6 ms·

The education bubble: Tech progress may reduce the demand for high-end jobs

93 points by terio 15y ago

simpleTruth 15y ago
Education is not an unstable bubble. Looking at the low and high end of the market there does seem to be an education bubble despite plenty of vary good state schools with reasonable tuition. What people seem to miss is unlike the housing or gold bubble tuition costs don't really feed off each other. The high end is really just a luxury in another form and nothing is stopping Breitling from selling 300,000$ watches any time soon. And the low end is a direct government subsidy (like corn farming) which will continue as long as the government feels the need to waste money. PS: As long as demand is unlimited and wages elastic Technology can't really destroy jobs in the long term even as it disrupts industry after industry. Still, people will always look for the best workers, so even if a degree might not mean an increase in pay the unemployment rate for people with a BS is 1/2 that of those without one for a reason.
- dpapathanasiou 15y ago
  It has more to do with people getting degrees for the wrong reasons: being educated doesn't mean you will always have economic security. And that's where the housing bubble analogy comes in: there are many good reasons to buy a house, but doing so because you expect its value to increase constantly is not one of them.
  - simpleTruth 15y ago
    The Education and Housing markets are complex systems. The bubble analogy works as a vary simplified analogy to describe how some markets can see sustained prices increases for a while followed by a sudden drop. This works with Housing, at a fundamental level if people decided to more houses one year the price increases, and if people buy fewer houses one year the value of your house decreases which can quickly cycle though to dramatic shifts. However, if fewer people decided to get a degree the value of your degree increases.
    - watchandwait 15y ago
      Both systems have a constant: massive government subsidies that distort the true supply, demand, and economic ROI for the good. There could not have been a housing bubble without Fannie and Freddie, the FHA, and the protected-by-regulation class of bond ratings agencies. Similarly, there would not be an education bubble without federal loan guarantees -- certainly they have escalated cost of college, and most of the shady for-profit colleges thrive on student subsidies.
      - simpleTruth 15y ago
        Sorry, bubbles happen even without government action. Read up on the tulip bubble for a classic one. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania There is also plenty of blame to spread around. EX: Irish http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_property_bubble http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_property_bubble burst 2008. UK http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_property_bubble http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_property_bubble burst 2008. Australian http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_property_bubble http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_property_bubble (yet to burst) etc. What is really interesting is how little the price could increase before market forces brought things back to reality. Housing is such a large percentage of the worlds wealth that we never saw the sort crazy multiples over value that other bubbles get to. EX: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_asset_price_bubble http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_asset_price_bubble
        jpadkins 15y ago
        Bubbles require rapid credit expansion. There may be varied reasons for what fuels a particular bubble, but the necessary precondition is easy money/credit. When the government regulates the currency & credit markets tightly, then government should share in the responsibility for the bubble.
        simpleTruth 15y ago
        The largest and least stable bubbles are often driven by credit but there is a wide range of causes. For example, one of the largest and less talked about bubbles comes from the shift from defined benefit plains to 401k style investing. In the mid-1980s there were fewer than 8 million participants with less than $100 billion of assets in 401(k) plans.[3] By 2006 there were seventy million participants with more than $3 trillion of assets in 401(k) plans. Now, what happens to the US stock market as baby boomers retire and there is a significant shift between people buying and selling stocks? PS: Many bubbles are simply money looking for somewhere to hide. Assume the US cut it's military budget by 80% and paid of the debt in 20 years, where do you think that money would end up?
  - cmurdock 15y ago
    Hasn't this always been true? Universities have always offered plenty of degrees in fields that are hard if not impossible to find good paying jobs in.
    - arethuza 15y ago
      Other than jobs in academia, of course.
      - esw 15y ago
        This is a terrible time to be looking for work in academia, too.
- krakensden 15y ago
  > As long as demand is unlimited and wages elastic Technology can't really destroy jobs in the long term even as it disrupts industry after industry Sure it can- because in the real world demand /is/ limited [which is why bubbles pop] and wages are pretty inelastic [because raising wages is seen as a one-way ratchet]. Computer programmers can pretend it isn't true as long as we want, but that's because if someone does come up with a real AI, we're going to be the last ones out of the building.
igorlev 15y ago
