Has the decline of knowledge work begun?

Bachelor Degrees need a complete rethink, it was basically modified finishing school for rich capital owners, needing to make their children of proper class before they could take over their businesses.

It then became a vocational degree for the working class, despite being completely detached from useful skills for a wide swathes of degrees. The only value is that you could talk the talk and become a member of the professional managerial class if you impressed the right hiring committee/individual.

In spite of this, we decided the working class should take out crippling loans to pay for this degree, and be in debt for the rest of their working life.

It's not sustainable, and just forgiving the debt only will make it all more expensive and less aligned with actual results we desire (useful workers).

Education can't be standardized because business is not standardized. It's about relationships and every shop does things their own way. Teachers should just go contract and provide their own courses. The degree is really can't designate what the person knows.

This is a bit black and white. Or maybe just cynical :)

It's inarguable that bachelor's degrees had real vocational utility in the last few decades (despite the memes).

A variety of degrees from a state school (with in-state tuition) would lead to good, white collar employement along with modest loans (if any) so there was clear ROI.

Maybe lower education should just have a different schedule with other activity years? I'm not particularly impressed with the average American's ability to be a positive element of society and despite all the problems, I think liberal arts students are probably better than the rest when considered over their lifetime. But why should each individual take loans to have the critical thinking to vote in the interest of larger institutions?

> despite being completely detached from useful skills for a wide swathes of degrees

It's a nice suggestion, but it's one that isn't supported by the evidence. Even controlling for other factors, a college degree makes more productive workers. And given that it's controlling for other factors, "selection bias" becomes a hard argument to make. STEMbros get real arrogant about their degrees (I have one; I've seen it first hand), but like it or not the person with an English degree still learned a lot of useful skills.

Going to uni to major in a specific career is how you get screwed when available careers change.

I don't think there is any doubt spending 4 years studying a subject will increase skills in some areas. The question is whether the benefits are worth the cost (and that question applies both to the individual student and society as a whole).

Remember the cost of all this is absolutely massive. Mostly the 4 years of lost time.

It doesn't have to be though. In Europe the vast majority of people attend public universities that don't require having to end up with a degree and crippling debt.

I left uni almost 20 years ago, but one year of my tuition was about 1000USD at the time, something I could easily afford with a part time job. I'm sure the cost is higher now, but I would have thought it is still orders of magnitude cheaper than in the UK or the US. Germany subsidizes university tuition fees for a huge percentage of students, and adds a monthly stipend for expenses and free public transport while enrolled in uni.

Your point is valid, challenging the worth/cost of higher education. But I think it is the cost part what is broken in some parts of the world, not necessarily the worth part.

I mean we can reform it without necessarily throwing out the baby with the bathwater. In Europe a bachelor's can often take 3 years, and maybe we can even shrink it down to 2 years; this is already kind of a thing in the US with some schools offering a 5 year bachelor+master's program.

Realistically maybe we reform community college to be the required thing instead of traditional undergrad, since the cost and length is more comparable.

associate degrees exist

they exist, but at least employers do not seem to think they currently cover enough to accept them in lieu of a bachelor's.

in fact i would say I don't know how much additional value an associates' holds in that context, and maybe we just merge the two concepts. I haven't ever really seen a posting that is okay with just an associate's.

>It then became a vocational degree for the working class,

This may have been some policymakers' intent, but it never really became that. Universities and colleges resisted being seen as mere vocational schools, and refused to modify curricula for that purpose. You'd see all sorts of academic arguments about how teaching them to do a job would be wrong, that they should still be teaching them to "think" and have heavy course loads of liberal arts.

So parents and guidance counselors may have thought of it as vocational school, while getting the high-class university experience (as best someone of middling academic achievement can manage that) along with the high-class university tuition bills. Well, the guidance counselors didn't get the bills. Nor, in many cases, the parents.

>It's not sustainable, and just forgiving the debt only will make it

It's ok. We don't have to sustain it. The demographic implosion is well under way. We are at the point where elementary schools are closing (and everyone's making up excuses for this, so we can pretend that it's for any other reason than a demographic implosion).

>and less aligned with actual results we desire (useful workers).

At any point in history, most of the output from workers went (indirectly) back to the workers. If 98% of the workforce did agricultural work, this was because 98% or nearly enough of 98% of food was needed to feed those workers. Same for any product, no matter how tangible or abstract. Sure, there are exceptions... if people worked in a diamond mine it wasn't so diamonds would go to diamond miners.

