We give it prestige because of it's history as a marker of success. But wow that more people have degrees, it has little value as a marker.
In the case of social sciences and humanities, college produces very little societal value.
So if a kid doesn't like school, and would enjoy being a plumber, why shouldn't he take a path that leaves him with less debt and more money?
We disparage it now because it's not prestigious, and this has harmful consequences for those who would enjoy the trades. They face an undeserved stigma for pursuing a career they would find satisfying.
Ridicoulous statements like this is why discussions outside a very few subjects never go anywhere on HN.
In retrospect, I shouldn't have included the humanities. I think everyone should read the materials studied in those fields. I personally lean towards reading them on my own time, but for many a humanities education is the impetus to read many works they would otherwise never read.
Edit: I'll add that, while I didn't give a reason why I think they produce little value, you didn't do anything to refute me. You just gave an ad hominem attack.
There is some value produced in those fields. However, it is very difficult to produce a controlled experiment in the social sciences. Yet they have scientific and mathematical pretensions. I agree with Nassim Taleb that much of what they produce is uncertain, tenuous and misleading.
Further, they teach students poor skills. The writing requirements encouraged bloated writing, which leads to the opposite of clear thinking.
I'm also a logic teacher (I work in LSAT prep). I see A students who have not learned how to think. I have seen no evidence that undergraduate social science degrees encourage better patterns of thought or erudition, the two most cited reasons for a liberal arts education.
I think social sciences when done correctly do produce good thinking, as any theory is only as good as its reasoning. In my opinion the real tragedy occurs when soft and hard sciences mix. Many times, especially in this setting, because someone with a hard science mindset doesn't understand, or ignore, the premise of soft science. I personally think this is why there are so many wild disagreements on things like systems engineering within the tech community.
It can also be argued that college isn't the best format (age, place, duration) to learn social science, but that can be said about many areas of study. It would also be to, as much of the debate do, ignore the lack of alternatives. In technology there are many examples of people dropping out and having success, at least as a practitioner, in their field. In many other areas this isn't as true. It might even say more about CS education than anything else.
Of course college also has value as an experience. It's where many people find their independence and meet long standing friends, colleagues and partners. Which would be perfectly fine to do anywhere else, but plumbing probably isn't it.
But the fact you have to include that caveat is itself evidence that it generally isn't.
We have to get over this blind devotion to the idea that college is so awesome that even questioning its value is heresy, and take a hard look at the facts. Yes, frankly, the value generated by the humanities right now by our colleges is not commensurate to the money we are pouring into it, nor the debt slavery we're imposing on people for it. That doesn't mean it's worthless, but the solution isn't letting the humanities continue to rot while they hide behind our blind obeisance to "education is of infinite value so we need not consider the costs! Ever! Don't even ask or you're no better than a knuckle-dragging hillbilly!"
Beyond a sober reconsideration of exactly what sort of benefits we are getting are better benefits than what we are now. But first, we have to ask the questions.
And no matter how enlightening this experience is, we can't ignore the financial side. A young person saddled with $50,000 in debt and no prospect of a high-paying job is in effect a serf. Add a mortgage a few years down the line, and you are ensuring that this person will never be free.
All 3 of which can, and should be learned outside of college.
Hell, of the 3, the second 2 are only really learned out in the work force. After all, learning new skills easily when you are going to school is fairly trivial. It's learning new skills after you've hit the work force. When you aren't spending the day in school, being fed the information.
If all college does is provide you with those 3 things, it's a waste of time.
The generation ahead of me believed exactly this, that college education was for the "elite." The generation behind me challenged this perception and went to college. It was a boon for the oldest of that generation. Then the world became saturated with college grads expecting top-notch salaries and benefits; when it was obvious that not everyone with a degree would receive The Best Salary Ever, the younger of the same generation began to question the need for post-secondary education.
I think we're just coming back to previous perceptions. I think with this ebb-and-flow of Things That Will Always Be is just happening faster than ever because of increased awareness (faster communication, broader audiences) brought about by technology; specifically the internet.
As for needing a "college level education," why would everyone require this? Are we all, the entire population, headed toward a society where every job is performed by a machine, leaving us to advance our existence through focused philosophy? This, I feel, is the utopian world of The Academics. Anything short of that simply requires access to the knowledge that allows one to function in the world and perform their chosen profession.
I agree. This is nothing new. But I believe even people in the trades should have a college-level education. College education is not about learning facts that are directly relevant to whatever we end up choosing to do. It is about learning critical thinking, how to work with others at a high level, how to acquire new knowledge and talents efficiently. These are skills that are valuable everywhere, in every profession.
"Are we all, the entire population, headed toward a society where every job is performed by a machine [...]"]
In short, yes. This won't happen for a while but most of our manual professions will be automated in the not-so-distant future. That will leave us, collectively, with a lot of time on our hands to figure out what to do with ourselves. Knowing where the next horizon lies will require a ton of high-level, specialized scientific knowledge, and those of us who were not lucky enough to receive a college education will be worse off as a result.
People are less and less able to work with each other at a high level (consider the inability to deal with blue-collar banter at conferences, and the common situation of ignoring each other to tweet or use phones).
People are not interested in acquiring new knowledge (they may, perhaps, cache relevant results from Stack Overflow or Google--usually not).
People do not want to think critically--think about how much effort we put into making our tools as simple and intuitive as possible, and how much we emphasize convention over configuration, and how much we spend on advertising to make people want our stuff.
There is probably no next horizon--there's just bullshit makework to help people function in a token economy spoonfed ads by Adsense on their iJiggers.
College doesn't make sense for many people/careers. In those cases, whether college is affordable or not is beside the point.
Why waste their time on a degree if they'll finish later in McDonalds? Learning a craft is much better than working in McDonalds, having a huge debt and a degree.
Rather than telling students to skip college shouldn't we be finding a way to make a high-quality college education affordable and not confined to the very rich or exceptionally gifted? I agree with Bloomberg on many things (but certainly not all) but this is just snobbery and elitism diguised as "reasonableness."
Bloomberg has been a huge donor to Johns Hopkins. Perhaps he should redirect more of his contributions from propping up the endowment of an elite institution like Hopkins (some of which, in fairness, does go to financial aid) to actually directly paying for underprivileged kids to obtain such an elite education.