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This data is pretty useless without data from other time periods. And it seems like bashing high education is the cool thing to do nowadays. We use stories of

This data is pretty useless without data from other time periods. And it seems like bashing high education is the cool thing to do nowadays. We use stories of the "I'm $200,000 in debt from my Ivy league B.A. in English and no one wants to hire me!" nature to justify that higher education is becoming irrelevant. But I think we're all missing several pieces of the puzzle. One piece is that forget that what we're trying to optimize is happiness, and if those 13.4% of waiters are happy, then who cares if they have a BA or MA? OK, maybe we've wasted government money on their education, but can we call it a waste just because they didn't use that BA in English to do Englishy stuff? No. They're probably a more refined person because of those four years. I do agree that higher education is broken. But higher education is broken in every single freaking country. The French spend less time in college, but they have a higher unemployment rate than us. Kenya's universities are based on entrance exams that encourages memorization and discourages critical thinking and imagination. Asia's universities are based on elite entrance exams where students to spend up to a year studying for. Yes, higher education is broken. But so is everything else in this world.

yummyfajitas 16y ago
OK, maybe we've wasted government money on their education, but can we call it a waste just because they didn't use that BA in English to do Englishy stuff? No. They're probably a more refined person because of those four years. Are you willing to go up to 40 middle class families and demand that each of them pay $1000 to have a more refined waiter who vaguely remembers some Proust after partying for 4 years? If not, then we can call it a waste. Wasting "government money" isn't a tiny drop in some gigantic abstract pool of thousand dollar bills. It's hard earned money taken by force from ordinary Americans. It's not government money, it's your money.
- igravious 16y ago
  >> It's hard earned money taken by force from ordinary Americans. It's not government money, it's your money. The money in your hand only has the value it has because we collectively instill a value in it. This is true, isn't it? I mean it really is just numbers and ink on pieces of paper and electrons over a bunch of wires. But if it were just the ink and and numbers and electrons then I could write a few zeros on a piece of fancy paper and become rich overnight. But then there is the printing presses, which are guarded and the vaults that are guarded and the software systems that are guarded and the counterfeiting laws none of which you created. So "your money" (see? I can do quotes too) is really society's money. Moreover we collectively agree that the government allocates a portion of all of our earnings and recognize that this happens nowadays in a mainly un-coerced fashion. Sorry it inconveniences you. Maybe we can argue about waste without bringing your pet ideology into it.
  - jimmyk 16y ago
    The form of the money is completely irrelevant. What's relevant is that resources are being allocated to one sector of the economy that does less to raise the standard of living than other sectors would likely be able to do with those same resources. Therefore the government, in this instance, is preventing the standard of living from increasing as much as it would have otherwise, which happens to hurt real people. Ensuring that the resources they take from the private sector are used better than they otherwise would have been should be one of the primary concerns any government has when it decides to meddle in an economy because the consequences can negatively impact a lot of people.
  - yummyfajitas 16y ago
    I'm not bringing ideology into it. I'm focusing on the human cost of spending money, that's all. So lets put it another way, since you want to get into arguments over the value of green pieces of paper. $40k worth of subsidies for education are about 2500 hours of labor from a median laborer. Are you willing to force 25 median Americans to work 100 hours each, just so that their waiter can party for 4 years and maybe quote Beowulf? The output of those 2500 hours of labor are what makes the green pieces of paper worth something. But then there is the printing presses, which are guarded and the vaults that are guarded and the software systems that are guarded and the counterfeiting laws none of which you created. I have, however, paid far more than my fair share for this service, which probably amounts to only a few dollars per person per year. It's also dishonest for you to bring public goods into this. We are discussing redistribution of wealth in the form of private goods, not public goods (such as anti-counterfeiting, police and fire protection). Now, you might argue there are public benefits to education (e.g., a well educated labor force is more productive). But that is irrelevant for this discussion - we are discussing workers who are choosing not to make a productive use of our investment in them.
    - timwiseman 16y ago
      I agree with every statement you have made highly, except for one small but significant nitpick. Many of those people are not choosing not to make productive use of it, but failing to find a good way to do it. I have an acquantaince with an MA in English literature who was unable to find any job related to it, my own wife failed to find any reasonable job with a BA in History and is pursuing her MA so she can teach at the community college, hopefully. You could say that they deliberately chose degrees that are hard to market and I would agree, but once they had those degrees neither of them chose not to use it deliberately. Also, I know that is anecodatal, but I strongly suspect a fair number of those PHDed waiters failed to find employment in their field rather than chose not to.
- duhprey 16y ago
  I might go up to 100,000,000 families and ask them to pay one penny so that 100 waiters can clearly explain what's on the menu...
  - yummyfajitas 16y ago
    Most consumers of waiter service already pay up to 20% of the total bill for the waiter to be helpful and friendly.
    - duhprey 16y ago
