6 ms·

The idea was, "hey, there are a lot of people whose lives are too hard, but college grads seem alright, so let's make everybody college grads." But the actual s

The idea was, "hey, there are a lot of people whose lives are too hard, but college grads seem alright, so let's make everybody college grads." But the actual situation was that there were only so many good lives to go around, and college just sorted out who got them. The obvious thing to do is directly improve life for all people, not doing some kind of trick bank shot to indirectly improve lives. Instead we have baristas with $60,000 in college debt. We ran this giant experiment to see to what extent college was productivity enhancing or merely a sorting mechanism. The results are in.

orbifold 7y ago
Well the kind of obvious explanation for that is that success in life is probably strongly determined by intelligence. So when ~10% of the population went to college there was a high chance that those were also approximately the 10% smartest of a generation. If lots more people go to college now, that just means that it ceases to be a good predictor of success.
- tudelo 7y ago
  I mean, you could probably just sort further via what field they pursue...
- petermcneeley 7y ago
  When you see people with stem Masters and PhDs working as highschool teachers you begin to wonder if the problem is intelligence. Or when people with PhDs in bio/Chem are working as programmers you wonder if it's a question of talent.
  - eli_gottlieb 7y ago
    The problem is that we decided to inflate education prices while deflating labor prices. You can't do both at the same time and get sane results, because each individual needs to make their labor price correspond to their (former) education price. So you wind up with Biochem PhDs working as programmers. Neither biochemistry nor programming is for stupid people, per se, but programming hires loads of people at salaries actually commensurate with the monetized value of the time-investment spent getting a doctorate, while actual biochemistry, the field of the doctorate, has emphasized cheap labor.
  - mattkrause 7y ago
    A big chunk of my PhD cohort subsequently left academia, but it certainly wasn’t based on “talent” or intelligence. It was pretty much random and not at all who I would have expected from our first year.
  - injb 7y ago
    But is that because they can't find a better job, or they just can't find a better job in academia? I find it hard to believe that someone with a Masters or PHD in stem could not find a high paying job in the tech industry. (disclosure: I didn't read the article; I'm just curious about these anecdotes I keep hearing about PHDs)
- travisoneill1 7y ago
  This has been proven. The Department of Education conducted the National Assessment of Adult Literacy in 1992 and 2003. The average score was almost identical, but the scores for college graduates plummeted. https://nces.ed.gov/naal/kf_dem_edu.asp https://nces.ed.gov/naal/kf_dem_edu.asp
- CelestialTeapot 7y ago
  It used to mostly be the children of parents who had the financial wherewithal to pay for it went to college. Looking at an article from InsideHigherEd.com [1], you'd think the "10% smartest of a generation" would actually be smarter than they were. At least 60% of college graduates didn't have prose proficiency and document proficiency in 1992! The breakdown for college grads, 1992 vs. 2003: Prose literacy proficiency dropped from 40% to 31% Document literacy proficiency dropped from 37% to 25% (quantitative proficiency not shown) 1. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/12/16/graduated-not-literate https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/12/16/graduated-not...
snarf21 7y ago
You are right but it was based on math. Graduates made $32K more per year than non graduates. But it doesn't take into account that most graduates were in careers that pay more. Doctors and lawyers can really bump the average. We needed more honest reporting of this. How much do college graduates make more per year by degree? So then people know that a BA in art history likely has a negative outcome.
- WalterBright 7y ago
  > How much do college graduates make more per year by degree? Google [salaries by college major]. You're welcome :-)
- bsanr2 7y ago
  Well, when we approach the problem from that angle, we have to ask what we value and why, and how that informs what work we value. Running that same analysis would find that a BA in education similarly underpays compared to private or academic STEM work, or finance, or law. So, we value work that, for example, actively undermines the stability of the economy for personal gain, or that often rent seeks on interpersonal grievances, or that drives climate change, over the raising and training youth to be positive and thoughtful contributors to society. In that light, I wonder if that BA in art history is such a bad thing. Maybe we ought to value the work those people do more. It's a decision whether or not to do so, not some natural phenomenon of the "market" that we have no control over.
  - snarf21 7y ago
    I'm not disagreeing that we don't value things fairly. Just that we never were open and honest with people that these jobs won't pay more. Then add in $50K-$100K in debt and it makes the choice easier.
    - bsanr2 7y ago
      I still think there's a problem with the logic, even accounting for "market forces." The "shortage" of STEM workers (whether that's an actual shortage of actual capable bodies or simply a shortage of people willing to put up with being undercompensated in some regard) makes us forget that, at some point in revolutionizing college education so that it churned out only STEM graduates, you'd reach the top of the curve, the paradigm would flip to there not being enough jobs, and salaries would start to fall. What you're really saying is that those types of jobs incentivize capitalists to invest in the workforce, so we should encourage people to go for that carrot. I'm saying that the capital is already there, regardless. We should be directing that money to society's priorities (which we should actually explicitly declare), not at the whims of a relatively small class of property-holders. I mean, the debt is also a decision. We could forgive it, if we really wanted to.
sjg007 7y ago
I think going to college and then grad school provides more opportunities for innovation to take place. The debt loads of course don't help since they discourage entrepreneurship but you would hope that some enterprising state government would provide some debt / tax relief to encourage start ups in their cities.
