8 ms·

I suspect that at least some of this is due to confusing cause with effect: people see that most highly successful people have a collage degree, and wrongly con

• collageking 9y ago
  i too have a degree in collaging. my friends call me Scrapbook King.
• kgwgk 9y ago
  > Collage (from the French: coller, "to glue";[1] French pronunciation: ​[kɔ.laʒ]) is a technique of an art production, primarily used in the visual arts, where the artwork is made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole. :-)
  • tpurves 9y ago
    To be fair, studying collage did famously turn out pretty well, and economically too, for some young people like Picasso and Braque :) http://www.ideelart.com/module/csblog/post/159-1-cubist-collage.html http://www.ideelart.com/module/csblog/post/159-1-cubist-coll...
  • cirgue 9y ago
    Collage is good, but I hear that if you really want to join the economic elite, you have to get into decoupage.
    • jxub 9y ago
      Fitting into that decoupage Was a torturing massage To the pain camouflage I gobbled a hefty sausage That prospect was still better envisage Than college, lectures about collage
  • jxub 9y ago
    Interestingly college comes from the eponymous word in 14th century French [1] and the French term from Latin collegium. On the other hand, collage comes from coller in Old French and this one from kolla in Ancient Greek. It's a strange quirk of history that two such simillar words have such different origins. [1] https://www.etymonline.com/word/college https://www.etymonline.com/word/college [2] https://www.etymonline.com/word/collage https://www.etymonline.com/word/collage
    • tbassetto 9y ago
      And to add some confusion, the French word “collège” is roughly the equivalent of middle school…
      • CPLX 9y ago
        While in Spanish colegio is the equivalent of high school.
        • chrisweekly 9y ago
          And in German, "gymnasium" is high school. (No wonder the Germans do so well in sports!) /jk
          • jxub 9y ago
            In Poland "gimnazjum" used to be middle school until recently when the 8 year primary school system was restored because of heavy critique.
        • kgwgk 9y ago
          It can also be primary school. In Spain, high school is instituto. And escuela, like ecole in French or school in English, can refer to primary school or higher education institutions.
      • jxub 9y ago
        This rabbit hole goes deep... In Castillian Spanish "colegio" is often used for primary school, but sometimes as a placeholder name for any kind of compulsory education from preschool up to high school (sometimes in the shortened form "cole").
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• gaius 9y ago
  More generally, it’s a problem with confusing a thing with the symbol of that thing. You can’t make people richer by printing money and just handing it out, tho’ that doesn’t stop governments trying it (quantitative easing being the latest example). No mere coincidence that the same governments think they can educate people by printing and handing out degree certificates.
  • AnthonyMouse 9y ago
    > You can’t make people richer by printing money and just handing it out, tho’ that doesn’t stop governments trying it (quantitative easing being the latest example). That actually does work pretty well, because it causes people to spend money. If you had none before and the government prints some and gives it to you, now you have some and can spend it. If you had some before and you know the government is going to be printing more, you want to spend it before the inflation reduces its value. As long as the things people are stimulated to buy are economically productive, it increases real wealth. The thing you have to be careful with is combining it with policies that cause people to spend the money on unproductive things. See housing bubble.
    • UncleEntity 9y ago
      I used that argument during my counterfeiting trial, didn't go over too well until I started talking about broken windows...
      • thaumasiotes 9y ago
        Counterfeiting is one way of creating money and is generally unpopular. But making loans is a more mainstream way of accomplishing the same thing, and is in fact often considered to promote growth.
        • skookumchuck 9y ago
          Loans don't make people wealthier. The loans are backed by collateral, and have to be paid back. It is not at all the same thing as counterfeiting.
• simonsarris 9y ago
  This is what Taleb has said for years. Wealth leads to education. Education does not necessarily, or even commonly, lead to wealth. If you gain wealth but do not come from an aristocratic or "respected family in society" background, the way to gain prestige is by paying for education for yourself or your children. Buying your kids a degree is the modern day equivalent of buying a venal office in 1500's France or Spain. (Except Venal offices probably guaranteed a little more ROI in addition to the status!) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venal_office https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venal_office
  • f1notformula1 9y ago
    Agreed with this as well as the GP comment. Personally I think this also has the unfortunate side-effect of college's turning into de-facto gatekeepers to 'earned' status/success/wealth.
  • motohagiography 9y ago
    I like to summarize a particular coastal elitist view as, "Let them eat college."
    • dhimes 9y ago
      What is a "coastal elitist?" I've never heard that term. Since I live on the coast and have a few liberal friends, I know what a "coastal liberal" is. But "coastal elitist?" The only people I know who fit that bill are finance guys, and only a few at that.
      • OtterCoder 9y ago
        California and New England are so divorced from the concerns and ethos of the 'flyover' states that they may as well be on another planet. You may not think of yourself as elitist, but from the perspective of a Midwesterner, you almost certainly are.
        • moorhosj 9y ago
• jxub 9y ago
  It's a typical case of the Red Queen effect [1]. Maybe in some decades a PhD will even be required to get a job as a barista (wait, the future is already here!). [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen_hypothesis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen_hypothesis
• Spooky23 9y ago
  College isn’t the issue, it’s the lack of political will to make the political and social objective sustainable. An English or art history major has a lot to add to the world, both in terms of enlightenment and analytical ability. The problem is that it isn’t worth the debt load, and the incentive structure for tuition guarantees bad outcomes. My dad went to City College in NYC for free in the late 60s and received a great education. His dad was a widower with 5 kids who ran a neighborhood bar. The modern version of my dad would be either in the army by necessity or saddled with massive debt even in a public school. The societal cost of the current situation is awful — wage slave milennials who will never own a home or have a opportunity to accumulate wealth.
