People want cheap healthcare, and it got shoehorned into an odd employer fringe benefit system that really is not at all related healthcare in any intrinsic way.
People want job training, and it got shoehorned into extra departments at liberal arts universities intended as aristocrat finishing schools. Job training really has little to no relationship to liberal arts.
And now both those two systems are failing to deliver those benefits because those benefits which were initially afterthought add-ons have outgrown the institutions that were their hosts. It's akin to a parasitic vine that is now much larger than the tree it grew on and is crushing it under its weight. Both will die as a result.
I think this is a textbook example of correlation not implying causality. The US was awarded a unique competitive advantage with WW2, which allowed it to become the world's hegemon. Much of the reason that the US was able to preserve it's status was how it managed to leverage that competitive advantage to fuel it's economical and technological development to build up and retain a competitive advantage. This was only made possible by its investment in higher education and R&D, which is a big factor behind the progress in the 1950s and 1960s you're lauding. Things like the GI bill are renowned by the huge impact it had on the tech industry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Rock
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Kleiner
The US never managed to shake off its anti-intellectual bias, and has this irrational belief that ladder-pulling is somehow conflated with the cream always rising to the top, but if anything it's preventing their domestic talent from fulfilling their potential.
America’s preference for common wisdom over book learning is a strength, not a weakness. Formal education filters for risk averse, process and credential-oriented people. And you need some of those people, but you don’t want your society to be like India where you worship credentials and degrees like religion.
The GI bill isn’t a counterpoint. GI’s still had to gain admissions at a time when colleges were far more selective than today: https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2024/01/23/why_college... (undergraduate IQs fell from 119 in 1939 to just 102 in 2022). So you created a filter that was extremely rigorous. It supported college education for people who were both significantly smarter than average, and also had served in the military—the Marcus Aurelius type.
Economic historians Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, who are essentially the gold standard reference here, show that the US became the richest nation precisely because it led the world in mass education (first universal high school, then mass higher ed), not in spite of it.
>> America’s preference for common wisdom over book learning is a strength, not a weakness. Formal education filters for risk averse, process and credential-oriented people.
High-education countries don't look like basket cases. Among 25-64 year olds, the countries with the highest tertiary attainment shares are: Canada (64%), Japan (56%), South Korea (53%), USA (50%), and the Nordic countries hovering around similar rates. These are some of the richest, most technologically advanced societies in the world. If "credential worship" made a society brittle and unproductive, you'd expect these places to be obvious failures.
India's problem is not too much college. It's that gross tertiary enrollment ratio is only 33%, below the world average. The development-econ diagnosis of India is actually the reverse of your claim: too many people with too little quality education, especially basic literacy, numeracy and foundational skills, plus a small highly-credentialed elite at the top.
>> The GI bill isn’t a counterpoint. GI’s still had to gain admissions at a time when colleges were far more selective than today: https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2024/01/23/why_college... (undergraduate IQs fell from 119 in 1939 to just 102 in 2022). So you created a filter that was extremely rigorous. It supported college education for people who were both significantly smarter than average, and also had served in the military—the Marcus Aurelius type.
The GI bill massively expanded college. Half of all college students in 1947 were vets. It is widely credited with building the post-war middle class. The IQ meta-analysis you cite explicitly says the drop in average student IQ is a mechanical result of more people going to college, not evidence that universities got worse. The researchers in fact explicitly say this.
The US has severe issues as well, but many countries that want to be seen for their techonological advancement want to hide the less successful parts of their communities.
Or China, Japan, Korea…
And every one I knew made sure their children went to University and were educated, because they understood it's value. So did every farmer, factory worker, bus driver. Their kids didn't understand the value, they just new they had to go. Just like todays kids don't understand the value. I don't think that's changed, other than parents aren't forcing life choices on their kids.
You are either very young and only exposed to the modern Audi driving millionaires, or had zero interaction with the actual industrial/ag/creative space/inventor America pre 2008/pre MAGA brainworms. But these people used to exist and were building blocks of this country AND local communities (unlike their zero community loyalty replacement leased Audi millionaires).
That advantage was: being the only country that wasn't ravaged by war, and that profited for a while by trading with every faction.
Some of countries were also severly kneecapped by US betrayal of promises, made by allies - to restore pre-war borders, and handover of them to USSR - that means less competition.
That also lead to US dollar becoming world's reserve currency, which may have affected the measured drop afterwards.
There are so many factors involved in that that attributing it to just investment in higher education and GI bill is a gross oversimplification, so is previous post's attribution of the drop afterwards.
Your comment sounds like you didn't quite understood the point I made.
The whole point was that US benefited greatly from WW2 to reach the position of world's hegemon. But that happened nearly a century ago, and reaching the position vs maintaining the position are two entirely different sets of challenges.
My point was that WW2 gave the US a running start, but it still required work to preserve that advantage. The US's postwar investment in higher education and R&D was the key competitive advantage that allowed the US to preserve it's dominance until the present day.
To put it another way, WW2 helped attract the world's finest research talent, but the technological and scientific achievements that followed were the result of the investment in domestic talent that followed. You cannot have the likes of silicon valley without the US's postwar investment in higher education and R&D.
It is hard to separate those two to verify either - that is my point.
Finally, it’s worth qualifying the idea of America’s decline. The USA is still THE powerhouse economy of the world. We have huge problems with unequal distribution and things are seriously politically messed up, but in terms of raw productivity, we are doing gangbusters. And solving the political and inequality issues call for a more educated populace, not less.
In terms of dubious financialized metrics of productivity, i.e. debt + fx driven growth. Which is valid indicator, but also the same inflated indicator that suggests 2025 tertiary that cost 200% 1980 tertiary (income/inflation adjusted) is somehow more productive and not parasitic. The entire problem is spreadsheet doing gangbusters is dependenant on increasingly inequitable CoL extraction to prop up GDP flows. US economy would appear much less powerhouse if not for all the disproportionate financiailization/rent extraction from inelastic sectors (rent/education/health etc) aggregated over past 40 years over functionally comparable value goods/services.
In US same thing happens. But the man is compelled by threat of law to pay for engineering studies, permits, as are the man with the backhoe and the man making the concrete, etc, etc. $10k is added to GDP.
Has anymore wealth actually been created tho?
You can argue there's a difference because the latter septic is superior because on average they fail less and there's some amortized cost to that but if you're arguing about marginal differences in the face of an integer multiple you've kind of already lost.
This generalizes to just about all products and services. No more value is being created. There's just a bunch of hands in the pot that look like value if you squint and apply motivated spreadsheet magic.
The extra taxes paid by all will (theoretically) improve the schools, roads, military, and services. The regulations will (theoretically) decrease the risk of poisoning ground water and injuring someone, which adds even more value to the local community.
The distinction is just that the septic tank is twice as expensive in the developed country. But that money can lift people out of poverty. The exception is when the company owner is hoarding the majority of the money tax-free instead of paying it to people who will spend it.
That's the grade school analysis and in reality we are all poorer for it.
If ten people pay $5k to avoid getting a substandard service that has a 1/10 chance of happening and will cost $20k to remediate if it does that is a massive loss to the overall economy because that money otherwise would've been spent elsewhere else.
This isn't just septics, it's every widget and service. And it's not just a government and tax problem (though those cases are frequently most flagrant). Private industry requirements cause the same problems.
People don't just build 1 thing for a house nor can they afford a $20k failure.
If you take Fred who saves up $10k for a major purchase for his house each year.
If there is a 10% chance of a failure, then Fred will have a 53% chance of bankruptcy in 7 years.
You can't run an economy where everyone is bankrupt.
I realize I don't speak for the more cash strapped population, and I agree that overbearing regulation can be a problem. The problem is not regulations themselves, which save lives, but the perverse execution of new regulations in countries like the US (often written by market leaders to cement their moat, with the power of lobbying.)
The piece you're missing is that the man has to pick between 10 indistinguishable men with backhoes, of which some unknown percentage are charlatans who will dig a hole, put some pipes in it, then disappear with the money. The original man will now have a puddle of human waste next to his house, no septic system, and be $20k poorer ($10k+ in cleanup, then $10k to someone to build an actual system).
Regulation ensures that the charlatans can't operate and that everyone who pays $10k for a septic system actually gets one that works for decades. This also protects the original man's neighbors who also suffer when his property develops a cesspool. Regulation also protects against well-meaning but incompetent operators, who are also common when regulation is weak or non-existent.
As someone from a random developing nation car accidents deliver crippling debt and destroy lives there frequently because insurance is not mandatory.
The developing nation blindly ignore the externalities of not having insurance (instead of spreading the cost throughout society, only a few people bear the brunt of it, usually the ones least equipped to handle it), so your example is great only if you assume its fine to continue to beat down the poor. There's a reason developed nations have developed such "red tape" and the anti-vaccine movement here in the US is finding out what happens when the red tape is removed.
And this isn't just insurance. Just because someone who work is being made for by law or by rule says that their work output reduces the failure rate from X to Y doesn't mean that the cost of their work when applied to everything isn't a massive loss compared to just not paying for that and cleaning up the mess X times instead of Y times.
You can appeal to emotion all you want but it's a very simple calculation. Heck, health insurance (in the US) serves a pretty obvious counterpoint.
> The USA is still THE powerhouse economy of the world.
The US was a powerhouse economy when it could build the world’s largest navy almost overnight. Since the 1980s, the U.S. economy has become highly financialized. It’s disputed how much American economic dominance is real versus on paper today.
Remember that, right before World War II, the US didn’t even have a top-10 military, having demobilized it after World War I. It’s vast industrial capacity is what enabled it to build a larger military than all of Europe combined within a few years.
I remember when I was around middle school or early high school, I attended a geopolitical simulation at MIT that wargamed out a crisis between major world powers, and that was the exact result. New Zealand won, in alliance with Australia. They were able to invest heavily in technology while everyone else was nuking each other, and then ended up with space lasers or whatever the endgame tech was while everyone else ended up back in the stone age.
We've lost oil refineries, steelworks, consumer car manufacturing, and we lack much shipbuilding and aerospace. We have a lot of mines, which curse us with success: it's not economically efficient to smelt ore when you could be digging up even more of it instead.
However, I have no desire to play Risk again as the dice mechanic is infuriating and it's almost the opposite of a euro-game i.e. Players can get eliminated a long time before the end of the game and the game length can be arbitrarily long. Also, if a player falls too far behind the other players, it's very unlikely that they can turn things around (excepting the infuriating dice mechanic which can let a single soldier defeat hordes of invaders).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleutian_Islands_campaign
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu-Go_balloon_bomb
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardment_of_Ellwood
That last one, in which a Japanese sub bombarded Santa Barbara, played a role in the later Japanese internment by escalating fears of an invasion.
Now, when did Hawai'i become a state?
And when and by whom was their king deposed?
> Pearl Harbour was the only time the country got directly attacked.
Uh, which country again was it?
(Edit: -4, really? Damn, people are salty about actually knowing history versus going against the US public school system's propaganda that "We (royal) were attacked". In reality, the occupier forces, the US military, were attacked, having deposed the government at the behest of Sanford Dole, of pineapple infamy.
But the simple bumper sticker slogan "Remember Pearl Harbor", short circuits and somehow gets people to ignore history at the behest of ruthless hegemonic expansion and irrational patriotism.)
There's nobody outside of hardcore Japanese nationalists that see any of their actions as countering US expansionism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_Kingdom
In 1887, King Kalākaua was forced to accept a new constitution after a coup d'état by the Honolulu Rifles, a volunteer military unit recruited from American settlers. Queen Liliʻuokalani, who succeeded Kalākaua in 1891, tried to abrogate the new constitution. She was subsequently overthrown in a 1893 coup engineered by the Committee of Safety (run by Sanford Dole), a group of Hawaiian subjects who were mostly of American descent, and supported by the U.S. military. The Committee of Safety dissolved the kingdom and established the Republic of Hawaii, intending for the U.S. to annex the islands, which it did on July 7, 1898, via the Newlands Resolution. Hawaii became part of the U.S. as the Territory of Hawaii until it became a U.S. state in 1959.
This isn't even something only cold imperialist superpowers adopt. Hawaii itself was populated with warring chiefdoms that were killing each other and taking land for centuries before a bigger fish showed up. Small fish happily eating smaller fish but then are upset when they get eaten...
Hawai'i became a territory of the United States on April 30, 1900. It had been US territory for 40 years. One can point to the US doing bad things to make that the state of affairs, but it was decidedly US territory for a long time at that point. It seems you need to learn history, or you're just being willfully obtuse about things.
Were we? Or is that just after the fact revisionism that makes things "easy"
If Europe had managed to keep it together a few more years the US may very well have had a bunch of communism adjacent social strife and FDR may have died a deposed tyrant.
We were certainly more unified on certain broad cultural and values axis, but things were still very divided.
The conflicts which superpowers have withdrawn from have been against occupied nations which were in no position to ever become a future threat, this would not be true in a conflict with China, as China could conceivably develop the ability to project force and would be certainly motivated to do so during or after a real conflict.
Russia is basically on its way out as a military power. It can't even conquer Ukraine.
As for China, you don't fight China alone. What do you think military bases in Japan are for? Anyway, for the world's sake, China shouldn't start a war, but sometime you just can't stop stupid.
Most people don't realize is that war is essentially a giant deadly game of logistics, and so the typical plan for Russia would be to simply destroy the logistics pipelines arming Ukraine. But thanks to the people 100% responsible for maintaining Ukraine's military managing to maintain a strategically accepted neutrality, it's impossible to fundamentally disrupt their logistics pipeline outside of small scale black ops stuff.
So that has turned this war into a war of attrition where Russia is advancing slowly, but mostly setting the goal as essentially having Ukraine simply run out of Ukrainians. And they seem to be succeeding. Once the real death tolls for this war are revealed, people are going to be shocked. You don't need to drag in people off the streets, close your borders, and continually lower the enlistment age (in a country with a severe demographic crisis) if you're not suffering catastrophic losses, especially since as the amount of territory you have to defend decreases, you need fewer soldiers to maintain the same defensive density.
Ukraine is going to have some painful demographic issues to deal with when the dust settles (and I am cheering for them!).
US did defeat Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. And indirectly Syria by supporting the insurgency (and we had bases in that Country). It is also worth noting that the US and South Vietnam had effectively contained the North by 1973. The Paris Peace Accords ended direct US involvement and the North violated those terms two years later when it launched a full-scale conventional invasion. South Vietnam collapsed only after the US withdrew military support. Same with Afghanistan. Iraq is flourishing without Saddam and without war. It toppled Saddam’s regime in weeks, and the country now has an elected government, functioning institutions, and no US occupation. Whatever its internal challenges, Iraq is not a case where the US attempted and failed to annex territory. It demonstrates that these were limited political interventions, not conquest wars.
Vietnamese are trying to not forget their history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Remnants_Museum
(I'm not sure how many Vietnamese actually love USA, vs how many don't... I just want to remind that different people in the same society might hold different opinions, and the sentiment is certainly not monolithic)
Russia will conquer Ukraine, any other prediction at this point is absurd.
See point one, America is alone now, it will take decades to repair the damage.
Not trying to be the world's policeman would allow tremendous downsizing of the military and its associated expense.
Decoupling and isolation is a very rational response if nuclear proliferation is going to accelerate, in order to avoid having entangling alliances pull the country into a nuclear equivalent of the first World War.
At the same time, soft power is also vanishing.
Economic motivation? Not so much now, with the US being a dominant oil producer, and with petroleum itself losing importance. Even then, it's questionable if this could justify the full cost of the US military.
I think the original motivation was two fold: it was a combination of some sort of moral obligation to defend the "free world" from authoritarians, and (after WW2) a desire to keep small countries (and recent WW2 enemies) from deciding their only option for defense was their own nuclear deterrent.
Why would the world need defending from non-expansionist authoritarians?
America are like a slightly corrupt and violent world police.
Apparently the invasion was Oct 2001 and Bin Laden hiked over into Pakistan in Dec 2001
Are you sure? They are advancing, sure, put look what they paid for to achieve this: 300k dead, 700k wounded, depletion of their souvereign wealth fund, 20%+ inflation, lower oil production and so on.
