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One thing that is always missing from these articles is the idea that it’s actually good for individuals (and for our society) to get an expansive view of human

by ihm 8y ago

One thing that is always missing from these articles is the idea that it’s actually good for individuals (and for our society) to get an expansive view of human knowledge rather than a narrow training to turn you into a worker on a production line (or at a computer). Of course right now that’s a path that’s not accessible to many people, and people may have other financial reasons for going to trade schools, but I think those are the issues we should fix. That is, make our society one where to be financially stable you don’t have to choose between a narrow training and an opportunity to explore the accumulated knowledge of the humanities and sciences.

cpursley 8y ago
I'm not convinced it's good for society to have adults entering it with $100,000 in student debt for a domain that any motivated individual can learn via-self study (books, MOOCS, wikipedia). Especially those that don't lead to lucrative career prospects...
- SolaceQuantum 8y ago
  As someone who both writes fiction and programs, I'd really like for some system that would support non-lucrative careers. Many famous authors recieved initial success when they were supported by others; how many more brilliant works is the world without? Programming works similarly, I found. We'll never know how many open source projects never saw the light due to time needed to develop them, or how truly amazing currently well-regarded open source projects could've been. These are skills that take more than self-study. They take time- time to build the skills and connections and knowledge-base. Time to explore and fail and innovate. Authors increasingly make commercially successful debut works in their late 30s and 40s because it takes that much time to develop as a writer. I find the trajectory of software development to be similar.
organsnyder 8y ago
Unfortunately, many universities are also missing this point (or feel that the market forces them to miss it). My alma mater, though in the process of renaming itself from a "college" to a "university", recently gutted many humanities departments (music, theater, history). Their official line was that those departments didn't have enough majors to justify their staffing levels; but (IMHO) they've failed to acknowledge the enrichment—even in recruiting!—offered by those departments to the entire college community. I sang in choir with people that were majoring in business, engineering, CS, etc., as well as music majors. Those people were clearly enriched by the (now gutted) music department, even if they didn't appear on lists of official music majors. This is a school that proudly proclaims itself to have a liberal arts philosophy, BTW.
simonsarris 8y ago
People going into college don't even get an expansive view of how debt works, and that's what they end college with the most of. I don't think that view is missing, I think people do not value college like they claim they do if that premise (getting an expansive view of human knowledge) is the goal. Of course that's a great goal, but its also something that should have been happening all the way to adulthood (16-18 years of age), not something that happens in between the keggers and the classes you don't skip. If you could make that the median college experience, or college graduation contingent upon it, that would be nice. We cannot even make high school graduation in the USA contingent on being able to read.
- vonmoltke 8y ago
  > We cannot even make high school graduation in the USA contingent on being able to read. In what states?
  - war1025 8y ago
    Just doing a quick search online, came across this article which suggests 19% of high school graduates are functionally illiterate. http://www.intellectualtakeout.org/blog/32-million-us-adults-are-functionally-illiterate-what-does-even-mean http://www.intellectualtakeout.org/blog/32-million-us-adults...
    - vonmoltke 8y ago
      That article does not do a good job of backing up its claims. The CNN article it references makes much weaker claim. The NALS report specifically states > While the literacy levels on each scale can be used to explore the range of literacy demands, these data do not reveal the types of literacy demands that are associated with particular contexts in this pluralistic society. That is, they do not enable us to say what specific level of prose, document, or quantitative skill is required to obtain, hold, or advance in a particular occupation, to manage a household, or to obtain legal or community services, for example. Nevertheless, the relationships among performance on the three scales and various social or economic indicators can provide valuable insights, and that is the goal of this report. So, contrary to the article's claim, the report does not define anyone as being "functionality illiterate". Furthermore, "functionality illiterate" is not the same as "can't read". It's a weaker standard. It's still a major problem, but that is not an excuse to conflate the two and make claims that high schools can't require graduates to know how to read at all.
ngngngng 8y ago
I'm a successful college dropout, and I completely disagree. One of the strongest motivators for me leaving school after 1 year was the realization that virtually all of my classes gave me no more benefit than if I had just purchased the textbook and read it myself. As for every other classroom benefit, there are brilliant mentors all over the internet I can discuss what i'm learning with whenever I choose, without having to pay tuition.
- SeanDav 8y ago
  A large component of a university education is not so much what you learn at university, but the doors it can open for you later. In general (with some exceptions of course) it is unlikely you would be using very much of your university knowledge after a few years in your job in any case. You can have a very successful career without a college / university education, it is just easier to do the same with such an education. It is almost impossible to get certain jobs at all without a university education. For example, try getting into a major investment bank in any kind of well paid position without a good university education or serious work experience - it is just not going to happen. This is not a comment about trade schools - it should be a completely valid and respected career path, I am just saying that one should try getting a university degree if at all possible and makes sense for your type of career.
  - invalidOrTaken 8y ago
    If this is true, it does not bode well for universities.
  - RankingMember 8y ago
    The "need that piece of paper" thing is sad but true. I do think it is changing, as I notice more and more IT job postings asking for X degree or equivalent experience nowadays.
    - ngngngng 8y ago
      Amazons current job postings (at least at pillpack) advertise the need for a degree or 3 YEARS of experience for every 1 year a degree takes. So 12 years experience = 1 degree.
isoskeles 8y ago
> Of course right now that’s a path that’s not accessible to many people... Not trying to be too argumentative here, but if the implication you're making is that university is the best way "to get an expansive view of human knowledge", I disagree. You are correct that it is not "accessible" to many people, but an expansive view of human knowledge is, IMO, more accessible than ever in history. An internet connection costs a lot less than university. The biggest problem with this is: how does a person figure out what to self-learn? To me it might be obvious to just start going through math problems and reading 'the classics', but I guess a person could just as easily start learning conspiracy theories or celebrity trivia.
- enitihas 8y ago
  You make an excellent point. The best part of University that I felt during my undergraduate years was curation of content. The university library is an excellent source of good books in your target domain. The university courses and faculty also help you keep focus. Another main advantage of University is access to a diverse group of peers with somewhat similar knowledge levels.
hockeybias 8y ago
