10 ms·

The World Might Be Better Off Without College for Everyone

92 points by johnny313 9y ago

tyingq 9y ago
I'm sure it has downsides, but the US military does a fairly decent job of using their ASVAB[1] tests to see what jobs recruits are qualified for. As an employer, I'd much rather look at something like that rather than the name of a school and a GPA. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armed_Services_Vocational_Aptitude_Battery https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armed_Services_Vocational_Ap...
- burfog 9y ago
  Of course, but legal risks make things weird. If a company gives a test, and there exists a protected group that does less well on the test, then discriminatory intent can be presumed. It is certainly legal to give such a test, but some valid connection to the job requirements would need to be shown. Proving that in court is probably more trouble than the test is worth. Employers don't seem to get in trouble for requiring a degree though, or even for preferring a degree from a fancy institution, despite the fact that entering a degree program usually requires a test such as the SAT or ACT. So that is the workaround for avoiding legal trouble: demand an unnecessary degree in order to filter by test score without directly demanding a test score. It's kind of like money laundering, but for test scores. Colleges make out very well in this deal.
  - jessriedel 9y ago
    The constitutional "disparate impact" constraints regarding protected groups you're referring to don't apply to businesses in Europe, who don't seem to use cognitive ability tests that much more frequently http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2013/07/three_big_facts.html http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2013/07/three_big_facts....
throwawayjava 9y ago
We need a college education to be accessible to anyone who is qualified. That's different from universal higher education. Those signals get crossed a lot.
- jseliger 9y ago
  We need a college education to be accessible to anyone who is qualified You should read the article: The labor market doesn’t pay you for the useless subjects you master; it pays you for the preexisting traits you signal by mastering them. This is not a fringe idea. Michael Spence, Kenneth Arrow, and Joseph Stiglitz—all Nobel laureates in economics—made seminal contributions to the theory of educational signaling. Every college student who does the least work required to get good grades silently endorses the theory. But signaling plays almost no role in public discourse or policy making. As a society, we continue to push ever larger numbers of students into ever higher levels of education. The main effect is not better jobs or greater skill levels, but a credentialist arms race. If college is mostly about signaling, then it's an arms race, and the faster the herd, the more the individual most race in order to keep up. Accessibility to higher education is important, but much more of that education should be vocational in nature. Right now we have a lot of access to college, but that access has led to ballooning problems with student loans, along with Girard-style mimetic crises ( https://jakeseliger.com/2017/06/27/violence-and-the-sacred-on-campus/ https://jakeseliger.com/2017/06/27/violence-and-the-sacred-o... ).
  - SapphireSun 9y ago
    If college is part of a signaling arms race, if we conceive of education purely as a labor market good, why are we asking the laborers to stand down from that race and not the employers?
    - analog31 9y ago
      Indeed, if everybody knows that a college education is empty signaling, then how is it possibly still effective? The best and biggest employers should have the best information on the value of college education (in whole and in terms of its parts, such as humanities courses). They could expand their potential labor pool and make better or cheaper hires by adopting different hiring standards. If there's an information arbitrage going on here, somebody should be able to make money from it. In my view the elephant in the room is that maybe a college education is valuable after all, but we haven't put our finger on the precise reason.
jseliger 9y ago
Caplan's whole book, The Case Against Education, is excellent, and if it doesn't convince you, try also Paying for the Party: https://jakeseliger.com/2014/04/27/paying-for-the-party-elizabeth-armstrong-and-laura-hamilton https://jakeseliger.com/2014/04/27/paying-for-the-party-eliz... , which is, too, congruent with my own experience on the provider side of the education system. We ought to be moving towards de-stigmatizing and strengthening the vocational education system: http://seliger.com/2017/06/16/rare-good-political-news-boosting-apprenticeships http://seliger.com/2017/06/16/rare-good-political-news-boost... . Not everyone wants to be or is well-suited to being an abstract-symbol manipulator. I am! But just because someone doesn't have that disposition, doesn't mean they are less or worse of a person.
- djrobstep 9y ago
  Caplan is absolutely correct to say the much of education system is a waste of resources, a pointless zero-sum competition that simply re-arranges people on the socio-economic ladder. But strangely, Caplan is a libertarian capitalist, an advocate of the very system that sets up and enforces this a socio-economic ladder in the first place. He's also thus an opponent of any kind of welfare system that would make this competition less intense by making the bottom of the ladder a less miserable place to be and make the difference between the top and bottom less grotesque.
  - ThrustVectoring 9y ago
    You talk about the socio-economic ladder like it's a bad thing in and of itself. IMO, it's only a bad thing where it sets up an incentive gradient that encourages bad behavior. The libertarian capitalist view is very aware of how you're rewarded with socio-economic status when you feed the hungry, invent cures for diseases, and generally provide wanted goods and services.
    - djrobstep 9y ago
      > you're rewarded with socio-economic status when you feed the hungry LOL
osrec 9y ago
Purely from an individual financial perspective this also makes sense. Take the example of the UK: fees are a flat 9k per year. At the end of a 3 year degree you're at least 30k in debt (usually closer to 50k with living costs). What chance does a drama graduate from an unheard of university have of paying that back comfortably?! Has their degree really added to their ability to earn? Add to that a whopping 6% interest rate on student loans. It's enough to make a young person depressed. A number of my friends now use less that 5% of their degree knowledge and have learnt most of their craft on the job. Maybe we could just skip uni and get straight to learning on the job? It just seems so much more sensible for a lot of careers (CS included).