Europe could do more, but at least most states dont play for Russia (Hungary and Slovakia excepted).
But beyond this, I don't think this war is about Ukraine anymore than a war in Taiwan will be about Taiwan. It's little more than a proxy for hegemony in both cases. Russia did not want NATO parked in their Achille's heel of the Ukrainian flatlands. NATO did, and we pushed forward against endless threats of it being a redline, essentially as a means of indirectly imposing our will on Russia and establishing a hierarchy of dominance.
And similarly, for those that don't the Taiwan-China history - the Mao led Chinese revolution was a success. The existing government of mainland China fled to Taiwan where they brutally oppressed the locals, in an era known as the 'white terror' [1], and established power through 40 years of martial law. And of course we backed them, solely to use them as a weapon against China, because geopolitics.
This is why these wars are so important for the participants. The US couldn't care less about Ukraine, but withdrawing without ruining our ability to militarily threaten other peer or near peer countries is difficult. And similarly the last thing Russia needs is more land, but if they never act on claims of red lines, then they can never expect their interests to be considered in the case of a conflict in interests between them and the West.
But in this scenario would you think Russia deploying weapons in Mexico is a precursor to them invading? Or that the US would be worried about that? Obviously not. Neither was Cuba. But it gives an adversarial power a tremendous strategic edge, while you get less than nothing out of it since it reduces your 'power' in the relative strategic balance of countries.
> Imagine Russia decided to form a military alliance with Mexico with the expected intention of deploying weapons on the Mexican border.
> In fact this is, more or less, what the Cuban Missile Crisis was
See this photo: https://www.jetphotos.com/photo/11312641
It is a Soviet-built MIG-23 fighter jet carrying Cuban insignia. MIG-23 first flew 5 years after the missile crisis and the first batch was delivered to Cuba in 1978.
It may have been about political security. If Ukraine which is basically at least part Russian had become a prosperous democracy on Russia's doorstep it would make it harder for Putin to justify his autocracy. In fact that one may come to pass.
In all honesty, would you hold that argument if Mexico decides to host Russian or Chinese troops?
Perhaps the objective isn't to conquer the whole of the Ukraine, but only most of it, leaving the western parts independent.
This seems to be pushed as the right approach wrt the Ukraine in Alexander Dugin's Foundations of Geopolitics, which apparently is used as the source for Russia's current "Eurasianist" geopolitical doctrine:
It doesn't seem like Russia has the will, or potentially the capability, to actually conquer Ukraine rather than squat on some of their land and hope to move their border.
They may or may not take Europe and Ukraine with them.
China is better placed to survive, but has its own structural issues.
They have been moving across Ukraine at a literal snails pace.
The US military's "ability" is very contextual - for instance, the US could easily obliterate Iran with a MIRV or two, but for various geopolitical reasons they choose not to. Likewise, the US navy is of limited use against Iran due to the literal mountain range between their only coastline and the bulk of their landmass (and population), much of which is quite mountainous.
So yes they are scary, but they aren't that scary relatively speaking. We've left the brief era where the US could exert military supremacy over the globe and it is ambiguous who has the "best" military among the major powers [0]. Militarys are generally a tool for self-destruction anyway so the term is a bit ambiguous, most of the big empires fall because they get too enamoured with military solutions over economic and diplomatic excellence.
[0] Does the US military even perform to spec? There is clearly a lot of corruption and I've seen it described on HN as a disguised welfare program.
What a nonsense. Really, if we're assuming a nuclear war then the remainder of the sentence no longer has any relevance.
Note that even the idiot in the Kremlin has been given reasons enough to consider that one off the table no matter how much he might want it (assuming he still can).
First strike is a non-starter for every sane country, so you better hope that sanity lasts long enough to get to the '.' at the end of your sentences. Because if it does not the best you can hope for is live near ground zero.
> Does the US military even perform to spec? There is clearly a lot of corruption and I've seen it described on HN as a disguised welfare program.
If you're aware of any American gear that has not performed in the last 12 months then maybe you should report it rather than to resort to 'just asking questions'.
So far all of the recipients seem to be fairly happy with the deliveries and most nations would quake in their boots if the USA set their sights on them with intent to punish, bar none, and to suggest otherwise is seriously ignorant.
There are things that make up the US that vastly increase its potential for self-organization when it is given an organizing principle. Yes, dynamism has taken a hit over the decades, but there are also a lot of aimless purposeless people right now that do have an appetite for purpose if given one.
Major modern countries today have red lines defined that they won't cross in order to keep the peace. Russia says don't attack Moscow or otherwise attempt to replace their government or they will nuke you. Nukes do change the structure of future wars between nuclear powers, which might actually make some aspects of it less extreme.
If Ukraine had nukes, they could have a red line like, "If you keep hitting hospitals and schools, we will nuke you. Powerplants and railroads we understand, but if you show us with your actions that you have no mercy for the weak and innocent, we will end you." Instead, they have nothing of the sort.
All the US has to do is wait for the enemy to make catastrophic moral failures and it's game over, because it rallies the people, the companies, the innovative talent, the allies, etc to reject it with force. It crystallizes the purpose.
We are energy independent and are advancing even more ways to expand the dimensions of that. You can't destroy our government, because we'll just recreate it.
We're forcing our allies to become more independent, because they got too soft and we need them hardened up. That only makes the US stronger, because strong allies are better for all of us. It makes us a better deterrent against war happening in the first place.
Meanwhile China is surrounded by countries that dislike it and don't trust it. Giving Canada and Mexico tough love is no comparison to the fundamental failures in the relationships China has with its neighbors in their region.
India is far more US aligned than with China, regardless of tensions. Neither North Korea nor Russia trust China, but they are forced to deal with it despite the buddy-buddy optics.
Failing to benefit from so many possible optimizations at the basic strategic level in their local region, any confidence in a favorable outcome for the CCP seems misplaced. Their failings probably cascade down into the other levels of preparation as well.
I’m just imagining someone getting a divorce saying they’re “teaching their spouse the value of independence”.
Translation: we are getting rid of our allies.
It does not make sense for a country to pay another country their "fair share" for military protection. That is literally why the American Revolution happened. Americans fought a war on behalf of the British and were thanked for their service with enough taxes to destroy the local economy. The push to make the colonies pay for "their war" drove the colonists to turn their guns inward and start shooting British regulars.
To be clear, it's one thing for NATO to tell countries to actually meet their 2% targets. But that is not what the current administration is doing. What it's actually doing is disrespecting them and foisting costs upon them. That is not how you run a military alliance.
> We are energy independent and are advancing even more ways to expand the dimensions of that. You can't destroy our government, because we'll just recreate it.
So our government is advancing the cause of energy independence by... what, exactly? Trying to shut down as many solar and wind projects as possible? Renewables (and, to a lesser extent, nuclear) are the best path towards energy independence, if not abundance, that we have. The current administration is bankrolled by Saudi oilmen whose only plan for energy independence is to shout "drill baby drill".
Meanwhile China is churning out solar panels like it's no tomorrow. This has some interesting effects. Like, there's parts of Africa that are just now getting reliable access to electricity because they can buy cheap Chinese solar panels and batteries. Renewables can be provided at basically any scale and can work without infrastructure. Which is making the current American governing coalition shit their pants because they're all oilmen. The American military is built to run on oil. And oil is going away.
> Meanwhile China is surrounded by countries that dislike it and don't trust it. Giving Canada and Mexico tough love is no comparison to the fundamental failures in the relationships China has with its neighbors in their region.
I'll give you that China is bad at making friends. However, for their hegemonic goals, they don't necessarily need big American style alliances. They just need America's allies to look the other way while they steal Taiwan.
Solar and wind are only okay, but they aren't reliable and subsidizing them mostly benefits China since they are by far the major supplies. Yes, it creates American jobs, but those people could be doing more important jobs without creating a foreign energy infrastructure dependency. I don't think we actually care that Africa has solar panels from China, except that it makes them energy dependent on them and increases foreign trade in Yuan. It's more of a way to create Chinese jobs, which is a huge priority so they end up with an oversupply.
Traditional nuclear has potential, but the costs, extreme complexity and lengthy lead times hurt the scalability. The newer fusion projects are interesting and I'm hopeful, but even if they work they take forever and are hard to replace quickly once they're up. It's more likely that we'll have a variety of all of these things.
There have been advancements in geothermal that are amazing, cheap, quick, less encumbered by supply chain risks and require way less land so we should see that scale out over the coming decades.
We do also have abundant oil which helps to reduce inflation and exporting it can offset some oil instability in the market. Yes, oil is eventually going away and that is why a renewable energy push was important, but a lot of oil remains untouched. The US military could also operate for years on just oil reserves and can get priority access to it. It would make plenty of sense for major countries to set aside oil for strategic and military purposes long after it stops being used for general transportation.
As for Taiwan, it is fair that dependency on exports from China can cause countries to tow the line, but it would mostly be optics with nothing preventing other forms of support. Also, the pain of losing Chinese exports in many ways would be less than the pain of an expanding China that goes unchecked, so I think those influences are only strong up to a threshold.
Give Trump a few more months then? The USA has shown itself so far be unreliable, and if not quite an enemy also not quite an ally while demanding 100% loyalty the other way around. This obviously will not hold, you can not combine those two and expect a static situation as the outcome.
Only if Geneva enters the equation.
> the US has already been undermined by the likes of China, Russia and India
What is India doing on this list?
[0] https://www.nationalheraldindia.com/national/explained-ahead...
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/9/16/india-joined-belaru...
US politics do not support all out war against foreign nations at this point in time hence the half wars.
This goes for most first world nations.
If they think conflict is inevitable then they may well feel they will get an upper hand by moving first.
With respect, Russia is being decimated (literally, at least the "big fortresses" that Russia has been gnawing at for months such as Pokrovsk have insane loss rates) by Ukraine's army who are mostly using donated shoddy Soviet-era remainders and decades old Western surplus.
If the US were to wage actual war with modern technology against either Russia or China (whose arms are based off of Soviet designs and stolen American plans), there is no chance in hell either would be able to do much against the US.
India is different but they're at least a democracy that's reasonably worth calling it that (despite Modi doing his best to dismantle it). I don't see any attempts of India to project power anywhere other than in its immediate neighborhood (i.e. the border disputes with Pakistan and China). They're no threat.
https://www.airandspaceforces.com/in-cnas-led-taiwan-wargame...
https://www.csis.org/analysis/first-battle-next-war-wargamin...
Things look decidedly different if you exclude the ad companies (Google, Meta, ...) and associated shovel sellers, see the WaPo article about the S&P 493 from a few days ago.
I would argue universities played a big role here. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=social+justice...
The theory of "elite overproduction" suggests that if you train too many aspirants for the same few elite jobs, they will foment instability in order to get the jobs they feel entitled to. That's what happened when we tried to get everyone going to college.
What am I supposed to do with my ethnic studies degree, aside from DEI consulting? Why would I want my DEI consulting to actually solve the underlying problem, if it puts me out of a job? Don't forget, I have a lot of student loans now! This isn't a small issue for me.
The left-extremists say "you need to give me a job in order to make your team more diverse". The right-extremists say "you need to give me a job because the deep state is corrupt, it's time to make america great again". Basically using extremist politics as a trick for getting elite roles.
This applies to any consulting. Normally you want to solve a problem, because there's another thousand of companies that need similar problem solved. You don't get many people coming into a company with an immediate "I'm going to try to not improve anything" plan.
> The left-extremists say "you need to give me a job in order to make your team more diverse".
This is seriously weird even as a misrepresentation. The extreme left is for changing diversity overall rather than just "give me a job". (If we actually go extreme left, it would be closer to "we've got enough resources for everyone to not need jobs to survive" anyway)
The overproduction issue is interesting, but it really didn't need the exaggerated caricatures as examples.
By definition you cannot have an elite that is comprised of a large part of the population. The problem is that education institutions have an incentive to bring in more and more people for the money and the power it affords them but that's completely contradictory to the goal of production elite individuals.
A true elite is only possible if you select for the top individuals each year and it cannot be determined solely by the capacity to pay for the school.
A good implementation would use qualities from both US and EU style institutions: education at no cost but very selective process that only accept around 5% of each generation. Otherwise you are just wasting money/ressources on people that will never pay back, whether it is paid by the taxpayer in the EU or by the individual/family in the US is an implementation detail.
And when it comes to "liberal arts" education, in a world where information is extremely cheap/free, it makes absolutely no sense. It was always about credentialism. The reality is that it was about assigning a fake value to people who are kinda useless. The primary selection features are obedience and industriousness which are not necessarily valuable qualities if they are not focused on worthwhile goals but it's very useful for the powers in place. Anybody knows that working hard isn't that desirable when the objectives are not useful. But this is exactly why we get DEI and other dysfunctional policies/systems.
This applies to science and engineering as much as it applies to the arts, but you need a good education to understand what "morality" means in this context.
The collapse of the West started when the old Enlightenment morality - education of all kinds as a collective good - was replaced by the MBA culture of greed and vapid narcissism.
DEI was a weak and ineffectual response to that. The dysfunction goes far deeper, and universities are now a vector of it rather than a bulwark against it.
Before WW2 only about 40% of people completed high school, now it’s at 90%
There is something to the point about needing a correction in post secondary education and making university again a specialized place rather than the catch all default generalized institutions. Where 70% of the population tries to waits 3-5yrs+ to enter the workforce in exchange for lots of debt. A debt heavily incentivized by cheap gov backed loans, subsidies, credential inflation, and very profitable immigration schemes.
You mean when so much of the rest of the world was poorly educated either not very industrialized yet or had their industrial base destroyed by the war? Easy for the US to be "on top" then.
But I much prefer the better educated America that came after that, even if wasn't as "at the top of the world" - though I'm really not sure who else you could be referring to that could be more on top.
Due to automation and the great advance of technology, the floor for most jobs has risen such that the skills/knowledge that a 1950s school dropout had would be insufficient for anything but the most menial jobs today.
Outside of a few sectors like agricultural or physical service labor, our economy just doesn't need less educated people anymore.
That doesn't mean everyone needs a 4 year degree, but to make a sustainable living at least a degree from a trade or service school focused on some advanced technician skill is required, and that must be followed by apprenticeship and licensing. In the end, it requires as much time as University, but might cost less if the education is at a public community college.
In fact I would argue in some ways society is even less capable today - the percentage of people skilled in the trades is much lower, so it would be much harder to rebuild from scratch.
Hell I applaud even boot camps for trying to fill it, for all their faults. At least they tried something slightly different.
However, uneducated people in the 1950s regularly got jobs in factories that paid enough for a single income to support a family.
That opportunity for uneducated Americans won't come back, regardless of our immigration policies.
I'm not even sure that is true. Poverty in the US was higher in the fifties and sixties.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#/...
I guess apartment living is closer to what people had post-war, but everybody wants to buy a house to get in the real estate gravy train.
It selects for the ability and intrinsic motivation to learn.
If you were running a factory or a building construction company, wouldn't you want that in someone you hire?
Are there high school dropouts who have the ability and intrinsic motivation? Of course there are. Many drop out due to poverty and family/community strife, or mental health challenges.
But as an employer would you risk assuming a high school dropout had the same motivation?
You are confusing obedience and willingness to jump through hoops with the motivation to learn. People largely don't need school to learn most things. I would argue that most good learners actually hate school. It would be challenging to self-teach your way to advanced math/physics but that does not concern the vast majority of education. Being motivated to learned is deeply linked to having a reason for learning. I actually wouldn't trust people who were too industrious at school for careerist reasons because it mostly means they are able to tolerate bullshit and rote learn without much pushback on nonsense. STEM is somewhat immune to this because you need at least some form of understanding to solve actual problems but plenty of field have a legitimacy issue resulting from this effect. Notably the medical field is full of hard working idiots and most of the social sciences are infested with ideological parrots. Allegedly it is supposed to select for conscientiousness but since I have faced specialised doctors who schedule 2 interventions when it could be done in one for billing purpose, I would argue it's mostly self-interest or a very perverted form of conscientiousness.