A few decades ago I graduated with a BFA and Business minor from a small liberal arts school and then went to a six month 'boot camp' for COBOL a few years later. I L O V E the fact that I was fortunate enough to do both. I feel that my liberal arts background makes my life so much richer. One of my sons graduated from BC with a Computer Science degree. I think the combo platter of CS degree from an excellent liberal arts school is best of both worlds. If you can do it, do it!
jefurii 8y ago
I think parent is saying that it would be good for trade schools to include basic coursework in things like history and civics, and some arts and literature, similar to General Education requirements in a university.
jseliger 8y ago
it’s actually good for individuals (and for our society) to get an expansive view of human knowledge rather than a narrow training to turn you into a worker on a production line (or at a computer). That's true, but have you taught college at a non-elite school lately? Have you talked to most college graduates? The Case Against Education covers these topics effectively. https://quillette.com/2018/06/03/bryan-caplans-case-education-review https://quillette.com/2018/06/03/bryan-caplans-case-educatio...
- danbolt 8y ago
  The article linked mentions that the benefit of education increases nonlinearly with years completed, and then suggests that it’s a signalling mechanism for attainment. I don’t entirely know if I agree with that, as I do think an undergraduate degree’s benefits are meant to be more impactful as you learn and specialize. Political Science students might learn general theories before engaging a specific focus, or electrical engineering students might spend their first year or two getting the foundations in place. I feel like the example is saying that if you taught someone programming with variables and not functions, but then claimed that employers use an understanding of functions as a social signal for hiring. That said, I do agree with the sentiment that we kind of over prescribe higher education to the general public. I’ve lost count of how many CS majors I’ve met that seem to have wished they did a trade school for programming instead of a four-year degree.
devoply 8y ago
Prove it. I have heard it said over and over again and get accepted at face value. Fact is companies need mostly low-level drones that do one thing well. They don't value much outside of that. Maybe for your personal gratification you might want an expansive view... but that's on you. Society, corporations, even the government cares little about these things. Maybe a more expansive education might make you have an open mind and that can be politically good so you are not supporting things like anti-vax or xenophobia... but there are studies that show that this is not the case: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ565304.pdf https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ565304.pdf In fact exposing people to too broad set of ideas may lead to nihilism and a constrained education may be better for mental health.
potta_coffee 8y ago
That's assuming a college education gives you "an expansive view of human knowledge." I think that assumption should be questioned. I for one know there were a lot of pointless courses in college. I've learned more by being widely read than I ever learned through college courses.
USNetizen 8y ago
I tend to agree with the commentators on your post. I went the college route, but technically had a "trade school" experience first via the military - it gave me the befit of trying out a career field before I committed to a degree. I have family members who just went to trade school and comfortably clear 6 figures a year - they never even had a desire for college. We need to stop stigmatizing trade schools and start realizing that college IS NOT a necessity for everyone, especially with recent debt loads people are taking on for worthless degrees (e.g. a top university near me recently removed all the math courses from an IT/cyber degree because students "were not enrolling in high enough numbers" - that would NEVER happen 20 or so years ago). "An expansive view of human knowledge" is not needed for someone who just wants to work as an electrician - which many people are perfectly happy doing. If they are happy with a trade, why force them into something they will be miserable in? Even now, as an employer in a technical field, college degrees are virtually meaningless because most institutions utterly fail to equip their students for the workforce. We hire based on a combination of experience, personality, and certifications. Only if your degree is in a designated engineering field do we give it any weight at all but, even then, experience is still paramount.
- ams6110 8y ago
  "An expansive view of human knowledge" is not what the modern undergraduate degree provides anyway. For a huge number of undergrads, college is high school part 2, just something they need to get through to get a good job. They are not there to expand their minds, and to the extent it happens, it's a side-effect and pretty minimal for most. I say that as someone with an undergrad degree from a major state university, and even 30 years ago when I was there it was like that. I don't think my mind was opened to anything really new at university. I learned about what I was interested in (computer science) but I had that interest going in. I did not discover anything new or mind-expanding outside of that.
  - mixmastamyk 8y ago
    > I did not discover anything new or mind-expanding outside of that. Which electives did you choose? Personally took several that have nothing to do with my current job that I still find interesting.
atiffany 8y ago
What if there were humanities bootcamps? That probably sounds like a joke...but why should a traditional expensive university be the only structured way to get exposure to broader human knowledge? An intensive bootcamp model doesn’t actually make sense for breadth (they are designed for the opposite)...but if you told me I could be part of a structured organization in my city where I’d be introduced to interesting broad humanities topics through lectures from experts and assignments over several months then I’d be interested.
- JamesBarney 8y ago
  But would you be 5 months off of work and $15,000 interested?
  - BoiledCabbage 8y ago
    If the answer is 'no', we have to ask why people are "4 years off work, 100k+ interested"? There is a value to history, the arts, humanities. But that value isn't always well captured by our current society. Optimization systems (like our economy) optimize for what I'd easy to measure, and ignore what's hard. A lot of those fields accrue value to the commons, which is value which is hard to measure, as a result their dollar reward is often lower than the value they produce. There isn't an easy solution - and often when faced with hard problems the answer taken is fall back to the tools were used to using to measure.
  - vkou 8y ago
    How on Earth does it cost $450,000 to teach humanities to a class of thirty adult students for five months?
    - JamesBarney 8y ago
      I was just taking the costs from most tech boot camps.
- meltek 8y ago
  They exist, just not called bootcamps. https://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/graduate/liberal-arts-education-certificate https://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/graduate/liberal-arts-... https://grahamschool.uchicago.edu/academic-programs/liberal-arts/basic-program/core-curriculum https://grahamschool.uchicago.edu/academic-programs/liberal-... https://ccae.org/classes/humanities https://ccae.org/classes/humanities https://www.92y.org/classes?100_Classes=Literature%20%26%20Writing https://www.92y.org/classes?100_Classes=Literature%20%26%20W... https://writersworkshop.uiowa.edu/summer-programs https://writersworkshop.uiowa.edu/summer-programs
dalbasal 8y ago
