8 ms·

The World Might Be Better Off Without College for Everyone (2018)

39 points by turtlegrids 3y ago

more_corn 3y ago
Education is the way we teach people to think. There are other ways. I actually prefer the apprenticeship model. I’ve learned a staggering amount just by showing up and helping smarter people with their work. I went to college, got a useless degree (but maybe learned to think and gained some work skills through work study). But really the valuable things I learned I learned on the job with fantastic mentors. The standard model of education is not the only one, but yes some processes or system for leveling people up is certainly required.
jseliger 3y ago
Having taught college students off and on for 15 years, the only part of the headline I disagree with is the word "might." https://seliger.com/2017/06/16/rare-good-political-news-boosting-apprenticeships/ https://seliger.com/2017/06/16/rare-good-political-news-boos...
Turskarama 3y ago
College as the base line assumption for getting a job is really bad, but there are a lot of other good effects that a year of college can give you that high school can't. 1) Since it's a lot bigger you will tend to mix with a much larger (and more diverse) number of people in an adult setting. 2) Since you get to choose your own subjects you can experience gaining knowledge that you actually want to gain, rather than knowledge as a means to an end (this would be even more true if again college wasn't a base requirement for jobs). 3) Most people will need to move at least a little way to go to college, which can help stop them forming a rut that they settle into after school and never get out of again.
- 111111IIIIIII 3y ago
  Material sustenance is a prerequisite for any of those things to be considered good rather than distraction. It's not ironic that the reason poor people go to college is to get a better job; it's the result of a society divided by social class. It's the poor imitating the rich in hopes that they can make a living someday. To say the least, it is cruel and unusual.
  - vba616 3y ago
    >it's the result of a society divided by social class Isn't it really the opposite? Pre-industrial revolution, most people would be farmers, and they would learn outside of school nearly everything they needed to know. Today, it's much more common for people to do something different from their parents, and even if college doesn't put you in an elite group, it gives you the freedom to choose from different lifestyles. I think people may be oblivious to this if they are a few generations removed from their farming ancestors, such that they never knew a living relative who was the first to abandon their traditional life and get educated and go to the city to work.
    - 111111IIIIIII 3y ago
      > Pre-industrial revolution, most people would be farmers, and they would learn outside of school nearly everything they needed to know. Nothing about society or college was comparable pre-industrial revolution, unless maybe you came from wealth and are comparing the life of aristocracy. What's your inheritance? > gives you the freedom to choose from different lifestyles See my previous comment. > I think people may be oblivious to this if they are a few generations removed from their farming ancestors, such that they never knew a living relative who was the first to abandon their traditional life and get educated and go to the city to work. Pre-industrial revolution peasants did not "abandon their traditional life" by choice; very far from it. They were forced into industrial centers as common lands were evacuated and commodified to staff the factories. Post-industrial revolution, they were forced by waves of technological change and economic instability. Again, only the very privileged few ever had the luxury of "abandoning traditional life" by choice.
      - vba616 3y ago
        >Nothing about society or college was comparable pre-industrial revolution, unless maybe you came from wealth and are comparing the life of aristocracy. What's your inheritance? We must be talking past each other. I was saying that being a farmer, or not being a farmer, but with no more formal education than a typical farmer, was brutal. People that could've done a hundred things with a college education spent their lives doing back breaking physical labor until they couldn't stand any more.
- roxgib 3y ago
  This is all undoubtably true, but are any of these worth four years and a ton of debt? Perhaps for some individuals, but across the board?
  - Turskarama 3y ago
    Probably not, which is why I specified one year. It is also perfectly within the power (if not the will) of any country above subsistence to provide one year of education for free.
- constantcrying 3y ago
  All of these can be accomplished without going to college. Moving away from home and doing some vocational training/apprenticeship works just as well. Especially since you actually get payed for your education and can actually be independent, instead of your parents paying for you.
- lotsoweiners 3y ago
  Where does online college fit into this? I got a bachelor’s degree from my state school. I never went to the campus once and only interacted with my teacher (not regularly). My diploma and transcript look exactly like everyone who went on campus.
- samtho 3y ago
