I can't help but wonder if the pandemic will serve as a irreversible shock to a status quo that can't have been sustainable. As much as college was a life-redefining experience for me, I also think it's incredibly wasteful and indulgent to send most 18 year olds to college. I had no idea what I wanted out of the experience, other than the experience itself.
I think a better future would be focused, shorter-term educational programs, taken flexibly through one's early career years. There simply have to be better ways to unbundle the positive aspects of the college experience to make them more responsive to people's individual journeys to their serious careers.
Maybe going off on a tangent but as a German I never understood why in the US people have to study for some very basic jobs.
Jobs like nurse, pharmacist, physical therapist, etc. are 3 year apprenticeships in Germany. You apply directly at a company that is educating you on the job and you go to “work school” in alternating fashion.
On the other side you need some kind of education for almost any job here. Car mechanic, etc. So
it is not as flexible.
I just always cringe when I hear someone is going to university to study for a job. Many jobs just require more practical experience than knowledge. In the US the choices are extrem: either go to some university or do nothing at all and try your luck.
The percentages of university graduates for an age cohort are growing yearly in Germany as well. 25.5% in 2008, 31.5 in 2018. The US is just further ahead in this trend. It has similar effects in Germany. Brace yourself, Akademikerproletariat is coming :).
Tricky question - because the entire discussion about social “fairness” and “stepping up in social ladder” in Germany happens around “likelihood to have a university degree”. Now, pragmatically speaking: the apprenticeship and university system in Germany allows people to flexibly qualify themselves for (well) paying jobs at minimal cost. There is another truth to that people rather want “not to be spoke out”: not everybody has the “right” qualifications for completing an apprenticeship or university degree. Having taught at an applied science university it sometimes was beyond my comprehension how Germany tries to “bump up university graduates at all costs”. But to be fair: I don’t think many of those people would have succeeded at an apprenticeship either...
I personally know several(!) instances where “the smart and brilliant sibling” went for university, the “quiet one went for an apprenticeship” - and the pay off has been substantially more beneficial for the people taking the apprenticeship road even though the “college siblings” didn’t exactly fail or end up unemployed... I know it’s anecdotical.
But in Germany, they seem to push a rather weird political agenda in this direction which doesn’t help anybody.
Similar story here in Canada - all my high school friends who went into blue-collar careers are doing all right.
I wonder whether it's self-correcting in some way - management-class hopefuls end up poorer than their hands-on counterparts, and these wealthier families end up having more political clout over time which balances the snobbery that got everyone to push their children into management streams in the first place...
The general expectation is that blue collar jobs pay more at the beginning, and white collar jobs pay more at the end. So at 20, the white-collar college student is eating ramen and wearing thrift store clothes and the blue collar worker is already making a decent salary, driving a new car, thinking about buying a home. At 40, the white collar worker is doing well, has a house and a car and a family, and the blue collar worker is about the same. At 55, the white collar worker is in the prime of their career living comfortably, making very good money, and achieving a level of prestige while the blue collar worker is living about the same life they had at 40, but with more physical ailments slowing their working ability.
This is what has traditionally been believed and does not necessarily represent reality, but it explains the tradeoffs each route offers.
Increasingly that expectation appears to be built on some very shaky assumptions regarding lifetime income.
This is anecdotal, but a blue-collar acquaintance who studied for a 3-year power plant safety program purchased a detached home a full 7-10 years before his peers who went to university for four-year degrees. There wasn't much parental assistance involved in the home purchase.
Being able to make enough to cover a mortgage and sock some money away in an investment account can give you a financial boost that compounds over time. If you live in an expensive housing area, that boost could end up exceeding what white-collar grads net out to, 15-20 years later.
This should be tempered by the fact that a lot of hands-on worker have to do a lot of physical work. They also have a higher risk of disability and injuries.
They also get a lot more physical exercise throughout the day on average, reducing the risk of many heart conditions, etc. That might balance that out.
My personal observation is rather: blue collar jobs (including office) are protected by unions and the company “then takes it out on university graduates that are not covered”. I am mainly talking “larger industrial companies” - that is where I grew up.
It is just so freakin easy to get an apprenticeship in comparison to getting a job with a university degree. And I am talking business/IT apprenticeship versus university counterparts.
It’s not as much “those business hobos will all get unemployed and they deserve it” - it’s rather: “if you just sign up early and promise not to strive for ambition you are better off financially in a lot of cases”.
> the “college siblings” didn’t exactly fail or end up unemployed... I know it’s anecdotical.
Since there are financially unwise college degrees (social work) and on the other end those with a mostly guaranteed, very decent minimal guaranteed income and incredible potential (medicine), this is an unfair comparison.
Sure. But one studied business (and got a decent paying job) and the other one went for a PhD in chemistry.
Now: two siblings were female and the one going for “becoming a secretary at a large automotive company” like literally did not know what to spend all the bonuses and salary on - she was living at home until getting married and saved rent as well. She can always work part-time in her job, probably has a “large house-down-payment” on her bank account and is in a really relaxed situation. Studying 5 years (paying rent, not having income,...) and the fact that university graduates “have a harder time getting into that large company and even get less paid than factory workers” was not exactly obvious at the beginning. Due to the workplace protection in place and pretty strong union representation in “blue collar jobs” it often doesn’t make much sense for women to pursue a university degree from a financial perspective. I am very frustrated about that.
Second example - well, the PhD postdoc survives 2-year contract over 2-year contract while his younger brother just loads just more cash than he can carry.
This does not hold everywhere - both “younger siblings” work at a large industrial company that pays well. It’s just 100x easier to get a job that is paying well with mediocre grades and an uncle than with an engineering, business or science “summa cum laude” university degree.
Really crazy how that turned out. Many more similar stories from my siblings and their class-mates.
The academic route has always been a crapshoot. Most of my professors from the Chemistry Department at Florida State were still there and active when my daughter went there for a Meteorology masters decades later. The cartoonist, Jorge Cham, parodies this in the Ph.D. Comics books and movies.
One must plan a technical career carefully. I was able to get an internship at Kodak's Tennessee plant after my junior and senior years. I originally wanted to study inorganic chemistry. I worked for scientists who both were Ph.D. polymer chemists. They showed me the American Chemical Society's study on chemist occupations. 80% of chemists worked on polymers at some time during their career. I applied for both types of programs, and the UMASS Amherst Polymer Science program provided a research assistance-ship that paid my way. it was a great experience and I had a fantastic Ph.D. Advisor - who is now an emeritus professor at Rice University. I stopped interviewing after I had 5 job offers. Employment fluctuates with the economy. Some fields are more robust than others... Do your homework before rushing into a pricey program...
Yes, I understand.
Education is free in Germany. I hold a PhD. I completed my degrees with “distinction” in high paying fields, worked in investment banking, top management consulting and tech.
But honestly: if it wasn’t for like 80+h weeks straight for the past 10 years and “an increadibly lucky chance” even for me university and working in the most prestigious companies would have been a crap choice. Even without the PhD (which I was able to get done in 3 years at the top university in Germany).
I literally do not recommend university to anybody “unless they are willing to take a pay cut and understand the need to be in the top 5 percent for the next 15 years to get a shot at being as well paid as that dude doing an apprenticeship in the quality department working 35h weeks”. And again: university is free here. Not worth it really from a financial perspective for most people. Yet, the “public and political agenda is to push more people into it”
That would not surprise me. One might be able to recover the cost of the education at a state university. I suspect the return on investment would significantly lower at a private school with higher tuition. My daughter teaches at a high school with many students from lower income households. One of the exercizes the class did was to have each student pick a career that interested them. They had to find the cost of the degree and the median salary. Next they were to make a budget that for their living expenses based on that median salary, including repayment of the student loans. It was an eye-opening experience for these students.
Higher education can be a ticket to a great career. It can be a cost it takes a lifetime to repay, especially if penalties and interest accrues.
I personally know several(!) instances where “the smart and brilliant sibling” went for university, the “quiet one went for an apprenticeship” - and the pay off has been substantially more beneficial for the people taking the apprenticeship road even though the “college siblings” didn’t exactly fail or end up unemployed
I think it's fairly easy to see this type of outcome if the major was a humanity and the trade was something like plumber, electrician, or climate control, even in the US.
The problem is, no family ever considers both to be valid options.
There are families where it's just assumed you'll go to college and no one even questions it. (They don't even stop think, wait, this gal would be a great plumber and easily make six figures as her own boss!)
There are families where college is something "extra" that's not required.
I know of no families (though I'm sure they exist) where plumber is considered an equally honorable profession as accountant or teacher.
There's a kind of social stigma attached to the trades, for want of a better word.
There are different levels of nursing in the United States. Not all of them require uni education, but they also do tasks most people would not want to do
There's actually a fundamental difference between the anglosaxon system, US/UK(Canada?) and basically all the others though which I kind of like.
In the US and UK you're considered educated once you go through school. So you can go another two years to University and become a lawyer(same with medicine, provided you can afford it). In Germany you're kind of set for life.
Engineers are not considered business people, business people can't be considered engineers. But one of my favorite startups back in the days(Basho the makers of Riak) two absolutely fantastic engineering managers I met were an english literature grad and an business school grad. Both just had a lot of interest in Computer Science.
Of course the other extreme of the equation is people that found the Fyre Festival or Theranos.
That is true, but you cannot say that this will lead to the same situation as in the US. The apprenticeship system is well established and it it just not feasible for everyone to take the time and money to study. Apprenticeships are payed. I just cannot see a baker with a M.Sc. :)
To add to that: This trend only shows that people do not want to do low-pay hands-on jobs anymore. It does not mean that universities compete with apprenticeships. Although this certainly causes the rise of bullshit study programs.
It is happening the same in germany too, you have many in germany now too which had been an Ausbildung before: Touristik, Agrarwirtschaft, Osteopathie ...
though, with a suitable focus on the applied science universities (where you have to work at least 1/7 of your education in a suitable position) and dual study programs, I think, we could avoid the worst (and are I actually think).
I think some of the commerce chambers/etc. have brought this onto themselves by pushing the advantage of their paying members who have effectively turned most trades and crafts into guilds, where your only chance at getting a good job (aka being self employed) is inheriting machines and the company rolodex.
[And no, you generally can't pull it off on your own, because you have to actually pay for studying to be allowed to open a business, so you are 30 years old, have no money and have to get a 200k loan for your non-hyperscaling business, while you have to pay rent or want to buy a house]
Capitalism solves the resulting supply shortage of "qualified" plumbers, carpenters et. al. by providing cheap, eastern european, DIY-style "I can do everything"-craftsmen (actually, my grandfathers both had similar sidegigs (ok, one built his and his friend's homes with them) during the "Wirtschaftswunder" and retired).
Nearly everyone who is sufficiently intelligent to pass the necessary exams then moves to university to study in the hope to get a "nice, comfortable" job. Even if they really liked their vocation. But working your ass off in the lower 10%-income bracket, while your boss buys a Porsche a year from profits you earned in a 5-person company he inherited from his father kind of sucks.
>Capitalism solves the resulting supply shortage of "qualified" plumbers, carpenters et. al. by providing cheap, eastern european, DIY-style "I can do everything"-craftsmen
You can say the same thing about software engineering. The push for easy immigration has solved the fake shortage in Germany and kept the salaries low enough to keep companies very profitable.
