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Higher ed is like employer based health insurance in that they are both weird path dependent historical accidents. People want cheap healthcare, and it got sho

• lovich 11mo ago
  I was told in college that the US system of healthcare being tied to your employer was the result of companies looking for fringe benefits to offer when tax rates were at their highest for the high income group. However I can’t find evidence of that now that I’m looking so if someone could confirm one way or the other that this was true or not, I’d appreciate it
  • pdonis 11mo ago
    It started during WW II when the US government put wage and price controls in place so that companies could not compete for employees by offering higher wages. So they competed for employees instead by offering employer-paid healthcare as a benefit. Then after the war, when the wage and price controls were repealed, the employer-paid healthcare system, instead of going away, kept getting more elaborate.
    • eli_gottlieb 11mo ago
      As with a lot of things, such as vacation time, Americans seem to prefer to provide certain social goods as employer benefits because that way it seems more like a reward for competitive merit, which one can show off as a status symbol, than like a universal social good.
      • jswelker 11mo ago
        Maybe some psychos think of it that way, but no one I have ever met, at least not regarding insurance. Some fringe benefits like unlimited vacation, free lunch, etc, maybe I can agree.
        • nebula8804 11mo ago
          Well maybe it was once prestigious to show off your Aetna card, now its a sign of embarrassment. I guess todays 'cool perk' is something like free lunch or allowing dogs at work. I think the "Unlimited Vacation" scam has unraveled at this point.
      • carlosjobim 11mo ago
        Another way to see it is to ask why a company should be able to reap the labour benefits of their workers and then force other people to pay for their basic needs?
        • orangecat 11mo ago
          Should your employer be required to pay for your housing, food, transportation, and clothes? Company towns turned out to be a bad idea.
          • carlosjobim 11mo ago
            No, but they should of course pay a salary that can cover all that and more. High salaries and high minimum wages is the right solution.
  • jswelker 11mo ago
    Yes it is true and is sort of the subject of my original post. One of those things I learned in college ironically and is now background knowledge I can't source.
• lotsofpulp 11mo ago
  > People want cheap healthcare, and it got shoehorned into an odd employer fringe benefit system that really is not at all related healthcare in any intrinsic way. Healthcare costs, and hence health insurance premiums, are the same with or without an employer intermediary. The only difference is with an employer intermediary, the insured gets to pay their premium with pre-tax income. The cost of the health insurance is still felt by the employer (shown in box 12 of code DD of everyone’s W-2), and seen by the employee in the form of smaller raises, or higher premiums/deductibles/oop max, or worse networks. >People want job training, and it got shoehorned into extra departments at liberal arts universities intended as aristocrat finishing schools. Job training really has little to no relationship to liberal arts. Job training didn’t get shoehorned, a cheap filtering mechanism for people worth betting on to be a good hire got shoehorned. But that filter simultaneously got worse and more expensive over time, making it a bad purchase for most students and bad signal for employers.
  • jjmarr 11mo ago
    > Healthcare costs, and hence health insurance premiums, are the same with or without an employer intermediary. If you read the fine print of a health "insurance" plan at a large company, you might discover healthcare costs are directly covered by the employer and the insurance company just administers the plan according to "set rules". In practice, this operates as blame as a service.
    • lotsofpulp 11mo ago
      Sure, but the doctors/medicine/hospitals/liability are not any cheaper. So the healthcare isn’t cheap, but the employer is able to gain more control over their employees by tying a piece of their non employee life to the employer creating more friction to prevent people from shopping for jobs with higher pay, and the employee is getting a small tax benefit.
      • jjmarr 11mo ago
        Yes, but the same insurance company will screw with your coverage depending on your employer. My mom's plan randomly denied my medications all the time as a student. My current job's plan always provides coverage. Both were the same insurance company, but she's in a different field with a more stingy employer.
