensive compared to other production. This is why it appears to cost so much to see the symphony orchestra, even in Cincinnati - it's not that the players all make a ton of money, it's that their productivity is flat, so the costs of the performance appear to rise relative to, say, toothpaste.
> Based on the details you provided—specifically the overlap with the poem "AM" (from Be Bop or Be Dead) and "Set The Tone" (from Bernie Worrell's Blacktronic Science)—the track you are most likely looking for is: "Music" by DeadbEAT (featuring Umar Bin Hassan) Released in 1992/1993 on the album Wild Kingdom, this track was a cult hit in the acid jazz/trip-hop scene of the 90s and later appeared on compilations like the influential Red Hot + Cool (1994).
Very good, except that there is no album called "Wild Kingdom" by an artist named Deadbeat, and while Hassan does appear on "Red Hot + Cool" it is on a differently named track written by himself.
So forgive me if I call bullshit on Gemini 3 as well.
However, in this instance, it is a correct summary of the most visible popular summaries of Baumol's cost disease, so there's that.
I don't think it captures the essence of what Baumol (& Bowen) were writing about, but I accept that my presentation was misleading.
It is what most people nowadays connect with "Baumol's cost disease", but in their paper, the way in which rising productivity sectors cause wage increases in stable productivity sectors was more of a detail than the central part of their thesis. The core part was the observation that certain kinds of economic activity cannot reduce costs through productivity gains, while others can; the wage connection between them was, well, not an afterthought, but more of a consequence of the very specific sort of economic system we live in. One could imagine a society with different ways of distributing resources to labor that didn't really have this feature, and yet the same sectors of this imaginary society's would still suffer from "Baumol's cost disease".
Also, campus ties you closer to home more than you imagine. They shutdown campus for different breaks and you're more or less forced to go elsewhere, which is typically your family home.
But honestly, double and triple occupancy rooms are completely unnecessary and uniquely American.
It depends entirely on the person. I had a similar thing happen to me, except that I managed to get a single my first couple years of school. But I know from others, that it often creates a very intimate, fraternal bond which gives kids some semblance of a family bond before they are able to get a real social life, join clubs, make friends, find a partner etc.
The cost of the person in front of the blackboard has not been increasing.
Put yourself into the student’s shoes. If you had the choice between two schools of otherwise roughly equal academic reputation but one offered luxurious residences while the other housed students like medieval monks, which would you choose?
Free health care doesn't mean "nobody gets paid to provide health care", it means "patients do not pay for health at the point of service".
If you'd prefer that we use some other term to describe this, please suggest it. I do find it interesting that the Scottish NHS uses "No fees at point of service" as part of their branding (or did, back in 2019).
This is plain false.
This isn’t socially useful.
The price of college at this point is a ridiculous value proposition to the average student. Who cares about the top students and the most gifted people. They will be fine regardless. The average student is getting crushed and ripped off blind.
Ripping off entire generations of young people is really stupid and is going to have devastating long run social consequences.
Then companies are evaluated on how much work is produced in their business (for example by revenue), and they have to either contract the equivalent number of people with college degrees, or even better - license the degree from a college graduate. This can also be used to pay for tuition. The student gets a mortgage that pays for her education when she enters college, and then the lender has the right to part of either her salary, or the licensing fee for her degree to companies that need it, or to people who need it.
Let's say a chef who hasn't gone to culinary college, he can pay a culinary college graduate 20% of his salary to use their degree, which is a professional license. Or a company needing programmers. They can hire immigrants or an AI to program, and pay licensing fees to computer science graduates who have the degree.
Think what I thriving market for banks, investors, and insurance companies! They will be able to package these licenses and offer them on the market to individual workers or to companies for competitive and efficient rates. The college student of course gets rewarded as well, as they can rent out their degree, or even sell it. So a good student can get several degrees, and have a very good income from both his own work and from degree licensing fees. Of course we'll make sure that students belonging to an oppressed class be allowed to license their one degree to several places at the same time.