If they don't need workers for the relatively small amount of food that is consumed by some small group, if they don't need workers for making garments (or building buildings, or any other thing) for the relatively amount of those products consumed by some small group, then they don't much need useful workers at all. Most of humanity is obsolete, or at least would be considered so if you belonged to a small group like that.

Well, these days you will need a non repetitive physical skill. ER doctor, electrician, comedy tour guide, painter, etc. If your job required you to sit in front of a computer, your job will be the first eliminated. Humans are quite cheap for physical labor compared to a full humanoid drone. Software costs are about to go to zero. Bachelors degrees would turn more into guilds.

That's right. Education should be universalized, not standardized.

The commodification of education will eventually make it useless. Universal, bespoke education is the ideal, but it's usually prohibitively expensive.

> Even controlling for other factors, a college degree makes more productive workers

I'd like to see this study. Most of the data I've seen that is pro-college still has massive confounds.

Two twins graduate high school. One gets a crappy copywriting job, and spends her free time reading books on how to write better, and specifically how to do copywriting. The other gets an English degree. I'm not nearly as confident as you are the one with the English degree is going to be a better copywriter.

I don't disagree you can learn skills, but cognitive science literature solidly shows far transfer is not a thing, and when it is it's incredibly inefficient. i.e. Reading the great works of Russian literature might make you a better copywriter but at a vastly slower pace than writing copy, or reading a book on copywriting.

The liberal arts model was intended for the elites, and the idea of education as means of producing useful workers is straight from a totalitarian planned economy. But there is also the Humboldtian model of higher education, which focuses on educating informed citizens who are free to make their own choices. Learning vocational skills is easy enough if you have good education, and it's also necessary to be able to do that outside school, as careers rarely last a lifetime.

American higher education is expensive, because you chose to defund public universities. And because you have an unhealthy obsession with rankings and top universities. Those are the things you need to change more than education itself.

Does liberal arts teach critical thinking? Do students who study liberal arts vs a mathematics/engineering show greater improvements on critical thinking tests?

I get the idea we want a more educated population that can better make decisions. But the biggest way the populace makes poor decisions is they are economically illiterate, and they don't really understand how the government works. We should probably spend more time teaching this in high school and a typical degree spends very little time teaching these subjects.

> useful workers is straight from a totalitarian planned economy

I'd still strongly prefer a totalitarian, planned economy. Hell it sounds like a straight-up pollyannish fantasy at this point. Watching people expect the chaos of building our country around the right-to-be-a-dick-to-others to result in a functional country makes me want to burn everything down.

But making your own labor force pay for their education? Straight suicidal.

I think an undervalued aspect of college over self learning for most is that college requires you to learn a broader array of things. If I was allowed just pick the classes I wanted to take for four years, they would have all been computer related classes. I would never had taken Chemistry, Physics, Drama, Psychology, History, International Relations, or anything that makes me a more educated and well rounded thinker.

There is a lot of value to standardizing things though. Most of what people need to learn is standard. 2+2, i before e... There is the more nebulous step of can you solve problems, but even that is taught at the lower levels in a standard way.

Eventually you get to a level where the answer hasn't been taught much and so there is no standard, but that only happens late in your education.

Of course education itself needs more research. "learning styles" was debunked last I heard, but is there some variation that says some people need different teaching? Is there a better way to teach things? However if you are not involved in this research you should be teaching in standard ways that have been proven to work.

The cost is there regardless. If the ROI is negative then it's making somebody worse off even if the state is paying for it. If the state pays, it's even worse, because people may take the option based on a positive ROI for themselves while it's overall negative. If the ROI is positive but people aren't taking advantage because of the cost to themselves, then you want to look at subsidies.

I strongly disagree. Commodification of education is very important. I want everyone to have the commodity reading writing arithmetic education. It might be faster for the student to give one on one teaching, but everyone needs this and I want it such a commodity that we give it to even the poorest "third world" kids who have nothing.

As you get beyond those basics you have to become an expert in something that there are few experts in. McDonald's success is mostly based on their ability to take you from zero to a productive crew member fast. It takes many years to make a brain surgeon, in large part because we haven't commodified it - if we needed more we should (but since the world doesn't really need many it isn't worth it)

> American higher education is expensive, because you chose to defund public universities. And because you have an unhealthy obsession with rankings and top universities. Those are the things you need to change more than education itself.

There's this and also the massive budgets for college sports and fancy student housing that make it worse.

Commodification denies a universal pedagogy. We've known this since the 1970s.