js2 7y ago
You write: "there were only so many good lives to go around, and college just sorted out who got them." Michal Young agrees: "A social revolution has been accomplished by harnessing schools and universities to the task of sieving people according to education's narrow band of values." https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment
lukifer 7y ago
Bryan Caplan makes a compelling case for education being primarily a signal for grit and conformity: https://press.princeton.edu/titles/11225.html https://press.princeton.edu/titles/11225.html
- ttcbj 7y ago
  Well, this vs. the parent comment is the true crux of the matter. Is college more about signaling, or is it more about giving people valuable skills? I agree Caplan makes a very compelling case for signaling, based primarily on the observable behavior of people in the system. My pet educational reform is not 'free college for everyone', but rather that the gov't would pay out a percentage of the increase in W2 earnings before/after the education to the educational institution for a few years. The gov't would pay it, so it is not indentured servitude. In order to get paid, the institutions would need to raise the W2 earnings of people who attended. I'd also like to see a requirement that the payouts be publicly reported, so that reports could identify which institutions were high achieving in this regard. I personally think that reform might focus the system more on improved skills, and less on signaling and a fight for improved US news rankings.
  - lacker 7y ago
    Is college more about signaling, or is it more about giving people valuable skills? Lumping all college degrees together confuses the issue. A computer science degree from a top-25 university gives you valuable skills. A philosophy degree from a non-top-25 university gives you no valuable skills. Colleges like to describe all degrees as if they are similar, because most degrees give you no valuable skills, but the existence of really valuable degrees gives all degrees some signaling value.
    - viburnum 7y ago
      How many people reading this right now make a very good living writing software without a “computer science degree from a top 25 university”? To what extent are those degrees also just for sorting?
helpPeople 7y ago
What if the problem was that some college degrees aren't useful? Why do we assume we won't have jobs for 100% programmers? Wouldn't everyone automate every task? Instead we have low skill grads because they never learned useful skills in college.
- dlp211 7y ago
  I guess it depends on your definition of useful. If it is purely in the economic sense, then yes, but I'd argue that misses the entire point of college.
  - mrkstu 7y ago
    Which was a fine argument to make when a college degree could be had with minimal or no debt at the end. The equation has changed now that a degree usually comes anchored down by significant debt.
zackmorris 7y ago
You're conflating lack of opportunity with artificial scarcity. The US is in a position where it spent trillions of dollars to educate young people, but then saddled them with a trillion dollars in student loans. So rather than being able to start businesses or have the breathing room to join professional organizations or otherwise build their careers gradually like in the past, graduates are forced to jump into student loan payback within 6 months or a year of graduation. This isn't necessarily a new thing. For example, my dad was a dentist and our family struggled financially until I was about 15 (20 years after he graduated from dental school). This was due to the excessive cost of lab supplies in the medical industry, and a corrupt scheme where suppliers lend money to young practices at exorbitant interest and fees. Someone is always trying to get a piece of the action. We should reform student loans to be the way that Stripe is doing it. A flat fee on the order of about 10% added to the original loan amount, then 0% interest for the life of the loan, and a maximum repayment each month of perhaps 5-20% of declared income. That way college graduates could explore their career space, potentially for years, and then pay back their loans after they're established and actually have income. Better yet, go back to how it used to be before Ronald Reagan and fund college publicly, and put more resources into building new campuses. The money for that is there, it's just been misappropriated for the military industrial complex, the prison industrial complex, big pharma, the war on drugs, you get the picture. My generation (gen x) thought that war was over after Vietnam, and we certainly didn't vote for any war on drugs, or foresee the return of racism/sexism/nationalism or that essentially all of the federal government's disposable income would go to tax breaks for the wealthy and increase the national debt to the point where our children and grandchildren would be poorer than us. ^^^ This was a grave concern of the founding fathers, who realized that one generation could run up the debt and enslave the next generation without their permission, effectively disenfranchising them, which is illegal as there is no taxation without representation, so that presents an existential threat to our union as serious as colonialism. I've been watching this same song and dance since I was a kid in the 80s, and my parents spoke often about how devastating it was to their generation when JFK, RFK and MLK were assassinated and Nixon got elected. Heck some people reading this weren't even born yet when 9/11 happened. Believe it or not, there was a time before this decades-long Middle East war swallowed the money that was going to pay for your future. Which is why I think that all of this is by design. Artificial scarcity begets income inequality begets class strife begets political division begets the rise of a new global aristocracy.
snowwrestler 7y ago
I think it's too early to call this. Education pays off across an entire lifetime. That's in part because it takes many years for innovation to change the shape of the economy, and it is in those changes where education can really help a person thrive.
- michaelt 7y ago
  If one can't work out the value of education until 50 years after it ends, and education methods change within 50 years, can one ever assess the benefits of education?