> If you were running a factory or a building construction company, wouldn't you want that in someone you hire?
Someone having a specific diploma doesn't mean he is actually competent in practice. It is just more likely that he isn't absolutely terrible, but that's mostly risk edging. It's funny you take that example because a while ago there was a news in France where an architect had sentenced because he practiced without the required diploma. The guy was 60 and he had designed some big building, even for the public market (his mistake); he had learnt on the job with a mentor and never got around finishing the school curriculum. Le Corbusier famously didn't have any formal architectural training yet seventeen of his projects are on UNESCO list. So I dunno, personally I would hire Le Corbusier regardless of his training if I ever could afford it but the point is that everyone should be free to choose for themselves, not the powers that be of the education establishment.
> Are there high school dropouts who have the ability and intrinsic motivation?
Yes, it doesn't mean anything, just that they got bored with education system or had some other problem. Two of the most valuable companies were founded by drop outs, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates (not high-school, but first year of college is basically the same). If it was just a problem of competence, you could have some sort of certifications for most things, where one could take an exam to prove that he knows what he is doing. But this doesn't happen because it is about enriching a specific class, restricting access to high level jobs to people who will submit to the dominant ideology. Most certifications/exams have a specific education level/diploma as requirement for entry. This is just supply control in favor of the most fortunate. You just cannot reduce ability and motivation to the willingness/capacity to submit to the education system.
> But as an employer would you risk assuming a high school dropout had the same motivation?
That's the whole point of a business. Assume risks to merit the potential payoff. Why do you think the cost of job training should be assumed by the public when they will not get any of the private benefits generated. On top of that, the issue is clearly a disconnect between what is needed in the market and what type of curriculum has been sold in universities so it's clearly not working. In any case it seems insane to me that you are arguing for the isolation of training risks for the benefits of business. What is need is relaxed employment regulations, so that if it doesn't work out, it is not too expensive for business to let go of poor prospect. In an healthy labor market, people would find jobs and the required training much easier. Schools are just a way to offload the cost to the private individual at best or to the public at worst. That's just bad, business have no reasons to exist if they are just to leach of public benefits, might as well go full on communism at this point.
I love to point this out to anti-welfare people and make them blue screen. Especially when they're not willing to acknowledge unethical solutions, such as euthanizing the stupid or acknowledging that not having welfare for an unemployable population shits things up for the rest of society.
It is now necessary to get a doctorate if you want to really signal academic prowess, but that comes with an incredibly high opportunity and personal cost.
Society really needs to just accept that just over half of the population is never going to maka a good doctor, engineer, physicist, etc. and that is perfectly OK. We readily understand that very few people can become professional athletes and don’t think any less of those that can’t.
So... I wouldn't look too nostalgically backwards for policy guidance when we have an entirely different set of geopolitical circumstances.
The inheritors and descendants of those that directly created the problem are screaming at the colleges as the problem.
But that’s ass backwards: Create the long-term financial opportunity and the college problem will disappear overnight.
The correlation is because rational actors will follow the only leads available to make money, survive, and raise a family.
Edit: I edited the tone, slightly.
Not to mention rank-and-file American conservatives who see universities as bastions of liberal thought/power, and create threadbare, post-hoc arguments as to why universities have to be dismantled or politically reeducated when partisanship has to be disguised.
The conservatives are right about the partisan bias of universities. See this survey by Mitchell Langbert.
https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/31/2/homogenous_the_p...
Anthropology and communications saw no registered Republicans. English, Sociology, and Art departments had a ratio of around 40:1 Democrat professors Republican professors, whereas in technical fields the ratio drops considerably to only 1.6:1 in engineering, and around 5:1 for economics, chemistry, and mathematics.
Langbert notes:
> The political registration of full-time, Ph.D.-holding professors in top-tier liberal arts colleges is overwhelmingly Democratic. Indeed, faculty political affiliations at 39 percent of the colleges in my sample are Republican free—having zero Republicans.
Duke: https://dukechronicle.com/article/duke-university-faculty-su...
> When asked for their political identities on a scale of “very liberal” to “very conservative,” 23.2% of respondents identified as “very liberal,” 38.53% identified as “somewhat liberal,” 24.48% identified as moderates or centrists, 9.92% identified as “somewhat conservative” and 3.87% identified as “very conservative.”
Yale: https://buckleyinstitute.com/faculty-political-diversity-rep...
> Across 14 departments in the Social Sciences and Humanities, the report identified 312 Democrat faculty (88%) and only 4 Republicans (1.1%), a ratio of around 78 to 1.
Conservatives are split into 2 groups. Conservatives who are in it for the money and conservatives who are in it because they don't know any better.
College professor is not a well paying job for the level of skill required nor is it a job that someone who isn't very knowledgeable could do. That excludes most conservatives from the position.
An inane assertion made without evidence.
> nor is it a job that someone who isn't very knowledgeable could do
So why is the bias the worst in the least rigorous fields?
Yes - and? Police forces and catholic churches skew conservative, but I figure it's an emergent property based on the self-selected group who join the respective organizations plus some exposure to new ideas.
You seem like you expect political "neutrality", but if you look at at any institution, you'll find "bias": theatre fook, country music, poets, small Business owners, baristas , farmers, CxOs, software engineers tend to lean one way or another on average. The battle is not to establish political neutrality everywhere, but selective against universities because the staff & students leans left. I'm yet to hear conservatives complain about the political bias in the Fraternal Order of Police or the FBI.
Looking at history, every nascent autocracy takes aim at independent intellectuals, like clockwork. First to be neutralized is the opposition, then the press, then the intellectuals in higher education.
There are plenty of conservatives interested in anthropology; there’s no reason to think they’ve self-selected out of the pool, so then we have to consider if conservatives enter the field but are exposed to new ideas such that none remain conservatives for long (this seems unlikely), or that these departments have been taken over by people who explicitly use their influence within these departments to promote certain narratives; this is far more likely as they have been explicitly stating that this is what they are doing for decades now.
This theory is further corroborated by where you see this bias; it’s the least pronounced in quantitative, technical fields (mathematics, engineering, chemistry), and most pronounced in fields that are almost completely qualitative.
By comparison, is there some affirmative evidence for the reason why there are so few liberals in the FBI is because they self-selected out, instead of that the FBI being perceived as a conservative institution causes them to self-select out?
What mechanisms do these department heads use to suppress conservative viewpoints in research? While politics in academia can be vicious, it's never a grand conspiracy like you think it is, it's typically, and depressingly petty issues and grudges.
Conservatism is not a doctrine of competence. Experience shows time and again that conservatives can't think, can't plan, and can't govern. They act in emotional and purely self-interested ways to promote rigid hierarchies, and are reliably surprised by consequences that are obvious and predictable to rational educated actors.
Brexit. Anti-vax campaigns. Anti-masking. Racism. "Lowering corporate taxes makes everyone richer."
All delusional, all emotionally motivated, all predictable failures with terrible consequences.
You're just othering.
The organizations we're talking about aren't diverse, inclusive or representative.
Nor is conservativatism a Western only thing.
And yet they are far from that. Lots of finger-in-ears, "la-la-la-I can't hear you" behaviour from universities in US/west past decade for sure.
That happens in conservative circles too. But instead of 4 years, Americans like myself are stuck with 40 years of business indoctrination from pro-business and conservative “leadership”.
The same leadership, by the way, that largely insisted on college degrees in the first place.
To be fair, they kind of are. In the 20th century there were conservative academics at elite universities and they've since largely been excommunicated as heretics. Which has been a mistake, because then the people who would have agreed with them instead reject academia as a whole and latch on to demagogues, which is so much worse.
Some people got off due to sexual harassment not being as cool as before, history and sociology started to study women and minorities. The problem is that conservatives see that just existing as a threat. If the history is not biased their way, they feel like victims.
Because it is extremely valid for other institutions and students to NOT be subject to the above. They were not kicked off other universities and less radical Christians still go there. Issue was that other universities did not punished non conservative thought and behavior enough. These conservatives do not want to share space with other nor to welcome anyone except those who are as conservative as them.
Your argument is typical "up is down and down is up" reversal. Conservatives want to create their own segregated spaces, because places that accept and tolerate non conservatives are just not acceptable to them. Somehow that is framed as problem with those other places not accepting conservatives (meaning not punishing non conservatives enough).
When academics were pushed out of Soviet and Chinese universities they had to leave to other locations or stop being productive.
The fact they can set up their own schools is a plus in the USA.
The disparate impact is clear.
You’re basically arguing that having more uneducated people is better. If that were the case, why did most of the world bend western and American in the latter 20th century culturally?
The problems now are that we have a super-old man and a bunch of others with super-old ideas at the helm, and as a whole none are both wise and caring. I say this as a middle-aged gen-X’r.
The missing ingredient is that no one fucking cares about anyone other than themselves. It’s not a problem that we need to solve by dumbing people down. I’d argue that we’re not educated enough.
Are you arguing that having more people educated in a narrow range of topics is necessarily better? In the USA in the 1950s I would suggest there were more people who knew how to make machine tools or even food.
"I love the poorly educated"
~our current president.
They said it's good. They didn't say it matches the best decades of the economy.
When the fintech boom in the 80s and 90s kicked off, quants aside, many had zero tertiary education. The benefit of a university then became access to social circles, and a bit of spreadsheets. I have friends who worked in this sector, and the associated industries wiring it up and nobody cared about your degree if you weren't dining with merchant bankers.
I think the WH is proving at best education is marginal value to hucksters.
Let's not pretend that 4 years in an average US/European university creates a renaissance Uber man.
Correlation != causation, but let’s go the correlation route and see where it goes…
China had correlation between higher-ed and economic growth, so I think you’re just trying to make an argument to support a fascist dictator who doesn’t want to be the dumbest person in the room.
The decline in Christianity, rise in apathy, rise of industry in other countries, offensive wars, rise of entertainment culture, etc. are correlated also.
One could also argue that the rise of uneducated conservatives was associated with U.S. decline.
That would be the definition of alienation for me.
But as it's normal with failing institutions, they'll be extended, kicking and screaming, until they completely collapse instead of reform, like almost every other country in the world already has.
Yes, and the US system is the envy of the world and is responsible for the overwhelming majority of wealth generated in the US over the past few decades.
I'm not sure how that's an argument against the US Higher Ed system.
Edit: The real issue you seem to be pointing to is the cost of attending universities in the US. There are 2 parts to this. 1 is the costs of running a university, and the other is the cost that is paid by the student.
Most of the rest of the world subsidizes student tuition so students dont pay much out of pocket. The US, OTOH, has been consistently reducing govt support for student tuition. Even worse, it's been pushing students into taking loans that unlike most other loans cannot be discharged during bankruptcy. And even though students aren't required to start paying back those loans until they graduate, they do start collecting interest from day 1, which means a student has picked up a significant burden simply from the interest on the loans they received to pay for their freshman tuition, when they graduate.
These are all issues with the US system of financing education as opposed to the actual liberal arts education system.
The benefits of the U.S. university system aren’t generated by average people taking a debt-financed 4 year vacation. They are generated by the same subset of people who would still be attending university even in a scaled down system that sent far fewer people to college.
It is certainly plausible that the most benefit to society comes from people that are both educated and empowered.
Whether the cost of that empowerment > the burden outsourced to society, well, that is another discussion.
Perhaps more on point, because I definitely think we can find examples of this in practice, it’s perhaps more truthy and also more actionable to say that college provides its optimal outcomes when it serves people who have intrinsic gifts that are empowered by knowledge. Sometimes these gifts are resources, but often these gifts are cognitive brilliance. Either one is like oxidiser for the fuel of knowledge, but especially brilliance when given resources.
I’m pretty sure that for the majority of college graduates, aside from its social signalling value, the amount of their secondary education that directly benefits them in their life could fit in a couple of years of summer school or a year of community college.
A quarter million dollars in debt is a tragic price to pay for a couple thousand dollars of educational utility. A system that requires a social signal 100x more costly than the value it represents is externalising that cost onto everyone, and the only benefits flow to financiers and the moneyed class.
Aside from educational titles (as opposed to capabilities) society is generally sensible regarding the cost of symbols vs the reality they facade.
We recognise the ridiculousness of people owing $90,000 for a truck when they live in a dilapidated trailer on a rented lot. We understand that a man who lives hand to mouth but wears a half of kilogram of gold around his neck is probably not making the best life decisions. We ridicule the faux-intellectual with their ridiculously stilted props. But somehow, we are convinced to dress up our children like heirs to the crown and send them to finishing school for their jobs in retail. It’s a profound mis-investment.
It’s also worth noting that it is way more expensive to provide an education to the intellectual proles than it is to educate brilliant and hungry minds. We are shovelling money (distilled human effort) into a furnace of misery in the service of vanity.
This is a fantastic analysis.
Where in the world have you polled?? because this is categorically opposite to my experience discussing the US college system
Do you think people in other countries envy the us college system based on rankings? If so I strongly recommend a trip abroad and striking up a few conversations with prospective or enrolled students. In my experience the topic of cost and non dischargeable student loans comes up often. Rankings very rarely.
And they also severely restrict who can attend university. Of course this is a non-starter in the current US political environment.
Getting into the medical faculty is harder because the government does pay for everything and training doctors is expensive- for those the university picks the best and brightest.
The government also has programs in place to send out students to Harvard and MIT as the future elite of the nation.
Citation needed on both counts
Can you elaborate on this a bit? It's very easy to read uncharitably without further elaboration and reads pretty delusional as is.
If I believed in conspiracy theories I might think this was all planned.
Worst financial crisis at any university was probably caused by himself at his own scam Trump University, long before he become president.
Those multi-billion dollar endowments are fine man, don't worry about them, they're not running out.
That sort of approach is exactly why "Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost" (as the title states)! People are wising up to the truth, and now it's harming the credibility of the system as a whole.
Are all colleges unaffordable? Do all colleges require engineering students to take liberal arts? Maybe this isn't universal, maybe it's just that prestigious colleges all have strong liberal arts programs, either out of tradition or because it's required for being seen as prestigious.
Liberal arts courses arguably are still helpful for building general language and reasoning skills.
On the whole though, it does seem strange that I paid the same for a graduate level stats course and a freshman history course, even though the former taught me about five times as much.
One of the best courses I had in college was a metalworking course during which I learned to weld.
But like many (engineering) students, for most of the liberal arts credit, I went with stuff where I could get the best possible grade with the least possible work.
15 credit hours of liberal arts education isn't why college in the US is so expensive, and if one pays attention, they might even learn something from it.
If nothing else, you'll learn how to read and write.
Like a car in the United States, outside of perhaps five metro areas?
By contrast, many people don't want to be forced to take classes unrelated to their desired area of study.
I think the median 4 year college graduate going after the "median college-degree-required job", did not care much about their studies at all. They slogged through it hung over from the night before. College was a social experience and gave them a sports team to root for on Saturday. It let them extend their childhood and eschew responsibilities for a few more years.
We have this weird cultural thing in the US where we put super high expectations on education systems but we actually don't value education. We value the social clout and whatnot. Public schools are a prime example, parents are the problem. Make your kids do homework! Take away the video games/phone/tablet/wifi/whatever. It translates to college as, do just what is necessary to get a degree. Often the bare minimum, etc. Cheating runs rampant and so on. It manifests itself in so many ways. Just a core part of youth right now is much more interested in being an influencer, popular, a good athlete, no sorry good athletes are a dime a dozen - you need to be an elite athlete, etc. Being a bookworm or just studious simply isn't seen as cool, it has no social reward, quite the opposite in fact.
This might not apply to many students at ivy and top schools, but I'd argue it's certainly the median for the nation's college students the past few decades maybe longer. I think colleges allow it to happen. They don't grade as harshly as they used to, they have dumbed down the courses, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if the "median undergrad" education was more on par with the "median high school" education from a few decades ago.
Applying this logic to college, schools used to be more strict yes but there was always leeway for students to chart their own path to success, it never really felt like Asia or Europe's systems where they place you in a bucket early on and thats it you are in there for life.