If you want a system that appeals to a plurality, and leaves the rest behind, commodification will deliver just that.

The populace making poor decisions isn't just economically illiterate, they are increasingly fundamentally illiterate. Teaching economic literacy in school won't matter one bit when an increasing number of people are graduating unable to read even at a basic level.

But in order to solve this problem you would have to overhaul our educational system and right now we have a party invested in destroying it so that it produces voters more aligned with their groupthink.

Now that we have AI tutors that cost <$1/Mtok, why not do on-demand standardized testing for academic credentials and eliminate compulsory (dejure or defacto) education beyond working age. Universities can focus on research, and normal people get off the credentialism treadmill or focus on as-needed training at minimal cost. Need the social environment? Libraries or community centers can lend vacant space for “college” classrooms.

Everyone wins, right? You know, except university administrators and lenders.

We look at that positively becomes it's a sunk cost, but if someone were to put the circumstances in front of us would we still be happy about it?

If your job told you that you had to pay 10k to study French poetry for 6 months without pay, would you happy for the opportunity to a more well rounded thinker?

>If your job told you that you had to pay 10k to study French poetry for 6 months without pay, would you happy for the opportunity to a more well rounded thinker?

That's unrealistic.

  1. That's just one subject.
  2. Semesters and/or quarters are not 6 months.
  3. Most colleges don't charge $10K for one subject for 6 months.

Having said all that, yes there were some annoying class requirements that I didn't particularly care for, but I still learned something from it. If nothing else, it allowed me to have more conversations with a broader array of people. Make no mistake, being an educated conversationalist impresses people. Being able to intelligently converse with more people because of a broader knowledge base has significant social and economic value. Imagine if you met your perfect mate by being able to talk about French poetry. Imagine your perfect company has a hiring manager who also loves French poetry. We are ultimately social creatures.

Or is it not a more recent trend that people should educate themselves, rather than an employer doing that? Internships have become very short and secondary, when they used to be the main vocational training. It's curious that this has remained only at the two ends of theoretical studies: artisanship and scientific research (PhDs). Otherwise, job training has become the employee and, where university is public, society's burden. Maybe it's employers that need a complete rethink, not so much universities?

>the idea of education as means of producing useful workers is straight from a totalitarian planned economy

???

15 years later do you think these classes matter?

Im not totally sure I could tell you most of what I even took let alone what I learned in those classes.

Maybe right after college there's a window of a couple years.

Great, let's make the average person even dumber. Or rather: dumb again. Universal education is a big win of the modern times and you want to destroy that for on-demand job training? Mass producing replaceable workers should not be humanity's goal.

I before e isn’t even standard.

Another reason they're expensive is because the government basically guarantees they'll pay for whatever tuition the universities set, so they raise prices. There's lot of other factors, including administrative bloat, and maybe partially from less funding... But they're still funded in large part by the government via loans. I don't know the right answer, but I know it's not simply more government funding.

It's a worldview that necessitates only teaching what leads to a job. It is anti beauty and anti human.

We are not machines of production. We are human beings, we deserve to learn stuff that doesn't help us produce.

Sometimes "ROI" isn't measurable. What's the "ROI" of a well rounded populus that gets along and doesn't want to kill each other? What's the "ROI" of creating beautiful works of art, or producing great culture? What's the "ROI" of happiness?

Sometimes the purpose of central government is to make a negative ROI into a positive one, because there are greater purpose than the return

It may not be measurable but we still need to think about it and do our best to figure out what things cost more than the benefits they provide.

If you're arguing we should improve schools to increase rates of numeracy and literacy than I'm in 100% agreement. But I thought we were talking about liberal arts degrees.

What about lost opportunity cost though? Or the cost of failure?

My college intake class had 60 enter in the first year, and I was paying $2000 out of pocket a semester. Only about a quarter got the paper in the end; the rest either withdrew or flunked out. And from what I understand, 75% starting but failing to achieve a degree isn't atypical for that course.

What happens to those students? The ones that take on debt and then realize far too late that they can't handle the workload and have nothing to show for it but student debt, years of lost income, and no degree to show for it?

And even for those of us that made it though, I'm... still uncertain it was worth the price. Not just in dollars.

Many people state how much they appreciate their degree. But when it comes down to it almost everyone who goes back from a second degree does so with the specific purpose of getting a credential for their career.

No one really values the intangible personal development that comes with education. If they did I'd have 5 friends who went back for a second degree to enrich themselves instead of 0.