  #2 is becoming decreasing true as more general education is piled on to both make up for the knowledge that students increasingly lack of abilities (as high schools are pressured to just pass them) as well as the perverse incentive for colleges to pack in these classes to keep them paying for more classes. This is compounded by the fact that these ill-prepared students wont as successful in a more rigorous program so departmental pressures within the college system have reduced the scope of undergrad classes by a staggering amount. These days, their major grants them surface-level, watered-down understanding, requiring the need to go into a masters or post-baccalaureate program for the privilege of learning anything useful.
diamondlovesyou 3y ago
https://archive.li/ZN5MJ https://archive.li/ZN5MJ
111111IIIIIII 3y ago
What might make "the world" better off is irrelevant when all you have us billions of individuals pitted against each other.
roxgib 3y ago
Credentialism and signalling are well established. At a broader level it's the old 'correlation vs causation' chestnut. Policymakers notice that people with education earn more, and decide that people should do more education so they too can earn more, but it mostly fails because it wasn't just the education that holds them back. Meanwhile, in a world where everyone is forced to see high school through to graduation the value of a diploma is diminished. In tech, some companies are increasingly willing to captialise on this by expanding their hiring pool and benefiting from snapping up workers that other companies don't want to hire. So there's some hope it seems that we can break free from the credentialist world that we're in right now.
cutler 3y ago
Despite the author's 40 years in education he still doesn't get it. Education is an end in itself not a job qualification. You can only grok this if you have lived in a country in which higher education is/was fully funded by the state. As soon as it becomes a cost/benefit exercise the original ideal behind education is lost and subjects such as Philosophy, Literature and History appear to be a waste of time and money. Ironically, when higher education in the UK was fully-funded by the state the resulting degrees, regardless of the subject(s) studied, were far more valuable in the job market than the more vocational degrees which today saddle students with £50k of debt. A society which doesn't value education as an investment is a society in decline. The same can also be said about a nation's health service.
- cykros 3y ago
  Amusing that philosophy always ends up in these hypothetical lists of "less useful" degrees. At least when I was in college 15 years ago, it was topping many lists of most sought out degrees in business magazines, because problem solving is a pretty solid cross-industry skillset. Obviously you then want to couple with it some more specific skills, but it's sort of like doing your core workout to get a solid base before worrying about specific muscle groups. Or taking a computer science curriculum before worrying about learning a specific language without any foundation in how the machine actually does, well, anything. Literature, art history...yes, a bit less widespread in their ability to make you suited for at least many professions. Though worth remembering "schola" is an ancient Greek root meaning "leisure," and yes, just because something isn't inherently going to return a profit directly doesn't mean it's worth discarding entirely. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
- constantcrying 3y ago
  >Education is an end in itself not a job qualification. But even students treat it as such. Many of the people I know went to get a degree because they believed "they had to", not because of an intrinsic desire to learn. And if all involved believe that it is about getting a qualification for some career, then that is what it will become. >when higher education in the UK was fully-funded by the state the resulting degrees, regardless of the subject(s) studied, were far more valuable in the job market Rarity is the actual important thing here. If a significant portion of students have some degree it will be inherently irrelevant. Education has been continually broadened, making it more and more irrelevant. In the past a university degree was an enormous signifier, now it is "expected" in the job market, even if irrelevant.
motohagiography 3y ago
If you want a more educated population, add another year to high school that is half math and half civics.
- constantcrying 3y ago
  School was such an enormous waste of time. The amount I learned in a single University semester was so much greater than years of school education.
  - rationalist 3y ago
    It sounds like you might be smarter than the vast majority of highschool students to which the GP comment was aimed at. The problem is, the math and civics classes already present in highschool should be adequate, it's just that many of the students don't take it seriously and try to learn - an extra year isn't going to fix that.
- whatscooking 3y ago
  You’re joking right? If anything School needs to be shortened not extended
pyinstallwoes 3y ago
