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>A possibility that the Big Thinkers don’t seem to consider is “Maybe colleges aren’t teaching anything of value to employers?” It's not about employers, but a

by Retra 12y ago

>A possibility that the Big Thinkers don’t seem to consider is “Maybe colleges aren’t teaching anything of value to employers?” It's not about employers, but about society. Colleges are supposed to be teaching things that are of value _to society_, not necessarily to employers. Employers should be trying to improve society by rewarding people who produce value to society, not to employers. That is how an employer justifies her power to a society that allows her to have a disproportionate amount of it. It is very possible that employers' values are not an accurate representation of societal values. Maybe your currency doesn't accurately encapsulate what your society values? Maybe your businesses are not in touch with who their customers/employees are and what motivates them? Example: I pay rent. I've never received an invoice telling me what that rent pays for or how much I'm actually paying for it. My rent payments are not approval of my landlord, they are necessary for my survival. Yet it gives my landlord economic power regardless of why I'm spending the money. Social values are not measured by economic power.

SilasX 12y ago
>It's not about employers, but about society. Colleges are supposed to be teaching things that are of value _to society_, not necessarily to employers Then why are students asked to bear the $100k cost individually? Kinda hard to justify that level of self sacrifice from anyone.
- Retra 12y ago
  Because things are messed up. Economists don't know what money is for, businesses don't know what education is for, people don't know how to fix anything, etc. This is probably one of our 10,000 year problems.
- crdoconnor 12y ago
  The justification is that because college students benefit personally from their education, non-college students should not be expected to pay for it. The reason is that ramping up aggregate private debt has a number of advantages to the following two groups: * Large employers would like to see the bargaining power of their employees curtailed. You'll be much more fearful of quitting your job or demanding a raise if you fear spiraling compound interest. * High finance (investment banks, hedge funds, etc.) because they can often figure out a way of being paid to administer debts and use it as fodder for high profit gambling activities (derivatives, etc.). An ancillary reason is that ramping up private debt is a way to give a quick economic and employment boost because it usually increases aggregate spending. The public can be boiled like a frog.
- vph 12y ago
  If you want to go to "brand name" universities, then yes $100K easily. But if you want to seek an education, state universities are much cheaper.
- vph 12y ago
  If you want to go to "brand name" universities, then yes $100K easily. But if you want to seek an education, state universities are much cheaper.
- thesagan 12y ago
  Without going into any detail (it's late for me), it smacks of paying up-front for some sort of lifetime employment insurance policy. (Probably a bad analogy, but it's an attempt)
- eli_gottlieb 12y ago
  So that lending to students can replace direct state funding as society's means of providing broad access to higher education.
rahimnathwani 12y ago
> Colleges are supposed to be teaching things that are of value _to society_ Not everyone agrees with you. - Employers may think colleges should teach things of value to them - Students may think colleges should teach things which will increase their lifetime earnings - Government may think colleges should educate people to be good citizens (by whatever definition) - College professors may think colleges are supposed to be teaching things of interest to them, regardless of the benefit to anyone else
- Retra 12y ago
  All of those things are valuable to society, but not all of those things generate economic value. That is why I am saying it is a problem to conflate societal value with economic value. Schools don't exist solely to support the economy, so it would be a mistake to demand education reform on the basis of economics alone.
- thesagan 12y ago
  Seems to me that college is a lot of things to a lot of people, and it's probably important that these expectations and measures of results are explained as understandably and universally as possible between all these groups and interests. I'm not sure we're there yet. (Not disagreeing with your post, btw)
wmf 12y ago
IMO any kind of universal knowledge (e.g. how to participate in democracy) should be taught in high school, preferably before the age when people are allowed to drop out. I think there's a social value to having an "intellectual class" (for lack of a better term) created by college education, but maybe it doesn't need to be a large fraction of the population.
- crdoconnor 12y ago
  >IMO any kind of universal knowledge (e.g. how to participate in democracy) should be taught in high school Participation in democracy comes naturally to people. I don't think the idea that you should fight for your corner needs to be taught for anybody. If it were taught in school, though, you can bet that how to participate effectively (organization, PR, core political principles) is not what would be taught. What would be taught would be "how to correctly fill in the form to register to vote for one of two equally reprehensible characters". >I think there's a social value to having an "intellectual class" (for lack of a better term) created by college education Well, we already have this. This can be counter productive if (a la 1984), they are the most highly indoctrinated segment of society.
yummyfajitas 12y ago
What does value "_to society_" mean? Can you provide a definition of this term? Arrows Impossibility Theorem generally says that value to a group is meaningless - individuals have preferences, but there is no consistent way to aggregate them into a group preference. You can get around this with things like cardinal preferences (essentially money and prices), but then the value of knowledge _to society_ is by definition what a person would pay for it. So what do you mean when you say "what your society values"? Is it just a code word for "whatever my team can sneak through the political system" or is there something intrinsic there?
- Retra 12y ago
  What is your definition of 'individual'? A group can have values just as easily as an individual, even if your attempts to quantify that value are necessarily fuzzier. Nothing useful is ever true by definition. Society has values because social contexts promote preferred actions. You start thinking about this by trying to define morality in useful manner: A morality is an algorithm that models counterfactuals and assigns values to them. (I.e., it _evaluates_ possible states of reality and prefers some to others.) Thus group morality is an aggregate of individual moralities, though it isn't necessarily a linear aggregate, nor is it necessarily known or (even knowable) by any individual. Either way, all you need is a hypothetical, because any reliable _reasoning_ you do about group morality is going to try to optimize in terms of flexibility: if there is an ideal outcome for a group, then every action should be taken to ensure such an outcome is not eliminated from potential futures. This implies a lot about group morality. It means information processing is valuable. (And hence, some vague notion of intelligence or creativity is valuable.) Generally speaking, a group is a decision-making entity, and it must value its own ability to make decisions and moral evaluations as a consequence. What is valuable to a society is not some specific state, but the ability to rapidly converge to better states as more information is obtained. Social stability, situational responsiveness, rapid dissemination of facts, efficiency, correctness, etc.. Every society values these things, even if they cannot be used to determine specific behavior for individuals. Arrows theorem says that there is no way for a preferred state to be knowable to an individual. It helps to think of a group as a network of brains in the same way that a brain is a network of neurons. It's a different kind of brain, but it still does all the brain stuff as a simple consequence of the fact that it is a strict superset of brains. Naturally, one brain cannot contain the information of 10,000 brains. (Thus, Arrow's Impossibility Theorem.) But one group can. We cannot know it, but we can presume such a state exists and optimize on flexibility, not state.
ArmchairEcon 12y ago
Let's accept your assumption that colleges teach things that are of value in some non-financial sense. Colleges make society better or make people happier. Then we should expect to see an improvement in a King of Bhutan-style Gross National Happiness rather than a reduction of inequality or an increase in GDP. If Americans aren't, on average, happier than they used to be (adjusted for income), then the conclusion should be "there was no return on the investment in broadening the number of people attending college"
- Retra 12y ago
  What colleges teach and what they should teach may not be the same. So it's hard to say "if A caused X, we should expect to see X." You can't just assume colleges teach things that are socially valuable because I said they are supposed to.

