7 ms·

Which is a good thing. More high educated people is better. Back in the days only a handful of people with the right background were able to study. Yes it migh

Which is a good thing. More high educated people is better. Back in the days only a handful of people with the right background were able to study. Yes it might diminish the value of a degree. Now actual additional skills and experience are needed to stand out. I am totally fine with this. Gone are the days of arrogant students thinking their degree is automatically bring them wealth (ok not entirely true in lots of countries). But still. We are heading into the right (not always perfect) direction.

mjburgess 5y ago
It's a catastrophe. Academics have always grossly oversold their own importance and the "value" of what they teach. The most valuable education is at the primary level (0 to 10 years old); then secondary (to 18); and tertiary education hardly has any effect whatsoever. By the point you're an adult, you aren't being "moulded" into anything, you're merely acquiring particular useful bits of knowledge that only have value if you're going to use them. What we have now is people spending tens of thousands to avoid earning money for several years; and thereby avoiding acquiring useful skills. And this is an economic catastrophe which burdens everyone in society and grossly misdirects public funds. I would be very supportive of an 12mo "generic higher learning skills" programmes being deployed at this scale. ie., something closer to a teenager-to-gradscheme transition programme which could include higher-level generic maths, writing, humanities, etc. skills. However what we have now is a gigantic tulip-style bubble that needs bursting or else we will continue to needlessly in-debt the next generations of people. The emperor really has no clothes on: your* degree really was a waste of money.... (* perhaps less so for HN readers )
- h2odragon 5y ago
  Now we've got "Invest in students" programs that amount to indentures: how long before those are "a success from private finance we must make public for the children" and worse? When do our societies ever look at the silly shit they're into and say "this shit is silly, let's stop it"? The Civil Rights movement maybe... Usually tho it comes to doubling down on the silly until something else breaks.
- mywittyname 5y ago
  > and tertiary education hardly has any effect whatsoever. This is the education I use all the time to make money. It matters that I can write and do arithmetic, but my entire career is based on what I learned after the age of 18.
  - mjburgess 5y ago
    Everyone's job relates to skills acquired post-18, necessarily so. The question is what role a university plays in that; and whether it actually provides those skills. Or whether, for example, the job itself can. I started programming as a child, and used this irc-gained knowledge and self-study to earn money till c. 26. I studied physics during. Much of what I make money with now was gained via MIT/Stanford/et al. initially on iTunes U, and latterly on youtube -- both during my apparent "attendance" at university; and for years afterwards. It would have been entirely possible for me to skip my entire university experience and still have the postgrad level of knowledge I have now: as almost all of it was gained via free lecture courses. You might say I'm cheating here: the content is still provided by some universities. Sure. The question remains whether even for the very high end, this process needs years at university; and whether all of them need to repeat it. Let alone how meaningless the process is on the low-end. I have been offered a PhD in a highly technical area (which I declined) -- and I can assure you nearly everything which landed me in that position had little to do with whatever my university "did". I barely attended.
    - jacobolus 5y ago
      So in other words: “We don’t need formal schooling beyond middle school because everyone can learn job skills as a child, and then self-study graduate level material from books and youtube and do independent PhD-level research with no funding, structure, or support.” This argument strongly reminds me of the guy I met who claimed nobody needs a paid job because they can just scavenge free food from restaurant garbage bins.
      - mjburgess 5y ago
        I used my case to question how central the university needs to be in any process of skill acquisition: high-end, or low-end. I wasn't answering the question; I was asking it. It is still clearly the case the university has a role. I just do not think we have caught up to how well employers can train their employees; how well even highly advanced skills can be acquired; how very very recent advancements (youtube, etc.) can provide a good-quality education; and so on. In an age where meaningful professional development can be made without the university, there is a serious question to be asked: how many will meaningfully benefit from the university system? (And: how many are meaningfully harmed?). The answer, in both cases, is surely: some.
- zacherates 5y ago
  > The emperor really has no clothes on: your* degree really was a waste of money.... I mean... my degree is why I can work in the United States and has been (and will continue to be) worth an unbelievable amount of money. More seriously though, a university education can be very valuable (we can measure the wage premium [1]), but the cost matters. A 4 year degree at in-state state school prices is almost always worth it (provided you graduate). It is difficult to tease out how much of the value is selection effects vs. signaling vs. credentialism vs. networking vs. exposure to challenge/opportunity vs. skills vs. knowledge vs. stepping stone to a professional degree (medicine/law/engineering/nursing). Thinking about my own experience, obviously the credential was a huge deal, but so was my school's co-op program that got me my first software jobs, and there are still classes that shaped the way I think to this day [2]. Where things go off the rails is when people think they can buy their way into the upper classes by getting a degree from a prestigious school (and spend way too much doing so), or people get snookered by for profit colleges or people who don't have a good chance of completing get pressured into going to a four year program and end up with the debt, but not the credential (you mostly don't get partial credit). You could argue that the