College has been oversold (2011)

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/11/college-has-been-oversold.html

by jseliger • 10 years ago

45 60 10 years ago

madengr• 10 years ago

Almost 20x the amount of psychology majors than chemical engineering.

Noseshine• 10 years ago

From what I read on reddit, news media and HN over the years we have no shortage of chemical engineers, but we do have a severe shortage of psychiatrists and psychologists at least here in Germany. Try getting an appointment - the problem isn't the one initial test appointment itself, but that if they accept you to come in for even just that "test talk" they don't have any room for the follow-up of many sessions over many months.

I think this is as one would expect: Pretty much anyone might use psychological help at some point (many different kinds exist, from "just talk" to prescribing some heavy drugs). How much need is there for chemical engineering? I've taken a few intro courses (just for fun, I'm happy in IT) so I know those guys don't just build chemical factories but also design devices like apheresis machine (great lecture, great professor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38kB2jTOyug). Still each machine needs to be designed only once, humans need help all the time. There should be many more psychologists than chemical or other engineers I think. One field scales much worse than the other one(s).

jknoepfler2• 10 years ago

In the U.S., one is required to obtain either a Ph.D. or a Psy.D to become a clinical psychologist, and can expect a salary of around $75,000/yr... the shortage of psychiatrists is probably not a function of insufficient psych majors.

beachstartup• 10 years ago

it sure has.

but... a good (read: difficult) degree from a good school will always net you at least an interview.

jschwartzi• 10 years ago

What bothers me about this is that we're now telling 15-year olds to make decisions that they won't understand the outcome of until they're 30. If they're lucky like me then they might manage to end up in a decent career despite having a mediocre degree from a mediocre school. But life has been tremendously unfair to most of the kids I went to high school with, and it's because our high school was mediocre and our parents didn't have the money to make up for it.

I shudder to think what the future will be like for my friends' kids.

T2_t2• 10 years ago

... which is the theme of the article!

Educated people have higher wages and lower unemployment rates than the less educated so why are college students at Occupy Wall Street protests around the country demanding forgiveness for crushing student debt? The sluggish economy is tough on everyone but the students are also learning a hard lesson, going to college is not enough. You also have to study the right subjects. And American students are not studying the fields with the greatest economic potential.

zizzles• 10 years ago

There will always be disproportionate amounts of arts/media majors vs STEM majors (more so now than ever before according to this article)

Not everyone is cut out to be a NASA astronaut space scientist engineering tech-guru UNIX kernel programming god. 1. There exists genetic limitations, and 2. Not everyone has an asperger-style of thinking. It should be no surprise to HN that your average human relates closer to the arts, music and perhaps sports than machine binary code.

vollmond• 10 years ago

However, we have people taking out enormous loans to get educations in non-STEM fields that have much less chance of repaying the investment financially.

We as a society push everyone in every possible field towards college. Many of these could be apprenticeships, etc. There's no reason to spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to learn a lot of this stuff.

Even if we went back 40 years to when college was (compared to now) fairly cheap, a lot of fields wouldn't make sense in that environment.

wolfgoatcabbage2• 10 years ago

Not sure this is true, although it appears to be the dominant perception. Programming skills bear a closer resemblance to language learning or critical thinking for many practical applications. Perhaps NASA engineers, kernel gods and lovers of binary will remain in the minority, but I wouldn't be surprised to see scripting in languages like Swift and Python become a more ubiquitous skill in the next 10 years. Even writing basic iOS apps is not beyond the range of someone with a creative writing degree.

WildUtah7• 10 years ago

And what share of 18-23 year olds are capable of learning a new language or critical thinking? Darn few. But nearly all are capable of partying, drinking, casual sex, and learning to write and appreciate fine arts a little better.

That's what we should be providing them with free college for.

justinator3• 10 years ago

How about also that the arts are important to a rich and diverse culture?

flowerbeater• 10 years ago

To people on Hacker News, art is just "content".

CN7R3• 10 years ago

While art is essential to any modern culture, you cannot build an country's economy off the creation and trade of paintings. Besides, isn't art a product of creativity - an attribute that cannot be taught? Colleges should exist to enable creativity with the technical skills to implement it. If money is a problem, prioritize practical skills over arts.

ZenoArrow4• 10 years ago

"1. There exists genetic limitations, and 2. Not everyone has an asperger-style of thinking."

You don't need asperger-style thinking to be able to code, nor do I think the skills you need to code are particularly rare. What's rarer is the inclination to learn.

