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Maybe the incentives for universities are all wrong. In the early 1900's only 4% of the US went to university. There ended up being a big push to get more peo

Maybe the incentives for universities are all wrong. In the early 1900's only 4% of the US went to university. There ended up being a big push to get more people into college with the assumption that it would benefit society. Eventually we ended up with a notion that everyone should go to college and this has been buttressed with government support but what if this idea is wrong? What if the incentives created lots of university departments that were superfluous, producing nothing that was actually benefitting society. This may show up as lots of superfluous/unreproducible papers and journals many not even based on the scientific method. Maybe the incentives focused universities on creating more "education" so they could rake in the cash made readily available through government subsidies targeting those who could not complete STEM degrees. Have we reached a state of elite-overproduction?

grahamburger 5y ago
This is basically my feeling as well. I would prefer that we (at least in the U.S.) focus on making high school much much better, to the point that fewer people have any need to go to college/university. And then, if we still need to, figure out what to do about University. (Saying this as someone who never finished college/university, largely because I was trying to pay for it myself and couldn't make it work.)
- billytetrud 5y ago
  Elementary and middle school is far more important than high school. The earlier you go, the more important it is.
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    If we actually wanted to improve education in our schools, we would just finish desegregating them.
    - rootusrootus 5y ago
      How do we accomplish that, short of randomizing which school students are assigned to and then dealing with the transportation headache to make it happen? Schools continue to be segregated because of underlying socioeconomic realities; changing that is how we desegregate the schools, I don't know how we could feasibly reverse that causality.
      - whimsicalism 5y ago
        I think randomization plus weighting for geographic distance could work. The issue with busing was never the actual busing, and there are plenty of places (like my hometown) where parents send their kids further out to ensure that they attend a school that is majority their race rather than the local neighborhood school. I lived in Cambridge, MA, and they have successfully desegregated their schools with a similar approach that kept transportation very low and remained a popular plan with most parents (75% approval income over $100k, ~95% approval income under $75k). In another place I lived, the top public magnet school was ~95% black. White parents pretty much universally refused to send their kids there, but would send their kids to a different magnet that was further away. The "underlying socioeconomic realities" are often overstated compared to the unfortunate, but big reason that we don't like to talk about, which is lots of parents (to some extent, understandably) are afraid to send their kids to a school where they would be in the racial minority. Schools are now as segregated as they were in 1976, which represents a backtracking from the peak in 1988. That represents an erosion of will more than a vastly changed socioeconomic reality.
        rootusrootus 5y ago
        > there are plenty of places (like my hometown) where parents send their kids further out to ensure that they attend a school that is majority their race rather than the local neighborhood school. Ah, that is interesting. In my district (and state, AFAIK), school assignment is completely out of the hands of the parents, with some narrow exceptions. I fully admit to having a narrow view on this, my state is not especially diverse, with more than 75% white and 2% black. So most of our school segregation, if it's fair to call it that, is completely socioeconomic even if the students are largely the same race.
- Tarsul 5y ago
  I read an interview[1] with the general secretary of German trade and he lamented that in Germany for many, many years the consensus was that more and more people had to study. Thias was also because the OECD said so, not just German politicans. He says we don't need so many people who go to university, and I wholeheartedly agree. And this is coming from Germany where the education system is a lot more forgiving than in the US/UK etc. (in that you don't need to study STEM to earn good money, and studies are cheap) But I think in the coming years there will be a lot of rethinking about these things. [1]https://www.spiegel.de/start/ausbildung-im-handwerk-in-den-koepfen-stecken-bilder-die-nicht-der-realitaet-entsprechen-a-fe6a684c-07e7-4c0a-8b08-e0c22ea911c6 https://www.spiegel.de/start/ausbildung-im-handwerk-in-den-k...
- bluedino 5y ago
  >> focus on making high school much much better Meanwhile we're lowering standards and just passing every kid we can, for 'fairness'
  - TheTrotters 5y ago
    I wouldn't pooh pooh that. It's a tough problem for politicians, teachers, education activists and researchers. If you set high standards and allowed only those who pass them to advance to the next grade, graduate HS etc. then you'd end up with clear racial disparities. I don't want to get into a discussion about what's the cause of these disparities and who's fault they are. But, based on available data on e.g. SAT scores, we'd have Asian Americans doing the best, followed by whites, and with blacks at the bottom. It'd provoke a flurry of media debate and negative attention on everyone involved. These people cannot fix the problem itself, at least not fully and certainly not quickly. But they can change standards to make it look like everyone is doing well. After all if you lower standards enough everyone will meet them. It's a real problem and these incentives aren't going to change. Any solution will have to acknowledge and address them, not pretend that they don't exist and that incompetent or weak-minded politicians are to blame.
    - ihsw 5y ago
      Self-selection has already lead to increased racial segregation, Asian and white students are already increasingly being put into private or charter schools. If we want to improve academic performance of students in predominantly black neighborhoods then we should aggressively remove disruptive students from classrooms regardless of race. An entire classroom is held back by a handful of students intent on raising hell and it does more harm towards ambitious young black boys and girls than any policies intent on solving "disparities." Disparities in outcome is not evidence of discrimination.