I think this is a valid point, but... The way the tertiary education "system" works is built on a premise that is contradictory to that. Within a generation or two we went from a university system that was intended to educate and socialize (for lack of a better term) wealthy people to a university system that educates regular people. The premise for this was/is "human capital." That is the idea that wealth isn't just wealth. Your ability to do earn income with your skills is wealth too. In that framework, education is a capital investment.. something that pays for itself. A lot of efforts went into making these capital investments. Students spend years. Parents save for decades. Charities contribute scholarships. Governments fund universities. ..and of course, (moreso in the US) debt pays for a lot of it. The human capital theories suggested that education is such a great investment though, that it's worth it. It turned out though, that colleges aren't really creating the income differences observed between graduates an non graduates. A lot of what they do is just admit people who will be high income earners. The ambitious, talented, studious, academically inclined... and the wealthy. Anyway.. The problem is that the investment is big. We (society, students, parents) can't afford for it to have a poor return, and retroactivley rebrand it as something else.. Intellectual enrichment is a very worthy pursuit, if you can afford it. That's what universities were originally for. Most people just can't afford it, on balance.
- msluyter 8y ago
  ”A lot of what they do is just admit people who will be high income earners.” Aka Bryan Caplan’s signalling theory of education: https://blog.press.princeton.edu/2018/01/23/bryan-caplan-on-the-case-against-education/ https://blog.press.princeton.edu/2018/01/23/bryan-caplan-on-...
  - mont 8y ago
    I don't think that was the point GP was making there. I believe that they were trying to say that the people who go to college are more likely to be successful than those who don't, regardless of if they actually go to college or not.
- dv_dt 8y ago
  It's hard to tell the difference in results when it could be systematic underpayment of value to the labor of the college educated - something that all labor save a few lucky sectors have been experiencing for decades now.
finder83 8y ago
Except that's what high school should be. And let's face it, general studies courses that make up that "expansive view" of college really are repeats of high school with slightly more work, at least if you take honors classes in high school. And if that expansive knowledge is being surrounded by peers who are in pursuit of higher learning...that's not the typical college experience these days. High school is becoming more dumbed down so that people can pass state exams and graduate rather than teaching the knowledge that we used to consider foundational. We've lowered expectations and extended adolescence so much that we no longer expect 18 year olds to be mature and capable adults, which shouldn't be the case. Your view of trade schools is severely skewed though, and is really indicative of the problem discussed in the article. Most trade schools do not turn you into a worker on a production line, they teach you to be a skilled worker or artisan in a trade. You don't go to a trade school to be an assembly line worker, those are jobs that are taught on the job and are typically low paying. You go to a trade school to be an electrician, mechanic, carpenter, welder, etc. These are skilled jobs that are difficult and challenging. They are also jobs that have a greatly accelerated pay scale, and often lead to jobs that pay as high or higher than the large majority of college degrees (maybe STEM excluded), particularly if you are able to start your own business in the trade.
- zanny 8y ago
  I'd argue that expansive view should be coming way, way earlier than high school. How about before you beat the curiosity and sense of wonder out of 5-8 year olds with times tables, memorizing the dates presidents were born, and repeating the word "prepositional phrase" a thousand times - that would be a good time to start.
  - linuxftw 8y ago
    Public education is fundamentally broken in this regard (except for the times tables, IMO much more time should be spent on math in-school vs homework). History in the elementary school level seems near useless, aside from building reading comprehension skills.
    - 8y ago
rjf72 8y ago
So you would say your average 22 year old college grad has "an expansive view of human knowledge"? I realize this sounds like it should be a strawman, but it is not! That follows directly from your supposition that 'college is good because it provides an expansive view of human knowledge.' If this is at all true then your average grad should have something at least vaguely resembling an expansive view of human knowledge. I think university can nicely compliment individuals' own personal strengths and attributes, but I do not think a university can turn a lump of coal into a diamond no matter how hard it may press. To take for instance Harvard, I think Harvard graduates are Harvard graduates long before graduating from Harvard - in some cases before they're even admitted. Abraham Lincoln as an extreme example had less than a year of formal schooling, giving up on formal education to help to take care of his family. Far from being an ignorant redneck, as would be the typical caricature of a person with no education running around in on rural land with overalls with a axe, he loved reading and taught himself an immense amount about the world and society. And this is in an era when access to information was exponentially more difficult and expensive to come by. Today it's easier than ever. In a different time he'd be another Harvard grad with people wowed at the caliber of individuals they continually manage to produce. No, it's the caliber of individuals that they manage to attract.
- MRD85 8y ago
  I'm in complete agreeance with this. I notice a difference in behaviour of "working class" vs "white collar" cultures but this difference isn't due to university, it's due to different cultures as adults. In my 20's I'd rarely meet someone intellectual through my professional circles, everyone that age simply wanted to go do drugs at music festivals, talk about the boring reality TV, etc. I know/knew people in academia, however, and this was the one area of my life where people largely had intellectual interests.
sametmax 8y ago
I don't know. I've been programming for 15 years now, and if I had to do it again, I would drop from school at 16 years old. I'm not saying it's the only right way to do it. But given my profile and my history, I would have saved years of wasted hours, frustration and money without loosing much. To me, the one thing we need to improve is to accept that school was a great improvement over what we had, but we now can sometime choose paths that are an improvement over school.
droobles 8y ago
I would argue with the internet we have access to an expansive view to broaden our horizons, and the paid training can go toward developing skills for income. With Youtube, Wikipedia, and Google Scholar I think I've learned more than I ever could have at college.
JamesBarney 8y ago
"opportunity to explore the accumulated knowledge of the humanities and sciences". What does this mean? We should be spending vast sums or human time and capital to make sure a sufficiently high percentage of the population needs knows how to shotgun beer and argue about Descartes?
benj111 8y ago
Yes, but on the other hand, some people just don't like school, and would rather get out and do something practical. This isn't an easy problem to solve, the UK introduced grammar and comprehensives post war, unified the 2 as secondary moderns, and is now introducing university technical colleges. But at least for the UK, this is all tied up with class. Lower classes did things with their hands. I don't think that association is as strong as it was though. Coal mines and low tech industry have been replaced by high tech manufacturing.
EpicEng 8y ago
At what point in time has the world as a whole been more educated than we are now? It seems to me that we've made great strides toward this goal, but the reality is that A) not everyone is cut out for it, and B) until we live in a Star Trek like utopia, life will never allow the majority of people to spend years studying e.g. philosophy in lieu of supporting themselves, their dependents, and contributing material value to society.
unimpressive 8y ago
