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Well, yeah. Education increases individual income primarily through competitive advantage in the job market, right? But, also, the function of education in the

• Chinjut 10y ago
  (And, yes: education can of course grant skills which are genuinely required for certain jobs. This being Hacker News, I suppose we'll hear that everyone should learn to code. I'm all for everyone getting to do whatever they wish to do, and if that wish is learning to code, so be it. But I suspect, if everyone did suddenly learn to code, we'd find that coding would, with corresponding suddenness, cease to be a ticket out of poverty...)
  • LordKano 10y ago
    I hate the idea that some people seem to hold that teaching everyone to code will fix the world's problems. It won't. People who want to code, should learn to code. Some people should learn to weld. Some people should learn to drive a commercial truck. Some people should learn to cook. Some people should learn to landscape. Some people should learn to fix automobiles and son on and so forth. We have a society that needs people with many diverse skills. We should be investing more in tech or trade schools than we are in colleges and universities. People need a way to gain the skills they will need to earn a living but sending everyone to college is a universally bad idea. It'll turn the Bachelor's degree into the new High School Diploma.
    • rickycook 10y ago
      people learning to code isn't about getting people jobs in which they can code. it's about allowing people to solve repetitive tasks in their daily lives and jobs if everyone were able to code, there'd be much more automation of menial jobs, which generally means a more productive economy in the long run it's the same thing that we do with running scalable information systems; automate the mundane so you can do things that really have an impact on quality, rather than spending hours doing something you could code and be done with it
    • dagw 10y ago
      Some people should learn to weld. Some people should learn to drive a commercial truck. Some people should learn to cook. Some people should learn to landscape. Some people should learn to fix automobiles and son on and so forth. Absolutely, and if all those people also knew how to code, they could find ways to apply the skill to their jobs to make them more efficient. People shouldn't learn to code so that they can become programmers, they should learn to code because knowing how to code can make you better at virtually any job you end up in.
      • Kurtz79 10y ago
        Please give some example how knowledge of programming would help a truck driver, a cook or a welder to be more efficient in their jobs.
        • dragandj 10y ago
          All these professions are (going to be) gradually replaced by automation/robots. Learning to code might put them in "robot manager/operator" instead of "they took our jobs" crowd.
        • dagw 10y ago
          Honestly not really sure, having never worked in any of those jobs and have no idea what those jobs will look like 20 years from now. However let me speculate: Many people believe that truck drivers will be become more and more replaced with autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles. Understanding the underlying software will no doubt make it easier to be in charge of a software controlled semi-autonomous truck convoy. Also for all I know truck drivers on places like docks, mines and factories won't be sitting in their trucks for much longer. They'll be controlling everything via computers from a remote command post. Also from what I seen trucking seems to involve a lot of complex routing and optimization problems, I'm guessing that as simply driving becomes less and less part of the job, those aspects will become more and more part of the job. I know fuck all about welding. I do however know some programmers who work for a company that makes industrial welders and apparently there's some pretty complex software running those welders. Perhaps being able to field program your welder is/will be a thing? Also perhaps welding things directly will become less and less common and people will be sending computer controlled drones to do the welding instead. Anyway it's not for me to sit on the outside and try to guess how programming can make people more efficient at their jobs. I truly believe that if someone with experience and domain knowledge also knows how to do some simple programming they'll be able to see all kinds of tiny improvements and automatstation they can implement. Improvements that both an outsider programmer and an insider non-programmer would completely overlook. And even if they aren't always skilled enough to implement those improvements, they'll be much better equipped to know what can be done and what to ask for.
  • meric 10y ago
    I think a lot of students' mindset is to pass with minimal effort as opposed to throughly understand the subject matter. When studying they focus on what's require to pass exams instead of what will contribute most to society. Exams aren't constructed to model what's best for society - they're there to help the universities or educational institutions convince students it's worth it to give them money.
  • tremon 10y ago
    I did not learn to code from any formal education though. By the time I had my first programming class (at university), I had already been writing code for nearly ten years (Basic, C++ and i386 assembly).
• tonmoy 10y ago
  I don't know about your developed country, but education seem to have helped the people in the poor developing country I am from. I feel as more people got educated, the more ambitious they became. Instead of doing the same things their forefathers used to do, they got a broader perspective and started venturing into more businesses. More engineers, doctors, accountants and economists have also helped. When you say that someone does not need a specialized piece of education because she will never use it, you are confining her to the life you think she should lead, while more specialized education while not always directly useful can help people see what they can become. But that's just my feeling, no data, no stats
  • kijin 10y ago
    One might say that there is a point of diminishing returns, and the U.S. has reached it while many developing countries haven't. Exactly where that point is, seems to be a function of how many highly educated people a country can produce vs. how many jobs it can create. 100K new doctors and engineers, with 100K new jobs for them? Wonderful! But what if you only had 20K new jobs? Now you're in trouble. Instead of treating this as a first world problem, developing countries should employ their brightest minds right now to research why this is happening in the U.S. and find a way to avoid getting stuck in the same place 20-30 years from now.