I think there is insight to be gleaned from how learning used to be done through an academy vs what became to be known as college or education post-industrialization. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factory_model_school https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factory_model_school
hotdogscout 3y ago
Interesting to think we inherited this structure for human knowledge from the Catholic Church. Also I don't think reasonable people want College for Everyone™ when they defend public higher education. Entrance exams for public universities in the third world are brutal.
steve76 3y ago
[dead]
NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
I attempted to finish college five times, and I fell short of my goal five times as well. This transpired over the course of 30 years. Having washed out of college twice by 1992, I landed my first job due to networking with my classmates, at a very college-adjacent employer. I then went on to ride the dot-com bubble for years, and I was able to capitalize on my natural talents and the generally hungriness of employers for system admins. I was utterly incompetent and ill-suited for the corporate world at that point. I was homeless a lot and I was unemployed a lot, and I couldn't really succeed at anything, even if I tried. Eventually I got used to volunteering a lot, developed a better work ethic, and then I went back to school. Several times. The first time I completed a two-year course for a certification that simply made me a better volunteer. Then I went to community college to try for an Associate of Applied Science. Unable to complete this degree, I did achieve my more realistic goals of brushing up on modern tech, and achieving the correct certifications. I then landed a great job in academia, and perhaps the recruiter found me because community college was on my LinkedIn profile. At any rate, they didn't give a fig about my relevant certifications (and they wouldn't pay to earn/maintain them either) and so here I sit, 3 years later, with a great part-time job, no degree, and two CompTIA certifications. College didn't matter for me. Unless it did. I definitely benefited in tangential ways from mingling and mixing in the halls of academia for so many years. I wouldn't trade it for anything.
dventimihasura 3y ago
The purpose of college is for its students to learn to relate to other people who went to college.
samtho 3y ago
The “everyone goes to college” mantra has caused educational inflation caused by misaligned incentives created from a misunderstood effect. In the past, wealthy people self selected to go to college because they could afford to live and pay for college at the same time, all of their life, they liked had a lot of educational privilege because they likely were able to focus on studies and not menial work. Post WWII, college was the hip thing to do that any good middle class young adult could do. They could go to a school that taught you almost exclusively what you wanted to know as everyone motivated enough to go likely had the background to succeed. College moved from a intellectual play grand for the rich to something closer to a vocational school. Because these the new college grads were going into new and specialized industries and earning way higher than average, lawmakers in the US took notice and instead of paying for college for all, they created the worst class of loan in history, one that cannot be discharged, subsidized by the federal government, and under minimal oversight. Colleges noticed this and raised tuition gradually until about 2000-2005 where it rose sharply out of control because they realized that every year that the fed just increased the loan cap, so now you have this loan cap tracking the cost of college in a case of perverse incentives where the most vulnerable people in this arrangement lose. I’m not even going to mention the FAFSA and what a steaming pile of horseshit the “estimated family contribution” is and how to this day condemns millions of students to take on ridiculous private loans just to be able to qualify for a job that maybe pays above minimum wage. Meanwhile, colleges are finding out that the “everyone goes to college” push made enrollment skyrocket but the quality of students has plummeted. Students are no longer self selecting, where in the past only the best and the brightest wanted to continue schooling, everyone from your high school valedictorian to the room-temperature-IQ nose picker was applying. They had to be more selective thereby creating more elite institutions, the rest of them had to deal with the problem of unqualified students filling up their ranks and wanted to find a way to extract more value so they lobbied for additional, comprehensive general education requirements which kept students in college, spending money on classes, because a ton of kids entering can’t do math or write coherently. Now, college is simply an extra few years of high school that ends up being very expensive and it’s returns are questionable with the best results achieved by those actually interested in the material but their 4-year degree looks exactly the same as the other person who skirted through class doing the bare minimum. What’s next? A masters degree. I cannot imagine a more machiavellian, insane, and hostile system for students. The current college system represents a fall from grace where students carried this increasing burden and we just let it happen.