It doesn't reduce the demand for high-end jobs, it might reduce the demand for the currently large variety of high-end jobs. I always thought that the development of science and technology pretty much meant that eventually everything trends towards pure symbol manipulation within a computerized environment, aka programming. Today we're programming ERP systems; tomorrow, automated asteroid belt ore extractors and 3d printers. Even then, I'm sure you'll have an even more bewildering variety of highly specialized technicians than you have today.
- yafujifide 15y ago
  What happens when computers are able to do their own symbol manipulation?
  - swombat 15y ago
    We all retire and let the computers run the economy for us, and devote our lives to the pursuit of happiness, art, love and other non-practical endeavours. And when the computers start caring about art too, they'll join us, no doubt.
    - nickpinkston 15y ago
      I really hope your vision comes true - I spend too much time thinking that computers are actually going to end-up as the Romans - we'll be their slaves... (pets?)
      - johngalt 15y ago
        'Slaves' would imply that we would have some useful value.
        nickpinkston 15y ago
        Yea, I feel like "pet" is probably the nicest thing we could be - that or they may have human sex fetishes ;-)
jonnathanson 15y ago
His point about the declining value of business school in particular is nominally sound, but he pinpoints the wrong source of the problem. The problem with business school is that it's started seeing itself in competition with law school, and accordingly, it's started focusing on younger and younger candidates. Average ages of first-year MBA students have been getting younger, especially at the top-tier programs like HBS and Stanford. This is, quite frankly, defeating the original purpose of business school: to be a finishing school, and not a preparatory school. Back in the day, you got an MBA because you had learned a thing or two in your work experience, and would like to reflect on it through the prism of various frameworks, theories, and leaders. But it was critical that you had an empirical knowledge base to work with, or else the lessons were vague and meaningless. The topics demanded practical knowledge of the general subject. Today, b-school is trying to position itself as an entry vehicle into the working world. You graduate, you go to b-school, you learn some mumbo-jumbo about how this whole working world -- which you've never experienced -- is supposed to work. And then you get sent off into that world, ready to be an entitled prick and piss off everyone around you who has actually experienced the real thing. People who will laugh at your frameworks and your theories, because they've heard them from the last 20,000 MBAs who came before you. B-school can still be relevant in today's business world, and in the business world of the future. But it needs to decide what it wants to be. And, whatever that is, it should be something more than simply an alternative to law school for 22-to-25-year-olds.
- Alex3917 15y ago
  "Today, b-school is trying to position itself as an entry vehicle into the working world." I do think there needs to be something that fills this position though. I think the ideal would be for b-school to work more like BYU or a salmon farm, e.g. * Students show up straight out of undergrad and learn for 3 - 4 months. * Students start their own project and work on it for another 4 - 6 months. * Students apply to Y Combinator or one of the other seed accelerators, and continue building out their business over the next two years. * Students who have shipped something significant are then allowed to come back at any point between two and ten years later.
  - 15y ago
jmm 15y ago
What gets me about many of these articles is how broad a brush they often use when describing "the education bubble." And so I appreciate that this article at least gestures at different types of grad school, and how student/consumer demand may be decreasing. But I'd to read more about specific bad "educational investment" decisions, and what makes these decisions bad, as a way of prescribing better pathways for students sizing up their college or grad school options. Specifically, what are the bigger competing opportunities that should entice these "kids" away from educational debt and opportunity cost? Thiel's program can only be a very small part of the re-balancing act, I think. Point me in the right direction if you've already read it...
- byrneseyeview 15y ago
  That is part of what makes a bubble a bubble. Individual houses have been good investments for particular reasons; individual e-commerce plays or telecom companies made sense in the mid-90's. But when people start calling up their broker to buy the next Internet IPO, or trying to invest in "housing" as a category--or when parents tell their kids to get "A degree," it naturally selects for the worst version of those. Here are a couple examples: * http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view.bg?articleid=1290088 http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view.bg?articleid=... * http://chronicle.com/article/Many-More-Students-Are/66223/ http://chronicle.com/article/Many-More-Students-Are/66223/ Thiel's program is more of a signal than anything. I dropped out of college five years ago, and people thought I was crazy. I had lunch a couple months ago with my high school classmates (from a regionally well-regarded prep school), and I'm pretty happy with how my career and prospects stack up.
  - jmm 15y ago
    Thanks. The relationship to the housing bubble is interesting, no doubt. In my mind, no two things have been more connected to class aspirations/freedoms over the last 50 years than home ownership and higher ed. There are class and race issues at play in both cases, which makes new prescriptions pretty tough to make, especially on a political level. But a problem has been identified here -- too many people are spending too much on money on phantom educational assets. Now the solution -- fewer people should go to college. (Especially expensive low to mid tier schools?) I guess what I was really asking above, is: so what should they do instead? And I'm guessing the answer ain't so pretty, something even more offensive to the idea of the American dream than the analogous housing case, of "sorry, just keep on renting."