Beautifully put. It feels like a view we sorely need as our corporate overlords become AI enabled.

Why not both?

If I want to learn how to do something, I want to be educated in that. There should be education available for that, but for knowledge workers, there largely isn't; instead, university has been hijacked to fill that role. In the trades there are schools dedicated to learning these topics and they work well at helping people learn to work effectively.

Universities should be a place of higher learning and research - those are really important too. The struggle in universities today is that they are expected to be both and those things aren't really compatible. That's why you get research professors begrudgingly teaching undergraduate courses.

We need an alternative to universities for learning the trades that knowledge workers tend to do.

You can certainly go overboard on the “teaching only practical skills” thing, but id argue the pendulum has swung way too far in the other direction.

The point of teaching useful skills is so people can be helpful to other people. While coded as right wing this is fundamentally pro-social. Finding a useful and needed place for yourself in society tends to result in more stable families, communities and mental health.

Spending decades indulging your own ego tends to do the opposite.

> "teaching useful skills is so people can be helpful to other people. While coded as right wing"

I'm apparently living deep underneath bedrock and/or have spent too much time worrying about [EDITED] "weird math"

When and where/how did the "helpful to other people == coded as right wing" happen? And does that mean people are finding fault in the first half because of the second?

Agreed. Higher education mostly became a pretext to justify why certain people were entitled to receive higher salaries in exchange for lower experience and lower quality output.

It's likely also partly why the west moved away from contract-based knowledge work and towards full-time work... It decouples the product of one's labor from its costs (salary) and it makes managers' lives easier as it gives them much more flexibility and less pressure with regard to how they measure and rank employee productivity. If costs were proportional to output, managers would pay a lot more attention to efficiency as their paychecks would depend on that efficiency.

Instead, managers' paychecks and career prospects are mostly based on political nonsense like how many people are working under them; literally creating an incentive for inefficiency.

> the idea of education as means of producing useful workers is straight from

...every social structure throughout time. An educated populace is more likely to be successful in achieving goals than re-learning from nothing.

> It's a worldview that necessitates only teaching what leads to a job.

Since education is generally funded, it makes sense that subjects are self-reinforcing. "Worldview" is, contextually, an anthropomorphism of a social process. The cause, not the effect, is people doing what people prefer to do. There's nothing outside of society pushing. People still make art, to their parents' chagrin.

The situation of forced subjects, is not rigid. There is education for other subjects; almost everything or anything that meets some arbitrary qualifiers. Crystals, dog breeding, board game design? Humans tend to share knowledge (even when it's wrong). There's no shortage of learning in subjects that aren't primary subjects in some accredited college.

The current zeitgeist according to chatgpt in the west:

Right-wing coded: Practical education, Hard skills/trades, having children, personal responsibility, entrepreneurship, exurban community orientation, traditional morality/religion, decentralization (less elite control), bad aesthetic taste, low emotional intelligence, etc.

Left-wing coded: Aspirational education, Universities, staying single into your 30s, personal irresponsibility (victimhood), artistic ego pursuit, urban orientation, performative morality/religion (climate doomerism, veganism, social justice-ism), centralization (more elite control), good aesthetic taste, high emotional intelligence, etc

Some countries have alternatives. For example, Finland has institutes that call themselves polytechnics, universities of applied sciences, or something similar. ~60% of higher education takes place in them, with the remaining 40% in research universities.

However, when similar fields of study are available in both types of institutes, employers almost universally prefer graduates from research universities.

The massive sports funding is mostly only a thing for D1 schools and it doesn't take much funding away from academics. The sports mostly pay for themselves through ticket sales and media licensing, with the big chunks of revenue coming from men's football and basketball. Sports also drive a lot of alumni donations.

> we decided the working class should take out crippling loans to pay for this degree

Historical point you've completely missed. You used to be able to declare bankruptcy and discharge this debt until very recently. This was not "decided" this was a trap sprung on the working class at a time when blue collar labor was almost entirely off shored.

> and just forgiving the debt only will make it all more expensive

That's why you discharge the debt instead. This is an institutional failure. They knowingly pumped a market at tax payer expense. The hair cut is theirs to take.

We have the same thing in the USA. Some schools like Cal Poly or Texas A&M have an explicit focus on learning by doing rather than knowledge for it's own sake.

Most European public universities have low tuition because taxpayers are subsidizing them. This can only work if the number of students is kept relatively low. You can't have both cheap tuition and widespread access to higher education. The math doesn't work.

