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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

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 1y 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 1y 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.
  - monero-xmr 1y ago
    I agree with you, but if the US truly has the best military (and it does 100x) then when push comes to shove, the US will destroy anyone who tries to undermine it. Very dangerous game to oppose it. Being able to construct things quickly is important, but if the US can militarily seize nearly every country on earth in days, the power is not necessarily where the kit is located
    - rayiner 1y ago
      If you take nukes off the table, the U.S. doesn’t have a 100x military advantage. If China seriously mobilized its industrial capability, the U.S. may not have even a 2x advantage. Remember that, right before World War II, the US didn’t even have a top-10 military, having demobilized it after World War I. It’s vast industrial capacity is what enabled it to build a larger military than all of Europe combined within a few years.
      - eastbound 1y ago
        The US was also much more unified at the time. That’s the thing about history: Like economy, it’s human matter, and you could reproduce and experiment twice and get completely different result because your systems are not isolated in location or time.
        potato3732842 11mo ago
        >The US was also much more unified at the time Were we? Or is that just after the fact revisionism that makes things "easy" If Europe had managed to keep it together a few more years the US may very well have had a bunch of communism adjacent social strife and FDR may have died a deposed tyrant. We were certainly more unified on certain broad cultural and values axis, but things were still very divided.
      - pjmlp 11mo ago
        The most important fact, that people overlook, is that its industrial capacity was never bombed during the war, and Pearl Harbour was the only time the country got directly attacked.
        nostrademons 11mo ago
        So Australia & New Zealand are the next superpowers. I remember when I was around middle school or early high school, I attended a geopolitical simulation at MIT that wargamed out a crisis between major world powers, and that was the exact result. New Zealand won, in alliance with Australia. They were able to invest heavily in technology while everyone else was nuking each other, and then ended up with space lasers or whatever the endgame tech was while everyone else ended up back in the stone age.
  - hollerith 11mo ago
    The last great economic expansion or at least economic reconfiguration was internet services (which of course is mostly distinct from financial services) and the US ended up with a very dominant trade position in internet services.
    - amrocha 11mo ago
      If all US internet companies stopped existing tomorrow the world would be no worse off for it. The internet infrastructure is great. Networking hardware is great. Private internet companies built on top of it? Big whoop
      - hollerith 11mo ago
        The big whoop is the 100s of billions of dollars of revenue that flow to American internet companies from the rest of the world every quarter (and the high profit margins on that revenue—much higher than the margins of say Foxconn or DJI).
        amrocha 11mo ago
        And that money would stay in their countries respective economies and everyone would be better off for it. Maybe someone would start a local alternative. It would be used productively instead of on ads that make everyone’s lives worse.
        hollerith 11mo ago
        My purpose was to cast doubt on Rayiner's assertion that "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." I was not commenting on whether the world would be better off if the US were less economically dominant.
        amrocha 11mo ago
        And I’m saying that that dominance is mostly in irrelevant categories like ads and entertainment, so it would be at best an annoyance if those companies were to disappear. There’s very few internet companies doing truly unique, irreplaceable work.
- 0xDEAFBEAD 1y ago
  >things are seriously politically messed up I would argue universities played a big role here. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=social+justice%2Cwhiteness%2CDonald+Trump&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=0&case_insensitive=false https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=social+justice... The theory of "elite overproduction" suggests that if you train too many aspirants for the same few elite jobs, they will foment instability in order to get the jobs they feel entitled to. That's what happened when we tried to get everyone going to college. What am I supposed to do with my ethnic studies degree, aside from DEI consulting? Why would I want my DEI consulting to actually solve the underlying problem, if it puts me out of a job? Don't forget, I have a lot of student loans now! This isn't a small issue for me. The left-extremists say "you need to give me a job in order to make your team more diverse". The right-extremists say "you need to give me a job because the deep state is corrupt, it's time to make america great again". Basically using extremist politics as a trick for getting elite roles.
  - seec 1y ago