Gaussian 15y ago
If only there were a way to short middling private schools. The hedgies shorting the for-profit schools are well documented. But you have to think that the lower- to middle-tier non-profit private schools--the ones that charge tuitions not unlike those of the Ivies--will be the first into the fire. Perhaps Goldman can create a Middling Private School Index (the MPX) and sell CDSs against it? The question: who can play the role of sucker on the long side? I know! Taxpayers!
- jnorthrop 15y ago
  Follow the model of John Paulson. He created a market so he could short the housing bubble and it made him one of the richest men in the world.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
fleitz 15y ago
The best evidence for an education bubble can be found at Starbucks. The amount of people who have advanced degrees and work at Starbucks is simply astounding.
- samfoo 15y ago
  Do you have any evidence that this is the case? Most of the people I know who work as barristas (Starbucks or otherwise) are college students or people obsessed with coffee. And in the suburbs the demographics change even more. (Seattle)
edw 15y ago
I think the author is confusing the members that currently make up the set of high-end jobs with the set itself. In 1995 I was writing HTML templating engines and session management code. An HR person might have called me a "templating and session engineer." By that definition the role I was filling is now obsolete: standardized technologies have been developed that mean I will never find work as a templating and session engineer again. I am not crying about that development. The coming obsolescence of particular high-end jobs opens an opportunity for new high-end jobs. The world has fewer Unix admins per Unix server than it did fifteen years ago, and the world is better off for that. (Apropos the recent "Linux admin shortage looms" non-story recent posted here.) The author is perpetuating the same fallacious argument that wheelwrights were at the dawn of the age of automobiles.
geebee 15y ago
I'm glad these articles are being written and taken seriously. We definitely need to end the heresy of questioning the value of higher education. Students need to understand that debt is the opposite of freedom, and student loans are (as the article pointed out) much harder to escape than almost any other kind of debt. That said, I'd like to see someone take on education in a stronger form. This particular article mocks an english teacher (another one asks who would spend $250,000 to read chaucer). Alrighty, agreed, not worth spending $250,000 to read Chaucer. How about engineering at a highly regarded state supported institution? How about Computer Science at the University of Washington or Illinois? Or even at a private university? How about going pre-med (though Medicine is clearly somewhat positional, rejecting many applicants than would be capable of completing the program), or to law school (probably even more positional than medicine in determining the value of your degree). Please understand, I'm not saying the answer is an obvious "yes" or "no" in any of these cases. If you're a good enough programmer to pass data structures at college that teaches the class for real, it could very well make sense to drop out and do YC or take that 100K startup from Thiel. But we do need to start distinguishing between different types of education: different majors, institutions, motivations. Definitely time to move past asking whether it's worth spending $250k to study Chaucer. There's much more interesting material here.
- AJ007 15y ago
  I think the bubble is already cracking and about to burst. If you take a look at all of the top for profit schools their enrollments have declined dramatically. Some degrees are certainly worth the money. All it takes is simple 5th or 6th grade math, which is not done for any number of reasons. I did the math, let me explain how it worked: -My parents had $X saved up for me to go to college (in my name I might add, so it was legally mine) -My dad was a faculty member at a local university which entitled me to free tuition -I attended that school for over 2 years, for free -I did the math that I could earn low to mid 5 figures with my degree, or make six to seven figures by dropping out and focusing on my current business I had been building -I dropped out, and I made a ton People are (or at least were) confused by what I was doing. I could have gone to a better school and not had a whole lot of debt. I could have stayed an extra year and a half and received my free college degree (minus the cost of books.) I did the math and it was damn simple math. Not a single other one of my friends did the math. Oddly enough, my brother did do the math and is attending an expensive engineering school for a degree in a special field. Anyone who gets deep in to debt for a non-marketable degree is a sucker. Anyone who gets deep in to debt in order to teach that same degree to others as a university faculty member is a participant in an elaborate ponzi scheme. There is nothing wrong with higher education. There is nothing wrong with devoting your entire life to something that will not earn you a penny. There is something wrong with elaborate and needless waste. Technology can, and will, bring education prices back down to earth. Accreditation along with deep rooted special interests means this will take a lot longer than it should.