It will also be interesting to see what happens now that Europe has to get real about defense spending instead of freeloading on US security guarantees. Since defense spending is going up there's going to be a lot of political pressure to cut higher education.

While there are a variety of different interest groups that have influenced current federal government education policy, most of them don't seem to be trying destroy it just for the sake of destruction. Instead the policy seems to be based more on the perception that the education system has been co-opted and corrupted to indoctrinate students with values and political philosophies that conservative or right-wing politicians find abhorrent. They see this as so damaging to society that it would be better to have no educational system at all rather than what we have now. I don't agree with this perception or their actions, but there is at least a kernel of truth to their viewpoint. In a politically diverse nation if we want to maintain broad based support for higher education then we need to find a way to keep universities at least somewhat politically neutral.

A higher education/degree teaches you how to think, not what to think. I’ve never used the knowledge from my physics degrees directly, but they taught me problem solving skills that I have applied to my career.

Here’s a pointed take on it from one of New Zealand’s successful businessmen: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/education/the-art-of-business-...

They also don't pay taxes because of a supreme court decision in favor of MIT for being a "Charity" and reducing tuition for some. Then every Uni piled on and decided to use a lot of that money on sports.

There was never anything I regretted learning.

What if we don't agree what the benefits are? Tieing the "benefits" to money breaks your system before you even get it off the ground.

We already have a way to discuss that benefit, it's the political process. Doing politics IS figuring out the benefits.

I think there's diminishing returns. A broad, liberal arts, undergraduate education develops critical thinking and reading skills in a zero-to-one kind of way. Once you've attained those skills (whether through a college degree or some other way), further enrichment via self-study is much more easily doable.

The bachelor's degree has become this strange hybrid of outdated prestige signaling and a vague promise of employability, but without delivering on either in a consistent way.

Defunding public institutions while glorifying prestige has created a system where access is limited and value is warped

More productive or more extractive. Managerial class has the degrees and they pay themselves and each other higher wages. A lot of production is done by those under them... Are they actually more productive or just lot more extractive?

> Bachelor Degrees need a complete rethink

Maybe. But what I think would help more is a broader focus on lifelong learning. Both on the job on company [dt]ime, and outside of work.

In many places you can take evening classes for languages, or hobby-classes like embroidery or goldsmithing. Even programming. But there are very few places where you can take maths classes after hours.

There's also, imo, way too much focus on degrees and not enough focus on competences. Some time ago I tried to register for some postgrad level classes, without any intention of using them for a certificate or whatever, but I was rejected for not having the right degree.

>What about lost opportunity cost though? Or the cost of failure?

Well for a high school grad today, most likely the opportunity cost is minimum wage service sector jobs. Those "temporary" jobs are also really easy to get stuck in for life. That's not a good life.

>Only about a quarter got the paper in the end; the rest either withdrew or flunked out. And from what I understand, 75% starting but failing to achieve a degree isn't atypical for that course. What happens to those students? The ones that take on debt and then realize far too late that they can't handle the workload and have nothing to show for it but student debt, years of lost income, and no degree to show for it?

They're fucked, but at least they know where they stand. They should know their chances with the standardized testing somewhat. You definitely shouldn't go to college if you don't have the aptitude or motivation, but you should go to some sort of trade school: electrical, carpentry, plumber, etc. The safest path to college is graduated study, community college for the AA, then full blown university for the last two. At least you get an AA degree, and if you can't handle community college, at least it isn't very expensive.

>And even for those of us that made it though, I'm... still uncertain it was worth the price. Not just in dollars.

The value proposition is pretty muddied with the negligent inflation of tuition over the past few decades, that is a certainty. Unless you are Ivy League, any college will do. I'm fortunate to live in a state where tuition for public college is on the lower end.

When you put it like that it really is a bad product.

What supports your assertion that low tuition fees limit student numbers in Europe? This would only apply to non-EU students. I could very well claim the opposite, that high tuition fees limit student numbers in the US and make higher education out of reach for most.

English needs to be standardized / simplified /reformed. I don't know how to make that happen.

> and the idea of education as means of producing useful workers is straight from a totalitarian planned economy

I disagree. I get food from the supermarket, my roof is built by someone else, unlimited water from the faucet. This stuff isn't coming for free, it is other peoples work. Of course i want to learn something useful to contribute back. But western societies don't seem to have a "We need X people with Y skillset" institution. If someone came to me like, "we need a welder to produce $needed_thing" then i would have put my skill points into that.

