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Pushing more and more people to go to college isn't going to raise productivity. It will just lead to even more degree inflation. We've been seeing degrees pa

Pushing more and more people to go to college isn't going to raise productivity. It will just lead to even more degree inflation. We've been seeing degrees pay out less and less as more and more people get them. This shouldn't be surprising. Look at the extreme cases in China. The amount highly educated labor is so vast that Seasonal workers moving to the city earn more than the average College graduate. Is this how we want to end up? It would be much better to give students the right kind of education, and make sure that post k-12 training reflects the demands in the market. Right now there's huge demand for construction workers that isn't being filled, and there are many other niches that could use the right type of trained workers. And industry needs to get better at highering, and better at understand what they actually need, rather than continuing to advertise job templates for which no one's given any thought to what they actually need.

gerbilly 8y ago
I disagree, let the companies do the training. If it's so valued in the market, then surely they will be happy to provide that training. Why we let the companies push that externality on higher education is beyond me. And I think degree inflation would be a great thing, if we could just reduce tuitions. A highly educated populace is a good thing. I've worked as farm labour in a tiny little town, where most of the the farmers went to college. If you want to go back to the farm, it's fine. Training is fine, but a true education is something they can never take away from you.
- megaman8 8y ago
  degree inflation means A degree is less valued by employers, thus jobs that used to require bachelors, now require masters (because there's too many people running around with bachelors), and jobs that used to only require high school completion now require bachelors. I also want a highly educated populace, but you can get that from a book/library/continuing education courses/online courses, book clubs, etc: there's no reason you MUST spend 50K on it (unless employers force it: as with degree inflation). That problem is the institutionalization of education and their subsequent monopoly on it.
  - gerbilly 8y ago
    Totally, one wish list item from my post was that education be cheap. Back when I went to university I paid for it by working farm labour. Not so feasible now. If we prioritized that as a society, we could have practically free higher education.
    - SamReidHughes 8y ago
      Education is already free, it's on the internet for anybody that wants it.
      - rmdashrfstar 8y ago
        Correct, it’s only the piece of paper and the teaching staff who read the books to you that cost $50k+.
- solatic 8y ago
  > I disagree, let the companies do the training. If it's so valued in the market, then surely they will be happy to provide that training. >Why we let the companies push that externality on higher education is beyond me. Welcome to the flip side of doing away with non-compete agreements. Why should a business invest so much money in training workers when they'll just get poached away by a competitor who is virtually guaranteed to be able to offer higher pay, not just for the value of the trained skill but because the competitor doesn't need to pay the overhead costs of training them? When new employees can leave their contracts at any time and for any reason, the expectations of employers necessarily shift away from training. Now of course, reality is a little more nuanced. Training for long-time employees to keep them up-to-date makes more sense since they have so much domain experience internalized. A just law would need to allow for some exceptions to allow employees to break their non-competes in cases like toxic workplaces, and the law would need to set a maximum term for a non-compete to prevent workers from being exploited for low pay for their entire working lives. But the notion that employers today should take "no-experience-needed" candidates off the street, give them 6+ months of full-day training with pay, and allow them to walk right out the door a week later to their competitor... is laughable on its face.
  - gerbilly 8y ago
    Screw non competes, they aren't even enforceable most of the time anyway. My answer to why companies should train people if they can just leave for another company is twofold: 1: It evens out. Sometimes people will leave company A, which trained them, and come to your company, and other times they you will train them and they will leave. As long as the relative rates are about even, it should be ok. 2: Any general training that would apply to all similar companies can just as easily be acquired on the job at any given company. So train the employees, and if you really don't want to lose your 'investment' then perhaps treat them nicely? Why are we always so quick to cry a river for huge organizations that hold a disproportionate amount of power over individuals?