Given the typical scope (e.g. burning VC money) of the companies going through the effort to hire/immigrate people, there is definitely no real supply shortage for software engineers. While for plumbers, there is, even with the influx of the aforementioned service people.
1 - a high school education in the US no longer results in someone functionally prepared for citizenship (manage a budget, understand how to vote, keep themselves fed and clothed, understand a newspaper etc). It’s also only 12 years. The first year of the 4-year undergrad program at most schools is leveling all the kids to the same base.
2 - despite my criticism above, the US undergraduate design is, by and large, intended to be broad rather than deep; while in most countries you can get an undergrad law or medicine degree and then be a lawyer or physician, in the US undergrads are expected not only to study their subject (“major”) but also some literature, maths, perhaps a foreign language etc. Actual profession comes in many cases from an advanced degree. I think this is a better system though not always well implemented.
There is also a Berufsschule- like system called an associates degree for basic accounting, dental assistant, etc.
My son attended German Grundschule and Gymnasium track, but did some US high school and US undergrad. I did US high school and US undergrad, but my exposure is to a different system. So while I think the us educational system is in a parlous state, it has some strengths as well.
> manage a budget, understand how to vote, keep themselves fed and clothed
You'll be shocked to find that there are people all over the world and throughout most of history who learned how to do all of these things without any school at all!
I intentionally kept reading the newspaper off that list, because that typically does require some formal education process.
I'm not a radically anti-state person, but its strange and concerning to me that there has been this increasing trend of critique public school for not teaching you basic life skills.
Maybe we need less school and not more. Extending the definition of "child" to be 18+ and keeping students so busy with homework that they don't even learn how the world works through their family and peers seems like a problem that more school won't fix.
I think you ou’d be surprised how many people can’t balance a checkbook. And how many people are taken in by straightforwardly bad decisions (excessive use of credit etc).
> 1 - a high school education in the US no longer results in someone functionally prepared for citizenship (manage a budget, understand how to vote, keep themselves fed and clothed, understand a newspaper etc).
Besides understanding a newspaper, which arguably schools do teach since they teach you to read and do analysis on text in English classes, did high school education ever cover the rest of this?
Yes, they were called “home economics classes” (or “home ec” for short). They were snobbishly looked down upon by anyone college bound when I went to high school, which is unfortunate.
They literally taught sewing, cooking, balancing a checkbook and budgeting, child care, basic auto mechanics, and some welding iirc. These are all super useful life skills and the sad part is that all of us brilliant geniuses that went on to college never got the equivalent covered.
Auto mechanics and welding you got in shop classes, not home ec. I was likewise tracked away from both, on the idea that I was too smart to need to know such things, and I haven't yet stopped resenting it.
Oh, I've acquired most of those skills on my own in the interim. I just haven't stopped being annoyed that I was denied the opportunity to do so as part of my formal education, on the basis of an incorrect assumption that I was college bound and a wrongheaded idea that such people should not have dirt under their fingernails.
I've come to understand that I'm a downtown living, college educated, hipster. Wanting to change my own oil and do my own repair I found a garage that charges $140/day to rent a bay and tools. Can't exactly be a shade tree mechanic at the dog park.
I feel like it'd be weird to find an auto parts store that wasn't OK with doing repairs in the parking lot. On the one hand, you're going to get a lot of people coming in to buy parts for ad hoc stuff. And on the other, if somebody finds halfway through a battery swap or whatever that they're short a tool they need, where are they going to go to get it?
$140/day seems steep to me as well. But if the tools are proper I can be in and out before the sun sets. If I do it in my parking lot I'm still spending $3-400 in tools. And I'll still need an air compressor.
They have a special rate for oil changes, $40. But you only get an hour on the lift. Just enough time to refill, replace filters, and rotate tires.
I do all my work on the street because I don't have a garage or driveway. I live in an upscale neighborhood ($2m homes average). There's not much of an issue with it. People look but that's about it.
Doing work in the parking lot of an auto parts store is very normal.
If you're teaching yourself to weld buy the cheapest 220v DC stick welder you can find. MIG sucks for beginners because it doesn't teach you anything except how to pull a trigger.
I learned how to weld at my local community college for less than $500 (course fees, all of the books are very inexpensive). Highly recommend the experience if you have a community college close by.
I've often wondered how much it would cost to learn HVAC stuff myself and then set up a "business" so I could purchase the the necessary items to DIY AC fixes.
The only knowledge I distinctly remember gaining in high school was from a class called "consumer auto". I learned to change my oil, replace the brakes and flush the lines, check the fluids, etc.
As a broke college student DIY auto repair was a great way to save money. As someone with a job, it's more of a hobby.
But learning how to fix a basic machine is an amazing lesson in design: you see how mature technology is made to be maintainable, which isn't something you get from a lot of modern electronics.
Where I went to school everything you just said was a mandatory class from middle school on. They taught you how to make snacks on your own and do the basics of cooking, sewing, and cleaning for a middle school age kid. They also had budgeting classes or a portion of a class, can’t remember. Home EC and typing was 100% mandatory in middle school.
Shop and welding was long gone by the early 2000s but my school had a big greenhouse so I took Horticulture.
My recollection of home ec was it was majority boys and mostly athletes. Most of the girls felt they didn't need the class (already had the life skills those courses covered) or were college-bound and didn't have time in the schedule for it.
A good friend of mine, who later went to the NFL, was so excited he learned to bake cookies. He also learned to read the stocks section and was super excited to try investing.
* He's doing quite well now. Football paid for college, NFL paid for law school.
>did high school education ever cover the rest of this?
No. But the upper middle class from which most of HN's inhabitants come could more easily be ignorant of it back then.
You had the token home ec and wood shop classes but eeryone who wasn't super interested did whatever and got a B and didn't really pick up any lasting knowledge in the process (art and music have similar probably the best point of comparison today).
Here in Canada mine did. They were optional courses inside of requisite streams, however.
[In the Ontario public school system, specifically] we were required a Civics-classified course in our upper years which resulted in me taking Canadian History rather than general civics—but understanding how to vote has never been a burden here.
Budgets, etc, were covered by a maths course called "Math for Everyday Life" which was, unfortunately, in the "enter the workforce" rather than the College or University stream so most avoided it because it appeared as if it was next to remedial. I took it. It was alright. I don't remember specifics, but it's likely responsible for a lot of my intuitive understanding of things like budgets, credit systems, mortgages, etc. While it wasn't in the higher streams, it did fulfill the requisite for math in order to graduate.
As far as English courses, we were required to take one of College or University streams throughout high school for reading a mix of literature critically, dramatically, and to engage in debate. You could also optionally take a Creative Writing course beside that which had more reading, more debate, more in-depth grammar and creative exercises (which if you ask me only improves reading comprehension) as well as a final project of developing a small body of related work, presenting it and defending it in a proposal.
And I attended rural schools, one of which was being progressively closed as I attended (thanks Mike Harris), so it wasn't just a matter of being in a city rich with resources, or of a certain class.
That said, it's unfortunate that I hear a lot of people claim those kinds of courses are not offered here (and worse, use that as reason for complete reform or selling our public system to private interests), and many subjects are not covered—but they are, and I've just noticed not many people take them. Canadian History, and our amazingly jaded teacher, covered in detail the dark side of the country's history and some of the complex network of politics of the First Nations, and the Math for Everyday Life course (while I wish I had dug into more complex topics with as much fervour) made the basic stuff a little more natural in my understanding.
Any of the wood shop/home economics (joint course, you had to take both) courses mentioned we had taken in the 7th/8th grade rather than high school. There was an auto shop, but I can't comment because I didn't take it. Car ownership seemed well out of reach so I didn't care as much at the time!
Ontario used to have a fifth year of secondary education (grade 13) which was phased out in 2003[1]. The expectation of secondary school students in Ontario prior to the abolition of the OAC year was that there were additional periods to use for electives.
I look back fondly on those years and absolutely loved free periods, in addition to the many electives I took that were not purely science or math.
I remember that. The last cohort of grade 13/OAC was when I entered high school. It definitely would be helpful, rather than racing kids into post-secondary. I ended up taking a year to work, myself, and saved some money, and spent a lot of time in music. Instead of heading off to U of T after that I rather wish I'd stayed that course (didn't even finish with the degree anyway but assumed the debt because I thought I should go)...
In the 1970s when my wife and I were in High School there were some gender biases. My wife (from Syracuse NY) had been cooking, cleaning, sewing, etc. because both her parents worked. She wanted to take shop instead because she was studying for the physical sciences and math. The high school administrators refused and forced her to take Home Economics. She was not pleased...
Nothing of what you said helps on the issue of job training. The undergrad program in the US is designed to be broad, because this is what the wealthy classes of the 19th century and early 20th century wanted in order to distinguish themselves from the poor. This is not ideal for people who need the university degree to get into the job market.
>2 - despite my criticism above, the US undergraduate design is, by and large, intended to be broad rather than deep; while in most countries you can get an undergrad law or medicine degree and then be a lawyer or physician, in the US undergrads are expected not only to study their subject (“major”) but also some literature, maths, perhaps a foreign language etc. Actual profession comes in many cases from an advanced degree. I think this is a better system though not always well implemented.
I'm studying CS and I had physics, electronics, history, intellectual property law, PLC programming, automatics and foreign language and more that I do not remember.
The jargon for this in the US is "general education requirements" or "gen ed"
For example, a CS student at Stanford would meet these requirements [1] by choosing from a wide range of courses such as "Jazz History", "Conservation Photography", "Contemporary Moral Problems" and "To Die For: Antigone and Political Dissent"
People who like this system would say it produces a well-rounded education - surely nobody would want students of politics to be ignorant of statistics, or students of engineering to be ignorant of ethics!
There are a variety of much more cynical interpretations available, of course...
Training employees use to be common in the US. Companies trained their workforce and marketed the quality of their training programs to both customers and potential employees.
US employers didn't do this out of the goodness of their shareholder's hearts or (as in Germany) any regulatory obligation. They did it for competitive advantage; skilled labor was scarce and worth investment.
Those days are long past. Contemporary workers are oblivious to this history as it has been more than two generations since this situation prevailed in the US. The reasons for this change can no longer be discussed in a candid manner without triggering people so I won't attempt it.
It might trigger me but I’m still interested in hearing your perspective on why this went away. My simple take is that the economic pressure to train workforces went away as the supply of labor changed, and there wasn’t a competitive advantage to spending on training. Is it something more than that?
In my view, there's been a strong push towards eliminating skilled labor in a lot of settings such as factories. We'd rather get rid of both apprentice and the master.
At the factory attached to my place of employment, I'm not sure what jobs are actually left that are related to any of the skilled trades. Most of our workers are assemblers. We do hire people with 2 year trade school degrees, or equivalent military service training. When our welder retires, we will probably outsource the welding.
Now we get pieces from shops that have skilled trades such as machinists, but I don't think those shops require a 4 year degree. I don't think carpenters, roofers, or plumbers have bachelors degrees. Many of the businesses that hire those people are family owned, and hard to break into if you're not connected.
As for health care trades, well, employers might be willing to bear the cost of the training, if there was only one employer: The government.