    That's because they are "elite" in their credentials, not actually elite in their competences/qualities. By definition you cannot have an elite that is comprised of a large part of the population. The problem is that education institutions have an incentive to bring in more and more people for the money and the power it affords them but that's completely contradictory to the goal of production elite individuals. A true elite is only possible if you select for the top individuals each year and it cannot be determined solely by the capacity to pay for the school. A good implementation would use qualities from both US and EU style institutions: education at no cost but very selective process that only accept around 5% of each generation. Otherwise you are just wasting money/ressources on people that will never pay back, whether it is paid by the taxpayer in the EU or by the individual/family in the US is an implementation detail. And when it comes to "liberal arts" education, in a world where information is extremely cheap/free, it makes absolutely no sense. It was always about credentialism. The reality is that it was about assigning a fake value to people who are kinda useless. The primary selection features are obedience and industriousness which are not necessarily valuable qualities if they are not focused on worthwhile goals but it's very useful for the powers in place. Anybody knows that working hard isn't that desirable when the objectives are not useful. But this is exactly why we get DEI and other dysfunctional policies/systems.
- maxglute 11mo ago
  > in terms of raw productivity In terms of dubious financialized metrics of productivity, i.e. debt + fx driven growth. Which is valid indicator, but also the same inflated indicator that suggests 2025 tertiary that cost 200% 1980 tertiary (income/inflation adjusted) is somehow more productive and not parasitic. The entire problem is spreadsheet doing gangbusters is dependenant on increasingly inequitable CoL extraction to prop up GDP flows. US economy would appear much less powerhouse if not for all the disproportionate financiailization/rent extraction from inelastic sectors (rent/education/health etc) aggregated over past 40 years over functionally comparable value goods/services.
  - potato3732842 11mo ago
    Exactly. In <pick random developing nation that isn't too poor> a man who wants to construct a septic for a house pays a man with backhoe who understands the nuances to make it happen. Concrete and diesel are bought, etc, etc, etc. Let's say $5k USD added to GDP. In US same thing happens. But the man is compelled by threat of law to pay for engineering studies, permits, as are the man with the backhoe and the man making the concrete, etc, etc. $10k is added to GDP. Has anymore wealth actually been created tho? You can argue there's a difference because the latter septic is superior because on average they fail less and there's some amortized cost to that but if you're arguing about marginal differences in the face of an integer multiple you've kind of already lost. This generalizes to just about all products and services. No more value is being created. There's just a bunch of hands in the pot that look like value if you squint and apply motivated spreadsheet magic.
    - mlinhares 11mo ago
      I haven't been in a car accident for 15 years, not even fender benders, that doesn't mean I shouldn't take insurance. As someone from a random developing nation car accidents deliver crippling debt and destroy lives there frequently because insurance is not mandatory. The developing nation blindly ignore the externalities of not having insurance (instead of spreading the cost throughout society, only a few people bear the brunt of it, usually the ones least equipped to handle it), so your example is great only if you assume its fine to continue to beat down the poor. There's a reason developed nations have developed such "red tape" and the anti-vaccine movement here in the US is finding out what happens when the red tape is removed.
- bildung 11mo ago
  > The USA is still THE powerhouse economy of the world. Things look decidedly different if you exclude the ad companies (Google, Meta, ...) and associated shovel sellers, see the WaPo article about the S&P 493 from a few days ago.
  - phillipcarter 11mo ago
    Not to discount physical infrastructure, but the world is quite digital these days and being at the absolute top of the software + associated techs economy is nothing to sniff at.
RVuRnvbM2e 1y ago
The reason for US economic domination starting in the 50s is the fact that society and infrastructure in the rest of the developed world had been utterly devastated by the second World War. The rate of college education is utterly irrelevant.
spankalee 1y ago
> When America was truly at the top of the world in the 1950s and 1960s You mean when so much of the rest of the world was poorly educated either not very industrialized yet or had their industrial base destroyed by the war? Easy for the US to be "on top" then. But I much prefer the better educated America that came after that, even if wasn't as "at the top of the world" - though I'm really not sure who else you could be referring to that could be more on top.
- WillPostForFood 1y ago
  US had highest per capita GDP in the world in 1913, before Europe's first, and second, self destructions. The US would have been on top in the in 1950s and 1960s no matter what. Just by scale, resources, and economic system.
danans 1y ago
> 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%. Due to automation and the great advance of technology, the floor for most jobs has risen such that the skills/knowledge that a 1950s school dropout had would be insufficient for anything but the most menial jobs today. Outside of a few sectors like agricultural or physical service labor, our economy just doesn't need less educated people anymore. That doesn't mean everyone needs a 4 year degree, but to make a sustainable living at least a degree from a trade or service school focused on some advanced technician skill is required, and that must be followed by apprenticeship and licensing. In the end, it requires as much time as University, but might cost less if the education is at a public community college.
- jswelker 1y ago
  Community colleges are the best existing institution we have to fill the gap. They are too wedded to the university model though. Credit hours, semesters, discrete courses, administrative overhead, the whole works, minus much of the campus life dressing. Hell I applaud even boot camps for trying to fill it, for all their faults. At least they tried something slightly different.
- bombcar 1y ago
