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This only makes sense if you think that bachelors degrees contribute no value during the entire lifetimes of the people who receive them, which seems like a pre

This only makes sense if you think that bachelors degrees contribute no value during the entire lifetimes of the people who receive them, which seems like a pretty huge assumption that should not pass unexamined. I agree that college financing is out of control, but that doesn’t mean a college education is a waste of time. Secondary education was once the domain of rich kids too, but we changed that and the long term value to the world is obvious. Financing public goods is a solvable problem. It seems pretty reasonable to me that as human society grows more complex and specialized, humans would benefit from more education.

knzhou 7y ago
> It seems pretty reasonable to me that as human society grows more complex and specialized, humans would benefit from more education. That narrative is totally destroyed by knowledge retention studies. It's one of the few things in life where the data is completely unequivocal: people don't keep what they don't use, and most people use almost none of what they learned in college. (I predict anybody who disagrees will be a STEM major in a STEM job, i.e. extremely unrepresentative of former college students at large.)
- hackerc 7y ago
  I still retain and use college knowledge in fields not directly related to my programs of study...
  - knzhou 7y ago
    You are an outlier, as is just about everybody else commenting here.
- jacobsenscott 7y ago
  I'm a programmer with a bachelor degree, majored in CS and minored in math. I can't do my kids AP calc anymore. I haven't used it in 20 years of programming.
- snowwrestler 7y ago
  Knowledge retention is the wrong metric in a world where you can look anything up in 5 seconds on your phone. Getting a college degree requires one to work with large amounts of information. Even if you retain none of those facts and figures later in life, you can still retain facility at working with information. And that is much more important to long-term success than how much you memorize.
  - AngryData 7y ago
    But a college degree is suppose to be far more than learning how to study and some minor industry exposure which is the vast majority of what it is being used for. It means people are paying for 90% fluff they don't want or need at exorbitant rates to overcome an invisible wall. Numerous classes I myself took and needed credit for to work towards a degree, while entertaining and informative, ultimately ended up as no more than what I could of obtained by reading a decent book on the subject myself. And it cost me a damn pretty penny. While I think those types of classes should still exist, they shouldn't be used as an artificial financial and time barrier to getting a decent job.
minblaster 7y ago
For most, college education is a signaling method. You learn on the job. If this weren’t the case, just hire people who dropped out during senior year for a wonderful discount. They got 7/8s the education!
- throwawayjava 7y ago
  Most students in CS are hired prior to graduation. On both sides the savings of skipping that last semester are marginal, and on the student side there's a nontrivial opportunity cost. 6 months of: studying whatever problem you want with the background you need to maybe solve it, networking, building code/ideas you own, socializing with a purpose (courting) or for fun, or, if you're smart, a bit of all 3.
  - lopmotr 7y ago
    There's a discrete jump in the career value of the education between not quite finishing a degree and graduating. It's not because there's some super important final semester that's worth much more than any of the previous ones. It's no doubt because it signals some quality like conscientiousness, or perhaps is just easier for an employer to evaluate the meaning of.
    - username90 7y ago
      Which is why hiring college grads right before they graduate is the best deal! You get a discount hire who will have a hard time getting other jobs!
- m463 7y ago
  In my experience, in college I learned the theoretical and on the job I learned the practical. For example, I learned how to conjugate verbs in foreign languages, and algorithms with O(n) vs O(log n) in computer science. Then later in a foriegn country I expanded my my vocabulary. On the job, I learned about version control, how to read other people's code and how to fix bugs.
datashow 7y ago
"more education" does not equal to college education. Education can take many different forms. It can be career and technology education, internship and apprenticeship, also self-study. College has an entrance barrier and is very disconnected to the outside world, so it has a strong signal effect. Also consider this: with four years of college time, you can get two career educations with real life industry experience and come with much less cost.
- throwawayjava 7y ago
  > with four years of college time, you can get two career educations with real life industry experience ...depending on both the student and the career. Many tech jobs require not much more than literacy, 6th grade algebra, and a tiny bit of grit. Most smart middle schoolers could make mid five figures slinging PHP part time. I did in early high school, and I'm not particularly smart or hard working. But there are many jobs, even in relatively easy fields like programming, where nonnegative productivity requires years of practice.
  - asciident 7y ago