There are new skilled trades coming up now. My friend is a robotics welder. Unlike a traditional welder, he does most of his work from a computer terminal. He programs the robot to weld a specific joint and then the robot repeats that weld for every part that comes through his station on the line.
The old guard of skilled welders who did the welding by hand are being replaced (and not happy about it) by young guys like him. My friend learned his job through a 3-year program at the local community college. His job involves a lot less of the tacit knowledge a skilled welder would have (judging the quality of a joint by feel) and a lot more theoretical knowledge of metallurgy. Instead of intuitive judgement, he relies on the methods of nondestructive (x-ray scanning) and destructive (cutting a test weld in half and inspecting it under an electron microscope) testing.
There are economic reasons behind it. My company used to invest a lot of training in the employees because most employees were working for the same company a very long time, more than half till retirement. I got a lot of training ~ 20 years ago as a new hire, while the new hires today get almost nothing, not even the bare minimum to do their job. Why? Well, a few weeks ago I had a meeting with a team from a very well known IT company for a project and they all expressed their amazement when they heard I am working for such a long time in one place; people now stay 3-5 years in a company and move on. Why train them, to make them better for the next job?
Companies that invested a lot in their employees paid less than companies that had no such expenses, so it became common to have a new hire, spend 3 years on trainings and leave for a better salary. This competition pressure made us adjust and move the training budget into salaries.
Tech employers usually offer reimbursement for online training, conferences, books, etc. That seems commonplace and enables business models of PluralSight and alike.
Some also bring outside consultants and training firms for in-house seminars, some pay for conference expenses, and some even reimburse tuition for a professional development course.
I too wish gp would elaborate. I don’t know what caused the change but it’s clear to me that companies wishing to choose hires now with no qualifications other than teachability would have a very difficult time dealing with diversity issues.
Demographics. Compulsory public education became a thing in the US around the same time child labor laws were becoming wide spread. This was coincidentally around the time men were coming back from the world wars and needing to take back the jobs their children/wives had been filling. Well, all those boomers are still alive, and we needed an excuse to keep their kids/grandkids out of the work force a little longer. Hence over-saturation of college degree requirements. That's changing as the boomers die out, so we will see "college degrees" become less of a requirement. The only thing that could keep it going is competition from immigrants, but I doubt that will be the case.
Notice how the high school graduation rate among 25-29 year-olds rose between 1940 and 1950. Those are people who graduated high school between 1929-1934 and 1939-1943. Before WWII.
This pre-WWII trend is consistent with the post-WWII trend, up until ~1978 when effectively "everyone" graduated high school. In other words, this has been happening since before WWII, and WWI had nowhere near the civilian mobilization as WWII, so the demobilized wives/children argument doesn't explain the inter-war increase.
As for college:
Notice how the number of 25-29 year-olds with college degrees rises dramatically between 1948 and 1951 and then slowly through about 1960. That's WWII vets using the GI bill to go to college (18-21 year-olds starting 1945 to 1948). Then the increase tapers off.
There's another significant rise between 1965 and 1978. That's boomers avoiding the Vietnam draft with college deferments. Then it levels off (actually, decreases) for 20 years until the late 90's.
The late 90's rise corresponds to the late-80's / early-90's push to throw student loans at anyone with a pulse.
Starting in 2008, the rate starts rising again: Young adults of all ages staying in or going back to finish college because the Great Recession killed a bunch of jobs. Plus, probably, some amount of people who started college around 2002 to avoid being drafted for Iraq (which didn't end up happening anyway).
These things are not mutually exclusive. For example, during the Great Recession, why were young people particularly unemployed, sending them to college? Because their elders held onto those jobs, squeezing them out of the work force. It became a meme that you needed 5 years of experience for an "entry level" position.
Because the apprentice watching you hammer in a nail is not producing $25/hr (or what ever the min wage happens to be). Add on all the ways that employees can screw your business over without the ability to get rid of them and you get the piecemeal training systems we have today.
> Add on all the ways that employees can screw your business over without the ability to get rid of them and you get the piecemeal training systems we have today.
This is an interesting angle. Do you think it is a mutually escalating war of trying to screw each other or maximize one's own gains that has resulted in a hostile relationship between employees and employers? What would mutual de-escalation look like?
I think mostly because most high school graduates have no idea what they want to do for a job. I really didn't figure out what I wanted to do for a career until I had 2 bachelor degrees and a masters degree. The career I have been doing for the past 20+ years has nothing to do with any of those degrees (fortunately I was smart enough to get academic scholarships every semester so I was able to graduate with no debt). But if you had asked me when I graduated from high school if I could have seen myself doing what I now do I would have laughed at you for the ridiculousness of even suggesting it.
totally agree - not to mention attempting to decide on 30+ years of career at 18 years old involves significant uncertainty risk as well. all those hospitality management majors from last year and for the next couple years have lost out on upto 4 years of time plus whatever accompanying student debt.
my first job out of college was as a "financial analyst". my undergrad degree (finance) was largely not applicable - excel skills were about the only relevant experience. any 18 year old with a 2 month excel bootcamp and maybe 2 weeks of industry and department specific orientation could have done my job; meanwhile i was desperate and had no other offers so i took it making 50k per year with my shiny new 175k degree.
I’ve been a programmer at a fortune 100 company for nearly 20 years (did a few years at a smaller company before that). In college I studied history, linguistics, and educational psychology.
We have many similar vocational programs in the US (ours are usually 1 or 2 year), but they have been historically stereotyped as being inferior options that are suited only for people who are incapable of studying at a university.
It is typical for grade-school teachers and advisors to discourage everyone but their least-performing students from considering those options.
I think what is meant here are "Pharmazeutisch-technische Assistenten" (PTA), which are not pharmacists but more like the pharmacists' assistents. There also is a full pharmacy course at German universities, and some regulated exams you need to pass to become a pharmacist. As far as I understand to actually run a pharmacy you need to be a pharmacist with a full degree.
I think there might be a distinction between those who can hand out the medicine already prescribed (pharmacy technician) and those who can prescribe as well (Bachelors and Masters of Pharmacy). At least that is how it is in Norway
In Germany only doctors can prescribe, but there's a big class of pharmaceutical products that can be sold without a prescription, but only by at pharmacies (e.g. not at a supermarket or convenience store). The vocationally trained pharmacy worker ("technician") can do that selling as well I think, but a university trained ("pharmacist") is required in a supervisorial role (e.g. the "technician" level cannot run their own pharmacy, not even a chain branch).
Much of the university requirement is a bit of an anachronism because a lot of the underlying reasoning is nominally based on the scenario of pharmacists manufacturing their own drugs in the backroom, but fortunately there seems to be a lot of political agreement that opening up requirements for theoretical efficiency gains would only enrich aggressive investors without making health noticeably cheaper.
Oh yes that is correct. Sorry then I compared apples and oranges here. “Pharmacists” in Germany only hand out the medics and produce some.
Doctors are the only ones who can prescribe.
I think this is outdated to a degree. Pharmacists like that would be needed in the pharma industry. The times when they mixed ingredients themselves on demand are probably gone.
But then doctors often end up looking at people's rashes all day and handing out hydrocortisone and tylenol.
There's a lot more advanced stuff pharmacists are qualified to do. Pills don't require much work, but liquids and powders may need to be mixed. Also they often can prescribe certain things like morning after pills for birth control.
Also pharmacists work in other places besides retail like hospitals.
That’s true in most countries, but pharmacists are trained to understand the side defects of medication better, able to detect mistakes made by doctors (dosage etc) and provide alternatives.
Some of that is due to regulatory capture. A big role of government certifications and minimum requirements and private accreditations is to artificially limit supply. For example consider the ADA (a private “professional organization”) fighting the introduction of a lower cost role called “Dental Therapist” to perform the most common mechanical procedures cheaply: https://reason.com/2017/02/22/the-nonsensical-argument-again...
Another part of it is that American college education has low upfront costs typically, due to the high supply of government loans and grants. This lets students access college with low short term financial burden and removes the immediacy of considering the cost benefit tradeoff. This is why we have tens of thousands of students graduating every year with degrees in fields with no economic value. There isn’t a clear incentive and feedback signal to tell students “get a degree in what society values” instead of “get a degree in your area of interest”. And then later when they’re unemployable or paid less than they’d like, they act confused as if the system is broken even though it was their choice to not study something that others value enough to pay for. That shows up in various political struggles 10-20 years later, as large quantities of those very same students now feel left behind.
Germany is different not only because of the availability of diverse education paths (like vocational programs), but due to its culture. The trades are respected in Germany. In the US that cultural value on trades has diminished. And now we are seeing many of those trades compensated heavily due to reduced supply.
Interesting, thanks for that insight! The respect for these “craftsmanship jobs” like baker or carpenter is certainly going down though. Everyone wants to study. Although that might be in parts because of the freedom and great time you have when studying.
But on the other hand, I am always very surprised to hear about “college dropouts” who make a living by working e.g. in a clothing store without any formal education. That seems to work.
My hope is that our culture self corrects, but I am not sure how long that will take. My teachers back in school were beating the drum of attending college very early on, and that constant messaging to children has caused them to take college attendance as a foregone conclusion or as a first goal they need to meet in life, even if there are economic signals telling them otherwise. It's hard to deprogram a belief taught to you at a young age.
I suspect that for the culture of study and work to change in America, we can't expect the current workers/students to change their views. It may only happen when a new generation no longer receives a constant push to attend college. If that's the case, then we'd see a change in college attendance and employer attitudes and employee attitudes 20 years in the future.
I remember being in High School and they asked who was going to college. I didn't raise my hand and was then publicly put on the spot to explain why not. Worked out okay for me, but I respect both paths.
We should be glad to have this, especially in these times. One problem is that people often leave the company after completing the apprenticeship and they even get encouraged to switch employers. Every healthy company I worked for didn't like company hoppers and tried to retain employees. Some departments always have some fluctuation, but it is one of the best quality markers for a company in my opinion.
But as you said, lateral entrants might have a difficult time since there is a profession for everything. It is a transient education system though. Even if you only got the lowest kind of basic education, you can do an apprenticeship to get access to university or any higher education. Some people need some time to find motivation.
Receiving specialized clearances is both time-consuming and expensive, but the federal government happily covers the bills. The day after the clearance is issued the employee leaves the government job to return as a security contractor.
The government covers all the expenses, the contracting company pockets all the benefits.
I'm from Italy, my parents were both nurses, they started in the middle 70s, they did apprenticeships while working directly at the Hospital (couple of major Hospitals in Rome).
They received a degree of professional nurse at the end of the three year course that has been made equivalent to the new three year University degree that is required now.
My view on the subject is that it was unnecessary.
My opinion is that in Italy there was a low number of graduates compared to other European countries, so we created this short term University courses to compensate for it that don't match the MD courses, not even closely, they are just the same old apprenticeships updated and rebranded.
Do you know how many years do doctors in Germany have to study before they become fully-fledged doctors?
In the US, it's 4 years of undergraduate college + 4 years of medical school + 3 years (minimum) of medical residency training.
In my native country in SE Asia, it's 5 years of medical school + 2 years of medical residency training + 1 year of remote posting (go to a remote area to work in order to get medical license). And the medical school is publicly funded, so it's pretty much free (you have to buy books yourself, of course, and pay a small amount for lab fees etc. for chemistry, anatomy labs).