So it would appear the Bryan Caplan thesis is consensus among the sample of HN readers that comment, and that honestly makes me pretty happy because I'm fairly sure it's correct. Still, it's always good to examine things from both sides: A lot of what the 'costly signaling' genre of comments miss is that a costly signal is very valuable. In the old school system where literally anyone could act as legal representation, it can be difficult to figure out who's trustworthy council. The professionalization of legal representation took away the public's ability to practice law, but it also better enabled them to consistently get competent legal counsel. Is that tradeoff worth it? Plausible. I feel like a lot of the rankling around licensing and professionalization is because the costs of it are rarely taken into account so we let the commons suffer. The truth is that you can only strictly license and professionalize so many occupations. In a society with limited growth and a need for everyone to be employed being sufficiently risk averse means that economic freedom is stunted. That more than anything else seems to be what people are feeling as they reel from massive college debts and 'hustlers mindset'. Licensing costs are probably nonlinear, your nth license restriction costs more than the last did. To the extent that college is 'sink or swim' it probably has a conditioning effect. I absolutely hate myself for what I tolerated to get my degree, but I'd be lying if I said the spiritual damage doesn't translate into a burnout who knows how to kill themselves going at stuff they hate. That's a very positive effect from an employability standpoint. Multiple times what I thought would be my psychological breaking point just turned out to be another ratchet on the road to scholastic moksha. It's only when you've learned to hate yourself so thoroughly that you can tolerate anything, that you're ready to handle the level of difficulty and nihilism the modern workplace is likely to present you with. Of course that perspective is closer in spirit to Mussolini than Mill, so you can't exactly advertise it in your universities brochure. It's very possible if we don't do that somehow, you just can't quite produce the sort of highly disciplined person you need to make society work.
patrickg_zill 8y ago
I agree about the expansive view of human knowledge. However there is more than one path to that knowledge...
scarface74 8y ago
I’m not spending thousands of dollars to put my children through school for the “good of humanity”. I’m spending that money so they can get a job and put food on their table. I also told them that I would not support them getting a degree that wouldn’t be marketable. No they can’t get a degree in Ancient Chinese Art History.
ThomPete 8y ago
Getting an expansive view of human knowledge is not done by the universities quite the contrary. Furthermore the expansive view isn't really interesting if you don't know how to apply it to something.
VLM 8y ago
The main thing missing from the article is intentional conflation of inherently opposing situations. True, a union apprentice electrician's classwork is not all that wide. However, I may be one of the only people here on HN who took my first 64 credits and an associates degree at a local tech school (for about $50/credit, admittedly quite a few years ago) and I received credit for 48 of them at the institution where I later got my BSCS. I assure you I had to sit thru the same intro to sociology, psych, public speaking, physics, and calculus classes as any other freshman. The main difference was trade school students tend to be older and more serious and pay more attention in class. The quality of lab equipment in degree granting fields (EE) was similar in trade school and uni. The quality of equipment in non-degree labs (physics) was vastly inferior, yet good enough. Neither of my experiences have anything to do with "semester long coding bootcamps" and similar training mentioned in the article. True, that university education is all pretty much the same; however, "everything that is not going to college" has quite a bit of diversity. Speaking of diversity, there is zero permitted diversity of thought or political opinion in university today; they are single political party indoctrination centers. Surely almost any other post-high school experience would better prepare students for the diverse real world.
TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
As a tradesperson myself, I completely reject the idea that the trades place limits on people. In my opinion, getting an expansive view of human knowledge has almost nothing to do with where and what you formally study. Indeed, as you progress through higher learning institutions a person tends to learn more and more about less and less. If a person is curious and motivated they'll have more luck getting an expansive view that those who are not. It may very well be that motivated curious people attend higher learning institutions more, but those people will obtain their expansive view in spite of their formal education, not because of it. Generally speaking.
dredmorbius 8y ago
There's a long history behind education, types of it, and the reasons, rationales, and interests behind these. One of the better synopses of these I've found is Wes Cecil's "Myths of the Modern American Mind: Education" (61 minutes, audio only): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFiiOm6fB3c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFiiOm6fB3c He traces the history back to Babylonia and scribal training, Plato's Academy, Aristotle's Lyceum, medieval education, scholaticism and the rise of the Seven Liberal Arts with their Trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric) and Quadrivium (Maths, Geometry, Music (or harmony) and Astronomy), the emergence of the modern physical and social sciences, and the Prussian Educational System which is the foundation of contemporary Western education. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education Throughout virtually all of this there's been a sharp division between intellectual and technical education. The liberal arts were distinguished from the technical arts, also called Artes Mechanicae (mechanical arts), servile arts, or vulgar arts, originally: tailoring and weaving, agriculture, architecture and masonry, warfare and hunting, trade, cooking, and blacksmithing and metalurgy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artes_Mechanicae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artes_Mechanicae Since 1800 or so, the distinctions have largely been between pure skills, including trade, vocational, and technical skills (including STEM), professional training (law, medicine, military, religion, and general administration), and humanities or liberal arts. The relative prestige of these has shifted fairly markedly over this period, as well as the increased specialisation within academic curricula and programmes, with the University of Virginia offering eight fields of study in 1825, and Johns Hopkins University using the term "major" for the first time in 1877. The emergence of technical schools, such as M.I.T. (1861) with specialised courses of study helped drive this transformation. Cecil's treatment is on the light side, but engaging.
wmeredith 8y ago
How “good” is that expansive view of human knowledge? Is it worth $100k? Is it for everyone?
dsajames 8y ago
This is often dragged out whenever "liberal education" is justified. It's overrated. My friends who went to college are not $50-$200k more expansively educated than those who didn't. Also, libraries, cheap Kindle books, YouTube, and other internet resources are freely/cheaply available. Those who want to learn will do so and can for the price of a tablet or less. This reminds me of the scene in Good Will Hunting where the Harvard student is brought down for his overpriced education that could be gotten for a few bucks in late fees at the library.
loveyourmother 8y ago
> rather than a narrow training to turn you into a worker on a production line (or at a computer). Skilled trades can be done anywhere in the world. You are not tied to a production line. I have seen all the options being discussed here. I joined the Army and lived abroad for years in Europe. When I came home I joined a union with a 4-year apprentice plan. It was only 4 weeks of school a year with the rest being learning on the job. At night, I went to college with GI bill. After I finished a 2-year degree I started traveling to work. We built and refinished some amazing hotels and residential buildings. Visiting and living in major cities on the east and west coast. I can use my "trade skill" anywhere in the world. I would suggest any young kid learn a trade. Someone has to build that high-tower so the smarts can look down on us. From their cubical.