  - baq 5y ago
    Not passing a kid sets them back 10 years of life (yeah I made up that number but it’s what I’d expect to happen when you end up in a negative feedback loop like this). Education doesn’t have a binary outcome.
thebean11 5y ago
Agree with your larger point but: > This may show up as lots of superfluous/unreproducible papers and journals many not even based on the scientific method. seems very STEM-centric. It sounds like you're saying academia outside of the realm of science is useless which I completely disagree with.
- greenail 5y ago
  I'm suggesting that we may be overinvesting in some parts of academia outside the realm of science and that publishing in a journal may not be the best way to measure how to tune those investments. Sokal's work in 1996 was interesting and "Sokal Squared" seems relevant to the topic. A journal's ability to filter out parody seems like a good test for evaluating the overall quality of investments in a field.
- deertick1 5y ago
  Not OP, but would like to say : I don't think science outside of stem is useless, but it is fundamentally different and fundentally less reliable/reproducible. In terms of reliability and rigor, it seems to go about like : Math -> computer science -> physics/chemistry -> biology -> everything else. As you continue, you must ignore more independent variables to conduct an experiment. By the time you get to social sciences where you're doing self reported survey studies on your sensation of gender acceptance, you cant really call it science anymore. Not saying its useless, but ir absolutely should not be treated with the same level of reverence and trust as the harder sciences. People act like the government should be making policy decisions based on psychology thesis papers, or that id you disagree with some purple haired feminism professor, you are a science "denier." Ultimately this is a function of poor education, and hivemind thinking caused by our inundation with news and various media. But yeah, my point is STEM (in its colloquial usage) is really all that can be considered science and people tend to mistake any academic paper or public persona for science or a scientist respectively, and that just isn't so. Sorry for the rant.
  - albatruss 5y ago
    Something important to understand is that the hard sciences are more rigorous, but that's because they're easier to model than what the social sciences have to deal with. The naming is confusing.
z3ncyberpunk 5y ago
Universities producing MBA grads, still produce nothing of value. At least liberal arts challenges you to think.
whimsicalism 5y ago
> Have we reached a state of elite-overproduction? I'm very curious about this line of thought, as it seems to have become very popular in the blogospher over the past year or two. What are the consequences of "elite overproduction"? I'm curious what the implications of this line of thought are. Generally, I think more education is better than less - I am wrong to think that? My personal hypothesis is that this fear of elite overproduction is being generated by existing professionals who are afraid an increasing supply of educated workers reducing their negotiating position/compensation.
- distribot 5y ago
  I think this elite notion is over-simplified and inaccurate. It suggests that some significant portion of students are at these kind of "walled garden", elite institutions where students become disconnected from the struggles of "real people". 80% of students go to a school where over half of applicants are accepted. Yes, these schools definitely are centers of, frankly, liberal idealism and free-spiritedness. But I think that would be the case in any system where young people are pretty unsupervised and have lots of time to read and study (or party). In my experience though, they aren't factories for elites in the common sense of that word. They're just a reflection of how you need much more training to be competitive in the job market today. https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/04/harvard-uchicago-elite-colleges-are-anomaly/586627/ https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/04/harvar...
  - ta1234567890 5y ago
    Not OP. My interpretation is that society doesn’t really need as many university degrees as we are producing. Not because of competition but because not all jobs require a college degree, and ideally we should be increasing the pay of those jobs. It might be better to adopt a model similar to the German or Swiss, in which people follow different tracks depending on their skills and interests, and not everyone goes to college, instead a lot of people go to trades schools. Of course for that to work in the US a huge societal change would need to happen first or alongside.
    - 5y ago
tartoran 5y ago
> Have we reached a state of elite-overproduction? I don't see that as a bad thing. Of course they won't be elites when overproduced but its output, when looking at the big picture, will be positive. If you're so with your view why stop at universities then? Why educate the masses at all? Why not have classes of educated and uneducated people?
- kapuasuite 5y ago
  There are tradeoffs, though - the resources that are poured into higher education are resources that cannot be spent on other vital things.
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    Like giving a $200k/yr tech worker $6k in stimmy checks? There are broad benefits to having an educated society, this rhetoric about 'elite overproduction' has classist/snobbish undertones, in my view.
    - kapuasuite 5y ago
      Tax dollars that go to universities for one reason or another are tax dollars that cannot be spent on healthcare - tax dollars that can't be collected from tax exempt institutions (like almost all universities) are tax dollars that can't be spent on maintaining infrastructure. The possibilities are endless. The questions isn't whether or not education is "good", because it obviously is, it's whether the level of resources devoted to it can be spent to better effect elsewhere, which is probably true.
      - whimsicalism 5y ago
        > which is probably true. Hm, is it? My guess is that government spending on college probably is probably a net positive investment in terms of revenue for the govt due to downstream growth, likely also lowers the cost to do other things in industry. There is extensive evidence that further public spending on healthcare does not have a size-able impact on outcomes, unfortunately. [0] > the level of resources devoted to it can be spent to better effect elsewhere But why the focus on education? Why not increase, say, inheritance taxation and then use it to fund those additional things? Couldn't we make better use of the resources our society devotes towards making sure that the kids of rich parents are also rich? [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAND_Health_Insurance_Experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAND_Health_Insurance_Experime... You really can't beat social science research like this and the followup in 2010.
