The High-Heel Bubble never popped, and the Education Bubble may not either

http://crazybear.posterous.com/higher-education-may-not-be-a-bubble

by yummyfajitas • 15 years ago

41 36 15 years ago

crazybear.posterous.com

An individual has all the reasons to defect if they believe that their time and money would be better spent, e.g., starting a company and profiting off of it rather than sinking their time and money into a degree.

drcode2• 15 years ago

It's risky though: If your startup goes belly up, many people will think of you as just a loser who dropped out of school because he/she couldn't handle it, even if that's unfair. Let's hope this dynamic changes in the future.

sliverstorm2• 15 years ago

What you are asking for is failures to no longer be regarded as failures. Maybe it's unfair, maybe it was just bad luck that conspired against you, but I can't really see a world in which failure is just as acceptable as success.

If the label of failure rubs you the wrong way, take it as an incentive- buck up, get back in the fray, and try again until you're a success.

joe_the_user2• 15 years ago

Among other serious flaws in the article, the author fails to make the distinction between simple irrational urges and the subtle and seductive irrationality specific to a bubble.

A number of people made more money by being in the housing market than was made by those who sat the whole thing out. The bubble was a loss in total but applying an overall process to an individual decision is not the easy-call that the author glibly claims it to be. A person can easily determine that wearing high-heals will be harder on their body than wearing flats. The calculations concerning a house in 2004 were much more complex and the calculations concerning whether to get a college education in 2011 are also more complex.

yummyfajitas5• 15 years ago

A person can easily determine that wearing high-heals will be harder on their body than wearing flats.

Of course you can - but how do you ensure that the other women in your office don't look down on you because you wear flats?

I'm not arguing that high heels are irrational at all. Far from it - I'm claiming the loss in status is worse than foot pain and thus it is rational for any individual to wear heels.

incomethax• 15 years ago

Not only that, but an individual company (as a single rational actor) has every incentive to hire workers with less "perceived" credentials and more actual work credentials.

Part of the reason I believe the education bubble is a bubble and will pop, is that the entire point of an accredited degree is to have a recognizable proxy for someone's intellectual capability. The ease at checking a person's ability prior to the internet and social media was in checking with their alma mater if they had the degree that they had and therefore if they were as capable as they claimed. Now it's even easier to check if someone has the intellectual capability by looking at their blog/github repo/facebook/twitter.

With that in mind, I think its only a matter of time before that starts to translate into educational institutions competing with industry for students.

hga• 15 years ago

"[...] the entire point of an accredited degree is to have a recognizable proxy for someone's intellectual capability."

Indeed, but the college degree is used for this because most of the former methods have been outlawed (or in the case of the high school diploma watered down to uselessness).

I don't find it impossible to imagine the government outlawing the new sort of Internet based investigations or enough people getting wise to the game to, well, game it.

cageface• 15 years ago

Women buy heels for their aesthetic effect, not because they are beholden to a 500 year old meme.

drcode2• 15 years ago

I'm not so sure- Men tend to prefer shorter women, aesthetically. Heels therefore may be anti-aesthetic and more of an economic signal, though I can't site any specific studies to substantiate this.

rdouble4• 15 years ago

Women don't buy heels to impress men, they buy them to impress women.

dantheman• 15 years ago

Heels affect a woman's posture to emphasize her T&A.

kevbin4• 15 years ago

> Men tend to prefer shorter women, aesthetically.

Is there evidence to support this? Short women have numerical and biological advantages (e.g., earlier puberty) wrt to pairing and reproduction; but aesthetic preferences seem tied to ratios—waist-hip, leg-torso—that can hold for samples tall or short. Heels seem like a means for adjusting the observed leg-torso ratio of a sample to mask suboptimal genetic inputs and environmental effects; i.e., heels make legs look longer in proportion to overall body height.

kmfrk• 15 years ago

I doubt many women use high heels to appear taller. Rather to "look pretty", strain the legs and glutes to make them look better.

Personally, I think women should stay away from high heels - they also ruin their feet doing it, which is definitely not aesthetic.

nicetryguy• 15 years ago

I don't have to take out a 10 year loan to own high heels

As a college educated individual, this may be the dumbest thing i have ever read

joe_the_user2• 15 years ago

Yes,

It's a transparent abuse of analogy.

"Bubble" is short-hand for a self-reinforcing financial/psychological dynamic which drive irrational investment patterns. Not every trend is a bubble, not even every exponentially-expanding trend is a bubble. Cigarette smoking, for example, expanded exponentially to virtually every nation on earth once tobacco was moderately widespread level. Epidemics often follow exponential growth patterns too but are not "bubbles".

Bubble are specific to the investment process because the investment process is where prevailing beliefs can drive short-term prices but long-term prices requires more "fundamental" qualities. Just as much, since a bubble dynamic requires not just high but expanding prices, bubbles are limited, at the minimum, that total amount of investment funds of a society.