I graduated with an Engineering degree in the early 2010s and let me tell you, I really did do the bare minimum in a bunch of classes. It led me to tinker with junk computers that the school discarded which led me to dedicated school space in a lab to experiment which led to my first job and general success. Looking back not studying harder led to more trouble later on but the path still worked out because I jumped at some opportunities due to that path. If I were in asia, I would have probably not even be admitted or permanently weeded out after my first academic probation warning instead of being a decently successful software developer.
> Just a core part of youth right now is much more interested in being an influencer, popular, a good athlete, no sorry good athletes are a dime a dozen
Before that people dreamed of becoming a hollywood actor. It was the number one desired career for years. The bar is much lower for trying your luck at being a successful influencer than becoming an actor. The end result will be the same, many will try and flame out and then go do something else.
>Being a bookworm or just studious simply isn't seen as cool, it has no social reward, quite the opposite in fact.
You sound like you are thinking of the 1990s as your context. These days after movies the The Social Network, one of the most desired careers is in software development. This goal requires people to expend much more effort than prior generations pursuing other desired careers and many more kids are doing it! Techies are the boss now.
> Techies are the boss now
I think it's more accurate to say that more socially adept people have infiltrated the tech scene due to the loot. Sure tech no longer equates to nerd like it did back then, and bullying is managed differently now, but let's not pretend that the same type of kids that were into tech back then are ruling the world today. The normalization of tech has opened it up to average joe's that wouldn't have touched it back then due to the social stigma it had. This is why I chose the words "bookworm" and "studious" because those things do not necessarily mean tech. But kids that value their studies over their social lives, or just like to have conversations about something more intellectual than video games and the trending tiktoks, are still likely outside the fold whatever the contemporary take on that is. Social norms, bullying, cliques have all changed but being a teenager in a group setting isn't yet a democratic affair.
Yep, it's all about status, money and power chasing. Nothing taught me this more than getting an iPhone before everyone else in France (wasn't yet available, imported). Before that I had weird phones and proto-smartphone that costed as much but nobody cared. But the iPhone was cool and desirable and automagically I became more desirable. Before that nobody gave a shit about my technology interest and it wasn't for the lack of trying to discuss it at large.
Ok you do make a good point about people coming into tech for the money. It was quite a recent phenomenon. About 15 years ago I was finishing at my engineering focused university and my CS department was considered loser ville. Only the deeply passionate people wanted to enroll in that program. Everyone else went into Engineering or the sciences. Fast forward a few years later, and they are the largest department in the university. We are at the tail end of a massive bubble and its possible that if AI sticks around or the tech industry cannot support these valuations, its likely that high salary gigs will become scarce. I guess we will then see if this field grew because most people genuinely wanted to be here vs people just looking for dollar signs.
>This is why I chose the words "bookworm" and "studious" because those things do not necessarily mean tech.
Yeah I'd imagine those kids would have gone into Engineering or similar fields instead. They really arent the people I was talking about. I considered the social structure growing up to be the "jocks" at one end of the social spectrum and the "techies" at the other end with a massive amount of regular people in the middle.
If you take these middle people and just filter for B average grades or higher, these middle people wouldn't necessarily consider tech because it just wasn't really a 24 hour lifestyle thing for highschool kids in the 2000s. Yeah we had computers and video games but for most people, computers were that beige box in the den you'd play with once in a while, not a career. I recall in high school (mid 2000s) coding was offered and they couldn't even fill the entire class. The only course computer related that had any relevance was graphic design. The industry really expanded post iPhone when computing became a 24/7 lifestyle. In my opinion thats when the normies started considering computing as a career because it now impacted them directly.
Always hard to know what’s universal, but I think the inclusion of video games on this list represents a genuine shift. When I was growing up only the other studious kids would talk with me about video games. We understood it to be an intellectual hobby because we were analyzing how to achieve things instead of just passively consuming.
Edit: also instructor composition, meaning the proportion of instructors in a program who are senior/tenured vs new vs adjuncts. Class size and instructor salary are nearly the whole equation.
For me it was the opposite. I came into college full of academic curiosity, and left completely burnt out by a system that cares about grades and proving knowledge much more than the pursuit of knowledge.
Regardless of your endpoint in that pursuit, you should have gained intermediate foundational knowledge along the way, even if you haven't arrived at your endpoint.
If you cannot show mastery of that intermediate knowledge, then any kind of journey for knowledge would have failed.
There's an obvious lack of logical rigor to jump from someone pointing that out to framing it as proving an untruth.
A is true if evidence B supports it ≠ A is only true if evidence B supports it.
But you can only claim A is true if B. Otherwise you're just blowing smoke around an unknown.
Having a college education could totally be an indicator for middle class even if most people didn’t have one.
If you're in the capital class, you're getting your income from the assets you own. If you're in the working class, you're getting your income from working.
I've heard multiple definitions for a middle class, eiher one that owns some capital in the form of rental apartments or stocks, or that the middle class has a decenr amount of discretionary income.
Personally I don't think the middle class is that useful of a term to make sense of the economy. I also have a feeling that people like the term middle class because it muddies the waters when it comes to understanding the relationship between capital and labor.
Middle class is a state of mind
> It’s peanut butter and chocolate that has served democracy and its people well
Most people are now saying in polls it didn't serve them well! You're disagreeing with the majority of people's lived experiences. And of those who say it was worth it, a lot will be people in denial. Nobody wants to rack up huge debts and then admit it was a mistake. If you were to somehow measure how many people it has actually served poorly, instead of whether people admit it served them poorly, the numbers would be worse.
And serving democracy? No way! The Biden presidency stressed democracy by illegally attempting to bail liberal arts majors out of their debts, an extreme violation of the social contract. And arguing this stuff served people well when they're telling you right out that it didn't, is the kind of anti-democratic attitude that liberal arts colleges incubate in their student body. It's a big reason they're now openly loathed by so many people.
A good example of the problem is when you claim the academy has "some kind of intellectual idealism separate from economic incentive". There is no "separate from economic incentive". Anywhere, ever. For an adult to have such a belief is like still believing Santa Claus is real. It's economic incentives that have led to these professors creating a flood of non-replicable research using unscientific methods. Publish more papers = get promoted, even if the claims are false. So they publish lots of false papers. Incentives = outcomes, always.
Professors brainwashing people at vulnerable stages of their lives into believing false things about human nature is the number one reason why politics is so polarized, why democracy is so stressed all the time and it's so difficult to get anything done. It can easily take decades for people to learn that it isn't true and sometimes they never learn at all (like, because they went into academia themselves).
And people don’t want “job training,” people want to be educated and have a fulfilling life.
Of course college looks too expensive if it is just “job training.” But that is not what college is.
College proved its immense value first, and then because of its obvious value, employers started looking for it. But you’ve let the cart get in front of the horse, by thinking that the value of a college education is simply that employers are looking for it.
If people were genuinely pursuing college for self betterment, then you'd think the numbers would have been dramatically higher in the past, especially back in the day when you could comfortably afford college even on just a part time job. The increase in enrollment also came right alongside sharp increases in cost.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_...
My issue is these things boil down to class. There should be a legitimate, high quality alternative for those who can’t afford it.
One of the most disappointing things about college was how little people cared about the liberal arts aspect, where humanities courses were an annoying box to tick.
College makes a person more capable in general, which confers long-term competitiveness during a career. That’s why parents want their kids to go to college. And the great thing is it works even if the kid is just checking the box. It works better if they are engaged and enthusiastic, of course.
Maybe if you limit it to STEM degrees. There are plenty of people saddled with humanities degrees that haber no hope of paying off the loans taken to get the degree, nevermind a job past barista.
Maybe the study tracks of those going to the industry and those pursuing a scientific career could split earlier. OTOH I personally must say that what I've studied for my master's degree, and even what I researched during my further postgrad studies (even though I did not ultimately go for a PhD) ended up being rather useful for my work in the industry.
It wasn't a sufficient job training though; I sometimes think that nothing is, nothing short of an actual job.
But not too abstract. From my point of view, the weird parts of the American educational system are the high school and the college. Everyone is supposed to choose the academic track. I'm more used to systems with separate academic and vocational tracks in both secondary and tertiary education.
Higher ed unfortunately almost desocializes a lot of people. They live in a bubble and become insufferable obsessed with politics and social issues that are disruptive and inappropriate in the workplace
I really wish the computer science degrees and even online courses spent like 30 mins on the history of computer science.
The entire existence of this field has been dependent on those non job-training liberal arts degrees.
A 4 year cs degree dumps you into heavy math, physics, and intro CS + Data structures in your first year to weed people out who cant cut it.
Second year teaches fundamentals of CS (discrete math, concept of languages, understanding algorithms at least at a basic level).
Third year is filled with more practical fundamentals (OS, DB, computer architecture + field specific courses the student wants).
Finally the fourth year pieces everything together with more advanced versions of prior topics (algorithms for example) + repeated practical applications of all the concepts from years 1-3 to hopefully put the student on at least an 'ok' footing post graduation.
I guess you can try to make the first lecture or two in CS101 about the history but most students don't even know if they want to pursue this journey. Would talking about Alan Turing's history really be appropriate in that class? I don't know really.
That course has 28 credits in first year, 3 of which are spent on computer science (arguably 3 more on "Roadmap to Computing"). Second year has a little more. Third and fourth year are heavy on CS/SE topics, but still have some time allocated to others.
I don't disagree with students learning Calculus and Statistics and even Physics as part of a CS course, and I think it's excellent that they take at least two courses in English composition. But you can't look at that four-year curriculum and say nothing could possibly be cut (turned into an elective) in favour of a History of Computers module.
Completely agree here. This would fall under the umbrella of liberal arts, which a lot of CS-only folks seem to find little to no value in.
Most concepts in computer science--especially when it comes to programming--are fairly easy to learn if you're good at learning. Reading something and understanding it to the point that you can write a proper college level essay about it trains that muscle, which is a different skill than rote memorization.
I taught university-level computer science and I'm not a historian by any stretch of the imagination. I know something about the history and might mention things in passing but I don't think I could legitimately teach it to other people!
Because the history I know has it being 99% created by men with engineering skills doing paid work for large corporations.
The uni I went to did, in multiple classes, to the point where you could almost predict the "war story" you were about to be told :D
This has a lot to do with what a country wants. Many countries show this is possible; the USA prefers a profit-based system where everyone pays a lot.
I’ve studied at university, state college and community college and my best history teacher was at a community college.
University is expensive probably because there is job demand but almost no real downward pressure to keep it cheap. Students can’t provide much pressure and it’s not directly affecting companies that ask for it. A lot of families also carry this “prestige” element that pushes the cost up.
It grows completely around the tree and creates its own trunk on the outside. The tree underneath eventually cannot get any nutrients in its sap and dies. The vine then feeds on the tree as it rots away on the inside.
Eventually you have a hollow tree.
I would add, though, that I think "co-op universities" have a good solution. That is, places like Northeastern and Drexel when the undergrad program is 5-ish years and a good portion of that time is working in paid co-op positions. This ensures that students graduate with at least some real-world experience in their field but still get the benefit of classroom study and the full college experience.
Funny too, because I had a philosophy professor there who talked about how the university is not a vocational school, but a place one goes to enrich the mind and become a more worldly citizen.
What is the university traditionally for? Education. What curriculum is most quintessentially constitutive of education? The liberal arts (traditionally understood, not the flakey pot-smoking/Dead Poets Society counterfeit). What is the purpose of the liberal arts? The free man.
What is the mission of the university today? Job training (putting to the side the question of how well it actually accomplishes this end). What are jobs? The servile arts.
There’s the heart of the contradiction. The university has a split personality that has rendered it bad at education and bad at job training, and to add insult to injury, it charges you Ritz prices for Motel 6 service.
The idea of universal education was never sensible. “Democratization” leads to mediocrity, because now market forces demand you satisfy the customer. You fail everyone by doing this. You get people that are uneducated (despite what they fancy themselves to be) and poorly trained for work, and on top of that, burdened by crushing debt. What a great start to adult life!
I propose that the first fundamental change needs to occur first in primary education, which is generally quite poor. Try teaching the basic liberal arts in primary schools (some adaptation of the trivium/quadrivium). Then, either after high school or by bifurcating high school into university-bound and trade-bound tracks, you choose one or the other track. In general, the majority should be in the trade track (where “trade” includes more that just plumbing or construction or whatever, but also vast swathes of what we put people through universities for for no justifiable reason).
Then we unsaddle the university of its job-training duties. Instead, you have apprenticeships and technical schools and so on to prepare people for their occupations. The university is stripped of anything that weakens its mission as educating institution. Valuable ancillary activities are spun off into, say, technical institutes.
See https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/401/424/ for the case.
The problem is that any hiring test that blacks and whites pass at different rates, is presumed racist. Never mind that the real issue might be that the blacks went to worse schools and received a worse education. Never mind that there is a big body of research showing that ability tests are a more effective way to hire good employees than interviews. If the ratio of blacks to whites hired is different than the ratio that apply, you are presumed to be racist and in violation of the Civil Rights Act.
So a company that needs to hire literate people can no longer, as used to be standard, allow high school students to apply and give them a literacy test. But they can require college.
Therefore college has become a job requirement for a plethora of jobs whose actual requirement is "literate". Jobs that people used to be able to do out of high school, and jobs that could still be done by plenty of high school graduates. That this has become so ubiquitous lead to an increased demand for college. Which is one of the factors driving tuition up.
(My suspicion is that an ability test would lead to a less racist outcome than requiring college. Why? Because minority families struggle more to afford college.)
This might have been true when the United States was mostly white, and "minority" specifically referred to the black population who was mostly descended from slaves brought to the US mainland pre-1808, or to an even small number of native Americans. Today, when the US population is significantly more ethnically diverse, and "minority" just means "anyone nonwhite, regardless of where they came from or what their family history is", there's a lot more variation in exactly how ability to afford college correlates with ethnicity.
Why spend so much money on an "education" if you could become successful by simple being competent. The tech sector was like that at first, but then came the degree requirement and the HR ladies. It was a short run and now they are very mad that some people became successful without needing to bow to the dominant ideology.
But as a matter of empirical reality, our enforcement system declines to prosecute employers who require degrees, because requiring degrees is morally good and requiring exams is morally bad.
The rules about what's allowed don't actually derive from the law. We have laws that forbid everything, accompanied by selective prosecution of only the things that certain people disapprove of.
> Even if there is no discriminatory intent, an employer may not use a job requirement that functionally excludes members of a certain race if it has no relation to measuring performance of job duties. Testing or measuring procedures cannot be determinative in employment decisions unless they have some connection to the job.
(emphasis mine)
When SCOTUS found against the power company they sent a clear message that merely being a technical, safety-critical job was an insufficient basis to establish a need to test people for intelligence. And as it's hard to argue that testing isn't needed for people who could cause massive power outages but is for <job X>, that was widely interpreted to ban such aptitude testing for any kind of job.
That's your interpretation. The court regarded the test used the power company as unrelated to the demands of the job. You're welcome to disagree with the court about that (as the company probably did), but don't misrepresent their actual position.
Your first sentence is the result of bigotry against those with "enhanced" melanin content, not the cause.
The cause is laid out in your second sentence.
Resolve the systemic bigotry (not just against those with enhanced melanin content, but against those with the least resources as, at least in the US, most schools are paid for by local property taxes, making the poorest areas the ones with the worst schools) and put us all on a level playing field and we'll be a much fairer society IMNSHO.
That's as may be, but my point was orthogonal to theirs and not meant as agreement or disagreement.
However I can’t find evidence of that now that I’m looking so if someone could confirm one way or the other that this was true or not, I’d appreciate it
I guess todays 'cool perk' is something like free lunch or allowing dogs at work. I think the "Unlimited Vacation" scam has unraveled at this point.
Healthcare costs, and hence health insurance premiums, are the same with or without an employer intermediary. The only difference is with an employer intermediary, the insured gets to pay their premium with pre-tax income. The cost of the health insurance is still felt by the employer (shown in box 12 of code DD of everyone’s W-2), and seen by the employee in the form of smaller raises, or higher premiums/deductibles/oop max, or worse networks.
