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Students don't seem to be getting much out of higher education (2018)

268 points by laurex 8y ago

firstplacelast 8y ago
Make college available for everyone for free, but make asking for and talking about degrees illegal in job interviews. Force employers to actually vet people for what they know and can do and not force otherwise capable people to jump through expensive hoops to display pseudo-signals. Not only will we be able to help people improve their skills as a society, but I bet college enrollment goes down across the board because most jobs aren’t that hard. Most jobs don’t actually need degrees, it’s just that degrees make hiring much easier.
- hnuser123457 8y ago
  Respectfully, you are retarded and should kill yourself.
- doitLP 8y ago
  > Force employers to actually vet people for what they know and can do How do you propose to do that? At least with developers you can make the candidate do some toy project or whiteboard but that process is woefully flawed and controversial. That’s tech, but what if you’re hiring for something more abstract, like Human Resources or sales? What if you just need a person who can learn quickly and is easy to work with? Almost every job I was in changed significantly within a year of being there. New tasks, new responsibilities, new teams. I grew with the changes or I left when I wanted a change. Screening upfront for specific skills only in all but the most narrow jobs will have limited usefulness. It seems to me the best way to accomplish this is to have a clear statement of the role, provide excellent on-boarding and make hiring and firing much easier, so you can quickly end a relationship that’s not definitely not working.
  - swiftcoder 8y ago
    > make hiring and firing much easier, so you can quickly end a relationship that’s not definitely not working. Firing is already pretty darn easy in most states. At will employment is pretty much designed to accomplish that.
- anewhnaccount2 8y ago
  Clearly yours is an unpopular opinion, but I often find myself similarly minded. To me, there should definitely be places/institutions of learning, but I think a lot of problems come from the bundling of learning, assessment (not including formative assessment, which is a teach tool) and qualification. Perhaps a decoupling could ease us into a situation where where the institutions help people engage in lifelong study alongside work, since the idea that the qualification is a prerequisite has been removed.
Simulacra 8y ago
The key problem I think, with higher education, is that we force students to take classes in the name of liberal education. If no one is required to take a class, then students might not take that class, which leads to that professor's usefulness, and perhaps career, coming into question. If anything universities are increasing not only the number of classes a student has to take, but also increasing seemingly-pointless labs and other classes taught by graduate students, so they can then pay those GTA's. It's almost like a pyramid scheme.
- Zanni 8y ago
  That's a side effect of Caplan's main objection, that a college degree has become a credential, used for signaling, and not indicating any real merit or learning. Once students recognize that (and they have), they put in the bare minimum to get the credential, and administrators respond by forcing new minimums. It's still possible to get a good education if you choose your institution, classes and professors wisely, but it's frustrating for motivated students to be surrounded by slackers. In a good learning environment, you're going to learn as much or more from your peers as from your teacher. I highly recommend his book: The Case Against Education - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B076ZY8S8J https://www.amazon.com/dp/B076ZY8S8J.
  - boazbarak 8y ago
    I don't presume my institution is representative (nor that it isn't), but for what it's worth, most students I see are not slackers at all. Students often choose the harder courses, and many of them require a significant amount of work (a typical CS course requires 12 hours of work outside lecture and many require much more).
    - cbhl 8y ago
      For a CS degree, the slackers can read the slides at home, do the assignments from home, and only come in to do the exams. You're not going to see them until the graduation ceremony. (At least, I didn't.)
titanix2 8y ago
> If schools aim to boost students’ future income by teaching job skills, why do they entrust students’ education to people so detached from the real world? Well, precisely because university does not exist to increase future income of its students. It's mostly about extending human knowledge in a formalized way called science, and producing enough doctors to let the institution continues in the future. If one aims to study practical skill there is dozen of other options: engineer and business schools, vocational schools, etc. I agree however that there is a worrying inflation of required degrees to get an entry position anywhere and that's a waste of time and money for all parties involved.
- linuxftw 8y ago
  > Well, precisely because university does not exist to increase future income of its students Then it's not worth subsidizing with government-backed loans and grants. That money would be better spent elsewhere.
justinzollars 8y ago
I feel like everyone is doing social media marketing - or something equally useless while the world around us is breaking down. In the Bay Area, in San Francisco specifically, voters allocated funds to fix or replace every single Bart escalator. The best hope we have for completing this job is 7 years. Yes you read this correctly 7 years. The problem is we do not have enough licensed escalator mechanics to do the work. Money isn't the problem. Maybe more people should go into the trades - and not be funneled into higher education. We desperately need better infrastructure, more housing, tangible things. Not everyone is cut out for college.
- HillaryBriss 8y ago
  In the old days, there weren't enough people who knew how to do social media marketing. But somehow a bunch more people learned. I don't know. One might argue that the licensing requirement for escalator mechanics is causing the shortage. Or maybe impediments related to unionized work minimums are causing a bottleneck in the flow of people who are allowed to hold these escalator mechanic jobs.
- deleted 8y ago
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- logicx24 8y ago
  If the world really needs more escalator mechanics, then salaries for them will rise commensurate to demand and people will train to become escalator mechanics. Until then, they'll continue with other pursuits that are more profitable to them. This is how things have always been, unless you want to reinstitute medieval guilds, and I don't see a problem with it. Generally, campaigning to make people to do something out of a sense of moral propriety is the wrong approach to creating change.
  - nostrebored 8y ago
    That assumes perfect knowledge. How many of you have ever stopped to check what an escalator mechanic makes?
boazbarak 8y ago
I have posted about this on https://windowsontheory.org/2018/05/02/short-non-review-of-caplans-case-against-education/ https://windowsontheory.org/2018/05/02/short-non-review-of-c... I am of course biased as a faculty (though I think his policy prescriptions would negatively effect public schools more than private universities such as Harvard), but I think Caplan's analysis is extremely shallow. First, note that if he's right, higher education should be an incredible drag on the economy - we're taking 4 highly productive years out of the workforce. Such an extreme conclusion shouldn't be that hard to test without resorting to anecdotes and contorted reading of data. Educational policies and subsidies vary so greatly between different countries and even states, that if it was such a colossal waste we should be seeing it in the higher GDP or productivity of the less educated countries and localities. (The article is in general very US-centric for an issue that is not specific to the US at all.) When a locality has less access to education, there would be naturally less of a "credential arms race" and so more people that have just as much base talent but did not go to college. Why aren't employers flocking to those places and hiring high school graduates who would be so much cheaper? I know one theory Caplan has is that completing college certifies "conformity" and "tolerance for boredom": is spending 4 years and tens or hundreds or thousands of dollars the only way to test for these properties? Also (at least from my experience in the IDF) conformity and tolerance for boredom are very important for the army, arguably moreso than many other employers, yet they do fine with high school graduates.
- analog31 8y ago
  >>> I know one theory Caplan has is that completing college certifies "conformity" and "tolerance for boredom": is spending 4 years and tens or hundreds or thousands of dollars the only way to test for these properties? Working any entry level office job from age 18-22 would be a pretty good test. I would not have survived it.
  - 80386 8y ago
    Do people care about that? This isn't a trick question. I've had two jobs for the last three years; one was sporadic, part-time, and technical, and the other was full-time horrid mostly-unskilled drudgery. I'm not sure whether or not to list the drudge job on my resume. Maybe I'll A/B test it...
analog31 8y ago
Kaplan can talk until he's blue in the face, but why aren't people going into the trades right now if it's such a good idea? If it's explained by the market value of a college degree, what's he going to do about that? There are some negatives to working in the trades. For one thing, manual labor takes a toll on your body. I've watched tradesmen work at my house and at my workplace. If they're my age, they're broken and hobbling. How can somebody survive that for long enough to have a decent retirement? How do they survive recessions, which typically affect the construction industry? An economist should be able to show us how to tip the balance. Show us.
- i_s 8y ago
  > Kaplan can talk until he's blue in the face, but why aren't people going into the trades right now if it's such a good idea? If it's explained by the market value of a college degree, what's he going to do about that? Because the government is subsidizing education. His suggestion is simple: cut/lower the subsidies.
  - analog31 8y ago
    Okay, just make life harder for everybody. Nice. How does subsidizing education, thus creating more college graduates, increase the value of a degree? There must be some sort of monstrous arbitrage going on, where young people have figured out a scheme for boosting their market value, and employers are utterly clueless about it. My own suggestions would be to provide better protections for blue collar workers, such as better enforcement of workplace safety laws, stronger unions, health care, pensions, and a generally stronger safety net.
    - i_s 8y ago