In my opinion, anyone that can write out a cooking recipe can learn to code. Cooking recipes are basically imperative programming in disguise. The ingredients are the variables, and the cooking instructions are the algorithms.

rayiner5• 10 years ago

This talk of free college in this election has been really upsetting to me. It's a huge waste of money and time for millions of more kids to get worthless college degrees. Nobody benefits but the professors and administrators of universities. And degree inflation creates a perverse situation for the sane people who don't want to spend four years of their life getting a college degree to be an administrative assistant.

College shouldn't be the default. It should be an option society encourages only for the very few fields that require four years of dedicated academic study.

chillwaves• 10 years ago

Financial constraints shouldn't be the barrier of entry to a college education. College shouldn't be for everyone, but motivated and intelligent students from poor backgrounds will give just as much back to the community as their monied peers. Other countries have already addressed this issue with difficult entry examples (e.g., Germany).

This is a solved problem.

WildUtah7• 10 years ago

College is a good way for young people to spend four or five years learning to drink, date, and party. Some of them even get a bit of an education.

It's an essential part of living a life of leisure and privilege in modern industrial society. And it should be free for everyone that wants it.

rayiner5• 10 years ago

The fact that learning to drink, date, and party is the main thing most people get out of college is why I don't think the government should be footing the bill for it.

sago• 10 years ago

Couldn't a similar argument be put for high school education. Not needed for many fields. Retail, transport, much of manufacturing, etc.

Is education primarily an economic, or social good?

rayiner5• 10 years ago

I think it would be fine to end high school at 16 as is done in Germany.

clementangerine• 10 years ago

These are two separate issues, for the most part.

One possible relevant benefit of free college, though, is that it removes a lot of the bad incentives in the university-student relationship. If students aren't in the paying customer role, and universities aren't so strongly incentivized to sell as many degrees as possible, it's a lot easier to enforce strict academic standards. So it could actually improve the degree inflation situation.

dilemma• 10 years ago

Colleges are still going to be rated and paid based on some measure, likely completion rates for courses and degrees. Then you get the situation where the education in the country's best technical university is a joke also known as teach to the test.

fullshark• 10 years ago

But it's a default requirement for most white collar entry level jobs in this country, and many blue collar manufacturing jobs have been exported out of the country. College feels like a default requirement for many students because it's the only way they see to get entry into a saught after career, even if they don't have a definite career chosen yet.

tptacek6• 10 years ago

We could fix that problem instead of allocating hundreds of billions of dollars to a new benefit that accrues primarily to the middle and upper classes.

mrxd• 10 years ago

It seems logical to me that as society grows more complex and sophisticated, citizens require more years of education to ensure political stability.

Restricting education to what's needed for employment creates a class division between high and low education groups. Social decisions become dominated by expert language that's incomprehensible to the majority, creating conditions for a populist backlash.

thesagan• 10 years ago

I think formal education is a personal vitamin and economic good with inherent diminishing returns, and one that cannot indefinitely require additional years for each societal advancement (since we do not live indefinitely).

Perhaps we should find a better way to distribute education; not just among social economic class, but by span and duration ("doses"). Otherwise we might see unnecessary educational inflation (which I think may be the case now), rather than an educational deflation.

pjmorris2• 10 years ago

It's also a huge waste to get so many young people borrowing to go to college when they might be happier and more well off as, e.g. firefighters, plumbers, mechanics, electricians, etc, but feel societal pressure to 'succeed' at a point where they're not even entirely sure what that means.

I see 'free college' and 'college by default' as two separate things, not as one. Just because someone can go to college (for free) doesn't mean someone should. In a 'free college' world, we would still need plenty of not-necessarily-college firefighters, plumbers, mechanics, electricians (and I'm sure there are many other routes that aren't best served by college), but people might not feel the same pressure to load up on debt at such a volatile point in their lives.

ChrisLTD• 10 years ago

If the U.S. economy keeps putting downward pressure on non-college wages, people will keep borrowing whatever it costs to have a chance to escape modern serfdom.

tptacek6• 10 years ago

It's also a regressive policy. It assumes the only cost of attending college is tuition. That's the cost that the middle class is attuned to, but it's probably not the most important thing keeping low-income people out of school: for them, a very important additional concern is opportunity cost. Not everyone has the luxury of forgoing 4 years of income to attend additional school.