    I couldn't disagree more. College teaches people to learn independently, to communicate their problems and their progress effectively, to write emails professionally, to manage their time and deal with more work than can be handled, to mentor more junior people, etc. Sure, someone straight from high school could have some of these skills, but doing well at a university practically guarantees it.
    - vezycash 7y ago
      > College teaches people to learn independently, to communicate their problems... Not mine. Went to two Universities - both taught students to regurgitate what lecturers taught. Anything beyond that meant low marks.
      - irishcoffee 7y ago
        Shhh, the truth doesn't line up with the ideal, don't speak of it...
oceanplexian 7y ago
I know you said this with some degree of sarcasm, but for the vast majority of people, you are right on the money. A bachelors degree does not only “contribute no value” but in fact leaches value from the economy. I work at a FAANG with no degree, and the reason I did so (In my 20s) was because instead of wasting my time in a classroom, I was out in the workforce working on real business problems at a telecom since I was 16, in a field where educators are 10-15 years behind reality. Most of the cutting edge work at Google or Facebook or Amazon is not public information, so how the hell would a college even teach that? It’s under NDA. Same as Ma Bell and the extraordinary innovations that came out of the telecommunications industry. A degree doesn’t just steal value in terms of money, which puts you tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of compounding debt, but it also steals your time, and indoctrinates you into a top-down style of learning. Your time, the most valuable asset in the world, could be spent solving real problems in the real world. The whole system is a scam, and I’m truly sorry for those who have fallen for it. My advice would be to cut your losses and get into entrepreneurship or work for a company that interests you ASAP. Life is too short to participate in someone else’s profit centered system of learning (Doctors and Lawyers excepted, but only because the level of gatekeeping in those fields is so high and perverted, and backed by government, that learning only via apprenticeship has literally been outlawed)
- danans 7y ago
  > Most of the cutting edge work at Google or Facebook or Amazon is not public information, so how the hell would a college even teach that? This is a highly questionable assertion, given that these firms largely recruit candidates from CS degree programs to staff their most cutting edge projects.
  - enitihas 7y ago
    The people directly recruited from CS programs to work on cutting edge projects on these companies are going to be PhD, not graduates. I can't fathom any of the above companies inviting an undergrad to work on their cutting edge projects, in doing anything but the most boilerplate of work.
AnthonyMouse 7y ago
> I agree that college financing is out of control, but that doesn’t mean a college education is a waste of time. The issue is that it's a waste of time for people who will never use it for anything. If you spend four years to get a BS and then find a career as a factory worker, it was a waste of time -- the education is worth less to you than the cost in time it took from you. This comes from subsidies causing oversupply. If you're going to actually be a doctor or an engineer then a college degree is worthwhile. But some people are going to be retail clerks and factory workers. Just blindly sending everyone to college because Everyone Should Go To College is wasting their time and the taxpayer's money.
- ddxxdd 7y ago
  I'm surprised that nobody in this thread has brought up economist Bryan Caplan's 2nd most recent book, "The Case Against Education". This economist has looked at economic research on the effects of education, such as: * How well students retain information * How well students apply their knowledge in contexts outside of the classroom * How much college graduates make versus how much someone makes after dropping out of school at the last minute * How much more productive nations are after educating large swaths of their population * How many companies outright tell their new hires that the knowledge they gained in school needs to be forgotten, and that they need to start learning everything from scratch. And the conclusion Caplan comes to is that college education is a social signal, i.o.w. it's a zero-sum game where getting a college degree comes at the expense of everyone else with a college degree since the signal is degraded and is not as special as it once was.
- snowwrestler 7y ago
  > If you're going to actually be a doctor or an engineer then a college degree is worthwhile. But some people are going to be retail clerks and factory workers. The WSJ article linked up at the top is literally about how factory work increasingly requires professional education like a college degree.
  - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
    > The WSJ article linked up at the top is literally about how factory work increasingly requires professional education like a college degree. But does the job really require a degree in order to do it, or is it only the employer that requires the degree, as a filter, because now they can get away with it as a result of the oversupply of college degrees?
PopeDotNinja 7y ago
> humans would benefit from more education. Seems reasonable to me. I'd love a better method for quantifying the value of education, too. It's too easy for Big Ed to argue how college is essential as they jack up the prices.