  Our immigration policies pretty strongly indicate we still need those less educated people doing work, we just don’t want to pay anything resembling reasonable wages for such.
  - danans 1y ago
    I agree that our system relies heavily on uneducated migrants for menial labor. However, uneducated people in the 1950s regularly got jobs in factories that paid enough for a single income to support a family. That opportunity for uneducated Americans won't come back, regardless of our immigration policies.
    - K0balt 11mo ago
nobodyandproud 1y ago
Correlation-only is sloppy analysis. The inheritors and descendants of those that directly created the problem are screaming at the colleges as the problem. But that’s ass backwards: Create the long-term financial opportunity and the college problem will disappear overnight. The correlation is because rational actors will follow the only leads available to make money, survive, and raise a family. Edit: I edited the tone, slightly.
- overfeed 11mo ago
  > The inheritors and descendants of those that directly created the problem are screaming at the colleges as the problem Not to mention rank-and-file American conservatives who see universities as bastions of liberal thought/power, and create threadbare, post-hoc arguments as to why universities have to be dismantled or politically reeducated when partisanship has to be disguised.
  - lurk2 11mo ago
    > when partisanship has to be disguised. The conservatives are right about the partisan bias of universities. See this survey by Mitchell Langbert. https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/31/2/homogenous_the_political_affiliations_of_elite_liberal_arts_college_faculty https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/31/2/homogenous_the_p... Anthropology and communications saw no registered Republicans. English, Sociology, and Art departments had a ratio of around 40:1 Democrat professors Republican professors, whereas in technical fields the ratio drops considerably to only 1.6:1 in engineering, and around 5:1 for economics, chemistry, and mathematics. Langbert notes: > The political registration of full-time, Ph.D.-holding professors in top-tier liberal arts colleges is overwhelmingly Democratic. Indeed, faculty political affiliations at 39 percent of the colleges in my sample are Republican free—having zero Republicans. Duke: https://dukechronicle.com/article/duke-university-faculty-survey-political-leanings-liberal-conservative-moderate-centrist-harvard-yale-variation-across-school-tenure-status-demographics-20241022 https://dukechronicle.com/article/duke-university-faculty-su... > When asked for their political identities on a scale of “very liberal” to “very conservative,” 23.2% of respondents identified as “very liberal,” 38.53% identified as “somewhat liberal,” 24.48% identified as moderates or centrists, 9.92% identified as “somewhat conservative” and 3.87% identified as “very conservative.” Yale: https://buckleyinstitute.com/faculty-political-diversity-report-2024/ https://buckleyinstitute.com/faculty-political-diversity-rep... > Across 14 departments in the Social Sciences and Humanities, the report identified 312 Democrat faculty (88%) and only 4 Republicans (1.1%), a ratio of around 78 to 1.
doctorpangloss 1y ago
are you saying that your kids should not go to college? okay, now do you see why your statistic is meaningless, even if it is true? who answers “yes” to the first question? (hardly anyone).
- ggm 1y ago
  A minor nit. "Should not" is on a path from "don't have to" and "can chose not to" When the fintech boom in the 80s and 90s kicked off, quants aside, many had zero tertiary education. The benefit of a university then became access to social circles, and a bit of spreadsheets. I have friends who worked in this sector, and the associated industries wiring it up and nobody cared about your degree if you weren't dining with merchant bankers. I think the WH is proving at best education is marginal value to hucksters.
  - expedition32 11mo ago
    It's about who you know not what you know is sadly true. Let's not pretend that 4 years in an average US/European university creates a renaissance Uber man.
Dylan16807 1y ago
What specifically are you calling revisionism? I don't see anything in their post that's tied to these numbers. They said it's good. They didn't say it matches the best decades of the economy.
Swenrekcah 11mo ago
The problem is that almost everyone is now expected to get a degree which necessarily devalues the whole thing. It is now necessary to get a doctorate if you want to really signal academic prowess, but that comes with an incredibly high opportunity and personal cost. Society really needs to just accept that just over half of the population is never going to maka a good doctor, engineer, physicist, etc. and that is perfectly OK. We readily understand that very few people can become professional athletes and don’t think any less of those that can’t.
firesteelrain 11mo ago
The correlation is backwards. America’s mid-20th-century dominance was not the result of having only about 10 percent college graduates. It came from unique post–World War II advantages: intact industrial capacity, massive federal investment like the GI Bill, NSF, DARPA, and the interstate highway system, and the fact that global competitors were rebuilding from destruction. The GI Bill greatly expanded access to higher education and economists widely credit it with boosting productivity, innovation, and the growth of the middle class. Rising college attainment in the 1990s and 2000s coincides with globalization, offshoring, and wage stagnation, which makes this a correlation problem rather than evidence that more education causes national decline.
- dmix 11mo ago
  It was 10% of the US population who went to college before the GI bill, which then doubled to 20% over a decade following the war. Now >50% have post secondary. 70% attempt post-secondary after high school Before WW2 only about 40% of people completed high school, now it’s at 90%