I'm sure you've already thought about the problem of students who have mortgaged their future degree, but do not graduate for some reason. What happens to the money the bank has invested? This problem is mitigated and solved by packing these degree mortgages into Credit default swaps to hedge the risk. Since most students will graduate and be a return on the investment, we will pack all degree mortgages into investment funds, and offer them on the international financial markets, with sophisticated leverage tools. So, investors will not feel the pain if 1 out of 10 students do not finish their degrees, that will be very much offset by those who do - especially when leverage is used.
This is how we solve social and environmental issues, make education affordable to everybody, create a great investment boom, and make the younger generations stakeholders in the economy. Smart parents would take advantage of degree mortgages for very low monthly rates if they sign them for their child already during pregnancy, meaning they could even be paid off before graduation. That's a good start in life!
If people want to play those exclusivity games that's up to them. What's wrong is asking the taxpayer to fund it under the false mask that the entire product is education.
For what it's worth, the USA isn't unique in adapting admissions to reject an unwanted minority. The most interesting mechanism has to be Moscow State University's Jewish Problems: https://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1556
There was a study on one of the most selective school in France and actually diversity of background has gone down in the last 20 years. Europe is highly politicised and it was always about selecting for ideologically compatible behavior. Otherwise education wouldn't need so much government intervention/support, even if said education would be paid for by the taxpayer (everyone could get some amounts of credits, that they could spend on their institution of choice).
Getting companies to see those superpowers in a hiring pipeline of course is a different story
Zero employers have ever asked to see my college GPA after graduating almost 17 years ago.
Harvard was one of the leaders of the charge in terms of grade inflation back 20ish years ago
Yes, more than one.
Either the bar for getting into Harvard cannot possibly be as high as it's made out to be, someone's figured out how to completely defeat degree-validation service providers, or Harvard is happy to churn out a nonzero number of students wholly unprepared for meeting extremely basic expectations for the prototypical job of their chosen degree.
There's nothing inherently wrong with not being able to write code, but you probably shouldn't be applying for software engineering roles where the main responsibility of the job is ultimately to write working code.
While my career involves writing code, I am not a SWE, I have never done any formal leetcode prep, and I have no formal education in technology beyond a high school CS class. I have no college degree whatsoever, not even an associate's degree.
I had a rule I stuck to when doing these interviews (which were for a SWE role) that felt very fair to me - I would not give these candidates any problem I couldn't solve in the same circumstances.
For reference, in the allotted time, one such candidate spent a good chunk of their time reading up on JS if/then syntax on w3schools. As I watched, I reminded them they could use any language they wanted, if they were more comfortable or familiar with others, and this Harvard CS grad declined, stating JS was their "strongest" language.
My best guess about these cases were rich kids / legacy admissions that weren't allowed to be failed for political reasons.
Don’t get me wrong, we don’t have much of a choice in evaluating especially junior hires. Even for senior hires you want to make sure they haven’t drifted through their last jobs without actually coding. But on the spot performances are different even for the simple stuff, they should practice coding questions on the fly regardless, and even the worst possible SWE candidate should be able to pass these with a bit of prep. With a lot of prep they could do leetcode, a still suck at the job when they get it.
1. Output the numbers from 1 to 100
2. If the number is a multiple of 3, write Fizz instead of the number
3. If the number is a multiple of 5, write Buzz instead of the number
4. If the number is a multiple of 3 and 5, write FizzBuzz instead of the number
Does that really sound like something requiring special practice and preparation? Assuming a decent interviewer would help out with the modulo operator if that was unfamiliar
FizzBuzz, reversing a sentence -- this is programming your way out of a wet paper bag, not elite and esoteric skills that need advanced study and cramming
String.Join(" ",
String.Split(" ", sentence).Reverse()))If I ask that of a senior candidate, it’s because I got a whiff of “this candidate might not be able to code at all, and I’d like to save us both some time and frustration.”