>People want job training, and it got shoehorned into extra departments at liberal arts universities intended as aristocrat finishing schools. Job training really has little to no relationship to liberal arts.
Job training didn’t get shoehorned, a cheap filtering mechanism for people worth betting on to be a good hire got shoehorned. But that filter simultaneously got worse and more expensive over time, making it a bad purchase for most students and bad signal for employers.
It matters for early retirees (or these days, people forced out of job some years before they wanted to officially retire). Without self-employment income they can't deduct it, and often for similar reasons they can't itemize. They still get the standard deduction of course, but an person on an employer plan gets that + their cost of premiums, automatically.
Probably half the jobs in the US don’t pay enough for the employee regularly see a doctor. It might protect them for the $500k emergency heart bypass, but they are not going to be able to afford the $10k out of pocket costs or the ongoing healthcare expenses after they lose their job.
Wouldn't you like to STOP the insanity of "picking" a plan every year (or more) and also end the billing nightmare by just making it all single payer (the government of the people, for the people)?
If you read the fine print of a health "insurance" plan at a large company, you might discover healthcare costs are directly covered by the employer and the insurance company just administers the plan according to "set rules".
In practice, this operates as blame as a service.
Imagine your car gets totaled. Your insurer says, "Hey, we're going to pay out $25K for your vehicle. So you have a $1,000 deductible, so that's $24,000, and then your copay for a total loss is $2,000, so that brings us down to $22,000. For total losses, your coinsurance as your contribution for your vehicle coverage is 20%, which is $5,000, so here's a check for $17,000. But that's only if you're buying a Hyundai, otherwise the vehicle is out of network and you'll get a check for $8,500 instead."
> If you read the fine print of a health "insurance" plan at a large company, you might discover healthcare costs are directly covered by the employer and the insurance company just administers the plan according to "set rules".
Generally this is done by a TPA (third party administrator). In many ways you can do as you wish, but as insurers have already done the actuarial work, it's generally easier to use a plan and tweak it if desired (like "Give us this plan but pay for 1 massage/week") versus having to figure that out yourself.
Health insurance is more insurance than car insurance in the US. There is a legal out of pocket maximum of $17k or so, and networks don’t matter for emergency situations. In fact, people get millions of dollars of healthcare from health insurance whereas auto insurance provides a maximum of $500k after which you have to use umbrella insurance.
Health insurance premiums are not insurance premiums, because legally, health insurance sellers cannot underwrite the health risks. Legally, young and healthy people have to subsidize old and sick, via age rating factor caps (3x and even 1x in NY and 2x in MA), and not being able to price pre existing conditions.
Which means health insurance premiums are mostly a tax if you are healthy and less than 50 years old or so, especially if you don’t plan on giving birth that year.
Auto insurance premiums are insurance, because the insurer is pricing your risk of loss, based on your driving history/driving distance/location/etc.
So the healthcare isn’t cheap, but the employer is able to gain more control over their employees by tying a piece of their non employee life to the employer creating more friction to prevent people from shopping for jobs with higher pay, and the employee is getting a small tax benefit.
My mom's plan randomly denied my medications all the time as a student. My current job's plan always provides coverage.
Both were the same insurance company, but she's in a different field with a more stingy employer.
That's missing the biggest problem, which is that the employer gets a free chance to extort the employee in all sorts of illegal ways lest they be cut off and die.
Wage theft is perhaps the biggest-value type of crime every year (sources disagree, but it's certainly higher than many), and that's only one kind of illegal thing employers do when they have all the leverage.
When one then compares US facilities to foreign ones, it's trivially easy to see that many parts of the system just look different, which comes from the perverse incentives of going through employers that aren't big enough to actually push down on providers' prices at all. Both truly private, low insurance systems and universal healthcare systems end up having much better incentives, and therefore lower prices, regardless of who is paying for them.
We get something similar when you compare US universities to those in Continental Europe. It's clear that over there, the finishing school component is so vestigial as to be practically invisible, whole the focus is a filtering mechanism that attempts to teach something. Go look at, say, Spain's universities and see how many open electives are there, or how many university-wide general requirements exist (0). Each degree is basically an independent unit, and chances are you'll never visit a building from a different school. Undeclared majors? Nope. Significant number of students living on campus? Nope. Sports teams, offering scholarships? Nothing of the sort. This also leads to much lower prices to the school itself, regardless of whether it's all paid by taxes or students.
While it may not be optimal, there is plenty of training/learning that happens in colleges.
It seems that the US will course correct but the EU seems to be declining into authoritarianism and proto-communism.
The left has not been popular in the EU since the 70s, which is why this development has gotten increasingly aggresive in the last few decades. You cannot seriously suggest that the EU has moved left in any meaningful way. The EU commission is currently trying to implement that every new regulation can only pass once an old regulation can be removed. It's a neoliberal dream, where the amount of regulation can only go down, and public funds are allocated to private companies more and more.
This is especially true for universities, where public funding programs for research has begun to be funneled to startups instead of research groups.
It is darkly amusing that in one post you claim "the left has not been popular since the 70s" whilst admitting that the EU is centrally planning new companies. That's very much the sort of thing the left did in the 1970s.
> You cannot seriously suggest that the EU has moved left in any meaningful way ... the EU commission is currently trying to implement that every new regulation can only pass once an old regulation can be removed.
And who believes they'll really do it? They only got to that point after ignoring decades of warnings from the right that their left wing approach would crush their own economic power, which it did.
It's a common enough claim that "the left" refers to exactly the same set of ideas that it did in 1930, and therefore that no modern entity is left wing. But this is spurious. There are still left wing people and groups, that claim to be so and nobody disagrees with them.
All that happened is that as left wing economics became discredited over the course of the 20th century the left became better at obfuscating what they were doing. After the working classes disappointed by not rising up in revolution, the concept of equality shifted to be about gender and race instead. The EU doesn't want to openly nationalize industries, but is really keen on feminism, regulation and mass third world migration.
And economically, the left didn't need to obfuscate much. The gap between heavy regulation and nationalization is small. CEOs get to pretend that they're still in charge, but with no strong commitment to private property rights they're ultimately just transient administrators and there's not much reason to sign up for the stresses of being one. So - no startups.
This is how you get some dude that will argue with a straight face that EU problems absolutely come from neoliberalism when many of the biggest members are closing on 60% public spending to GDP ratio. I just can't imagine the cognitive dissonance at this point.
I wish it would be simple ignorance or plain stupidity because it would mean that would be somewhat solvable. But they are simply and purely lying and they have been doing it for so long that they don't even know where/what reality is anymore. That's a bit sad when you think about it.
At least the "good thing" is that since they are nothing but parasites, eventually they successfully destroy the host system. Then comes the reality check and for a while the parasites get evacuated.
By the way, HN is infested with Marxist types, which is hilarious considering it is supposed to be a forum for a filthy capitalist endeavor. But this is the way of life of the parasite: identify a valuable target and destroy it from the inside. Find another supply, rinse and repeat.
Nationalization and regularization are both on the decline. The opposite has happened: privatization of state monopolies and deregulatization.
I also think it's hilarious that you think a) the EU is feminist, and b) that feminism is leftist. What you are describing is liberalism, a right wing political position.
And even the liberal right is losing ground to the conservative right. The EU commission is far more conservative than it ever has been, and hard-right parties are in government in at least six EU countries (see e.g., https://www.politico.eu/article/mapped-europe-far-right-gove...), with conservative governments elsewhere. This is a strict break with tradition, where the extreme right has been excluded from European governments by consensus of other parties ever since the second world war.
Your beliefs are not aligned with reality. I am also personally in the middle of this research money refunnelling, I can vouch forst hand that research money is being funneled to startups and other private companies, while austerity measures are hitting hard across the EU.
Here is what Wikipedia has to say on the matter. > Neoliberalism is often associated with a set of economic liberalization policies, including privatization, deregulation, depoliticisation, consumer choice, labor market flexibilization, economic globalization, free trade, monetarism, austerity, and reductions in government spending.
Do you agree with that definition ? If so, none of what is happening in the EU is consistent with that description. If not, I'm all hears for what you think it means.
> The left has not been popular in the EU since the 70s What constitute the left has mutated and is not called as such anymore. It is now found in the "green" parties and adjacent. The hard left is actually very popular, at least as much as the right wing, but I'll grant you they are becoming less desirable because people are pushing back on the immigration the hard left is very much for that. It is incoherent because it mechanically reduce the power/earning of their supposed electorate but on the other hand it grants them dominating power in key places and they get the votes of the bourgeoisie.
Here is some data on public government spending in the EU. https://www.statista.com/statistics/263220/public-spending-r... https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/government-spendin...
Most of the rich countries are over 50% and approaching 60% very fast. After COVID, spending has increased at an insane rate, via debt creation. It's basically like a poor family using credit to buy an ultra expensive fancy car but I guess that's very austere to you.
It's balsy to pretend that the EU suffer from austerity when the data readily show the contrary. The only tax revisions to be found are to raise them, not the other way around.
To be clear, I'm all for the targeted raising of taxes on the boomers, who got us into this mess. I also think some of the regulations goals are laudable (notably transition to electric everything and building improvements but I disagree that regulation is the way to get there. Considering that the EU economy is basically in the dump, I'll say that the world largely agree with me.
And a positive EV isn't sufficient. It would also need to have a very low chance of negative EV. Otherwise people would be crazy to sink $400,000 into a degree that might or might not leave their child with better job prospects in the future.
Of course, only the wealthy pay full price for college, but when you ask people if college is worth the cost, they may be anchored to those prices even if their own kids would end up paying less.
From the point of view of developing your brain, leaving your country is a free education in itself. There is also the effect of embedding yourself in a network of expats made up of the best and brightest from countries all over the world. That all comes on top of the education you receive. And if you are less in it for the intellectual stuff and are more into drinking and partying, college life in the US is pretty lame compared to some university towns across the world. Cheaper, wilder, better.
Community college to state school path.
You can get a full bachelors degree for ~$35k. All four years, $35k. Not per year. Full degree. $35k.
And that's before any scholarships or grants.
Kids and parents are just insane though, and want to flex about the college they are going to from day one. Its become a ritualistic practice with social shame attached to going to community school.
Even though the end result is exactly the same.
Whether that is a sensible strategy for the firm (a candidate bias towards those who can pay the top college fees) is another question.
A one-person apartment in the local halls of residence costs under €500/month here in DE. A room in a shared flat costs a lot less.
I wonder how long it will last? UK Universities are now for rich foreigners only. It does mean great options for Chinese food near student halls though.
I mean, good luck finding a job in the US when your degree is not from the us (or maybe Canada). Most industries don't hire folks with overseas degrees.
They’re paying less, but they can also only afford to pay less.
I went to college with many people who were paying heavily reduced tuition rates and it was still a significant financial burden for them.
So even if the expected value of the degree is high in the long run, the downside risk is immediate financial ruin.
It is also worth noting that the non-wealthy pay for higher education in two ways: first through tuition, and second through the taxes required to fund the very programs that provided their "discount."
Which, honestly, isn't that bad of an idea. Means-testing for everyone.
So I'd say we have to consider the full set of drivers that can correlate: overall rising cost of living making it very expensive to be at a university full-time, general labor market sentiment which is mostly down since covid, interest rates and debt risk which are still high despite recent cuts, etc.
1. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/education/college-costs-working...
This is one of those things that may technically be correct, but only because colleges are giving out tiny $500/yr scholarships to practically everyone.
There are still affordable schools. And staying in a dorm with expensive room and board remains optional at many institutions. Heck, some people still live with their parents.
The state school I went to is still just around $10k/year tuition, and I got a broad education that opened many doors for me. (I was in the humanities, but there are very good science programs there as well.)
Of course it's crazy to sink $400k into a degree for most people. And for many, many people, it is completely un-necessary! You can still get a relatively affordable 4 year degree.
Getting companies to see those superpowers in a hiring pipeline of course is a different story
Harvard was one of the leaders of the charge in terms of grade inflation back 20ish years ago
Yes, more than one.
Either the bar for getting into Harvard cannot possibly be as high as it's made out to be, someone's figured out how to completely defeat degree-validation service providers, or Harvard is happy to churn out a nonzero number of students wholly unprepared for meeting extremely basic expectations for the prototypical job of their chosen degree.
From one of my professors who did their graduate work at an Ivy, apparently there are a lot of rich kids who can't be failed because their parents donate so much money to the school. But I don't think Harvard has ever had the best undergraduate reputation (among the Ivies), its more well known for its grad/professional programs.
Most of Harvard's endowment is via alumni, so it doesn't surprise me in the least they continue with it.
FizzBuzz, reversing a sentence -- this is programming your way out of a wet paper bag, not elite and esoteric skills that need advanced study and cramming
String.Join(" ",
String.Split(" ", sentence).Reverse()))There's nothing inherently wrong with not being able to write code, but you probably shouldn't be applying for software engineering roles where the main responsibility of the job is ultimately to write working code.
1. Output the numbers from 1 to 100
2. If the number is a multiple of 3, write Fizz instead of the number
3. If the number is a multiple of 5, write Buzz instead of the number
4. If the number is a multiple of 3 and 5, write FizzBuzz instead of the number
Does that really sound like something requiring special practice and preparation? Assuming a decent interviewer would help out with the modulo operator if that was unfamiliar
While my career involves writing code, I am not a SWE, I have never done any formal leetcode prep, and I have no formal education in technology beyond a high school CS class. I have no college degree whatsoever, not even an associate's degree.
I had a rule I stuck to when doing these interviews (which were for a SWE role) that felt very fair to me - I would not give these candidates any problem I couldn't solve in the same circumstances.
For reference, in the allotted time, one such candidate spent a good chunk of their time reading up on JS if/then syntax on w3schools. As I watched, I reminded them they could use any language they wanted, if they were more comfortable or familiar with others, and this Harvard CS grad declined, stating JS was their "strongest" language.
My best guess about these cases were rich kids / legacy admissions that weren't allowed to be failed for political reasons.
Don’t get me wrong, we don’t have much of a choice in evaluating especially junior hires. Even for senior hires you want to make sure they haven’t drifted through their last jobs without actually coding. But on the spot performances are different even for the simple stuff, they should practice coding questions on the fly regardless, and even the worst possible SWE candidate should be able to pass these with a bit of prep. With a lot of prep they could do leetcode, a still suck at the job when they get it.
It’s been 20 years or so since my knowledge was up-to-date, but Oxbridge undergrads used to bitterly complain that their 2:2 (grade C I guess?) wasn’t seen as equivalent to getting a 1st(A?) or 2:1(B) from other good UK unis by graduate schemes and large employers.
Oxbridge workload seemed to be significantly higher for most undergrad degrees than it was at other unis, and the feeling was that an essay a week was required that would have been equivalent to a term’s work at other unis. I only ever heard the Oxbridge side of this, however.
Zero employers have ever asked to see my college GPA after graduating almost 17 years ago.
You are already seeing grade inflation in the UK too: Go look at the percentage of first class degrees over time.
The only place where a modern US university can be used as a filter is in their own admissions, where they can still be pretty stringent. Harvard could fill their class 6 times with people that are basically indistinguishable from their freshman class, so just getting into the right university already shows that you must have had some skill and maturity by the time you were a junior in high school.
This is also why hiring juniors is so difficult nowadays for software: Having successfully finished a CS degree at most universities says nothing about your ability to write any code at all, or analyze any complex situation. And with the advent of leetcode training, it's not as if you can now tell who happens to be good because they remember their algorithms and data structure classes really well. You have no idea of how good the new grad is going to be when they show to the interview, and even those that pass might not be all that great in practice, as they might just have spent 3 months memorizing interview questions like an automaton.
The UK system doesn't really let students choose which classes to take
Two improvements then: Degrees that earn the reputation of not being given for anything less than excellence in studies. Where the earned reputation is used both to discourage the non-serious, and enhance the value of the degree.
And of course, bring down the costs. Create a high octane alumni network to match. Foster an opinionated high work ethic, college-as-daycare / party-scene repellent culture. Anything and everything rethought from scratch.