    - Raidion 8y ago
      The problem with #2 is that if a company spends $30k of time and effort to get an employee trained up, the poaching company can offer a raise of 10k and still be in the black 3 years later. If the original company decided to match that offer, they're now spending 60k more over three years, and the poaching company can offer a 15k raise and STILL be in the black after 3 years. Any money you pay in training is a sunk cost that doesn't have to be paid by your competitors.
- rjf72 8y ago
  I have a practical question about the seeming truism that a highly educated population is a good thing. Our educational attainment rates have absolutely skyrocketed. The number of people with a bachelor's degree or higher is now comparable to the number that managed a high school degree in the 1950s. What would you say are the clear benefits we've really achieved from this? It's hard to disagree with a highly education population being a good thing, yet in practice I find myself able to list quite a lot of negatives relating to our sharp increases in educational attainment, but I'm not really sure what the positives are except in the most abstract terms.
  - gerbilly 8y ago
    The 'education' of today is starting to look more and more like job training. However, education is meant to expand your mind and to teach you how to think critically. Education is supposed to round you out, teach you about the history of your culture. Adam Gopnik once wrote a piece for the New Yorker. The gist of it is that he was living in Paris, and his wife was pregnant with a girl, after having already had a boy. When French people found out about this the would always say to him: "Mais c'est le choix du roi!"[1] Finally after a taxi driver said the same thing to him for the 10th time, he asked a bit exasperatedly, what it meant. The point of the anecdote is that the taxi driver then proceeded to explain how under the Salic law governing the succession of French royalty, having a son followed by a girl had certain advantages. That is education populace. [1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2000/01/31/like-a-king https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2000/01/31/like-a-king (Paywalled)
    - rjf72 8y ago
      I'd completely agree with you here about the ideal of education being meant to expand your mind and teaching one to think critically. But this is where we might begin to diverge a bit. Is this really happening in modern times? Do you associate fresh graduates with anything like critical thinking and breadth (let alone depth) of views and understanding? We could blame this on our educational institutions of course. And I'd agree that our institutions have changed. But this gets into the question of why have they changed? And I think there we get back to the initial issue. As we see vastly more people pursuing post-secondary education, it means that the demographic of your average student is changing. Systems that worked and produced a certain tier of student when dealing with top e.g. 2% of society, cannot reasonably be expected to achieve the same or comparable results when dealing with more than 30% of society. This is what made me ask the question. In principle I cannot disagree with the notion that an educated population is a good thing. But in practice, universities are seemingly giving it their all to make me rethink this view.
nerpderp82 8y ago
The change we need isn't going to be arrived at by turning some knobs. We need deep structural change around our relationship with growth, capital and ownership. The total job pool due to the way we have structured and rewarded society will only continue to shrink. No amount of votec training will change that. It is all just deck chairs. https://www.ted.com/talks/kate_raworth_a_healthy_economy_should_be_designed_to_thrive_not_grow?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/kate_raworth_a_healthy_economy_sho...
Armisael16 8y ago
I disagree with your core argument (that a more educated populace is not necessarily a good thing). I’m not going to argue that, though. Even if you have a finite number of spots for educated people, isn’t it better to give those spots to the more naturally talented people? Wouldn’t be be better off educating our smartest?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
lm28469 8y ago
> Pushing more and more people to go to college isn't going to raise productivity. "Every appeal for productivity comes from above. But only creativity is spontaneously rich. It is not from ’productivity’ that a full life is to be expected, it is not ’productivity’ that will produce an enthusiastic collective response to economic needs."