- nothrabannosir 9y ago
  I have to say, I use significant parts of my CS BSc all the time. Especially compilers, embedded systems, programming of course, algo complexity, language design, operating systems, graph theory, networking, databases, etc. My thesis was on a functional programming language and involved a deep dive into the compiler (all credit to my amazing professor for his knowledge and patience). My first job straight out was embedded systems engineer; I was asked about I2C buses in the interview (and wouldn’t in a million years have known about them without the embedded sys classes). Having worked on a compiler fundamentally changed how I look at code and how I program. I would never have made it anywhere close to where I am today without it. I can tell you that much.
  - osrec 9y ago
    Imagine if your professor worked in the field and you were his apprentice. Could that not have had a similar impact on your life? Perhaps it would have made you even better at applying the knowledge he imparted to you. Perhaps, it would make you additionally capable of teaching and transferring that knowledge to others in a very practical manner.
- intopieces 9y ago
  Fron a individual financial perspetive, this does not make sense, and the article says so: FTA: "Would I advise an academically well-prepared 18-year-old to skip college because she won’t learn much of value? Absolutely not. Studying irrelevancies for the next four years will impress future employers and raise her income potential. If she tried to leap straight into her first white-collar job, insisting, “I have the right stuff to graduate, I just choose not to,” employers wouldn’t believe her. To unilaterally curtail your education is to relegate yourself to a lower-quality pool of workers. For the individual, college pays."
justizin 9y ago
This take is so incredibly tired. What good would life be if we only had technical writers and PR people? Further, why stop at college? Why not just predetermine who is likely to be most successful based on their parents, and not school certain kids at all? This is beyond a slippery slope, and it's always expressed by someone with a LOT of education, like a fucking professor of economics with a PhD from an Ivy League school. My eyes couldn't be rolling harder. I have a successful career in tech of 20+ years, without a degree, and a HUGE amount of what's wrong with the culture of tech is that we are surrounded and led by folks who haven't studied sociology, political science, even economics, having HUMONGOUS impact on what those fields teach. Far more rarely will you hear people for whom higher education was always out of reach say that we think it had nothing to offer us. It's a great privilege, but I definitely think society could benefit from trying to get more education in the hands of folks who would do something with it, instead of greedy little fuckshits who think studying art and literature is a waste of time. I've been working in tech since I was 16 years old, and I can never get that time back. There are subjects which I'll never be as able to learn - particularly higher math - as I was at that age. I was excited to dive into my career when I was young, but I do not feel it yielded the best life I could have had.
- dvt 9y ago
  > My eyes couldn't be rolling harder. I have a successful career in tech of 20+ years, without a degree, and a HUGE amount of what's wrong with the culture of tech is that we are surrounded and led by folks who haven't studied sociology, political science, even economics, having HUMONGOUS impact on what those fields teach. Couldn't agree with this more. I'm relatively young, but I'm trying to get out of tech (and especially engineering) because of the lack of a stimulating cultural environment. The kind of conversations I like having, the kind of women I'd like to meet, and the kind of company I like to keep just don't exist in tech. Talking about video games was cool in my early 20s, but I've had 30+ coworkers that literally only talked about video games and the most recent tech stack. Yuck. Coming from having studied philosophy (at an elite school) and where most of my old classmates are lawyers now, it's kind of a bummer. As an aside, startup people/founders/investors tend to be much more eclectic, but tech, at the ground level, is an intellectual wasteland.
cmurf 9y ago
We're also incentivizing a disparity in credential signalling by making it so straightforward for 16 year olds to drop out of highschool. I'm not aware of any industrialized nation that makes this so easy.
solidsnack9000 9y ago
It’s beneficial for a broad segment of society to be in conversant in the liberal arts — particularly history. Not everyone needs or wants a degree, but it’s hard to have an informed or politically engaged populace without this kind of education making its way into everyone’s hands.
- justAnotherNET 9y ago
  And why can't high school communicate these critically important concepts? The current trend seems to consider those 4 years as utterly wasted. The biggest problem I have with education, as someone from an "Elite" engineering school, is the sheer inefficiency of it. We spend the first quarter of our entire lifetimes to get "educated". There has to be a better way and throwing more years at it isn't the answer.
intopieces 9y ago
Notice that every time someone writes an article about how some people are not cut out for higher education, it's always other people's kids who should avoid it. I'd like to know what Bryan Caplan's (the author) kids are up to these days. Are they welders? Plumbers? That credential inflation is a topic of this article really shows the author's hand: someone keep these people out of higher ed, they don't deserve it and they're just making it harder for my offspring to differentiate themselves in the job market.
- JasonFruit 9y ago
  I've made the same argument as the writer, and I have children. Frankly, I'm not sure how to advise them when the time comes. It may well be that for some, I'd suggest a college education, while for others, I might suggest learning a trade and getting ahead in it while they're young. That is to say, I think your comment makes a conclusion based on your assumptions about people who question the universal value of higher education, and you don't have anything real to back it up.