93 points by terio 15y ago

Education is not an unstable bubble. Looking at the low and high end of the market there does seem to be an education bubble despite plenty of vary good state schools with reasonable tuition. What people seem to miss is unlike the housing or gold bubble tuition costs don't really feed off each other. The high end is really just a luxury in another form and nothing is stopping Breitling from selling 300,000$ watches any time soon. And the low end is a direct government subsidy (like corn farming) which will continue as long as the government feels the need to waste money. PS: As long as demand is unlimited and wages elastic Technology can't really destroy jobs in the long term even as it disrupts industry after industry. Still, people will always look for the best workers, so even if a degree might not mean an increase in pay the unemployment rate for people with a BS is 1/2 that of those without one for a reason.

dpapathanasiou 15y ago
It has more to do with people getting degrees for the wrong reasons: being educated doesn't mean you will always have economic security. And that's where the housing bubble analogy comes in: there are many good reasons to buy a house, but doing so because you expect its value to increase constantly is not one of them.
- simpleTruth 15y ago
  The Education and Housing markets are complex systems. The bubble analogy works as a vary simplified analogy to describe how some markets can see sustained prices increases for a while followed by a sudden drop. This works with Housing, at a fundamental level if people decided to more houses one year the price increases, and if people buy fewer houses one year the value of your house decreases which can quickly cycle though to dramatic shifts. However, if fewer people decided to get a degree the value of your degree increases.
  - watchandwait 15y ago
    Both systems have a constant: massive government subsidies that distort the true supply, demand, and economic ROI for the good. There could not have been a housing bubble without Fannie and Freddie, the FHA, and the protected-by-regulation class of bond ratings agencies. Similarly, there would not be an education bubble without federal loan guarantees -- certainly they have escalated cost of college, and most of the shady for-profit colleges thrive on student subsidies.
    - simpleTruth 15y ago
      Sorry, bubbles happen even without government action. Read up on the tulip bubble for a classic one. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania There is also plenty of blame to spread around. EX: Irish http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_property_bubble http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_property_bubble burst 2008. UK http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_property_bubble http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_property_bubble burst 2008. Australian http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_property_bubble http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_property_bubble (yet to burst) etc. What is really interesting is how little the price could increase before market forces brought things back to reality. Housing is such a large percentage of the worlds wealth that we never saw the sort crazy multiples over value that other bubbles get to. EX: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_asset_price_bubble http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_asset_price_bubble
      - jpadkins 15y ago
        Bubbles require rapid credit expansion. There may be varied reasons for what fuels a particular bubble, but the necessary precondition is easy money/credit. When the government regulates the currency & credit markets tightly, then government should share in the responsibility for the bubble.
        simpleTruth 15y ago
        The largest and least stable bubbles are often driven by credit but there is a wide range of causes. For example, one of the largest and less talked about bubbles comes from the shift from defined benefit plains to 401k style investing. In the mid-1980s there were fewer than 8 million participants with less than $100 billion of assets in 401(k) plans.[3] By 2006 there were seventy million participants with more than $3 trillion of assets in 401(k) plans. Now, what happens to the US stock market as baby boomers retire and there is a significant shift between people buying and selling stocks? PS: Many bubbles are simply money looking for somewhere to hide. Assume the US cut it's military budget by 80% and paid of the debt in 20 years, where do you think that money would end up?
- cmurdock 15y ago
  Hasn't this always been true? Universities have always offered plenty of degrees in fields that are hard if not impossible to find good paying jobs in.
  - arethuza 15y ago
    Other than jobs in academia, of course.
    - esw 15y ago
      This is a terrible time to be looking for work in academia, too.
krakensden 15y ago
> As long as demand is unlimited and wages elastic Technology can't really destroy jobs in the long term even as it disrupts industry after industry Sure it can- because in the real world demand /is/ limited [which is why bubbles pop] and wages are pretty inelastic [because raising wages is seen as a one-way ratchet]. Computer programmers can pretend it isn't true as long as we want, but that's because if someone does come up with a real AI, we're going to be the last ones out of the building.

igorlev 15y ago

It doesn't reduce the demand for high-end jobs, it might reduce the demand for the currently large variety of high-end jobs. I always thought that the development of science and technology pretty much meant that eventually everything trends towards pure symbol manipulation within a computerized environment, aka programming. Today we're programming ERP systems; tomorrow, automated asteroid belt ore extractors and 3d printers. Even then, I'm sure you'll have an even more bewildering variety of highly specialized technicians than you have today.