I couldn't agree more with this. I'm a mature student who left school with nothing, joined and left the military with nothing, and managed to get a relatively decent paying public sector job. I decided to put myself through a bachelor's degree part time and self funded. I now have one, it's a nice piece of paper, but the skills I gained from it I likely could have got a lot cheaper on udemy. In fact udemy is very likely to be more up to date.

I obviously think the computer science degree is full of useful skills unlike a lot of degrees, but it's nothing I couldn't have got elsewhere.

With a kid in university I am torn because I know that having a degree actually means nothing in the job market, not like it used to.

On the other side, pallets and standard shipping containers exist.

> You definitely shouldn't go to college if you don't have the aptitude or motivation, but you should go to some sort of trade school: electrical, carpentry, plumber, etc.

Why are you assuming they would fair any better in trade school?

The money has to come from somewhere. Tuition doesn't cover the cost of operating those European public universities. Most of the cost is borne by taxpayers. More students would thus mean higher taxes.

To an extent this also applies in the USA. Public universities in most states have relatively low tuition (although still higher than their European equivalents) for in-state students. But they are unable to meet market demand, so many students take out loans to pay tuition at lower-tier private universities.

> What's the "ROI" of a well rounded populus that gets along and doesn't want to kill each other?

Calculable.

> What's the "ROI" of creating beautiful works of art, or producing great culture?

The academy doesn’t do this anymore and hasn’t for more than half a century.

> What's the "ROI" of happiness?

Is there any evidence to suggest college graduates are happier which account for differences in childhood socioeconomic status, lifetime earning potential, and similar confounding factors?

> Sometimes the purpose of central government is to make a negative ROI into a positive one, because there are greater purpose than the return

While I agree with you in principle, this rationale can be used as a cover for bad policy. You take a measure that is widely accepted as an indication of worth, and then insist that the system’s failure to produce that indication of worth may actually just indicate that it’s providing an intangible goodness that cannot be measured nor accounted for (beauty, happiness, etc.).

It's an odd attitude to me that I see on this site, and is VERY prevalent among STEM majors, CS especially. The attitude seems to be that the only learning you should do relates to income and/or career advancement. Look at the story on here yesterday about monetizing, or at least publicizing your hobbies.

I do not regret any of the classes I took. I learned something from all of them. And it's not putting a rosy shine on something I was forced to do. I genuinely appreciate being well-rounded and knowing many things. It made me a better person.

If people just want to learn core skills, get a technical degree like a certificate or associates. That's why those things exist. You can do a 6 month certificate in coding at my local community college if your goal is just to go work and not learn things other than that.

So what is more efficient for this? : 4 years going in debt to get a well rounded education with a concentration in learning maybe 1.5 years of welding (in theory): or 2-3 years as an apprentice learning your specific trade and focusing on your one task (not in how many credits needed to graduate)?

We had this structure with apprenticeships. Companies were the ones to say "we need x people with Y mindset". And they can pay to foster those people and mindsets.

But they abandoned that because they didn't want to fit the bill for their own workforce. They instead put up with mediocre welders they kinda sorta train for 6 months and maybe the good ones stay. Great model for society.

I don't know, why not both? Companies killed apprenticeship and even training programs, so they took your choice unless you're going blue collar. Even with blue collar, Unions more or less took a lot of potential spots for new blood, so it becomes a schmooz game for something you want to take your time and effort to learn.

So yea, surprise that once again it comes down to companies that don't want to pay for the talent they yearn for.

>Why are you assuming they would fair any better in trade school?

Maybe they do, maybe they don't, but if they find themselves in service work, they should do anything they can to not be in that position. Some people just don't have any other options due to aptitude or attitude, so that's where they stay. That's not a great place to be in the US for the limited existence we have on Earth.

Something I learned in high school sports, particularly wrestling, is you have to always work to improve your position. That lesson holds very true in life.

>I think there's diminishing returns.

This is definitely true. I think pre-graduate college is pretty eye opening, at least when I went. In most high schools, they just cover the top layer of knowledge; in college they go quite a bit deeper. "They never taught us that in high school," is a saying that applies.

Historically sports was self paying and a massive benefit. I don't know what the score has been for the last 2 decades.

In order to rethink Bachelor Degrees, one must first rethink high school. It is routine in the US to see schools where 1) <=5% of the student body is proficient in math; but also 2) the school has a 90% graduation rate.

If that's high school, then it's useless, both as a signal, but also just because, you know, nobody is learning anything. You pretty much have to have some other place for smart people to demonstrate that they're smart.