To me, the system in the US is unnecessarily complicated/long and it not only burdens wanna-be doctors with debt (not to mention that because of the high cost, mostly the affluent/well-off kids--mostly the kids of doctors/lawyers/well-paid professionals--can now afford go to to medical school), but it helps them justify the $250K+/year salaries (part of the reason why the healthcare is expensive in the US) that they earn right after their residency programs.
> Jobs like nurse, pharmacist, physical therapist, etc. are 3 year apprenticeships in Germany.
You're wrong about the pharmacists (it's a study program almost as hard as medicine), and the fact that nurses are not an academic study in Germany is something that is often criticized.
Germany and the US are opposite ends of the spectrum. The US values general education highly. Germany values specialisation highly. Most places are somewhere in between. I often wonder why certain things require specialization in DE.
Germany also has strong unions across its blue collar workforce which provides a political and social base for the apprenticeship system. These don’t exist anywhere to the same extent in the US, where many in these jobs are forced into independent contractor status and unions are formed on a shop-vote basis, things which were purposely designed to prevent unionization.
Not sure what you mean by pharmacist but a real pharmacist aka 'Apotheker' has to do a full university study of pharmacy. The people selling the medication over the counter don't, but they aren't pharmacists.
True. Practical hands on beats book learning by orders of magnitude. Apprenticeships need to become the norm again. It is ridiculous to get deep in college debt that will take a major portion of your wage earning years to pay back.
In the US a degree is often used as the first filter. Without a degree your resume could just be rejected by a computer before a human even looks at it.
Does depend some countries treat nursing for example differently and is there a path to a degree at the end.
I recall over hearing two specialist nurses discussing what their "first" degree was - this was in a transplant ward.
Three years sounds short back when I was doing my higher level apprenticeships in the uk it was 4 years and it was assumed that some if not all would have done a full craft aprticieship first.
We do have that here too, you can apply to be an electrician (IBEW I think) and other trades and be paid on the job to learn. Unfortunately high paying jobs like IT or pharmacy you have to pay first.
I believe the US requires internships for professional jobs like nurse and pharmacist. Also professional schools are required by licensing and accreditation boards (which are composed of practitioners in the field, not teachers who never leave the ivory tower) to be extremely "hands on". E.g. engineering schools have labs where students make things. Dental schools have clinics where students can serve patients under supervision. Etc.
Also bachelor's degrees get all the attention, but there' associates degrees, two-year degrees offered both by colleges and (very cheap) junior colleges. These include a lot of "less theoretical" stuff like dental hygienist or working with other kinds of specialized technology.
Agreed. I have heard many positive things about Germany's "career funnels," for want of a better term. Something they could definitely improve on in the USA.
It's purely gatekeeping, just like in a lot of other fields. A lot of people make a lot of money from it, so it's not going anywhere anytime soon, unfortunately. I too don't see why one would need a degree to give me a bottle of pills (dispensed by a robot) and read the label (printed by the same robot). I can read it myself, and I'd prefer if human was optional - this reduces the probability of a screw-up.
Because Americans are sold bullshit narratives about university educations intended to justify the mountains of debt required to finance the lifestyles of the people who run those institutions.
I don't know who "you is", but I recently found out that nurses around here make about $100k more than my base salary (and I make a good six figure salary). I went into the wrong field ;-)
I saw a comment on HN the other day about bay area nurses making like $200k. Idk how true it is, but fuck if so, what the hell am I doing with my life.
The highest average salaries are for Cali and Hawaii, about 100k. Taken in for cost of living, cost of college, benefits - I'm pretty sure a german lives quite nicely compared to a nurse in Cali.
I completely reject the idea that college is a job training program. Making connections between a "career" and an undergraduate degree is exactly how we got where we are today.
I'm in support of continuing education but I don't think it needs to be tied to jobs. People should continue learning and pursuing their interests for their whole lives.
If we want job training trade schools exist and do a great job.
Really? I remember half my capstone classmates that couldn't code or focus for more than five minutes on a project. All of them had good grades of course.
People still pursue their own interests, but usually it's outside of a university setting. Mixing these things with job training and then siloing them into an expensive and overly bureaucratic[1] system called "college" is of questionable value.
[1]Compare signing up for a college foreign language course with signing up for a foreign language course outside of college.
Sure people should continue learning and pursuing their interests their whole lives. But why do taxpayers need to subsidize it? If someone has an interest in something as a hobby, they can finance it themselves.
You have a weird definition of the word "subsidize."
I suppose I will allow low-income subsidies, but I consider non-dischargeable federal debt to be less of a subsidy and more of a "sure we'll help, but you better keep paying every f'ing month, or we'll make your life challenging, and we'll still get our money when you die," and less of a "here's some free government money with no strings attached."
It's also an excellent way to "print" money and ensure a steady cash-flow.
I guess it depends on which narrative makes you sleep at night with your worldview.
I didn't say anything about funding education, just the reasoning for it.
Having said that I do believe undergraduate education should be available to everyone. As automation continues to improve there is less and less need for labor. Why not reduce the supply a bit and get more educated citizens out of the deal?
If we say an undergraduate education is not worth taxpayer dollars then the real question seems to be "how much education is enough?" If 16 years is too much how do we know 12 is the right amount? The question leaves open the possibility that 8 years is just as good.
Clearly some amount of taxpayer funded education is beneficial. It seems natural to me that the ideal amount of education will continue to increase as we learn more as a species.
Enrichment of the population can be beneficial and worth fostering? This doesn’t speak to if we should do it, just that there are reasons to argue for it.
Practically, there are plenty of ways to unbundle college. Culturally... it doesn't work like that.
Compare to other cultural institutions, like religion. When religion receded, it wasn't "unbundled." It just receded. The belief in God, the community ties, the source of leadership, the welfarism, moral support, etc.
Same for tribes, villages.
There was a Louise Theroux line about Scientology. Dissident scientologists tried to continue the practices, without the totalitarian cult stuff. It didn't work. All that was left was some squishy, gimmicky, self help stuff that people quickly drifted out of.
That said, change is coming. College is no longer a very good way of being educated, and in the US, the price is crazy high.
What still locks college I to place is that it works for the upper classes, and for the high achievers. They pay less, get more and have the most cultural influence.
IDK if it's a reason to lose hope. It just means we can't invent civilisation on the fly. It doesn't mean we can't acquire civilisation. People made university. We'll make other stuff too, eventually.
College has been a racket for a long time. There have existed huge issues on incentive structures and expectations. The hollywood dream of college life combined with the promise of adding value to an economy with a learned discipline.
The chasm that has grown between that fantasy and what the economy demands has been massive in the past few decades and the university system only increased it with political red tape.
I certainly agree that a layer that connects businesses with potential is the right shape. Something closer to the “apprentice” structure of before.
The problem is that employers would need to value those programs and see them as an effective signal that graduates are of high quality.
We have a lot of those short type of programs in my city in Canada, but employers generally seem to treat them as where you end up if you couldn't get a real degree. There is no signal and thus it is often hard to use it to get a job.
As much as college was a life-redefining experience for me, I also think it's incredibly wasteful and indulgent to send most 18 year olds to college.
To add to the parent's point, one doesn't need to go to college to have an equally valuable "life-redefining experience". You'll hear similar stories and nostalgia from others who went to trade school. the military, mission, Peace Corps, or even just going straight to work. The "life-redefining" experience has more to do with being 20-ish than with being in college.
Indeed, we shouldn't have this huge discrepancy between training to get a job and training once one has a job. There's also a lot of advantages to having a diverse group of individuals rather than separating people out into age cohorts or by lack of professional experience.
Degrees cost the same because Universities don’t understand the value of their degree programs and they don’t understand the costs of each one.
>Colleges also have a lot of issues around cost. They haven't been good at tracking their costs or really knowing what their programs cost. For example, a lot of colleges don't know what it costs them to graduate a nursing major, versus an English major, versus a business major. And that's in part because the college business model is so complicated.
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/16/913500758/as-campuses-become-...
I suspect a lot of their failures to do this in the US are related to easy money from non-defaultable federal loans.
Not only is there less incentive to control costs, but there's a perverse incentive to build stadiums, fancy student dorms, and other things to persuade new students to choose your school over another. Since that student is taking out loans without really evaluating their costs prices get driven up. The student gets left holding the bag eventually.
I understand the intent behind these loans is opportunity - making it so students that would otherwise be rejected for a loan from a bank can get one, but the negative knock on effects are severe. I think ISAs (structured like Lambda's that are very student friendly) align incentives between the school and the student while also giving all students opportunity.
There's also the issue that universities are primarily selling status with some education on the side (particularly true for fluffier majors that are almost entirely status). That's a harder cultural problem to fix.
Software is a good place to get a foothold though since if lambda school can actually deliver students that can write code and pass interview questions they can build out a referral network. Since universities are generally pretty bad at actually teaching students how to write code and pass interview questions there's a good opportunity here.
> I think a better future would be focused, shorter-term educational programs, taken flexibly through one's early career years.
A better future would be free education. Get knowledge and experience without the financial burden. College is more than studying. It's also about making friends, connections and getting to know yourself.
I totally wish I would have gone to college when I was like 24 or 26 rather than 18. I would have been a great student with a much better idea of what I wanted and how to get it, rather than lazy and aimless.
Interestingly, junior colleges appear to be suffering the worst of this drop according to the data linked by the article. BS enrollments are barely hit while enrollments for advanced degrees, the biggest risks of all, are seeing increases.
It's interesting to me that most people in this thread view colleges as jobs programs. In other words, many of us seem to view universities as machines that take in undergraduates at one socioeconomic level and graduate them at a higher socioeconomic level.
If this is how we come to view "higher education," we should be careful because that's not the ideal that gave birth to the university in the form that we recognize it. And so it's not clear to me whether universities as we recognize them will continue to exist if we continue to view them as a jobs programs.
>It's interesting to me that most people in this thread view colleges as jobs programs
What else would it be for the vast majority of people? You're investing thousands of dollars (either directly, or through opportunity cost) and huge chunk of time. If you can't make back that investment, then it just isn't worth for most people. The number of people that could make a living from pure research is always going to be miniscule. The number of people that could justify the expense (or opportunity cost) to just learn something for pleasure, is miniscule.
> that's not the ideal that gave birth to the university in the form that we recognize it
Right. Because originally universities were for the ruling and religious class that could justify the expense of education for its own sake. In modern world, many more people could make that calculation too, but lots of people could not justify the expense ... especially if you put this in these kinds of stark terms.
>And so it's not clear to me whether universities as we recognize them will continue to exist if we continue to view them as a jobs programs.
They could not. And that's a good thing. Humanities are a mess just for the reason that they take tuition and time from students and leave them hanging out to dray, after they graduate with no direct job prospects (i.e. a way to make a living).
> What else would it be for the vast majority of people? You're investing thousands of dollars (either directly, or through opportunity cost) and huge chunk of time. If you can't make back that investment, then it just isn't worth for most people. The number of people that could make a living from pure research is always going to be miniscule. The number of people that could justify the expense (or opportunity cost) to just learn something for pleasure, is miniscule.