For instance, why are degrees based on years? Why so standardized when neither students or jobs are? Why not a skill chart that can be custom traversed per student - with students expected to move on whenever they choose to, or have a good opportunity. A high percentage of students leaving for good jobs after just one year would be a win.
For just one slice of education, to start.
As with anything complex, start with something small and focused. Like a low population cutting edge practice/research AI school. Start from scratch with the thing that is new, challenging and in high demand.
Then expand into other fast changing, high demand areas. Keep figuring out better ways, keep taking on more, keep reducing costs, as long as all three of those efforts tradeoffs are compatible.
If people want to play those exclusivity games that's up to them. What's wrong is asking the taxpayer to fund it under the false mask that the entire product is education.
There was a study on one of the most selective school in France and actually diversity of background has gone down in the last 20 years. Europe is highly politicised and it was always about selecting for ideologically compatible behavior. Otherwise education wouldn't need so much government intervention/support, even if said education would be paid for by the taxpayer (everyone could get some amounts of credits, that they could spend on their institution of choice).
For what it's worth, the USA isn't unique in adapting admissions to reject an unwanted minority. The most interesting mechanism has to be Moscow State University's Jewish Problems: https://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1556
This isn’t socially useful.
The price of college at this point is a ridiculous value proposition to the average student. Who cares about the top students and the most gifted people. They will be fine regardless. The average student is getting crushed and ripped off blind.
Ripping off entire generations of young people is really stupid and is going to have devastating long run social consequences.
Then companies are evaluated on how much work is produced in their business (for example by revenue), and they have to either contract the equivalent number of people with college degrees, or even better - license the degree from a college graduate. This can also be used to pay for tuition. The student gets a mortgage that pays for her education when she enters college, and then the lender has the right to part of either her salary, or the licensing fee for her degree to companies that need it, or to people who need it.
Let's say a chef who hasn't gone to culinary college, he can pay a culinary college graduate 20% of his salary to use their degree, which is a professional license. Or a company needing programmers. They can hire immigrants or an AI to program, and pay licensing fees to computer science graduates who have the degree.
Think what I thriving market for banks, investors, and insurance companies! They will be able to package these licenses and offer them on the market to individual workers or to companies for competitive and efficient rates. The college student of course gets rewarded as well, as they can rent out their degree, or even sell it. So a good student can get several degrees, and have a very good income from both his own work and from degree licensing fees. Of course we'll make sure that students belonging to an oppressed class be allowed to license their one degree to several places at the same time.
Nothing is free - once you graduate you are hit with 50% tax that gets back all you "free" tuition costs many, many times over.
Not saying education should not be subsidized via taxes (I think it's good overall), but it's not free at all - the price is just hidden and spread out over many years (similar to student loans but less visible).
https://www.aei.org/articles/the-crazy-amount-america-spends...
Put yourself into the student’s shoes. If you had the choice between two schools of otherwise roughly equal academic reputation but one offered luxurious residences while the other housed students like medieval monks, which would you choose?
There are lots of reasons why US academics earn so much more than their european counterparts, but the income level of US tech employees is not high on the list, if it is on the list at all.
Also, Baumol's doesn't predict that wages in low productivity growth sectors will rise, it merely notes that the costs in such sectors do not fall, which means that whatever the sector produces (good, services, art etc) become relatively more expensive compared to other production. This is why it appears to cost so much to see the symphony orchestra, even in Cincinnati - it's not that the players all make a ton of money, it's that their productivity is flat, so the costs of the performance appear to rise relative to, say, toothpaste.
> Based on the details you provided—specifically the overlap with the poem "AM" (from Be Bop or Be Dead) and "Set The Tone" (from Bernie Worrell's Blacktronic Science)—the track you are most likely looking for is: "Music" by DeadbEAT (featuring Umar Bin Hassan) Released in 1992/1993 on the album Wild Kingdom, this track was a cult hit in the acid jazz/trip-hop scene of the 90s and later appeared on compilations like the influential Red Hot + Cool (1994).
Very good, except that there is no album called "Wild Kingdom" by an artist named Deadbeat, and while Hassan does appear on "Red Hot + Cool" it is on a differently named track written by himself.
So forgive me if I call bullshit on Gemini 3 as well.
However, in this instance, it is a correct summary of the most visible popular summaries of Baumol's cost disease, so there's that.
I don't think it captures the essence of what Baumol (& Bowen) were writing about, but I accept that my presentation was misleading.
It is what most people nowadays connect with "Baumol's cost disease", but in their paper, the way in which rising productivity sectors cause wage increases in stable productivity sectors was more of a detail than the central part of their thesis. The core part was the observation that certain kinds of economic activity cannot reduce costs through productivity gains, while others can; the wage connection between them was, well, not an afterthought, but more of a consequence of the very specific sort of economic system we live in. One could imagine a society with different ways of distributing resources to labor that didn't really have this feature, and yet the same sectors of this imaginary society's would still suffer from "Baumol's cost disease".
The cost of the person in front of the blackboard has not been increasing.
Free health care doesn't mean "nobody gets paid to provide health care", it means "patients do not pay for health at the point of service".
If you'd prefer that we use some other term to describe this, please suggest it. I do find it interesting that the Scottish NHS uses "No fees at point of service" as part of their branding (or did, back in 2019).
You're kidding. The former means all higher net worth individuals to take on both the cost (via taxes) and the benefit (a well-trained workforce for businesses, well-paid, highly taxed contributors for the state, an educated populace of voters, graduates with stable work and in-demand skills). The latter is another example of America's "Everyone for themselves" theme, with students bearing the entire cost of their education, while the graduate, public, state, and businesses reap the benefit.
If the benefits are spread so widely, why shouldn't the cost be?
My point is that it doesn't matter in principle if one takes a loan and pays it down over time vs. one is taxed at much higher % and that tax "pays down" a phantom student loan of "free" education.
It does introduce a risk and hence the incentive for loan takers to choose their degree wisely though. Which should lead to better allocation of labor but at a cost of some personal risk.
The entirety of society benefits from a well-educated populace. That's one reason even those without children pay for public education.
Following that, if everyone benefits, why is the graduate taking on all the risk (via a non-dischargeable student loan) instead of spreading the risk across the entirety of society?
I think that's fair that risk should be more spread. Comes at a cost of people choosing degrees more frivolously though and wasting their time and everyone's money
Some degrees are less in-demand (at time of graduation) economically, but a well-educated populace that can apply critical thinking and remember lessons from history, can be its own reward. Notably, pushing for a population completely lacking these skills is an excellent way to topple a democracy over time.
I see your point on broader benefits, however, those are largely speculative while a shortage of e.g. doctors has very direct and concrete costs to the society.
On prior point regarding spreading risks - would you say government should bail out failed entrepreneurs? Because that is very similar in principle (taking risk, benefit for society)
I'm not saying failed entrepreneurs should be bailed out, even if (through bankruptcy proceedings) they de-facto are. To your point though, they're given tax breaks by my government [0], which aligns with the goals we seem to have agreed are important and good for society at large.
Small businesses are given assistance when starting out and financially vulnerable; financial assistance that is paid for by all members of society, as we all reap the benefits of a stronger economy when they succeed. I'm not sure how one defends not extending the same courtesy to students.
In the EU, the risk has been loaded onto everyone but the benefits are meager at best, and inexistent in practice. This is the typical problem of socialist system where everyone bear the cost but the benefits are only distributed to those in power or those who could manipulate the system for their own benefits.
If that wasn't true, France wouldn't be in the political turmoil and economic disaster that it is today. Unsurprisingly, France has been dominated by marxist adjacent ideologies, co-opted by the "resistants", the real winners of WW2. The US won on the ground but largely lost the ideological battle, we are now seeing the result of that invisible battleground.
Nobody said the student achieves no benefit. We keep saying that the student does not capture all the benefit of their own education in higher wages, but bears the entire cost.
Affordable access to good education is a good outcome from the heavy taxation I pay.
Just don't say it's "free" - those who get the education pay back all they got via taxes (which in it's end effect are like paying down a student loan).
And nobody thinks free education doesn't cost anything, just like people don't think the military doesn't cost anything. Somehow, though, there is endless trillions for "defense", and a little moth flies out of the wallet when it's for something that doesn't involve drones.
People with a degree: Get free education and free stipends, then get paid by the tax payers for the rest of their lives in their cushy government "jobs".
I had opportunities to move to the US and likely make 2x-3x what I make here and pay less taxes. I chose moving to Europe instead. It is the sort of society I prefer to live in.
While arguably that's indirectly 'for the piece of paper', I'd argue the pleasant experience is a factor too, even if not quoted as such. i.e. if it was a purely rational, economic choice (my interpretation of going to college just for the degree) we'd see higher enrollment in high-ROI majors.
If you're a kid and you want to be making money (or at least a comfortable living) in 20 year's time, become a farrier.
Because we are going to be ploughing with horses again soon, the way things are going. And even if we're not, a horse needs shod every couple of months and costs a couple of hundred every time.
I've never seen a hungry-looking farrier or scrap metal dealer.
Is this not rational behavior? If, through grade inflation, the only thing that matters to an employer is what school you went to and that you completed it (the sheepskin effect), then isn't the correct optimization to reduce wasting time on levers that won't make any practical difference in the end?
Sure sure, there's the love of learning and the formation of the well-rounded modern individual, but most people are much more pragmatic than that.
They need to get in, get the piece of paper for the least effort, get a job. Everything they need can be taught on the job or asked to ChatGPT most likely anyway.
A Case Against Education https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691174655/th... was prophetic of this phenomenon years ago.
If you think the purpose of an education is literally nothing more than the diploma, then yeah sure.
If you think that I'm interviewing you for an entry SWE job (yes, we do this still) and you think I'm going to hire you because you hyperoptimized a compsci degree to minimize the work and learning you had to do and maximized your GPA, then you're going to blow the interview and wind up another person on reddit scratching your head wondering why these mean companies just don't want to give you your $125k software dev job.
Obviously, you don't need a degree to learn enough to convince me that you'll be a productive member of our team (or at least good enough in the short term and productive after a few months). But in my experience, the ones who half ass and ChatGPT their way through college are almost never brilliant polymaths. In my experience as a student years back and my experience interviewing graduates now, those students breezed through their courses and sought out more challenging learning opportunities such as accelerated graduate courses, impressive work within student organizations (for example, winning CTFs competitions with their school's computer security group), etc. And that all shows up on resumes and in interviews in a way that's night and day vs the ones who got tricked into thinking that the only purpose of an education is to get a paper.
Yes, and it is also demonstrated by the Flynn Effect. [1]
About "A Case Against Education": Caplan draws on the latest social science to show how the labor market values grades over knowledge, and why the more education your rivals have, the more you need to impress employers. He explains why graduation is our society’s top conformity signal, and why even the most useless degrees can certify employability.
The reason I don't think this is rational at all is the amount of work needed to "look good for employers" isn't really that far off from the amount of work needed to understand and learn the info well in the first place.
I used to do a lot of college hiring for software devs. We did on-campus recruiting at a bunch of top universities, so sure, the school you went to is inherently one factor in our hiring process. But we also definitely cared about the grades you got, especially in core CS courses. Most importantly, my on-campus interviews were focused on things that someone should have learned in their data structures and/or algorithms course (but used examples that were as "real world" as possible). If you didn't actually understand the material, we weren't going to hire you.
When it came time for me, I couldn’t even come close to affording college (in 1981). Long story, but there were many challenges to address.
I didn’t want to accept financial support from my family (see “long story,” above), but I did let them co-sign a government-backed student loan for $6,000, for a two-year, full-time trade school (which seemed outrageously expensive, back then).
Took ten years to repay, but I never regretted it.
Now compare this to income differential. Starting grad income is $80k(?). At 4% raise per year compared to 3.5% raise per year for a non-college employee. Over 43 years.
My math comes out to the college grad is still making more money despite the initial sunk cost.
I have some middle and upper middle class gen X and older friends giving their children TERRIBLE advice about how degrees aren't worth it anymore and you get more out of getting started in your career ASAP than spending 4 years in school. The problem is that a BS now is like a high school diploma when they grew up, and if you don't have one, then in all likelihood, you will struggle to not be downwardly mobile, as it's the new middle class gatekeeping tool.
People should NOT listen to anyone over 45-50 or so who tells them college isn't necessary. Those people grew up in a world that no longer exists.
Another example of bad gen X / boomer advice is to knock out core credits in community college and transfer to university later. They don't understand that your only shot at getting significant scholarships and financial aid is when you enter as a 1st time freshman. I know someone with brilliant kids who made National Merit Scholar this year who is already setting their kids aims low by advising them to do this when there are so many good universities, both private and state, where their kids have a good shot at getting a full ride.
The correct way to do it is to utilize high school dual credit or dual enrollment offerings. Then you can shave off a year or two of college but still be eligible for freshman scholarships. Often cheaper than community college too.
I'll have to push back on this. I'll give NJ as an example but other states have similar systems. In NJ If you are in the top 15% of your graduating school you are covered for full tuition provided for the first two years at community college. You are also given a guaranteed spot at whatever public college/program you want. (EDIT: I am not sure if this is still the case im trying to sift through the documentation but now I think it may also require minimum GPA in CC) Imagine getting that university degree and starting your professional career with potentially 0 debt.
Furthermore a variation of this program extends to families making less than 65k. If you meet that criteria. The community college degree is 0$. From there you are given a course schedule that if you follow will transfer 1:1 to a university and if you do well academically there you can be eligible for reduced or waived tuition at the public college of your choosing. This system helps people who did poorly in high school or just didnt make the cut aid wise get a second chance at tuition free college.
If you make more than 65k, you still get reduced tuition on some sliding scale. And again excellent grades translates to more savings.
At least for NJ, Community college really sets many people up for an excellent start in their career by not having any college debt.
I got a full ride plus stipend to a pretty good but not great school, but one of the things I wish my parents pushed me on harder was applying to schools like MIT where I didn't bother applying because I didn't want to be saddled with debt. This was a couple decades back, and it's so much easier to get a full ride now if you can make it in (admittedly much harder now).
My point isn't to write off community college. It's that a talented and accomplished high schooler should set their sights higher because the old idea that all these elite colleges are unaffordable is rapidly changing.
Also, I am not sure if you know people taking CC courses recently, but they are often taught in a way that gives you what you paid for at $0. Prerecorded canned lectures, infuriating and curiosity crushing online worksheets, etc. I know multiple people who were excited to do free CC when it was made free for older (30+) students whose academic aims were immediately stamped out within one semester because there was no college instruction. Just endless online worksheets. These things exist in other higher ed paths too, but truly not to the extent that I've witnessed.
Ivy league is a shrinking circle of spots and does not represent the majority of where exceptionally talented students go to as a result. Lets just take the example I cited with the top 15% of high school students in each high school in NJ would likely exceed the available spots at all Ivy Leagues. You mentioned public institutions in your original message. States have programs in place to ensure exceptional students are taken care of.
>Also, I am not sure if you know people taking CC courses recently, but they are often taught in a way that gives you what you paid for at $0. Prerecorded canned lectures, infuriating and curiosity crushing online worksheets, etc. I know multiple people who were excited to do free CC when it was made free for older (30+) students whose academic aims were immediately stamped out within one semester because there was no college instruction. Just endless online worksheets. These things exist in other higher ed paths too, but truly not to the extent that I've witnessed.
I was admitted to an Engineering school but due to severe health issues with family, I was forced to move closer and enroll in community college so I have gone through this experience in a unique way (Enrolled at University -> Transfered to CC -> Transferred back to University).
This was ~15 years ago but during that time all the teachers at the CC had Masters degrees in their field and also had additional teaching credentials(some had PHDs).
I found that instruction was very focused on ensuring students learned material vs my experience at my public Research based university where either TAs taught courses or professors focused on their research would reluctantly lecture as a requirement.
I will concede that instruction in subjects like Math/Physics were not of the same caliber as university only because while CCs tended to give examinations consisting of hard versions of the practice problems assigned as homework, my Engineering university expected me to to deeply understand the material and would give very unique problems during the common exams that test the deeper understanding vs just technique.