  - firesteelrain 11mo ago
    Those numbers actually back up the point. The jump in education after WWII happened during the biggest boom years the US ever had. The rise to 40 percent college grads happened much later, during globalization and offshoring. So the slowdown is about the economy changing, not people getting more education. It is just a bad correlation.
    - dmix 11mo ago
      Right, there was clearly much more capacity for advanced education with the rise of technology (farming advancements, medicine, electronics etc) that started before WW2 There is something to the point about needing a correction in post secondary education and making university again a specialized place rather than the catch all default generalized institutions. Where 70% of the population tries to waits 3-5yrs+ to enter the workforce in exchange for lots of debt. A debt heavily incentivized by cheap gov backed loans, subsidies, credential inflation, and very profitable immigration schemes.
zbzdrol 11mo ago
> A high fraction of college attendance is better correlated with the 21st century decline in America's situation. You’re basically arguing that having more uneducated people is better. If that were the case, why did most of the world bend western and American in the latter 20th century culturally? The problems now are that we have a super-old man and a bunch of others with super-old ideas at the helm, and as a whole none are both wise and caring. I say this as a middle-aged gen-X’r. The missing ingredient is that no one fucking cares about anyone other than themselves. It’s not a problem that we need to solve by dumbing people down. I’d argue that we’re not educated enough.
- jimnotgym 11mo ago
  > You’re basically arguing that having more uneducated people is better. Are you arguing that having more people educated in a narrow range of topics is necessarily better? In the USA in the 1950s I would suggest there were more people who knew how to make machine tools or even food.
- NickC25 11mo ago
  >You’re basically arguing that having more uneducated people is better. "I love the poorly educated" ~our current president.
locknitpicker 11mo ago
> 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. I think this is a textbook example of correlation not implying causality. The US was awarded a unique competitive advantage with WW2, which allowed it to become the world's hegemon. Much of the reason that the US was able to preserve it's status was how it managed to leverage that competitive advantage to fuel it's economical and technological development to build up and retain a competitive advantage. This was only made possible by its investment in higher education and R&D, which is a big factor behind the progress in the 1950s and 1960s you're lauding. Things like the GI bill are renowned by the huge impact it had on the tech industry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Rock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Rock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Kleiner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Kleiner The US never managed to shake off its anti-intellectual bias, and has this irrational belief that ladder-pulling is somehow conflated with the cream always rising to the top, but if anything it's preventing their domestic talent from fulfilling their potential.
- rayiner 11mo ago
  The U.S. was already the richest country in the world per capita by 1880–even at the peak of the British Empire. Most of its military achievements during the war—building up the world’s largest Navy and airforce from almost nothing within a couple of years—was a product of the industrial economy that already existed before the war. America’s preference for common wisdom over book learning is a strength, not a weakness. Formal education filters for risk averse, process and credential-oriented people. And you need some of those people, but you don’t want your society to be like India where you worship credentials and degrees like religion. The GI bill isn’t a counterpoint. GI’s still had to gain admissions at a time when colleges were far more selective than today: https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2024/01/23/why_college_students_average_iq_has_fallen_17_points_since_1939_1006608.html https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2024/01/23/why_college... (undergraduate IQs fell from 119 in 1939 to just 102 in 2022). So you created a filter that was extremely rigorous. It supported college education for people who were both significantly smarter than average, and also had served in the military—the Marcus Aurelius type.
docfath 11mo ago
> A high fraction of college attendance is better correlated with the 21st century decline in America's situation. Correlation != causation, but let’s go the correlation route and see where it goes… China had correlation between higher-ed and economic growth, so I think you’re just trying to make an argument to support a fascist dictator who doesn’t want to be the dumbest person in the room. The decline in Christianity, rise in apathy, rise of industry in other countries, offensive wars, rise of entertainment culture, etc. are correlated also. One could also argue that the rise of uneducated conservatives was associated with U.S. decline.
sharts 11mo ago
Today’s college is yesterday’s high school though
deleted 11mo ago
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spicyusername 11mo ago
Sorry to say that I don't think the post-WWII boom had anything to do with sound economic policies, but rather the chance fact that the United States was the only industrialized nation unravaged by war and capable of capturing a major share of global economic spending because of that. So... I wouldn't look too nostalgically backwards for policy guidance when we have an entirely different set of geopolitical circumstances.
rixed 11mo ago
Could it be that "America" and "Americans" are two related but different things, and that what's good for the one may not always be the best for the other?