  • autokad 9y ago
    > "wage slave milennials who will never own a home or have a opportunity to accumulate wealth." not with the way they spend it. i graduated in '02 with 35k dept, couldn't find work till '05. started off at 29k doing tech support. But I didnt travel, I -never- ate out, always tried to keep my spending to almost nothing. two years before i bought my house, i lived in a micro apartment for 400/month to save money. bought a house by 2013. I dont think I qualify as being a millennial, but I do respect the hardships they faced, as I graduated during the 2001 recession and was smacked with the housing crisis as soon as I was starting to get on my feet. delayed employment and years of low wages have made it almost impossible for me to save enough to retire. however, when gainfully employed people say they cant afford a house, they very often mean: "I dont want to adjust my spending, and I dont want to be flexible for where I want to live."
    • closeparen 9y ago
      This has more to do with urbanization/centralization than with spending habits. A handful of firms headquartered in global cities are increasingly eating the world; this is making those cities expensive by increasing the importance of living in one of them. All the San Francisco complainers could likely find living-wage jobs and houses in what's left of America's small towns and stagnant cities, and choose not to. You're right. But IT jobs only exist in Middle America because the Bay Area and Seattle cloud companies haven't gotten to them yet. If you want to be on the forefront of your industry and on the right side of history, you probably need to do it from a place where homeownership is growing further and further out of reach to mere professionals. In those cities, the few thousand dollars a year you could save by cutting the restaurant meals and travel don't make a meaningful difference in your ability to amass as $200k down payment or plop down a $1m cash offer (increasingly necessary to win a bid).
• forkandwait 9y ago
  Given the evidence we have, I don't think we can say whether success -> college or college -> success or both or neither. Just a random anecdote, but I spend 10 years working crappy blue collar jobs after going to pretty good East Coast private dayschools, and while my blue collar compatriots had crappy study skills, they weren't really any smarter or dumber than my fellow students. Guess who did better in the long run...
• samsonradu 9y ago
  Peter Thiel had an interesting analysis on the higher-education issues [1]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzdiWDw4teo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzdiWDw4teo
• snambi 9y ago
  Today education is an industry. They influence and market themselves into the government that they are the authority for knowledge. Ultimately most of what I learnt in College is crap and useless. Just got a degree certificate which is useful to provide to governments. Knowledge has nothing to do with colleges/schools/universities.
  • skookumchuck 9y ago
    > Ultimately most of what I learnt in College is crap and useless College degree programs have a lot of flexibility in classes you choose to take. If you choose poorly, or look for the easy classes, your education will be worth a lot less. I.e. college provides you with an opportunity to learn. What you make of that is up to you.
    • pascalxus 9y ago
      No. They force you to learn mostly useless stuff. I can't just decide what I want to learn. Let's say I wanted to do a startup. Besides reading all the Paul Graham articles, the best way to learn how to run your own specific business is to learn by doing. School can only teach you the concepts. No, school in the world will be able to teach you which channel will generate your best customer for "your" business: only an A/B test can teach you that. Most colleges let you choose 1 semester of real world experience. And the other 95%, is classes that you have to pick from (even if you're creating your own degree). And, in a world where jobs/careers are becoming increasingly specialized, this antiquated form of education is no longer effective for many of us. The opportunity cost is enormous. At least 6 years of lost wages (500K+). You work for them for 6 years that they don't even pay for (not even minimum wage), and to add insult to injury, you need to pay them for it.
      • skookumchuck 9y ago
        > I can't just decide what I want to learn. Sure you can. You pick the college, you pick the major. > only an A/B test can teach you that. You learn how to do that and how to interpret the results in college. That's what your statistics class is about. > The opportunity cost is enormous. My college degree paid off enormously for me. Of course, I picked a major that paid well, and carefully selected the classes to maximize my value in the workplace. I also took accounting classes in college, because running a profitable business requires knowledge of accounting. (Most startups fail because the owners don't understand notions of profit, cash flow, balance sheets, etc.)
• erodr015 9y ago
  Your argument is based on anecdotal evidence. Do your research.
• derivt 9y ago
  Why collage and not college? https://www.learnenglish.de/mistakes/collagevscollege.html https://www.learnenglish.de/mistakes/collagevscollege.html
• agumonkey 9y ago
  I see a few non educational issues with this trend: - human nature has important points: teenage, young adult, young parents. Pushing education longer means delaying these. - being a student is not necessarily being an independant adult, very often it delay teenagehood, whereas previous generation had to start earning their life around 16. It creates a meeting point between high desires and responsibilities. Something that doesn't happen nowadays where kids 'may' (only a mild subjective opinion) satisfy desires through culture and fads - higher education was a bet on the previous structures, where being a grad student meant sure and high payoff. This changed... very often people with degrees are struggling. The education pipeline isn't met by a good demand in a way. I think it also change the family structure where parents became grand parents earlier, now you may start stable life after 25 and have kids at 30, whereas before people would have them before that. And IMO this factor is an important source of happiness and motivation for the whole family circle. Delaying means everybody is older and doesn't respond the same way at all.
  • closeparen 9y ago
    >whereas previous generation had to start earning their life around 16 The previous generation had access to vastly more efficient and heavily taxpayer-subsidized public universities, and could pay for them with typical teenage part-time jobs. Universal high school came on the scene in the 1940s. I'm sure there was a generation that had to earn its life starting at age 16, but it was more than a couple of generations ago.