You describe the function of the current system, it's not an inevitability. There's massive wealth in the US, and it could absolutely subsidize a different kind of education which is intended to produce an educated and informed citizenry. It's telling that this is not a priority. (One could also imagine a hypothetical culture that does not prioritize earnings so highly, and could value other attributes of service or community more highly than earning high incomes, but let's not get too crazy here...)
In reality, and sadly, higher ed is a series of moats. At the highest tier, the expensive schools protect the oligarchy by keeping their children in different social spheres than the rest of the population. At the level of state schools, it's a zero sum game that people feel forced to enter because their ability to make a living is otherwise severely impaired.
>There's massive wealth in the US, and it could absolutely subsidize a different kind of education which is intended to produce an educated and informed citizenry.
No. It couldn't. You certainly could make a 4-year degrees ostensibly an extension of high-school - where the school is fully paid for - and some countries do do that. There's still opportunity cost of not earning an income for those 4 years. There's no getting around that.
>One could also imagine a hypothetical culture that does not prioritize earnings so highly, and could value other attributes of service or community more highly than earning high incomes, but let's not get too crazy here...
Plenty of people do that already. In fact, most people balance out income with other life goals whether it's through career choices, deciding to stay home and raise kids, or even deciding to stay in some city because your entire family is there. So I don't know what you mean by a "hypothetical culture that does not prioritize earnings so highly", everyone already makes those considerations and though income is important, for most people it is not the most important thing.
>At the highest tier, the expensive schools protect the oligarchy by keeping their children in different social spheres than the rest of the population. At the level of state schools, it's a zero sum game that people feel forced to enter because their ability to make a living is otherwise severely impaired.
I don't agree with that characterization at all. For one thing, state schools provide quality education (that is as good as any high-priced ivy league school). I'm not sure what the zero sum game you're referring to is. Many people do see university as a vocational institution and what's wrong with that? Making Nobody is forcing anybody to do anything, and most people are excited about becoming teachers, or software developers, lawyers, nurses or architects.
> For one thing, state schools provide quality education
Long ago I worked at a startup in Los Angeles. We had software engineers from all over, but because of the location many from UCLA or Cal Tech. We used to have a joke about hiring a "CS major from Brown". I am sure Brown is a great school. But some of the Ivy League educated people that we would interview would have a ton of confidence and polish but not necessarily better technical skills. So they felt they deserved a better job, but it wasn't clear they were equipped to do a better job.
> For one thing, state schools provide quality education (that is as good as any high-priced ivy league school). I'm not sure what the zero sum game you're referring to is.
I know UC-Davis provides as good or better an education than Stanford (not at all sarcastic and meant in an earnest way), but it seems willfully blind to not see that they serve different social and economic roles in the American class system.
>but it seems willfully blind to not see that they serve different social and economic roles in the American class system.
Sure. Just like a BMW is a status symbol in a way that a Toyota Corolla is not. The irony in this case, which also applies to state vs ivy league schools, is that a Corolla is a more reliable car (cheaper to operate and cheaper to maintain too!) - so as a car it is 'better', though just not as 'cool'. Similarly, a state school will provide you a quality education at a fraction of the cost and afford you all or most of the same kinds of opportunities as a ivy league school.
So what does that mean for the 'American class system'? To me it means that we live in a a society where you can spend lots of money to acquire 'status'... or you can save that money and do your own thing.
If we are using car brands as analogies, sure, in some way a BMW is a status symbol on public road, but on race tracks, pretty much every non-SUV BMW model would excel. Look at how many non-purpose-built BMW production cars that entered the 2019 VLN race series. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_VLN_Series
After a car leaves the showroom, it's ultimately up to the owner to decide what to do with the car. A Corolla is great at getting groceries, but a BMW can not only take you to supermarkets but also win races on Sundays.
Oh BTW, BMW has just won the 24 Hours of the Nürbergring this past Sunday.
Run an Estimated Family Contribution sometime. Elite schools are cheaper than public, or at least similar, for kids in the middle / upper middle class range. Status is about admissions, not tuition. And sometimes about the intellectual hazing ritual (MIT, Chicago).
> I don't agree with that characterization at all.
Are you denying there's a networking benefit to attending an Ivy League school? I don't have the article I was thinking of handy, but this source (0) seems to say the main advantages are networking and status.
The sad part is that with the exception of those graduates with degrees that require mathematical or statistical rigor, I don't find my college educated friends to be better informed than my friends without degrees.
If there is one thing I could change about education in the US, I would add classes in statistics starting in the same grade we start teaching algebra and I'd have students take both a pure math and a pure statistics classes every semester until they finish their schooling.
Classes in philosophy, especially the philosophy of science I think should also be required. As should classes in logic.
The problem is that education has become a factory that teaches people what to think and not how to think.
There’s an old concept from classical education: rhetoric. The art of persuading people with words, writing, speech, debate. A small corner of students today, law and politics, learn this.
In earlier times, we were sending a few people to college to be leaders, and thus all were expected and required to learn to persuade. The hoi polloi were not in college, and were to be convinced by said rhetorically trained leaders. There were many more hoi polloi, and democracy provided the check and balance between the educated and manipulative (in good and bad ways), and the unarmed masses.
Now we have many more topics to cover and many more students, thus the term Universe-ity. Few students learn rhetoric formally. Which is good in the sense that when there is an expectation of needing to argue, it descends into sophistry. Arguments about how many angels fit on the head of a pin, etc.
What all non-rhetoric students should learn is how not to be convinced, not to be persuaded. Something that has been called critical thinking. There have been a lot of writings in the past on how to train students in critical thinking. It was a hot topic in post-WWII education. When 60 million people die, arguably because of a lack of critical thinking, and those that survive go to college on the GI Bill, they start asking good questions. When hundreds of thousands of older students who lived through the horrors of modern war entered campus, they made it clear to the Academy that critical thinking was a priority. That sort of moral authority, gained at the end of a rifle barrel or in a cockpit facing life and death, is lacking now.
Expand that to persuaders in the visual arts, and it becomes media studies. Media studies as the transliterate counterpart of critical thinking and classical rhetoric in text. Logic falls under rhetoric. And, when you think about it, there is a broad overlap between statistics and media studies. I recommend the book, How To Lie With Statistics, published in 1954. Tufte wrote some good stuff too.
Not everybody needs to learn to be a persuader in college. That can be picked up later as needs arise or not. But everyone coming out of college needs to learn to be a critical thinker, an anti rhetorician. There are standard techniques, philosophies, ways of thinking, psychologies that could be bundled together in a Freshman course. I’m still a fan of General Semantics and cognitive bias research myself. Mixing humanities and STEM in a common cause. Fifty years ago as a high school senior, I developed a unit plan to do something similar for high school students.
Looking at prior examples, state-subsidized education seems to become indoctrination at the worst possible time. The value of education being determined by employers may be suboptimal, but it's at least decentralised enough to resist mass dishonesty or tyranny. If you have an idea to replace the current system I'd want to know how it doesn't lose that feature before I listened further.
Many European countries pay for their citizens’ university education, and from experience I can confirm that there is none of the sort of indoctrination that you are concerned about.
If anything I’d say more college-educated citizens is a shield against tyranny, as it trains you to be more intellectually critical, and therefore (one would hope)c , inoculated somewhat against anti-factual biases.
In Europe far fewer people go to college vs the US (apart from Norway, UK, NL). Moreover, they have significantly more rigorous secondary educations, especially on the technical track.
Though note that the gap closes when you compare "equivalent to a 4-year degree or higher" rather than "equivalent to a 2-year degree or higher". Seems that 2/3 year degrees are much more common in the US for some reason. Wonder if that's 3-year bachelor's degrees vs. the more common 4-year in many European institutions.
E.g. US/UK/DE/FR, pct completed for 25-34 yr olds:
2 year: 47/49/30/45
4-year: 36/42/28/28
I'd be interested in further reading/analysis as this is a pretty rough eyeball of the tabular data on my part, and I'm not claiming to have understood this fully.
Do you have any examples? My university education, at a state university, was paid for by my state government. I have no idea what 'indoctrination' you're talking about. The only requirements that the state government gave my university were the requirements under their land-grant status.
Colleges in the US are very skewed ideologically, towards the far left. This has been a very clear and consistent pattern building up over a few decades, but it has become obvious only in the last 5-10 years, where that bias has been exercised much more openly to promote one worldview and suppress all others. I recommend following The College Fix (http://www.thecollegefix.com/) or FIRE (https://www.thefire.org/) to keep up with stories on this topic. There are also other publications like the Chronicle (https://www.chronicle.com/) or Inside Higher-ed (https://www.insidehighered.com/) that feature some of this content.
Here are several examples of political bias/indoctrination/monocultures on college campuses:
I could keep going but this is what I was able to find quickly through search. The reality is that there is no room for views that go against the prevailing culture on most campuses today. Those who share the prevailing views are now in the camp of using the power of their supermajority to suppress/censor/punish/ban anyone who disagrees with them. Honest debate and truth seeking cannot take place in such an environment - and if that is true, then it follows that university environments tell people WHAT to think, not HOW to think, and that constitutes indoctrination.
The question posed is not whether the political viewpoint of academicians lean in a particular direction. The question is regards to whether government-funded schools enact the biases of the government.
You evidence demonstrates that is not the case -- many of those left-leaning professors are employed by institutions funded by the governments of red states.
I misunderstood. Federal and state funding do make up a significant portion of public university budgets, but post-recession, federal funding makes up a greater share than state funding (https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-bri...). Regardless, I don't feel universities enact the biases of governments, either at the state or federal level. I think there is a general bias in the academic community that crosses those lines.
I think that bias (perceived or real) is more of a factor of US higher-education tradition of than anything else. If you get a liberal arts degree, you'll take courses focused in nuanced discussions of arts, humanities, sociology, etc... and those courses are going to be taught by people who inherently thought those topics were important enough to dedicate their lives to.
Of course, it's completely reasonable for a sociology professor to think that social issues are important, just as much as we might expect a business or economics professor to believe that business or economics is important. And the things that people think are important influences a person's politics.
If you look at the academic disciplines that are interest groups that conservative politics align with, you'll find conservatives there: petroleum engineering, business, marketing, religious studies, etc. The thing is, there's just not that many academic focus areas that contemporary conservative politics prioritizes in their messaging.
In the end, I don't think the bias of individual professors at a university is a concern as much as institutional bias is. You can never really hire a professor who doesn't have an inherent interest in their own work. The important part is that we continue the western tradition of well-rounded study so that people are exposed to as many differing viewpoints as possible.
Your point about biases aligning with the field is interesting. I think it depends on how "generalized" a field is. "Economics" for example, allows exploration of both pro-capitalist and anti-capitalist perspectives. However, social science has been subdivided into many narrow fields like "gender studies", which include presupposed assumptions. If instead these same subjects fell under a single broader field called "social science", then there is room for academic exploration both in favor of and against such assumptions.
We probably both agree that individual bias cannot realistically be eliminated. However, I feel that despite biases, individuals shouldn't practice disingenuous academic behavior. As a quick example of this, I'll offer that sociologists regularly claim there is a significant gender pay gap without performing a multivariate study that controls for various confounding factors. If they exercised more rigor and held a sincere mentality of truth seeking, they would explore those obvious contradictions to their assumptions more readily, and also welcome the same explorations from their students and peers.
It has been nearly a decade for me, but I went to a large state school for undergraduate and an even larger state school for graduate. I too have no idea what you're talking about.