ashtonkem 5y ago
A podcast I listen to[0] had a throwaway line that’s stuck with me. I’m not sure if it’s actually correct, this isn’t an area I’m an expert in, but it’s interesting nonetheless. > Colleges are really just real estate speculation businesses that also incidentally give you a degree in dentistry or whatever. If that’s true, wouldn’t it explain why colleges do things that don’t make sense for education? 0 - Well There’s Your Problem Podcast, Episode 71
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  I think the type of person who tends to browse HN has a problem with latching on to phrases or ideas that "sound interesting" and then never doing any further research. I think it's where a lot of the rhetoric around 'elite overproduction' comes from. > Colleges are really just real estate speculation businesses that also incidentally give you a degree in dentistry or whatever. Why would that incentivize colleges to enroll more students? How does college as real estate speculation business work?
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    You can disagree with the podcast without attacking me.
    - whimsicalism 5y ago
      I'm attacking myself as much as you, I have this problematic tendency to latch onto interesting sounding ideas.
      - ChainOfFools 5y ago
        universe is infinite, brains are finite. ergo, brains find compression irresistible, to the point of self-dosing reward juice when a delightful morsel of smartly collapsed reality is encountered. even our signal processing wiring, with each lopsided neuron merging many inputs into a single output, is biased toward obligate compression.
13415 5y ago
Can you give me an exact definition of "benefitting society"? That sounds a lot like the "real value" of things that salon communists talk about all the time. Count me a skeptic. Opinions about what benefits society differ vastly, and I'm not sure there could be a compelling "objective benefits" theory in this area. Society is what people make of it and how they and elected representatives shape the future.
fallingknife 5y ago
Any major that ends in "studies"
rednerrus 5y ago
We should be pouring the money we pour into universities into high schools. We should set the bar higher for what we expect of high school students. We should create vocational programs so that kids come out of high school with skills that help to improve society. If you want to improve society, give kids a sense that they can make a difference and be functional members of society. We should also be pouring money into early childhood development. We should setup community centers for expecting/new mothers. Women can go to these community centers for support, education, and to be with other mothers.
tsimionescu 5y ago
I vehemently disagree. Education is a value in itself, whatever its impact on the economy or on technology is. People have an innate right to be as educated as they want (and can handle). Of course, it doesn't follow that they have a right to be considered researchers or publish papers afterwards, and the plethora of bad research may be a real problem. However, it should be noted that academic pseudosciences are not a new phenomenon, and they have sometimes been much more destructive than some of today's examples. Race science, phrenology, medicine in the time of bloodletting and others have been respected academic pursuits created by elites, not the result of anything like over-education.
- octopoc 5y ago
  But does education need to look like universities and colleges? Education used to look (for most people) like apprenticeships, which is more like a tutoring approach without study of anything unnecessary to your trade. Maybe a better system in modern times would be a combination of mentoring with official recommendations and travel (to broaden horizons).
  - gknoy 5y ago
    How would you study history, philosophy, or ethics, then? Those classes covered things which I have never encountered in my _trade_, but which formatively affected my views on how one should treat others (or treat oneself). I feel like the stereotypical "liberal arts" education, in which one studies things that are not just focused on your trade, has an intrinsic value which is hard to articulate.
    - eunoia 5y ago
      “You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library” Of course not everyone is autodidactic so the path is not for everyone, but it is indeed quite possible to acquire this kind of knowledge/humanity outside of the university structure. Alternatively: everyone should read the classics.
marcosdumay 5y ago
> Eventually we ended up with a notion that everyone should go to college and this has been buttressed with government support but what if this idea is wrong? > What if the incentives created lots of university departments that were superfluous, producing nothing that was actually benefitting society. I would say that those are two completely independent issues, that just look alike because of policy. Now, about the actual subject, I'm not sure. The knowledge one gets at higher education brings a lot of possibilities too. It's not all signaling. An educated society is supposed to create wealth by itself, and this seems to happen on practice. I would look elsewhere for the origins of our current economic stagnation.
mariodiana 5y ago
My understanding of the history (in the United States) is this. College used to be almost exclusively for the rich. Now, while there were always students who went to college as a stepping stone to the further study of medicine, law, or theology, there were plenty of rich kids — "legacies," they were called — who went only because they were from the "right kind" of families, and went only to network with others from the same social circles. This is where the idea of a "Gentleman's C" comes from. You see, their lives were already pretty well set out. You made connections, graduated, and then went to work for your father or uncle, or your father or uncle's firm; or, married the daughter of a well-to-do family and went to work for your father-in-law. But there has long been an egalitarian and meritocratic strain in the United States, and after WWII, as a way of saying thank you to those who had saved the world from Hitler, the GI Bill was started. This was a great success. The GI Bill made it possible for older, generally more mature, and generally more motivated individuals to attend