39 points by turtlegrids 3y ago

Education is the way we teach people to think. There are other ways. I actually prefer the apprenticeship model. I’ve learned a staggering amount just by showing up and helping smarter people with their work. I went to college, got a useless degree (but maybe learned to think and gained some work skills through work study). But really the valuable things I learned I learned on the job with fantastic mentors. The standard model of education is not the only one, but yes some processes or system for leveling people up is certainly required.

jseliger 3y ago

Having taught college students off and on for 15 years, the only part of the headline I disagree with is the word "might." https://seliger.com/2017/06/16/rare-good-political-news-boosting-apprenticeships/ https://seliger.com/2017/06/16/rare-good-political-news-boos...

Turskarama 3y ago

College as the base line assumption for getting a job is really bad, but there are a lot of other good effects that a year of college can give you that high school can't. 1) Since it's a lot bigger you will tend to mix with a much larger (and more diverse) number of people in an adult setting. 2) Since you get to choose your own subjects you can experience gaining knowledge that you actually want to gain, rather than knowledge as a means to an end (this would be even more true if again college wasn't a base requirement for jobs). 3) Most people will need to move at least a little way to go to college, which can help stop them forming a rut that they settle into after school and never get out of again.

111111IIIIIII 3y ago
Material sustenance is a prerequisite for any of those things to be considered good rather than distraction. It's not ironic that the reason poor people go to college is to get a better job; it's the result of a society divided by social class. It's the poor imitating the rich in hopes that they can make a living someday. To say the least, it is cruel and unusual.
- vba616 3y ago
  >it's the result of a society divided by social class Isn't it really the opposite? Pre-industrial revolution, most people would be farmers, and they would learn outside of school nearly everything they needed to know. Today, it's much more common for people to do something different from their parents, and even if college doesn't put you in an elite group, it gives you the freedom to choose from different lifestyles. I think people may be oblivious to this if they are a few generations removed from their farming ancestors, such that they never knew a living relative who was the first to abandon their traditional life and get educated and go to the city to work.
  - 111111IIIIIII 3y ago
    > Pre-industrial revolution, most people would be farmers, and they would learn outside of school nearly everything they needed to know. Nothing about society or college was comparable pre-industrial revolution, unless maybe you came from wealth and are comparing the life of aristocracy. What's your inheritance? > gives you the freedom to choose from different lifestyles See my previous comment. > I think people may be oblivious to this if they are a few generations removed from their farming ancestors, such that they never knew a living relative who was the first to abandon their traditional life and get educated and go to the city to work. Pre-industrial revolution peasants did not "abandon their traditional life" by choice; very far from it. They were forced into industrial centers as common lands were evacuated and commodified to staff the factories. Post-industrial revolution, they were forced by waves of technological change and economic instability. Again, only the very privileged few ever had the luxury of "abandoning traditional life" by choice.
    - vba616 3y ago
      >Nothing about society or college was comparable pre-industrial revolution, unless maybe you came from wealth and are comparing the life of aristocracy. What's your inheritance? We must be talking past each other. I was saying that being a farmer, or not being a farmer, but with no more formal education than a typical farmer, was brutal. People that could've done a hundred things with a college education spent their lives doing back breaking physical labor until they couldn't stand any more.
roxgib 3y ago
This is all undoubtably true, but are any of these worth four years and a ton of debt? Perhaps for some individuals, but across the board?
- Turskarama 3y ago
  Probably not, which is why I specified one year. It is also perfectly within the power (if not the will) of any country above subsistence to provide one year of education for free.
constantcrying 3y ago
All of these can be accomplished without going to college. Moving away from home and doing some vocational training/apprenticeship works just as well. Especially since you actually get payed for your education and can actually be independent, instead of your parents paying for you.
lotsoweiners 3y ago
Where does online college fit into this? I got a bachelor’s degree from my state school. I never went to the campus once and only interacted with my teacher (not regularly). My diploma and transcript look exactly like everyone who went on campus.
samtho 3y ago
#2 is becoming decreasing true as more general education is piled on to both make up for the knowledge that students increasingly lack of abilities (as high schools are pressured to just pass them) as well as the perverse incentive for colleges to pack in these classes to keep them paying for more classes. This is compounded by the fact that these ill-prepared students wont as successful in a more rigorous program so departmental pressures within the college system have reduced the scope of undergrad classes by a staggering amount. These days, their major grants them surface-level, watered-down understanding, requiring the need to go into a masters or post-baccalaureate program for the privilege of learning anything useful.