knzhou 7y ago

> It seems pretty reasonable to me that as human society grows more complex and specialized, humans would benefit from more education. That narrative is totally destroyed by knowledge retention studies. It's one of the few things in life where the data is completely unequivocal: people don't keep what they don't use, and most people use almost none of what they learned in college. (I predict anybody who disagrees will be a STEM major in a STEM job, i.e. extremely unrepresentative of former college students at large.)

hackerc 7y ago
I still retain and use college knowledge in fields not directly related to my programs of study...
- knzhou 7y ago
  You are an outlier, as is just about everybody else commenting here.
jacobsenscott 7y ago
I'm a programmer with a bachelor degree, majored in CS and minored in math. I can't do my kids AP calc anymore. I haven't used it in 20 years of programming.
snowwrestler 7y ago
Knowledge retention is the wrong metric in a world where you can look anything up in 5 seconds on your phone. Getting a college degree requires one to work with large amounts of information. Even if you retain none of those facts and figures later in life, you can still retain facility at working with information. And that is much more important to long-term success than how much you memorize.
- AngryData 7y ago
  But a college degree is suppose to be far more than learning how to study and some minor industry exposure which is the vast majority of what it is being used for. It means people are paying for 90% fluff they don't want or need at exorbitant rates to overcome an invisible wall. Numerous classes I myself took and needed credit for to work towards a degree, while entertaining and informative, ultimately ended up as no more than what I could of obtained by reading a decent book on the subject myself. And it cost me a damn pretty penny. While I think those types of classes should still exist, they shouldn't be used as an artificial financial and time barrier to getting a decent job.

minblaster 7y ago

For most, college education is a signaling method. You learn on the job. If this weren’t the case, just hire people who dropped out during senior year for a wonderful discount. They got 7/8s the education!

throwawayjava 7y ago
Most students in CS are hired prior to graduation. On both sides the savings of skipping that last semester are marginal, and on the student side there's a nontrivial opportunity cost. 6 months of: studying whatever problem you want with the background you need to maybe solve it, networking, building code/ideas you own, socializing with a purpose (courting) or for fun, or, if you're smart, a bit of all 3.
- lopmotr 7y ago
  There's a discrete jump in the career value of the education between not quite finishing a degree and graduating. It's not because there's some super important final semester that's worth much more than any of the previous ones. It's no doubt because it signals some quality like conscientiousness, or perhaps is just easier for an employer to evaluate the meaning of.
  - username90 7y ago
    Which is why hiring college grads right before they graduate is the best deal! You get a discount hire who will have a hard time getting other jobs!
m463 7y ago
In my experience, in college I learned the theoretical and on the job I learned the practical. For example, I learned how to conjugate verbs in foreign languages, and algorithms with O(n) vs O(log n) in computer science. Then later in a foriegn country I expanded my my vocabulary. On the job, I learned about version control, how to read other people's code and how to fix bugs.

datashow 7y ago

"more education" does not equal to college education. Education can take many different forms. It can be career and technology education, internship and apprenticeship, also self-study. College has an entrance barrier and is very disconnected to the outside world, so it has a strong signal effect. Also consider this: with four years of college time, you can get two career educations with real life industry experience and come with much less cost.

throwawayjava 7y ago
> with four years of college time, you can get two career educations with real life industry experience ...depending on both the student and the career. Many tech jobs require not much more than literacy, 6th grade algebra, and a tiny bit of grit. Most smart middle schoolers could make mid five figures slinging PHP part time. I did in early high school, and I'm not particularly smart or hard working. But there are many jobs, even in relatively easy fields like programming, where nonnegative productivity requires years of practice.
- asciident 7y ago
  I couldn't disagree more. College teaches people to learn independently, to communicate their problems and their progress effectively, to write emails professionally, to manage their time and deal with more work than can be handled, to mentor more junior people, etc. Sure, someone straight from high school could have some of these skills, but doing well at a university practically guarantees it.
  - vezycash 7y ago
    > College teaches people to learn independently, to communicate their problems... Not mine. Went to two Universities - both taught students to regurgitate what lecturers taught. Anything beyond that meant low marks.
    - irishcoffee 7y ago
      Shhh, the truth doesn't line up with the ideal, don't speak of it...