• anon291 11mo ago
  It didn't get shoe horned. Before college degrees proliferated, employers had entrance exams and were expected to train people. A supreme court decision found this to be racist. Companies could be held liable so most companies stopped that and demanded a 'fair' credential. Then everyone had to go to college
  • btilly 11mo ago
    This one case isn't the full story, but I firmly believe that it is a big deal. See https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/401/424/ https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/401/424/ for the case. The problem is that any hiring test that blacks and whites pass at different rates, is presumed racist. Never mind that the real issue might be that the blacks went to worse schools and received a worse education. Never mind that there is a big body of research showing that ability tests are a more effective way to hire good employees than interviews. If the ratio of blacks to whites hired is different than the ratio that apply, you are presumed to be racist and in violation of the Civil Rights Act. So a company that needs to hire literate people can no longer, as used to be standard, allow high school students to apply and give them a literacy test. But they can require college. Therefore college has become a job requirement for a plethora of jobs whose actual requirement is "literate". Jobs that people used to be able to do out of high school, and jobs that could still be done by plenty of high school graduates. That this has become so ubiquitous lead to an increased demand for college. Which is one of the factors driving tuition up. (My suspicion is that an ability test would lead to a less racist outcome than requiring college. Why? Because minority families struggle more to afford college.)
    • thaumasiotes 11mo ago
      You'll occasionally see people point out that requiring a college degree has all the same legal problems as requiring a hiring exam does. And those people are correct in terms of the judgments that impose our terrible precedents. They're all just as negative on degree requirements as they are on performance requirements. But as a matter of empirical reality, our enforcement system declines to prosecute employers who require degrees, because requiring degrees is morally good and requiring exams is morally bad. The rules about what's allowed don't actually derive from the law. We have laws that forbid everything, accompanied by selective prosecution of only the things that certain people disapprove of.
• collinmcnulty 11mo ago
  This view seems to be common, but I think it misses what incredible alchemy comes from making people who come in for “job training” (like I did) spend 4 years in close proximity with research, academic freedom, liberal arts, and at least an attempt at some kind of intellectual idealism separate from economic incentive. It’s peanut butter and chocolate that has served democracy and its people well by having a middle class that is not just productive, but truly educated. It’s weird and it has problems, but it’s also wonderful, and we should not try to sever the two so we can more “efficiently” crank out credentials.
  • rayiner 11mo ago
    That's historical revisionism. The percentage of American adults over age 25 who have a college degree was only 20% as recently as 1990. When America was truly at the top of the world in the 1950s and 1960s, it was under 10%. A high fraction of college attendance is better correlated with the 21st century decline in America's situation.
    • collinmcnulty 11mo ago
      I think widening the aperture outside the USA shows how big societal progress has come out of universities of the type we now recognize, starting with 1800s Germany. Even within the USA, the technological and social progress that percolated on universities had big impacts beyond the people actually enrolled and were essential in providing the basis for the employment of many other Americans. Finally, it’s worth qualifying the idea of America’s decline. The USA is still THE powerhouse economy of the world. We have huge problems with unequal distribution and things are seriously politically messed up, but in terms of raw productivity, we are doing gangbusters. And solving the political and inequality issues call for a more educated populace, not less.
      • rayiner 11mo ago
        Germany is a great example of how you don’t need most of the population enrolled in universities. > The USA is still THE powerhouse economy of the world. The US was a powerhouse economy when it could build the world’s largest navy almost overnight. Since the 1980s, the U.S. economy has become highly financialized. It’s disputed how much American economic dominance is real versus on paper today.
• jltsiren 11mo ago
  The job training you get at 20 is often obsolete when you're 40. For example, many women of my parents' generation trained for jobs in the textile industry. But eventually the jobs disappeared, as Finland got too wealthy. A bit more abstract education would have made it easier for them to find a new career. But not too abstract. From my point of view, the weird parts of the American educational system are the high school and the college. Everyone is supposed to choose the academic track. I'm more used to systems with separate academic and vocational tracks in both secondary and tertiary education.