      > Okay, just make life harder for everybody. Nice. If you spend less on one thing, you can spend more on other things (or tax less), so I don't see how that follows. > How does subsidizing education, thus creating more college graduates, increase the value of a degree? I would think about it like this instead: subsidizing education lowers the cost, making it more attractive than it otherwise would be compared to the alternatives (e.g., trade school). For example, if the government decided to subsidize Ford car purchases, more people would buy Ford, right? Doesn't mean Ford cars became any better.
vippy 8y ago
Bryan Caplan is an authoritarian piece of garbage. The purpose of education is not to boost the incomes of students, but to expand human knowledge and spread enlightenment; to combat ignorance. It was employers who decided to base hiring decision on the basis of degrees. It is employers who can still change their requirements. We must protect education and fight for an enlightened, fair, nonviolent, just society.
egypturnash 8y ago
> From kindergarten on, students spend thousands of hours studying subjects irrelevant to the modern labor market. Why do English classes focus on literature and poetry instead of business and technical writing? uggggh this, this market-driven bullshit that assumes "business" should be the end goal of all human behavior English classes focus on literature and poetry because maybe you should have some sense of beauty, because you should have some vague idea of what a good fucking sentence looks like instead of just learning to write the abominable circumlocutions of this year's dialect of Business English. Because maybe reading stories about people in interesting moral dilemmas can help us think about how we'd react in a similar situation and be able to say "hey wait I am starting to act like that asshole in that one book, it sure didn't end well for her, okay what else can I try then". Because part of the job of education is to pass on a culture to the next generation along with raw knowledge. > Why do advanced-math classes bother with proofs almost no student can follow? When will the typical student use history? What's the old saw about people who don't learn history? They're doomed to repeat it? Do you really want kids making the same mistakes your parents made, because they didn't see any of the results? "Oh hey let's vote for this obvious confidence man for the lulz, what's the worst that could happen", one year later we have literal fucking Nazi groups rallying in the streets? uuuggggghhh yes let's all just learn exactly what we need to learn to be useful to some big corporate entity, let's learn nothing that will make us ever question its inhuman, amoral, profit-first motives, I am sure this will have absolutely no problems whatsoever.
- potatoyogurt 8y ago
  I don't get it, I don't understand how the author of the article has a PhD if this is what he thinks. Like, > Why do advanced-math classes bother with proofs almost no student can follow? Because that literally _is_ mathematics, and the point of working through them is because students can actually understand them and learn to do the same thing with new problems. How does he expect anyone to create or discover anything new with just arithmetic 101? There's a kernel of a good argument in that signaling probably is one of the main values that students get from a college degree, but it's overstated to such a degree that it crosses over into idiocy.
  - 8y ago
bennesvig 8y ago
> If schools aim to boost students’ future income by teaching job skills, why do they entrust students’ education to people so detached from the real world? Because the aim of school is to teach compliance, to sit quietly for 8 hours a day and do what you're told. I don't think it has ever been about learning truly practical skills. I don't even remember taking basic finance classes in high school.
euske 8y ago
Related article: https://www.chronicle.com/article/Why-the-College-Degree-Is-a/245923 https://www.chronicle.com/article/Why-the-College-Degree-Is-...
cdf2theworld 8y ago
Student here - I was struck by the "summer learning loss" quoted in the article. Everyone I talk to has this, myself included. The greatest reason for this, personally, is subject diffusion. This is especially true from freshman to junior year; we are required to take a dizzying number of classes that not only have nothing to do with our job field, but also have nothing to do with each other. I understand that it's important to "gain broad interests", but I retained very very little until my junior year, when all of the irrelevant courses had been completed. This issue may be coupled with the signaling problem, in that not only is the senior year the only year of college that employers care about (because you get handed a credential), but also because you take so little away from school until that point. I'd say that paying for college should be scaled with the earning benefit it imparts, freshman year costing very little, and senior year costing a majority of the total degree. Thoughts?
- kiba 8y ago
  If there's "summer loss"? What about when you leave high school and college? What happened to the notes you took for your classes at the end of the semester? I suspect that they are thrown away and never seen again. I suspect part of the problem with education is that we don't learn how to learn, and that we done very little work on how to retain those skills and connect them to our world.
  - cdf2theworld 8y ago
    I'm sorry, I don't understand what you are getting at. With the internet in it's current state, notes from college years 1&2 are useless... I could go on Wikipedia and YouTube and get the same, if not higher quality, information about those subjects. FWIW, I still have all of those notes. The understanding and intuitive development is what suffers, not having the information available.
    - kiba 8y ago
      You do not develop understanding by merely looking up resources and reading about it. Reading something alone will create not create fluency and understanding. That is why we take notes. They serve both as records of what we learned, a learning tools, and a place to synthesize knowledge and understanding. I also use wikipedia and lookup youtube videos, but I don't merely read or watch about it. I engage in an active process of learning and synthesizing information.
ceoddevelopment 8y ago
ooooops sorrrryy
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randomacct3847 8y ago
Having worked in tech for a few years in non-tech roles (analytics, product) I was looking for a code bootcamp because I didn’t want to look back and regret not deeply learning in a way that I felt like I could not do with self study alone. I was skeptical but decided to start in SF earlier this month at the best rated/most reputable one I could find. Obviously still early on, but I can say that I’m already grasping concepts better than I have just doing code academy/coursesa/reading SO alone on and off over the years. It’s very possible there isn’t anything special specifically about this program, but if you basically commit to doing nothing but one thing for 16 hours a day (full day on site with projects, lectures, and then homework at night) plus weekend study for weekly tests then you will get better at anything. Most colleges, though, aren’t really structured to support students to become good at just one thing. Though I’d also argue they aren’t necessarily designed to be job factories.
- jaabe 8y ago
  You can take CS50 and following or the MIT MOOCs on edx.org and learn more about CS in a few weeks than I did during my entire freshman year of the university of Aalborg. Sure it’s introductory, but so was my freshman year. I don’t really agree with the article though, I enjoyed philosophy and history as side tracks doing my entire schooling, and I use the creativity and insights I got from those a whole lot more than I ever use economics or math.
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QuadmasterXLII 8y ago
“Indeed, in the average study, senior year of college brings more than twice the pay increase of freshman, sophomore, and junior years combined. Unless colleges delay job training until the very end, signaling is practically the only explanation.” The author genuinely can’t conceptualize that people who fail out in the fourth year might, on average, have learned less in the first three? The line “practically the only explanation” even calls out the flaw in the author’s own logic. Lol.
- adrianratnapala 8y ago
  That's his point. The advantage of getting through the fourth and final year is the signal that it shows you are not one of those who did worse.
_hardwaregeek 8y ago
There's several issues I've noticed as a student. First, kids are told to go to college immediately after high school. If college was high school 2.0, this would be fine. But college is completely different from high school; it's significantly more expensive, more free form and more rigorous (at least compared to most high schools). I see so many students who clearly have no clue what they want to do, why they're in college (beyond "my parents want me to") or how to accomplish their goals. Having seen the sheer quantity of kids struggling with simple stuff like cleaning, cooking and not drinking themselves to death, I'm becoming more and more in favor of a mandatory service at the age of 18. Maybe not military like the IDF, but some sort of program where kids are forced to go away from home and learn to be self sufficient. Little Bobby should learn how to scrub a pot and clean a bathroom before he's entrusted with a 240k education. I took a gap year and I was significantly more focused and disciplined than I was in high school. And way better than the majority of my college peers. But even worse than being unprepared for college, I feel like we've been fostering a poor attitude towards learning. I grew up in an academic family, so to me, learning wasn't a stage of life. Learning was an essential aspect of being alive. Going to college wasn't some arbitrary merit badge that society deems necessary. It was a natural extension of whatever field I wanted to study. I see college as a tool; I need to learn certain topics in order to get what I want in life. Of course, I'm very fortunate to have taken a gap year and worked as a programmer. If nothing else, I know that I like programming, I'm good at it and I'm willing to suffer through the painful parts. It's kinda good to know that before I spent 240k on a CS degree.
- vanderZwan 8y ago
  > Of course, I'm very fortunate to have taken a gap year and worked as a programmer. I told my youngest sister to take a gap year to figure herself out. She didn't, and now years into college she has decided to switch studies, just like I did. Luckily we're Dutch and this is actually a realistic possibility for us.
- HAL9000Ti 8y ago
  > mandatory service You can't be serious now
- krapp 8y ago
monster2control 8y ago