What pendulum???

> Software costs are about to go to zero.

Not all software is like webshit boilerplate.

> It's a worldview that necessitates only teaching what leads to a job. It is anti beauty and anti human.

The question is always who is footing the bill while you find yourself? Education that leads to productive vocations can arguably have some public funding because that gets paid back in taxes, etc. If you're paying for expanding your own horizons through education, then sure, have at it.

> We look at that positively becomes it's a sunk cost,

I don't care what you "look at it like." I car what the actual statistics demonstrate. Facts don't care about your feelings.

> 15 years later do you think these classes matter?

Yes. A broad, liberal arts education made me a better, more informed citizen. One might even say I know more than the current President (certainly his supporters) about tariffs, what affects the price of eggs, etc.

We need to admit schools are babysitting kids and not teaching them anymore. A few kids can still learn, but so many others don't. Especially the one who would learn in a better environment, but whose class is disrupted by 1 or 2 students preventing their education. Once a student gets behind a year, they aren't going to ever catch up if they are only passed on to the next year instead of being identified as someone who needs to repeat the year.

Edit: I should have been clearer in "are increasingly babysitting" and not been as strong as indicating it as some universal truth. I hear horror stories from teachers about how much of their time is focused on classroom management, how little on actual education, and how much effort it put into processes so the grades stay up regardless.

Anyone who wants to can learn as much about the humanities as they want to these days without a college degree, with audiobooks, discussion forums, etc. I myself have done this.

Charging the government $50k a year to force hungover 18 year olds to plagiarize essays at 7:45am before class to get a required credit benefits no one.

But this presupposes that they only "useful skills" are those that are economically useful. There are plenty of artistic skills that produce products that are not generally of high economic value but are helpful to society by making life nicer to live.

There are statues that I go by every day that generate zero revenue for the city, but they make getting around town just a little bit nicer. Nobody is coming to this city to see these statues, so they don't drive tourist revenue. They're just there and nice to look at.

The artists made some money, but there's no return on investment in straight dollars for the city that commissioned these works. And yet it is valuable to society.

> Is there any evidence to suggest college graduates are happier which account for differences in childhood socioeconomic status, lifetime earning potential, and similar confounding factors?

I'm not going to read this entire study just to respond to a single comment, but according to ChatGPT, the answer to your question is yes.

https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.25.1.159

https://chatgpt.com/share/67e5793f-e284-800f-8bb4-ebd340e4c9...

"Yes, the evidence strongly suggests that schooling has nonpecuniary benefits like increased happiness, beyond what can be explained by income or family background. But the authors remain cautious and emphasize the need for further causal research."

I don’t necessarily disagree with you but kind of a poor example considering copywrite work seems to be having a severe identity crisis because of AI at the moment. At least the English major still has their education to fall back on while the copywrite might have their entire skillset made obsolete with no other credentials to utilize.

How would it make people dumber? Students provably forgets 90%+ of what they learn, and education is massively inefficient today, which can also provably be improved by virtual tutors (see Bloom's two sigma problem). Your reaction seems knee jerk instead of thinking through this from first principles. Something like this is likely to happen whether you like it or not.

Exactly. I think the people who oppose this do it for sentimental reasons. Either because they want the prestige of a place like Stanford on their resume, or they enjoyed the social milieu. A social network of similarly ambitious people is also arguably more important than the actual knowledge. The knowledge is already available for free online, and like Bryan Caplan points out: at many universities you can just go and sit in class, but nobody does it because what you actually want is the credentials, not the knowledge.

A few essential skills that I feel schools ought to teach:

1. Personal knowledge management

2. Digital literacy

3. Calling bullshit in the age of big data (this is an actual course, freely available on youtube)

I wonder if alternative forms of education (like Waldorf/Steiner) would make more sense to more kids. It's clear that the standard way of teaching doesn't resonate with many kids, and we would do well to investigate that.

What is your definition of economic literacy?

Subsidizing a service with public funds does not make it less expensive, it only changes who pays the expense.

What is economy of scale? What is induced demand? What is return on investment? What is increased total innovation?

When everything else is starving, it doesn't make sense to keep sports constantly upgrading

You answer your own question here.

You don’t have to tie the benefits to money, but you do need to understand that there is a cost, some of which is money, and the benefits should be worth it if you’re going to be doing it. Who pays the money is a secondary concern to that.

If you used all that knowledge to disdain others instead of learning from them, then you have learnt nothing.