college. Interestingly, the "gentlemen" students, the anecdote goes, used to complain about these people as "DAB's": Damn Average Busters. Those on the GI Bill weren't satisfied with grades of C (whether real or given with a wink). Now, here I break from the history to my own opinion. The former GI's were a special cohort. To identify them as merely middle and working class people benefiting from college, and from there to imagine that all (or nearly all) middle and working class young people could benefit from college just does not follow. But, whether or not one follows from the other, it's a wonderful thing for a politician to promise, and just the kind of thing people want to believe. Promising to send the children of your constituents to trade school just doesn't have the same ring to it. So, it became college for everybody. From here, I can pick up with what you're saying, and add that what you're saying jibes with what Allan Bloom said, way back in 1987, with his Closing of the American Mind. Bloom argued that middle class people are far more practical, economically — not having well-to-do fathers, uncles, and father-in-laws to fall back on; and because of that, colleges had to retool to become far more practical. In other words, many of the new degrees — at least at first — were closer to the aims of trade schools than traditional liberal arts curriculums. It seems like things were like that for a while. Where I think it gets worse is that government money has created a bubble in higher education, a bubble that has created degrees which I term luxury degrees. These degrees are neither traditional college curriculums or glorified trade school syllabi. These are the so-called "navel gazing" or "basket weaving" courses. Maybe, if you were rich and lacked the ability to take over the family business, your rich parents might send you off to study one of these luxury majors, and that might make some kind of sense. Maybe you'd still meet a nice girl or boy, and then fall back on your trust fund. In any case, it would be their money and their business; and, in any case, how much of that sort of thing would there be? But spending taxpayer money to fund these courses of study and produce these degree holders is ludicrous. It is gross malinvestment, plain and simple.
leto_ii 5y ago
This position strikes me as unjustifiably elitist, reminiscent perhaps of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind. > lots of university departments that were superfluous, producing nothing that was actually benefitting society Who's to decide precisely what does and doesn't benefit society? More so, how can you decide in advance which line of inquiry will prove fruitful and which won't? Shouldn't you cast a broad net, especially when it comes to academia? > government subsidies targeting those who could not complete STEM degrees This, I'm sure, varies greatly between countries. But why do you think there's such a clear hierarchy of academic topics? It's quite dismissive of entire fields to assume that the people who are involved with them are simply STEM drop-outs. As a side note I would also have to say that lumping together science, engineering and mathematics doesn't make much sense to me - this observation is not targeted at the parent, it's just a general peeve I have. > Have we reached a state of elite-overproduction? What would the alternative be? Back to the aristocracy, or to something like the Gilded Age or Belle Epoque?
taneq 5y ago
> Eventually we ended up with a notion that everyone should go to college and this has been buttressed with government support but what if this idea is wrong? The mistake was assuming "going to college" was the goal and not "learning something useful." Too many kids spend years of their life and earnings studying completely useless degrees. > Maybe the incentives focused universities on creating more "education" so they could rake in the cash made readily available through government subsidies targeting those who could not complete STEM degrees. Nail, head, yep.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  We have been long past point where just a degree is enough. What the degree is in is also important. And here even some hard-science paths like physics can be limiting.
- eigenket 5y ago
  Speaking as someone who went pretty heavily into STEM (I have a PhD in math and work as a mathematical physicist) I absolutely hate this view. I have not seen any evidence that on average STEM is harder in a meaningful sense than non-STEM subjects. A huge amount of non-stem stuff is really difficult, if you tried to push me as an undergrad through a philosophy or history or literature degree or whatever I'd probably fail. Viewing non-stem stubjects as a lesser course for "those who could not complete STEM degrees" is simultaneously idiotic and elitist, which is pretty impressive. I also completely disagree with the naive assumption that non-vocational degrees are "useless degrees", there is a big difference between something being "useless" and you, personally, not understanding the use.
  - scroot 5y ago
    There is a richness to life that has nothing whatsoever to do with money. To the technocratic mind that would confuse this fact, what is "useful" can only ever be presented in the terms of the economics profession. Under such guidelines it is quite "useless" to, say, spend a decade studying Akkadian. But our understanding of the past would be so much poorer without people willing to engage with Assyriology. I'd like to see STEM-maximalists argue that one engineering field or another is somehow more difficult than ANE studies.
legulere 5y ago
Access to universities was even less based on merit than it is today I think. Also I think that we’re actually hindering progress by trying to limit research to topics that have direct use following out of it.
notJim 5y ago
> Eventually we ended up with a notion that everyone should go to college and this has been buttressed with government support but what if this idea is wrong? I think the problem with this line of thinking is that since the US is a highly-developed country, we depend on having a well-educated, highly productive workforce in order to maintain our economy. The US is no longer a place where you have large numbers of people working in huge low-tech factories, for example, because the productivity of those factories does not afford the living standards of a highly-developed country. Instead, developed countries perform R & D and need highly-skilled workforces. To the extent we have manufacturing, it tends to be highly-automated advanced processes. Again, automation is enabling high worker productivity here. It seems like the issue may be misallocation of the education being produced, not too much education in general.