      But that's after the point at which anything can be done educationally. My point wasn't helpful and friendly, illiterate people aren't any less helpful or friendly than literates.
- stinkytaco 16y ago
  Sure, but you could say that about anything the government spends money on. I happen to believe that the value of the educational system far outweighs the small amount of money wasted on 5,000 waiters. And the bureaucracy of weeding out those 5,000 waiters would far outspend the cost of just paying for their PhDs. Do you suggest that we mandate what jobs anyone who gets a state education gets?
  - yummyfajitas 16y ago
    That's exactly the test I would use for anything the government spends money on. It's called a cost/benefit analysis. If our elected officials are not doing that, we should immediately vote them out of office. Would I demand 100 hours of labor from 25 people to lock a rapist away from them for 2 years? Yes. Would I demand 100 hours of labor from 25 people to lock a pot smoker away from them for 2 years? No. 2500 hours of labor to kill a few Iraqis? Not liking that so much. 2500 hours of labor to vaccinate 800 babies against MMR? I'm ok with that. Now, it might not be cost effective to police the educational system for people wasting their education. But that's not the argument elbenshira was making, or what I was arguing against.
    - access_denied 16y ago
      An English BA who is waiting tables isn't necessarily wasting their education.
    - shadowfox 16y ago
      The problem with this sort of thing is that the perceived benefit is often quite subjective. It is hard to define and get people to agree on a quantitative measure to use for evaluation
- abeppu 16y ago
  Higher education is not meant to be job training. No one gets an English BA because they think that's the path that will get them the best jobs; they get it because they think it will make them happy. And if the point of higher education isn't job training, it's silly to measure its efficacy based on how well it helps graduates into jobs which wouldn't have otherwise been accessible. And the benefit to society of a person (who eventually waits tables) getting an education (which wasn't about how to wait tables) doesn't need to be manifested while that person brings you your check. That person has a whole life outside of work where they can benefit from a richer understanding of the world. As an example, we're a (kinda) democratic society, and a lot of the sanity of our government and policy rests on the judgment of the citizenry. Dealing with political rhetoric, forming opinions about sometimes highly technical public policy issues, and understanding economic policy at a minimum require an ability to critically evaluate rhetoric, some level of scientific literacy, and some numeracy, which are all benefited by a well rounded undergrad program. In some places, the political process requires that people not only be able to follow and evaluate political platforms, but produce arguments on their own (I'm thinking of state primary caucuses in particular). Having an educated populace is important independent of the desire of individuals to be wealthy or professionally successful. Just because we need waiters and parking lot attendants and bar tenders doesn't mean education is wasted on the portion of the population which fills that need. If your concern is with public funds subsidizing education, I would actually have greater objection to funding educations for people that go on to earn high salaries in jobs that require high levels of education -- those are students who could afford to take loans and pay them back.
  - yummyfajitas 16y ago
    That person has a whole life outside of work where they can benefit from a richer understanding of the world. Why should the 3/4 Americans without a college degree be forced to subsidize the private enjoyment of an individual? Should the government also subsidize my private enjoyment of video games, pornography or martial arts? As an example, we're a (kinda) democratic society, and a lot of the sanity of our government and policy rests on the judgment of the citizenry. If that is the case, would you favor denying the vote to people unable to make correct judgements, deal with political rhetoric or form opinions about highly technical issues? It seems that filtering the noise is far cheaper than increasing the signal, in this case.
- kasterma 16y ago
  I think it might only be a waste if you can come up with a way to predict who is going to be the person with a BA in English that doesn't use it. If you can't predict it, then it means that those who do use it are more expensive than sticker price (their cost would be "total costs to get people BA's in English"/"total number of people that actually use it").
- harshpotatoes 16y ago
  I think it's important for you to not go trolling. A middle class family paying a thousand dollars for one complete stranger to go to school is ridiculous sum of money, which is exactly why nobody pays that much money. Please, in the future, use figures which are more closely based in reality. However, the fact remains that middle class families do pay for part of the tuition of certain people (people who go to public school, and those who get federal loans). It is important to question why from time to time, so I will address your argument, and I will assume a number more realistic (I don't know what a more realistic number would be, and I'm not going to do your work for you). I think it is very important for middle class families to partially pay for part of student's college tuitions. For one, there is the very likely possibility that one of these students will go on to be a future Proust, and I think it is very important to have the resources available for such a person, even though much of that money will be 'wasted' on people who will go on to be waiters. Secondly, we live in a mostly democratic society, for better or for worse the opinions of the public can very much shape important political and economic decisions made by our leaders. It is therefore extremely important that the public be educated enough to understand arguments made by our leaders, and to be able to parse evidence presented by experts. Obviously I don't expect the public to understand all of the details of everything, but they need to be able to listen, and to know when they don't know anything at all and shut the fuck up. We as a society can't move forward without understanding what happened in our past, what we've done right, and what we've done wrong. Right now, high school is very good about telling us certain things, while college is very good helping us understand things. For better or for worse, at some point we have learn how to analyze, and that is something that is not done very well in high school. So, you can either ask your middle class families to pay up to reform high schools, or you can ask middle class families to continue to pay for some individual's college tuitions.