I understand where the author is coming from, yet, perhaps because he is constantly surrounded by well educated individuals, he failed to point out the unmeasureable benefits of going to college. When a person is exposed to the diversity of different people normally found at a college their view of the world is expanded. This generally increases their empathy and broadens their humanity. You just don’t get the same exposure at a trade school or through an apprenticeship. Perhaps the real solution is that colleges should offer training in the trades. You’d benefit from classes on how to run a business and do taxes and accounting if you’re in a trade and want to start your own business. And just because the direct access to the knowledge is not retained, doesn’t mean the residual knowledge is completely lost. If I never learned Calculus I’d have no idea where to start if I wanted or needed to pick it up again, but because I did, I have a much easier time refreshing myself. As a programmer, I jump from language to language often. When I haven’t used a language in a while I forget a lot of it, but once I start using it again, I recall and pick it up much faster. So, while those researchers proved that if you don’t use it, you do indeed lose it, they failed to see if a quick refresh of the material proved their skills more than someone that never learned the skill at all. I’d imagine the results would be as I’d expect and those that previously learned it did much better than those that never learned it. And finally, the author touched on what is more directly the issue. College ciriculiums are simply not well designed. If more majors were designed like engineering as his example, their would be more useful and their for used knowledge acquired during a students years in college and therefore more skills would translate into their field.
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tfehring 8y ago
It seems like the countercultural anti-college rhetoric that’s sprung up recently is focused on the individual level, which makes sense. But I’m concerned that it misses a broader and incredibly important point as a result. Roughly a third of American adults have at least a Bachelor’s degree. I (unsurprisingly) haven’t been able to find any hard data on this question, but does anyone want to take a guess at what percentage of innovation they’re responsible for? It’s certainly over a third - my shot in the dark is 90%. Measure innovation however you see fit. You can explain away some of that gap with factors like parental education and wealth, but I’m not convinced you can explain away all of it. Skilled trades may be great for the individual, but they don’t really drive innovation. Neither do social media managers, of course - not every college graduate can be a unicorn CEO - but I’m still convinced that college education is a substantial net positive in expectation.
- taftster 8y ago
  I don't know. You're making the leap to suggest that 33% of Americans are responsible for 90% of the innovation. I don't think that's the case at all. It's probably more like 0.1% of Americans are responsible for 90% of innovation. Or in other words, 32.9% of the population of Bachelor degree holders don't add any more innovative value than the 67% of non-Bachelor holders. Or to put it another way, there isn't a direct correlation between Bachelor's holders and innovators. Sure there are some ridiculously smart people out there, and probably most of them have some formal higher education. But their education probably isn't what made them ridiculously smart; instead it was probably their education that helped shape their thinking and possibly opened some doors. And of course there are many examples of innovations that came from people without degrees. Many technology company founders that we would today consider innovative did not necessarily hold a Bachelor's degree. In short, I think your connection that 33% of Americans are automatically innovative just because they have a degree is quite the stretch. A degree doesn't have any correlation to ones aptitude for innovation.
  - tfehring 8y ago
    I think you’re either thinking of innovation more narrowly than I am or underestimating the number of people who contribute to it. I don’t think you can attribute, say, the development of a new drug to a single person in most cases. Or the implementation of a machine learning model. Or the changes that have led to massive improvements in the efficiency of clean energy in recent years. Or, if you want to really stretch the definition of “innovation,” the development of financial instruments to help investors better allocate capital and manage risk. The list goes on, of course. But what I want to illustrate is that entrepreneurs with “a-ha” moments don’t have a monopoly on innovation. Far from it. Now, going through that list of innovations again, what proportion of the people involved do you think have a Bachelor’s degree or more? I promise I didn’t intentionally cherry-pick at all - I suspect the pattern will hold if you come up with your own list, provided that you limit it to the last, say, 50 years. And at least in the examples I gave, the fact that the people responsible overwhelmingly have college degrees isn’t incidental, it’s a result of the fact that deep subject matter expertise is needed to push the envelope.
JHH_18 8y ago
First, I love the Atlantic's writing .. so good. Second, I'm just a poor boy, despite all the promises of the 60's. Please try to be kind to the community college boys with more than 200 units. We did take-up the spear. Good speed.
ryanmcbride 8y ago
Anecdotally the other day I was talking with two friends and former coworkers we realized that one of us had completed grad school, one of us had a undergraduate degree, and one of us was a college dropout(that one's me) and we all have the exact same job at the exact same level.
thenullfries 8y ago
>“I have been in school for more than 40 years. First preschool, kindergarten, elementary school, junior high, and high school. Then a bachelor’s degree at UC Berkeley, followed by a doctoral program at Princeton. The next step was what you could call my first “real” job—as an economics professor at..” and >”Suppose your law firm wants a summer associate. A law student with a doctorate in philosophy from Stanford applies. What do you infer? The applicant is probably brilliant, diligent, and willing to tolerate serious boredom.” I feel dedicated people with an above average IQ could achieve similar things, but this sort of pedigree tends to speak more towards socioeconomic class than sheer intelligence. Where intelligence and high socioeconomic class seem to be a signaling with degrees from impressive schools. Makes me wonder how many smart working class kids we are missing out on. The high IQ kids who went to schools not ranked in the top 100, those that would have excelled at MIT but for whatever reason never applied and now does who knows what, not performing to their potential. We have so much inbreeding, where we continually get the same kids from the same backgrounds missing out on an entire segment of the population.
mnm1 8y ago
College isn't just about jobs. I studied philosophy, got two diplomas in it and now I write software for a living. Do I regret it? Of course not. I learned a lot in college. I learned a lot about myself. I learned a lot about learning, other people, and the world. I'm glad I didn't waste those four years learning computers, something I was much better able to do on my own. Yes, if the only goal is to learn job skills only, most colleges and most majors shouldn't exist and they certainly shouldn't be pursued. I know it's hard for the author to fathom, but there are other reasons to learn. Many people enjoy learning and it improves lives in many immeasurable ways. It's so shortsighted to look at a college education as simply a path to better jobs that may or may not exist. Frankly, it's a stupid, small minded idea that seems to be pervasive in America's culture of stupidity. Isn't our society stupid enough without people railing against higher education? Perhaps if more people could attend college, if the costs weren't astronomical we'd have a better, more educated society and culture instead of the stupidity that dominates. That's reason enough to encourage people to go to college, let alone all the personal reasons mentioned above.
- Kaveren 8y ago
  This article isn't the full picture of Caplan's view. I haven't read his book, but here's a timestamped talk [0] at The Heritage Foundation where he addresses this argument. To summarize, he says that he loves "useless" knowledge but that it should be enriching (points to amount of busywork), and that it requires that students are willing participants, which he argues that many of them are not. Caplan says that the book has an entire chapter dedicated to refuting this argument, which I can't speak to. [0] https://youtu.be/kCLGURUubzc?t=1893 https://youtu.be/kCLGURUubzc?t=1893
_hao 8y ago
I'm not from the US (born in Eastern Europe), but I'd like to share some of my own experience. I'm 26 now and I barely finished high-school because I thought it was a waste of time and I was working on my own projects and learning everything I could on my own about CS. My last year at school (turned 18 just before the start of the school year) I found a job as a QA in a small outsourcing company and didn't even attend classes. I didn't even care it wasn't a dev job. I wanted to be around devs and see how it is to actually work in a real company. Now the important question here is... Why would they hire me, a person that can legally work, but not having a high school diploma? There were a couple of factors that played in my favor. First - it was basically a contract for 1 year, with 3 months of trial period. I was supposed to take the place of a woman that went in maternity. Second - I wanted a laughably low salary, really low. To me it was a lot of money at that time, but I didn't know my worth. Third - I did really well on the interview and I managed to prove to the owners of the company that I can do this job. They hired me. I did my job well and after the trial period my boss pulled me to the side and offered me a permanent contract. I said yes without even thinking. He said that it's usually normal to ask for a raise after your trial ends and I asked for something stupid like 5%. He smiled at me and gave me a 100% raise and the position of a dev. I got lucky. I've thought a lot about it, but I really think that luck was on my side there. I obviously did the job good, and to this day it's the company I've worked the longest for - over 3 years. By the way I got A's on all of my final exams (had to book holiday to go and take them haha) and got my diploma. After that I decided to enroll in university, but it was just the same as in high school. After 1 semester I couldn't escape the feeling that I was wasting my time. I continued, but in the end I dropped out. I think I made a mistake enrolling in a CS course. I should've went for something that's interesting to me, but not necessarily to do as a living like Economics, Physics, Philosophy, History etc. I like the idea of higher education and I'm still thinking about enrolling and pursuing a degree in a different field, but I wouldn't go for a CS degree again. My 8 years in the industry now have taught me everything I need to deal with it. EDIT: Grammar, spelling
hezag 8y ago
> When will the typical student use history? Trigonometry? Art? Music? Physics? Seriously?
minikites 8y ago