diamondlovesyou 3y ago

https://archive.li/ZN5MJ https://archive.li/ZN5MJ

111111IIIIIII 3y ago

What might make "the world" better off is irrelevant when all you have us billions of individuals pitted against each other.

roxgib 3y ago

Credentialism and signalling are well established. At a broader level it's the old 'correlation vs causation' chestnut. Policymakers notice that people with education earn more, and decide that people should do more education so they too can earn more, but it mostly fails because it wasn't just the education that holds them back. Meanwhile, in a world where everyone is forced to see high school through to graduation the value of a diploma is diminished. In tech, some companies are increasingly willing to captialise on this by expanding their hiring pool and benefiting from snapping up workers that other companies don't want to hire. So there's some hope it seems that we can break free from the credentialist world that we're in right now.

cutler 3y ago

Despite the author's 40 years in education he still doesn't get it. Education is an end in itself not a job qualification. You can only grok this if you have lived in a country in which higher education is/was fully funded by the state. As soon as it becomes a cost/benefit exercise the original ideal behind education is lost and subjects such as Philosophy, Literature and History appear to be a waste of time and money. Ironically, when higher education in the UK was fully-funded by the state the resulting degrees, regardless of the subject(s) studied, were far more valuable in the job market than the more vocational degrees which today saddle students with £50k of debt. A society which doesn't value education as an investment is a society in decline. The same can also be said about a nation's health service.

cykros 3y ago
Amusing that philosophy always ends up in these hypothetical lists of "less useful" degrees. At least when I was in college 15 years ago, it was topping many lists of most sought out degrees in business magazines, because problem solving is a pretty solid cross-industry skillset. Obviously you then want to couple with it some more specific skills, but it's sort of like doing your core workout to get a solid base before worrying about specific muscle groups. Or taking a computer science curriculum before worrying about learning a specific language without any foundation in how the machine actually does, well, anything. Literature, art history...yes, a bit less widespread in their ability to make you suited for at least many professions. Though worth remembering "schola" is an ancient Greek root meaning "leisure," and yes, just because something isn't inherently going to return a profit directly doesn't mean it's worth discarding entirely. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
constantcrying 3y ago
>Education is an end in itself not a job qualification. But even students treat it as such. Many of the people I know went to get a degree because they believed "they had to", not because of an intrinsic desire to learn. And if all involved believe that it is about getting a qualification for some career, then that is what it will become. >when higher education in the UK was fully-funded by the state the resulting degrees, regardless of the subject(s) studied, were far more valuable in the job market Rarity is the actual important thing here. If a significant portion of students have some degree it will be inherently irrelevant. Education has been continually broadened, making it more and more irrelevant. In the past a university degree was an enormous signifier, now it is "expected" in the job market, even if irrelevant.

motohagiography 3y ago

If you want a more educated population, add another year to high school that is half math and half civics.

constantcrying 3y ago
School was such an enormous waste of time. The amount I learned in a single University semester was so much greater than years of school education.
- rationalist 3y ago
  It sounds like you might be smarter than the vast majority of highschool students to which the GP comment was aimed at. The problem is, the math and civics classes already present in highschool should be adequate, it's just that many of the students don't take it seriously and try to learn - an extra year isn't going to fix that.
whatscooking 3y ago
You’re joking right? If anything School needs to be shortened not extended

pyinstallwoes 3y ago

I think there is insight to be gleaned from how learning used to be done through an academy vs what became to be known as college or education post-industrialization. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factory_model_school https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factory_model_school

hotdogscout 3y ago

Interesting to think we inherited this structure for human knowledge from the Catholic Church. Also I don't think reasonable people want College for Everyone™ when they defend public higher education. Entrance exams for public universities in the third world are brutal.