  - electromagnetic 16y ago
    > A middle class family paying a thousand dollars for one complete stranger to go to school is ridiculous sum of money, which is exactly why nobody pays that much money. > However, the fact remains that middle class families do pay for part of the tuition of certain people (people who go to public school, and those who get federal loans). It is important to question why from time to time, so I will address your argument, and I will assume a number more realistic (I don't know what a more realistic number would be, and I'm not going to do your work for you). So you clearly don't know what a realistic figure is, which means you obviously have no clue as to what an unrealistic figure is, yet you're highly critical of his ballpark analogy yet you can't even guesstimate to a figure within the city that the ballpark is in! Perhaps you should ask where the original commenter is from. I grew up in the UK, the government paid for around 800GBP worth of education in night classes I took. I'm not even sure what the price tag on my 2-year certification course was but I'm sure it was a little more than a weekly Psychology and Sociology course. As I've said before here, what pays my bills is using a hammer. At one point I was coding in HTML and PHP while I was 14 in high school, and I was pushed by every faculty member into going to university (I'm assuming to justify their own existence). I would have loved to go to university, I would have loved to have the opportunity to study psychology or ancient history, or some such... there's books for curiosity. I use a hammer, and metal shears, and a drill. These are the basic of the basic, the most mundane objects in existence and I see dozens of intelligent, well educated people walk into a job and quit or get fired because they struggle to use them because of shitty education. I have my woodwork and metalwork teachers to thank for a good education, one that anywhere in the world is guaranteed to pay my bills. Why is our education system set out to target self-actualization when it doesn't even teach us how to achieve our physiological needs. First and foremost we should be teaching our children how to make money; how to work a job. Second, we should be teaching our children how to spend money; avoiding reliance on credit cards and debt traps. The aim is to improve peoples happiness, but without even teaching the basic steps on the hierarchy, it's a fruitless effort. If more money out of my pocket would mean better education for the next generation, I'm happy to do it. I would actually love to see a generation of children told "you know it's okay to want to do carpentry, or to become a mechanic". If bashing the frivolity of higher education will get that, then I'll be happy to bash away to get a decent economy and a decent citizenry.
- Niten 16y ago
  > Are you willing to go up to 40 middle class families and demand that each of them pay $1000 to have a more refined waiter who vaguely remembers some Proust after partying for 4 years? This is a foolish comment, even beyond your arbitrary splitting up the cost of a degree between 40 "middle class families", or the insinuation that one can actually earn a degree by simply "partying for 4 years." The value of education goes beyond landing one a job. Simply having well-educated citizens is of value to society -- especially in a representative democracy, where our level of education has a direct impact on how wisely we choose our own leaders. In fact, that education for its own sake is of great value to society is the core assumption behind public education. Besides which, how exactly would you propose to "fix" the "problem" of well-educated people choosing overqualified jobs? With a state-controlled labor market, dictating what kind of people are allowed to work what kind of jobs?
  - mcosta 16y ago
    Right, but a country can get well-educated citizens in high-school, and spend promoting lecture and arts. This last benefits all society, not just students and professors.
  - yummyfajitas 16y ago
    Any particular way of bringing aggregate costs down to the individual level is arbitrary. I chose a method which illustrates the cost in simple human terms. The fact is, a $10k/year subsidy for college (note: this is roughly the subsidy for Rutgers, which I chose since I attended) is expensive. To give that subsidy to one person, a median worker must work 2500 hours. As for earning a degree by partying for 4 years, I stand by that claim. College isn't that hard and plenty of idiots pass while learning very little. Believe me, I passed quite a few. The fix: end subsidies for college. I don't care if you waste your money on a worthless degree, I only care if you waste mine.
    - dbingham 16y ago
      The numbers you are coming up with are utterly arbitrary. I could come up with similar numbers via anal extraction and have them be just as relevant to the question at hand. That is not at all. As for partying for 4 years and passing - Yes, there are some who party for four years, learn nothing and pass college. There are even some who do it on scholarship or government grants. But those are the exception, not the rule. In my experience the ones who partied like crazy and learned nothing were the ones there on their parent's dime. The ones who were there on government dime rarely left the library, worked their butts off and came away with an excellent education. It's true, your mileage may vary, but if you ask me it is of great benefit to society that everyone gets the best level of education they can handle as determined by the quality of their mind and determination, not the quality of their parent's bank account. After all when you're of the age to be applying to college you haven't had the chance to begin being a productive member of society or make any money of your own. The whole point of education is to make people productive members of society. So what determines whether you can pay your own way in college is whether or not your parents were productive members of society -- and no one should be limited by their parents. We'd lose a lot of very bright people that way. That's what government subsidies are for. They are an investment by all of society in our future. And in the people of our future. Think of it like venture capital investment. Not every investment works out. But if even a few really do succeed, then the investment in all those who don't is worth it. Of course the place where the analogy fails is that unlike with venture capital where only a few will succeed, with college subsidies only a few will fail.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- nexton 16y ago