collinmcnulty 1y 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 1y 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.
- monero-xmr 1y ago
  I agree with you, but if the US truly has the best military (and it does 100x) then when push comes to shove, the US will destroy anyone who tries to undermine it. Very dangerous game to oppose it. Being able to construct things quickly is important, but if the US can militarily seize nearly every country on earth in days, the power is not necessarily where the kit is located
  - rayiner 1y ago
    If you take nukes off the table, the U.S. doesn’t have a 100x military advantage. If China seriously mobilized its industrial capability, the U.S. may not have even a 2x advantage. Remember that, right before World War II, the US didn’t even have a top-10 military, having demobilized it after World War I. It’s vast industrial capacity is what enabled it to build a larger military than all of Europe combined within a few years.
    - eastbound 1y ago
      The US was also much more unified at the time. That’s the thing about history: Like economy, it’s human matter, and you could reproduce and experiment twice and get completely different result because your systems are not isolated in location or time.
      - potato3732842 11mo ago
        >The US was also much more unified at the time Were we? Or is that just after the fact revisionism that makes things "easy" If Europe had managed to keep it together a few more years the US may very well have had a bunch of communism adjacent social strife and FDR may have died a deposed tyrant. We were certainly more unified on certain broad cultural and values axis, but things were still very divided.
    - pjmlp 11mo ago
      The most important fact, that people overlook, is that its industrial capacity was never bombed during the war, and Pearl Harbour was the only time the country got directly attacked.
      - nostrademons 11mo ago
        So Australia & New Zealand are the next superpowers. I remember when I was around middle school or early high school, I attended a geopolitical simulation at MIT that wargamed out a crisis between major world powers, and that was the exact result. New Zealand won, in alliance with Australia. They were able to invest heavily in technology while everyone else was nuking each other, and then ended up with space lasers or whatever the endgame tech was while everyone else ended up back in the stone age.
- hollerith 11mo ago
  The last great economic expansion or at least economic reconfiguration was internet services (which of course is mostly distinct from financial services) and the US ended up with a very dominant trade position in internet services.
  - amrocha 11mo ago
    If all US internet companies stopped existing tomorrow the world would be no worse off for it. The internet infrastructure is great. Networking hardware is great. Private internet companies built on top of it? Big whoop
    - hollerith 11mo ago
      The big whoop is the 100s of billions of dollars of revenue that flow to American internet companies from the rest of the world every quarter (and the high profit margins on that revenue—much higher than the margins of say Foxconn or DJI).
      - amrocha 11mo ago
        And that money would stay in their countries respective economies and everyone would be better off for it. Maybe someone would start a local alternative. It would be used productively instead of on ads that make everyone’s lives worse.
        hollerith 11mo ago
        My purpose was to cast doubt on Rayiner's assertion that "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." I was not commenting on whether the world would be better off if the US were less economically dominant.
        amrocha 11mo ago
        And I’m saying that that dominance is mostly in irrelevant categories like ads and entertainment, so it would be at best an annoyance if those companies were to disappear. There’s very few internet companies doing truly unique, irreplaceable work.
0xDEAFBEAD 1y ago
>things are seriously politically messed up I would argue universities played a big role here. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=social+justice%2Cwhiteness%2CDonald+Trump&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=0&case_insensitive=false https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=social+justice... The theory of "elite overproduction" suggests that if you train too many aspirants for the same few elite jobs, they will foment instability in order to get the jobs they feel entitled to. That's what happened when we tried to get everyone going to college. What am I supposed to do with my ethnic studies degree, aside from DEI consulting? Why would I want my DEI consulting to actually solve the underlying problem, if it puts me out of a job? Don't forget, I have a lot of student loans now! This isn't a small issue for me. The left-extremists say "you need to give me a job in order to make your team more diverse". The right-extremists say "you need to give me a job because the deep state is corrupt, it's time to make america great again". Basically using extremist politics as a trick for getting elite roles.
- seec 1y ago
  That's because they are "elite" in their credentials, not actually elite in their competences/qualities. By definition you cannot have an elite that is comprised of a large part of the population. The problem is that education institutions have an incentive to bring in more and more people for the money and the power it affords them but that's completely contradictory to the goal of production elite individuals. A true elite is only possible if you select for the top individuals each year and it cannot be determined solely by the capacity to pay for the school. A good implementation would use qualities from both US and EU style institutions: education at no cost but very selective process that only accept around 5% of each generation. Otherwise you are just wasting money/ressources on people that will never pay back, whether it is paid by the taxpayer in the EU or by the individual/family in the US is an implementation detail. And when it comes to "liberal arts" education, in a world where information is extremely cheap/free, it makes absolutely no sense. It was always about credentialism. The reality is that it was about assigning a fake value to people who are kinda useless. The primary selection features are obedience and industriousness which are not necessarily valuable qualities if they are not focused on worthwhile goals but it's very useful for the powers in place. Anybody knows that working hard isn't that desirable when the objectives are not useful. But this is exactly why we get DEI and other dysfunctional policies/systems.
maxglute 11mo ago
> in terms of raw productivity In terms of dubious financialized metrics of productivity, i.e. debt + fx driven growth. Which is valid indicator, but also the same inflated indicator that suggests 2025 tertiary that cost 200% 1980 tertiary (income/inflation adjusted) is somehow more productive and not parasitic. The entire problem is spreadsheet doing gangbusters is dependenant on increasingly inequitable CoL extraction to prop up GDP flows. US economy would appear much less powerhouse if not for all the disproportionate financiailization/rent extraction from inelastic sectors (rent/education/health etc) aggregated over past 40 years over functionally comparable value goods/services.
- potato3732842 11mo ago
  Exactly. In <pick random developing nation that isn't too poor> a man who wants to construct a septic for a house pays a man with backhoe who understands the nuances to make it happen. Concrete and diesel are bought, etc, etc, etc. Let's say $5k USD added to GDP. In US same thing happens. But the man is compelled by threat of law to pay for engineering studies, permits, as are the man with the backhoe and the man making the concrete, etc, etc. $10k is added to GDP. Has anymore wealth actually been created tho? You can argue there's a difference because the latter septic is superior because on average they fail less and there's some amortized cost to that but if you're arguing about marginal differences in the face of an integer multiple you've kind of already lost. This generalizes to just about all products and services. No more value is being created. There's just a bunch of hands in the pot that look like value if you squint and apply motivated spreadsheet magic.
  - mlinhares 11mo ago
    I haven't been in a car accident for 15 years, not even fender benders, that doesn't mean I shouldn't take insurance. As someone from a random developing nation car accidents deliver crippling debt and destroy lives there frequently because insurance is not mandatory. The developing nation blindly ignore the externalities of not having insurance (instead of spreading the cost throughout society, only a few people bear the brunt of it, usually the ones least equipped to handle it), so your example is great only if you assume its fine to continue to beat down the poor. There's a reason developed nations have developed such "red tape" and the anti-vaccine movement here in the US is finding out what happens when the red tape is removed.
bildung 11mo ago
> The USA is still THE powerhouse economy of the world. Things look decidedly different if you exclude the ad companies (Google, Meta, ...) and associated shovel sellers, see the WaPo article about the S&P 493 from a few days ago.
- phillipcarter 11mo ago
  Not to discount physical infrastructure, but the world is quite digital these days and being at the absolute top of the software + associated techs economy is nothing to sniff at.

