Has the decline of knowledge work begun?

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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

???

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.

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?

> 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 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.

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.

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

> 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.

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.

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

What pendulum???

> 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

>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...