  - intopieces 9y ago
    I question the universal value of higher education, too. But I come to a different conclusion: that is, that education ought to be reformed to make it more universally valuable, not systematically kept from the people it failed.
  - jimmaswell 9y ago
    Here's one argument against college education for jobs: you're very likely to be forced to move far from home to find any work in your field. There just weren't programming jobs within an hour of me in upper NY so I had to move to a place in New Jersey that I don't like that much out of necessity. I'm sure it would've went the same for chemical engineering or whatever else with very few exceptions, maybe law or medicine. If I'd taken a trade like electrical work or plumbing I could live anywhere I wanted - everyone has toilets and wires - but now I'm at the mercy of the programming job market until I can transition to remote work, so it'll be years until I get to live somewhere to my preference. Where do you live? If it's not in or very close to highly dense areas, encourage trades if you don't want to have to take a plane or drive hours to visit your grandchildren.
Hasz 9y ago
Interesting article (also something of a condensed version of his book, The Case against Education), and a couple of counterpoints. Caplan is making several seemingly-logical assumptions that most readers will miss. I will say that at least some of these assumptions are false, negating the conclusion. Caplan assumes that people are largely immutable ("What I’m cynical about is people."). His touts several studies about both the retention and application of knowledge that support his point excellently. That being said, these studies are, at best, empirical estimations of a philosophical issue. The issue of "real world" ability suffers from being largely impossible to test, has no real definition, and is fraught with assumptions, none of which make for rigorous science. Caplan, as I imagine, is taking college at its full cost when arguing that less people ought to go. I would like to point out it is fully possible to provide a college level education for significantly less than is done so now. I believe point this out makes his pragmatic argument much less strong. I take issue to this claim in particular "My exams are designed to measure comprehension, not memorization. Yet in a good class, four test-takers out of 40 demonstrate true economic understanding." If just 10% of students understand, I would argue the teacher is either grossly ineffective or the student is grossly underprepared. Teasing out the fault is difficult, but don't forget, this anecdote is wholly from the teacher. Also, what constitutes "true economic understanding"? I don't disagree with Caplan's conclusion personally, but I do disagree with how he arrives there. Calling students philistines is both an unfair generalization and a sidelining insult. His assumptions allow him to arrive at an agreeable point, but that path taken is full of disagreeable compromises.
- wallace_f 9y ago
  >I would like to point out it is fully possible to provide a college level education for significantly less than is done so now Yea, exactly. That, and I just wish I could study and compete for degrees in an open, competitive and lucrative system.
ChrisRackauckas 9y ago
Why teach everyone advanced math and physics? Because you have to start training for it at a very young age in order to have mathematically and mentally matured enough to be ready for a modern PhD in your early 20's. The system is inefficient but has naturally evolved to give everyone a shot, starting everyone on this path and letting people drop out at different steps along the way. Our society needs scienstis, lawyers, doctors, and MBAs. Everyone's parent want their child to be one of these. So everyone is sent along this path. It's better than the old style where you could only go to school if you were rich enough. That kind of society couldn't compete with a society that found the best among millions instead of thousands and thus naturally eroded away.
- palimpsests 9y ago
  The fraction of people out of the total population that will actually want (need?) a PhD in math, physics, or other related fields doesn't really support your statement. Also, I know plenty of parents who don't have specific career goals in mind for their children, who support their children following their own calling towards a particular profession.
Chiba-City 9y ago
It is easier today than ever before to share a basic great books history and philosophy "story" today. We can include our primate biology, geology, food history and organizational and strategic narratives from Sun Tzu to Aristotle to Schelling's game theory to Robert's Rules of order. If we're going to live to 100, we should should share some tooling for how to get there better together. Education is not the problem. Constant crop dusting on filmic conflict fictions and staged sport conflicts is the problem. Living together in an industrial world secreted behind walls or even continents away on 1-way broadcast communications is foolhardy.
znpy 9y ago
Classic American: "I can't make money on it, it's useless". Having an education (at least a high school diploma) is supposed to make you a civil and functioning citizen of your country, with enough knowledge to understand (albeit at a basic level) why things are the way they are.
- dang 9y ago
  National swipes are not allowed on HN, regardless of which nation. Please don't do it here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
mnm1 9y ago
The article defeats its own arguments with statements like, "In other words, education enriches individuals much more than it enriches nations." Hard to argue against education at that point but the article tries anyway. Let's ignore the fact that that is the point of education. When was it the the object of education to teach specific job skills? That's a new one to me. After all, we must be talking about fortune tellers if you can tell which job skills will be in most demand and pay best two decades from now. It's sad that people don't want to learn, educate, or improve themselves. It's a defeatist attitude and sad that we as a society are willing to explore so little of people's potential. This attitude towards education in the US is, in many ways, more corrosive to our society than the lack of quality education itself.