by ihm 8y ago

cpursley 8y ago

I'm not convinced it's good for society to have adults entering it with $100,000 in student debt for a domain that any motivated individual can learn via-self study (books, MOOCS, wikipedia). Especially those that don't lead to lucrative career prospects...

SolaceQuantum 8y ago
As someone who both writes fiction and programs, I'd really like for some system that would support non-lucrative careers. Many famous authors recieved initial success when they were supported by others; how many more brilliant works is the world without? Programming works similarly, I found. We'll never know how many open source projects never saw the light due to time needed to develop them, or how truly amazing currently well-regarded open source projects could've been. These are skills that take more than self-study. They take time- time to build the skills and connections and knowledge-base. Time to explore and fail and innovate. Authors increasingly make commercially successful debut works in their late 30s and 40s because it takes that much time to develop as a writer. I find the trajectory of software development to be similar.

organsnyder 8y ago

Unfortunately, many universities are also missing this point (or feel that the market forces them to miss it). My alma mater, though in the process of renaming itself from a "college" to a "university", recently gutted many humanities departments (music, theater, history). Their official line was that those departments didn't have enough majors to justify their staffing levels; but (IMHO) they've failed to acknowledge the enrichment—even in recruiting!—offered by those departments to the entire college community. I sang in choir with people that were majoring in business, engineering, CS, etc., as well as music majors. Those people were clearly enriched by the (now gutted) music department, even if they didn't appear on lists of official music majors. This is a school that proudly proclaims itself to have a liberal arts philosophy, BTW.

simonsarris 8y ago

People going into college don't even get an expansive view of how debt works, and that's what they end college with the most of. I don't think that view is missing, I think people do not value college like they claim they do if that premise (getting an expansive view of human knowledge) is the goal. Of course that's a great goal, but its also something that should have been happening all the way to adulthood (16-18 years of age), not something that happens in between the keggers and the classes you don't skip. If you could make that the median college experience, or college graduation contingent upon it, that would be nice. We cannot even make high school graduation in the USA contingent on being able to read.

vonmoltke 8y ago
> We cannot even make high school graduation in the USA contingent on being able to read. In what states?
- war1025 8y ago
  Just doing a quick search online, came across this article which suggests 19% of high school graduates are functionally illiterate. http://www.intellectualtakeout.org/blog/32-million-us-adults-are-functionally-illiterate-what-does-even-mean http://www.intellectualtakeout.org/blog/32-million-us-adults...
  - vonmoltke 8y ago
    That article does not do a good job of backing up its claims. The CNN article it references makes much weaker claim. The NALS report specifically states > While the literacy levels on each scale can be used to explore the range of literacy demands, these data do not reveal the types of literacy demands that are associated with particular contexts in this pluralistic society. That is, they do not enable us to say what specific level of prose, document, or quantitative skill is required to obtain, hold, or advance in a particular occupation, to manage a household, or to obtain legal or community services, for example. Nevertheless, the relationships among performance on the three scales and various social or economic indicators can provide valuable insights, and that is the goal of this report. So, contrary to the article's claim, the report does not define anyone as being "functionality illiterate". Furthermore, "functionality illiterate" is not the same as "can't read". It's a weaker standard. It's still a major problem, but that is not an excuse to conflate the two and make claims that high schools can't require graduates to know how to read at all.

ngngngng 8y ago

I'm a successful college dropout, and I completely disagree. One of the strongest motivators for me leaving school after 1 year was the realization that virtually all of my classes gave me no more benefit than if I had just purchased the textbook and read it myself. As for every other classroom benefit, there are brilliant mentors all over the internet I can discuss what i'm learning with whenever I choose, without having to pay tuition.

SeanDav 8y ago
A large component of a university education is not so much what you learn at university, but the doors it can open for you later. In general (with some exceptions of course) it is unlikely you would be using very much of your university knowledge after a few years in your job in any case. You can have a very successful career without a college / university education, it is just easier to do the same with such an education. It is almost impossible to get certain jobs at all without a university education. For example, try getting into a major investment bank in any kind of well paid position without a good university education or serious work experience - it is just not going to happen. This is not a comment about trade schools - it should be a completely valid and respected career path, I am just saying that one should try getting a university degree if at all possible and makes sense for your type of career.
- invalidOrTaken 8y ago
  If this is true, it does not bode well for universities.
- RankingMember 8y ago
  The "need that piece of paper" thing is sad but true. I do think it is changing, as I notice more and more IT job postings asking for X degree or equivalent experience nowadays.
  - ngngngng 8y ago
    Amazons current job postings (at least at pillpack) advertise the need for a degree or 3 YEARS of experience for every 1 year a degree takes. So 12 years experience = 1 degree.

isoskeles 8y ago

> Of course right now that’s a path that’s not accessible to many people... Not trying to be too argumentative here, but if the implication you're making is that university is the best way "to get an expansive view of human knowledge", I disagree. You are correct that it is not "accessible" to many people, but an expansive view of human knowledge is, IMO, more accessible than ever in history. An internet connection costs a lot less than university. The biggest problem with this is: how does a person figure out what to self-learn? To me it might be obvious to just start going through math problems and reading 'the classics', but I guess a person could just as easily start learning conspiracy theories or celebrity trivia.

enitihas 8y ago
You make an excellent point. The best part of University that I felt during my undergraduate years was curation of content. The university library is an excellent source of good books in your target domain. The university courses and faculty also help you keep focus. Another main advantage of University is access to a diverse group of peers with somewhat similar knowledge levels.

hockeybias 8y ago

A few decades ago I graduated with a BFA and Business minor from a small liberal arts school and then went to a six month 'boot camp' for COBOL a few years later. I L O V E the fact that I was fortunate enough to do both. I feel that my liberal arts background makes my life so much richer. One of my sons graduated from BC with a Computer Science degree. I think the combo platter of CS degree from an excellent liberal arts school is best of both worlds. If you can do it, do it!