orbifold 7y ago

Well the kind of obvious explanation for that is that success in life is probably strongly determined by intelligence. So when ~10% of the population went to college there was a high chance that those were also approximately the 10% smartest of a generation. If lots more people go to college now, that just means that it ceases to be a good predictor of success.

tudelo 7y ago
I mean, you could probably just sort further via what field they pursue...
petermcneeley 7y ago
When you see people with stem Masters and PhDs working as highschool teachers you begin to wonder if the problem is intelligence. Or when people with PhDs in bio/Chem are working as programmers you wonder if it's a question of talent.
- eli_gottlieb 7y ago
  The problem is that we decided to inflate education prices while deflating labor prices. You can't do both at the same time and get sane results, because each individual needs to make their labor price correspond to their (former) education price. So you wind up with Biochem PhDs working as programmers. Neither biochemistry nor programming is for stupid people, per se, but programming hires loads of people at salaries actually commensurate with the monetized value of the time-investment spent getting a doctorate, while actual biochemistry, the field of the doctorate, has emphasized cheap labor.
- mattkrause 7y ago
  A big chunk of my PhD cohort subsequently left academia, but it certainly wasn’t based on “talent” or intelligence. It was pretty much random and not at all who I would have expected from our first year.
- injb 7y ago
  But is that because they can't find a better job, or they just can't find a better job in academia? I find it hard to believe that someone with a Masters or PHD in stem could not find a high paying job in the tech industry. (disclosure: I didn't read the article; I'm just curious about these anecdotes I keep hearing about PHDs)
travisoneill1 7y ago
This has been proven. The Department of Education conducted the National Assessment of Adult Literacy in 1992 and 2003. The average score was almost identical, but the scores for college graduates plummeted. https://nces.ed.gov/naal/kf_dem_edu.asp https://nces.ed.gov/naal/kf_dem_edu.asp
CelestialTeapot 7y ago
It used to mostly be the children of parents who had the financial wherewithal to pay for it went to college. Looking at an article from InsideHigherEd.com [1], you'd think the "10% smartest of a generation" would actually be smarter than they were. At least 60% of college graduates didn't have prose proficiency and document proficiency in 1992! The breakdown for college grads, 1992 vs. 2003: Prose literacy proficiency dropped from 40% to 31% Document literacy proficiency dropped from 37% to 25% (quantitative proficiency not shown) 1. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/12/16/graduated-not-literate https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/12/16/graduated-not...