  >Are you willing to go up to 40 middle class families and demand that each of them pay $1000 to have a more refined waiter who vaguely remembers some Proust after partying for 4 years? Yes, I am. Education is a diversified investment. While you will get a few negative returns (e.g. your waiters with English BAs), you will also get a handful of exceptional returns (e.g. Sergey Brin). As long as the overall ROI is positive, public education is a good thing.
hugh3 16y ago
And it seems like bashing high education is the cool thing to do nowadays. It seems to be particularly common around here. Perhaps because most of the people around here have degrees in CS, which is something relatively easy to self-teach. If you hang around on a forum with a bunch of mathematicians or molecular biologists I doubt you'd be hearing the same "blah blah, university is useless" memes.
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  By mathematicians, do you mean the tiny fraction of people with math PhD's employed as math profs, quants or "the machine learning guy"? Or do you include the much larger set of mathematicians who couldn't find a job as mathematicians, and now work as high school math teachers, community college adjuncts or business analysts? I'm a member of the former set. Most of the people I went to school with are members of the latter. School was fun, but no one is under the illusion it was a good career move.
  - sz 16y ago
    As a math major that makes me worry a little bit. How tiny is the fraction?
    - yummyfajitas 16y ago
      We started with 11. One left in the first year. 3 more failed to graduate after 4-7 years. 5 people got postdocs. Of the 5 with postdocs, 2 left the country (one involuntarily), I left academia to work in the private sector, and one I haven't kept in touch with. So at most, 2 are on the tenure track in the US [1]. This was Rutgers - at Princeton, the ratio would be a bit better, at NJIT it would be worse. Don't even ask about podunk state. It's a shitty career path. Unless you are fantastically good, don't waste your time. [1] My adviser told me I could have been on the tenure track if I wanted to. Since I didn't put it to the test by applying for such jobs, I won't claim it as true.
      - sz 16y ago
edanm 16y ago
"One piece is that forget that what we're trying to optimize is happiness, and if those 13.4% of waiters are happy, then who cares if they have a BA or MA?" Sorry to nitpick, but this is important. Never mind whether a degree really brings more happiness - who said we're trying to optimize happiness anyway? It's certainly not what most societies try and optimize, at least not on the societal level. Just as a simple example, sending kids to join the army is not in the best interests of the kids' happiness, nor in the best interests of the parents' happiness; yet every society chooses to do so (never mind your personal stance on the military, societies are obviously optimizing for self-preservation over the happiness of individuals.)
- mattlanger 16y ago
  Consider as a counterpoint Aristotle's Politics, Vii.2: "It is evident that the form of government is best in which every man, whoever he is, can act best and live happily."
- sesqu 16y ago
  Not all societies. Fighting wars has usually been a profession for adults, and even today there are countries without military: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_without_armed_forces http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_without_armed...
kevin_morrill 16y ago
I'd be fine with people going to college to be happy if it wasn't based on tax dollars forcibly collected from me. It's time to end public funding for higher education and let people pay their own way. I am sure someone will comment and say, "But you benefit from people going to college." And of course I do just as each of us benefit from all kinds of network effects. Volitional trade is the way to settle those scores, not stealing someone's money because you claim to have helped them.
jcfrei 16y ago
Higher education isnt necessarily broken - it just serves a different purpose than you might think. The signalling theory suggests that gaining a higher education isnt meant to equip you with a specific set of skills. Instead higher education simply works as a filter to distinguish between efficient and less efficient persons. An efficient person is able to get a college degree, which in terms signals to potential employers that this student is very productive. This is especially true, if you consider how little application most of the things you learned actually have in the real world.
nhebb 16y ago
BA in English I think it's a fallacy to automatically hone in on liberal arts degrees. When I worked for several manufacturing companies, I always came across people with engineering and other technical degrees that were working on the production floor as assembly workers. These were entry level jobs paying $6-10/hr. They often had one or more or the following attributes: - They were 45+ years old. - They were more introverted, less likely to network. - They had technical degrees from outside the US. - Their careers had taken them into management or PM roles. So these are just a few career considerations if you don't want to be pushing a mop when you're 55.
mathewsi 16y ago
"Yes, higher education is broken. But so is everything else in this world." ^ Such an accurate, simple statement.