RVuRnvbM2e 1y ago

The reason for US economic domination starting in the 50s is the fact that society and infrastructure in the rest of the developed world had been utterly devastated by the second World War. The rate of college education is utterly irrelevant.

spankalee 1y ago

> When America was truly at the top of the world in the 1950s and 1960s You mean when so much of the rest of the world was poorly educated either not very industrialized yet or had their industrial base destroyed by the war? Easy for the US to be "on top" then. But I much prefer the better educated America that came after that, even if wasn't as "at the top of the world" - though I'm really not sure who else you could be referring to that could be more on top.

WillPostForFood 1y ago
US had highest per capita GDP in the world in 1913, before Europe's first, and second, self destructions. The US would have been on top in the in 1950s and 1960s no matter what. Just by scale, resources, and economic system.

danans 1y ago

> 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%. Due to automation and the great advance of technology, the floor for most jobs has risen such that the skills/knowledge that a 1950s school dropout had would be insufficient for anything but the most menial jobs today. Outside of a few sectors like agricultural or physical service labor, our economy just doesn't need less educated people anymore. That doesn't mean everyone needs a 4 year degree, but to make a sustainable living at least a degree from a trade or service school focused on some advanced technician skill is required, and that must be followed by apprenticeship and licensing. In the end, it requires as much time as University, but might cost less if the education is at a public community college.