grahamburger 5y ago

This is basically my feeling as well. I would prefer that we (at least in the U.S.) focus on making high school much much better, to the point that fewer people have any need to go to college/university. And then, if we still need to, figure out what to do about University. (Saying this as someone who never finished college/university, largely because I was trying to pay for it myself and couldn't make it work.)

billytetrud 5y ago
Elementary and middle school is far more important than high school. The earlier you go, the more important it is.
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  If we actually wanted to improve education in our schools, we would just finish desegregating them.
  - rootusrootus 5y ago
    How do we accomplish that, short of randomizing which school students are assigned to and then dealing with the transportation headache to make it happen? Schools continue to be segregated because of underlying socioeconomic realities; changing that is how we desegregate the schools, I don't know how we could feasibly reverse that causality.
    - whimsicalism 5y ago
      I think randomization plus weighting for geographic distance could work. The issue with busing was never the actual busing, and there are plenty of places (like my hometown) where parents send their kids further out to ensure that they attend a school that is majority their race rather than the local neighborhood school. I lived in Cambridge, MA, and they have successfully desegregated their schools with a similar approach that kept transportation very low and remained a popular plan with most parents (75% approval income over $100k, ~95% approval income under $75k). In another place I lived, the top public magnet school was ~95% black. White parents pretty much universally refused to send their kids there, but would send their kids to a different magnet that was further away. The "underlying socioeconomic realities" are often overstated compared to the unfortunate, but big reason that we don't like to talk about, which is lots of parents (to some extent, understandably) are afraid to send their kids to a school where they would be in the racial minority. Schools are now as segregated as they were in 1976, which represents a backtracking from the peak in 1988. That represents an erosion of will more than a vastly changed socioeconomic reality.
      - rootusrootus 5y ago
        > there are plenty of places (like my hometown) where parents send their kids further out to ensure that they attend a school that is majority their race rather than the local neighborhood school. Ah, that is interesting. In my district (and state, AFAIK), school assignment is completely out of the hands of the parents, with some narrow exceptions. I fully admit to having a narrow view on this, my state is not especially diverse, with more than 75% white and 2% black. So most of our school segregation, if it's fair to call it that, is completely socioeconomic even if the students are largely the same race.
Tarsul 5y ago
I read an interview[1] with the general secretary of German trade and he lamented that in Germany for many, many years the consensus was that more and more people had to study. Thias was also because the OECD said so, not just German politicans. He says we don't need so many people who go to university, and I wholeheartedly agree. And this is coming from Germany where the education system is a lot more forgiving than in the US/UK etc. (in that you don't need to study STEM to earn good money, and studies are cheap) But I think in the coming years there will be a lot of rethinking about these things. [1]https://www.spiegel.de/start/ausbildung-im-handwerk-in-den-koepfen-stecken-bilder-die-nicht-der-realitaet-entsprechen-a-fe6a684c-07e7-4c0a-8b08-e0c22ea911c6 https://www.spiegel.de/start/ausbildung-im-handwerk-in-den-k...
bluedino 5y ago
>> focus on making high school much much better Meanwhile we're lowering standards and just passing every kid we can, for 'fairness'
- TheTrotters 5y ago
  I wouldn't pooh pooh that. It's a tough problem for politicians, teachers, education activists and researchers. If you set high standards and allowed only those who pass them to advance to the next grade, graduate HS etc. then you'd end up with clear racial disparities. I don't want to get into a discussion about what's the cause of these disparities and who's fault they are. But, based on available data on e.g. SAT scores, we'd have Asian Americans doing the best, followed by whites, and with blacks at the bottom. It'd provoke a flurry of media debate and negative attention on everyone involved. These people cannot fix the problem itself, at least not fully and certainly not quickly. But they can change standards to make it look like everyone is doing well. After all if you lower standards enough everyone will meet them. It's a real problem and these incentives aren't going to change. Any solution will have to acknowledge and address them, not pretend that they don't exist and that incompetent or weak-minded politicians are to blame.
  - ihsw 5y ago
    Self-selection has already lead to increased racial segregation, Asian and white students are already increasingly being put into private or charter schools. If we want to improve academic performance of students in predominantly black neighborhoods then we should aggressively remove disruptive students from classrooms regardless of race. An entire classroom is held back by a handful of students intent on raising hell and it does more harm towards ambitious young black boys and girls than any policies intent on solving "disparities." Disparities in outcome is not evidence of discrimination.
- baq 5y ago
  Not passing a kid sets them back 10 years of life (yeah I made up that number but it’s what I’d expect to happen when you end up in a negative feedback loop like this). Education doesn’t have a binary outcome.