jefurii 8y ago

I think parent is saying that it would be good for trade schools to include basic coursework in things like history and civics, and some arts and literature, similar to General Education requirements in a university.

jseliger 8y ago

it’s actually good for individuals (and for our society) to get an expansive view of human knowledge rather than a narrow training to turn you into a worker on a production line (or at a computer). That's true, but have you taught college at a non-elite school lately? Have you talked to most college graduates? The Case Against Education covers these topics effectively. https://quillette.com/2018/06/03/bryan-caplans-case-education-review https://quillette.com/2018/06/03/bryan-caplans-case-educatio...

danbolt 8y ago
The article linked mentions that the benefit of education increases nonlinearly with years completed, and then suggests that it’s a signalling mechanism for attainment. I don’t entirely know if I agree with that, as I do think an undergraduate degree’s benefits are meant to be more impactful as you learn and specialize. Political Science students might learn general theories before engaging a specific focus, or electrical engineering students might spend their first year or two getting the foundations in place. I feel like the example is saying that if you taught someone programming with variables and not functions, but then claimed that employers use an understanding of functions as a social signal for hiring. That said, I do agree with the sentiment that we kind of over prescribe higher education to the general public. I’ve lost count of how many CS majors I’ve met that seem to have wished they did a trade school for programming instead of a four-year degree.

devoply 8y ago

Prove it. I have heard it said over and over again and get accepted at face value. Fact is companies need mostly low-level drones that do one thing well. They don't value much outside of that. Maybe for your personal gratification you might want an expansive view... but that's on you. Society, corporations, even the government cares little about these things. Maybe a more expansive education might make you have an open mind and that can be politically good so you are not supporting things like anti-vax or xenophobia... but there are studies that show that this is not the case: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ565304.pdf https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ565304.pdf In fact exposing people to too broad set of ideas may lead to nihilism and a constrained education may be better for mental health.

potta_coffee 8y ago

That's assuming a college education gives you "an expansive view of human knowledge." I think that assumption should be questioned. I for one know there were a lot of pointless courses in college. I've learned more by being widely read than I ever learned through college courses.

USNetizen 8y ago

I tend to agree with the commentators on your post. I went the college route, but technically had a "trade school" experience first via the military - it gave me the befit of trying out a career field before I committed to a degree. I have family members who just went to trade school and comfortably clear 6 figures a year - they never even had a desire for college. We need to stop stigmatizing trade schools and start realizing that college IS NOT a necessity for everyone, especially with recent debt loads people are taking on for worthless degrees (e.g. a top university near me recently removed all the math courses from an IT/cyber degree because students "were not enrolling in high enough numbers" - that would NEVER happen 20 or so years ago). "An expansive view of human knowledge" is not needed for someone who just wants to work as an electrician - which many people are perfectly happy doing. If they are happy with a trade, why force them into something they will be miserable in? Even now, as an employer in a technical field, college degrees are virtually meaningless because most institutions utterly fail to equip their students for the workforce. We hire based on a combination of experience, personality, and certifications. Only if your degree is in a designated engineering field do we give it any weight at all but, even then, experience is still paramount.

ams6110 8y ago
"An expansive view of human knowledge" is not what the modern undergraduate degree provides anyway. For a huge number of undergrads, college is high school part 2, just something they need to get through to get a good job. They are not there to expand their minds, and to the extent it happens, it's a side-effect and pretty minimal for most. I say that as someone with an undergrad degree from a major state university, and even 30 years ago when I was there it was like that. I don't think my mind was opened to anything really new at university. I learned about what I was interested in (computer science) but I had that interest going in. I did not discover anything new or mind-expanding outside of that.
- mixmastamyk 8y ago
  > I did not discover anything new or mind-expanding outside of that. Which electives did you choose? Personally took several that have nothing to do with my current job that I still find interesting.

atiffany 8y ago

What if there were humanities bootcamps? That probably sounds like a joke...but why should a traditional expensive university be the only structured way to get exposure to broader human knowledge? An intensive bootcamp model doesn’t actually make sense for breadth (they are designed for the opposite)...but if you told me I could be part of a structured organization in my city where I’d be introduced to interesting broad humanities topics through lectures from experts and assignments over several months then I’d be interested.

JamesBarney 8y ago
But would you be 5 months off of work and $15,000 interested?
- BoiledCabbage 8y ago
  If the answer is 'no', we have to ask why people are "4 years off work, 100k+ interested"? There is a value to history, the arts, humanities. But that value isn't always well captured by our current society. Optimization systems (like our economy) optimize for what I'd easy to measure, and ignore what's hard. A lot of those fields accrue value to the commons, which is value which is hard to measure, as a result their dollar reward is often lower than the value they produce. There isn't an easy solution - and often when faced with hard problems the answer taken is fall back to the tools were used to using to measure.
- vkou 8y ago
  How on Earth does it cost $450,000 to teach humanities to a class of thirty adult students for five months?
  - JamesBarney 8y ago
    I was just taking the costs from most tech boot camps.
meltek 8y ago
They exist, just not called bootcamps. https://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/graduate/liberal-arts-education-certificate https://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/graduate/liberal-arts-... https://grahamschool.uchicago.edu/academic-programs/liberal-arts/basic-program/core-curriculum https://grahamschool.uchicago.edu/academic-programs/liberal-... https://ccae.org/classes/humanities https://ccae.org/classes/humanities https://www.92y.org/classes?100_Classes=Literature%20%26%20Writing https://www.92y.org/classes?100_Classes=Literature%20%26%20W... https://writersworkshop.uiowa.edu/summer-programs https://writersworkshop.uiowa.edu/summer-programs

dalbasal 8y ago

I think this is a valid point, but... The way the tertiary education "system" works is built on a premise that is contradictory to that. Within a generation or two we went from a university system that was intended to educate and socialize (for lack of a better term) wealthy people to a university system that educates regular people. The premise for this was/is "human capital." That is the idea that wealth isn't just wealth. Your ability to do earn income with your skills is wealth too. In that framework, education is a capital investment.. something that pays for itself. A lot of efforts went into making these capital investments. Students spend years. Parents save for decades. Charities contribute scholarships. Governments fund universities. ..and of course, (moreso in the US) debt pays for a lot of it. The human capital theories suggested that education is such a great investment though, that it's worth it. It turned out though, that colleges aren't really creating the income differences observed between graduates an non graduates. A lot of what they do is just admit people who will be high income earners. The ambitious, talented, studious, academically inclined... and the wealthy. Anyway.. The problem is that the investment is big. We (society, students, parents) can't afford for it to have a poor return, and retroactivley rebrand it as something else.. Intellectual enrichment is a very worthy pursuit, if you can afford it. That's what universities were originally for. Most people just can't afford it, on balance.