jswelker 1y ago
Community colleges are the best existing institution we have to fill the gap. They are too wedded to the university model though. Credit hours, semesters, discrete courses, administrative overhead, the whole works, minus much of the campus life dressing. Hell I applaud even boot camps for trying to fill it, for all their faults. At least they tried something slightly different.
bombcar 1y ago
Our immigration policies pretty strongly indicate we still need those less educated people doing work, we just don’t want to pay anything resembling reasonable wages for such.
- danans 1y ago
  I agree that our system relies heavily on uneducated migrants for menial labor. However, uneducated people in the 1950s regularly got jobs in factories that paid enough for a single income to support a family. That opportunity for uneducated Americans won't come back, regardless of our immigration policies.
  - K0balt 11mo ago

nobodyandproud 1y ago

Correlation-only is sloppy analysis. The inheritors and descendants of those that directly created the problem are screaming at the colleges as the problem. But that’s ass backwards: Create the long-term financial opportunity and the college problem will disappear overnight. The correlation is because rational actors will follow the only leads available to make money, survive, and raise a family. Edit: I edited the tone, slightly.

overfeed 11mo ago
> The inheritors and descendants of those that directly created the problem are screaming at the colleges as the problem Not to mention rank-and-file American conservatives who see universities as bastions of liberal thought/power, and create threadbare, post-hoc arguments as to why universities have to be dismantled or politically reeducated when partisanship has to be disguised.
- lurk2 11mo ago
  > when partisanship has to be disguised. The conservatives are right about the partisan bias of universities. See this survey by Mitchell Langbert. https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/31/2/homogenous_the_political_affiliations_of_elite_liberal_arts_college_faculty https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/31/2/homogenous_the_p... Anthropology and communications saw no registered Republicans. English, Sociology, and Art departments had a ratio of around 40:1 Democrat professors Republican professors, whereas in technical fields the ratio drops considerably to only 1.6:1 in engineering, and around 5:1 for economics, chemistry, and mathematics. Langbert notes: > The political registration of full-time, Ph.D.-holding professors in top-tier liberal arts colleges is overwhelmingly Democratic. Indeed, faculty political affiliations at 39 percent of the colleges in my sample are Republican free—having zero Republicans. Duke: https://dukechronicle.com/article/duke-university-faculty-survey-political-leanings-liberal-conservative-moderate-centrist-harvard-yale-variation-across-school-tenure-status-demographics-20241022 https://dukechronicle.com/article/duke-university-faculty-su... > When asked for their political identities on a scale of “very liberal” to “very conservative,” 23.2% of respondents identified as “very liberal,” 38.53% identified as “somewhat liberal,” 24.48% identified as moderates or centrists, 9.92% identified as “somewhat conservative” and 3.87% identified as “very conservative.” Yale: https://buckleyinstitute.com/faculty-political-diversity-report-2024/ https://buckleyinstitute.com/faculty-political-diversity-rep... > Across 14 departments in the Social Sciences and Humanities, the report identified 312 Democrat faculty (88%) and only 4 Republicans (1.1%), a ratio of around 78 to 1.

doctorpangloss 1y ago

are you saying that your kids should not go to college? okay, now do you see why your statistic is meaningless, even if it is true? who answers “yes” to the first question? (hardly anyone).

ggm 1y ago
A minor nit. "Should not" is on a path from "don't have to" and "can chose not to" When the fintech boom in the 80s and 90s kicked off, quants aside, many had zero tertiary education. The benefit of a university then became access to social circles, and a bit of spreadsheets. I have friends who worked in this sector, and the associated industries wiring it up and nobody cared about your degree if you weren't dining with merchant bankers. I think the WH is proving at best education is marginal value to hucksters.
- expedition32 11mo ago
  It's about who you know not what you know is sadly true. Let's not pretend that 4 years in an average US/European university creates a renaissance Uber man.

Dylan16807 1y ago

What specifically are you calling revisionism? I don't see anything in their post that's tied to these numbers. They said it's good. They didn't say it matches the best decades of the economy.

Swenrekcah 11mo ago

The problem is that almost everyone is now expected to get a degree which necessarily devalues the whole thing. It is now necessary to get a doctorate if you want to really signal academic prowess, but that comes with an incredibly high opportunity and personal cost. Society really needs to just accept that just over half of the population is never going to maka a good doctor, engineer, physicist, etc. and that is perfectly OK. We readily understand that very few people can become professional athletes and don’t think any less of those that can’t.

firesteelrain 11mo ago

The correlation is backwards. America’s mid-20th-century dominance was not the result of having only about 10 percent college graduates. It came from unique post–World War II advantages: intact industrial capacity, massive federal investment like the GI Bill, NSF, DARPA, and the interstate highway system, and the fact that global competitors were rebuilding from destruction. The GI Bill greatly expanded access to higher education and economists widely credit it with boosting productivity, innovation, and the growth of the middle class. Rising college attainment in the 1990s and 2000s coincides with globalization, offshoring, and wage stagnation, which makes this a correlation problem rather than evidence that more education causes national decline.

