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Simple: you dumb college down. If college is the new high school, then college becomes a default path that is more valued for its socialization experience than

Simple: you dumb college down. If college is the new high school, then college becomes a default path that is more valued for its socialization experience than for academic knowledge imparted. And like AP classes in high school, you have hard majors where the "life of mind" is taught, and push the smart kids to go into those.

13thLetter 11y ago
Don't know if you're serious, but there's a problem here: an enormous rent, in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, is now being extracted from the students sent in for "socialization" -- both in direct costs to the college, and indirectly in the reduction of their earning potential during those years. Furthermore, it is being extracted specifically from a class of people who probably have a hard time laying their hands on that money, and being paid to already upper-class people. We managed to socialize ourselves in the past just fine without doing this. "Free" college, by the way, does not solve this problem; all it does is slightly improve the lot of the poor by instead spreading the rent over the class of all taxpayers, while making the payouts to an unproductive administrative class even bigger. I suspect the second part explains the popularity of this idea among the administrative class, though.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  I'm confused about calling student loans "socializing". This seems like an essence of American capitalism. Elsewhere, in more "socialized" parts of the world, college is free and total costs are nowhere near that of the US, because it's much less profitable for rent-seekers to set up shop where there isn't much money flowing.
  - douche 11y ago
    Different kind of socializing, I imagine. The sort of training-wheels for life as a real adult that college tends to be. With all the "networking", which usually manifests as getting blackout drunk on cheap alcohol and bad weed three or four nights a week.
the_ancient 11y ago
Of course... I think everyone should have to spend the first 40 years of their life in some kind of government run institution being learned.... Only then can they be true productive members of society...
methodover 11y ago
This is an insane answer, I know. When we're at a point in the super far future when automation does everything that a below average intelligence human can do, maybe we could raise the average. Maybe through genetic engineering offspring. How insane is that I wonder?
scottlocklin 11y ago
OK, put it a different way: if society requires you have an IQ of 115 to make a decent living, what are you going to do with the people with IQ scores below 115? It's pretty much the same statement as above, minus the apparently confusing mention of college. College is already dumbed down.
- ArkyBeagle 11y ago
  IMO, what people with a 100 IQ can do, and what people with 115 can do isn't that significant. 100 IQ people can be better at some things than people with 115 IQ. We've kind of made a fetish of IQ without really understanding intelligence to begin with.
jdavis703 11y ago
You just wind up giving dumb people a degree. The better solution is to make it illegal for employers to ask about college/post college education, except for perhaps certain fields like law or medicine (though the relevant licenses should really suffice in those cases). Colleges will never make dumb people into smart people who can solve problems independently. People who can solve problems and innovate are the only ones who will succeed in the new economy. I know CS grads with shiny new graduate-level degrees who can't even solve problems, they need to be told exactly what to do from a technical perspective to solve a business problem (e.g. if the boss is asking you for data on X, you'll need to write a SQL query into Y and Z databases (which they already knew existed), and then put the results into a graph in Excel).
- rboyd 11y ago
  How would this work in practice? Job seekers would still be allowed to advertise their education, and surely nearly all would. Wouldn't employers just pass over candidates who didn't?
  - jdavis703 11y ago
    That's a fair point. My knee jerk reaction is to say well, prohibit discussion of education then... Kind of like how parental status, race and in some places criminal history, can only be discussed after a certain stage of the hiring process. On the other hand maybe it'll weed out things like QSR managers who were asking for degrees at the peek of the recession just because they could.

13thLetter 11y ago

Don't know if you're serious, but there's a problem here: an enormous rent, in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, is now being extracted from the students sent in for "socialization" -- both in direct costs to the college, and indirectly in the reduction of their earning potential during those years. Furthermore, it is being extracted specifically from a class of people who probably have a hard time laying their hands on that money, and being paid to already upper-class people. We managed to socialize ourselves in the past just fine without doing this. "Free" college, by the way, does not solve this problem; all it does is slightly improve the lot of the poor by instead spreading the rent over the class of all taxpayers, while making the payouts to an unproductive administrative class even bigger. I suspect the second part explains the popularity of this idea among the administrative class, though.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
I'm confused about calling student loans "socializing". This seems like an essence of American capitalism. Elsewhere, in more "socialized" parts of the world, college is free and total costs are nowhere near that of the US, because it's much less profitable for rent-seekers to set up shop where there isn't much money flowing.
- douche 11y ago
  Different kind of socializing, I imagine. The sort of training-wheels for life as a real adult that college tends to be. With all the "networking", which usually manifests as getting blackout drunk on cheap alcohol and bad weed three or four nights a week.

the_ancient 11y ago

Of course... I think everyone should have to spend the first 40 years of their life in some kind of government run institution being learned.... Only then can they be true productive members of society...

methodover 11y ago

This is an insane answer, I know. When we're at a point in the super far future when automation does everything that a below average intelligence human can do, maybe we could raise the average. Maybe through genetic engineering offspring. How insane is that I wonder?

scottlocklin 11y ago

OK, put it a different way: if society requires you have an IQ of 115 to make a decent living, what are you going to do with the people with IQ scores below 115? It's pretty much the same statement as above, minus the apparently confusing mention of college. College is already dumbed down.

ArkyBeagle 11y ago
IMO, what people with a 100 IQ can do, and what people with 115 can do isn't that significant. 100 IQ people can be better at some things than people with 115 IQ. We've kind of made a fetish of IQ without really understanding intelligence to begin with.

jdavis703 11y ago

You just wind up giving dumb people a degree. The better solution is to make it illegal for employers to ask about college/post college education, except for perhaps certain fields like law or medicine (though the relevant licenses should really suffice in those cases). Colleges will never make dumb people into smart people who can solve problems independently. People who can solve problems and innovate are the only ones who will succeed in the new economy. I know CS grads with shiny new graduate-level degrees who can't even solve problems, they need to be told exactly what to do from a technical perspective to solve a business problem (e.g. if the boss is asking you for data on X, you'll need to write a SQL query into Y and Z databases (which they already knew existed), and then put the results into a graph in Excel).

rboyd 11y ago
How would this work in practice? Job seekers would still be allowed to advertise their education, and surely nearly all would. Wouldn't employers just pass over candidates who didn't?
- jdavis703 11y ago
  That's a fair point. My knee jerk reaction is to say well, prohibit discussion of education then... Kind of like how parental status, race and in some places criminal history, can only be discussed after a certain stage of the hiring process. On the other hand maybe it'll weed out things like QSR managers who were asking for degrees at the peek of the recession just because they could.