gerbilly 8y ago

I disagree, let the companies do the training. If it's so valued in the market, then surely they will be happy to provide that training. Why we let the companies push that externality on higher education is beyond me. And I think degree inflation would be a great thing, if we could just reduce tuitions. A highly educated populace is a good thing. I've worked as farm labour in a tiny little town, where most of the the farmers went to college. If you want to go back to the farm, it's fine. Training is fine, but a true education is something they can never take away from you.

megaman8 8y ago
degree inflation means A degree is less valued by employers, thus jobs that used to require bachelors, now require masters (because there's too many people running around with bachelors), and jobs that used to only require high school completion now require bachelors. I also want a highly educated populace, but you can get that from a book/library/continuing education courses/online courses, book clubs, etc: there's no reason you MUST spend 50K on it (unless employers force it: as with degree inflation). That problem is the institutionalization of education and their subsequent monopoly on it.
- gerbilly 8y ago
  Totally, one wish list item from my post was that education be cheap. Back when I went to university I paid for it by working farm labour. Not so feasible now. If we prioritized that as a society, we could have practically free higher education.
  - SamReidHughes 8y ago
    Education is already free, it's on the internet for anybody that wants it.
    - rmdashrfstar 8y ago
      Correct, it’s only the piece of paper and the teaching staff who read the books to you that cost $50k+.
solatic 8y ago
> I disagree, let the companies do the training. If it's so valued in the market, then surely they will be happy to provide that training. >Why we let the companies push that externality on higher education is beyond me. Welcome to the flip side of doing away with non-compete agreements. Why should a business invest so much money in training workers when they'll just get poached away by a competitor who is virtually guaranteed to be able to offer higher pay, not just for the value of the trained skill but because the competitor doesn't need to pay the overhead costs of training them? When new employees can leave their contracts at any time and for any reason, the expectations of employers necessarily shift away from training. Now of course, reality is a little more nuanced. Training for long-time employees to keep them up-to-date makes more sense since they have so much domain experience internalized. A just law would need to allow for some exceptions to allow employees to break their non-competes in cases like toxic workplaces, and the law would need to set a maximum term for a non-compete to prevent workers from being exploited for low pay for their entire working lives. But the notion that employers today should take "no-experience-needed" candidates off the street, give them 6+ months of full-day training with pay, and allow them to walk right out the door a week later to their competitor... is laughable on its face.
- gerbilly 8y ago
  Screw non competes, they aren't even enforceable most of the time anyway. My answer to why companies should train people if they can just leave for another company is twofold: 1: It evens out. Sometimes people will leave company A, which trained them, and come to your company, and other times they you will train them and they will leave. As long as the relative rates are about even, it should be ok. 2: Any general training that would apply to all similar companies can just as easily be acquired on the job at any given company. So train the employees, and if you really don't want to lose your 'investment' then perhaps treat them nicely? Why are we always so quick to cry a river for huge organizations that hold a disproportionate amount of power over individuals?
  - Raidion 8y ago
    The problem with #2 is that if a company spends $30k of time and effort to get an employee trained up, the poaching company can offer a raise of 10k and still be in the black 3 years later. If the original company decided to match that offer, they're now spending 60k more over three years, and the poaching company can offer a 15k raise and STILL be in the black after 3 years. Any money you pay in training is a sunk cost that doesn't have to be paid by your competitors.
rjf72 8y ago
I have a practical question about the seeming truism that a highly educated population is a good thing. Our educational attainment rates have absolutely skyrocketed. The number of people with a bachelor's degree or higher is now comparable to the number that managed a high school degree in the 1950s. What would you say are the clear benefits we've really achieved from this? It's hard to disagree with a highly education population being a good thing, yet in practice I find myself able to list quite a lot of negatives relating to our sharp increases in educational attainment, but I'm not really sure what the positives are except in the most abstract terms.
- gerbilly 8y ago
  The 'education' of today is starting to look more and more like job training. However, education is meant to expand your mind and to teach you how to think critically. Education is supposed to round you out, teach you about the history of your culture. Adam Gopnik once wrote a piece for the New Yorker. The gist of it is that he was living in Paris, and his wife was pregnant with a girl, after having already had a boy. When French people found out about this the would always say to him: "Mais c'est le choix du roi!"[1] Finally after a taxi driver said the same thing to him for the 10th time, he asked a bit exasperatedly, what it meant. The point of the anecdote is that the taxi driver then proceeded to explain how under the Salic law governing the succession of French royalty, having a son followed by a girl had certain advantages. That is education populace. [1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2000/01/31/like-a-king https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2000/01/31/like-a-king (Paywalled)
  - rjf72 8y ago
    I'd completely agree with you here about the ideal of education being meant to expand your mind and teaching one to think critically. But this is where we might begin to diverge a bit. Is this really happening in modern times? Do you associate fresh graduates with anything like critical thinking and breadth (let alone depth) of views and understanding? We could blame this on our educational institutions of course. And I'd agree that our institutions have changed. But this gets into the question of why have they changed? And I think there we get back to the initial issue. As we see vastly more people pursuing post-secondary education, it means that the demographic of your average student is changing. Systems that worked and produced a certain tier of student when dealing with top e.g. 2% of society, cannot reasonably be expected to achieve the same or comparable results when dealing with more than 30% of society. This is what made me ask the question. In principle I cannot disagree with the notion that an educated population is a good thing. But in practice, universities are seemingly giving it their all to make me rethink this view.

nerpderp82 8y ago

The change we need isn't going to be arrived at by turning some knobs. We need deep structural change around our relationship with growth, capital and ownership. The total job pool due to the way we have structured and rewarded society will only continue to shrink. No amount of votec training will change that. It is all just deck chairs. https://www.ted.com/talks/kate_raworth_a_healthy_economy_should_be_designed_to_thrive_not_grow?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/kate_raworth_a_healthy_economy_sho...

Armisael16 8y ago

I disagree with your core argument (that a more educated populace is not necessarily a good thing). I’m not going to argue that, though. Even if you have a finite number of spots for educated people, isn’t it better to give those spots to the more naturally talented people? Wouldn’t be be better off educating our smartest?

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

lm28469 8y ago

> Pushing more and more people to go to college isn't going to raise productivity. "Every appeal for productivity comes from above. But only creativity is spontaneously rich. It is not from ’productivity’ that a full life is to be expected, it is not ’productivity’ that will produce an enthusiastic collective response to economic needs."