wage premium is just class discrimination through credentialism. Maybe it is... but then that's the thing that needs to be dismantled. As an individual if you have a good shot at finishing a 4 year degree and can afford it, you should probably play the game unless you happen to have much better options. [1] Eg. $640/week median college vs. high school in Q4 2020: https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2018/07/is-college-still-worth-it/ https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2018/07/is-college-still-wor... [2] The crash course in epistemology in my Evolutionary Biology class, the complementary rationalism of my Discrete Mathematics Course, the Econ 101 perspective from Introduction to Micro-Economics. Not to mention the tour of data-structures and algorithms from my Computer Science classes so I can do leet code interviews :). Maybe I could have picked the stuff up on my own, but would I have if I was working in a factory back home?
Wintamute 5y ago
That seems like a naive assessment of an education model that is failing across multiple dimensions of analysis. It saddles many students with crippling debt. It monopolises some of the most productive years of a persons life studying subjects often of minimal practical value to their future careers. It drains public funding and resources. You say more highly educated people is better as if its a truism, it doesn't seem so clear to me. I don't see why, for example, someone spending their early 20s in an apprenticeship, doing vocational training or in an industry learning on the job is inherently worse for them or society than receiving a higher education. Just about the only unambiguous positive I can see in university is the chance to grow and learn as a young person in a social setting, freshly independent of parents. But surely there are more efficient approaches that could be employed here.
- chii 5y ago
  > studying subjects often of minimal practical value to their future careers the fact that these subjects offer minimal value should mean that the loan taken to study them should not have been taken. If the student likes the subject, and would be willing to pay, then so be it. But to borrow money, off the back of tax payers, to study a useless subject, is basically folly on the part of the administration approving those loans.
  - Jcowell 5y ago
    I for one am glad the system is not like this. I don’t not think our society as a whole would be better if the only thing we approved were studies of subjects with lucrative careers. While I do not understand Gender Studies , I appreciate those who are willing to study more about us and the phenomenons we silly little humans do.
screye 5y ago
> Which is a good thing. More high educated people is better That's a dangerous statement in isolation. For a country with a median income of $35k, imposing debts worth $200k for degrees with questionable employability and no clear resolution (Can't pay off, can't default) is insanely dangerous. Education is also not a monolith. Some careers need education, in that gaining skills in the profession requires a degree of instruction or apprenticeship (Medicine, Pure Sciences, Engineering etc). But a large number of them end up being paper pushers or knowledge from a single course or learn everything on their first job. For this second cohort, education can be burden with terrible payoff. A lot of educational fields are also entirely unemployable. This includes 3 type of professions: 1. Pyramid schemes - where the only real job is in instruction of the next generation. 2. Priest - where they create a dogma that mandates them as essential in the system, but have no use in isolation. 3. Professional disk golfer - where there is only 1 employable position, and about a million wannabes. As of now, progressive society is pushing people to consider all kinds of professions as equal. However, the equivalency is flawed. The risk/reward ratio of getting educated varies massively across professions. It can vary from a ticket to the upper-middle-class to being entirely useless equivalent to homeopath or hucksterism in terms of unsubstantiated merit. The university system was never created for everyone to get educated. The concept has existed only post GI-bill and seemed to work in a Boomer-era post scarcity America. (Nothing that worked well in America from 1950-1980 should be taken as an example that can be replicated. It was a special time in history. It would be like trying to be Saudi prince without an oil well in your backyard) I am strongly in favor of higher education for all. However, it needs to either be fully distanced from the present university mafia or the universities must be compelled to produce economically productive graduates across their various offerings. Universities sell a financial product. It is about time we see their variables-controlled return on investment with th fine grained granularity that we evaluate any other financial product. Lest we get stuck with sub-prime graduates bundled into funds that are considered AAA because there are a large enough number of them in it.
- chalst 5y ago
  > Universities sell a financial product No, they do not. Universities offer undergraduate education to school leavers. Both schools and universities bend over backwards to inform prospective students on the fit between degrees and careers. Students pursue degrees with poor career options despite advice and the offerings in the humanities are shrinking. A feature you overlooked is how bad the graduate employment market is for even the degrees most favoured by employers.
billyruffian 5y ago
I'm studying for another batchelors with the Open University in the UK. It's a good institution and I completed my computing masters with them a few years ago. I'm studing for fun, not for career. I'm so disappointed to see my peers spend most of their time discussing how to get grant funding, which parts of the taught course they can safely skip and how to formally complain about a tutor that has given them poor feedback for poor effort is just depressing.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
AlgorithmicTime 5y ago
No, it's not a good thing. It's people wasting years of their prime life in a pointless institution.
bluedino 5y ago
>> More high educated people is better. I'd be happy with people being simply 'educated'. Too many people barely graduated high school, lack all kinds of skills, have poor reading/writing abilities.

