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Bachelor Degrees need a complete rethink, it was basically modified finishing school for rich capital owners, needing to make their children of proper class bef

• dkkergoog 2y ago
  Education can't be standardized because business is not standardized. It's about relationships and every shop does things their own way. Teachers should just go contract and provide their own courses. The degree is really can't designate what the person knows.
  • kelseyfrog 2y ago
    That's right. Education should be universalized, not standardized. The commodification of education will eventually make it useless. Universal, bespoke education is the ideal, but it's usually prohibitively expensive.
    • bluGill 2y ago
      I strongly disagree. Commodification of education is very important. I want everyone to have the commodity reading writing arithmetic education. It might be faster for the student to give one on one teaching, but everyone needs this and I want it such a commodity that we give it to even the poorest "third world" kids who have nothing. As you get beyond those basics you have to become an expert in something that there are few experts in. McDonald's success is mostly based on their ability to take you from zero to a productive crew member fast. It takes many years to make a brain surgeon, in large part because we haven't commodified it - if we needed more we should (but since the world doesn't really need many it isn't worth it)
      • kelseyfrog 2y ago
        Commodification denies a universal pedagogy. We've known this since the 1970s. If you want a system that appeals to a plurality, and leaves the rest behind, commodification will deliver just that.
  • bluGill 2y ago
    There is a lot of value to standardizing things though. Most of what people need to learn is standard. 2+2, i before e... There is the more nebulous step of can you solve problems, but even that is taught at the lower levels in a standard way. Eventually you get to a level where the answer hasn't been taught much and so there is no standard, but that only happens late in your education. Of course education itself needs more research. "learning styles" was debunked last I heard, but is there some variation that says some people need different teaching? Is there a better way to teach things? However if you are not involved in this research you should be teaching in standard ways that have been proven to work.
    • a2tech 2y ago
      I before e isn’t even standard.
      • bluGill 2y ago
        English needs to be standardized / simplified /reformed. I don't know how to make that happen.
  • mejutoco 2y ago
    On the other side, pallets and standard shipping containers exist.
• whateveracct 2y ago
  This is a bit black and white. Or maybe just cynical :) It's inarguable that bachelor's degrees had real vocational utility in the last few decades (despite the memes). A variety of degrees from a state school (with in-state tuition) would lead to good, white collar employement along with modest loans (if any) so there was clear ROI.
  • nvrletgorz 2y ago
    [dead]
• borntoolate 2y ago
  Maybe lower education should just have a different schedule with other activity years? I'm not particularly impressed with the average American's ability to be a positive element of society and despite all the problems, I think liberal arts students are probably better than the rest when considered over their lifetime. But why should each individual take loans to have the critical thinking to vote in the interest of larger institutions?
  • JamesBarney 2y ago
    Does liberal arts teach critical thinking? Do students who study liberal arts vs a mathematics/engineering show greater improvements on critical thinking tests? I get the idea we want a more educated population that can better make decisions. But the biggest way the populace makes poor decisions is they are economically illiterate, and they don't really understand how the government works. We should probably spend more time teaching this in high school and a typical degree spends very little time teaching these subjects.
    • fzeroracer 2y ago
      The populace making poor decisions isn't just economically illiterate, they are increasingly fundamentally illiterate. Teaching economic literacy in school won't matter one bit when an increasing number of people are graduating unable to read even at a basic level. But in order to solve this problem you would have to overhaul our educational system and right now we have a party invested in destroying it so that it produces voters more aligned with their groupthink.
      • JamesBarney 2y ago
        If you're arguing we should improve schools to increase rates of numeracy and literacy than I'm in 100% agreement. But I thought we were talking about liberal arts degrees.
