
Peter Thiel: The Education Bubble Is Becoming Dangerous (2018) [video] - admiralspoo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crAHDXdBCXg
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jb775
I agree college is overpriced, but I doubt Thiel's companies often hire people
without a formal college education. He's really just stating the obvious here
without mentioning any viable alternatives.

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rsj_hn
Agreed. And it's not just "overpriced", because "overprice" says you are not
getting enough output per input. In this case, with higher education, the
economy (and nation) _needs_ skilled workers, and universities are not
producing them in the quantities needed even as they graduate more and more
students who have degrees that don't help them succeed in the job market.

I think the solution should be a combination of things:

1\. Make universities cheaper. Say fire 90% of non-academic staff, and force
universities to have more academic staff than non-academic staff. Also make
admission more rigorous, so they are more selective. Also get rid of the non-
tenure track slave labor in academic staff. Ideally roughly 1/3 of the
population should go to university, say 30% fresh from college students and 5%
older students.

2\. Provide vocational training so that people can have as option vocational
education such as electrical work, carpentry, plumbing, machine tools, and
yes, programming, day care, medical assistant, accountant, etc. Vocational
training should be max 3 years of focused training with an apprenticeship
period in the last year, and unlike universities, these vocational schools
should be setup so that everyone can access at least a couple of vocational
school options, at government expense. Ideally 2/3 of the population should go
to a vocational school.

3\. Stop providing government loans to universities entirely. Universities can
provide scholarships and there should be government scholarships available
based solely on merit. There should also be student _aid_ based solely on
financial need, but with high academic requirements, otherwise route the
student to a vocational school, which should be fully paid for by the
government.

4\. Safety valve. If someone goes to a vocational school there should be an
option to go back to university based on academic merit. Say a construction
worker really takes to it and wants to become an architect, etc. The safety
valve should be rare, say 5% max.

5\. Online learning/certifications for people switching specializations
roughly within the same field.

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blablabla123
I think other countries do well without such expensive universities, like
Germany for instance where students are much more on their own. So I disagree
with reducing "non-academic staff" and making admissions more difficult. In my
opinion class sizes could be even larger and moved online completely. After
all students only spend a fraction of their time in classes. Most of the time
needs to be spent actually learning the stuff from the lectures, both alone
and in groups with other students. Universities are there to facilitate the
latter, it's just not possible with pure online learning - yet. To me most
valuable are tutoring classes that are lead by staff or just more senior
students, so it's possible to get qualified feedback and help with exercises
and to actually understand things on a deeper level. At least for CS, Math,
Natural Sciences.

There is a tendency to automatize a lot of basic work. Speaking for myself, I
moved out from home 15 years ago and had to hire someone to repair something
at my place only once. And that was because they messed up an installation
that was initiated by the landlord. Societies as a whole are economically much
better off when people get a higher education and should strive to enable it
for everybody who wants to get it. (Many people actually don't want to study.)

~~~
rsj_hn
The _reason_ why education in Germany is affordable whereas education in the
US is not, is precisely because we have 7-10 non-academic staff per academic
staff, whereas Germany has less than 1. These proposals of reducing non-
academic staff, increasing rigor, reducing time to graduation, etc, is an
attempt to be more like the German model.

You might want to look at this comment where I provide some numbers:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23817814](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23817814)

~~~
blablabla123
Thanks for sharing, this is really interesting.

Still, I wonder how German and U.S. universities compare for example in
numbers of tutors. ("HiWis") I would estimate there is one per 20-50 students
per course and they might fall into both groups since those helping out in 1st
or 2nd semester courses might not have a university degree yet. Also the
payment is typically quite low, although considered good enough for a first
student job.

They are actually quite an important part of studies like Physics and
Mathematics.

Regarding time of gradution/number students: in the past German model (which
is now obsolete) where people studied for diploma, the typical lazy student
would mean basically no extra cost for univsersities. Since this person
usually doesn't occupy any lecture room or tutoring capacity... ;-) But the
introduction of Bachelor/Master introduced quite some changes, in particular
closer support for the students and more stringent time lines. But still, the
Bachelor usually takes 3 years and the master an additional 2 years. Basically
the curricula for diploma studies were just being split.

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rsj_hn
So people like tutors, graders, TAs, are considered academic staff, and you
can add them up in terms of FTE (full time equivalent), so 5 tutors that each
work 8 hours per week add up to a single FTE.

It turns out not to make much of a difference to look only at full time staff
versus FTE -- I didn't know this when I started looking at the data, but the
slices of time by tutors end up being a marginal correction to counting just
full time staff when you look at things like student-teacher ratios or total
expenditure per staff.

In the US, there _is_ a meaningful difference between tenure track and non-
tenure track, as universities shift ever more funds away from academic staff
and towards non-academic staff, one way this is accomplished is to pay the
academic staff less, and this is accomplished by keeping the old professors at
current pay but hiring mostly non-tenure track instructors as headcount is
increased. The other way this is accomplished is by identifying some problem
that needs an immediate solution, and then creating multiple vice provost
positions which require their own department position, etc. Say community
relations, gender equality, many different types of "outreach" positions, etc.
European universities have so far resisted this type of cannibalization of
tuition dollars by non-academic staff.