  • doctorpangloss 11mo ago
    economies and national policies are complex. only the most straightforward things, like ending patriarchy, wars and modifying interest rates, have firm evidence of causing this or that thing on a national scale. nobody knows if so and so nuanced educational policy really matters in an intellectually honest way.
  • nradov 11mo ago
    There are certain advantages to having separate academic and vocational tracks, but that tends to lock out late bloomers. Quite a few of prominent US scientists and business leaders didn't have good grades going into secondary school.
  • bko 11mo ago
    Job training is a lot more than learning how to use equipment. It's about showing up on time, dealing with coworkers and being a productive member of a team. That's best learned on the job and is a big reason people don't like new grads. Its like going out on a date with someone that has never had a girlfriend. Let someone else break them in and screen them. Higher ed unfortunately almost desocializes a lot of people. They live in a bubble and become insufferable obsessed with politics and social issues that are disruptive and inappropriate in the workplace
• ajashdkjhasjkd 11mo ago
  > People want job training, and it got shoehorned into extra departments at liberal arts universities intended as aristocrat finishing schools I really wish the computer science degrees and even online courses spent like 30 mins on the history of computer science. The entire existence of this field has been dependent on those non job-training liberal arts degrees.
  • metamet 11mo ago
    > I really wish the computer science degrees and even online courses spent like 30 mins on the history of computer science. Completely agree here. This would fall under the umbrella of liberal arts, which a lot of CS-only folks seem to find little to no value in. Most concepts in computer science--especially when it comes to programming--are fairly easy to learn if you're good at learning. Reading something and understanding it to the point that you can write a proper college level essay about it trains that muscle, which is a different skill than rote memorization.
  • nebula8804 11mo ago
    Schools typically have no space to squeeze it in. Here is a typical pathway for a CS student: https://catalog.njit.edu/undergraduate/computing-sciences/computer-science/bs/ https://catalog.njit.edu/undergraduate/computing-sciences/co... A 4 year cs degree dumps you into heavy math, physics, and intro CS + Data structures in your first year to weed people out who cant cut it. Second year teaches fundamentals of CS (discrete math, concept of languages, understanding algorithms at least at a basic level). Third year is filled with more practical fundamentals (OS, DB, computer architecture + field specific courses the student wants). Finally the fourth year pieces everything together with more advanced versions of prior topics (algorithms for example) + repeated practical applications of all the concepts from years 1-3 to hopefully put the student on at least an 'ok' footing post graduation. I guess you can try to make the first lecture or two in CS101 about the history but most students don't even know if they want to pursue this journey. Would talking about Alan Turing's history really be appropriate in that class? I don't know really.
    • dmurray 11mo ago
• dexwiz 11mo ago
  Plenty of colleges and universities started as job training. The Morrill land grant colleges were founded to study mechanical and agricultural arts, and that was over 150 years ago. Many of those are now the top state schools in the USA.
• seec 11mo ago
  At least the good part about the US situation is that people are still free to choose for themselves. The cost isn't redirected to the whole population at large via taxation. In the EU it's much worse, because the same reality is materialising, but it is still advertised as "free". Of course, this is the path to a form of soft communism and all systems are becoming dysfunctional and unable to create real value at the same time. The "solution" has been to create ever more taxation and even more debt that is to be paid by the next generation. It seems that the US will course correct but the EU seems to be declining into authoritarianism and proto-communism.
  • tovej 11mo ago
    The EU is aggressively neoliberal or liberal-conservative, and that is the reason universities have begun to be more expensive. It's related to austerity, privatization, the aggressive revision of tax codes, and New Public Management. The left has not been popular in the EU since the 70s, which is why this development has gotten increasingly aggresive in the last few decades. You cannot seriously suggest that the EU has moved left in any meaningful way. The EU commission is currently trying to implement that every new regulation can only pass once an old regulation can be removed. It's a neoliberal dream, where the amount of regulation can only go down, and public funds are allocated to private companies more and more. This is especially true for universities, where public funding programs for research has begun to be funneled to startups instead of research groups.