steve76 3y ago

[dead]

NoZebra120vClip 3y ago

I attempted to finish college five times, and I fell short of my goal five times as well. This transpired over the course of 30 years. Having washed out of college twice by 1992, I landed my first job due to networking with my classmates, at a very college-adjacent employer. I then went on to ride the dot-com bubble for years, and I was able to capitalize on my natural talents and the generally hungriness of employers for system admins. I was utterly incompetent and ill-suited for the corporate world at that point. I was homeless a lot and I was unemployed a lot, and I couldn't really succeed at anything, even if I tried. Eventually I got used to volunteering a lot, developed a better work ethic, and then I went back to school. Several times. The first time I completed a two-year course for a certification that simply made me a better volunteer. Then I went to community college to try for an Associate of Applied Science. Unable to complete this degree, I did achieve my more realistic goals of brushing up on modern tech, and achieving the correct certifications. I then landed a great job in academia, and perhaps the recruiter found me because community college was on my LinkedIn profile. At any rate, they didn't give a fig about my relevant certifications (and they wouldn't pay to earn/maintain them either) and so here I sit, 3 years later, with a great part-time job, no degree, and two CompTIA certifications. College didn't matter for me. Unless it did. I definitely benefited in tangential ways from mingling and mixing in the halls of academia for so many years. I wouldn't trade it for anything.

dventimihasura 3y ago

The purpose of college is for its students to learn to relate to other people who went to college.

samtho 3y ago

The “everyone goes to college” mantra has caused educational inflation caused by misaligned incentives created from a misunderstood effect. In the past, wealthy people self selected to go to college because they could afford to live and pay for college at the same time, all of their life, they liked had a lot of educational privilege because they likely were able to focus on studies and not menial work. Post WWII, college was the hip thing to do that any good middle class young adult could do. They could go to a school that taught you almost exclusively what you wanted to know as everyone motivated enough to go likely had the background to succeed. College moved from a intellectual play grand for the rich to something closer to a vocational school. Because these the new college grads were going into new and specialized industries and earning way higher than average, lawmakers in the US took notice and instead of paying for college for all, they created the worst class of loan in history, one that cannot be discharged, subsidized by the federal government, and under minimal oversight. Colleges noticed this and raised tuition gradually until about 2000-2005 where it rose sharply out of control because they realized that every year that the fed just increased the loan cap, so now you have this loan cap tracking the cost of college in a case of perverse incentives where the most vulnerable people in this arrangement lose. I’m not even going to mention the FAFSA and what a steaming pile of horseshit the “estimated family contribution” is and how to this day condemns millions of students to take on ridiculous private loans just to be able to qualify for a job that maybe pays above minimum wage. Meanwhile, colleges are finding out that the “everyone goes to college” push made enrollment skyrocket but the quality of students has plummeted. Students are no longer self selecting, where in the past only the best and the brightest wanted to continue schooling, everyone from your high school valedictorian to the room-temperature-IQ nose picker was applying. They had to be more selective thereby creating more elite institutions, the rest of them had to deal with the problem of unqualified students filling up their ranks and wanted to find a way to extract more value so they lobbied for additional, comprehensive general education requirements which kept students in college, spending money on classes, because a ton of kids entering can’t do math or write coherently. Now, college is simply an extra few years of high school that ends up being very expensive and it’s returns are questionable with the best results achieved by those actually interested in the material but their 4-year degree looks exactly the same as the other person who skirted through class doing the bare minimum. What’s next? A masters degree. I cannot imagine a more machiavellian, insane, and hostile system for students. The current college system represents a fall from grace where students carried this increasing burden and we just let it happen.