by Retra 12y ago

SilasX 12y ago

>It's not about employers, but about society. Colleges are supposed to be teaching things that are of value _to society_, not necessarily to employers Then why are students asked to bear the $100k cost individually? Kinda hard to justify that level of self sacrifice from anyone.

Retra 12y ago
Because things are messed up. Economists don't know what money is for, businesses don't know what education is for, people don't know how to fix anything, etc. This is probably one of our 10,000 year problems.
crdoconnor 12y ago
The justification is that because college students benefit personally from their education, non-college students should not be expected to pay for it. The reason is that ramping up aggregate private debt has a number of advantages to the following two groups: * Large employers would like to see the bargaining power of their employees curtailed. You'll be much more fearful of quitting your job or demanding a raise if you fear spiraling compound interest. * High finance (investment banks, hedge funds, etc.) because they can often figure out a way of being paid to administer debts and use it as fodder for high profit gambling activities (derivatives, etc.). An ancillary reason is that ramping up private debt is a way to give a quick economic and employment boost because it usually increases aggregate spending. The public can be boiled like a frog.
vph 12y ago
If you want to go to "brand name" universities, then yes $100K easily. But if you want to seek an education, state universities are much cheaper.
vph 12y ago
If you want to go to "brand name" universities, then yes $100K easily. But if you want to seek an education, state universities are much cheaper.
thesagan 12y ago
Without going into any detail (it's late for me), it smacks of paying up-front for some sort of lifetime employment insurance policy. (Probably a bad analogy, but it's an attempt)
eli_gottlieb 12y ago
So that lending to students can replace direct state funding as society's means of providing broad access to higher education.

