6 ms·

Very good analysis. I think free university education is part of the solution. It forces people to get over the neck of the hourglass (because all the competi

by ajuc 12y ago

Very good analysis. I think free university education is part of the solution. It forces people to get over the neck of the hourglass (because all the competitors will have a degree). Yes it leads to worse level of university education, you cannot avoid that, but as long as it's over the neck - it will allow people to learn more on their own (we have internet after all), and they will have motivation. This works in Poland (big unemployement 20 years ago might have been a big factor too - everybody knew that your kids must learn English and get M.A. if they want to have a job). We had period where "you aint gonna need it" approach to math education was winning (they even made math optional in the final high-school exam), but in the end everybody realised it was a mistake. The only problem with this model is - it's hard to get the best scientists to teach math to everybody. And hard to make public universities be able to afford the best scientists at all. So this model produces huge amount of reasonably educated engineers, programmers, economists, analists etc, but it produces few world-class scientists.

TeMPOraL 12y ago
> This works in Poland (big unemployement 20 years ago might have been a big factor too - everybody knew that your kids must learn English and get M.A. if they want to have a job). A sad side-effect of this is that we have tons of unemployed M.A.s of humanities - everybody knew that their kids need to get an M.A., but not much thought was applied towards what kind of M.A. could be useful. But this can be attributed to a generation of people discovering for the first time how the whole capitalism thing works. It's a problem with social expectations, not with free universities, of course.
- theorique 12y ago
  That tends to be one of the challenges with credentialism and inflation. In the 1960s or 1970s (at least in the USA), the mindset among employers tended to be "you've got a degree? you're HIRED!" - they just needed reasonably smart people and university acted as a filter. The parents of Millennials were among this cohort and internalized this mindset (along with the society at large). The idea of "more education = better job opportunity" has lasted for the past 40-50 years and even been escalated.
  - innguest 12y ago
    > they just needed reasonably smart people and university acted as a filter Bingo. That's all most employers are looking for. If employers in the US were allowed to do IQ tests on candidates, no one would care what degrees you have.
    - ajuc 12y ago
      They can't? Seems strange. What's the justification for that?
      - theorique 12y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.
  - HillRat 12y ago
    It will be interesting -- and by "interesting" I mean "terrifying" -- to see what the thwarting of internalized expectations does to our social fabric. It's the same essential motivation that fueled the rise of Islamist terror groups in the Mideast: young men with education but no financial or social prospects. Obviously, these were societies with threadbare social fabric due to decades of political repression and economic mismanagement, but there's no ironclad rule that an otherwise stable country can't tip over with shocking speed. (In this, the sheer size of the US probably creates a tendency towards short-term stability, while also making it more difficult to enact long-term solutions.) The post-war economic ideal of America was a powerful albeit somewhat utopian concept -- a large number of financially-secure skilled and unskilled laborers supporting a smaller but still large upper middle-class of "symbolic manipulators" for whom a college degree served as an entrance ticket. The lure was, of course, that anyone could move up the ladder if they applied themselves, worked hard, and got an education. The post-war social compact offered stability and meritocratic advancement in exchange for sociopolitical legitimation. Stability was swept away by automation and globalization, and advancement is, for all but the most elite, tenuous at best; what, then, will we replace it with?
  - chetanahuja 12y ago

by ajuc 12y ago

TeMPOraL 12y ago

> This works in Poland (big unemployement 20 years ago might have been a big factor too - everybody knew that your kids must learn English and get M.A. if they want to have a job). A sad side-effect of this is that we have tons of unemployed M.A.s of humanities - everybody knew that their kids need to get an M.A., but not much thought was applied towards what kind of M.A. could be useful. But this can be attributed to a generation of people discovering for the first time how the whole capitalism thing works. It's a problem with social expectations, not with free universities, of course.

theorique 12y ago
That tends to be one of the challenges with credentialism and inflation. In the 1960s or 1970s (at least in the USA), the mindset among employers tended to be "you've got a degree? you're HIRED!" - they just needed reasonably smart people and university acted as a filter. The parents of Millennials were among this cohort and internalized this mindset (along with the society at large). The idea of "more education = better job opportunity" has lasted for the past 40-50 years and even been escalated.
- innguest 12y ago
  > they just needed reasonably smart people and university acted as a filter Bingo. That's all most employers are looking for. If employers in the US were allowed to do IQ tests on candidates, no one would care what degrees you have.
  - ajuc 12y ago
    They can't? Seems strange. What's the justification for that?
    - theorique 12y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.
- HillRat 12y ago
  It will be interesting -- and by "interesting" I mean "terrifying" -- to see what the thwarting of internalized expectations does to our social fabric. It's the same essential motivation that fueled the rise of Islamist terror groups in the Mideast: young men with education but no financial or social prospects. Obviously, these were societies with threadbare social fabric due to decades of political repression and economic mismanagement, but there's no ironclad rule that an otherwise stable country can't tip over with shocking speed. (In this, the sheer size of the US probably creates a tendency towards short-term stability, while also making it more difficult to enact long-term solutions.) The post-war economic ideal of America was a powerful albeit somewhat utopian concept -- a large number of financially-secure skilled and unskilled laborers supporting a smaller but still large upper middle-class of "symbolic manipulators" for whom a college degree served as an entrance ticket. The lure was, of course, that anyone could move up the ladder if they applied themselves, worked hard, and got an education. The post-war social compact offered stability and meritocratic advancement in exchange for sociopolitical legitimation. Stability was swept away by automation and globalization, and advancement is, for all but the most elite, tenuous at best; what, then, will we replace it with?
- chetanahuja 12y ago