yummyfajitas 16y ago

OK, maybe we've wasted government money on their education, but can we call it a waste just because they didn't use that BA in English to do Englishy stuff? No. They're probably a more refined person because of those four years. Are you willing to go up to 40 middle class families and demand that each of them pay $1000 to have a more refined waiter who vaguely remembers some Proust after partying for 4 years? If not, then we can call it a waste. Wasting "government money" isn't a tiny drop in some gigantic abstract pool of thousand dollar bills. It's hard earned money taken by force from ordinary Americans. It's not government money, it's your money.

igravious 16y ago
>> It's hard earned money taken by force from ordinary Americans. It's not government money, it's your money. The money in your hand only has the value it has because we collectively instill a value in it. This is true, isn't it? I mean it really is just numbers and ink on pieces of paper and electrons over a bunch of wires. But if it were just the ink and and numbers and electrons then I could write a few zeros on a piece of fancy paper and become rich overnight. But then there is the printing presses, which are guarded and the vaults that are guarded and the software systems that are guarded and the counterfeiting laws none of which you created. So "your money" (see? I can do quotes too) is really society's money. Moreover we collectively agree that the government allocates a portion of all of our earnings and recognize that this happens nowadays in a mainly un-coerced fashion. Sorry it inconveniences you. Maybe we can argue about waste without bringing your pet ideology into it.
- jimmyk 16y ago
  The form of the money is completely irrelevant. What's relevant is that resources are being allocated to one sector of the economy that does less to raise the standard of living than other sectors would likely be able to do with those same resources. Therefore the government, in this instance, is preventing the standard of living from increasing as much as it would have otherwise, which happens to hurt real people. Ensuring that the resources they take from the private sector are used better than they otherwise would have been should be one of the primary concerns any government has when it decides to meddle in an economy because the consequences can negatively impact a lot of people.
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  I'm not bringing ideology into it. I'm focusing on the human cost of spending money, that's all. So lets put it another way, since you want to get into arguments over the value of green pieces of paper. $40k worth of subsidies for education are about 2500 hours of labor from a median laborer. Are you willing to force 25 median Americans to work 100 hours each, just so that their waiter can party for 4 years and maybe quote Beowulf? The output of those 2500 hours of labor are what makes the green pieces of paper worth something. But then there is the printing presses, which are guarded and the vaults that are guarded and the software systems that are guarded and the counterfeiting laws none of which you created. I have, however, paid far more than my fair share for this service, which probably amounts to only a few dollars per person per year. It's also dishonest for you to bring public goods into this. We are discussing redistribution of wealth in the form of private goods, not public goods (such as anti-counterfeiting, police and fire protection). Now, you might argue there are public benefits to education (e.g., a well educated labor force is more productive). But that is irrelevant for this discussion - we are discussing workers who are choosing not to make a productive use of our investment in them.
  - timwiseman 16y ago
    I agree with every statement you have made highly, except for one small but significant nitpick. Many of those people are not choosing not to make productive use of it, but failing to find a good way to do it. I have an acquantaince with an MA in English literature who was unable to find any job related to it, my own wife failed to find any reasonable job with a BA in History and is pursuing her MA so she can teach at the community college, hopefully. You could say that they deliberately chose degrees that are hard to market and I would agree, but once they had those degrees neither of them chose not to use it deliberately. Also, I know that is anecodatal, but I strongly suspect a fair number of those PHDed waiters failed to find employment in their field rather than chose not to.
duhprey 16y ago
I might go up to 100,000,000 families and ask them to pay one penny so that 100 waiters can clearly explain what's on the menu...
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  Most consumers of waiter service already pay up to 20% of the total bill for the waiter to be helpful and friendly.
  - duhprey 16y ago
    But that's after the point at which anything can be done educationally. My point wasn't helpful and friendly, illiterate people aren't any less helpful or friendly than literates.
stinkytaco 16y ago
Sure, but you could say that about anything the government spends money on. I happen to believe that the value of the educational system far outweighs the small amount of money wasted on 5,000 waiters. And the bureaucracy of weeding out those 5,000 waiters would far outspend the cost of just paying for their PhDs. Do you suggest that we mandate what jobs anyone who gets a state education gets?
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  That's exactly the test I would use for anything the government spends money on. It's called a cost/benefit analysis. If our elected officials are not doing that, we should immediately vote them out of office. Would I demand 100 hours of labor from 25 people to lock a rapist away from them for 2 years? Yes. Would I demand 100 hours of labor from 25 people to lock a pot smoker away from them for 2 years? No. 2500 hours of labor to kill a few Iraqis? Not liking that so much. 2500 hours of labor to vaccinate 800 babies against MMR? I'm ok with that. Now, it might not be cost effective to police the educational system for people wasting their education. But that's not the argument elbenshira was making, or what I was arguing against.
  - access_denied 16y ago
