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There seems to be a strong sentiment in this thread that the only value provided by education is the contribution to career (e.g. that loans should only be prov

• acchow 10y ago
  You really don't need to pay tuition to gain a rich education in art and humanities and sciences if you want one. There are resources aplenty - buy a book! I'd even go so far as to say the majority of college grads learned almost nothing during college, and the few who did would, after a few years of maturity, pick up a book of their own free will and enrich themselves. I think the costs of university (huge amounts of debt and enormous human and physical resources put into holding lectures in giant buildings that need to be maintained and heated, the social divide created between those who got to hang out among the privileged for 4 years and those who couldn't) generally outweighs the hypothetical benefits you mention that some people might gain during college. Except perhaps for a few fields (like medicine, or dramatical arts, or music) where you can't just pick up a textbook and learn it all.
  • skwosh 10y ago
    You could say that about anything though, and I'm sure many in engineering do (about everything from design patterns to category theory...). The value added by quality in-person tuition shouldn't be underrated though, not to mention access to equipment, studios, and like minds... Working and communicating in person is a hugely effective catalyst for productivity, creative evolution, etc. Artistic and scientific development is often accelerated by human interaction, which is why art movements and scientific advancements tend to cluster around communities (vs individuals).
    • acchow 10y ago
      > Working and communicating in person is a hugely effective catalyst for productivity, creative evolution, etc. Artistic and scientific development is often accelerated by human interaction, which is why art movements and scientific advancements tend to cluster around communities (vs individuals). Sounds like Google, and they don't charge tuition.
    • saiya-jin 10y ago
      Parent has a good point - there are very few specializations which cannot be learned with dedication and internet connection. Human interaction/team efforts for example are important, but in almost all cases you are under-trained coming from uni to real world and soon you'll pick it up in real life. There are bad/mediocre universities/colleges, which don't give you almost nothing on top of what is currently available in few clicks. Most people out there graduate on those. I know, since I am one of them. All useful stuff I know now I learned on my own, either during studies (a bit) or working (most of it). The only good reason why I don't regret university is campus life - but if you don't have a need for party-style episode in your life and human interaction in that style, then universities/colleges are not the best place to spend 5 of your most creative years. Unless also hunting for future contacts in elite places, but that's another topic.
  • deleted 10y ago
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  • dagw 10y ago
    Just reading a book is a not an effective way to learn, and the value of university is not that they make you read a bunch of books. The real value comes from interaction around that material with researchers and fellow students and being 'forced' to engage with that material to solve problems and doing your own research, as well as the feedback you get on that work. Now I'll certainly agree that the cost of a University education in the US is much too high, and there are probably more efficient ways to get the same educational benefits, but to say that you can replace Universities with books is simply disingenuous.
  • OliverJones 10y ago
    > buy a book! True. And, if you live in the US, patronize one of our great public libraries. If you're in New York or Boston, just walk in. If you're elsewhere you can borrow via interlibrary loan.
  • wfo 10y ago
    "Just buying a book" is not a way for anyone to learn anything serious. There is a negligible fraction of actual autodidacts in this world, and they are not even usually the best and the brightest -- just a weird curiosity. Go pick up a graduate mathematics textbook (or even an undergraduate one, I'll be generous) of your choice and try to learn from it without help from an instructor. I'll wait. Best case scenario, you will believe you understand it until you come into contact with someone who actually does and be horribly embarrassed. Or perhaps so self-satisfied with your ability to surpass everyone in the universe at understanding mathematics quickly and without help or discussion that you won't be able to even grasp the fact that you don't understand it. I've seen both first hand. English and Philosophy (especially Philosophy) are exactly the same. You cannot learn philosophy from only reading textbooks. It's where you start, not where you finish. It's the bare minimum. It's what you should have done before you even show up to the class, at which point you begin learning nearly everything there is to learn about the subject. Almost everyone learns a GREAT deal in college. Some people do learn so little they aren't even capable of understanding what it is they were /supposed/ to learn, and post on tech message boards about how college is a waste of time.
• rhizome 10y ago
  "true" art is antithetical to capitalism Absolutely not, especially now when the mechanisms of compensation have been democratized so well. Beyond that, Andy Warhol (et al) would be amused to learn that real art and capitalism were conceptual enemies. NB: I'm assuming you're using "antithetical" to mean that their successes are inversely proportional.
  • skwosh 10y ago
    Not inversely proportional, just somewhat orthogonal, reflecting a (largely) different set of priorities. Plus I'm not sure that the "mechanisms of compensation have been democratized so well", as you claim. (Which is to say it's all still largely driven by major label interests [1] [2].) [1] http://pitchfork.com/features/article/8993-the-cloud/ http://pitchfork.com/features/article/8993-the-cloud/ [2] http://www.newyorker.com/culture/sasha-frere-jones/if-you-care-about-music-should-you-ditch-spotify http://www.newyorker.com/culture/sasha-frere-jones/if-you-ca...