rahimnathwani 12y ago

> Colleges are supposed to be teaching things that are of value _to society_ Not everyone agrees with you. - Employers may think colleges should teach things of value to them - Students may think colleges should teach things which will increase their lifetime earnings - Government may think colleges should educate people to be good citizens (by whatever definition) - College professors may think colleges are supposed to be teaching things of interest to them, regardless of the benefit to anyone else

Retra 12y ago
All of those things are valuable to society, but not all of those things generate economic value. That is why I am saying it is a problem to conflate societal value with economic value. Schools don't exist solely to support the economy, so it would be a mistake to demand education reform on the basis of economics alone.
thesagan 12y ago
Seems to me that college is a lot of things to a lot of people, and it's probably important that these expectations and measures of results are explained as understandably and universally as possible between all these groups and interests. I'm not sure we're there yet. (Not disagreeing with your post, btw)

wmf 12y ago

IMO any kind of universal knowledge (e.g. how to participate in democracy) should be taught in high school, preferably before the age when people are allowed to drop out. I think there's a social value to having an "intellectual class" (for lack of a better term) created by college education, but maybe it doesn't need to be a large fraction of the population.

crdoconnor 12y ago
>IMO any kind of universal knowledge (e.g. how to participate in democracy) should be taught in high school Participation in democracy comes naturally to people. I don't think the idea that you should fight for your corner needs to be taught for anybody. If it were taught in school, though, you can bet that how to participate effectively (organization, PR, core political principles) is not what would be taught. What would be taught would be "how to correctly fill in the form to register to vote for one of two equally reprehensible characters". >I think there's a social value to having an "intellectual class" (for lack of a better term) created by college education Well, we already have this. This can be counter productive if (a la 1984), they are the most highly indoctrinated segment of society.

yummyfajitas 12y ago

What does value "_to society_" mean? Can you provide a definition of this term? Arrows Impossibility Theorem generally says that value to a group is meaningless - individuals have preferences, but there is no consistent way to aggregate them into a group preference. You can get around this with things like cardinal preferences (essentially money and prices), but then the value of knowledge _to society_ is by definition what a person would pay for it. So what do you mean when you say "what your society values"? Is it just a code word for "whatever my team can sneak through the political system" or is there something intrinsic there?

Retra 12y ago
What is your definition of 'individual'? A group can have values just as easily as an individual, even if your attempts to quantify that value are necessarily fuzzier. Nothing useful is ever true by definition. Society has values because social contexts promote preferred actions. You start thinking about this by trying to define morality in useful manner: A morality is an algorithm that models counterfactuals and assigns values to them. (I.e., it _evaluates_ possible states of reality and prefers some to others.) Thus group morality is an aggregate of individual moralities, though it isn't necessarily a linear aggregate, nor is it necessarily known or (even knowable) by any individual. Either way, all you need is a hypothetical, because any reliable _reasoning_ you do about group morality is going to try to optimize in terms of flexibility: if there is an ideal outcome for a group, then every action should be taken to ensure such an outcome is not eliminated from potential futures. This implies a lot about group morality. It means information processing is valuable. (And hence, some vague notion of intelligence or creativity is valuable.) Generally speaking, a group is a decision-making entity, and it must value its own ability to make decisions and moral evaluations as a consequence. What is valuable to a society is not some specific state, but the ability to rapidly converge to better states as more information is obtained. Social stability, situational responsiveness, rapid dissemination of facts, efficiency, correctness, etc.. Every society values these things, even if they cannot be used to determine specific behavior for individuals. Arrows theorem says that there is no way for a preferred state to be knowable to an individual. It helps to think of a group as a network of brains in the same way that a brain is a network of neurons. It's a different kind of brain, but it still does all the brain stuff as a simple consequence of the fact that it is a strict superset of brains. Naturally, one brain cannot contain the information of 10,000 brains. (Thus, Arrow's Impossibility Theorem.) But one group can. We cannot know it, but we can presume such a state exists and optimize on flexibility, not state.

ArmchairEcon 12y ago

Let's accept your assumption that colleges teach things that are of value in some non-financial sense. Colleges make society better or make people happier. Then we should expect to see an improvement in a King of Bhutan-style Gross National Happiness rather than a reduction of inequality or an increase in GDP. If Americans aren't, on average, happier than they used to be (adjusted for income), then the conclusion should be "there was no return on the investment in broadening the number of people attending college"

Retra 12y ago
What colleges teach and what they should teach may not be the same. So it's hard to say "if A caused X, we should expect to see X." You can't just assume colleges teach things that are socially valuable because I said they are supposed to.