I am surprised to hear the anecdote that you expressed as that wouldn't pass muster with the university accreditation bodies as well as the admissions departments of the public universities that renew the "transfer agreements" with the CCs. In NJ there is a requirement of a minimum standard of instruction needed or else the receiving university has the right to reject course credit from the CC and rescind transfer agreements. The universities know who comes from the CCs and they are assessing academic performance of those students. For example Rutgers does this with some CC in their CS classes as the subject material is not 1:1(they are offered as general elective credit instead so still allows the student to not fall too behind).
Let me ask you was this anecdote occuring during COVID? Maybe that accounts for the strange online instruction?
Bear in mind when I say "elite college", I'm not talking Ivy Leagues, as those have covered tuition for the non-wealthy students for a while now. I'm talking elite liberal arts colleges (Amherst, Swarthmore), elite private universities (MIT, Rice), etc. Many state schools cover a lot but your mileage varies dramatically, and it's often tied to fairly intense GPA requirements. Georgia Tech has a student suicide problem because of this, for example.
>This was ~15 years ago but during that time all the teachers at the CC had Masters degrees in their field and also had additional teaching credentials(some had PHDs).
It's much worse now. A lot of the core classes (calculus, first semester bio and chem, etc.) don't have teachers at all. You're given all of your instruction via canned videos and your homework and evaluation through online tests. There's often a way to contact a teacher of some sort, but they will mostly be terse and just link you to a resource to work on it yourself or direct you to a forum where you and your classmates can talk about it.
This isn't covid, this is from this year. A lot of this started with covid but has stuck around for budgetary reasons. YMMV but for a lot of places, this is how you cut costs to be able to easily offer free college. Some of the classes will still have teachers, but the big ones that people typically use CC for will be largely automated because that's what scales.
> gen X / boomer
Those 2 generations aren't even remotely close in terms of shared experience of what high school diploma was like when they grew up.
You are conflating the “exceptional” kid coming out if HS who is offered full rides (who clearly should take advantage of that and go straight into university with that full ride) with an average student who will have to pay for some or all of college. For the latter, community college for 2 years was and still is a good idea.
And that is the point: do the math that assesses the incomes correctly and many people won’t see as college as sensible for those professions.
If I were faced with spending $100k/yr for my kid to go to college, I would strongly consider offering 5 tranches of $50,000 that we would together invest in business ideas over the next 5 years. Humanities and social sciences could be learned in parallel, while trying to launch businesses that bring value to the world.
The lessons learned would not be the same as those one learns in college, and the social aspects would be very different/lacking. This would clearly not work for all teenagers, but for some, it could be a much better opportunity and use of funds.
Any other industry? Biology? Social sciences? Academia? Manufacturing?
I struggle to think of anything other than finance that has a shot of STARTING at $80k. Hell I didn’t hit $80k in software industry until ~3 years in and I thought I was (I indeed WAS) very lucky.
It doesn't really matter if you consider it to be insane. The studies on this stuff always compare averages to averages, and average college grads do better in the long run no matter how optimistically you cook the books to make the inverse seem likely.
This is far from true when you consider the selection bias of who goes to college, and the sheepskin effect.
You are making the assumption that it all boils down to the degree (the difference in income). This can't be possible (maybe a majority of it, but not all of it). There are other factors (like being from a middle-class, higher IQ, etc.) that selects for going to Uni. and this has effect later on income.
The base salaries for Entry level SWE roles are in the $80k-100k range nationally [0].
Additionally, most finance roles start in that ranges, though high finance has starting salaries comparable to Big Tech new grad.
Even Biotech new grad salaries tend to be in the $60k-80k range.
Same with manufacturing engineering roles [1]
[0] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/levels/entry-leve...
[1] - https://www.salary.com/research/salary/alternate/entry-manuf...
If Florida is "backwater", then so is most of the rest of the country outside of a handful of overpriced cities where earning 80k is required to be able to afford a room in an apartment - not the whole apartment, and certainly not buying one.
Heck, most states have fallen into a technical recession [1]. Florida is weird simply because of how much tourism and retirement adjacent industries skew it's economy (eg. Elderly care, primary care, etc) - in fact, healthcare services (as in elderly care, hospice care, and homecare) is the only non-skilled industry that is seeing a significant expansion in the US.
I personally along with HN, other VCs, and PE funds have been actively following the MSO space for a couple years now because of this boom.
And I say this as someone who kinda likes Florida (Dr Philips reminds me and moreso the missus of bougie gated communities back in ASEAN - it's a nice place for us to Fat FIRE).
[0] - https://www.axios.com/local/denver/2025/02/28/white-collar-w...
[1] - https://www.ft.com/content/e9be3e3f-2efe-42f7-b2d2-8ab3efea2...
I would not assume earning that much for 43 years.
There are other ways of getting the same thing. Like if your country has some kind of compulsory service.
But maybe let’s stop pretending college is just about the intellectual stuff and see it as a social good.
I see several possible reactions. One is to do what Georgia Tech and U Texas are doing -- to offer online degrees for MUCH reduced cost, like $10k. Will such 30 credit MS degree programs (that don't require BS first) replace 120 credit BS degrees? That makes a lot of sense to me.
The popularity of residential degree programs may be ending, due to insanely high cost and the need to retrain often as AI automation changes the employment picture rapidly and unpredictably.
> The popularity of residential degree programs may be ending, due to insanely high cost.
I think the problem is that universities _have_ been changing in the direction of _delivering less_ at the same time that they cost more. The article cites public schools doubling tuition in inflation-adjusted terms since 1995, but simultaneously:
- student-faulty ratios have gotten worse
- schools use under-paid adjuncts for a larger share of classes
- good schools often trade on the research record of faculty, but the success of those prominent faculty often mean they can get course buyouts / releases, so they're not teaching anyway
- much has been published about administrative bloat in universities but for example see 2010 vs 2021 numbers here https://www.usnews.com/education/articles/one-culprit-in-ris...
Rather than trying to make new online offerings, I think schools need to lean out their staff, and cut back on programs that don't have to do with instruction. Even better would be if federal funding eligibility was tied to schools demonstrating that at least X% of their budget goes to instruction, where that X should ratchet up over time.
> While there have been some small declines in tuition prices over the last decade, when adjusted for inflation, College Board data shows that the average, inflation-adjusted cost of public four-year college tuition for in-state students has doubled since 1995.
In Chinese/Japanese cultures, role models and parental influence on education is still pretty huge. Japan is changing a bit, but I think school systems are still strict enough to keep it up. China is still a beast of its own.
But in general #1 dominates the dollars spent on this experience and it's really too bad.
elite schools aren't only desirable because they set you up with big opportunities. they are the way for high-school overachievers to signal to everybody how smart and good they are.
elite schools could probably make bank if they just sold a stamp-of-approval from their admissions committees that just said "you are smart enough to get admitted, but were not lucky enough to win the lottery of being given a seat".
> Founder & CEO of Nitrility which is the world's first music licensing marketplace working with over a billion $ in assets from 80K rightsholders.
> Age 21 as of August, high school diploma (Rutgers Prep), college dropout (UIUC), grew up in Somerset NJ, 2 time founder with 1 exit at age 18, 2400 rated chess player, former top tennis player, Forbes Technology Council.
> Usually you will find me in NYC, LA, or SF.
The dropout thing struck me because it was such an obvious attempt to try to appear to be the Mark Zuckerberg style figure that this kid desperately wanted others to believe he was. I’ve been seeing a ton of these kids claiming to have had exits before they even graduated high school, and even though I know they’re lying, I’ve been browsing here long enough that I would probably have believed them if I hadn’t picked up on it being a social media trend.
I believe the primary reason is to attain credentials in pursuit of access to more lucrative employment prospects. I think your 1 and 2 are both significant factors, but they are quite far behind the pursuit of credentials.
No different than any other form of inflation from the government blowing on the fire (subsidizing with money) without adding any actual fuel (intrinsic value). Just like housing and healthcare.
[1] https://educationdata.org/education-attainment-statistics#:~...
Employers want passionate and self-motivated workers, instead they have gotten a mountain of applicants who routinely forget everything they crammed the moment the test is over.
Like most investments in yourself, you get out of it what you put into it.
Like any business. The only valuable thing is that paper and network (that is if it’s a top 50 school).
The course I took on Literature of the Apocalypse, in fall of 1999, is probably one you would say is unnecessary. It has proven quite valuable as I learned how to read a lot, a lot more quickly. I learned how to write quickly as well. I also learned a lot about an important aspect of our cultural and political context, as western society is dominated by doomsday cults (especially the atheistic ones, everyone’s got a utopia they are trying to sell in order to get you to sacrifice your life for them).
It is easy to read something about one subset of universities while subconsciously thinking of a different subset (eg all universities vs well-known / highly regarded / similar ones to your own).
When some survey says that people no longer see the value in the degree, it obviously doesn’t mean that no college is worth it.
Another thing: a lot of recent wage growth was in the lower end of the income distribution so better alternatives is part of the decreased desirability of college.
In the past it was much cheaper to train people on the job because wages and benefits were much lower. Higher education has driven up wages and benefit costs (through inflation and cost disease), thus cementing higher education’s position as a gatekeeper.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education?wpr...
I think the most valuable things I learned from my degree were about myself and how to work well with others, manage my time that kind of thing.
We kind of need 1 year collage degrees.
When the unemployment rate for fresh American college grads is the same or higher than those without a degree, it does not make a compelling case for spending all of that money and time on a degree.
It doesn't matter that I didn't remember how to do real analysis, but I had that class, and I learned it at some point, the process itself is exactly what happens in work - we'll learn new things, use it for some time, and then almost forget it to learn the next thing.
It doesn't have to be college, but there are a lot less opportunity, freedom and guidance to do so elsewhere.
Thiel and his ilk are eager to shove the US back into feudalism, with themselves at the top like some kind of warmed-over Borgia family. An educated populace that is capable of operating a democracy competently is absolutely intolerable for them.
>Why pay to get a degree in the US when you are competing for jobs not based on merit or qualifications?
This is one of those things that people just say and while of course there are issues with our current system, this provably false and patently absurd. Do you not do a technical interview for new devs? You don't check their merit or qualifications? You just do a lottery? It's frustrating to hear comments like this because it reeks of people thinking they're so smart while ignoring reality.
- People with more money live better lives, so let's just print/hand out money and everyone will live a better life!
- People with college degrees live better lives, so let's just push more people through college and everyone will live better lives!
In both cases, of course, completely missing the underlying reasons money/college degrees provide(d) better lives.
It's hard to believe that any single person in government truly thinks printing money will increase resources or that more easily handing out college degrees will automatically make everyone better off. So I don't fully understand how this happens, perhaps pandering to the electorate.
• Poor people live shorter, unhealthier lives.
• Without a college degree, your employment options are diminished.
It's fine to trash "handing out money" or "pushing more people through college" but then what is left is: there's nothing we can do for poor people.
Most of those jobs went overseas a long time ago. Short of the couple I could think of, the rest of the jobs remaining that don't require some advanced education don't pay a "living wage".
I'd love to see the US have a vocational "track" beginning in high school again. But that also requires we have the jobs for them when they graduate.
So you just need to sort of move wealth around such that it is less egregiously unequal. Oh, and states can fund universities like they did a few decades ago. :) Win-win! Poorer people get to participate more freely in society, with more opportunities, and you don't have to print any extra money.
The problem is that many young Americans for the past 30+ years has been told that a bachelor’s degree is the prerequisite for a job that pays well enough to afford a middle class lifestyle, which I’ll define as being able to afford owning a home in a safe neighborhood and being able to provide for a household without living paycheck-to-paycheck.
What happens when a large number of college graduates enter a tough hiring market while they have five- (or even six-) figure student loan balances? It’s one thing to work at McDonald’s debt-free with a high school diploma; it’s another thing to end up at McDonald’s with tens of thousands of dollars in debt with a bachelor’s degree.
Of course, there’s more to going to college than career prospects, and there’s also the reality that no one is owed a job. Still, given the amount of adults struggling with paying off their student loans, it’s no wonder more people are reevaluating the economic value of going to college.
Told by who?
Their parents.
What worries me is how they came to believe this in spite of the last 10-15 years of change in the country…while possibly raising around 3 generations of high school graduates throughout.
That's not to say other personalities are less worthwhile... It's just that we have emphasized one kind of personality as the ultimate one and then are surprised that -- after maxing out opportunities for those already suited towards that personality -- a saturation point is reached and future effort has marginal gains.
And even if that wasn't the case, education in general actually speaks to a variety of personalities: The self-motivated learner, the self-improver, the intellectual explorer, the goal-oriented achiever, the rules-based structure seeker.
I guess that's true even now but in a perverse sort of way. As markers of indoctrination and unsuitability for productive corporate roles.
Employers probably decided to avoid them.
That's not fair to a large number of students but the old system of colleges being markers of intelligence, suitability etc was not fair to large number of others either..
I agree that colleges have acted as filters, but the value of degrees has been deflated, even in Ivy leagues, because they’re easier and more common. I think a degree still acts as a filter though; getting a job is hard with a degree but nearly impossible without.
EDIT: There’s the Thiel fellowship, which requires not having a degree, but I’m not aware of other such opportunities. Early work experience looks better to some employers than university, but that requires getting a job in the first place.
Yes.
The Ivy grads are often considered over-qualified (rightly or wrongly). Especially for government positions that don’t normally hire elite school grads and smallish local/regional businesses.
I know plenty of people who work in different government positions (federal, state, local) who will not hire grads from an elite schools (Ivy, Stanford, Berkeley, etc.) because they think something must be wrong with them (“why would they apply for this job?”), or they think that the applicant will jump ship at the first opportunity.
I agree that those can both be issues, but I’m not sure those issues are limited to or are more likely in elite school grads.
I’ve certainly seen situations in which elite school grads have worked at an org that didn’t normally hire any of them, and the quality and quantity of work produced caused there to be some tough conversations in terms of standards and evaluations (they basically “crushed the curve”). In the two cases I’m most familiar with, the people in question were relatively non-ambitious female employees who just cranked out high quality work. They took those jobs because they were decent jobs near their respective families. In both cases, the companies had bittersweet feelings when said employees left —- they lost productivity, but they no longer had the manage outlier performers.
One of these ladies left her job to become a stay at home mom. The other joined a more prestigious privately-held company who seemed to know how to harness her abilities (she moved up quickly).
So… it happens.
But bigger issue is in USA where general jobless numbers are lower, with several sectors facing shortages, why is there the issue of grad unemployment at all.
The correct answer is important because politicians are filling the vacuum with false narratives to suit their base.
But there's enough SM comments to make a guess.
Similarly we avoided engineers from the Bay Area due to cost concerns.
The company was also a pioneer in the distributed work environment. A decade before Covid. So that opened a huge market for recruitment at that time.
Look forward to an article like this about every economic sector every few months
Whenever I hear about the cost of degrees in the US I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.
It doesn't make sense, it's entirely inhumane and predatory to loan that kind of money to a teenager, and there's no way I would ever have gotten a degree if I lived there.
I tried being in debt once, for a far more modest amount than a US degree, and it weighed on my subconscious the entire time.
If that training and certification can be made available via other easier means, that's the end of brick-mortar universities with grand campuses. The dinosaur has to evolve into a bird.
Offering education to more and more people via reduced cost mass online courses, lowering entry requirements or similar approaches will only erode the signalling value of a degree further.
The fact that paying taxes is required of all members of the community that organizes, collects and distributes resources in this way doesn't change the relationship between the person and the service at the point of service.
Whether an education is paid for by loans or by higher taxes, the cost is ultimately borne by someone. In neither case is it free and in both cases its cost-benefit difference should be scrutinized.
That’s irrelevant to the point the grandparent comment was making, which is that these resources don’t just fall out of the sky and that “I got it for free and I liked getting it for free,” isn’t a good basis for policy.
I went to school (K-BS(c)) in the UK, and it was entirely normal to talk about that as "free", despite the fact that in dozens of conversations my parents would discuss the way in which their local taxes funded all of it, including my university education. People are not that stupid ...