    • rhizome 10y ago
      Dribbble, DeviantArt, Bandcamp, ebooks...the list goes on.
• laretluval 10y ago
  > These fields don't usually/directly translate into a financial success, but they broaden our perspective and deepen our experience. And in doing so provide the tools and language to more effectively analyse and engage with human culture. What concrete evidence leads you to think this is true?
  • skwosh 10y ago
    Emphasis on "usually"... As far as evidence goes, more experiential - I've studied visual and sonic arts at a few different universities/colleges (in Australia). Generally, not many found financial success in their chosen field.
  • ingenieros 10y ago
    A calligraphy class taught by Robert Palladino in Reed College would go on to have a profound effect on a guy whose name now escapes me. :)
    • Qwertious 10y ago
      It's Steve Jobs, for anyone who doesn't want to look it up.
• deleted 10y ago
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• nightski 10y ago
  I feel like the value of adversity is lost sometimes on HN. We should be especially familiar with it. Earning a high level of income makes life extraordinarily comfortable, to the point where it is easy to become complacent and stop trying to really contribute to society in a meaningful way. Some times a struggle is not a bad thing. Not to the point where one should be homeless or starving of course, but having everything handed to you (even if you have worked hard in the past) doesn't always result in the best of outcomes.
  • wojcech 10y ago
    This sentiment is so bizarre from a European perspective. So the only thing that stops people from getting an education willy nilly is student debt? Or American engineers are all better in some respects than German engineers because of their debt?
    • nightski 10y ago
      I never really said any of that. The reality is that you can get a really good college education for rather cheap in the U.S. if you are smart about it. I could of gone to a local state college for 1/10th the tuition of a private school and received an education at a very similar level. I just feel that a free for all education system (ala Bernie Sanders) would be detrimental. Having things be somewhat exclusive and require some amount of effort is not necessarily a bad thing. Germany itself imposes exams for example (although I don't know how difficult they actually are personally).
      • DasIch 10y ago
        Germany doesn't impose any exams at all. The only limiting factor is that you qualify for university and maybe your grade, if the number of applicants requires it. There are no exams that need to be passed, no essays need to be written or anything of the sort.
      • lentil_soup 10y ago
        Depending on the course/university there's limited space, of course. The problem is when this "exclusivity" that you mention is purely based on who can pay, that is what's detrimental.
• hueving 10y ago
  When it comes to student loans though, they should be given on someone's potential ability to actually pay them back, which is dependent on future career prospects. I'm not against Arts or offering scholarships/grants for them. What I'm against is allowing a person to take out $160,000 of debt at 6% interest for an education that will land them a job as an administrative assistant. They will most likely carry that debt for the majority of their adult life. It's bad for society to allow 18 year old kids that have a poor grasp of long term consequences to shackle themselves with such a financial burden. None have had long term full time jobs to appreciate how difficult it will be to pay back that much money.
  • Godel_unicode 10y ago
    This. Banks give home/auto/business loans based on value of the home and ability to pay. Why not have similar metrics for education?
    • roel_v 10y ago
      Because there is no collateral for education.
      • rwmj 10y ago
        The collateral is a claim on future earnings, isn't it? In the UK, the student loans company gets back 9% of your salary post graduation and you cannot legally opt out until the loan is repaid provided you earn over a minimum threshold.
        • roel_v 10y ago
          You can't squeeze blood from a rock. Sure, you can say 'hey let's garnish this guy's McD wages for the next 25 years' - but the collection costs are almost as much as you can get your hands on. Just not worth it. Well, only at very high interest rates, so that the good ones make up for the bad ones.
      • Godel_unicode 10y ago
• danmaz74 10y ago
  I totally get you, but then the question is: do you need to get into a "top" and super-expensive college to get a good education in humanities and abstract art and similar? Because, unless you're rich or get a very good scholarship, I guess that going to that kind of college makes sense only if you plan to pursue a high-paying career.
  • paulmd 10y ago
    Harvard and company are doing massive amounts of needs-based scholarships now. If you are a high-flying middle class person you can probably pay either nothing or very little. They have massive endowments, to the tune of many tens of billions of dollars, they can fund their operation out of the interest. On the other hand this benefits them as an institution since they can soak those legacy students for every hundred-thousand that daddy is worth and let them coast through on the reputation of those high-flyers.
  • closeparen 10y ago
    Backwards. Top colleges have the best need-based financial aid. You rack up enormous debt at average colleges (or by going to a top college when your parents could pay for it but won't).
    • stale2002 10y ago
      Look, if you get a full ride at a top school, then obviously you should do it. Nobody disagrees about that. That's not the question though. Because apparently students have 1 trillion dollars of debt. So apparently people are NOT receiving full rides to everywhere. The population we are discuss is this 1 trillion dollars of debt.