>From kindergarten on, students spend thousands of hours studying subjects irrelevant to the modern labor market. Why do English classes focus on literature and poetry instead of business and technical writing? Why do advanced-math classes bother with proofs almost no student can follow? When will the typical student use history? Trigonometry? Art? Music? Physics? Latin? The class clown who snarks “What does this have to do with real life?” is onto something. Yet another attack on the liberal arts that misses the point of education entirely. An education in a variety of fields is about what it means to be a person in a world among other people and the natural environment. It's what makes democracy possible (https://press.princeton.edu/titles/10858.html https://press.princeton.edu/titles/10858.html). If we reduce education to mere employment training, we might as well revert to medieval feudalism where your entire life is bound to your economic production.
- watwut 8y ago
  Overwhelming majority of students don't have classes on art, music, history, physics or poetry. Majority of students who sign for advanced-math classes can actually follow them enough (not necessary to A++ but enough to). There are some minimums of these, but that is all there is to it, unless you decide to sign for these or pick art major. I am not saying that everything was practical or useful, but the way article describes the school amounts to building a strawman. Most college students go for various business degrees and those do have classes like business writing and technical writing. It might have bad pedagogy, but the intent to teach those things is there. The other thing is that I think that we should teach history, because what happened in history is closely related to how world functions now. So having rough idea that things happened (which is pretty much what high school history teaches) is something good to have.
mirimir 8y ago
> Why do advanced-math classes bother with proofs almost no student can follow? Because they're for math majors. And less-advanced ones are filters for potential math majors. Me, I hated that stuff. Engineering math actually taught useful skills. > I’m cynical about students. The vast majority are philistines. I was a horrible TA. I was mainly an RA, but had to TA one semester. I had no patience for the "what do I need to know for the test?" ones. Especially pre-meds. But ~five kids loved me, because we all cared about the ideas. It was actually easier as a professor, because I had TAs to deal with most students. Only the ones who cared bothered to see me personally. Or maybe I was just too rude to the others.
- swiley 8y ago
  I personally was pretty happy I got to take the math classes full of proofs that were “for math majors.” I feel like if you just want something practical you can go take an engineering class.
- bjs250 8y ago
  Politely disagree. I'm going to take engineering math to mean ~4 semesters of calculus (differentiation, integration, multivariable, and differential equations) as well as maybe a Linear Algebra class and a discrete mathematics class (probability, set theory, combinatorics). I would argue only the discrete mathematics course is practically useful Anecdotally, as an engineer in industry, I use very little of the engineering math. Number sense and sort of general quantitative reasoning are used. Let's suppose for sake of argument that I actually used engineering math though. Analytic solutions to derivatives and integrals (2 semesters of calculus) are largely useless because of applications like Wolfram Alpha that will solve these problems for you. The small class of ODE/PDE problems that are handled by analytic undergrad math classes will most often be solved using numerical methods such as Runge Kutta. Linear algebra is actually super useful in practice because you can use matrix solvers to solve systems of linear equations -- but a first course in undergraduate linear algebra is often just basic by-hand computations on matrix systems, and don't discuss higher order concepts at more than a shallow level (spans, invertibility, spectral decomposition, canonical forms, etc.)
  - 8y ago
packetpirate 8y ago
What a load of crap... "why do schools focus on unmarketable skills?" Gee, I don't know? Maybe because we shouldn't be teaching kids that they only exist to learn about a trade so they can be another cog in the machine? Because there are things worth learning beyond just what's valuable to the job market and every person should be given the opportunity to branch out and be diverse in their studies? Colleges give you all those supplemental classes so that you'll be well-rounded. Sure, you'd graduate faster and spend less money if you only took the classes that were immediately relevant to your career, but math proofs and math in general aren't always practical... it's about training your brain to solve problems, and the more abstract you can think about and approach a problem, the more creative you can get with your solutions. And it's not even just about skills... college is a whole different ball game than High School in terms of meeting new people. High School is all about cliques and for a lot of people (myself included) was fucking miserable. College allows you to meet a diverse set of new people who may or may not share common interests and for me, at least, allowed me to grow as a person in ways that don't necessarily translate to anything "marketable". Sure, not everyone is meant to go to college and the mentality that our parents had when we were younger, that "you have to go to college or you'll be flipping burgers for the rest of your life" is toxic, but those of us who do want to pursue a career that requires a higher education shouldn't have to spend the rest of our lives in debt just to do so.
- fuball63 8y ago
  I'm all for the movement to teach math and science differently so students garner a greater appreciation for critical thinking, but when the author suggested learning literature, poetry, and history are wastes of time, I strongly disagreed. The arts and history teach us empathy and give us context of the human condition. There is so much more to being a cog in the machine, as you said correctly. The more I see the way people behave in today's "current events" realm, the more I believe these things are more important than ever.
  - linuxftw 8y ago
    > The arts and history teach us empathy and give us context of the human condition. I disagree. These courses should be merely electives, if offered at all. The average person doesn't really have time for this stuff, they have a long road ahead of them and they need to spend more of their formative years preparing for the hard conditions of adult life.
thatoneuser 8y ago
Higher education is insanely our of touch with reality. Literally, on any given campus you'll hear "we don't produce jobs, we produce degrees" all while they boast $$$ on their website over what you'll earn. It's disgusting. I was a yuge Bernie fan in 2016 because he addressed one of the biggest issues our society faces - why do we allow the universities to endenture our youth? There's simply no reason. The material is all online. Usually in a better format than what your university is offering. Testing isn't something special that only universities can offer. Hell at this point it's mostly grad students teaching anyway... (Personal experience) We should do away with university. Learn online, test at a local institute (much more economic), but for the love of God let's give the 20 year Olds dorms still cuz that's an experience we all need to have. Coed.
- kypro 8y ago
  > but for the love of God let's give the 20 year Olds dorms still cuz that's an experience we all need to have. Coed. If this is true could you explain what I missed out on?
  - ZeroFries 8y ago
    Depends on the type of person you are. I didn't like them much, but lots of people had fun and formed great memories and friendships.
    - kypro 8y ago
      Why should tax payers be paying for, "people having fun"? I mean people have fun, form memories and make friendships on holidays too.
      - qntty 8y ago
        I think the point is that we should preserve the tradition of young people living in large houses together even if fewer people end up going to college. Tax payers don't necessarily have to pay for it. BTW, if you spent time living in a city near other young people, you probably didn't miss out on much by not living in a dorm. Some people really thrive in that environment, but personally I prefer the apartment-style living in an area with a lot of young people (college campus or city with young people) that I transitioned to after freshman year.
mikorym 8y ago
I don't think this is true for science majors. Maybe this article is more about the economics of your career. But: > ...students who excel on exams frequently fail to apply their knowledge to the real world... the same goes for students of biology, mathematics, statistics, ... I think this holds better for high school. That's were we (myself, at least) got into the "test-zone". Looking back it feels like it was deceitful to emphasise tests. However, the main point from my side is this: I happened to have a good math lecturer at university (i.e., in higher education) that launched my research orientated subsequent years. I don't know if the problem is "higher education" or maybe just mentorship. I think it's a mixed bag for different people.
waylandsmithers 8y ago
All costs aside, I think this is discounting the benefit of a place for 18 year olds to go where they can make mistakes and grow up semi-independently (or sometimes completely independently) for four years in a relatively safe environment.
nobodyandproud 8y ago
The article is making a roundabout case for trade schools. But each business is like a fiefdom, with its very own set of very processes; rules; and even acceptable styles of writing. Trying to teach this is a losing prospect, as it can only come from experience.
Ericson2314 8y ago
Most jobs are stupid and pointless to society in America (the exceptions tend to make no money), so why would the education system that leads up to them be at all good? Once UBI creates a real job market can we consider the actual transformative potential of education. Until then alienated labor makes us all stupid.
YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
>> Why do English classes focus on literature and poetry instead of business and technical writing? Because they're trying to teach you English, as opposed to business and technical writing? Same goes for history, maths proofs, etc etc. They're not trying to teach you how to get a job, but how to think mathematically, etc. Not that school succeeds in teaching those things. I don't think I learned anything at school. But I did learn many of the things that school was trying to teach me, on my own. Because the things that school tries to teach you are actually useful, kinds of knowledge that cultivate the personality and make you a better person in all sorts of ways. We should try to change education to be more effective teaching you what it does, not changing what it tries to teach you.
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hurryskurry 8y ago
I've always felt this. College is the wrong place for most people. College is for nerds who want to learn and do research, and things like that. It isn't for someone who just wants to get a "real" job, nor it is really necessary. You can learn almost anything on the job. Because people feel like it's a waste of time they're not going to classes to learn, and so it's simply a waste of time and money for most people.

