4 ms·
Having a degree makes you look good in the job market, compared to someone with the same skills but no degree, so you go get one. Good choice! Now, many other
by camccann 17y ago
Having a degree makes you look good in the job market, compared to someone with the same skills but no degree, so you go get one. Good choice!
Now, many other people wisely do the same. The more people have degrees, the more pressure is applied on those who don't to go get one. Awkward, that.
So, now we have a huge demand for degrees, plus a lot of degree-seekers who (to be honest) aren't really cut out for college. But that's no big deal! The market hears and obeys, as enrollment goes up, standards go down, and bottom-tier schools admit anyone with a pulse. Hooray, everyone's getting educations, isn't this great? Who cares if they're learning anything.
Oh dear, it seems we've stumbled into a Nash equilibrium wherein the competent people are still competent, the incompetent are still incompetent, you can't tell them apart by seeing who has a degree anymore, and now everyone has student loans weighing them down. Alas, game theory, she is a cruel mistress.
- Fixnum 17y ago"... the competent people are still competent ..." Sadly, one could adduce many reasons this no longer remains true.
- RevRal 17y agoI'm trying to understand. Are you saying that the competent are being held back?
- Fixnum 17y agoAs far as I can tell, opening the universities to the masses damages the classes, standards, and student-faculty relations to the point where those who really 'ought' to be at university rather than at technical colleges don't benefit in the same way as previously. Perhaps this is just elitism, but I get the feeling that the 'bright' entering students are still the 'bright' graduating students, but gain much less deep knowledge than in the past. Of course, this applies to all disciplines, not just CS. As famous mathematician S Novikov said in 2002: "In the West, however, there was also an abrupt fall in the level of college and school education in physics and mathematics in the last 20-25 years, and in the USA the decline in school education was apparently particularly steep. I can clearly see that contemporary education cannot produce a theoretical physicist capable of passing Landau’s theoretical minimum." (http://www.mi.ras.ru/~snovikov/cris_en.pdf http://www.mi.ras.ru/~snovikov/cris_en.pdf) Basically, this education crisis seems to me to be endemic to developed societies. I don't have a clear thesis on this yet, but it seems that when a society progresses from "Education is a route from poverty to paradise" to the anti-liberal "Everyone should receive fourteen years of education" that the quality of education rapidly declines.