    • qcnguy 11mo ago
      > where public funding programs for research has begun to be funneled to startups instead of research groups. It is darkly amusing that in one post you claim "the left has not been popular since the 70s" whilst admitting that the EU is centrally planning new companies. That's very much the sort of thing the left did in the 1970s. > You cannot seriously suggest that the EU has moved left in any meaningful way ... the EU commission is currently trying to implement that every new regulation can only pass once an old regulation can be removed. And who believes they'll really do it? They only got to that point after ignoring decades of warnings from the right that their left wing approach would crush their own economic power, which it did. It's a common enough claim that "the left" refers to exactly the same set of ideas that it did in 1930, and therefore that no modern entity is left wing. But this is spurious. There are still left wing people and groups, that claim to be so and nobody disagrees with them. All that happened is that as left wing economics became discredited over the course of the 20th century the left became better at obfuscating what they were doing. After the working classes disappointed by not rising up in revolution, the concept of equality shifted to be about gender and race instead. The EU doesn't want to openly nationalize industries, but is really keen on feminism, regulation and mass third world migration. And economically, the left didn't need to obfuscate much. The gap between heavy regulation and nationalization is small. CEOs get to pretend that they're still in charge, but with no strong commitment to private property rights they're ultimately just transient administrators and there's not much reason to sign up for the stresses of being one. So - no startups.
• hn_throwaway_99 11mo ago
  Thanks, I thought this was a very insightful comment that helped me think about the problem differently. I would add, though, that I think "co-op universities" have a good solution. That is, places like Northeastern and Drexel when the undergrad program is 5-ish years and a good portion of that time is working in paid co-op positions. This ensures that students graduate with at least some real-world experience in their field but still get the benefit of classroom study and the full college experience.
  • ryandv 11mo ago
    Obligatory uwaterloo plug. I didn't even end up graduating after 3 years of compsci but still ended up with almost two years of work experience. Colleagues in my early career were still paying down student debt while I had already paid for tuition out of pocket, not with tax dollars. Funny too, because I had a philosophy professor there who talked about how the university is not a vocational school, but a place one goes to enrich the mind and become a more worldly citizen.
• deleted 11mo ago
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• hfsdhkdshksdhk 11mo ago
  Funnily enough there is a parasitic vine in Australian rain forests that kills its host and then thrives. It grows completely around the tree and creates its own trunk on the outside. The tree underneath eventually cannot get any nutrients in its sap and dies. The vine then feeds on the tree as it rots away on the inside. Eventually you have a hollow tree.
  • jswelker 11mo ago
    Very apt metaphor for the current situation.
  • trashface 11mo ago
    Sure sounds like a good descriptor for the US healthcare system at least. The hospitals will still be operating and collecting government payments even when most people don't have healthcare. Bunch of empty rooms with beeping hardware everywhere. Meanwhile a bunch of sick and dying people outside the hospitals that are too poor to actually go into them.
• shevy-java 11mo ago
  "People want cheap healthcare" This has a lot to do with what a country wants. Many countries show this is possible; the USA prefers a profit-based system where everyone pays a lot.
• lo_zamoyski 11mo ago
  There is indeed a mismatch between the traditional de jure mission of the university and the de facto mission it has today. What is the university traditionally for? Education. What curriculum is most quintessentially constitutive of education? The liberal arts (traditionally understood, not the flakey pot-smoking/Dead Poets Society counterfeit). What is the purpose of the liberal arts? The free man. What is the mission of the university today? Job training (putting to the side the question of how well it actually accomplishes this end). What are jobs? The servile arts. There’s the heart of the contradiction. The university has a split personality that has rendered it bad at education and bad at job training, and to add insult to injury, it charges you Ritz prices for Motel 6 service. The idea of universal education was never sensible. “Democratization” leads to mediocrity, because now market forces demand you satisfy the customer. You fail everyone by doing this. You get people that are uneducated (despite what they fancy themselves to be) and poorly trained for work, and on top of that, burdened by crushing debt. What a great start to adult life! I propose that the first fundamental change needs to occur first in primary education, which is generally quite poor. Try teaching the basic liberal arts in primary schools (some adaptation of the trivium/quadrivium). Then, either after high school or by bifurcating high school into university-bound and trade-bound tracks, you choose one or the other track. In general, the majority should be in the trade track (where “trade” includes more that just plumbing or construction or whatever, but also vast swathes of what we put people through universities for for no justifiable reason). Then we unsaddle the university of its job-training duties. Instead, you have apprenticeships and technical schools and so on to prepare people for their occupations. The university is stripped of anything that weakens its mission as educating institution. Valuable ancillary activities are spun off into, say, technical institutes.