268 points by laurex 8y ago

Make college available for everyone for free, but make asking for and talking about degrees illegal in job interviews. Force employers to actually vet people for what they know and can do and not force otherwise capable people to jump through expensive hoops to display pseudo-signals. Not only will we be able to help people improve their skills as a society, but I bet college enrollment goes down across the board because most jobs aren’t that hard. Most jobs don’t actually need degrees, it’s just that degrees make hiring much easier.

hnuser123457 8y ago
Respectfully, you are retarded and should kill yourself.
doitLP 8y ago
> Force employers to actually vet people for what they know and can do How do you propose to do that? At least with developers you can make the candidate do some toy project or whiteboard but that process is woefully flawed and controversial. That’s tech, but what if you’re hiring for something more abstract, like Human Resources or sales? What if you just need a person who can learn quickly and is easy to work with? Almost every job I was in changed significantly within a year of being there. New tasks, new responsibilities, new teams. I grew with the changes or I left when I wanted a change. Screening upfront for specific skills only in all but the most narrow jobs will have limited usefulness. It seems to me the best way to accomplish this is to have a clear statement of the role, provide excellent on-boarding and make hiring and firing much easier, so you can quickly end a relationship that’s not definitely not working.
- swiftcoder 8y ago
  > make hiring and firing much easier, so you can quickly end a relationship that’s not definitely not working. Firing is already pretty darn easy in most states. At will employment is pretty much designed to accomplish that.
anewhnaccount2 8y ago
Clearly yours is an unpopular opinion, but I often find myself similarly minded. To me, there should definitely be places/institutions of learning, but I think a lot of problems come from the bundling of learning, assessment (not including formative assessment, which is a teach tool) and qualification. Perhaps a decoupling could ease us into a situation where where the institutions help people engage in lifelong study alongside work, since the idea that the qualification is a prerequisite has been removed.

Simulacra 8y ago

The key problem I think, with higher education, is that we force students to take classes in the name of liberal education. If no one is required to take a class, then students might not take that class, which leads to that professor's usefulness, and perhaps career, coming into question. If anything universities are increasing not only the number of classes a student has to take, but also increasing seemingly-pointless labs and other classes taught by graduate students, so they can then pay those GTA's. It's almost like a pyramid scheme.

Zanni 8y ago
That's a side effect of Caplan's main objection, that a college degree has become a credential, used for signaling, and not indicating any real merit or learning. Once students recognize that (and they have), they put in the bare minimum to get the credential, and administrators respond by forcing new minimums. It's still possible to get a good education if you choose your institution, classes and professors wisely, but it's frustrating for motivated students to be surrounded by slackers. In a good learning environment, you're going to learn as much or more from your peers as from your teacher. I highly recommend his book: The Case Against Education - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B076ZY8S8J https://www.amazon.com/dp/B076ZY8S8J.
- boazbarak 8y ago
  I don't presume my institution is representative (nor that it isn't), but for what it's worth, most students I see are not slackers at all. Students often choose the harder courses, and many of them require a significant amount of work (a typical CS course requires 12 hours of work outside lecture and many require much more).
  - cbhl 8y ago
    For a CS degree, the slackers can read the slides at home, do the assignments from home, and only come in to do the exams. You're not going to see them until the graduation ceremony. (At least, I didn't.)

titanix2 8y ago

> If schools aim to boost students’ future income by teaching job skills, why do they entrust students’ education to people so detached from the real world? Well, precisely because university does not exist to increase future income of its students. It's mostly about extending human knowledge in a formalized way called science, and producing enough doctors to let the institution continues in the future. If one aims to study practical skill there is dozen of other options: engineer and business schools, vocational schools, etc. I agree however that there is a worrying inflation of required degrees to get an entry position anywhere and that's a waste of time and money for all parties involved.

linuxftw 8y ago
> Well, precisely because university does not exist to increase future income of its students Then it's not worth subsidizing with government-backed loans and grants. That money would be better spent elsewhere.

justinzollars 8y ago

I feel like everyone is doing social media marketing - or something equally useless while the world around us is breaking down. In the Bay Area, in San Francisco specifically, voters allocated funds to fix or replace every single Bart escalator. The best hope we have for completing this job is 7 years. Yes you read this correctly 7 years. The problem is we do not have enough licensed escalator mechanics to do the work. Money isn't the problem. Maybe more people should go into the trades - and not be funneled into higher education. We desperately need better infrastructure, more housing, tangible things. Not everyone is cut out for college.

HillaryBriss 8y ago
In the old days, there weren't enough people who knew how to do social media marketing. But somehow a bunch more people learned. I don't know. One might argue that the licensing requirement for escalator mechanics is causing the shortage. Or maybe impediments related to unionized work minimums are causing a bottleneck in the flow of people who are allowed to hold these escalator mechanic jobs.
deleted 8y ago
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logicx24 8y ago
If the world really needs more escalator mechanics, then salaries for them will rise commensurate to demand and people will train to become escalator mechanics. Until then, they'll continue with other pursuits that are more profitable to them. This is how things have always been, unless you want to reinstitute medieval guilds, and I don't see a problem with it. Generally, campaigning to make people to do something out of a sense of moral propriety is the wrong approach to creating change.
- nostrebored 8y ago
  That assumes perfect knowledge. How many of you have ever stopped to check what an escalator mechanic makes?

boazbarak 8y ago

I have posted about this on https://windowsontheory.org/2018/05/02/short-non-review-of-caplans-case-against-education/ https://windowsontheory.org/2018/05/02/short-non-review-of-c... I am of course biased as a faculty (though I think his policy prescriptions would negatively effect public schools more than private universities such as Harvard), but I think Caplan's analysis is extremely shallow. First, note that if he's right, higher education should be an incredible drag on the economy - we're taking 4 highly productive years out of the workforce. Such an extreme conclusion shouldn't be that hard to test without resorting to anecdotes and contorted reading of data. Educational policies and subsidies vary so greatly between different countries and even states, that if it was such a colossal waste we should be seeing it in the higher GDP or productivity of the less educated countries and localities. (The article is in general very US-centric for an issue that is not specific to the US at all.) When a locality has less access to education, there would be naturally less of a "credential arms race" and so more people that have just as much base talent but did not go to college. Why aren't employers flocking to those places and hiring high school graduates who would be so much cheaper? I know one theory Caplan has is that completing college certifies "conformity" and "tolerance for boredom": is spending 4 years and tens or hundreds or thousands of dollars the only way to test for these properties? Also (at least from my experience in the IDF) conformity and tolerance for boredom are very important for the army, arguably moreso than many other employers, yet they do fine with high school graduates.

analog31 8y ago
>>> I know one theory Caplan has is that completing college certifies "conformity" and "tolerance for boredom": is spending 4 years and tens or hundreds or thousands of dollars the only way to test for these properties? Working any entry level office job from age 18-22 would be a pretty good test. I would not have survived it.
- 80386 8y ago
  Do people care about that? This isn't a trick question. I've had two jobs for the last three years; one was sporadic, part-time, and technical, and the other was full-time horrid mostly-unskilled drudgery. I'm not sure whether or not to list the drudge job on my resume. Maybe I'll A/B test it...

analog31 8y ago

Kaplan can talk until he's blue in the face, but why aren't people going into the trades right now if it's such a good idea? If it's explained by the market value of a college degree, what's he going to do about that? There are some negatives to working in the trades. For one thing, manual labor takes a toll on your body. I've watched tradesmen work at my house and at my workplace. If they're my age, they're broken and hobbling. How can somebody survive that for long enough to have a decent retirement? How do they survive recessions, which typically affect the construction industry? An economist should be able to show us how to tip the balance. Show us.

i_s 8y ago
> Kaplan can talk until he's blue in the face, but why aren't people going into the trades right now if it's such a good idea? If it's explained by the market value of a college degree, what's he going to do about that? Because the government is subsidizing education. His suggestion is simple: cut/lower the subsidies.
- analog31 8y ago
  Okay, just make life harder for everybody. Nice. How does subsidizing education, thus creating more college graduates, increase the value of a degree? There must be some sort of monstrous arbitrage going on, where young people have figured out a scheme for boosting their market value, and employers are utterly clueless about it. My own suggestions would be to provide better protections for blue collar workers, such as better enforcement of workplace safety laws, stronger unions, health care, pensions, and a generally stronger safety net.
  - i_s 8y ago
    > Okay, just make life harder for everybody. Nice. If you spend less on one thing, you can spend more on other things (or tax less), so I don't see how that follows. > How does subsidizing education, thus creating more college graduates, increase the value of a degree? I would think about it like this instead: subsidizing education lowers the cost, making it more attractive than it otherwise would be compared to the alternatives (e.g., trade school). For example, if the government decided to subsidize Ford car purchases, more people would buy Ford, right? Doesn't mean Ford cars became any better.