thebean11 5y ago

Agree with your larger point but: > This may show up as lots of superfluous/unreproducible papers and journals many not even based on the scientific method. seems very STEM-centric. It sounds like you're saying academia outside of the realm of science is useless which I completely disagree with.

greenail 5y ago
I'm suggesting that we may be overinvesting in some parts of academia outside the realm of science and that publishing in a journal may not be the best way to measure how to tune those investments. Sokal's work in 1996 was interesting and "Sokal Squared" seems relevant to the topic. A journal's ability to filter out parody seems like a good test for evaluating the overall quality of investments in a field.
deertick1 5y ago
Not OP, but would like to say : I don't think science outside of stem is useless, but it is fundamentally different and fundentally less reliable/reproducible. In terms of reliability and rigor, it seems to go about like : Math -> computer science -> physics/chemistry -> biology -> everything else. As you continue, you must ignore more independent variables to conduct an experiment. By the time you get to social sciences where you're doing self reported survey studies on your sensation of gender acceptance, you cant really call it science anymore. Not saying its useless, but ir absolutely should not be treated with the same level of reverence and trust as the harder sciences. People act like the government should be making policy decisions based on psychology thesis papers, or that id you disagree with some purple haired feminism professor, you are a science "denier." Ultimately this is a function of poor education, and hivemind thinking caused by our inundation with news and various media. But yeah, my point is STEM (in its colloquial usage) is really all that can be considered science and people tend to mistake any academic paper or public persona for science or a scientist respectively, and that just isn't so. Sorry for the rant.
- albatruss 5y ago
  Something important to understand is that the hard sciences are more rigorous, but that's because they're easier to model than what the social sciences have to deal with. The naming is confusing.

z3ncyberpunk 5y ago

Universities producing MBA grads, still produce nothing of value. At least liberal arts challenges you to think.

whimsicalism 5y ago

> Have we reached a state of elite-overproduction? I'm very curious about this line of thought, as it seems to have become very popular in the blogospher over the past year or two. What are the consequences of "elite overproduction"? I'm curious what the implications of this line of thought are. Generally, I think more education is better than less - I am wrong to think that? My personal hypothesis is that this fear of elite overproduction is being generated by existing professionals who are afraid an increasing supply of educated workers reducing their negotiating position/compensation.

distribot 5y ago
I think this elite notion is over-simplified and inaccurate. It suggests that some significant portion of students are at these kind of "walled garden", elite institutions where students become disconnected from the struggles of "real people". 80% of students go to a school where over half of applicants are accepted. Yes, these schools definitely are centers of, frankly, liberal idealism and free-spiritedness. But I think that would be the case in any system where young people are pretty unsupervised and have lots of time to read and study (or party). In my experience though, they aren't factories for elites in the common sense of that word. They're just a reflection of how you need much more training to be competitive in the job market today. https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/04/harvard-uchicago-elite-colleges-are-anomaly/586627/ https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/04/harvar...
- ta1234567890 5y ago
  Not OP. My interpretation is that society doesn’t really need as many university degrees as we are producing. Not because of competition but because not all jobs require a college degree, and ideally we should be increasing the pay of those jobs. It might be better to adopt a model similar to the German or Swiss, in which people follow different tracks depending on their skills and interests, and not everyone goes to college, instead a lot of people go to trades schools. Of course for that to work in the US a huge societal change would need to happen first or alongside.
  - 5y ago

tartoran 5y ago

> Have we reached a state of elite-overproduction? I don't see that as a bad thing. Of course they won't be elites when overproduced but its output, when looking at the big picture, will be positive. If you're so with your view why stop at universities then? Why educate the masses at all? Why not have classes of educated and uneducated people?

kapuasuite 5y ago
There are tradeoffs, though - the resources that are poured into higher education are resources that cannot be spent on other vital things.
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  Like giving a $200k/yr tech worker $6k in stimmy checks? There are broad benefits to having an educated society, this rhetoric about 'elite overproduction' has classist/snobbish undertones, in my view.
  - kapuasuite 5y ago
    Tax dollars that go to universities for one reason or another are tax dollars that cannot be spent on healthcare - tax dollars that can't be collected from tax exempt institutions (like almost all universities) are tax dollars that can't be spent on maintaining infrastructure. The possibilities are endless. The questions isn't whether or not education is "good", because it obviously is, it's whether the level of resources devoted to it can be spent to better effect elsewhere, which is probably true.
    - whimsicalism 5y ago
      > which is probably true. Hm, is it? My guess is that government spending on college probably is probably a net positive investment in terms of revenue for the govt due to downstream growth, likely also lowers the cost to do other things in industry. There is extensive evidence that further public spending on healthcare does not have a size-able impact on outcomes, unfortunately. [0] > the level of resources devoted to it can be spent to better effect elsewhere But why the focus on education? Why not increase, say, inheritance taxation and then use it to fund those additional things? Couldn't we make better use of the resources our society devotes towards making sure that the kids of rich parents are also rich? [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAND_Health_Insurance_Experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAND_Health_Insurance_Experime... You really can't beat social science research like this and the followup in 2010.

