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Anecdotally speaking, all I can remember hearing drilled into me in the American school system as the path for life success was going to college. The implicatio

Anecdotally speaking, all I can remember hearing drilled into me in the American school system as the path for life success was going to college. The implication was that you'd be a loser who worked flipping burgers at McDonalds for the rest of your life if you didn't go to college. As far as the data you ask for, I'm all for doing that kind of research, but there's probably many variables that are hard to directly even start to compare and interpret. For instance, consider the impact of countries that are overall poorer than the US. It might be the case that this incentivizes a lot more people in other countries to go to school to try and escape a bad living standard. Or it might be the case that they don't have the resources to get to school even if they were desperate to educate themselves as much as possible. Even if you had this data, interpreting it would seem to be really tough. Or what about countries with more homogenous populations? Perhaps IQ tests provide more value to employers in the US with a significantly heterogenous population and are far less useful in countries where just about everybody has the same overall background.

rahimnathwani 3y ago
I agree with the general sentiment that people do degrees for bad reasons, that even good reasons at an individual level may not be optimal in aggregate etc. But I'm particularly interested in your hypothesis that it's driven mainly or solely by the inability for US employers to use IQ tests. Your first sentences (about college being the default/accepted path) is also true in other countries that aren't subject to that supreme court case, like the UK. Or like Sweden: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35594618 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35594618
- logicalmonster 3y ago
  The reason for anything large usually has a lot of contributing causes, and I don't think I have all of the answers here, but a first guess would be to think about US Cultural Dominance. If the real world was a game of Civilization, the US would be having an overwhelming cultural lead after WWII. Basically whatever the zeitgeist in the US is ends up spreading through the world for many reasons. If it dominated American culture 50 years ago that going to college was mandatory, it seems likely that this attitude would have spread to a lot of other countries too. Is that the right explanation? Probably not entirely, but I think that attitudes and ideas that dominate the US end up spreading a lot because of Hollywood and other cultural reasons.

rahimnathwani 3y ago

I agree with the general sentiment that people do degrees for bad reasons, that even good reasons at an individual level may not be optimal in aggregate etc. But I'm particularly interested in your hypothesis that it's driven mainly or solely by the inability for US employers to use IQ tests. Your first sentences (about college being the default/accepted path) is also true in other countries that aren't subject to that supreme court case, like the UK. Or like Sweden: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35594618 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35594618

logicalmonster 3y ago
The reason for anything large usually has a lot of contributing causes, and I don't think I have all of the answers here, but a first guess would be to think about US Cultural Dominance. If the real world was a game of Civilization, the US would be having an overwhelming cultural lead after WWII. Basically whatever the zeitgeist in the US is ends up spreading through the world for many reasons. If it dominated American culture 50 years ago that going to college was mandatory, it seems likely that this attitude would have spread to a lot of other countries too. Is that the right explanation? Probably not entirely, but I think that attitudes and ideas that dominate the US end up spreading a lot because of Hollywood and other cultural reasons.