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Has the decline of knowledge work begun?

(www.nytimes.com)
388 points pseudolus | 4 comments | 25 Mar 25 17:02 UTC | HN request time: 0.654s | source
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fullshark ◴[25 Mar 25 17:21 UTC] No.43473662[source]▶
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).

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1. AtomBalm ◴[26 Mar 25 20:08 UTC] No.43486648[source]▶
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.

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2. poincaredisk ◴[26 Mar 25 22:00 UTC] No.43487903[source]▶
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.
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3. martindbp ◴[27 Mar 25 16:58 UTC] No.43495542[source]▶
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.
4. martindbp ◴[27 Mar 25 17:03 UTC] No.43495593[source]▶
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.