ashtonkem 5y ago

A podcast I listen to[0] had a throwaway line that’s stuck with me. I’m not sure if it’s actually correct, this isn’t an area I’m an expert in, but it’s interesting nonetheless. > Colleges are really just real estate speculation businesses that also incidentally give you a degree in dentistry or whatever. If that’s true, wouldn’t it explain why colleges do things that don’t make sense for education? 0 - Well There’s Your Problem Podcast, Episode 71

whimsicalism 5y ago
I think the type of person who tends to browse HN has a problem with latching on to phrases or ideas that "sound interesting" and then never doing any further research. I think it's where a lot of the rhetoric around 'elite overproduction' comes from. > Colleges are really just real estate speculation businesses that also incidentally give you a degree in dentistry or whatever. Why would that incentivize colleges to enroll more students? How does college as real estate speculation business work?
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  You can disagree with the podcast without attacking me.
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    I'm attacking myself as much as you, I have this problematic tendency to latch onto interesting sounding ideas.
    - ChainOfFools 5y ago
      universe is infinite, brains are finite. ergo, brains find compression irresistible, to the point of self-dosing reward juice when a delightful morsel of smartly collapsed reality is encountered. even our signal processing wiring, with each lopsided neuron merging many inputs into a single output, is biased toward obligate compression.

13415 5y ago

Can you give me an exact definition of "benefitting society"? That sounds a lot like the "real value" of things that salon communists talk about all the time. Count me a skeptic. Opinions about what benefits society differ vastly, and I'm not sure there could be a compelling "objective benefits" theory in this area. Society is what people make of it and how they and elected representatives shape the future.

fallingknife 5y ago

Any major that ends in "studies"

rednerrus 5y ago

We should be pouring the money we pour into universities into high schools. We should set the bar higher for what we expect of high school students. We should create vocational programs so that kids come out of high school with skills that help to improve society. If you want to improve society, give kids a sense that they can make a difference and be functional members of society. We should also be pouring money into early childhood development. We should setup community centers for expecting/new mothers. Women can go to these community centers for support, education, and to be with other mothers.

tsimionescu 5y ago

I vehemently disagree. Education is a value in itself, whatever its impact on the economy or on technology is. People have an innate right to be as educated as they want (and can handle). Of course, it doesn't follow that they have a right to be considered researchers or publish papers afterwards, and the plethora of bad research may be a real problem. However, it should be noted that academic pseudosciences are not a new phenomenon, and they have sometimes been much more destructive than some of today's examples. Race science, phrenology, medicine in the time of bloodletting and others have been respected academic pursuits created by elites, not the result of anything like over-education.

octopoc 5y ago
But does education need to look like universities and colleges? Education used to look (for most people) like apprenticeships, which is more like a tutoring approach without study of anything unnecessary to your trade. Maybe a better system in modern times would be a combination of mentoring with official recommendations and travel (to broaden horizons).
- gknoy 5y ago
  How would you study history, philosophy, or ethics, then? Those classes covered things which I have never encountered in my _trade_, but which formatively affected my views on how one should treat others (or treat oneself). I feel like the stereotypical "liberal arts" education, in which one studies things that are not just focused on your trade, has an intrinsic value which is hard to articulate.
  - eunoia 5y ago
    “You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library” Of course not everyone is autodidactic so the path is not for everyone, but it is indeed quite possible to acquire this kind of knowledge/humanity outside of the university structure. Alternatively: everyone should read the classics.

marcosdumay 5y ago

> Eventually we ended up with a notion that everyone should go to college and this has been buttressed with government support but what if this idea is wrong? > What if the incentives created lots of university departments that were superfluous, producing nothing that was actually benefitting society. I would say that those are two completely independent issues, that just look alike because of policy. Now, about the actual subject, I'm not sure. The knowledge one gets at higher education brings a lot of possibilities too. It's not all signaling. An educated society is supposed to create wealth by itself, and this seems to happen on practice. I would look elsewhere for the origins of our current economic stagnation.

