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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 i

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.
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  > ideally we should be increasing the pay of those jobs. The pay of which jobs? The ones that require a college degree or not. > Not because of competition but because not all jobs require a college degree And are the number and prospects of these jobs increasing or decreasing? I also find this whole conflation of having a college degree and being an elite silly. The problem seems much less to be that we have too many educated people and seems much more that wealth is concentrated by the small subset of wealthy people who "got here first" and then get the compounding returns.

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.

whimsicalism 5y ago
> ideally we should be increasing the pay of those jobs. The pay of which jobs? The ones that require a college degree or not. > Not because of competition but because not all jobs require a college degree And are the number and prospects of these jobs increasing or decreasing? I also find this whole conflation of having a college degree and being an elite silly. The problem seems much less to be that we have too many educated people and seems much more that wealth is concentrated by the small subset of wealthy people who "got here first" and then get the compounding returns.