yafujifide 15y ago
What happens when computers are able to do their own symbol manipulation?
- swombat 15y ago
  We all retire and let the computers run the economy for us, and devote our lives to the pursuit of happiness, art, love and other non-practical endeavours. And when the computers start caring about art too, they'll join us, no doubt.
  - nickpinkston 15y ago
    I really hope your vision comes true - I spend too much time thinking that computers are actually going to end-up as the Romans - we'll be their slaves... (pets?)
    - johngalt 15y ago
      'Slaves' would imply that we would have some useful value.
      - nickpinkston 15y ago
        Yea, I feel like "pet" is probably the nicest thing we could be - that or they may have human sex fetishes ;-)

jonnathanson 15y ago

His point about the declining value of business school in particular is nominally sound, but he pinpoints the wrong source of the problem. The problem with business school is that it's started seeing itself in competition with law school, and accordingly, it's started focusing on younger and younger candidates. Average ages of first-year MBA students have been getting younger, especially at the top-tier programs like HBS and Stanford. This is, quite frankly, defeating the original purpose of business school: to be a finishing school, and not a preparatory school. Back in the day, you got an MBA because you had learned a thing or two in your work experience, and would like to reflect on it through the prism of various frameworks, theories, and leaders. But it was critical that you had an empirical knowledge base to work with, or else the lessons were vague and meaningless. The topics demanded practical knowledge of the general subject. Today, b-school is trying to position itself as an entry vehicle into the working world. You graduate, you go to b-school, you learn some mumbo-jumbo about how this whole working world -- which you've never experienced -- is supposed to work. And then you get sent off into that world, ready to be an entitled prick and piss off everyone around you who has actually experienced the real thing. People who will laugh at your frameworks and your theories, because they've heard them from the last 20,000 MBAs who came before you. B-school can still be relevant in today's business world, and in the business world of the future. But it needs to decide what it wants to be. And, whatever that is, it should be something more than simply an alternative to law school for 22-to-25-year-olds.

Alex3917 15y ago
"Today, b-school is trying to position itself as an entry vehicle into the working world." I do think there needs to be something that fills this position though. I think the ideal would be for b-school to work more like BYU or a salmon farm, e.g. * Students show up straight out of undergrad and learn for 3 - 4 months. * Students start their own project and work on it for another 4 - 6 months. * Students apply to Y Combinator or one of the other seed accelerators, and continue building out their business over the next two years. * Students who have shipped something significant are then allowed to come back at any point between two and ten years later.
- 15y ago

jmm 15y ago

What gets me about many of these articles is how broad a brush they often use when describing "the education bubble." And so I appreciate that this article at least gestures at different types of grad school, and how student/consumer demand may be decreasing. But I'd to read more about specific bad "educational investment" decisions, and what makes these decisions bad, as a way of prescribing better pathways for students sizing up their college or grad school options. Specifically, what are the bigger competing opportunities that should entice these "kids" away from educational debt and opportunity cost? Thiel's program can only be a very small part of the re-balancing act, I think. Point me in the right direction if you've already read it...

byrneseyeview 15y ago
That is part of what makes a bubble a bubble. Individual houses have been good investments for particular reasons; individual e-commerce plays or telecom companies made sense in the mid-90's. But when people start calling up their broker to buy the next Internet IPO, or trying to invest in "housing" as a category--or when parents tell their kids to get "A degree," it naturally selects for the worst version of those. Here are a couple examples: * http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view.bg?articleid=1290088 http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view.bg?articleid=... * http://chronicle.com/article/Many-More-Students-Are/66223/ http://chronicle.com/article/Many-More-Students-Are/66223/ Thiel's program is more of a signal than anything. I dropped out of college five years ago, and people thought I was crazy. I had lunch a couple months ago with my high school classmates (from a regionally well-regarded prep school), and I'm pretty happy with how my career and prospects stack up.
- jmm 15y ago
  Thanks. The relationship to the housing bubble is interesting, no doubt. In my mind, no two things have been more connected to class aspirations/freedoms over the last 50 years than home ownership and higher ed. There are class and race issues at play in both cases, which makes new prescriptions pretty tough to make, especially on a political level. But a problem has been identified here -- too many people are spending too much on money on phantom educational assets. Now the solution -- fewer people should go to college. (Especially expensive low to mid tier schools?) I guess what I was really asking above, is: so what should they do instead? And I'm guessing the answer ain't so pretty, something even more offensive to the idea of the American dream than the analogous housing case, of "sorry, just keep on renting."