92 points by johnny313 9y ago

I'm sure it has downsides, but the US military does a fairly decent job of using their ASVAB[1] tests to see what jobs recruits are qualified for. As an employer, I'd much rather look at something like that rather than the name of a school and a GPA. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armed_Services_Vocational_Aptitude_Battery https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armed_Services_Vocational_Ap...

burfog 9y ago
Of course, but legal risks make things weird. If a company gives a test, and there exists a protected group that does less well on the test, then discriminatory intent can be presumed. It is certainly legal to give such a test, but some valid connection to the job requirements would need to be shown. Proving that in court is probably more trouble than the test is worth. Employers don't seem to get in trouble for requiring a degree though, or even for preferring a degree from a fancy institution, despite the fact that entering a degree program usually requires a test such as the SAT or ACT. So that is the workaround for avoiding legal trouble: demand an unnecessary degree in order to filter by test score without directly demanding a test score. It's kind of like money laundering, but for test scores. Colleges make out very well in this deal.
- jessriedel 9y ago
  The constitutional "disparate impact" constraints regarding protected groups you're referring to don't apply to businesses in Europe, who don't seem to use cognitive ability tests that much more frequently http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2013/07/three_big_facts.html http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2013/07/three_big_facts....

throwawayjava 9y ago

We need a college education to be accessible to anyone who is qualified. That's different from universal higher education. Those signals get crossed a lot.