vippy 8y ago

Bryan Caplan is an authoritarian piece of garbage. The purpose of education is not to boost the incomes of students, but to expand human knowledge and spread enlightenment; to combat ignorance. It was employers who decided to base hiring decision on the basis of degrees. It is employers who can still change their requirements. We must protect education and fight for an enlightened, fair, nonviolent, just society.

egypturnash 8y ago

> From kindergarten on, students spend thousands of hours studying subjects irrelevant to the modern labor market. Why do English classes focus on literature and poetry instead of business and technical writing? uggggh this, this market-driven bullshit that assumes "business" should be the end goal of all human behavior English classes focus on literature and poetry because maybe you should have some sense of beauty, because you should have some vague idea of what a good fucking sentence looks like instead of just learning to write the abominable circumlocutions of this year's dialect of Business English. Because maybe reading stories about people in interesting moral dilemmas can help us think about how we'd react in a similar situation and be able to say "hey wait I am starting to act like that asshole in that one book, it sure didn't end well for her, okay what else can I try then". Because part of the job of education is to pass on a culture to the next generation along with raw knowledge. > Why do advanced-math classes bother with proofs almost no student can follow? When will the typical student use history? What's the old saw about people who don't learn history? They're doomed to repeat it? Do you really want kids making the same mistakes your parents made, because they didn't see any of the results? "Oh hey let's vote for this obvious confidence man for the lulz, what's the worst that could happen", one year later we have literal fucking Nazi groups rallying in the streets? uuuggggghhh yes let's all just learn exactly what we need to learn to be useful to some big corporate entity, let's learn nothing that will make us ever question its inhuman, amoral, profit-first motives, I am sure this will have absolutely no problems whatsoever.

potatoyogurt 8y ago
I don't get it, I don't understand how the author of the article has a PhD if this is what he thinks. Like, > Why do advanced-math classes bother with proofs almost no student can follow? Because that literally _is_ mathematics, and the point of working through them is because students can actually understand them and learn to do the same thing with new problems. How does he expect anyone to create or discover anything new with just arithmetic 101? There's a kernel of a good argument in that signaling probably is one of the main values that students get from a college degree, but it's overstated to such a degree that it crosses over into idiocy.
- 8y ago

bennesvig 8y ago

> If schools aim to boost students’ future income by teaching job skills, why do they entrust students’ education to people so detached from the real world? Because the aim of school is to teach compliance, to sit quietly for 8 hours a day and do what you're told. I don't think it has ever been about learning truly practical skills. I don't even remember taking basic finance classes in high school.

euske 8y ago

Related article: https://www.chronicle.com/article/Why-the-College-Degree-Is-a/245923 https://www.chronicle.com/article/Why-the-College-Degree-Is-...

cdf2theworld 8y ago

Student here - I was struck by the "summer learning loss" quoted in the article. Everyone I talk to has this, myself included. The greatest reason for this, personally, is subject diffusion. This is especially true from freshman to junior year; we are required to take a dizzying number of classes that not only have nothing to do with our job field, but also have nothing to do with each other. I understand that it's important to "gain broad interests", but I retained very very little until my junior year, when all of the irrelevant courses had been completed. This issue may be coupled with the signaling problem, in that not only is the senior year the only year of college that employers care about (because you get handed a credential), but also because you take so little away from school until that point. I'd say that paying for college should be scaled with the earning benefit it imparts, freshman year costing very little, and senior year costing a majority of the total degree. Thoughts?

kiba 8y ago
If there's "summer loss"? What about when you leave high school and college? What happened to the notes you took for your classes at the end of the semester? I suspect that they are thrown away and never seen again. I suspect part of the problem with education is that we don't learn how to learn, and that we done very little work on how to retain those skills and connect them to our world.
- cdf2theworld 8y ago
  I'm sorry, I don't understand what you are getting at. With the internet in it's current state, notes from college years 1&2 are useless... I could go on Wikipedia and YouTube and get the same, if not higher quality, information about those subjects. FWIW, I still have all of those notes. The understanding and intuitive development is what suffers, not having the information available.
  - kiba 8y ago
    You do not develop understanding by merely looking up resources and reading about it. Reading something alone will create not create fluency and understanding. That is why we take notes. They serve both as records of what we learned, a learning tools, and a place to synthesize knowledge and understanding. I also use wikipedia and lookup youtube videos, but I don't merely read or watch about it. I engage in an active process of learning and synthesizing information.

ceoddevelopment 8y ago

ooooops sorrrryy

deleted 8y ago

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randomacct3847 8y ago

Having worked in tech for a few years in non-tech roles (analytics, product) I was looking for a code bootcamp because I didn’t want to look back and regret not deeply learning in a way that I felt like I could not do with self study alone. I was skeptical but decided to start in SF earlier this month at the best rated/most reputable one I could find. Obviously still early on, but I can say that I’m already grasping concepts better than I have just doing code academy/coursesa/reading SO alone on and off over the years. It’s very possible there isn’t anything special specifically about this program, but if you basically commit to doing nothing but one thing for 16 hours a day (full day on site with projects, lectures, and then homework at night) plus weekend study for weekly tests then you will get better at anything. Most colleges, though, aren’t really structured to support students to become good at just one thing. Though I’d also argue they aren’t necessarily designed to be job factories.

jaabe 8y ago
You can take CS50 and following or the MIT MOOCs on edx.org and learn more about CS in a few weeks than I did during my entire freshman year of the university of Aalborg. Sure it’s introductory, but so was my freshman year. I don’t really agree with the article though, I enjoyed philosophy and history as side tracks doing my entire schooling, and I use the creativity and insights I got from those a whole lot more than I ever use economics or math.

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QuadmasterXLII 8y ago

“Indeed, in the average study, senior year of college brings more than twice the pay increase of freshman, sophomore, and junior years combined. Unless colleges delay job training until the very end, signaling is practically the only explanation.” The author genuinely can’t conceptualize that people who fail out in the fourth year might, on average, have learned less in the first three? The line “practically the only explanation” even calls out the flaw in the author’s own logic. Lol.

adrianratnapala 8y ago
That's his point. The advantage of getting through the fourth and final year is the signal that it shows you are not one of those who did worse.

_hardwaregeek 8y ago

There's several issues I've noticed as a student. First, kids are told to go to college immediately after high school. If college was high school 2.0, this would be fine. But college is completely different from high school; it's significantly more expensive, more free form and more rigorous (at least compared to most high schools). I see so many students who clearly have no clue what they want to do, why they're in college (beyond "my parents want me to") or how to accomplish their goals. Having seen the sheer quantity of kids struggling with simple stuff like cleaning, cooking and not drinking themselves to death, I'm becoming more and more in favor of a mandatory service at the age of 18. Maybe not military like the IDF, but some sort of program where kids are forced to go away from home and learn to be self sufficient. Little Bobby should learn how to scrub a pot and clean a bathroom before he's entrusted with a 240k education. I took a gap year and I was significantly more focused and disciplined than I was in high school. And way better than the majority of my college peers. But even worse than being unprepared for college, I feel like we've been fostering a poor attitude towards learning. I grew up in an academic family, so to me, learning wasn't a stage of life. Learning was an essential aspect of being alive. Going to college wasn't some arbitrary merit badge that society deems necessary. It was a natural extension of whatever field I wanted to study. I see college as a tool; I need to learn certain topics in order to get what I want in life. Of course, I'm very fortunate to have taken a gap year and worked as a programmer. If nothing else, I know that I like programming, I'm good at it and I'm willing to suffer through the painful parts. It's kinda good to know that before I spent 240k on a CS degree.

vanderZwan 8y ago
> Of course, I'm very fortunate to have taken a gap year and worked as a programmer. I told my youngest sister to take a gap year to figure herself out. She didn't, and now years into college she has decided to switch studies, just like I did. Luckily we're Dutch and this is actually a realistic possibility for us.
HAL9000Ti 8y ago
> mandatory service You can't be serious now
krapp 8y ago

monster2control 8y ago

I understand where the author is coming from, yet, perhaps because he is constantly surrounded by well educated individuals, he failed to point out the unmeasureable benefits of going to college. When a person is exposed to the diversity of different people normally found at a college their view of the world is expanded. This generally increases their empathy and broadens their humanity. You just don’t get the same exposure at a trade school or through an apprenticeship. Perhaps the real solution is that colleges should offer training in the trades. You’d benefit from classes on how to run a business and do taxes and accounting if you’re in a trade and want to start your own business. And just because the direct access to the knowledge is not retained, doesn’t mean the residual knowledge is completely lost. If I never learned Calculus I’d have no idea where to start if I wanted or needed to pick it up again, but because I did, I have a much easier time refreshing myself. As a programmer, I jump from language to language often. When I haven’t used a language in a while I forget a lot of it, but once I start using it again, I recall and pick it up much faster. So, while those researchers proved that if you don’t use it, you do indeed lose it, they failed to see if a quick refresh of the material proved their skills more than someone that never learned the skill at all. I’d imagine the results would be as I’d expect and those that previously learned it did much better than those that never learned it. And finally, the author touched on what is more directly the issue. College ciriculiums are simply not well designed. If more majors were designed like engineering as his example, their would be more useful and their for used knowledge acquired during a students years in college and therefore more skills would translate into their field.