    • eli_gottlieb 10y ago
      >One might say that there is a point of diminishing returns, and the U.S. has reached it while many developing countries haven't. I'm skeptical, given that the population-wide baseline of knowledge in the USA isn't actually that high. When the subject comes up, we hear that other countries teach their high-school kids calculus, linear algebra, and real physics.
      • edc117 10y ago
        Those uneducated people are also the same ones increasingly out of work in this country today. And we 'encourage' the brightest of those children from other countries to move here (yes, not exactly what happens with H1-B, but still). I tend to agree with above poster that it'd be nice if there was substantive analysis done on the current situation.
• fanzhang 10y ago
  I don't think it's a commonly accepted conclusion that education increases income primarily through competitive advantage (i.e. it's a zero sum game). Take, for example, being educated on home farming methods to grow 200 cabbages a year instead of 100. In this case your income grows directly as a result of your education. Now yes there are some cases that may be signaling, but I'd like to see some empirical evidence that education is mostly zero-sum.
  • autarch 10y ago
    Unless, of course, all home cabbage farmers receive the education, thus doubling the supply of cabbage on the market, which we would expect to more or less halve the price, leading to ... a zero sum game ;)
    • rickycook 10y ago
      and now we need half as many cabbage farmers, which means that half those people doing manual labor can do something else, which in turn makes the economy more productive either way, you get more of something in the economy, even if it's not money for those in poverty. in this case, it'd likely lead to food becoming cheaper and more people being able to eat I fail to see how education hasn't benefited those in need in this (somewhat contrived) analogy
      • DiabloD3 10y ago
        Except we're now leading to one of the major problems in the current US economy: we now have too many workers, and not enough jobs, due to the large scale improvements in efficiency since the end of WW2. So, we're back to what started this: people are going to school, getting education, and now they're working as the local McD's night shift manager with a masters in their pocket. Making better workers only helps if there are enough better jobs to go around, otherwise it is just inflating a massive bubble in the education industry.
        • EliRivers 10y ago
• galdosdi 10y ago
  Have you found noticing this (the large degree to which education is just a filtering/grading ritual rather than a process for actually imparting useful learning) incredibly frustrating?
  • rickycook 10y ago
    and that's the problem. our "modern" education frequently just ends up being a ranking system, rather than teaching people how to think, learn, and get excited about things can you imagine how much better the world would be if kids came home from school telling their parents how amazing numbers are? to anyone that doesn't think that's possible, I'd suggest looking at how kids react to kerbal space program. there's plenty of examples of 8-15 year olds getting excited about putting things on the "mun" with simplified orbital physics. try and teach that the way we teach it in school, and they might pass a test and then forget it a year later
• nikofeyn 10y ago
  i haven't read the article but you are discussing education as it stands today and not what education should be in the ideal sense. education shouldn't be about the bullshit standardization and paper seeking that it has become. instead, it should be what education is all about: intellectual and skilled growth. if we truly educated people, this would help becuase it creates the skills necessary to adapt to and change one's situation.
  • RobertKerans 10y ago
    "Learn woodwork; metalwork; they will not make you a carpenter or a blacksmith any more than mastering writing will make you a clerk"
• pfisch 10y ago
  What about job creators? Some people are going to create new business opportunities through education, and then they will hire more educated people to help them. It seems like you have experienced education from a bunch of non-entrepreneurial sides. Not everyone is an employee.
  • vkou 10y ago
    When are these educated job creators going to create jobs in the Rust Belt? The people living there have been waiting for that for decades, now.
  • vkou 10y ago
    When are these educated job creators going to create jobs in the Rust Belt? The people living there have been waiting for that for decades, now. Giving all of them PHDs in chemistry and medicine won't do a damned thing. Only a few industries in the US are actually short on qualified people - and they can't absorb 20 million retrained people.
    • pfisch 10y ago
      If more people knew how to program wages for programmers would drop and you could hire more of them. I wouldn't mind having 2-3 more programmers right now. Even if you're right that no new businesses would be created by educating people which is ridiculous, we would employ more people because they would be cheaper. Also if wages drop for a career it is less risky to start your own business because the potential wages lost are reduced. I mean, just about every industry is short on qualified people as their salary approaches $0.
• accnumnplusone 10y ago
  Two categories of developer on my team: life-long programmers, and people with two years of dev experience since their computing degree pushing their way into management. Why did the latter bother with that degree? And why are they muddling the dev team for their negligible experience?
  • nine_k 10y ago
    Do you think that IT managers should not have an idea how developers work, or about the fundamentals of programming?
  • UK-AL 10y ago
    Because development is one of the easiest entry points into the tech industry for people without connections.
• D_Alex 10y ago
  > the function of education in the job market is largely just as a certification arms race, right? Largely, no. You just cannot do certain jobs without a high level education. Engineering, science, medicine for example. >an awful lot of time, money, and effort is spent on a process that is not actually valued in any direct, substantial way Yes... Including whole courses such as "women's studies/gender studies", anything connected with religious studies, much of B. Arts etc.