snarf21 7y ago

You are right but it was based on math. Graduates made $32K more per year than non graduates. But it doesn't take into account that most graduates were in careers that pay more. Doctors and lawyers can really bump the average. We needed more honest reporting of this. How much do college graduates make more per year by degree? So then people know that a BA in art history likely has a negative outcome.

WalterBright 7y ago
> How much do college graduates make more per year by degree? Google [salaries by college major]. You're welcome :-)
bsanr2 7y ago
Well, when we approach the problem from that angle, we have to ask what we value and why, and how that informs what work we value. Running that same analysis would find that a BA in education similarly underpays compared to private or academic STEM work, or finance, or law. So, we value work that, for example, actively undermines the stability of the economy for personal gain, or that often rent seeks on interpersonal grievances, or that drives climate change, over the raising and training youth to be positive and thoughtful contributors to society. In that light, I wonder if that BA in art history is such a bad thing. Maybe we ought to value the work those people do more. It's a decision whether or not to do so, not some natural phenomenon of the "market" that we have no control over.
- snarf21 7y ago
  I'm not disagreeing that we don't value things fairly. Just that we never were open and honest with people that these jobs won't pay more. Then add in $50K-$100K in debt and it makes the choice easier.
  - bsanr2 7y ago
    I still think there's a problem with the logic, even accounting for "market forces." The "shortage" of STEM workers (whether that's an actual shortage of actual capable bodies or simply a shortage of people willing to put up with being undercompensated in some regard) makes us forget that, at some point in revolutionizing college education so that it churned out only STEM graduates, you'd reach the top of the curve, the paradigm would flip to there not being enough jobs, and salaries would start to fall. What you're really saying is that those types of jobs incentivize capitalists to invest in the workforce, so we should encourage people to go for that carrot. I'm saying that the capital is already there, regardless. We should be directing that money to society's priorities (which we should actually explicitly declare), not at the whims of a relatively small class of property-holders. I mean, the debt is also a decision. We could forgive it, if we really wanted to.

sjg007 7y ago

I think going to college and then grad school provides more opportunities for innovation to take place. The debt loads of course don't help since they discourage entrepreneurship but you would hope that some enterprising state government would provide some debt / tax relief to encourage start ups in their cities.

js2 7y ago

You write: "there were only so many good lives to go around, and college just sorted out who got them." Michal Young agrees: "A social revolution has been accomplished by harnessing schools and universities to the task of sieving people according to education's narrow band of values." https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment

lukifer 7y ago

Bryan Caplan makes a compelling case for education being primarily a signal for grit and conformity: https://press.princeton.edu/titles/11225.html https://press.princeton.edu/titles/11225.html