It's also the case that the pipeline to college attendance is constructed to reward children brought up under middle class circumstances. Unless you think it's the case that food and shelter insecurity, the requirement to care for and sometimes transport younger siblings, and sometimes total lack of supervision doesn't contribute to poorer school performance.

In that sense, proposals for free college tuition aren't that much different than the (totally, unbelievably, egregiously regressive) tax favoritism we accord home ownership through the mortgage income deduction.

How about we fix childcare and K-12 first?

jasode2• 10 years ago

How about we fix childcare and K-12 first?

Well, you already know that the answer to that. Desirable employers don't screen job applicants based on which childcare facility and high school they attended. It's always college that's the focal point. Seems inevitable that the reactionary conversation then gravitates towards fixing college access rather than K-12 quality. (Therefore, it doesn't matter if K-12 is actually the more important thing to fix.) As an example, James Clark of Netscape dropped out of high school[1] but his future employers didn't care because he had a college degree. The college degree overshadows the stigma of being a high school dropout.

If McKinsey Consulting, Goldman Sachs, Google Inc, etc filtered out candidates based on what kind of public libraries the candidate had access to while he grew up, I suppose we'd be having political conversations about "building better public libraries!" so children can compete for jobs.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_H._Clark#Early_life_and_...

rayiner5• 10 years ago

How about we fix childcare and K-12 first?

Free childcare for working families (particularly single mothers) would do so much to lift kids out of poverty.

WildUtah7• 10 years ago

In European countries where free tuition is taken seriously, stipends for students and subsidized part time work for students fill in the gap of mitigating opportunity costs.

Free college tuition is a start, but you're right that even more investment is needed. College students should be paid by the state to invest in their education and enjoy their carefree student days.

Mortgage interest deductions are obviously and inexcusably evil policy, of course. They make a bad example for comparison, like holding up someone's politics to Naziism.

Also, we can't just fix K-12 or child care first and leave everything else aside. Those are complicated issues that will be controversial forever. We do have to improve other things in the meanwhile.

jknoepfler2• 10 years ago

Why do you prefer a population that remains minimally educated to a population that benefits from free post-secondary education? I'm legitimately puzzled by why this would be upsetting.

I hope my children's children's children get to live in a future where a Ph.D. (or whatever) is the default. It probably won't happen, but I wish I lived in that world. Is this an upsetting ideal to you? (Serious question, I am honestly very confused by your statement).

Edit: I can understand being upset by the idea of gating jobs by a four-year degree, but I think I disagree about the percentage of (particularly future-safe) jobs for which a four year degree are necessary: medicine, law, engineering, teaching, even public administration. Your average paralegal, nurse, junior high math teacher, and public health official should all probably have degrees. And sure, there are proxies for a degree that aren't a degree, but I think I'd prefer to live in a world where a degree was attainable for those with ability, drive, and cooperative circumstances.

rayiner5• 10 years ago

You don't need a four year degree to be a lawyer (much less a four-year degree plus law degree). In the UK a law degree is a three-year undergraduate degree.

tzs• 10 years ago

Until we have enforced national standards for science in high school, I'd like to see as many people go to college as possible just so they get some education not under the control of their local or state school board, which may have watered down or crippled the science curriculum to better fit their religious views.

An administrative assistant may not get anything at college directly applicable to their job, but they might get something that will help them make more informed decisions when things like vaccinations and climate change become issues in a political campaign or show up on ballot initiatives.

alexmat2• 10 years ago

For 1,000 years, parents have bought B.A. degrees for their kids as positional goods: "My son, the college man." But a B.A. no longer provides positional status. There are too many people who possess one.

Certification protects many careers: barrier to entry. It does not provide entrepreneurial skills. It provides bureaucratic skills. These will be worth less and less in the digital age.

WildUtah7• 10 years ago

Evidence says that bureaucratic skills have become more and more valuable in the digital age. Fewer and fewer good jobs are available for qualified skilled people and more and more reward licenses, certifications, and connections.

alexmat2• 10 years ago

As long as government spending and subsides are able to sustain them.

tiptop• 10 years ago

People keep missing the fact that 'liberal arts' is just free money for colleges and helps fund for the labs and science majors.

CN7R3• 10 years ago

Yes, but how much of that money is actually going towards funding STEM education in colleges. Isn't a large part of why tuition has increased in the past decade is due to expanding (unnecessary) amenities and administrators?

munin• 10 years ago

no, the labs and science majors are funded by their own students and grants the science professors win. the "liberal arts" is just free money for colleges and goes into their endowment.

College has been oversold (2011)

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