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>It's not reasonable to tell young people (or any people) that their goal should be to find a job so they can be self-sufficient and they can support themselves
by Mvandenbergh 14y ago
>It's not reasonable to tell young people (or any people) that their goal should be to find a job so they can be self-sufficient and they can support themselves financially.
It's quite correct to tell any given young person or group of young people to do so! That doesn't mean that it works as a policy prescription.
To take your musical chairs model a bit further: I might like there to be more chairs, I'd like that quite a lot actually. It'd be great to get youth unemployment down. In the mean-time though, you bet I'll be working on my musical chairs strategy, and if anyone asks me for advice I'd tell them to do the same. Will that fix the lack of chairs? No, of course not. It will keep me comfortably housed and fed though, and while that is not the only thing I care about it is rather important to me.
Would a degree from Yale have value if everyone got in? Much less.
Would I advise an individual who got accepted to go? Yes of course I would.
- Suncho 14y agoExcellent points. But it's important to remember that as the number of chairs keeps decreasing, your advice becomes less appropriate for any given young person. Personally, even today, I would advise most individuals who got accepted by Yale not to go. The quality of free online education is so high that we've essentially reached the point where "everyone got in" to Yale. What does the decrease in the number of chairs mean? It means that less work is necessary and fewer jobs are necessary to support our society. This is good. We should want it to continue decreasing. I would like there to be fewer chairs, and faster. =)
- Mvandenbergh 14y agoSure enough, but to strain the analogy even further, if we need fewer chairs then we need to find a place for people not playing the game to sit. Also, the quality of free online education is not high enough to make it folly to go to Yale. Of course you still have to into account the cost, but for many people that will be much lower than sticker because of their generous endowment funded financial aid policies.
- Suncho 14y agoExactly. Instead of spending energy trying to increase the number of chairs, we need to find a place for the people not playing the game to sit. My hope is that society realizes this before we go through too much pain and suffering. Regarding the Yale degree, I agree that it will always be useful and valuable to some people. But even then, the value of a Yale degree to someone graduating today is different from the value of a Yale degree to someone graduating four years from now.