      • nradov 2y ago
        While there are a variety of different interest groups that have influenced current federal government education policy, most of them don't seem to be trying destroy it just for the sake of destruction. Instead the policy seems to be based more on the perception that the education system has been co-opted and corrupted to indoctrinate students with values and political philosophies that conservative or right-wing politicians find abhorrent. They see this as so damaging to society that it would be better to have no educational system at all rather than what we have now. I don't agree with this perception or their actions, but there is at least a kernel of truth to their viewpoint. In a politically diverse nation if we want to maintain broad based support for higher education then we need to find a way to keep universities at least somewhat politically neutral.
• KPGv2 2y ago
  > despite being completely detached from useful skills for a wide swathes of degrees It's a nice suggestion, but it's one that isn't supported by the evidence. Even controlling for other factors, a college degree makes more productive workers. And given that it's controlling for other factors, "selection bias" becomes a hard argument to make. STEMbros get real arrogant about their degrees (I have one; I've seen it first hand), but like it or not the person with an English degree still learned a lot of useful skills. Going to uni to major in a specific career is how you get screwed when available careers change.
  • HPsquared 2y ago
    I don't think there is any doubt spending 4 years studying a subject will increase skills in some areas. The question is whether the benefits are worth the cost (and that question applies both to the individual student and society as a whole). Remember the cost of all this is absolutely massive. Mostly the 4 years of lost time.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • 18766hahsbc767 2y ago
      It doesn't have to be though. In Europe the vast majority of people attend public universities that don't require having to end up with a degree and crippling debt. I left uni almost 20 years ago, but one year of my tuition was about 1000USD at the time, something I could easily afford with a part time job. I'm sure the cost is higher now, but I would have thought it is still orders of magnitude cheaper than in the UK or the US. Germany subsidizes university tuition fees for a huge percentage of students, and adds a monthly stipend for expenses and free public transport while enrolled in uni. Your point is valid, challenging the worth/cost of higher education. But I think it is the cost part what is broken in some parts of the world, not necessarily the worth part.
      • wat10000 2y ago
        The cost is there regardless. If the ROI is negative then it's making somebody worse off even if the state is paying for it. If the state pays, it's even worse, because people may take the option based on a positive ROI for themselves while it's overall negative. If the ROI is positive but people aren't taking advantage because of the cost to themselves, then you want to look at subsidies.
• NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
  >It then became a vocational degree for the working class, This may have been some policymakers' intent, but it never really became that. Universities and colleges resisted being seen as mere vocational schools, and refused to modify curricula for that purpose. You'd see all sorts of academic arguments about how teaching them to do a job would be wrong, that they should still be teaching them to "think" and have heavy course loads of liberal arts. So parents and guidance counselors may have thought of it as vocational school, while getting the high-class university experience (as best someone of middling academic achievement can manage that) along with the high-class university tuition bills. Well, the guidance counselors didn't get the bills. Nor, in many cases, the parents. >It's not sustainable, and just forgiving the debt only will make it It's ok. We don't have to sustain it. The demographic implosion is well under way. We are at the point where elementary schools are closing (and everyone's making up excuses for this, so we can pretend that it's for any other reason than a demographic implosion). >and less aligned with actual results we desire (useful workers). At any point in history, most of the output from workers went (indirectly) back to the workers. If 98% of the workforce did agricultural work, this was because 98% or nearly enough of 98% of food was needed to feed those workers. Same for any product, no matter how tangible or abstract. Sure, there are exceptions... if people worked in a diamond mine it wasn't so diamonds would go to diamond miners. If they don't need workers for the relatively small amount of food that is consumed by some small group, if they don't need workers for making garments (or building buildings, or any other thing) for the relatively amount of those products consumed by some small group, then they don't much need useful workers at all. Most of humanity is obsolete, or at least would be considered so if you belonged to a small group like that.
• ransom1538 2y ago
  Well, these days you will need a non repetitive physical skill. ER doctor, electrician, comedy tour guide, painter, etc. If your job required you to sit in front of a computer, your job will be the first eliminated. Humans are quite cheap for physical labor compared to a full humanoid drone. Software costs are about to go to zero. Bachelors degrees would turn more into guilds.