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tfehring 8y ago

It seems like the countercultural anti-college rhetoric that’s sprung up recently is focused on the individual level, which makes sense. But I’m concerned that it misses a broader and incredibly important point as a result. Roughly a third of American adults have at least a Bachelor’s degree. I (unsurprisingly) haven’t been able to find any hard data on this question, but does anyone want to take a guess at what percentage of innovation they’re responsible for? It’s certainly over a third - my shot in the dark is 90%. Measure innovation however you see fit. You can explain away some of that gap with factors like parental education and wealth, but I’m not convinced you can explain away all of it. Skilled trades may be great for the individual, but they don’t really drive innovation. Neither do social media managers, of course - not every college graduate can be a unicorn CEO - but I’m still convinced that college education is a substantial net positive in expectation.

taftster 8y ago
I don't know. You're making the leap to suggest that 33% of Americans are responsible for 90% of the innovation. I don't think that's the case at all. It's probably more like 0.1% of Americans are responsible for 90% of innovation. Or in other words, 32.9% of the population of Bachelor degree holders don't add any more innovative value than the 67% of non-Bachelor holders. Or to put it another way, there isn't a direct correlation between Bachelor's holders and innovators. Sure there are some ridiculously smart people out there, and probably most of them have some formal higher education. But their education probably isn't what made them ridiculously smart; instead it was probably their education that helped shape their thinking and possibly opened some doors. And of course there are many examples of innovations that came from people without degrees. Many technology company founders that we would today consider innovative did not necessarily hold a Bachelor's degree. In short, I think your connection that 33% of Americans are automatically innovative just because they have a degree is quite the stretch. A degree doesn't have any correlation to ones aptitude for innovation.
- tfehring 8y ago
  I think you’re either thinking of innovation more narrowly than I am or underestimating the number of people who contribute to it. I don’t think you can attribute, say, the development of a new drug to a single person in most cases. Or the implementation of a machine learning model. Or the changes that have led to massive improvements in the efficiency of clean energy in recent years. Or, if you want to really stretch the definition of “innovation,” the development of financial instruments to help investors better allocate capital and manage risk. The list goes on, of course. But what I want to illustrate is that entrepreneurs with “a-ha” moments don’t have a monopoly on innovation. Far from it. Now, going through that list of innovations again, what proportion of the people involved do you think have a Bachelor’s degree or more? I promise I didn’t intentionally cherry-pick at all - I suspect the pattern will hold if you come up with your own list, provided that you limit it to the last, say, 50 years. And at least in the examples I gave, the fact that the people responsible overwhelmingly have college degrees isn’t incidental, it’s a result of the fact that deep subject matter expertise is needed to push the envelope.

JHH_18 8y ago

First, I love the Atlantic's writing .. so good. Second, I'm just a poor boy, despite all the promises of the 60's. Please try to be kind to the community college boys with more than 200 units. We did take-up the spear. Good speed.

ryanmcbride 8y ago

Anecdotally the other day I was talking with two friends and former coworkers we realized that one of us had completed grad school, one of us had a undergraduate degree, and one of us was a college dropout(that one's me) and we all have the exact same job at the exact same level.

thenullfries 8y ago

>“I have been in school for more than 40 years. First preschool, kindergarten, elementary school, junior high, and high school. Then a bachelor’s degree at UC Berkeley, followed by a doctoral program at Princeton. The next step was what you could call my first “real” job—as an economics professor at..” and >”Suppose your law firm wants a summer associate. A law student with a doctorate in philosophy from Stanford applies. What do you infer? The applicant is probably brilliant, diligent, and willing to tolerate serious boredom.” I feel dedicated people with an above average IQ could achieve similar things, but this sort of pedigree tends to speak more towards socioeconomic class than sheer intelligence. Where intelligence and high socioeconomic class seem to be a signaling with degrees from impressive schools. Makes me wonder how many smart working class kids we are missing out on. The high IQ kids who went to schools not ranked in the top 100, those that would have excelled at MIT but for whatever reason never applied and now does who knows what, not performing to their potential. We have so much inbreeding, where we continually get the same kids from the same backgrounds missing out on an entire segment of the population.

mnm1 8y ago

College isn't just about jobs. I studied philosophy, got two diplomas in it and now I write software for a living. Do I regret it? Of course not. I learned a lot in college. I learned a lot about myself. I learned a lot about learning, other people, and the world. I'm glad I didn't waste those four years learning computers, something I was much better able to do on my own. Yes, if the only goal is to learn job skills only, most colleges and most majors shouldn't exist and they certainly shouldn't be pursued. I know it's hard for the author to fathom, but there are other reasons to learn. Many people enjoy learning and it improves lives in many immeasurable ways. It's so shortsighted to look at a college education as simply a path to better jobs that may or may not exist. Frankly, it's a stupid, small minded idea that seems to be pervasive in America's culture of stupidity. Isn't our society stupid enough without people railing against higher education? Perhaps if more people could attend college, if the costs weren't astronomical we'd have a better, more educated society and culture instead of the stupidity that dominates. That's reason enough to encourage people to go to college, let alone all the personal reasons mentioned above.

Kaveren 8y ago
This article isn't the full picture of Caplan's view. I haven't read his book, but here's a timestamped talk [0] at The Heritage Foundation where he addresses this argument. To summarize, he says that he loves "useless" knowledge but that it should be enriching (points to amount of busywork), and that it requires that students are willing participants, which he argues that many of them are not. Caplan says that the book has an entire chapter dedicated to refuting this argument, which I can't speak to. [0] https://youtu.be/kCLGURUubzc?t=1893 https://youtu.be/kCLGURUubzc?t=1893

_hao 8y ago

I'm not from the US (born in Eastern Europe), but I'd like to share some of my own experience. I'm 26 now and I barely finished high-school because I thought it was a waste of time and I was working on my own projects and learning everything I could on my own about CS. My last year at school (turned 18 just before the start of the school year) I found a job as a QA in a small outsourcing company and didn't even attend classes. I didn't even care it wasn't a dev job. I wanted to be around devs and see how it is to actually work in a real company. Now the important question here is... Why would they hire me, a person that can legally work, but not having a high school diploma? There were a couple of factors that played in my favor. First - it was basically a contract for 1 year, with 3 months of trial period. I was supposed to take the place of a woman that went in maternity. Second - I wanted a laughably low salary, really low. To me it was a lot of money at that time, but I didn't know my worth. Third - I did really well on the interview and I managed to prove to the owners of the company that I can do this job. They hired me. I did my job well and after the trial period my boss pulled me to the side and offered me a permanent contract. I said yes without even thinking. He said that it's usually normal to ask for a raise after your trial ends and I asked for something stupid like 5%. He smiled at me and gave me a 100% raise and the position of a dev. I got lucky. I've thought a lot about it, but I really think that luck was on my side there. I obviously did the job good, and to this day it's the company I've worked the longest for - over 3 years. By the way I got A's on all of my final exams (had to book holiday to go and take them haha) and got my diploma. After that I decided to enroll in university, but it was just the same as in high school. After 1 semester I couldn't escape the feeling that I was wasting my time. I continued, but in the end I dropped out. I think I made a mistake enrolling in a CS course. I should've went for something that's interesting to me, but not necessarily to do as a living like Economics, Physics, Philosophy, History etc. I like the idea of higher education and I'm still thinking about enrolling and pursuing a degree in a different field, but I wouldn't go for a CS degree again. My 8 years in the industry now have taught me everything I need to deal with it. EDIT: Grammar, spelling

hezag 8y ago

> When will the typical student use history? Trigonometry? Art? Music? Physics? Seriously?