    An English BA who is waiting tables isn't necessarily wasting their education.
  - shadowfox 16y ago
    The problem with this sort of thing is that the perceived benefit is often quite subjective. It is hard to define and get people to agree on a quantitative measure to use for evaluation
abeppu 16y ago
Higher education is not meant to be job training. No one gets an English BA because they think that's the path that will get them the best jobs; they get it because they think it will make them happy. And if the point of higher education isn't job training, it's silly to measure its efficacy based on how well it helps graduates into jobs which wouldn't have otherwise been accessible. And the benefit to society of a person (who eventually waits tables) getting an education (which wasn't about how to wait tables) doesn't need to be manifested while that person brings you your check. That person has a whole life outside of work where they can benefit from a richer understanding of the world. As an example, we're a (kinda) democratic society, and a lot of the sanity of our government and policy rests on the judgment of the citizenry. Dealing with political rhetoric, forming opinions about sometimes highly technical public policy issues, and understanding economic policy at a minimum require an ability to critically evaluate rhetoric, some level of scientific literacy, and some numeracy, which are all benefited by a well rounded undergrad program. In some places, the political process requires that people not only be able to follow and evaluate political platforms, but produce arguments on their own (I'm thinking of state primary caucuses in particular). Having an educated populace is important independent of the desire of individuals to be wealthy or professionally successful. Just because we need waiters and parking lot attendants and bar tenders doesn't mean education is wasted on the portion of the population which fills that need. If your concern is with public funds subsidizing education, I would actually have greater objection to funding educations for people that go on to earn high salaries in jobs that require high levels of education -- those are students who could afford to take loans and pay them back.
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  That person has a whole life outside of work where they can benefit from a richer understanding of the world. Why should the 3/4 Americans without a college degree be forced to subsidize the private enjoyment of an individual? Should the government also subsidize my private enjoyment of video games, pornography or martial arts? As an example, we're a (kinda) democratic society, and a lot of the sanity of our government and policy rests on the judgment of the citizenry. If that is the case, would you favor denying the vote to people unable to make correct judgements, deal with political rhetoric or form opinions about highly technical issues? It seems that filtering the noise is far cheaper than increasing the signal, in this case.
kasterma 16y ago
I think it might only be a waste if you can come up with a way to predict who is going to be the person with a BA in English that doesn't use it. If you can't predict it, then it means that those who do use it are more expensive than sticker price (their cost would be "total costs to get people BA's in English"/"total number of people that actually use it").
harshpotatoes 16y ago
I think it's important for you to not go trolling. A middle class family paying a thousand dollars for one complete stranger to go to school is ridiculous sum of money, which is exactly why nobody pays that much money. Please, in the future, use figures which are more closely based in reality. However, the fact remains that middle class families do pay for part of the tuition of certain people (people who go to public school, and those who get federal loans). It is important to question why from time to time, so I will address your argument, and I will assume a number more realistic (I don't know what a more realistic number would be, and I'm not going to do your work for you). I think it is very important for middle class families to partially pay for part of student's college tuitions. For one, there is the very likely possibility that one of these students will go on to be a future Proust, and I think it is very important to have the resources available for such a person, even though much of that money will be 'wasted' on people who will go on to be waiters. Secondly, we live in a mostly democratic society, for better or for worse the opinions of the public can very much shape important political and economic decisions made by our leaders. It is therefore extremely important that the public be educated enough to understand arguments made by our leaders, and to be able to parse evidence presented by experts. Obviously I don't expect the public to understand all of the details of everything, but they need to be able to listen, and to know when they don't know anything at all and shut the fuck up. We as a society can't move forward without understanding what happened in our past, what we've done right, and what we've done wrong. Right now, high school is very good about telling us certain things, while college is very good helping us understand things. For better or for worse, at some point we have learn how to analyze, and that is something that is not done very well in high school. So, you can either ask your middle class families to pay up to reform high schools, or you can ask middle class families to continue to pay for some individual's college tuitions.
- electromagnetic 16y ago