Gaussian 15y ago

If only there were a way to short middling private schools. The hedgies shorting the for-profit schools are well documented. But you have to think that the lower- to middle-tier non-profit private schools--the ones that charge tuitions not unlike those of the Ivies--will be the first into the fire. Perhaps Goldman can create a Middling Private School Index (the MPX) and sell CDSs against it? The question: who can play the role of sucker on the long side? I know! Taxpayers!

jnorthrop 15y ago
Follow the model of John Paulson. He created a market so he could short the housing bubble and it made him one of the richest men in the world.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

fleitz 15y ago

The best evidence for an education bubble can be found at Starbucks. The amount of people who have advanced degrees and work at Starbucks is simply astounding.

samfoo 15y ago
Do you have any evidence that this is the case? Most of the people I know who work as barristas (Starbucks or otherwise) are college students or people obsessed with coffee. And in the suburbs the demographics change even more. (Seattle)

edw 15y ago

I think the author is confusing the members that currently make up the set of high-end jobs with the set itself. In 1995 I was writing HTML templating engines and session management code. An HR person might have called me a "templating and session engineer." By that definition the role I was filling is now obsolete: standardized technologies have been developed that mean I will never find work as a templating and session engineer again. I am not crying about that development. The coming obsolescence of particular high-end jobs opens an opportunity for new high-end jobs. The world has fewer Unix admins per Unix server than it did fifteen years ago, and the world is better off for that. (Apropos the recent "Linux admin shortage looms" non-story recent posted here.) The author is perpetuating the same fallacious argument that wheelwrights were at the dawn of the age of automobiles.

geebee 15y ago

I'm glad these articles are being written and taken seriously. We definitely need to end the heresy of questioning the value of higher education. Students need to understand that debt is the opposite of freedom, and student loans are (as the article pointed out) much harder to escape than almost any other kind of debt. That said, I'd like to see someone take on education in a stronger form. This particular article mocks an english teacher (another one asks who would spend $250,000 to read chaucer). Alrighty, agreed, not worth spending $250,000 to read Chaucer. How about engineering at a highly regarded state supported institution? How about Computer Science at the University of Washington or Illinois? Or even at a private university? How about going pre-med (though Medicine is clearly somewhat positional, rejecting many applicants than would be capable of completing the program), or to law school (probably even more positional than medicine in determining the value of your degree). Please understand, I'm not saying the answer is an obvious "yes" or "no" in any of these cases. If you're a good enough programmer to pass data structures at college that teaches the class for real, it could very well make sense to drop out and do YC or take that 100K startup from Thiel. But we do need to start distinguishing between different types of education: different majors, institutions, motivations. Definitely time to move past asking whether it's worth spending $250k to study Chaucer. There's much more interesting material here.

AJ007 15y ago
I think the bubble is already cracking and about to burst. If you take a look at all of the top for profit schools their enrollments have declined dramatically. Some degrees are certainly worth the money. All it takes is simple 5th or 6th grade math, which is not done for any number of reasons. I did the math, let me explain how it worked: -My parents had $X saved up for me to go to college (in my name I might add, so it was legally mine) -My dad was a faculty member at a local university which entitled me to free tuition -I attended that school for over 2 years, for free -I did the math that I could earn low to mid 5 figures with my degree, or make six to seven figures by dropping out and focusing on my current business I had been building -I dropped out, and I made a ton People are (or at least were) confused by what I was doing. I could have gone to a better school and not had a whole lot of debt. I could have stayed an extra year and a half and received my free college degree (minus the cost of books.) I did the math and it was damn simple math. Not a single other one of my friends did the math. Oddly enough, my brother did do the math and is attending an expensive engineering school for a degree in a special field. Anyone who gets deep in to debt for a non-marketable degree is a sucker. Anyone who gets deep in to debt in order to teach that same degree to others as a university faculty member is a participant in an elaborate ponzi scheme. There is nothing wrong with higher education. There is nothing wrong with devoting your entire life to something that will not earn you a penny. There is something wrong with elaborate and needless waste. Technology can, and will, bring education prices back down to earth. Accreditation along with deep rooted special interests means this will take a lot longer than it should.