minikites 8y ago

>From kindergarten on, students spend thousands of hours studying subjects irrelevant to the modern labor market. Why do English classes focus on literature and poetry instead of business and technical writing? Why do advanced-math classes bother with proofs almost no student can follow? When will the typical student use history? Trigonometry? Art? Music? Physics? Latin? The class clown who snarks “What does this have to do with real life?” is onto something. Yet another attack on the liberal arts that misses the point of education entirely. An education in a variety of fields is about what it means to be a person in a world among other people and the natural environment. It's what makes democracy possible (https://press.princeton.edu/titles/10858.html https://press.princeton.edu/titles/10858.html). If we reduce education to mere employment training, we might as well revert to medieval feudalism where your entire life is bound to your economic production.

watwut 8y ago
Overwhelming majority of students don't have classes on art, music, history, physics or poetry. Majority of students who sign for advanced-math classes can actually follow them enough (not necessary to A++ but enough to). There are some minimums of these, but that is all there is to it, unless you decide to sign for these or pick art major. I am not saying that everything was practical or useful, but the way article describes the school amounts to building a strawman. Most college students go for various business degrees and those do have classes like business writing and technical writing. It might have bad pedagogy, but the intent to teach those things is there. The other thing is that I think that we should teach history, because what happened in history is closely related to how world functions now. So having rough idea that things happened (which is pretty much what high school history teaches) is something good to have.

mirimir 8y ago

> Why do advanced-math classes bother with proofs almost no student can follow? Because they're for math majors. And less-advanced ones are filters for potential math majors. Me, I hated that stuff. Engineering math actually taught useful skills. > I’m cynical about students. The vast majority are philistines. I was a horrible TA. I was mainly an RA, but had to TA one semester. I had no patience for the "what do I need to know for the test?" ones. Especially pre-meds. But ~five kids loved me, because we all cared about the ideas. It was actually easier as a professor, because I had TAs to deal with most students. Only the ones who cared bothered to see me personally. Or maybe I was just too rude to the others.

swiley 8y ago
I personally was pretty happy I got to take the math classes full of proofs that were “for math majors.” I feel like if you just want something practical you can go take an engineering class.
bjs250 8y ago
Politely disagree. I'm going to take engineering math to mean ~4 semesters of calculus (differentiation, integration, multivariable, and differential equations) as well as maybe a Linear Algebra class and a discrete mathematics class (probability, set theory, combinatorics). I would argue only the discrete mathematics course is practically useful Anecdotally, as an engineer in industry, I use very little of the engineering math. Number sense and sort of general quantitative reasoning are used. Let's suppose for sake of argument that I actually used engineering math though. Analytic solutions to derivatives and integrals (2 semesters of calculus) are largely useless because of applications like Wolfram Alpha that will solve these problems for you. The small class of ODE/PDE problems that are handled by analytic undergrad math classes will most often be solved using numerical methods such as Runge Kutta. Linear algebra is actually super useful in practice because you can use matrix solvers to solve systems of linear equations -- but a first course in undergraduate linear algebra is often just basic by-hand computations on matrix systems, and don't discuss higher order concepts at more than a shallow level (spans, invertibility, spectral decomposition, canonical forms, etc.)
- 8y ago

packetpirate 8y ago

What a load of crap... "why do schools focus on unmarketable skills?" Gee, I don't know? Maybe because we shouldn't be teaching kids that they only exist to learn about a trade so they can be another cog in the machine? Because there are things worth learning beyond just what's valuable to the job market and every person should be given the opportunity to branch out and be diverse in their studies? Colleges give you all those supplemental classes so that you'll be well-rounded. Sure, you'd graduate faster and spend less money if you only took the classes that were immediately relevant to your career, but math proofs and math in general aren't always practical... it's about training your brain to solve problems, and the more abstract you can think about and approach a problem, the more creative you can get with your solutions. And it's not even just about skills... college is a whole different ball game than High School in terms of meeting new people. High School is all about cliques and for a lot of people (myself included) was fucking miserable. College allows you to meet a diverse set of new people who may or may not share common interests and for me, at least, allowed me to grow as a person in ways that don't necessarily translate to anything "marketable". Sure, not everyone is meant to go to college and the mentality that our parents had when we were younger, that "you have to go to college or you'll be flipping burgers for the rest of your life" is toxic, but those of us who do want to pursue a career that requires a higher education shouldn't have to spend the rest of our lives in debt just to do so.

fuball63 8y ago
I'm all for the movement to teach math and science differently so students garner a greater appreciation for critical thinking, but when the author suggested learning literature, poetry, and history are wastes of time, I strongly disagreed. The arts and history teach us empathy and give us context of the human condition. There is so much more to being a cog in the machine, as you said correctly. The more I see the way people behave in today's "current events" realm, the more I believe these things are more important than ever.
- linuxftw 8y ago
  > The arts and history teach us empathy and give us context of the human condition. I disagree. These courses should be merely electives, if offered at all. The average person doesn't really have time for this stuff, they have a long road ahead of them and they need to spend more of their formative years preparing for the hard conditions of adult life.

thatoneuser 8y ago

Higher education is insanely our of touch with reality. Literally, on any given campus you'll hear "we don't produce jobs, we produce degrees" all while they boast $$$ on their website over what you'll earn. It's disgusting. I was a yuge Bernie fan in 2016 because he addressed one of the biggest issues our society faces - why do we allow the universities to endenture our youth? There's simply no reason. The material is all online. Usually in a better format than what your university is offering. Testing isn't something special that only universities can offer. Hell at this point it's mostly grad students teaching anyway... (Personal experience) We should do away with university. Learn online, test at a local institute (much more economic), but for the love of God let's give the 20 year Olds dorms still cuz that's an experience we all need to have. Coed.

kypro 8y ago
> but for the love of God let's give the 20 year Olds dorms still cuz that's an experience we all need to have. Coed. If this is true could you explain what I missed out on?
- ZeroFries 8y ago
  Depends on the type of person you are. I didn't like them much, but lots of people had fun and formed great memories and friendships.
  - kypro 8y ago
    Why should tax payers be paying for, "people having fun"? I mean people have fun, form memories and make friendships on holidays too.
    - qntty 8y ago
      I think the point is that we should preserve the tradition of young people living in large houses together even if fewer people end up going to college. Tax payers don't necessarily have to pay for it. BTW, if you spent time living in a city near other young people, you probably didn't miss out on much by not living in a dorm. Some people really thrive in that environment, but personally I prefer the apartment-style living in an area with a lot of young people (college campus or city with young people) that I transitioned to after freshman year.

mikorym 8y ago

I don't think this is true for science majors. Maybe this article is more about the economics of your career. But: > ...students who excel on exams frequently fail to apply their knowledge to the real world... the same goes for students of biology, mathematics, statistics, ... I think this holds better for high school. That's were we (myself, at least) got into the "test-zone". Looking back it feels like it was deceitful to emphasise tests. However, the main point from my side is this: I happened to have a good math lecturer at university (i.e., in higher education) that launched my research orientated subsequent years. I don't know if the problem is "higher education" or maybe just mentorship. I think it's a mixed bag for different people.

waylandsmithers 8y ago

All costs aside, I think this is discounting the benefit of a place for 18 year olds to go where they can make mistakes and grow up semi-independently (or sometimes completely independently) for four years in a relatively safe environment.

nobodyandproud 8y ago

The article is making a roundabout case for trade schools. But each business is like a fiefdom, with its very own set of very processes; rules; and even acceptable styles of writing. Trying to teach this is a losing prospect, as it can only come from experience.

Ericson2314 8y ago

Most jobs are stupid and pointless to society in America (the exceptions tend to make no money), so why would the education system that leads up to them be at all good? Once UBI creates a real job market can we consider the actual transformative potential of education. Until then alienated labor makes us all stupid.

YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago

>> Why do English classes focus on literature and poetry instead of business and technical writing? Because they're trying to teach you English, as opposed to business and technical writing? Same goes for history, maths proofs, etc etc. They're not trying to teach you how to get a job, but how to think mathematically, etc. Not that school succeeds in teaching those things. I don't think I learned anything at school. But I did learn many of the things that school was trying to teach me, on my own. Because the things that school tries to teach you are actually useful, kinds of knowledge that cultivate the personality and make you a better person in all sorts of ways. We should try to change education to be more effective teaching you what it does, not changing what it tries to teach you.

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hurryskurry 8y ago

I've always felt this. College is the wrong place for most people. College is for nerds who want to learn and do research, and things like that. It isn't for someone who just wants to get a "real" job, nor it is really necessary. You can learn almost anything on the job. Because people feel like it's a waste of time they're not going to classes to learn, and so it's simply a waste of time and money for most people.