  > A middle class family paying a thousand dollars for one complete stranger to go to school is ridiculous sum of money, which is exactly why nobody pays that much money. > However, the fact remains that middle class families do pay for part of the tuition of certain people (people who go to public school, and those who get federal loans). It is important to question why from time to time, so I will address your argument, and I will assume a number more realistic (I don't know what a more realistic number would be, and I'm not going to do your work for you). So you clearly don't know what a realistic figure is, which means you obviously have no clue as to what an unrealistic figure is, yet you're highly critical of his ballpark analogy yet you can't even guesstimate to a figure within the city that the ballpark is in! Perhaps you should ask where the original commenter is from. I grew up in the UK, the government paid for around 800GBP worth of education in night classes I took. I'm not even sure what the price tag on my 2-year certification course was but I'm sure it was a little more than a weekly Psychology and Sociology course. As I've said before here, what pays my bills is using a hammer. At one point I was coding in HTML and PHP while I was 14 in high school, and I was pushed by every faculty member into going to university (I'm assuming to justify their own existence). I would have loved to go to university, I would have loved to have the opportunity to study psychology or ancient history, or some such... there's books for curiosity. I use a hammer, and metal shears, and a drill. These are the basic of the basic, the most mundane objects in existence and I see dozens of intelligent, well educated people walk into a job and quit or get fired because they struggle to use them because of shitty education. I have my woodwork and metalwork teachers to thank for a good education, one that anywhere in the world is guaranteed to pay my bills. Why is our education system set out to target self-actualization when it doesn't even teach us how to achieve our physiological needs. First and foremost we should be teaching our children how to make money; how to work a job. Second, we should be teaching our children how to spend money; avoiding reliance on credit cards and debt traps. The aim is to improve peoples happiness, but without even teaching the basic steps on the hierarchy, it's a fruitless effort. If more money out of my pocket would mean better education for the next generation, I'm happy to do it. I would actually love to see a generation of children told "you know it's okay to want to do carpentry, or to become a mechanic". If bashing the frivolity of higher education will get that, then I'll be happy to bash away to get a decent economy and a decent citizenry.
Niten 16y ago
> Are you willing to go up to 40 middle class families and demand that each of them pay $1000 to have a more refined waiter who vaguely remembers some Proust after partying for 4 years? This is a foolish comment, even beyond your arbitrary splitting up the cost of a degree between 40 "middle class families", or the insinuation that one can actually earn a degree by simply "partying for 4 years." The value of education goes beyond landing one a job. Simply having well-educated citizens is of value to society -- especially in a representative democracy, where our level of education has a direct impact on how wisely we choose our own leaders. In fact, that education for its own sake is of great value to society is the core assumption behind public education. Besides which, how exactly would you propose to "fix" the "problem" of well-educated people choosing overqualified jobs? With a state-controlled labor market, dictating what kind of people are allowed to work what kind of jobs?
- mcosta 16y ago
  Right, but a country can get well-educated citizens in high-school, and spend promoting lecture and arts. This last benefits all society, not just students and professors.
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  Any particular way of bringing aggregate costs down to the individual level is arbitrary. I chose a method which illustrates the cost in simple human terms. The fact is, a $10k/year subsidy for college (note: this is roughly the subsidy for Rutgers, which I chose since I attended) is expensive. To give that subsidy to one person, a median worker must work 2500 hours. As for earning a degree by partying for 4 years, I stand by that claim. College isn't that hard and plenty of idiots pass while learning very little. Believe me, I passed quite a few. The fix: end subsidies for college. I don't care if you waste your money on a worthless degree, I only care if you waste mine.
  - dbingham 16y ago
    The numbers you are coming up with are utterly arbitrary. I could come up with similar numbers via anal extraction and have them be just as relevant to the question at hand. That is not at all. As for partying for 4 years and passing - Yes, there are some who party for four years, learn nothing and pass college. There are even some who do it on scholarship or government grants. But those are the exception, not the rule. In my experience the ones who partied like crazy and learned nothing were the ones there on their parent's dime. The ones who were there on government dime rarely left the library, worked their butts off and came away with an excellent education. It's true, your mileage may vary, but if you ask me it is of great benefit to society that everyone gets the best level of education they can handle as determined by the quality of their mind and determination, not the quality of their parent's bank account. After all when you're of the age to be applying to college you haven't had the chance to begin being a productive member of society or make any money of your own. The whole point of education is to make people productive members of society. So what determines whether you can pay your own way in college is whether or not your parents were productive members of society -- and no one should be limited by their parents. We'd lose a lot of very bright people that way. That's what government subsidies are for. They are an investment by all of society in our future. And in the people of our future. Think of it like venture capital investment. Not every investment works out. But if even a few really do succeed, then the investment in all those who don't is worth it. Of course the place where the analogy fails is that unlike with venture capital where only a few will succeed, with college subsidies only a few will fail.
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nexton 16y ago
>Are you willing to go up to 40 middle class families and demand that each of them pay $1000 to have a more refined waiter who vaguely remembers some Proust after partying for 4 years? Yes, I am. Education is a diversified investment. While you will get a few negative returns (e.g. your waiters with English BAs), you will also get a handful of exceptional returns (e.g. Sergey Brin). As long as the overall ROI is positive, public education is a good thing.