• harrall 11mo ago
  Liberal arts is cheap and is not why university is expensive. You can get it for relative pennies at a community college. I’ve studied at university, state college and community college and my best history teacher was at a community college. University is expensive probably because there is job demand but almost no real downward pressure to keep it cheap. Students can’t provide much pressure and it’s not directly affecting companies that ask for it. A lot of families also carry this “prestige” element that pushes the cost up.
• snowwrestler 11mo ago
  People don’t want “cheap healthcare,” people want to be healthy. And people don’t want “job training,” people want to be educated and have a fulfilling life. Of course college looks too expensive if it is just “job training.” But that is not what college is. College proved its immense value first, and then because of its obvious value, employers started looking for it. But you’ve let the cart get in front of the horse, by thinking that the value of a college education is simply that employers are looking for it.
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  • kgdiem 11mo ago
    I agree with you in spirit but most people in the US look at college like job training. It’s literally advertised as job training on TV, buses and billboards. Teachers, parents, and media have long been seen as “the way” to get a job. One of the most disappointing things about college was how little people cared about the liberal arts aspect, where humanities courses were an annoying box to tick.
    • tootie 11mo ago
      I think that's the disconnect. When college was more rarified, it was populated by a mix of children of privilege and those who had the talent, ambition and desire to expand their minds. That selection bias was enough to predict future success. When the formula was boiled down to "college=success" it became a system to be gamed. Students scraping and cheating to get admission, schools offering easier degrees. The birth of diploma mills where education didn't matter and student life was non-existent. No wonder the value of college seems so diminished.
    • snowwrestler 11mo ago
      Teenagers do not understand the true value of things. This is not news and not restricted to the field of education. “You’ll need to get a good job someday” is one of the all-purpose lines adults use when harassing them into making better life choices. College makes a person more capable in general, which confers long-term competitiveness during a career. That’s why parents want their kids to go to college. And the great thing is it works even if the kid is just checking the box. It works better if they are engaged and enthusiastic, of course.
• nine_k 11mo ago
  What kind of job training should an engineer have? An engineer's job is to understand very complex systems, and to evolve them, to design, to invent. It's very different from a carpenter's job training, because it requires a much larger width of base knowledge, and much less of what can be acquired by just watching others do their thing, and imitating. Maybe the study tracks of those going to the industry and those pursuing a scientific career could split earlier. OTOH I personally must say that what I've studied for my master's degree, and even what I researched during my further postgrad studies (even though I did not ultimately go for a PhD) ended up being rather useful for my work in the industry. It wasn't a sufficient job training though; I sometimes think that nothing is, nothing short of an actual job.
• skirge 11mo ago
  "job training" at school? Everyone known you learn how to work at work, where first day they say to forget everything you have been taught at school.
• beefnugs 11mo ago
  Except of course for technical degrees: those skills are highly transferrable to many real life, money saving skills you can use your entire life (just kidding you will never own a home and would never want to work on your landlords house)
• bathwaterpizza 11mo ago
  Higher education is very much alive in the rest of the world where we don't pay for it
• wvlia5 11mo ago
  In Argentina, electricity bill comes with an added fee for covering funeral costs insurance.