Now, it should be noted that the investors driving an "education bubble" are not the "education consumers" - these consumers don't even have any money! The real investors are the government and the educational institutions. Together, this group is shoveling money into the education system with the expectation of getting more back later, with interest. For-profit educational institutions add to this dynamic by allowing unlimited further money to enter into the equation. That government guarantees this racket and doesn't, itself, expect a profit, only heightens this "problematic dynamic" (like the home-loan scam only "pre-bailed out").

kungfooey• 15 years ago

The author only addresses one side of the equation. The other side is the person who makes the loan. This bubble has a lot to do with the ease of which a loan can be obtained - thereby driving up the price (see: Housing Bubble).

The bubble will begin to pop when enough students start defaulting on the loan (by not working or getting paid under the table), not when potential students come to the realization that it is overpriced.

yummyfajitas5• 15 years ago

It's quite possible that if the government guarantees for student loans are removed, speculators will increase the price of loans and reduce education spending a bit.

But I suspect the result won't be a bubble popping, but merely a leveling off at a higher level.

lkrubner• 15 years ago

Your remark is reminiscent of "Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau."

Are you aware what an awful history lies behind the idea of "merely a leveling off at a higher level"?

That is not how markets work. Things go up and down, they do not stabilize for any length of time.

The above quote is famous because it was terribly wrong, and it came from a respected voice. In the USA, the recession had already begun, which later developed into the Great Depression.

For context:

"Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau. I do not feel there will be soon if ever a 50 or 60 point break from present levels, such as (bears) have predicted. I expect to see the stock market a good deal higher within a few months." - Irving Fisher, Ph.D. in economics, Oct. 17, 1929

He said this 12 days before Black Monday.

http://www.gold-eagle.com/editorials_01/seymour062001.html

I recall some economics blog, it was either Calculated Risk or Paul Krugman, pointed out several examples of "a permanently high plateau" being applied to the USA housing market circa 2005-2008. It is remarkable how often this phrase gets resurrected, and always just before some class of assets is seen to be losing a great deal of its value.

absconditus• 15 years ago

I doubt that our economy would be seriously damaged if the "high-heel bubble" popped.

sliverstorm2• 15 years ago

Considering what women's shoes cost, maybe it would...

rdouble4• 15 years ago

The bubble metaphor seems a bit overextended. Here it seems to mean any sort of trend. By this article's usage, we've also been trapped in a long term bubble of wearing pants, sitting in chairs, and drinking out of cups.

yummyfajitas5• 15 years ago

Upon rereading, I realize it isn't clear that I'm arguing that we aren't observing a speculative bubble in education, but something considerably more harmful. I've edited the post to (hopefully) make this more clear.

I merely used the term "education bubble" as a way of referencing a continuing conversation.

rdouble4• 15 years ago

The article reads like current trends in higher education are as harmful as wearing high heels.

fizx• 15 years ago

Those things have non-social utility. High heels once did (horses), but no longer do.

Gianteye2• 15 years ago

I'd rather the headline read "hasn't popped" versus "never popped". It implies there's some force keeping the high heel bubble (whatever that may be) from popping in perpetuity, and seems to draw a connection to the education bubble doing the same.

This is like an article in 2007 reading "The High-Hell Bubble never popped, and the Housing Bubble may not either."

jpadvo• 15 years ago

That is exactly what he claimed -- that the situation with high heels is in a stable equilibrium. Barring some kind of outside influence, stable equilibria remain in their state indefinitely.

Gianteye2• 15 years ago

But the author doesn't state why that equilibrium cannot change. He states that is hasn't, which is different.

It's the difference between a double blind experiment and an epidemiological survey. One attempts to isolate a mechanism that is predictive, another attempts to explain historical trends.

kevbin4• 15 years ago

My life-long, unscientific, uncontrolled observation of the sample space shows a strong inverse correlation between heel-height and years of formal education. A crude approximation of initial results shows a curious trifurcation at 16 years:

{[0,12) => <Lucious, 8" Stilleto Pump, Lucite>

,[12-14) => <Ellie, 5" Pump, Leatherette>

,[14-16] => <Steve Madden, 3" Pumps, Leather>

,(16-]† => <Ferragamo, 4" Pumps, Italian Leather>

,(16-]†† => <Ecco, Flats, Natural Materials>

,(16-]††† => <Birkenstock,Sandal, Vegan BirkoFelt> }

† professional school

†† graduate school, science

††† graduate school, social-science/humanities

Tichy• 15 years ago

Isn't the solution to the education problem to simply party as hard as you can for four years?

scotty79• 15 years ago

High-heel is not social pit you can't crawl out because of possible peer ostracism.

Most of the movement men were conditoned to perceive as womanly comes from simple mechanical attempts of a female trying not to fall of the high heels.

To quit that, all woman would have to pass on advantage of using fairly easy way to tap into male conditioning for at least one generation.

The High-Heel Bubble never popped, and the Education Bubble may not either

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