Rather than replying to my personal anecdote with a hostile "you don't know what you're talking about", I'm sure you'd find yourself with fewer downvotes if you instead provided your own personal anecdote, or some objective information supporting your argument.
I thought that this statement was sufficiently self-evident as to not require examples, anecdotal or otherwise. The comments and downvotes would suggest otherwise, so here goes a basic one.
Look at the voting registration or political donations among academics in the United States. They are skewed almost exclusively toward one party, despite the fact that the country itself is quite divided. Even arguing that it's common for a field to self-select and skew this way or that, there is an extreme political monoculture among the instructors at most U.S. universities.
Now, can one _prove_ that this leads to an insular intellectual culture there that presents one side of an issue? Probably not, that's a hard thing to prove because persuasion and beliefs are a very complex and multi-faceted topic. However, common sense would dictate that yes, when all of your instructions are aligned more or less with one part of the political spectrum the end result is a lopsided presentation of things that has the effect of indoctrinating students to the dominant political view of the instructors, even if that was never the explicit intent.
One example from my own experience. I had a public health professor who did a multi-part lecture on the evil of the U.S. embargo on Cuba. This took place over several classes resulting in about four hours of total lecture time, and included a fair amount of history. At no point during any lecture did she mention the Cuban missile crisis, i.e. the Cuban government allowing the Soviet Union to place nuclear weapons 90 miles off of the American coast, putting a large portion of the population at risk of nuclear destruction. Now I don't think this necessarily justifies the embargo, but to spend four days of class discussing the embargo on Cuban without a single mention the Cuban missile crisis is intellectually irresponsible at best, and a example of someone's personal bias worming its way into the instruction.
"There is none of the indoctrination you speak of"
Defunding an area of study because the ruling party doesn't like it sure looks like state propaganda to me. Funding coming from the government makes that easier.
Part of a solid academic education includes entertaining viewpoints that you might not necessarily agree with. Academics is the proper place to have those discussions. If your tax dollars don't support an unfettered academic discussion, they are by definition, supporting a biased agenda.
That's kind of the point I'm trying to make. When governments start dictating to institutions of learning is when voices independent of government are needed most.
Edit: I should add that, while most of the people who think college indoctrination is a problem would think it's propaganda to teach gender studies in the first place and defunding it is not, the very fact that an administration has to make that decision at all means that someone somewhere is going to feel the government is indoctrinating their children.
To maybe add some more particulars to this, in most Western countries governmental authority is legitimized via public opinion. We all have heard that "a well educated citizenry is critical to democracy" but one ought to also consider that one's education will impact one's opinions. So state funded education could theoretically manipulate mass opinion in favor of government backed positions over time (maybe by framing historical events in a particular way for example).
Manipulating public opinion may seem petty or roundabout for a government but having legitimized policy creates a lot of stability for decision makers so it seems worthwhile. The gambit even pays off when the majority of the public isn't persuaded by education too, since the people who agree with you are by definition the "well educated" you can give their opinion more weight without seeming like a tyrant.
That's the idea being alluded to by the parent here at least I think.
Yeah I suppose to detect a situation like this you'd need to do some sort of meta analysis on changes in how historical narratives are framed versus government policy. Like, maybe some country goes from ally to non ally and then historical narratives around that country shift to a slightly more negative tone. I dunno.
My opinion was more shaped by accounts of education when state power waned - By the accounts I've heard Rome, the USSR, the Ottomans etc all tried to retain power by tightening control over institutions of education. It's a natural lever to grab for when things get worse, and it's also when these institutions most need to be independent.
All institutions, public, private, and communities, have a narrative that favors them. That's not particular to universities.
However out of all the institutions I have personally and anecdotally interacted with, universities have by the far the most openness to dissenting ideas, by a very substantial margin.
A lot of people revel at the amount of internal gossip and conflict within universities, but the fact that it exists, rather than there being people kicked out without question, is a testament to its flexibility.
> Looking at prior examples, state-subsidized education seems to become indoctrination at the worst possible time.
3/4 of the university students in the US are currently enrolled in a state-subsidized public institution. This has been the status-quo for many decades.
To the contrary, US state universities are known for their solid educational foundations and research output -- and the reputation of various private-universities in the US is rather spotty.
Is it true that Germany “tracks” students early and aggressively? I.e. if you’re not doing well academically, then you are encouraged to use the vocational track.
Not that there’s anything wrong with vocational training compared to a university. The plumber who came out for a 15 minute house call probably makes more than I do in a year.
> Not that there’s anything wrong with vocational training compared to a university.
The quality of work put out by German tradesmen is also world-class: I think the system deserves praise. Small manufacturing businesses are the backbone of German exports.
I did say it was suboptimal. The fact that you chose to insult rather than put forward solutions tells me you either don't understand the strengths of such a system or know your own solution would fall short.
>At the level of state schools, it's a zero sum game that people feel forced to enter because their ability to make a living is otherwise severely impaired.
What you're missing here is that colleges... teach stuff. You are more skilled after you get a good STEM degree than you were before you got that degree. Medical schools aren't a "zero sum game" or way to protect the oligarchy, they teach you how to practice medicine. This tangible, practical value of education is missing from the humanities.
The humanities in theory would teach humanity. That is, the patterns of literature, philosophy, art, and communication that lead to the best human outcomes and amplify human talent and virtue. It should be training in how to engage with the wider world productively and positively.
The alternative to viewing college like a jobs program is not "pure research".
There is still a stark difference between someone who has the expectation that: "college will get me a job" and "college will give me the education I need to be successful". And that difference is not whether or not someone is employable.
There are many activities that universities facilitate, which are of upmost importance to society, but are not vocationally important. These activities should not be undermined. If you want a vocational education, you really should be attending an institution with that goal.
The vast majority of people leverage their liberal arts education in furtherance of not only their career, but their quality of life in general. Narrowing that scope is a regression, not an improvement.
If vocational schools aren’t offering the types of educations that job seekers are looking for, that’s a a failure of our vocational schools, not a failure of our universities.
Many of these universities would state the point: university education enriches the mind, introducing students to a broad range of topics, perspectives, and readings that were pivotal to human history and human civilization. For example, at UChicago, the Core Curriculum has most of the students reading Das Kapital by Marx, a text with profound implications for the history of the 20th century.
I'm agnostic about the value of this: on the one hand, we need informed citizenry who can dissect media and think critically. On the other hand, we need practical skills and we don't need a massively indebted younger generation.
The DIRE push for undergraduate education in many K-12 schools has probably undervalued solid vocational training. What does it say that I'm now into woodworking and making things, but in my entire 22 year education, no one ever showed me how to use a single power tool.
>on the one hand, we need informed citizenry who can dissect media and think critically
That isn't what universities are creating though. They're creating people who think one specific way about the world. The problem is that they only teach Marxist ideas about the 20th century, and you have to go elsewhere to get a balanced and realistic view of what actually happened. My humanities classes 20 years ago all glossed over the horrors of Stalin's gulags, the horrors of Mao's great leap forward, and all the death caused by Marxist ideas being put into practice at a wide scale in the 20th century. I had to learn about all these things from my history classes. My humanities classes were all talking about the evils of capitalism while glossing over the 20-100 million dead from starvation and exposure under totalitarian communist regimes. I can't imagine it's gotten any less biased and one sided in the past 20 years.
>My humanities classes 20 years ago all glossed over
>I had to learn about all these things from my history classes.
So the education provided you with multiple, different viewpoints, then. If you evaluate specific, individual classes, yes, you'll find a bias depending on the specific, individual faculty. I had faculty ranging from those who extolled the virtues of a strong-man in the white house, to those who wanted a complete anarchy.
I'm willing to bet most university/college educations contain a little bit of everything.
Or, put more simply, wide ranging viewpoints. . . .
Depending on how you define "a little bit of everything", you'd lose that bet. Colleges have always leaned left politically, but the viewpoint imbalance has been getting larger in recent years. The last study I read said that in social sciences, colleges average 17:1 liberal to conservative professors, whereas in previous decades it was around 4:1. My wife got out of teaching at college because the schools were more interested in pushing a far left ideology that appeals to college students than actually giving them a good education.
> The problem is that they only teach Marxist ideas about the 20th century
To you, what is a "Marxist idea" about the 20th century?
And if your teacher really did gloss over the crimes against humanity committed by Stalin / the USSR, Mao / the PRRC, then, well, that person was a poor teacher.
If you want to learn humanities, you can pretty much read any book anytime in your life (in fact most of the teaching in humanities is just assigning books to read). I would say that there the value added of a college over an online reading list is marginal. For STEM, completely different story, it is very hard for someone who hasn’t been trained formally to pick it up later in one’s career.
>in fact most of the teaching in humanities is just assigning books to read
I don't know what college you went to, but at mine, reading was the homework, and the discussion on the books (even with the professor's inherent biases) in the class with my peers is what developed the profound thoughts and ideas that I still carry with me. Humanities might not contribute to jobs, (I'm STEM) but I don't for a second regret the philosophy classes I took.
A lot of this is dependent on class size and class level. It's not until you get to class sizes of less than 20 and at the 300 level and up classes that you get actual discussion instead of lecturing and leading questions. And even smaller class size and higher level isn't a guarantee of good critical dialogue.
I went to a large well ranked public university class in the United States, have both a STEM and non-STEM degree with over 200 credit hours over 4.5 years and I can think of exactly two humanities classes that had real discussions that weren't just being assigned books, largely uncritically accepting their contents and being lectured. Both classes with real dialogue were higher level classes with just over 10 people in them.
One class was about the intersection of art and technology and the other was a philosophy of science class.
There was way more critical thought and dialogue on average in my STEM classes.
If you want to learn humanities, you can pretty much read any book anytime in your life (in fact most of the teaching in humanities is just assigning books to read).
The pragmatic part of humanities is argumentation and writing. You can't get that from just reading.
What you're saying is like "the value of a computer science degree over just reading programming books is marginal." It's ignoring that the most important part of the learning happens in application.
Good luck with James Joyce's Ulysses ... or Samuel Beckett. Or Thomas Pynchon. Or -- the author you didn't even know existed until the domain expert (aka professor) assigned/suggested it.
Or, you know ... history?
Or even Shakespeare, for that matter. For some, a course makes reading such material hugely more enlightening.
This is also happening in K12 schools. Seattle, which has a famously far-left leaning school system, is creating a plan to inject ethnic studies and progressive ideology into math classes: https://www.seattletimes.com/education-lab/new-course-outlin...
>“How is math manipulated to allow inequality and oppression to persist?”
That doesn't seem like injecting ethnic studies into math to me.
In fact, I think this is an excellent type of question. Schools should be teaching more critical thinking exactly like this, in every domain. For example, manipulation of scales, axes, statistical bias, and mathematical context are one of the key tools that people like climate change deniers use to spread their propaganda. Mathematics education should be about more than just handraulically banging out a bunch of long division. Interpretation and context are key underpinnings of mathematics.
Oh course I do, which is why several of my comments in this thread were about the importance of statistics education.
I'm okay with having classes pointing out propaganda so long as it is even handed in pointing out propaganda irrespective of agenda. If a professor only points out the propaganda of those with whom they disagree, that's a bad class.