jseliger 9y ago
We need a college education to be accessible to anyone who is qualified You should read the article: The labor market doesn’t pay you for the useless subjects you master; it pays you for the preexisting traits you signal by mastering them. This is not a fringe idea. Michael Spence, Kenneth Arrow, and Joseph Stiglitz—all Nobel laureates in economics—made seminal contributions to the theory of educational signaling. Every college student who does the least work required to get good grades silently endorses the theory. But signaling plays almost no role in public discourse or policy making. As a society, we continue to push ever larger numbers of students into ever higher levels of education. The main effect is not better jobs or greater skill levels, but a credentialist arms race. If college is mostly about signaling, then it's an arms race, and the faster the herd, the more the individual most race in order to keep up. Accessibility to higher education is important, but much more of that education should be vocational in nature. Right now we have a lot of access to college, but that access has led to ballooning problems with student loans, along with Girard-style mimetic crises ( https://jakeseliger.com/2017/06/27/violence-and-the-sacred-on-campus/ https://jakeseliger.com/2017/06/27/violence-and-the-sacred-o... ).
- SapphireSun 9y ago
  If college is part of a signaling arms race, if we conceive of education purely as a labor market good, why are we asking the laborers to stand down from that race and not the employers?
  - analog31 9y ago
    Indeed, if everybody knows that a college education is empty signaling, then how is it possibly still effective? The best and biggest employers should have the best information on the value of college education (in whole and in terms of its parts, such as humanities courses). They could expand their potential labor pool and make better or cheaper hires by adopting different hiring standards. If there's an information arbitrage going on here, somebody should be able to make money from it. In my view the elephant in the room is that maybe a college education is valuable after all, but we haven't put our finger on the precise reason.

jseliger 9y ago

Caplan's whole book, The Case Against Education, is excellent, and if it doesn't convince you, try also Paying for the Party: https://jakeseliger.com/2014/04/27/paying-for-the-party-elizabeth-armstrong-and-laura-hamilton https://jakeseliger.com/2014/04/27/paying-for-the-party-eliz... , which is, too, congruent with my own experience on the provider side of the education system. We ought to be moving towards de-stigmatizing and strengthening the vocational education system: http://seliger.com/2017/06/16/rare-good-political-news-boosting-apprenticeships http://seliger.com/2017/06/16/rare-good-political-news-boost... . Not everyone wants to be or is well-suited to being an abstract-symbol manipulator. I am! But just because someone doesn't have that disposition, doesn't mean they are less or worse of a person.

djrobstep 9y ago
Caplan is absolutely correct to say the much of education system is a waste of resources, a pointless zero-sum competition that simply re-arranges people on the socio-economic ladder. But strangely, Caplan is a libertarian capitalist, an advocate of the very system that sets up and enforces this a socio-economic ladder in the first place. He's also thus an opponent of any kind of welfare system that would make this competition less intense by making the bottom of the ladder a less miserable place to be and make the difference between the top and bottom less grotesque.
- ThrustVectoring 9y ago
  You talk about the socio-economic ladder like it's a bad thing in and of itself. IMO, it's only a bad thing where it sets up an incentive gradient that encourages bad behavior. The libertarian capitalist view is very aware of how you're rewarded with socio-economic status when you feed the hungry, invent cures for diseases, and generally provide wanted goods and services.
  - djrobstep 9y ago
    > you're rewarded with socio-economic status when you feed the hungry LOL

osrec 9y ago

Purely from an individual financial perspective this also makes sense. Take the example of the UK: fees are a flat 9k per year. At the end of a 3 year degree you're at least 30k in debt (usually closer to 50k with living costs). What chance does a drama graduate from an unheard of university have of paying that back comfortably?! Has their degree really added to their ability to earn? Add to that a whopping 6% interest rate on student loans. It's enough to make a young person depressed. A number of my friends now use less that 5% of their degree knowledge and have learnt most of their craft on the job. Maybe we could just skip uni and get straight to learning on the job? It just seems so much more sensible for a lot of careers (CS included).

nothrabannosir 9y ago
I have to say, I use significant parts of my CS BSc all the time. Especially compilers, embedded systems, programming of course, algo complexity, language design, operating systems, graph theory, networking, databases, etc. My thesis was on a functional programming language and involved a deep dive into the compiler (all credit to my amazing professor for his knowledge and patience). My first job straight out was embedded systems engineer; I was asked about I2C buses in the interview (and wouldn’t in a million years have known about them without the embedded sys classes). Having worked on a compiler fundamentally changed how I look at code and how I program. I would never have made it anywhere close to where I am today without it. I can tell you that much.
- osrec 9y ago
  Imagine if your professor worked in the field and you were his apprentice. Could that not have had a similar impact on your life? Perhaps it would have made you even better at applying the knowledge he imparted to you. Perhaps, it would make you additionally capable of teaching and transferring that knowledge to others in a very practical manner.
intopieces 9y ago
Fron a individual financial perspetive, this does not make sense, and the article says so: FTA: "Would I advise an academically well-prepared 18-year-old to skip college because she won’t learn much of value? Absolutely not. Studying irrelevancies for the next four years will impress future employers and raise her income potential. If she tried to leap straight into her first white-collar job, insisting, “I have the right stuff to graduate, I just choose not to,” employers wouldn’t believe her. To unilaterally curtail your education is to relegate yourself to a lower-quality pool of workers. For the individual, college pays."