  • tempodox 2y ago
    > Software costs are about to go to zero. Not all software is like webshit boilerplate.
    • ransom1538 2y ago
      I wish that mattered.
• jltsiren 2y ago
  The liberal arts model was intended for the elites, and the idea of education as means of producing useful workers is straight from a totalitarian planned economy. But there is also the Humboldtian model of higher education, which focuses on educating informed citizens who are free to make their own choices. Learning vocational skills is easy enough if you have good education, and it's also necessary to be able to do that outside school, as careers rarely last a lifetime. American higher education is expensive, because you chose to defund public universities. And because you have an unhealthy obsession with rankings and top universities. Those are the things you need to change more than education itself.
  • nukem222 2y ago
    > useful workers is straight from a totalitarian planned economy I'd still strongly prefer a totalitarian, planned economy. Hell it sounds like a straight-up pollyannish fantasy at this point. Watching people expect the chaos of building our country around the right-to-be-a-dick-to-others to result in a functional country makes me want to burn everything down. But making your own labor force pay for their education? Straight suicidal.
  • jselysianeagle 2y ago
    > American higher education is expensive, because you chose to defund public universities. And because you have an unhealthy obsession with rankings and top universities. Those are the things you need to change more than education itself. There's this and also the massive budgets for college sports and fancy student housing that make it worse.
    • nradov 2y ago
      The massive sports funding is mostly only a thing for D1 schools and it doesn't take much funding away from academics. The sports mostly pay for themselves through ticket sales and media licensing, with the big chunks of revenue coming from men's football and basketball. Sports also drive a lot of alumni donations.
  • gruez 2y ago
• AtomBalm 2y ago
  Now that we have AI tutors that cost <$1/Mtok, why not do on-demand standardized testing for academic credentials and eliminate compulsory (dejure or defacto) education beyond working age. Universities can focus on research, and normal people get off the credentialism treadmill or focus on as-needed training at minimal cost. Need the social environment? Libraries or community centers can lend vacant space for “college” classrooms. Everyone wins, right? You know, except university administrators and lenders.
  • poincaredisk 2y ago
    Great, let's make the average person even dumber. Or rather: dumb again. Universal education is a big win of the modern times and you want to destroy that for on-demand job training? Mass producing replaceable workers should not be humanity's goal.
    • martindbp 2y ago
      How would it make people dumber? Students provably forgets 90%+ of what they learn, and education is massively inefficient today, which can also provably be improved by virtual tutors (see Bloom's two sigma problem). Your reaction seems knee jerk instead of thinking through this from first principles. Something like this is likely to happen whether you like it or not.
  • martindbp 2y ago
    Exactly. I think the people who oppose this do it for sentimental reasons. Either because they want the prestige of a place like Stanford on their resume, or they enjoyed the social milieu. A social network of similarly ambitious people is also arguably more important than the actual knowledge. The knowledge is already available for free online, and like Bryan Caplan points out: at many universities you can just go and sit in class, but nobody does it because what you actually want is the credentials, not the knowledge.
• MITSardine 2y ago
  Or is it not a more recent trend that people should educate themselves, rather than an employer doing that? Internships have become very short and secondary, when they used to be the main vocational training. It's curious that this has remained only at the two ends of theoretical studies: artisanship and scientific research (PhDs). Otherwise, job training has become the employee and, where university is public, society's burden. Maybe it's employers that need a complete rethink, not so much universities?
• jongjong 2y ago
  Agreed. Higher education mostly became a pretext to justify why certain people were entitled to receive higher salaries in exchange for lower experience and lower quality output. It's likely also partly why the west moved away from contract-based knowledge work and towards full-time work... It decouples the product of one's labor from its costs (salary) and it makes managers' lives easier as it gives them much more flexibility and less pressure with regard to how they measure and rank employee productivity. If costs were proportional to output, managers would pay a lot more attention to efficiency as their paychecks would depend on that efficiency. Instead, managers' paychecks and career prospects are mostly based on political nonsense like how many people are working under them; literally creating an incentive for inefficiency.