Yes it is. "Free" doesn't mean "has no cost paid by anyone" and never has in these discussions. It means "at no cost to the student".
Apologies if English isn't your first language.
Calling these programs “free” obfuscates the issue because there are people (even college-educated people) who genuinely believe the government can just make something appear from nothing; they genuinely don’t understand that the resources have to come from somewhere, which means someone else who does not necessarily benefit from the program pays for it now or those benefitting from the program have to pay for it later.
> Apologies if English isn't your first language.
I would encourage you to review the site guidelines. These kinds of quips are discouraged here.
Untrue.
>These kinds of quips are discouraged here.
"Free" has a specific meaning in English, and someone who doesn't speak it fluently might think that it means, for example, "appearing from nothing". Whereas a fluent English speaker of sound mind understands that "free" refers to the price in a transaction. No one thinks that the "free pizza" at an event was created at no cost to anyone in the supply chain that brought it there. They just understand that it means that they won't be charged for consuming it. But for some reason, I never hear people make a big deal about how "I can't believe you'd say free pizza when I know that your organization had to pay for it!" It's always when it comes to reactionary opposition to social services where this simple word immediately becomes so much more nuanced and impossible to comprehend for the layperson.
and GP's whole point was that it is not at no cost to the student.
Apologies if reading comprehension isn't your strong suit.
Apologies if English isn't your first language.
It wasn’t, other people paid for it.
For reference:
> Beginning in Fall 2022, the number of students placed into Math 2 began to grow rapidly. Math 2 was first created in 2016, and it was originally designed to be a remedial math course serving a very small number of first-year students (less than 100 students a year or around 1% of the incoming class) who were not prepared to start in our standard precalculus courses [...] In Fall 2024, the numbers of students placing into Math 2 and 3B surged further, with over 900 students in the combined Math 2 and 3B population, representing an alarming 12.5% of the incoming first-year class (compared to under 1% of the first-year students testing into these courses prior to 2021).
https://senate.ucsd.edu/media/740347/sawg-report-on-admissio...
These are students that even middling American public schools would have failed to pass from high school in decades past, or would have later failed to meet standardized test requirements prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.
At the time it felt elitist, but now I agree with her. Yes, this example shows that the high schools are doing a bad job, but it's not clear to me that the universities should clean up the mess. There are other possibilities.
That doesn't matter for the op's point. Students starting from this base won't get good in 4 years.
8.5% of incoming freshmen place in Math 2. 25% of a class of Math 2 students could (EDIT: couldn't) answer 7+2=_+6
8.5% x 25% is about 2%, so 1 in 50.
It must severely limit what they can learn in college.
One of those is a bad outcome, but the other 2 are fine.
Many mothers claim their child is gifted. In this case, I believe it. It is not my son, unfortunately. I am just in a roommate situation.
I give him math challenges sometimes. Today I started introducing equations with 2 unknowns.
I think the more relevant question is, why would you go to grade school and high school at institutions that produce graduates like that?
Do you not know how U.S. K-12 public schools are funded by local property taxes, which means the quality of a child's education is a direct causal relationship of the wealth of their neighborhood?
Why don't these children just grow up in richer neighborhoods?
California's schools (for instance) aren't funded by local taxes, they're funded by the state and allocated funding based on a formula[1] of performance, need, population, etc. They can be augmented by local taxes, but in practice that's rare as the wealthy just avoid the system altogether; instead, opting for private institutions.
That's at least 12% of the population that is not funded in the manner you outline.
For one unremarkable observation in this area, see the following think tank report:
> States often commission cost studies to establish the level of funding required to help students meet state standards. LPI analyzed five of the more recent of these studies [...] All of these studies recommended additional weighted funding to support English learners and students considered "at-risk," which was most often defined by a measure of family income and also included other factors [...] The recommended weights for English learners in these studies ranged from 15% to 40% of the base grant level in each state. The recommended weights for at-risk students ranged from 30% to 81%. Compared to the recommended funding in these states, the LCFF’s supplemental grant weight of 20% is at the lower end of the recommended range of weights for English learners and below the range of weights for at-risk students.
Although forcing the funding to go through a collective rather than letting people choose a school and pay on in individual basis would probably deliver a pretty serious blow to the quality.
I doubt most people would even believe the differences until they saw them, I wouldn't of believed public school could vary that much until I personally saw it. Going from some middling school with a half dozen rich properties around, versus a truly poor rural school, showed me how true it is. The better middle school was teaching topics that the poor rural school didn't even broach until senior year. Our civics book from the late 2000s talked about the civil rights movement as an ongoing and building issue too keep an eye on, and half the school books had kid's grandparents name signed in them. Our calculus class, which was downgraded to pre-calc after a few years because so many kids failed college calc entrance exams, had a teacher bragging about how it only took her 3 tries to pass calc 102 in order to qualify for that teaching position. You certainly didn't get very many good teachers when they pay was that far below the national median wage, and it was sad to watch them struggle to afford things as simple as whiteboard markers, or copy paper in order to print student assignments on, because yes the school couldn't afford and didn't supply copy paper for teachers to print assignments on other than a literal single ream of paper to last the entire year.
Not to mention single/families without kids and seniors that still pay for school districts.
The value of college to me was mostly social and intellectual, not economic. It's an irreplicable experience. There's certainly some logic to skipping that experience, but I couldn't recommend it.
However, many high school students don’t have the opportunity to take such classes, and there are also many high school students who struggled in elementary and middle school.
I was a high school student in California during the first half of the 2000s. California used to have the High School Exit Exam, which was mandatory to graduate from high school. The test focused on English grammar, reading comprehension, and algebra. I took the exam in 10th grade, and I felt it was easy. So easy, in fact, that I believed eighth graders shouldn’t have much difficulty passing the exam.
However, there were many students who weren’t able to pass the exam, even with multiple attempts. Eventually the state got rid of the test. I don’t know if educational outcomes improved in the immediate aftermath, but UC San Diego’s study on remedial math shows that our high schools are inadequate at preparing students not only for college, but for life in our modern economy.
Of course, to fix high schools, we also need to fix our elementary and middle schools. This goes beyond the classroom; this also involves addressing the cost-of-living crisis. It’s hard for kids to thrive in school when they have parents who need to work heroic hours to make ends meet, and this doesn’t include the kids who have to deal with homelessness and other unstable living situations.
As an example, when I went to college tuition prices were already ridiculous. I got in to some good schools but ended up going to my local state flagship purely because of price. I was able to pay off all my loans and have a good job as a software engineer. Compared to my brother who went to a private school, he is 3 years older than me and makes the same amount of money as me, and is still paying off his loans.
Of course where I live in NYC there's still this smugness from those private university grads when they hear where I went to school. As though the US News and World Report rankings are some kind of way of deciding your self worth. Wow, you school is ranked #36 and mine at #42? You must be a smarter and more valuable person than me! Except... we work at the same place and live in the same area. But I don't have any loans to pay. I guess for some people it's not about the cost.
If it were job training it would have to actually train students for jobs. But neither is that "academic" in any sense of the word nor actually practical in any way. University trains people to be research scientists in the hope this helps them do some later job.
If the goal were training students to be academics, then degree requirements for most jobs are absolutely nonsensical and universities admitting large percentages of the population would be extremely counterproductive.
If the goal were a continued education to create "well rounded" people, then why give that task to university professors and create a social environment where this is the least likely thing to happen?
If the goal is networking, then why do all that academic research stuff? Just play sports throughout the day.
The four-year college isn’t good at either of these as it wasn’t intended for this. I don’t think the trade school model is quite right for this (there’s lots of soft skills to be learned) but it’s closer than the 4-year.
One of the reasons why inflation is so high is because college costs have skyrocketed, so citing that they have increased after taking into inflation is like circular logic.
Banks lent an unlimited amount of money to students because they knew they couldn't discharge the debt in bankruptcy, and the schools jacked up prices because they knew students had the money. College costs more than doubled in a 10 years period but the services or even the number of students enrolled didn't even get without a ballpark of doubling. They just enriched themselves off student loans.
The only way to fix this is to let student loans be dischargeable from bankruptcy again, and let banks and colleges take the fall. Right now it's another instance of us peons playing a game of "heads you win, tails i lose."
Higher education delivers a fantastic ROI for the country as a whole. The people who benefit most from a strong economy are the wealthy. So tax them more. And put that money towards lowering the cost of education. Win-win-win.
I took just one such course—gender studies—which was utterly abysmal. There was zero tolerance for debating ideas or considering opposing viewpoints. You either assimilated with the group think, or you were castigated for your heresy. It was indoctrination, not education.
From what was described to me, and I trust this person to not misrepresent their experience, was that they were essentially told 'hi, cis white male, sit down and don't say a damn thing, this isn't your place to talk'. And then go on to essentially present a curriculum that was essentially a myriad of thinly-veiled misandry, compounded by extremely clear classroom rules/culture where any opposition was decidedly unwanted by the lecturers.
I'm the first to champion equal rights and equal opportunity, but that that sort of thing was going on in higher ed left a bad taste in my mouth.
If it was "Women should be allowed to vote" I can understand the teachers reluctance to engage in debate.
Edit to add: Also, you failed to learn the lesson that you can't always quit in the face of tyranny. Did you never have a history or civics class in high school?
By the end of the class I had softened on my stance a bit (though still an atheist), and I saw multiple Christians get up, walk out of the class mid-lecture and never come back. Not all of them mind you, but a few of them took such great offense at the class even mentioning other religions that they left, and some really couldn't handle any sort of debate or discussion.
Which university, which year was this, what was your major, and what happened with your education and/or career after you dropped out?
And what precisely do you mean by "castigated," in your specific case?
No. The university added other "studies" courses to my requirements that contributed to my decision. After taking gender studies, I knew I could not tolerate the other "studies" courses the university was suddenly demanding—which were not required when I first started.
> Which university
The University of Utah
> which year was this
2014
> what was your major
Computer Science
> what happened with your education and/or career after you dropped out?
I still have 8 classes left. Nothing happened to my career.
> And what precisely do you mean by "castigated," in your specific case?
One of our guest speakers was a man with autogynephilia—a man who derives sexual pleasure from dressing like a woman.
In a follow-up discussion, I committed the "sins" of referring to him as a man, and saying things like he is not a woman, and there are only two sexes.
My instructor and some students went scorched earth on me over these elementary facts. They made it quite clear that the only acceptable narrative was that, because he "identifies" as a woman, he is a woman.
This is just one example of the kind of "thinking" that went on in this course. I don't like it when I'm told what I must think. As I said before, that's indoctrination, not education.
> I have a hard time believing this story.
Why? It's all true.
Sincere question: Why were you not able to just think "Oh, ok, some people do this and feel this way." and then just move on? I'm not sure why these particular things needed to be discussed.
According to the University of Utah Computer Science Undergraduate Student Handbook 2014-2015, "Students must take two intellectual explorations courses in each: fine arts (FF), humanities (HF), and social sciences (BF). Two of these six courses must be upper division – one should meet the diversity (DV) requirement and one should meet the international (IR) requirement" and "The diversity (DV) requirement can be satisfied by taking a course from an approved list as part of the intellectual explorations courses." So, there was only one required diversity course, from a list of courses, meaning that gender studies was not specifically mandated. If you took gender studies to satisfy the diversity requirement, it was because you chose gender studies, which seems like an odd choice, given your beliefs. In any case, you would not have to take multiple diversity courses.
> I still have 8 classes left. Nothing happened to my career.
I'm not sure exactly what you mean. As a result of dropping out, do you not have a career in computing? Alternatively, did dropping out without getting a computer science degree not harm your career at all, and if it didn't, then why were you spending time and money ("I refused to spend another dollar of my hard-earned money") to get a degree?
In a later comment, you say:
> this was the beginning of why I personally no longer thought a college degree was worth the cost.
> sitting through courses where I was not allowed to openly debate the ideas being presented to me.
I'm confused here. For you, is the monetary value of a college degree to openly debate ideas in class? And if so, why did you major in computer science, as opposed to philosophy, for example, which is known for open debate of ideas in class, unlike computer science?
> My instructor and some students went scorched earth on me
Scorched earth is a metaphor. It's not in this case an accurate and informative description of reality. I suspect you just mean that you got criticized, which is exactly what you asked for: an open debate of ideas. The use of hyperbolic phrases like "castigated" and "scorched earth" does not make your comments plausible.
> In a follow-up discussion, I committed the "sins" of referring to him as a man, and saying things like he is not a woman, and there are only two sexes.
Now I definitely agree with the other poster that this sounds made up, or at the very least you are significantly embellishing the story in such a way to completely ruin your own credibility.
The guy told us he was married, with children, and that he had a separate apartment where he "lived like a woman" most weekends. He lived that way because his wife didn't like it when he dressed like a woman around her. He said he was intensely aroused by wearing pantyhose and skirts, in particular.
That may sound "significantly embellished" to you, but I assure you it is not.
Regardless of what you, or anyone else here, would like to believe about my credibility, this was the beginning of why I personally no longer thought a college degree was worth the cost. I refused to spend another dollar of my hard-earned money sitting through courses where I was not allowed to openly debate the ideas being presented to me.
Do you have any thoughts about the cost of college degrees being worth the cost? That's ultimately what prompted me to comment.
Are there problems in Higher Ed? Almost certainly. Are changes to the situation driven by the "vaccines don't work crowd" likely to make things even worse for everyone? Oh yes.
The last century will be a mere footnote in a case study of folly, where 100% of the university's problems came from dealing with the underclass at all with a side helping of federal funny money. It will be comedic relief amongst starry eyed business majors, waiting to satisfy a condition of their trust fund
The employment sector's decision to require degrees is mere happenstance and something that sector will need to reconcile on its own.
We wake up tomorrow to a world where universities never existed.
No cultivation of Copernicus, Newton, Einstein...
So we're stuck mostly with 1000 year old technology.
A happy side effect of that university degree was a more rounded education, which now many young adults will be missing out on. The downstream effects could be catastrophic.
Absolutely! So many people bemoan taking general Ed classes, but knowing the basics about economics, literature, science, art, math, history is valuable if you want to think critically about the world.
That's not the online material I was referring to. Many universities have their course materials available for free online. Not to mention other online learning sites.
The issue isn't teaching, it's learning. I don't think it's at all obvious that being taught by college professors is the best way to learn that material.
Sure if that is relevant to what your goals in life are. I chose to get an education that was tightly coupled with the outcome I wanted.
Also, knowing a little about a lot of things doesn’t preclude you from being an expert in your field.
A lot of people would likely have been better off going to a trade school or going into a trade apprenticeship.
Parents should focus on helping their kids figure out what they want to do and developing a path to achieve it. The path may take them to university, a trade, or something else.
1. Someone to write lesson plans for you
2. A piece of paper that tells the world you are capable of conforming with the sometimes-frustrating impositions of an institution for 4 years without making too much of a fuss in the process
This is trivially false outside of some math, CS and sweng. Even within IT learning networking at an above basic level requires a well equipped lab.
we've allowed capitalists and rent-seekers into our educational system and it's nigh impossible to root them out. same goes for healthcare, housing, etc.
Being long degeneracy [1] is the number one strategy right now
People are also now learning this fact, which is why you’re getting unpalatable politicians elected.
Irony is, that doesn't prevent such sentiments as yours leading to people like Trump. I had a chance to live in the USA years back, I'm glad I didn't bother to take it.
Do you have numbers? If you don’t, the appropriate baseline is population.
I’m a manager in a unique field where people come in with many educational levels. There is little correlation between educational credentials and job performance. A variety of previous jobs and having lived a few different places seems to correlate more with performance.
Also: Any positive or negative effect of a college degree is either amplified or moderated by candidates self-selecting. A candidate who greatly values their college degree will seek out employers who do the same, and vice-versa.
https://www.sfu.ca/~allen/Spence.pdf
It’s not just about learning skills, but it’s a natural and rational mechanism to filter talents.
White rich people hated competition from poor and brown people. That whole even playfield thing was their nightmare.
Ask the rich families if college degrees are still important. You’ll get a different answer.