mjburgess 5y ago

It's a catastrophe. Academics have always grossly oversold their own importance and the "value" of what they teach. The most valuable education is at the primary level (0 to 10 years old); then secondary (to 18); and tertiary education hardly has any effect whatsoever. By the point you're an adult, you aren't being "moulded" into anything, you're merely acquiring particular useful bits of knowledge that only have value if you're going to use them. What we have now is people spending tens of thousands to avoid earning money for several years; and thereby avoiding acquiring useful skills. And this is an economic catastrophe which burdens everyone in society and grossly misdirects public funds. I would be very supportive of an 12mo "generic higher learning skills" programmes being deployed at this scale. ie., something closer to a teenager-to-gradscheme transition programme which could include higher-level generic maths, writing, humanities, etc. skills. However what we have now is a gigantic tulip-style bubble that needs bursting or else we will continue to needlessly in-debt the next generations of people. The emperor really has no clothes on: your* degree really was a waste of money.... (* perhaps less so for HN readers )

h2odragon 5y ago
Now we've got "Invest in students" programs that amount to indentures: how long before those are "a success from private finance we must make public for the children" and worse? When do our societies ever look at the silly shit they're into and say "this shit is silly, let's stop it"? The Civil Rights movement maybe... Usually tho it comes to doubling down on the silly until something else breaks.
mywittyname 5y ago
> and tertiary education hardly has any effect whatsoever. This is the education I use all the time to make money. It matters that I can write and do arithmetic, but my entire career is based on what I learned after the age of 18.
- mjburgess 5y ago
  Everyone's job relates to skills acquired post-18, necessarily so. The question is what role a university plays in that; and whether it actually provides those skills. Or whether, for example, the job itself can. I started programming as a child, and used this irc-gained knowledge and self-study to earn money till c. 26. I studied physics during. Much of what I make money with now was gained via MIT/Stanford/et al. initially on iTunes U, and latterly on youtube -- both during my apparent "attendance" at university; and for years afterwards. It would have been entirely possible for me to skip my entire university experience and still have the postgrad level of knowledge I have now: as almost all of it was gained via free lecture courses. You might say I'm cheating here: the content is still provided by some universities. Sure. The question remains whether even for the very high end, this process needs years at university; and whether all of them need to repeat it. Let alone how meaningless the process is on the low-end. I have been offered a PhD in a highly technical area (which I declined) -- and I can assure you nearly everything which landed me in that position had little to do with whatever my university "did". I barely attended.
  - jacobolus 5y ago
    So in other words: “We don’t need formal schooling beyond middle school because everyone can learn job skills as a child, and then self-study graduate level material from books and youtube and do independent PhD-level research with no funding, structure, or support.” This argument strongly reminds me of the guy I met who claimed nobody needs a paid job because they can just scavenge free food from restaurant garbage bins.
    - mjburgess 5y ago
      I used my case to question how central the university needs to be in any process of skill acquisition: high-end, or low-end. I wasn't answering the question; I was asking it. It is still clearly the case the university has a role. I just do not think we have caught up to how well employers can train their employees; how well even highly advanced skills can be acquired; how very very recent advancements (youtube, etc.) can provide a good-quality education; and so on. In an age where meaningful professional development can be made without the university, there is a serious question to be asked: how many will meaningfully benefit from the university system? (And: how many are meaningfully harmed?). The answer, in both cases, is surely: some.
zacherates 5y ago
> The emperor really has no clothes on: your* degree really was a waste of money.... I mean... my degree is why I can work in the United States and has been (and will continue to be) worth an unbelievable amount of money. More seriously though, a university education can be very valuable (we can measure the wage premium [1]), but the cost matters. A 4 year degree at in-state state school prices is almost always worth it (provided you graduate). It is difficult to tease out how much of the value is selection effects vs. signaling vs. credentialism vs. networking vs. exposure to challenge/opportunity vs. skills vs. knowledge vs. stepping stone to a professional degree (medicine/law/engineering/nursing). Thinking about my own experience, obviously the credential was a huge deal, but so was my school's co-op program that got me my first software jobs, and there are still classes that shaped the way I think to this day [2]. Where things go off the rails is when people think they can buy their way into the upper classes by getting a degree from a prestigious school (and spend way too much doing so), or people get snookered by for profit colleges or people who don't have a good chance of completing get pressured into going to a four year program and end up with the debt, but not the credential (you mostly don't get partial credit). You could argue that the wage premium is just class discrimination through credentialism. Maybe it is... but then that's the thing that needs to be dismantled. As an individual if you have a good shot at finishing a 4 year degree and can afford it, you should probably play the game unless you happen to have much better options. [1] Eg. $640/week median college vs. high school in Q4 2020: https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2018/07/is-college-still-worth-it/ https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2018/07/is-college-still-wor... [2] The crash course in epistemology in my Evolutionary Biology class, the complementary rationalism of my Discrete Mathematics Course, the Econ 101 perspective from Introduction to Micro-Economics. Not to mention the tour of data-structures and algorithms from my Computer Science classes so I can do leet code interviews :). Maybe I could have picked the stuff up on my own, but would I have if I was working in a factory back home?