• timewizard 2y ago
  > we decided the working class should take out crippling loans to pay for this degree Historical point you've completely missed. You used to be able to declare bankruptcy and discharge this debt until very recently. This was not "decided" this was a trap sprung on the working class at a time when blue collar labor was almost entirely off shored. > and just forgiving the debt only will make it all more expensive That's why you discharge the debt instead. This is an institutional failure. They knowingly pumped a market at tax payer expense. The hair cut is theirs to take.
  • andrekandre 2y ago
    > You used to be able to declare bankruptcy and discharge this debt until very recently. specifically, from 2005 onwards [0] in the 'Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act' signed by gw... [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bankruptcy_Abuse_Prevention_and_Consumer_Protection_Act#Dischargeability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bankruptcy_Abuse_Prevention_an...
• KurSix 2y ago
  The bachelor's degree has become this strange hybrid of outdated prestige signaling and a vague promise of employability, but without delivering on either in a consistent way.
  • jeremycarter 2y ago
    When you put it like that it really is a bad product.
    • KurSix 2y ago
      The only product where you go into debt, get four years older, and still need "experience" to get hired
• elric 2y ago
  > Bachelor Degrees need a complete rethink Maybe. But what I think would help more is a broader focus on lifelong learning. Both on the job on company [dt]ime, and outside of work. In many places you can take evening classes for languages, or hobby-classes like embroidery or goldsmithing. Even programming. But there are very few places where you can take maths classes after hours. There's also, imo, way too much focus on degrees and not enough focus on competences. Some time ago I tried to register for some postgrad level classes, without any intention of using them for a certificate or whatever, but I was rejected for not having the right degree.
• account-5 2y ago
  I couldn't agree more with this. I'm a mature student who left school with nothing, joined and left the military with nothing, and managed to get a relatively decent paying public sector job. I decided to put myself through a bachelor's degree part time and self funded. I now have one, it's a nice piece of paper, but the skills I gained from it I likely could have got a lot cheaper on udemy. In fact udemy is very likely to be more up to date. I obviously think the computer science degree is full of useful skills unlike a lot of degrees, but it's nothing I couldn't have got elsewhere. With a kid in university I am torn because I know that having a degree actually means nothing in the job market, not like it used to.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• dionidium 2y ago
  In order to rethink Bachelor Degrees, one must first rethink high school. It is routine in the US to see schools where 1) <=5% of the student body is proficient in math; but also 2) the school has a 90% graduation rate. If that's high school, then it's useless, both as a signal, but also just because, you know, nobody is learning anything. You pretty much have to have some other place for smart people to demonstrate that they're smart.
  • SkyBelow 2y ago
    We need to admit schools are babysitting kids and not teaching them anymore. A few kids can still learn, but so many others don't. Especially the one who would learn in a better environment, but whose class is disrupted by 1 or 2 students preventing their education. Once a student gets behind a year, they aren't going to ever catch up if they are only passed on to the next year instead of being identified as someone who needs to repeat the year. Edit: I should have been clearer in "are increasingly babysitting" and not been as strong as indicating it as some universal truth. I hear horror stories from teachers about how much of their time is focused on classroom management, how little on actual education, and how much effort it put into processes so the grades stay up regardless.
    • elric 2y ago
      I wonder if alternative forms of education (like Waldorf/Steiner) would make more sense to more kids. It's clear that the standard way of teaching doesn't resonate with many kids, and we would do well to investigate that.
  • elric 2y ago
    A few essential skills that I feel schools ought to teach: 1. Personal knowledge management 2. Digital literacy 3. Calling bullshit in the age of big data (this is an actual course, freely available on youtube)