ttcbj 7y ago
Well, this vs. the parent comment is the true crux of the matter. Is college more about signaling, or is it more about giving people valuable skills? I agree Caplan makes a very compelling case for signaling, based primarily on the observable behavior of people in the system. My pet educational reform is not 'free college for everyone', but rather that the gov't would pay out a percentage of the increase in W2 earnings before/after the education to the educational institution for a few years. The gov't would pay it, so it is not indentured servitude. In order to get paid, the institutions would need to raise the W2 earnings of people who attended. I'd also like to see a requirement that the payouts be publicly reported, so that reports could identify which institutions were high achieving in this regard. I personally think that reform might focus the system more on improved skills, and less on signaling and a fight for improved US news rankings.
- lacker 7y ago
  Is college more about signaling, or is it more about giving people valuable skills? Lumping all college degrees together confuses the issue. A computer science degree from a top-25 university gives you valuable skills. A philosophy degree from a non-top-25 university gives you no valuable skills. Colleges like to describe all degrees as if they are similar, because most degrees give you no valuable skills, but the existence of really valuable degrees gives all degrees some signaling value.
  - viburnum 7y ago
    How many people reading this right now make a very good living writing software without a “computer science degree from a top 25 university”? To what extent are those degrees also just for sorting?

helpPeople 7y ago

What if the problem was that some college degrees aren't useful? Why do we assume we won't have jobs for 100% programmers? Wouldn't everyone automate every task? Instead we have low skill grads because they never learned useful skills in college.

dlp211 7y ago
I guess it depends on your definition of useful. If it is purely in the economic sense, then yes, but I'd argue that misses the entire point of college.
- mrkstu 7y ago
  Which was a fine argument to make when a college degree could be had with minimal or no debt at the end. The equation has changed now that a degree usually comes anchored down by significant debt.

zackmorris 7y ago

You're conflating lack of opportunity with artificial scarcity. The US is in a position where it spent trillions of dollars to educate young people, but then saddled them with a trillion dollars in student loans. So rather than being able to start businesses or have the breathing room to join professional organizations or otherwise build their careers gradually like in the past, graduates are forced to jump into student loan payback within 6 months or a year of graduation. This isn't necessarily a new thing. For example, my dad was a dentist and our family struggled financially until I was about 15 (20 years after he graduated from dental school). This was due to the excessive cost of lab supplies in the medical industry, and a corrupt scheme where suppliers lend money to young practices at exorbitant interest and fees. Someone is always trying to get a piece of the action. We should reform student loans to be the way that Stripe is doing it. A flat fee on the order of about 10% added to the original loan amount, then 0% interest for the life of the loan, and a maximum repayment each month of perhaps 5-20% of declared income. That way college graduates could explore their career space, potentially for years, and then pay back their loans after they're established and actually have income. Better yet, go back to how it used to be before Ronald Reagan and fund college publicly, and put more resources into building new campuses. The money for that is there, it's just been misappropriated for the military industrial complex, the prison industrial complex, big pharma, the war on drugs, you get the picture. My generation (gen x) thought that war was over after Vietnam, and we certainly didn't vote for any war on drugs, or foresee the return of racism/sexism/nationalism or that essentially all of the federal government's disposable income would go to tax breaks for the wealthy and increase the national debt to the point where our children and grandchildren would be poorer than us. ^^^ This was a grave concern of the founding fathers, who realized that one generation could run up the debt and enslave the next generation without their permission, effectively disenfranchising them, which is illegal as there is no taxation without representation, so that presents an existential threat to our union as serious as colonialism. I've been watching this same song and dance since I was a kid in the 80s, and my parents spoke often about how devastating it was to their generation when JFK, RFK and MLK were assassinated and Nixon got elected. Heck some people reading this weren't even born yet when 9/11 happened. Believe it or not, there was a time before this decades-long Middle East war swallowed the money that was going to pay for your future. Which is why I think that all of this is by design. Artificial scarcity begets income inequality begets class strife begets political division begets the rise of a new global aristocracy.

snowwrestler 7y ago

I think it's too early to call this. Education pays off across an entire lifetime. That's in part because it takes many years for innovation to change the shape of the economy, and it is in those changes where education can really help a person thrive.

michaelt 7y ago
If one can't work out the value of education until 50 years after it ends, and education methods change within 50 years, can one ever assess the benefits of education?