• jeffdavis 10y ago
  Where you are wrong is that it's not just about money, it's about accountability. Smart investing is the same whether the returns are financial or something else (citizenship, etc.): Someone needs to make good decisions about which investments are good and which aren't. If I believed your romantic notion of the humanities reflected reality in the classroom, that would be a great investment. But I don't believe that's true for many students.
  • skwosh 10y ago
    Sure, through the lens of "smart investing", an arts degree is a shitty investment, and therefore shouldn't be funded. I just think that's a bit reductive, and that the value provided by those programs can be hard to quantify. I agree that many students probably gain nothing at all from studying arts, but many do, and become better people, professionals, politicians, etc. Studying these fields (or communicating with people who have (even watching documentaries)) helps to understand and contextualise the world, and to articulate those (often complex and abstract) ideas. Of course, many people come away with nothing, and many with only the most superficial understanding, but an educational climate with less participation in the arts, humanities, theoretical sciences, etc would suffer a net reduction in cultural capital, political discourse, etc. [*] IMO.
• Lazare 10y ago
  Okay, but how does that translate into policy? Fact 1: Education in the US is very expensive, in large part because the ready availability of loans removes most downwards pressure on prices. Fact 2: If you are loaned money to obtain a degree which is not economically valued then you will not be able to pay it back. Fact 3: If you loan people money without expecting people to pay it back, then it's not a loan, it's a grant. Fact 4: If you offer grants to high school graduates to take non-economically values classes, a lot of them will do so. This pushes up the cost of the education, and pushes down the wages graduates will make, excerbating the problem. > For that reason these fields absolutely should be subsidised Perhaps. But in which case by how much, by whom, and in what fashion? Because offhand offering free arts degrees sounds like one of the worst possible ways you could subsidise art as a field, and one of the best ways you can cause a lot of harm to young people while enriching the existing education institutions and not really advancing art at all. Mind you... > otherwise art becomes about marketing, journalism becomes about propaganda, and science becomes about start-ups... Artists, journalists, and scientists have always had to earn a living. To the best of my knowledge, there was no "golden age". We've never subsidized artists (or scientists, or journalists) in the way you say we should; the future you're afraid of "becoming" is our present and past.
  • skwosh 10y ago
    If I was designing policy? Really all I'm talking about is not defunding/sidelining Arts etc "because it's not financially viable". The idea is really to provide a well rounded education, (giving students a broader perspective on the world, a stronger vocabulary for expressing ideas, etc), as opposed to a purely career focused one. I think it would be detrimental to culture and society in general if everyone was groomed from high-school to only ever consider the safe, paved, career footpath. This may take the form of allowing for more electives in vocational courses, encouragement to take double degrees, or eliminating barriers for later study (letting people change their minds, or even just reskilling when the robots take over). What I was meant by "subsidisation" is just the "somewhat" free education that exists in some places today, but has been more prevalent/widespread in the past. And while prioritising vocational degrees is fine to some extent, crippling participation in the Arts by making those qualifications prohibitively expensive (by not providing loans) is a bad idea imo.
• verbify 10y ago
  There are still people in the US without access to clean water. In some parts of the country, primary and secondary school education is abysmal. As far as I'm concerned, it's a question of priorities. Sure, I love the humanities, but the government only has so many tax dollars, and studying Shakespeare in university is not a priority.
  • dvtv75 10y ago
    So if the government stops wasteful funding of those fields considered to be not profitable, then these problems will be fixed?
    • conanbatt 10y ago
      It depends on what the people demand of government. Subsidy on higher education is another way to increase the wealth gap.
  • cpursley 10y ago
    > There are still people in the US without access to clean water. [citation needed]
    • grzm 10y ago
      Here are two, the first having been reported on this past summer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint_water_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint_water_crisis http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/08/12/even-in-the-us-access-to-clean-water-can-be-tough http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/08/12/even-in-the-u...