justizin 9y ago

This take is so incredibly tired. What good would life be if we only had technical writers and PR people? Further, why stop at college? Why not just predetermine who is likely to be most successful based on their parents, and not school certain kids at all? This is beyond a slippery slope, and it's always expressed by someone with a LOT of education, like a fucking professor of economics with a PhD from an Ivy League school. My eyes couldn't be rolling harder. I have a successful career in tech of 20+ years, without a degree, and a HUGE amount of what's wrong with the culture of tech is that we are surrounded and led by folks who haven't studied sociology, political science, even economics, having HUMONGOUS impact on what those fields teach. Far more rarely will you hear people for whom higher education was always out of reach say that we think it had nothing to offer us. It's a great privilege, but I definitely think society could benefit from trying to get more education in the hands of folks who would do something with it, instead of greedy little fuckshits who think studying art and literature is a waste of time. I've been working in tech since I was 16 years old, and I can never get that time back. There are subjects which I'll never be as able to learn - particularly higher math - as I was at that age. I was excited to dive into my career when I was young, but I do not feel it yielded the best life I could have had.

dvt 9y ago
> My eyes couldn't be rolling harder. I have a successful career in tech of 20+ years, without a degree, and a HUGE amount of what's wrong with the culture of tech is that we are surrounded and led by folks who haven't studied sociology, political science, even economics, having HUMONGOUS impact on what those fields teach. Couldn't agree with this more. I'm relatively young, but I'm trying to get out of tech (and especially engineering) because of the lack of a stimulating cultural environment. The kind of conversations I like having, the kind of women I'd like to meet, and the kind of company I like to keep just don't exist in tech. Talking about video games was cool in my early 20s, but I've had 30+ coworkers that literally only talked about video games and the most recent tech stack. Yuck. Coming from having studied philosophy (at an elite school) and where most of my old classmates are lawyers now, it's kind of a bummer. As an aside, startup people/founders/investors tend to be much more eclectic, but tech, at the ground level, is an intellectual wasteland.

cmurf 9y ago

We're also incentivizing a disparity in credential signalling by making it so straightforward for 16 year olds to drop out of highschool. I'm not aware of any industrialized nation that makes this so easy.

solidsnack9000 9y ago

It’s beneficial for a broad segment of society to be in conversant in the liberal arts — particularly history. Not everyone needs or wants a degree, but it’s hard to have an informed or politically engaged populace without this kind of education making its way into everyone’s hands.

justAnotherNET 9y ago
And why can't high school communicate these critically important concepts? The current trend seems to consider those 4 years as utterly wasted. The biggest problem I have with education, as someone from an "Elite" engineering school, is the sheer inefficiency of it. We spend the first quarter of our entire lifetimes to get "educated". There has to be a better way and throwing more years at it isn't the answer.

intopieces 9y ago

Notice that every time someone writes an article about how some people are not cut out for higher education, it's always other people's kids who should avoid it. I'd like to know what Bryan Caplan's (the author) kids are up to these days. Are they welders? Plumbers? That credential inflation is a topic of this article really shows the author's hand: someone keep these people out of higher ed, they don't deserve it and they're just making it harder for my offspring to differentiate themselves in the job market.

JasonFruit 9y ago
I've made the same argument as the writer, and I have children. Frankly, I'm not sure how to advise them when the time comes. It may well be that for some, I'd suggest a college education, while for others, I might suggest learning a trade and getting ahead in it while they're young. That is to say, I think your comment makes a conclusion based on your assumptions about people who question the universal value of higher education, and you don't have anything real to back it up.
- intopieces 9y ago
  I question the universal value of higher education, too. But I come to a different conclusion: that is, that education ought to be reformed to make it more universally valuable, not systematically kept from the people it failed.
- jimmaswell 9y ago
  Here's one argument against college education for jobs: you're very likely to be forced to move far from home to find any work in your field. There just weren't programming jobs within an hour of me in upper NY so I had to move to a place in New Jersey that I don't like that much out of necessity. I'm sure it would've went the same for chemical engineering or whatever else with very few exceptions, maybe law or medicine. If I'd taken a trade like electrical work or plumbing I could live anywhere I wanted - everyone has toilets and wires - but now I'm at the mercy of the programming job market until I can transition to remote work, so it'll be years until I get to live somewhere to my preference. Where do you live? If it's not in or very close to highly dense areas, encourage trades if you don't want to have to take a plane or drive hours to visit your grandchildren.