hugh3 16y ago

And it seems like bashing high education is the cool thing to do nowadays. It seems to be particularly common around here. Perhaps because most of the people around here have degrees in CS, which is something relatively easy to self-teach. If you hang around on a forum with a bunch of mathematicians or molecular biologists I doubt you'd be hearing the same "blah blah, university is useless" memes.

yummyfajitas 16y ago
By mathematicians, do you mean the tiny fraction of people with math PhD's employed as math profs, quants or "the machine learning guy"? Or do you include the much larger set of mathematicians who couldn't find a job as mathematicians, and now work as high school math teachers, community college adjuncts or business analysts? I'm a member of the former set. Most of the people I went to school with are members of the latter. School was fun, but no one is under the illusion it was a good career move.
- sz 16y ago
  As a math major that makes me worry a little bit. How tiny is the fraction?
  - yummyfajitas 16y ago
    We started with 11. One left in the first year. 3 more failed to graduate after 4-7 years. 5 people got postdocs. Of the 5 with postdocs, 2 left the country (one involuntarily), I left academia to work in the private sector, and one I haven't kept in touch with. So at most, 2 are on the tenure track in the US [1]. This was Rutgers - at Princeton, the ratio would be a bit better, at NJIT it would be worse. Don't even ask about podunk state. It's a shitty career path. Unless you are fantastically good, don't waste your time. [1] My adviser told me I could have been on the tenure track if I wanted to. Since I didn't put it to the test by applying for such jobs, I won't claim it as true.
    - sz 16y ago

edanm 16y ago

"One piece is that forget that what we're trying to optimize is happiness, and if those 13.4% of waiters are happy, then who cares if they have a BA or MA?" Sorry to nitpick, but this is important. Never mind whether a degree really brings more happiness - who said we're trying to optimize happiness anyway? It's certainly not what most societies try and optimize, at least not on the societal level. Just as a simple example, sending kids to join the army is not in the best interests of the kids' happiness, nor in the best interests of the parents' happiness; yet every society chooses to do so (never mind your personal stance on the military, societies are obviously optimizing for self-preservation over the happiness of individuals.)

mattlanger 16y ago
Consider as a counterpoint Aristotle's Politics, Vii.2: "It is evident that the form of government is best in which every man, whoever he is, can act best and live happily."
sesqu 16y ago
Not all societies. Fighting wars has usually been a profession for adults, and even today there are countries without military: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_without_armed_forces http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_without_armed...

kevin_morrill 16y ago

I'd be fine with people going to college to be happy if it wasn't based on tax dollars forcibly collected from me. It's time to end public funding for higher education and let people pay their own way. I am sure someone will comment and say, "But you benefit from people going to college." And of course I do just as each of us benefit from all kinds of network effects. Volitional trade is the way to settle those scores, not stealing someone's money because you claim to have helped them.

jcfrei 16y ago

Higher education isnt necessarily broken - it just serves a different purpose than you might think. The signalling theory suggests that gaining a higher education isnt meant to equip you with a specific set of skills. Instead higher education simply works as a filter to distinguish between efficient and less efficient persons. An efficient person is able to get a college degree, which in terms signals to potential employers that this student is very productive. This is especially true, if you consider how little application most of the things you learned actually have in the real world.

nhebb 16y ago

BA in English I think it's a fallacy to automatically hone in on liberal arts degrees. When I worked for several manufacturing companies, I always came across people with engineering and other technical degrees that were working on the production floor as assembly workers. These were entry level jobs paying $6-10/hr. They often had one or more or the following attributes: - They were 45+ years old. - They were more introverted, less likely to network. - They had technical degrees from outside the US. - Their careers had taken them into management or PM roles. So these are just a few career considerations if you don't want to be pushing a mop when you're 55.

mathewsi 16y ago

"Yes, higher education is broken. But so is everything else in this world." ^ Such an accurate, simple statement.