mariodiana 5y ago

My understanding of the history (in the United States) is this. College used to be almost exclusively for the rich. Now, while there were always students who went to college as a stepping stone to the further study of medicine, law, or theology, there were plenty of rich kids — "legacies," they were called — who went only because they were from the "right kind" of families, and went only to network with others from the same social circles. This is where the idea of a "Gentleman's C" comes from. You see, their lives were already pretty well set out. You made connections, graduated, and then went to work for your father or uncle, or your father or uncle's firm; or, married the daughter of a well-to-do family and went to work for your father-in-law. But there has long been an egalitarian and meritocratic strain in the United States, and after WWII, as a way of saying thank you to those who had saved the world from Hitler, the GI Bill was started. This was a great success. The GI Bill made it possible for older, generally more mature, and generally more motivated individuals to attend college. Interestingly, the "gentlemen" students, the anecdote goes, used to complain about these people as "DAB's": Damn Average Busters. Those on the GI Bill weren't satisfied with grades of C (whether real or given with a wink). Now, here I break from the history to my own opinion. The former GI's were a special cohort. To identify them as merely middle and working class people benefiting from college, and from there to imagine that all (or nearly all) middle and working class young people could benefit from college just does not follow. But, whether or not one follows from the other, it's a wonderful thing for a politician to promise, and just the kind of thing people want to believe. Promising to send the children of your constituents to trade school just doesn't have the same ring to it. So, it became college for everybody. From here, I can pick up with what you're saying, and add that what you're saying jibes with what Allan Bloom said, way back in 1987, with his Closing of the American Mind. Bloom argued that middle class people are far more practical, economically — not having well-to-do fathers, uncles, and father-in-laws to fall back on; and because of that, colleges had to retool to become far more practical. In other words, many of the new degrees — at least at first — were closer to the aims of trade schools than traditional liberal arts curriculums. It seems like things were like that for a while. Where I think it gets worse is that government money has created a bubble in higher education, a bubble that has created degrees which I term luxury degrees. These degrees are neither traditional college curriculums or glorified trade school syllabi. These are the so-called "navel gazing" or "basket weaving" courses. Maybe, if you were rich and lacked the ability to take over the family business, your rich parents might send you off to study one of these luxury majors, and that might make some kind of sense. Maybe you'd still meet a nice girl or boy, and then fall back on your trust fund. In any case, it would be their money and their business; and, in any case, how much of that sort of thing would there be? But spending taxpayer money to fund these courses of study and produce these degree holders is ludicrous. It is gross malinvestment, plain and simple.

leto_ii 5y ago

This position strikes me as unjustifiably elitist, reminiscent perhaps of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind. > lots of university departments that were superfluous, producing nothing that was actually benefitting society Who's to decide precisely what does and doesn't benefit society? More so, how can you decide in advance which line of inquiry will prove fruitful and which won't? Shouldn't you cast a broad net, especially when it comes to academia? > government subsidies targeting those who could not complete STEM degrees This, I'm sure, varies greatly between countries. But why do you think there's such a clear hierarchy of academic topics? It's quite dismissive of entire fields to assume that the people who are involved with them are simply STEM drop-outs. As a side note I would also have to say that lumping together science, engineering and mathematics doesn't make much sense to me - this observation is not targeted at the parent, it's just a general peeve I have. > Have we reached a state of elite-overproduction? What would the alternative be? Back to the aristocracy, or to something like the Gilded Age or Belle Epoque?

taneq 5y ago

> Eventually we ended up with a notion that everyone should go to college and this has been buttressed with government support but what if this idea is wrong? The mistake was assuming "going to college" was the goal and not "learning something useful." Too many kids spend years of their life and earnings studying completely useless degrees. > Maybe the incentives focused universities on creating more "education" so they could rake in the cash made readily available through government subsidies targeting those who could not complete STEM degrees. Nail, head, yep.

Ekaros 5y ago
We have been long past point where just a degree is enough. What the degree is in is also important. And here even some hard-science paths like physics can be limiting.
eigenket 5y ago
Speaking as someone who went pretty heavily into STEM (I have a PhD in math and work as a mathematical physicist) I absolutely hate this view. I have not seen any evidence that on average STEM is harder in a meaningful sense than non-STEM subjects. A huge amount of non-stem stuff is really difficult, if you tried to push me as an undergrad through a philosophy or history or literature degree or whatever I'd probably fail. Viewing non-stem stubjects as a lesser course for "those who could not complete STEM degrees" is simultaneously idiotic and elitist, which is pretty impressive. I also completely disagree with the naive assumption that non-vocational degrees are "useless degrees", there is a big difference between something being "useless" and you, personally, not understanding the use.
- scroot 5y ago
  There is a richness to life that has nothing whatsoever to do with money. To the technocratic mind that would confuse this fact, what is "useful" can only ever be presented in the terms of the economics profession. Under such guidelines it is quite "useless" to, say, spend a decade studying Akkadian. But our understanding of the past would be so much poorer without people willing to engage with Assyriology. I'd like to see STEM-maximalists argue that one engineering field or another is somehow more difficult than ANE studies.

legulere 5y ago

Access to universities was even less based on merit than it is today I think. Also I think that we’re actually hindering progress by trying to limit research to topics that have direct use following out of it.

notJim 5y ago

> Eventually we ended up with a notion that everyone should go to college and this has been buttressed with government support but what if this idea is wrong? I think the problem with this line of thinking is that since the US is a highly-developed country, we depend on having a well-educated, highly productive workforce in order to maintain our economy. The US is no longer a place where you have large numbers of people working in huge low-tech factories, for example, because the productivity of those factories does not afford the living standards of a highly-developed country. Instead, developed countries perform R & D and need highly-skilled workforces. To the extent we have manufacturing, it tends to be highly-automated advanced processes. Again, automation is enabling high worker productivity here. It seems like the issue may be misallocation of the education being produced, not too much education in general.