Part of educational development has to include the realization that your instructors themselves have individual biases. To expect educators to be completely even handed and bias free is unrealistic.
Agree and I think many people here on HN realize that. I can't say the same for many of the people I know that are college educated, which leads me to think that we're largely missing that aspect of educational development.
no you're right. I was able to read the article in full and it doesn't say anything like that. the only thing it said about the math department was that they were going to allow students to apply for "lenient grading" if they felt their studies were negatively impacted by the george floyd killing.
to be fair, there is a subset of leftist thought that advocates placing lived experiences above statistical arguments. you can see this play out on social media where people are scolded for not being fully convinced by an individual's personal story about {insert macro issue}. the argument here is not that math itself is racist (how could it be?), but that the study and application of it can be. in other words, if statistics is disproportionately studied by an already-dominant subset of society, its application will likely lead to conclusions that more or less support the status quo.
If your studies were negatively impacted by <whatever factor outside your control>, why would "lenient grading" be the right response?
"You get a no-penalty 'incomplete' and can complete the course later" seems vastly more appropriate than saying you learned something that you haven't. I'm sure some people were negatively impacted; they should not suffer a poor grade as a result. Nor should they be granted a better grade than the ability they demonstrated.
> If your studies were negatively impacted by <whatever factor outside your control>, why would "lenient grading" be the right response?
I'm not necessarily saying it is, just that the issue covered in the article is only tangentially related to the "math is now racist" strawman. personally, I think no-penalty incomplete would be more fair, although I'm sure someone could find issues with that too.
my guess is "lenient grading" starts to seem more reasonable when you take into account what a lot of schools were already doing in response to covid and remote learning at this time. giving incompletes is a reasonable measure to take when you have a couple students with extenuating circumstances. but what do you do when almost all the students have been impacted by a sudden shift to remote learning? you can't just give the whole class an incomplete and delay everyone by some fraction of a semester.
> Are we giving grades based on effort/attempt or based on knowledge acquired?
it's not really that simple. grades are just a way to measure how well students have met the course expectations. the expectations may or may not be reasonable in the first place. if there was no curving and year after year, 90% of students fail a course, the material would get adjusted. either fewer topics would be covered, or less difficult problems would be selected from each topic. the syllabus itself is an implicit curve, in a way. when someone designs a data structures course, they design it in a way that a target portion of the students will actually pass the class. they don't just say "well, arrays, linked lists, binary trees, rb-trees, BSPs, splay trees, octtrees, hashmaps, bloom filters, skiplists, and all the different types of heaps are essential topics and everyone who can't master every single one in 16 weeks fails". there's no objective standard for exactly what set of topics needs to be covered and learned in a particular course (or major), you just try to teach as much as is reasonable.
> no one ever showed me how to use a single power tool.
This is because using power tools is most of the time following safety protocols and reading the instruction manual. if you learned how to read well, you shouldn't need someone to teach you this (unless you're using highly specialized tools for niche situations, but that's more of vocational training)
What? There's a lot more to learning the intersection of power tools and a given craft area X than just how to not hurt yourself.
Why would I use a spade vs a single point vs a Forstner drill bit? When would I use a backer board? When would I use conventional cutting vs climb cutting? If I want to achieve tolerance X on face F, what should be my sequence of operations? How can I fixture this work to give me the best results? When is a circular saw vs a table saw vs a jig saw vs a mitre saw appropriate?
The cost of universities has also ballooned in both raw costs and risk adjusted terms in the last few decades, likely driving out most people who historically would have viewed their "opportunity cost" as worth it.
In the 1970s one could earn ~$2.75/hr as an entry level employee at a union job in a factory (~$20/hr today). UVA instate tuition and fees were only $484/yr, meaning that over a summer a student could earn ~2 years worth of tuition and fees.
At the time, spending the opportunity cost also opened doors just from having done it - substantially lowering the risk.
The costs really exploded in the past 15 or so years.
I'm in my mid-30s and managed to pay for the first two years of (community) college out of pocket while waiting tables. Quarterly tuition was ~$1500; I just cut a check at the registrar after scheduling my classes. By the time I went back for my BS a decade later, costs were closer to $10k per semester.
aye - The numbers I quoted were from my father's experience. I ended up carrying 1 years pay in non-dischargeable debt on graduation in 2010. Even on an accelerated payment schedule it took 10 years to fully pay down the debt. Paradoxically my initial inability to pay the debt nearly cost me my first job.
> The number of people that could justify the expense (or opportunity cost) to just learn something for pleasure, is miniscule
I disagree with that. Most people who enter college in "soft sciences" or "humanities" these days understand very well that it's a risky investment that will probably not get them rich, or not even get a job. Still they enroll into it, because the knowledge and understanding they seek, the relationship they want to build with the world, is not tied to the brand of their car or the size of their house.
a college freshman (or high school senior) may factually understand that their chosen major is very risky, but I don't think most of them are in a position to really understand the choice they are making. I knew a lot of people in highschool who bravely said they were willing to starve for their art (or other low expected income passion). it's an easy thing to say when you haven't yet had to grapple with the day-to-day experience of actually supporting yourself. several of these folks realized they were making a mistake halfway through college and pivoted. of the ones that finished the original degree, most of them had to find some unrelated work to make ends meet. I can't imagine the sense of regret that must come from paying off debt for a degree you don't even use.
> > And so it's not clear to me whether universities as we recognize them will continue to exist if we continue to view them as a jobs programs.
> They could not. And that's a good thing. Humanities are a mess just for the reason that they take tuition and time from students and leave them hanging out to dray, after they graduate with no direct job prospects (i.e. a way to make a living).
Why is that a good thing? Just because the humanities don't funnel into jobs the way STEM does doesn't mean that they should cease to exist. Every book you've read, movie you've watched, song you've listened to, play you've seen, etc. has been a direct result of our journey through the humanities, and I'm positive nobody thinks those forms of entertainment should just "cease to exist". It's the same thing for countless other fields of study universities offer. The problem is not that these fields don't have the ROI of STEM, it's that the cost of education is way too fucking high.
Every book you've read, movie you've watched, song you've listened to, play you've seen, etc. has been a direct result of our journey through the humanities, and I'm positive nobody thinks those forms of entertainment should just "cease to exist".
Ah yes, but how many of these would require obtaining a 4-year degree with 6-figure debt?
In the words of Matt Damon from Good Will Hunting “You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library.”
And yet he attended Harvard, until acting picked up. You also kind of reinforced the actual point he was making - the preppy douchebag didn’t actually understand the material he was quoting. Rather, he had just memorized a bunch of stuff, which without comprehension, provides little value.
Yes and unfortunately thats the humanities education that most students get. How to game the system through rote memorization in order to get a high GPA so they can get into grad school.
Sure there are exceptions to the rule, just like how there are people who have contributed greatly to the humanities without stepping foot in a degree granting institution.
Although no attendance records for the period survive, most biographers agree that Shakespeare was probably educated at the King's New School in Stratford,[19][20][21] a free school chartered in 1553,[22] about a quarter-mile (400 m) from his home. Grammar schools varied in quality during the Elizabethan era, but grammar school curricula were largely similar: the basic Latin text was standardised by royal decree,[23][24] and the school would have provided an intensive education in grammar based upon Latin classical authors.[25]
> The number of people that could justify the expense (or opportunity cost) to just learn something for pleasure, is miniscule.
When you make this argument for college, it seems reasonable to also ask “is grade 12 the ideal point at which this fitness function is optimized for most?” Maybe it should be after grade 14. Maybe it should be after grade 10.
> What else would it be for the vast majority of people?
Its supposed to be to attain an education, but judging from the communication capabilities of many college graduates education was clearly not the top priority.
> Humanities are a mess just for the reason that they take tuition and time from students and leave them hanging out to dray, after they graduate with no direct job prospects (i.e. a way to make a living).
If you wanted job prospects you would instead focus upon a professional license, which is not education. In addition to better job prospects it's also cheaper and substantially less time consuming to attain.
Right. Because originally universities were for the ruling and religious class that could justify the expense of education for its own sake.
That doesn't sound right to me. That may have been partly true, but education was also just necessary training because the jobs demanded literacy and other specialized training.
Values have changed. Universities were one only for the rich. Students were only of slightly above average intelligence (Jordan Peterson mentions this). Some time in the 20th century (I'm guessing 50's or 60's) we recognised the importance of education, and universities changed from being a place of the financial elite to more of a place of the intellectual elite.
In the 70's, and earlier parts of the 80's, a university degree was your passport to a job. You had a university degree. You KNEW something. In the UK students were given a grant.
As the saying goes, what a wise man does in the beginning, a fool does in the end. Time passed, this mindset persisted, but things changed. The whole thing became increasingly commoditised, universities now seem less like seats of learning and more like commercial enterprises, with people talking all manner of crap about "return on investment". Graduation fees were tagged on and students nickeled-and-dimed at every opportunity.
The US seems to be particularly egregious in that respect.
The whole thing has become a fiasco. Universities and governments want to keep the game going as long as possible, with young people being suckered into enormous debt on the premise that they'll get a good job out of it. That premise is looking increasingly sketchy.
What "should" happen, IMO, is a return to the 70's. School pupils should get a good educational grounding through O levels. You can then get a job, or pursue further education either with an academic bent (A levels) or a vocational bent. For the really bright, the possibility of university exists. For the less bright, but those who want to pursue skilled professions requiring a lot of knowledge, there is (or at least was) Polytechnics.
We don't have that, though. What we have is a monstrosity of a system that still seems to be able to sustain itself despite common sense dictating that it is no longer fit for purpose.
How long can this continue? I don't know. I do hope it collapses, though. We need a better system than the one we've got at the moment.
> Humanities are a mess just for the reason that they take tuition and time from students and leave them hanging out to dray, after they graduate with no direct job prospects (i.e. a way to make a living).
It seems like this is a rumor that refuses to die. Humanities majors do just fine.
According to a 2018 ACS survey,[0] humanities majors are looking at 2.13% unemployment, which is comparable to other fields. The same survey shows that people who majored in the humanities earn comparable salaries to their peers in other disciplines.[1]
A 2014 study in Forbes found that humanities majors go on to earn even more than their peers in other disciplines as they all advance on their chosen career paths.[2]
I'm curious why the image of the deadbeat humanist persists, especially in an era where we need people who have been trained to look at potentially misleading information, identify why it is misleading, and point us towards better sources. Rampant misinformation in this social media age has shown us that "the facts" are much more slippery than anyone would like, and we need people who have been trained in the subjective arts of parsing contradictory information and -- even more importantly -- justifying their interpretation to others.
The ideal that gave birth to the university in the form that we recognize it was tied to the fact that until very recently, the university was an intellectual playground for the wealthy. Most of these folks either didn't need to work for a living or already had good jobs waiting for them via well-established social connections among their fellow elite.
The vast majority of people need to work for a living and need practical skills that others are willing to pay them for. The idea that the university should exist for "learning for the sake of learning", and the idea that "everyone should go to college" is incompatible. You can have one, you can have the other, you can't realistically have both.
If you want to learn for the sake of learning (I know I do), there's never been a better time to do it. The average person with a $200 laptop and an internet connection has access to more and better information than a Harvard graduate student did 50 years ago. We need to rid ourselves of the notion that college == education and that education == college. At this point a college degree is mainly just proof that you are diligent and were able to follow directions for four years while meeting deadlines.