“Yes but I’m right and they’re wrong” — When you’re 49% of the population, it doesn’t matter.

> "They never taught us that in high school," is a saying that applies.

Equally likely, the kid just didn't pay attention.

Your comment according to ChatGPT "in the west":

Prompt: { Someone posted this:

The current zeitgeist according to chatgpt in the west: Right-wing coded: Practical education, Hard skills/trades, having children, personal responsibility, entrepreneurship, exurban community orientation, traditional morality/religion, decentralization (less elite control), bad aesthetic taste, low emotional intelligence, etc.

Left-wing coded: Aspirational education, Universities, staying single into your 30s, personal irresponsibility (victimhood), artistic ego pursuit, urban orientation, performative morality/religion (climate doomerism, veganism, social justice-ism), centralization (more elite control), good aesthetic taste, high emotional intelligence, etc

Does this sound like something you'd say, chatgpt? }

ChatGPT: { No, that post is not an accurate reflection of how I analyze political or cultural dynamics. It presents a highly polarized and caricatured view of different ideologies, using broad generalizations and subjective judgments rather than a nuanced or objective perspective.

If I were to discuss cultural or political trends, I would aim for a more balanced approach, recognizing the complexities and overlaps between different worldviews rather than reducing them to a list of traits with implicit value judgments. Real social and political identities are more fluid and context-dependent than what that post suggests. }

Response: { Can you expand on how it's a polarized and caricatured view? }

ChatGPT: { 1. Using Broad Generalizations It treats political ideologies as monolithic and assigns rigid, opposing characteristics to "right-wing" and "left-wing" identities. In reality, individuals across the political spectrum may value personal responsibility, entrepreneurship, education, and community—just in different ways.

2. Assigning Subjective Value Judgments The post implies that one side has positive traits (e.g., "practical," "hard-working," "responsible") while the other is marked by negative traits (e.g., "egotistical," "performative," "irresponsible"). This makes it less of an analysis and more of a partisan framing.

3. Over-Simplifying Political and Cultural Attitudes Not everyone fits neatly into the categories presented. There are libertarians, centrists, populists, progressives, social conservatives, classical liberals, and many more who defy these stereotypes.

4. Framing Complex Issues as Binary Opposites Instead of acknowledging nuance, the post forces everything into a binary left vs. right framework, when in reality, people’s values often overlap.

Conclusion The post is more of a stereotyped narrative than an accurate representation of political and cultural trends. It distorts reality by exaggerating differences, dismissing complexity, and reinforcing partisan divisions rather than fostering real understanding. }

Really fascinating stuff if you ask me.

A basic understand of supply/demand and how many well intended policies can have terrible effects.

Many groups that want to destroy things make up excuses for why it is good. Even Adolf Hitler said the Jews were attacking Germany and he was just acting in self-defense. So the mere existence of an excuse doesn't mean very much.

I can agree with that. That's very basic and uncontroversial. I asked because terms like "economic literacy" often masquerade "thinks about economics the way I want them to". For example, some people would say that you must believe things like "financial markets are good" or else you're economically illiterate.

But supply and demand happen in every economy, even those without money and even post-scarcity sci-fi. And unintended consequences are just a thing everywhere.

Unless "unintended consequences" was shorthand for "if you hurt stock market investors that's bad for the country", of course.

The political pendulum, maybe? Good times make weak people, weak people make bad times (you are here), etc?

I prompted GPT for stereotypes of the current left/right culture wars, and simply edited down the LLM weasel language and wordy equivocation on each bullet point in the novel it wrote.

Fascinating indeed.

It seems your editorializing had a bigger impact than you thought!

> they abandoned that because they didn't want to fit the bill for their own workforce.

Exactly. Privatize profits. Socialize costs.

  > You used to be able to declare bankruptcy and discharge this debt until very recently.

specifically, from 2005 onwards [0] in the 'Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act' signed by gw...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bankruptcy_Abuse_Prevention_an...

>But western societies don't seem to have a "We need X people with Y skillset" institution. If someone came to me like, "we need a welder to produce $needed_thing" then i would have put my skill points into that.

We do, it's called the price of labor. We currently need highly educated healthcare professionals like a forest fire needs rain. These wages are literally off the chart:

BLS list: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/highest-paying.htm

Another list: https://www.careeronestop.org/Toolkit/Wages/highest-paying-c...

The only product where you go into debt, get four years older, and still need "experience" to get hired

I wish that mattered.