And that’s for someone with only a 50/50 success rate at summing an array of integers. Do you want to hire someone for a software role who is an underdog to be able to sum an array of ints?
The beauty is, even a simple exercise answered quickly like "sum of integers" provides ample opportunity to learn a lot about how they think.
Start digging in to testability, requirement changes, etc. Change it to a rolling sum (producing a sequence instead of a single value). Do they use an array or an iterator? Do they output straight to the console, or produce an actual function? Could the numbers come from other sources (database, queue, etc)? What might the tradeoffs be? If there's something they are unfamiliar with, are they quick on the uptake if you explain it? And so on.
From one of my professors who did their graduate work at an Ivy, apparently there are a lot of rich kids who can't be failed because their parents donate so much money to the school. But I don't think Harvard has ever had the best undergraduate reputation (among the Ivies), its more well known for its grad/professional programs.
Most of Harvard's endowment is via alumni, so it doesn't surprise me in the least they continue with it.
It’s been 20 years or so since my knowledge was up-to-date, but Oxbridge undergrads used to bitterly complain that their 2:2 (grade C I guess?) wasn’t seen as equivalent to getting a 1st(A?) or 2:1(B) from other good UK unis by graduate schemes and large employers.
Oxbridge workload seemed to be significantly higher for most undergrad degrees than it was at other unis, and the feeling was that an essay a week was required that would have been equivalent to a term’s work at other unis. I only ever heard the Oxbridge side of this, however.
You are already seeing grade inflation in the UK too: Go look at the percentage of first class degrees over time.
The only place where a modern US university can be used as a filter is in their own admissions, where they can still be pretty stringent. Harvard could fill their class 6 times with people that are basically indistinguishable from their freshman class, so just getting into the right university already shows that you must have had some skill and maturity by the time you were a junior in high school.
This is also why hiring juniors is so difficult nowadays for software: Having successfully finished a CS degree at most universities says nothing about your ability to write any code at all, or analyze any complex situation. And with the advent of leetcode training, it's not as if you can now tell who happens to be good because they remember their algorithms and data structure classes really well. You have no idea of how good the new grad is going to be when they show to the interview, and even those that pass might not be all that great in practice, as they might just have spent 3 months memorizing interview questions like an automaton.
The UK system doesn't really let students choose which classes to take
Two improvements then: Degrees that earn the reputation of not being given for anything less than excellence in studies. Where the earned reputation is used both to discourage the non-serious, and enhance the value of the degree.
And of course, bring down the costs. Create a high octane alumni network to match. Foster an opinionated high work ethic, college-as-daycare / party-scene repellent culture. Anything and everything rethought from scratch.
For instance, why are degrees based on years? Why so standardized when neither students or jobs are? Why not a skill chart that can be custom traversed per student - with students expected to move on whenever they choose to, or have a good opportunity. A high percentage of students leaving for good jobs after just one year would be a win.
For just one slice of education, to start.
As with anything complex, start with something small and focused. Like a low population cutting edge practice/research AI school. Start from scratch with the thing that is new, challenging and in high demand.
Then expand into other fast changing, high demand areas. Keep figuring out better ways, keep taking on more, keep reducing costs, as long as all three of those efforts tradeoffs are compatible.
While arguably that's indirectly 'for the piece of paper', I'd argue the pleasant experience is a factor too, even if not quoted as such. i.e. if it was a purely rational, economic choice (my interpretation of going to college just for the degree) we'd see higher enrollment in high-ROI majors.
If you're a kid and you want to be making money (or at least a comfortable living) in 20 year's time, become a farrier.
Because we are going to be ploughing with horses again soon, the way things are going. And even if we're not, a horse needs shod every couple of months and costs a couple of hundred every time.
I've never seen a hungry-looking farrier or scrap metal dealer.