Thus the extra cost of non-academic staff is a good first order explanation
for the diverge in annual tuition between US and Europe, and the fact that our
students take 5-6 years to graduate and many don't graduate is another
multiplier that explains differences in total spending on tertiary education
per bachelors degree holder.

Taken together, these three factors: non-academic staff, longer time to
graduation, much higher dropout rates, basically explain the full difference
in spending between the US and Europe.

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api
I find myself having binary reactions to virtually all of Thiel's positions: I
either strongly agree or strongly disagree. I guess that's what his
methodological contrarianism generates.

I agree with this one. Not only are college costs out of control, but the fact
that colleges have seen tuition increase much faster than inflation _while
simultaneously decreasing the number of real tenure track positions and other
academic positions_ should be a national scandal. It's borderline fraud.

What the hell is all that money going toward? As near as I can tell it's
unnecessary vanity buildings, executive salaries, and runaway bloat in
administrative offices. It's going toward everything but real tenure track
professorships, better teacher/student ratios, and everything else a
university should be doing.

~~~
sradman
See _The Baumol Effect_ by Alex Tabarrok [1]:

> After looking at education and health care and doing a statistical analysis
> covering 139 industries, Helland and I conclude that a big factor in price
> increases over time in the rising price of skilled labor.

The interesting question, in my mind, is why the United States is an outlier
compared to other advanced nation states.

[1]
[https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/05/th...](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/05/the-
baumol-effect.html)

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matthewaveryusa
I find that discoverability is the problem. Out of all the classes I took, 2
without a doubt made the whole experience worth it and is still paying
dividends: (discrete math and advanced algorithms) -- but I had no idea at the
time that they would be the ones that would provide so much value. They were
the classes that convinced me that I wanted to write software and not do
electrical engineering. I wonder how you can solve this without simply going
through the four years and hoping for the best.

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avindroth
Which discrete math class? (Currently trying to decide on a math class for
autumn as CS major)

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matthewaveryusa
This one back in 2014 -- just the intro undergrad class. I actually absorb
very little from lectures and do most of my learning by reading and doing
problems myself -- the book was so good I read it cover to cover and did a lot
of the practice problems.

[https://wl11gp.neu.edu/udcprod8/bwckctlg.p_disp_course_detai...](https://wl11gp.neu.edu/udcprod8/bwckctlg.p_disp_course_detail?cat_term_in=201610&subj_code_in=MATH&crse_numb_in=2310)

[https://www.amazon.com/Discrete-Mathematics-Applications-
Ken...](https://www.amazon.com/Discrete-Mathematics-Applications-Kenneth-
Rosen/dp/0073229725/ref=mp_s_a_1_12?dchild=1&keywords=discrete+mathematics+and+its+applications+8th+edition&qid=1597488825&sprefix=discrete+math&sr=8-12)

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sradman
This appears the final section of a 2014 episode of _Conversations with Bill
Kristol_ [1]:

> CH. 6 : THE HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE (1:13:57 - 1:36:39)

> Is American higher education heading towards a major fiscal crisis? Thiel
> explains he thinks it is.

[1] [https://conversationswithbillkristol.org/video/peter-
thiel/](https://conversationswithbillkristol.org/video/peter-thiel/)

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advaita
IMO, adding 2018 in the title would be better.

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ykevinator
Peter Theil is an insulated idiot genius who happens to be right on this

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aklemm
Couldn’t have said it better myself.

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pfkurtz
Hard for me to separate theses Thiel is partially right about from the great
harm his existence has done to our species.

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asldkjaslkdj
He's not nearly the first one to make this claim, so I'm not sure why it's
even notable... "billionaire believes an oft-feared problem"

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chrisco255
Yes, but Thiel has been saying this for many years, if not decades, and he did
put his money where his mouth was, by paying students to drop out as part of
the Thiel Fellowship program:
[http://thielfellowship.org/](http://thielfellowship.org/)

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Taniwha
At this point I think Thiel lives in his own wealth bubble so distinct from
the experience of most people that his reckons just should be ignored by
default.

I suspect that the main reason we see what he has to say so much is that he
can pay a publicist to get people to listen to him .... he's essentially
trying to buy\ his way into the 'marketplace of ideas' using money rather than
actual ideas, essentially trying to skew the marketplace in his favor

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Ziggy_Zaggy
Although there's merit to the fact that people can be blinded by their wealth-
bubbles to the point that they cannot adequately identify/assess solutions to
address problems that seem obvious to the rest of society, to discount
someone's views based on their wealth-bubble status is likely ultimately a
recipe for division, grid-lock, and a more closed-off society. Perhaps it's
more useful to try to evlauate an individual's ideas based on the merits of
their feasbility and overall utility versus writing them off by default in
order to achieve a more functional society for everyone?

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baix777
Why should we listen to the ideas of a rich guy rather than an educator? How
many times have have you seen an education expert on this site discussing
these topics from a critical standpoint?

The bigger issue is why to people want to listen to rich people rather than
experts in the field? This reminds me the climate change where some people
don't want to listen to the experts but instead want to listen so someone (or
news organization) they already know.

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badhabit
don't discriminate much, take every idea, the odd idea that gots strong
reaction (in a good, strange, nonobvious way), probably is on to something.

same idea with anova, the variable that causes a lot of variance is probably
significant.