msluyter 8y ago
”A lot of what they do is just admit people who will be high income earners.” Aka Bryan Caplan’s signalling theory of education: https://blog.press.princeton.edu/2018/01/23/bryan-caplan-on-the-case-against-education/ https://blog.press.princeton.edu/2018/01/23/bryan-caplan-on-...
- mont 8y ago
  I don't think that was the point GP was making there. I believe that they were trying to say that the people who go to college are more likely to be successful than those who don't, regardless of if they actually go to college or not.
dv_dt 8y ago
It's hard to tell the difference in results when it could be systematic underpayment of value to the labor of the college educated - something that all labor save a few lucky sectors have been experiencing for decades now.

finder83 8y ago

Except that's what high school should be. And let's face it, general studies courses that make up that "expansive view" of college really are repeats of high school with slightly more work, at least if you take honors classes in high school. And if that expansive knowledge is being surrounded by peers who are in pursuit of higher learning...that's not the typical college experience these days. High school is becoming more dumbed down so that people can pass state exams and graduate rather than teaching the knowledge that we used to consider foundational. We've lowered expectations and extended adolescence so much that we no longer expect 18 year olds to be mature and capable adults, which shouldn't be the case. Your view of trade schools is severely skewed though, and is really indicative of the problem discussed in the article. Most trade schools do not turn you into a worker on a production line, they teach you to be a skilled worker or artisan in a trade. You don't go to a trade school to be an assembly line worker, those are jobs that are taught on the job and are typically low paying. You go to a trade school to be an electrician, mechanic, carpenter, welder, etc. These are skilled jobs that are difficult and challenging. They are also jobs that have a greatly accelerated pay scale, and often lead to jobs that pay as high or higher than the large majority of college degrees (maybe STEM excluded), particularly if you are able to start your own business in the trade.

zanny 8y ago
I'd argue that expansive view should be coming way, way earlier than high school. How about before you beat the curiosity and sense of wonder out of 5-8 year olds with times tables, memorizing the dates presidents were born, and repeating the word "prepositional phrase" a thousand times - that would be a good time to start.
- linuxftw 8y ago
  Public education is fundamentally broken in this regard (except for the times tables, IMO much more time should be spent on math in-school vs homework). History in the elementary school level seems near useless, aside from building reading comprehension skills.
  - 8y ago

rjf72 8y ago

So you would say your average 22 year old college grad has "an expansive view of human knowledge"? I realize this sounds like it should be a strawman, but it is not! That follows directly from your supposition that 'college is good because it provides an expansive view of human knowledge.' If this is at all true then your average grad should have something at least vaguely resembling an expansive view of human knowledge. I think university can nicely compliment individuals' own personal strengths and attributes, but I do not think a university can turn a lump of coal into a diamond no matter how hard it may press. To take for instance Harvard, I think Harvard graduates are Harvard graduates long before graduating from Harvard - in some cases before they're even admitted. Abraham Lincoln as an extreme example had less than a year of formal schooling, giving up on formal education to help to take care of his family. Far from being an ignorant redneck, as would be the typical caricature of a person with no education running around in on rural land with overalls with a axe, he loved reading and taught himself an immense amount about the world and society. And this is in an era when access to information was exponentially more difficult and expensive to come by. Today it's easier than ever. In a different time he'd be another Harvard grad with people wowed at the caliber of individuals they continually manage to produce. No, it's the caliber of individuals that they manage to attract.

MRD85 8y ago
I'm in complete agreeance with this. I notice a difference in behaviour of "working class" vs "white collar" cultures but this difference isn't due to university, it's due to different cultures as adults. In my 20's I'd rarely meet someone intellectual through my professional circles, everyone that age simply wanted to go do drugs at music festivals, talk about the boring reality TV, etc. I know/knew people in academia, however, and this was the one area of my life where people largely had intellectual interests.

sametmax 8y ago

I don't know. I've been programming for 15 years now, and if I had to do it again, I would drop from school at 16 years old. I'm not saying it's the only right way to do it. But given my profile and my history, I would have saved years of wasted hours, frustration and money without loosing much. To me, the one thing we need to improve is to accept that school was a great improvement over what we had, but we now can sometime choose paths that are an improvement over school.

droobles 8y ago

I would argue with the internet we have access to an expansive view to broaden our horizons, and the paid training can go toward developing skills for income. With Youtube, Wikipedia, and Google Scholar I think I've learned more than I ever could have at college.

JamesBarney 8y ago

"opportunity to explore the accumulated knowledge of the humanities and sciences". What does this mean? We should be spending vast sums or human time and capital to make sure a sufficiently high percentage of the population needs knows how to shotgun beer and argue about Descartes?

benj111 8y ago

Yes, but on the other hand, some people just don't like school, and would rather get out and do something practical. This isn't an easy problem to solve, the UK introduced grammar and comprehensives post war, unified the 2 as secondary moderns, and is now introducing university technical colleges. But at least for the UK, this is all tied up with class. Lower classes did things with their hands. I don't think that association is as strong as it was though. Coal mines and low tech industry have been replaced by high tech manufacturing.