Wintamute 5y ago

That seems like a naive assessment of an education model that is failing across multiple dimensions of analysis. It saddles many students with crippling debt. It monopolises some of the most productive years of a persons life studying subjects often of minimal practical value to their future careers. It drains public funding and resources. You say more highly educated people is better as if its a truism, it doesn't seem so clear to me. I don't see why, for example, someone spending their early 20s in an apprenticeship, doing vocational training or in an industry learning on the job is inherently worse for them or society than receiving a higher education. Just about the only unambiguous positive I can see in university is the chance to grow and learn as a young person in a social setting, freshly independent of parents. But surely there are more efficient approaches that could be employed here.

chii 5y ago
> studying subjects often of minimal practical value to their future careers the fact that these subjects offer minimal value should mean that the loan taken to study them should not have been taken. If the student likes the subject, and would be willing to pay, then so be it. But to borrow money, off the back of tax payers, to study a useless subject, is basically folly on the part of the administration approving those loans.
- Jcowell 5y ago
  I for one am glad the system is not like this. I don’t not think our society as a whole would be better if the only thing we approved were studies of subjects with lucrative careers. While I do not understand Gender Studies , I appreciate those who are willing to study more about us and the phenomenons we silly little humans do.

screye 5y ago

> Which is a good thing. More high educated people is better That's a dangerous statement in isolation. For a country with a median income of $35k, imposing debts worth $200k for degrees with questionable employability and no clear resolution (Can't pay off, can't default) is insanely dangerous. Education is also not a monolith. Some careers need education, in that gaining skills in the profession requires a degree of instruction or apprenticeship (Medicine, Pure Sciences, Engineering etc). But a large number of them end up being paper pushers or knowledge from a single course or learn everything on their first job. For this second cohort, education can be burden with terrible payoff. A lot of educational fields are also entirely unemployable. This includes 3 type of professions: 1. Pyramid schemes - where the only real job is in instruction of the next generation. 2. Priest - where they create a dogma that mandates them as essential in the system, but have no use in isolation. 3. Professional disk golfer - where there is only 1 employable position, and about a million wannabes. As of now, progressive society is pushing people to consider all kinds of professions as equal. However, the equivalency is flawed. The risk/reward ratio of getting educated varies massively across professions. It can vary from a ticket to the upper-middle-class to being entirely useless equivalent to homeopath or hucksterism in terms of unsubstantiated merit. The university system was never created for everyone to get educated. The concept has existed only post GI-bill and seemed to work in a Boomer-era post scarcity America. (Nothing that worked well in America from 1950-1980 should be taken as an example that can be replicated. It was a special time in history. It would be like trying to be Saudi prince without an oil well in your backyard) I am strongly in favor of higher education for all. However, it needs to either be fully distanced from the present university mafia or the universities must be compelled to produce economically productive graduates across their various offerings. Universities sell a financial product. It is about time we see their variables-controlled return on investment with th fine grained granularity that we evaluate any other financial product. Lest we get stuck with sub-prime graduates bundled into funds that are considered AAA because there are a large enough number of them in it.

chalst 5y ago
> Universities sell a financial product No, they do not. Universities offer undergraduate education to school leavers. Both schools and universities bend over backwards to inform prospective students on the fit between degrees and careers. Students pursue degrees with poor career options despite advice and the offerings in the humanities are shrinking. A feature you overlooked is how bad the graduate employment market is for even the degrees most favoured by employers.

billyruffian 5y ago

I'm studying for another batchelors with the Open University in the UK. It's a good institution and I completed my computing masters with them a few years ago. I'm studing for fun, not for career. I'm so disappointed to see my peers spend most of their time discussing how to get grant funding, which parts of the taught course they can safely skip and how to formally complain about a tutor that has given them poor feedback for poor effort is just depressing.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

AlgorithmicTime 5y ago

No, it's not a good thing. It's people wasting years of their prime life in a pointless institution.

bluedino 5y ago

>> More high educated people is better. I'd be happy with people being simply 'educated'. Too many people barely graduated high school, lack all kinds of skills, have poor reading/writing abilities.