dmix 11mo ago
It was 10% of the US population who went to college before the GI bill, which then doubled to 20% over a decade following the war. Now >50% have post secondary. 70% attempt post-secondary after high school Before WW2 only about 40% of people completed high school, now it’s at 90%
- firesteelrain 11mo ago
  Those numbers actually back up the point. The jump in education after WWII happened during the biggest boom years the US ever had. The rise to 40 percent college grads happened much later, during globalization and offshoring. So the slowdown is about the economy changing, not people getting more education. It is just a bad correlation.
  - dmix 11mo ago
    Right, there was clearly much more capacity for advanced education with the rise of technology (farming advancements, medicine, electronics etc) that started before WW2 There is something to the point about needing a correction in post secondary education and making university again a specialized place rather than the catch all default generalized institutions. Where 70% of the population tries to waits 3-5yrs+ to enter the workforce in exchange for lots of debt. A debt heavily incentivized by cheap gov backed loans, subsidies, credential inflation, and very profitable immigration schemes.

zbzdrol 11mo ago

> A high fraction of college attendance is better correlated with the 21st century decline in America's situation. You’re basically arguing that having more uneducated people is better. If that were the case, why did most of the world bend western and American in the latter 20th century culturally? The problems now are that we have a super-old man and a bunch of others with super-old ideas at the helm, and as a whole none are both wise and caring. I say this as a middle-aged gen-X’r. The missing ingredient is that no one fucking cares about anyone other than themselves. It’s not a problem that we need to solve by dumbing people down. I’d argue that we’re not educated enough.

jimnotgym 11mo ago
> You’re basically arguing that having more uneducated people is better. Are you arguing that having more people educated in a narrow range of topics is necessarily better? In the USA in the 1950s I would suggest there were more people who knew how to make machine tools or even food.
NickC25 11mo ago
>You’re basically arguing that having more uneducated people is better. "I love the poorly educated" ~our current president.

locknitpicker 11mo ago

> 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. I think this is a textbook example of correlation not implying causality. The US was awarded a unique competitive advantage with WW2, which allowed it to become the world's hegemon. Much of the reason that the US was able to preserve it's status was how it managed to leverage that competitive advantage to fuel it's economical and technological development to build up and retain a competitive advantage. This was only made possible by its investment in higher education and R&D, which is a big factor behind the progress in the 1950s and 1960s you're lauding. Things like the GI bill are renowned by the huge impact it had on the tech industry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Rock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Rock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Kleiner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Kleiner The US never managed to shake off its anti-intellectual bias, and has this irrational belief that ladder-pulling is somehow conflated with the cream always rising to the top, but if anything it's preventing their domestic talent from fulfilling their potential.

rayiner 11mo ago
The U.S. was already the richest country in the world per capita by 1880–even at the peak of the British Empire. Most of its military achievements during the war—building up the world’s largest Navy and airforce from almost nothing within a couple of years—was a product of the industrial economy that already existed before the war. America’s preference for common wisdom over book learning is a strength, not a weakness. Formal education filters for risk averse, process and credential-oriented people. And you need some of those people, but you don’t want your society to be like India where you worship credentials and degrees like religion. The GI bill isn’t a counterpoint. GI’s still had to gain admissions at a time when colleges were far more selective than today: https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2024/01/23/why_college_students_average_iq_has_fallen_17_points_since_1939_1006608.html https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2024/01/23/why_college... (undergraduate IQs fell from 119 in 1939 to just 102 in 2022). So you created a filter that was extremely rigorous. It supported college education for people who were both significantly smarter than average, and also had served in the military—the Marcus Aurelius type.

docfath 11mo ago

> A high fraction of college attendance is better correlated with the 21st century decline in America's situation. Correlation != causation, but let’s go the correlation route and see where it goes… China had correlation between higher-ed and economic growth, so I think you’re just trying to make an argument to support a fascist dictator who doesn’t want to be the dumbest person in the room. The decline in Christianity, rise in apathy, rise of industry in other countries, offensive wars, rise of entertainment culture, etc. are correlated also. One could also argue that the rise of uneducated conservatives was associated with U.S. decline.

sharts 11mo ago

Today’s college is yesterday’s high school though

deleted 11mo ago

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spicyusername 11mo ago

Sorry to say that I don't think the post-WWII boom had anything to do with sound economic policies, but rather the chance fact that the United States was the only industrialized nation unravaged by war and capable of capturing a major share of global economic spending because of that. So... I wouldn't look too nostalgically backwards for policy guidance when we have an entirely different set of geopolitical circumstances.

rixed 11mo ago

Could it be that "America" and "Americans" are two related but different things, and that what's good for the one may not always be the best for the other?