EpicEng 8y ago

At what point in time has the world as a whole been more educated than we are now? It seems to me that we've made great strides toward this goal, but the reality is that A) not everyone is cut out for it, and B) until we live in a Star Trek like utopia, life will never allow the majority of people to spend years studying e.g. philosophy in lieu of supporting themselves, their dependents, and contributing material value to society.

unimpressive 8y ago

So it would appear the Bryan Caplan thesis is consensus among the sample of HN readers that comment, and that honestly makes me pretty happy because I'm fairly sure it's correct. Still, it's always good to examine things from both sides: A lot of what the 'costly signaling' genre of comments miss is that a costly signal is very valuable. In the old school system where literally anyone could act as legal representation, it can be difficult to figure out who's trustworthy council. The professionalization of legal representation took away the public's ability to practice law, but it also better enabled them to consistently get competent legal counsel. Is that tradeoff worth it? Plausible. I feel like a lot of the rankling around licensing and professionalization is because the costs of it are rarely taken into account so we let the commons suffer. The truth is that you can only strictly license and professionalize so many occupations. In a society with limited growth and a need for everyone to be employed being sufficiently risk averse means that economic freedom is stunted. That more than anything else seems to be what people are feeling as they reel from massive college debts and 'hustlers mindset'. Licensing costs are probably nonlinear, your nth license restriction costs more than the last did. To the extent that college is 'sink or swim' it probably has a conditioning effect. I absolutely hate myself for what I tolerated to get my degree, but I'd be lying if I said the spiritual damage doesn't translate into a burnout who knows how to kill themselves going at stuff they hate. That's a very positive effect from an employability standpoint. Multiple times what I thought would be my psychological breaking point just turned out to be another ratchet on the road to scholastic moksha. It's only when you've learned to hate yourself so thoroughly that you can tolerate anything, that you're ready to handle the level of difficulty and nihilism the modern workplace is likely to present you with. Of course that perspective is closer in spirit to Mussolini than Mill, so you can't exactly advertise it in your universities brochure. It's very possible if we don't do that somehow, you just can't quite produce the sort of highly disciplined person you need to make society work.

patrickg_zill 8y ago

I agree about the expansive view of human knowledge. However there is more than one path to that knowledge...

scarface74 8y ago

I’m not spending thousands of dollars to put my children through school for the “good of humanity”. I’m spending that money so they can get a job and put food on their table. I also told them that I would not support them getting a degree that wouldn’t be marketable. No they can’t get a degree in Ancient Chinese Art History.

ThomPete 8y ago

Getting an expansive view of human knowledge is not done by the universities quite the contrary. Furthermore the expansive view isn't really interesting if you don't know how to apply it to something.

VLM 8y ago

The main thing missing from the article is intentional conflation of inherently opposing situations. True, a union apprentice electrician's classwork is not all that wide. However, I may be one of the only people here on HN who took my first 64 credits and an associates degree at a local tech school (for about $50/credit, admittedly quite a few years ago) and I received credit for 48 of them at the institution where I later got my BSCS. I assure you I had to sit thru the same intro to sociology, psych, public speaking, physics, and calculus classes as any other freshman. The main difference was trade school students tend to be older and more serious and pay more attention in class. The quality of lab equipment in degree granting fields (EE) was similar in trade school and uni. The quality of equipment in non-degree labs (physics) was vastly inferior, yet good enough. Neither of my experiences have anything to do with "semester long coding bootcamps" and similar training mentioned in the article. True, that university education is all pretty much the same; however, "everything that is not going to college" has quite a bit of diversity. Speaking of diversity, there is zero permitted diversity of thought or political opinion in university today; they are single political party indoctrination centers. Surely almost any other post-high school experience would better prepare students for the diverse real world.

TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago

As a tradesperson myself, I completely reject the idea that the trades place limits on people. In my opinion, getting an expansive view of human knowledge has almost nothing to do with where and what you formally study. Indeed, as you progress through higher learning institutions a person tends to learn more and more about less and less. If a person is curious and motivated they'll have more luck getting an expansive view that those who are not. It may very well be that motivated curious people attend higher learning institutions more, but those people will obtain their expansive view in spite of their formal education, not because of it. Generally speaking.

dredmorbius 8y ago

There's a long history behind education, types of it, and the reasons, rationales, and interests behind these. One of the better synopses of these I've found is Wes Cecil's "Myths of the Modern American Mind: Education" (61 minutes, audio only): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFiiOm6fB3c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFiiOm6fB3c He traces the history back to Babylonia and scribal training, Plato's Academy, Aristotle's Lyceum, medieval education, scholaticism and the rise of the Seven Liberal Arts with their Trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric) and Quadrivium (Maths, Geometry, Music (or harmony) and Astronomy), the emergence of the modern physical and social sciences, and the Prussian Educational System which is the foundation of contemporary Western education. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education Throughout virtually all of this there's been a sharp division between intellectual and technical education. The liberal arts were distinguished from the technical arts, also called Artes Mechanicae (mechanical arts), servile arts, or vulgar arts, originally: tailoring and weaving, agriculture, architecture and masonry, warfare and hunting, trade, cooking, and blacksmithing and metalurgy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artes_Mechanicae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artes_Mechanicae Since 1800 or so, the distinctions have largely been between pure skills, including trade, vocational, and technical skills (including STEM), professional training (law, medicine, military, religion, and general administration), and humanities or liberal arts. The relative prestige of these has shifted fairly markedly over this period, as well as the increased specialisation within academic curricula and programmes, with the University of Virginia offering eight fields of study in 1825, and Johns Hopkins University using the term "major" for the first time in 1877. The emergence of technical schools, such as M.I.T. (1861) with specialised courses of study helped drive this transformation. Cecil's treatment is on the light side, but engaging.

wmeredith 8y ago

How “good” is that expansive view of human knowledge? Is it worth $100k? Is it for everyone?

dsajames 8y ago

This is often dragged out whenever "liberal education" is justified. It's overrated. My friends who went to college are not $50-$200k more expansively educated than those who didn't. Also, libraries, cheap Kindle books, YouTube, and other internet resources are freely/cheaply available. Those who want to learn will do so and can for the price of a tablet or less. This reminds me of the scene in Good Will Hunting where the Harvard student is brought down for his overpriced education that could be gotten for a few bucks in late fees at the library.

loveyourmother 8y ago

> rather than a narrow training to turn you into a worker on a production line (or at a computer). Skilled trades can be done anywhere in the world. You are not tied to a production line. I have seen all the options being discussed here. I joined the Army and lived abroad for years in Europe. When I came home I joined a union with a 4-year apprentice plan. It was only 4 weeks of school a year with the rest being learning on the job. At night, I went to college with GI bill. After I finished a 2-year degree I started traveling to work. We built and refinished some amazing hotels and residential buildings. Visiting and living in major cities on the east and west coast. I can use my "trade skill" anywhere in the world. I would suggest any young kid learn a trade. Someone has to build that high-tower so the smarts can look down on us. From their cubical.