I think university should exist for “learning for the sake of learning” and that “everyone should go to college.” I don’t think it’s incompatible. I think someone becoming more educated has a lot of positive externalities. I think the list of positive externalities is so great that we should provide free tuition, room, board, and even a stipend to anyone willing and able to attend college. This should be funded from tax dollars, and seen as an investment in people. All of the money _will_ be returned by increased tax revenue from a more educated populous but this is just a side effect. The real benefit comes from having a more educated community capable of a high level of critical thinking.
I think you're largely right, but it's a very tough sell, particularly because of the opportunity cost. It's easy to make the case that learning is valuable in its own right, but it becomes much tougher to say, "learning is valuable in its own right so we should spend more money on it instead of spending that money on pressing and immediate issue X".
On average a college graduate will have one million dollars more of lifetime earnings than a high school graduate. This one million dollars will be taxed at at least twelve percent federally. Twelve percent is a very conservative estimation on the federal tax rate of that money. This means the federal tax revenue of a college grad is at least one hundred and twenty thousand dollars more than a high school graduate. The average net price of a public college education with room, board, fees, and tuition is fifteen thousand four hundred dollars a year, or just under sixty two thousand dollars for four years.
In four years the federal government spends $62,000 to send someone to college.
Over their lifetime the federal government receives $120,000 back.
Today we create jobs for staff, professors, admins, etc at university. Tomorrow we have a more educated and skilled workforce.
Of course, what I really want is for my fellow citizens to be more well read, better critical thinkers, and better informed citizens. Sometimes the best way to sell someone on something isn’t to focus on what you want out of the deal.
> On average a college graduate will have one million dollars more of lifetime earnings than a high school graduate.
This does not scale. Adding more college degrees does not make that many more productive jobs exist. It just moves the education bar higher for the jobs that do.
College degrees quadrupled since the 1960s. Productive jobs haven't. We already have an oversupply of degree holders working at Starbucks.
The stark reality is that the human race doesn't and can't have enough aggregate demand to productively employ everybody. The necessities of life - food, housing, medical - really only take about 10% of the population to produce and supply. Maybe another 20% in productivity-adjacent areas like finance and government services and other administration. Everything else is leisure and service economy, and there isn't infinite demand for that.
Indeed, it's just a correlation: if we sort people by how much they earn, of course university degrees will be more prevalent in the high end than in the low end. It could be that degrees cause more income, or that more income causes degrees, or that there is a common cause: people from a more well-to-do social backgrounds tend to get degrees.
Is going to college the cause of someone earning more? Or is the type of person that goes to college someone who inherently will earn more money regardless of the education level they receive? Seems to me if you took Harvard students (and not the legacy/donor admits) and had them stop at a high school education, they'd still do way better than other non-college graduates.
How many people did you know in school who were there for the education? Everyone I knew in my engineering program was there for the degree to get a good job, only 1 or 2 people I ever met genuinely wanted to understand the material, and it was kind of strange upon first realizing that. This was in a top state university.
I studied computer science at a state university. It is fully accredited, but otherwise has very little prestige.
Maybe 25% of the students in the program were there to learn how to make video games. They weren’t there to get a job in making video games. They weren’t there because there is money in making video games. They were there because they wanted to know enough about computer programming to make video games, and everyone had ideas about what type of game they wanted to make.
Disagree on the "playground" historical note students hundreds of years ago would probably not agree at all, basically since life back then was tougher for everyone including elite compared to tosay. Somewhat agree with 2d and 3d paragraphs though
That's because college-as-increasing-earnings-potential is the simplest way to rationalise taking on a lifetime of debt.
Spending $100,000 to boost your income by $20,000 per year for life is a very simple argument.
On the other hand, to argue a manual labourer with a $100,000 philosophy degree that didn't boost their income at all had nonetheless made a good investment requires much more complex arguments about the nature of human happiness and the inherent value of knowledge to the individual and society. Which in turn leads to a wealth of follow-on questions which can't be answered with any finality.
Consider knowledge as a strict tradeoff against things like interesting vacations and buying a house N years earlier, and it's genuinely tricky. Would you trade buying a house at 30 with less knowledge of liberal arts for buying a house at 40 and knowing a BS worth of liberal arts?
Luckily (unluckily) the decision is easier because to buy a house at 30, you likely need the degree too, so the question is flipped.
Philosophy majors are about the only humanities major with a marketable skill: actual skills in critical thinking and not largely an illusion of critical thinking
As such they do better financially than other humanities majors:
I mean, universities were born out of the need to train Christian ministers in the faith. Even the earliest American universities were of that form; Harvard was founded by the Massachussets colony to train clergymen.
So in a sense, they were always jobs programs. If today they seem secular, it's because society was able to reshape the institution over time. For example, the Morril Act, which established the land grant universities, made it's utilitarian purpose explicit:
> without excluding other scientific and classical studies and including military tactic, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in such manner as the legislatures of the States may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life.
But it's not clear to me that universities _should_ exist as we commonly imagine them. Why are the worlds top researchers presumed to be the worlds top educators, when we have all the evidence in the world they are not and generally believe being recognized as a good educator is a career curse? And even if they were at least good at the job of educating, why are there 100+ courses independently designed without meaningful comparison?
You're right, but I'd say that the damage has been done.
There was an ugly truth even to the ideal that it allowed scions of rich families to network - so even when it was a jobs program in neither practise nor theory it upped one's chances of success later in life dramatically.
Once that game was known, the attendant success became desired and colleges were flooded with applicants. Colleges optimised for large numbers of undergraduates motivated by socioeconomic mobility, their marketing efforts and staffing levels are optimised for that reality.
I'm not sure when you encountered universities, but I was never aware of them being marketed as anything but jobs programs, and I'm closer to an X'er than a Zoomer.
What's interesting to me is that so many people believe that tertiary education should be nothing more than a jobs program, but they're happy to let students "waste" time in secondary and primary school on useless (for an office job) activities like sports, camping and reading fiction books.
The vast, vast majority of high school graduates aren't going to be professional athletes. But everyone (I hope) understands that we don't have PE in schools just so that schools can supply professional sports leagues with athletes. We have it because it helps people live better lives, even if it doesn't prepare them for a job.
>that's not the ideal that gave birth to the university in the form that we recognize it.
I get it when people say this, but at the same time, I don't. Why are you basing the effectiveness of the institution in modern times on what it was designed for half a millennia ago? The world has changed since universities were introduced. Do you do the same thing with other institutions that were around at the same time? Do you talk about how marriage customs were different in the middle ages and what we call marriage now is not originally in the spirit of marriage the way it was practiced in the middle ages? Do you talk about how the catholic church was run in the middle ages and how organized religion is different now, and how we should consider what religion was used for centuries ago? Why are universities some special exception that get to be downright reactionary and not move forward with the times?
In the late 1990s my school sold itself mostly as a way to get a high paying job. There was a clear disconnect between admissions (the salespeople), the professors, and the students.
The salespeople: College is a way to get a high paying job.
The professors: College is about exploring academic subjects.
The students: College is a rite of passage to be part of the upper-middle-class.
IMO, the only way to fix the system is to be stricter about who gets into college, and more lenient about who's hired for professional jobs. Also, we need more trade schools.
I always get a lot of pushback when I express this sentiment but I think you're spot on. To me, this situation is another symptom of the weakening social contract I see between societies and their citizens. The responsibility of a society to educate its populace extends beyond mere vocation. It's frighteningly naive and optimistic for societies to assume that flattening that responsibility to such a small fraction will not result in horrific second order consequences.
This sort of thinking that “universities are only a function to get jobs” is the sort of thinking that can allow other countries to supersede the technological and scientific advancements of that particular country, because so little emphasis is put in higher learning and research. This dismissal of higher education and research is a bit troubling.
Sure, this country with that thinking might be able to attract the best talent from other countries to innovate and do research, but politically it might not be wise to always count on it.
When a populous has the mindset of dismissing universities and education to just get a job, then don’t be surprised when they fail to keep up with the latest advances in AI and science.
The human mind is one of the most wonderful things in the whole known universe. That we have saddled most of them with meaningless toil and vapid entertainment is disappointing.
The shift to the right coincides with a decades long attack on academia and intellectualism. Change incentives, allow the structures to corrode and the weight to shift and the bridge will come down on its own.
If one is only outcome based and based on simple linear line of sight, we will never make the discoveries. But if that statement is outcome based, we should be settings these minds free to discover everything they can, not just STEM advancements.
> The shift to the right coincides with a decades long attack on academia and intellectualism.
This is a comforting narrative for leftists, but it's objectively false.
The attacks on academia and "intellectualism" (isn't it interesting how progressives presume a monopoly on this, just as they do on progress?) are a reaction to the exploitation of the academy as a tool for political indoctrination.
Individuals with openly right-wing beliefs are personas non grata on faculty, in administrations, etc. There's a reason for that. The left is desperate to maintain its stranglehold on one of the major sense-making organs of the culture - and its stranglehold on the ability to socially engineer the next generation of educated professionals.
It shouldn't surprise you, public schools and universities sell themselves as jobs programs. Ignorance is not an excuse, and I'm going to go ahead and venture a guess that your surprise comes from arrogance and not ignorance. "We need to be careful" is not a solution. The article itself is about the fact that universities are dying out, so you being "unclear" on the abstract nature of western education itself doesn't add anything to the conversation.
The "ideal that gave birth to the university in the form that we recognize it" is inherently aristocratic.
If the financial investment in university doesn't provide social mobility, if it's a nebulous "preparation for citizenship," then you're essentially asserting, by default, that people who are blind to the financial ROI of university are better citizens.
I'd argue that universities as we recognize them are already an unstable hybrid of their original purpose with jobs programs. Institutions of pure academic curiosity are valuable, but not so valuable that the US needs thousands of them, so a return to the original vision would probably mean closing most colleges.
Responses to your insightful post demonstrate why we'll never achieve Roddenberry's dream of a post-scarcity economy. Because in my day I walked 100 miles in the snow so I could get to school to study and become an engineer to pay the bills.
Higher education is seen as a means of both economic AND social mobility. I think most economic models fail to capture the latter. This explains why so many people get into debt to attend a “prestigious “ university for little apparent financial gain.
So long as universities are charging tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars for degrees that employers are requiring, university will always be a jobs program. It's very sad, particularly since it's not a very good one at that.
If colleges are simultaneously marketed for the average person and carry large bills (not just in $$ but in taking 4 years of your life), they better be jobs programs at a bare minimum.
The ideals -- "liberal arts" -- were agreements about what enabled people to live a "free" life.
We've lost those as ideals. Instead, we interpret all the liberal arts through racialist-socialist lens, and find they required us to adopt norms outside ourselves.
The ideal we do hold together is hating authority and norms outside ourselves -- whether that's racial, religious, political, sexual, biological, musical, literary, fashion, filmmaking, etc. Just Do It. Have It Your Way. Think different.
So, the jobs part is the part we hold in common. The ideals dispute is leading to violent protests in the streets.
I think a better future would be focused, shorter-term educational programs, taken flexibly through one's early career years. There simply have to be better ways to unbundle the positive aspects of the college experience to make them more responsive to people's individual journeys to their serious careers.