    • enraged_camel 10y ago
      Have you been living under a rock or something? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint_water_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint_water_crisis
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• zaroth 10y ago
  The only value provided by education is certainly not contribution to career. The question is should certain types of education be more directly subsidized by taxpayers than others. The underlying theory of subsidizing tuition is that a college degree increases lifetime earnings, which increases GDP and the tax base, ultimately paying for itself. Generally speaking, investments which do not pay for themselves are considered bad ones. Taxpayers don't want to make bad investments in subsidizing college education. Clearly this is happening at a massive scale, but I think liberal arts degrees are just the scapegoat. The reality is that $1.3 trillion in mostly unpayable and undischargable debt is a problem much bigger than earning the wrong degree. With the housing bubble and subsequent crash [1], the truth is that not everyone should have a mortgage, and pushing the homeownership rate above 64% was not sustainable. But college degree rates are on a much longer term and steady rise, and there's not clearly a bubble [2] but maybe I'm looking at the wrong data. If $1.3 trillion in student debt didn't actually result in significantly more people getting degrees than otherwise would have, then we are talking about a completely failed policy which is merely padding school endowments. Literally nothing to do with choice of degree. Imagine an alternative policy; making a $1.3 trillion investment in building and endowing 5,000 public universities. Significantly increase the supply of college education to drive down the cost. Would that have worked better? [1] - http://cdn.tradingeconomics.com/embed/?s=unitedstahomownrat&v=201611211358r&d1=19160101&d2=20161231&h=300&w=600 http://cdn.tradingeconomics.com/embed/?s=unitedstahomownrat&... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Educational_Attainment_in_the_United_States_2009.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_...
• cpursley 10y ago
  > There seems to be a strong sentiment in this thread that the only value provided by education is the contribution to career I don't believe that's the sentiment at all. Few on here will argue against the value of a well-rounded liberal arts education. However, the sentiment is that if an education requires borrowing piles of money, it should lead to employment which can realistically service the loan.
• jimmywanger 10y ago
  > This just seems so wrong. Why? Out of all the things to think are wrong, inability to pick a useless major based on financial status is wrong? As opposed to pollution in East Asia, conflict minerals in our supply chain, or slavery in shrimp fisheries in Thailand? > These fields don't usually/directly translate into a financial success, but they broaden our perspective and deepen our experience. Yes. Those are luxuries. For most of history, middle class people couldn't afford to study those fields. Colleges used to have much smaller enrollments. They'd either by A&M schools, used to help train up mechanics and farmers or engineering schools where you need to learn the math to become an engineer. Only a few prestigious ones (Yale, Harvard, etc etc) offered humanities majors, for landed gentry. The kind of people who didn't really have to work for a living. > And to a certain extent, "true" art is antithetical to capitalism That is ridiculous. "True" art has to appeal to an audience, and if it appeals, it will sell. You can't just put our art and say "hey, it's true, support me". That's a dangerously naive view of the world.
  • ud0 10y ago
    no truer words have been spoken here.
  • skwosh 10y ago
    Yes, those things are also wrong. As are decreasing socioeconomic mobility, racially & religiously motivated violence, lack of code hygiene and unit testing, etc... If you read my and other responses in this thread, the arts/humanities are far from useless (they just have a less direct economic effect). Historically important art/music has often been ignored, ridiculed, censored, etc. To suggest that it only has social/cultural value if it appeals to a popular/paying audience is overly simplistic. I'm not saying there's no overlap between capitalism and art in general, but if they're perfectly aligned then we miss the challenging, obscure, alternative, upsetting, disruptive, etc.
    • jimmywanger 10y ago
      > If you read my and other responses in this thread, the arts/humanities are far from useless (they just have a less direct economic effect). I never said arts/humanities are useless. I said they are luxuries, and the fact that people are bemoaning that it costs so much money to enter a non-lucrative profession is the very definition of a first world problem. > Historically important art/music has often been ignored, ridiculed, censored, etc. To suggest that it only has social/cultural value if it appeals to a popular/paying audience is overly simplistic. It might very well have social/cultural value. If you're not independently wealthy, you'll want it to appeal to a popular and paying audience if you like having food and shelter and toys. > I'm not saying there's no overlap between capitalism and art in general, but if they're perfectly aligned then we miss the challenging, obscure, alternative, upsetting, disruptive, etc. They're not perfectly aligned. However, if your "art" doesn't align with a paying audience, be prepared to be a starving artist with huge student loans. Society is not beholden to you to help you self-actualize your life. Get a job that pays money, and then do your obscure art in your spare time.
• digler999 10y ago
  > tuning out the abstract arts and sciences and... oh, the humanities Kind of ironic you say that, since the humanities programs themselves "tune out" all recognition to Eastern/South American/African art and humanities. I took 3 required "western traditions" classes, and except for a brief study of sumerian/egyptian cultures, the vast majority centered around dead white men.
• Kalium 10y ago
  You're absolutely right! A broader perspective, deeper experience, and the ability to effectively analyze and engage with human culture is immensely valuable. So, how valuable do you think all of those are when measured in terms of dollars and human lifetimes? I'd go so far as to suggest that learning the tools and language to construct a building, treat cancer, or program a computer all may offer significantly upside for human culture and civilization. This is in potential constract when items in that list are neglected in favor of Roman poetry, post-modern art, or dissecting the rhyming schemes of long-dead authors. The humanities have their place, but the list of things that broaden our perspectives and deepen our experiences is literally the list of all subjects that can be studied. The humanities have no monopoly on perspective, experience, or reasoning.