Hasz 9y ago

Interesting article (also something of a condensed version of his book, The Case against Education), and a couple of counterpoints. Caplan is making several seemingly-logical assumptions that most readers will miss. I will say that at least some of these assumptions are false, negating the conclusion. Caplan assumes that people are largely immutable ("What I’m cynical about is people."). His touts several studies about both the retention and application of knowledge that support his point excellently. That being said, these studies are, at best, empirical estimations of a philosophical issue. The issue of "real world" ability suffers from being largely impossible to test, has no real definition, and is fraught with assumptions, none of which make for rigorous science. Caplan, as I imagine, is taking college at its full cost when arguing that less people ought to go. I would like to point out it is fully possible to provide a college level education for significantly less than is done so now. I believe point this out makes his pragmatic argument much less strong. I take issue to this claim in particular "My exams are designed to measure comprehension, not memorization. Yet in a good class, four test-takers out of 40 demonstrate true economic understanding." If just 10% of students understand, I would argue the teacher is either grossly ineffective or the student is grossly underprepared. Teasing out the fault is difficult, but don't forget, this anecdote is wholly from the teacher. Also, what constitutes "true economic understanding"? I don't disagree with Caplan's conclusion personally, but I do disagree with how he arrives there. Calling students philistines is both an unfair generalization and a sidelining insult. His assumptions allow him to arrive at an agreeable point, but that path taken is full of disagreeable compromises.

wallace_f 9y ago
>I would like to point out it is fully possible to provide a college level education for significantly less than is done so now Yea, exactly. That, and I just wish I could study and compete for degrees in an open, competitive and lucrative system.

ChrisRackauckas 9y ago

Why teach everyone advanced math and physics? Because you have to start training for it at a very young age in order to have mathematically and mentally matured enough to be ready for a modern PhD in your early 20's. The system is inefficient but has naturally evolved to give everyone a shot, starting everyone on this path and letting people drop out at different steps along the way. Our society needs scienstis, lawyers, doctors, and MBAs. Everyone's parent want their child to be one of these. So everyone is sent along this path. It's better than the old style where you could only go to school if you were rich enough. That kind of society couldn't compete with a society that found the best among millions instead of thousands and thus naturally eroded away.

palimpsests 9y ago
The fraction of people out of the total population that will actually want (need?) a PhD in math, physics, or other related fields doesn't really support your statement. Also, I know plenty of parents who don't have specific career goals in mind for their children, who support their children following their own calling towards a particular profession.

Chiba-City 9y ago

It is easier today than ever before to share a basic great books history and philosophy "story" today. We can include our primate biology, geology, food history and organizational and strategic narratives from Sun Tzu to Aristotle to Schelling's game theory to Robert's Rules of order. If we're going to live to 100, we should should share some tooling for how to get there better together. Education is not the problem. Constant crop dusting on filmic conflict fictions and staged sport conflicts is the problem. Living together in an industrial world secreted behind walls or even continents away on 1-way broadcast communications is foolhardy.

znpy 9y ago

Classic American: "I can't make money on it, it's useless". Having an education (at least a high school diploma) is supposed to make you a civil and functioning citizen of your country, with enough knowledge to understand (albeit at a basic level) why things are the way they are.

dang 9y ago
National swipes are not allowed on HN, regardless of which nation. Please don't do it here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

mnm1 9y ago

The article defeats its own arguments with statements like, "In other words, education enriches individuals much more than it enriches nations." Hard to argue against education at that point but the article tries anyway. Let's ignore the fact that that is the point of education. When was it the the object of education to teach specific job skills? That's a new one to me. After all, we must be talking about fortune tellers if you can tell which job skills will be in most demand and pay best two decades from now. It's sad that people don't want to learn, educate, or improve themselves. It's a defeatist attitude and sad that we as a society are willing to explore so little of people's potential. This attitude towards education in the US is, in many ways, more corrosive to our society than the lack of quality education itself.