oceanplexian 7y ago

I know you said this with some degree of sarcasm, but for the vast majority of people, you are right on the money. A bachelors degree does not only “contribute no value” but in fact leaches value from the economy. I work at a FAANG with no degree, and the reason I did so (In my 20s) was because instead of wasting my time in a classroom, I was out in the workforce working on real business problems at a telecom since I was 16, in a field where educators are 10-15 years behind reality. Most of the cutting edge work at Google or Facebook or Amazon is not public information, so how the hell would a college even teach that? It’s under NDA. Same as Ma Bell and the extraordinary innovations that came out of the telecommunications industry. A degree doesn’t just steal value in terms of money, which puts you tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of compounding debt, but it also steals your time, and indoctrinates you into a top-down style of learning. Your time, the most valuable asset in the world, could be spent solving real problems in the real world. The whole system is a scam, and I’m truly sorry for those who have fallen for it. My advice would be to cut your losses and get into entrepreneurship or work for a company that interests you ASAP. Life is too short to participate in someone else’s profit centered system of learning (Doctors and Lawyers excepted, but only because the level of gatekeeping in those fields is so high and perverted, and backed by government, that learning only via apprenticeship has literally been outlawed)

danans 7y ago
> Most of the cutting edge work at Google or Facebook or Amazon is not public information, so how the hell would a college even teach that? This is a highly questionable assertion, given that these firms largely recruit candidates from CS degree programs to staff their most cutting edge projects.
- enitihas 7y ago
  The people directly recruited from CS programs to work on cutting edge projects on these companies are going to be PhD, not graduates. I can't fathom any of the above companies inviting an undergrad to work on their cutting edge projects, in doing anything but the most boilerplate of work.

AnthonyMouse 7y ago

> I agree that college financing is out of control, but that doesn’t mean a college education is a waste of time. The issue is that it's a waste of time for people who will never use it for anything. If you spend four years to get a BS and then find a career as a factory worker, it was a waste of time -- the education is worth less to you than the cost in time it took from you. This comes from subsidies causing oversupply. If you're going to actually be a doctor or an engineer then a college degree is worthwhile. But some people are going to be retail clerks and factory workers. Just blindly sending everyone to college because Everyone Should Go To College is wasting their time and the taxpayer's money.

ddxxdd 7y ago
I'm surprised that nobody in this thread has brought up economist Bryan Caplan's 2nd most recent book, "The Case Against Education". This economist has looked at economic research on the effects of education, such as: * How well students retain information * How well students apply their knowledge in contexts outside of the classroom * How much college graduates make versus how much someone makes after dropping out of school at the last minute * How much more productive nations are after educating large swaths of their population * How many companies outright tell their new hires that the knowledge they gained in school needs to be forgotten, and that they need to start learning everything from scratch. And the conclusion Caplan comes to is that college education is a social signal, i.o.w. it's a zero-sum game where getting a college degree comes at the expense of everyone else with a college degree since the signal is degraded and is not as special as it once was.
snowwrestler 7y ago
> If you're going to actually be a doctor or an engineer then a college degree is worthwhile. But some people are going to be retail clerks and factory workers. The WSJ article linked up at the top is literally about how factory work increasingly requires professional education like a college degree.
- AnthonyMouse 7y ago
  > The WSJ article linked up at the top is literally about how factory work increasingly requires professional education like a college degree. But does the job really require a degree in order to do it, or is it only the employer that requires the degree, as a filter, because now they can get away with it as a result of the oversupply of college degrees?

PopeDotNinja 7y ago

> humans would benefit from more education. Seems reasonable to me. I'd love a better method for quantifying the value of education, too. It's too easy for Big Ed to argue how college is essential as they jack up the prices.