

College for the masses - Futurebot
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/26/upshot/college-for-the-masses.html

======
stegosaurus
Writing from a UK perspective here - the idea of a 'ticket to the middle
class' is wrong on so many levels. Fundamentally I have trouble with the idea
of making college the battleground.

First of all, the actual pool of bona fide middle class jobs is quite small as
far as I can see. Being able to shop at Waitrose is not interesting. If you
have no net worth and your parents have no net worth you are not middle class.

A mortgage in London on a 1BR flat with the maximum reasonable commute
requires a 50K annual income.

Outside of the capital; similar situation but with the numbers scaled down.
There are jobs that exist paying this well, yes, but they are certainly not
common.

That is to say that graduating is not necessarily good enough. It might be a
good result, or good internships, or talent, or prestige (e.g. an elite
university).

Income inequality is not the issue; wealth inequality is (specifically, the
middle class now sits on levels of wealth that look intergenerational from
where I stand).

College should not be pulled in to this. College should be about education.
About helping people to appreciate and understand this world we have around
us. About making adults out of children.

The capitalist economy is broken for youth today. Sending them to college
won't fix that except for a tiny privileged few.

~~~
interesting_att
You make a great point. A lot of this "ticket to the middle class" sounds like
delaying the issue of wealth inequality. One of the biggest predictor of
financial success is who you are born to, something you have no control over.

When we drive millions more poor people to college, the average value of a
college degree will go down. Then we will come up with some new institution
that is the "ticket to the middle class," like getting a masters degree. Back
in the 1970s, you could get a job with a high school diploma. Now, you have to
go to college, work a few unpaid internships, hope you can get an OK job.

~~~
stegosaurus
'Delaying the issue' is a great way to put it.

Social mobility is a distraction. It's not a real solution. It's political
language; it assumes the underlying system.

A system that cycles people around from being poor to rich based on merit is
not a good system, because merit is essentially arbitrary (beyond deliberate
antisocial behaviour).

I have a talent, my friend does not, I get to live the good life, he gets a
lifetime of insecure rental accomodation or homelessness. (True story.)

It just does not work. It's based on an outdated idea of work ethic, it
assumes people have more control over their faculties than they actually do.

I can live with a system that has people competing for sports cars, yachts and
jets. Those things don't matter. But having people fight to put a roof over
their head is just nonsensical in wealthy countries like the UK/USA. It's a
holdover from the Industrial Revolution and the wealthy's desire to force
people to labour.

~~~
NTDF9
It's the same old story again. A nobility is born and serfdom becomes the
norm.

Here's the kicker! Everyone thinks that the current form of capitalism is
good. Right from childhood (at least in the US) the American system of
capitalism is drilled into children's minds as the best thing there can be
(perhaps even God's chosen system of similar bullcrap)

~~~
mikerichards
_Right from childhood (at least in the US) the American system of capitalism
is drilled into children 's minds as the best thing there can be (perhaps even
God's chosen system of similar bullcrap)_

And then when they get to college, they're indoctrinated into the exact
opposite ideology by marxist/socialist professors into your line of thinking.

~~~
NTDF9
Because we soon realize that real life is not what it was all made up to be in
textbooks and propaganda based literature.

Personally, I want reality to be presented the way it is instead of constant
self-glorification.

------
interesting_att
One quote really struck out to me:

"College graduates are also healthier, happier, more likely to remain married,
more likely to be engaged parents and more likely to vote, research has
found."

Much of discourse surrounding college has been the economics. Arguably, it is
hard to justify the cost of $200k price tag + $200k opportunity cost for a
top-tier university, and come out with a $40-60k/year job. But college isn't
just about crafting yourself to a job market. You get to truly explore who you
are with a diverse group of people (race, genders, sexualities, culture,
political leanings, economic backgrounds, drug habits) near your age, all
while having access to all the knowledge of the world (be it religion,
history, art, economics, etc).

Is the SJW culture of thought police hurting what makes college awesome? Yes.
Is there a huge bloat of administrators that drives up the cost of college
education? Yes. Are certain humanities departments misleading students into
thinking that they can get a job with their degree? Yes. Do less-social
students get less out of college? Yes.

But is college completely worthless? Of course not.

~~~
stegosaurus
Right.

I don't think it's particularly off the wall to say that some things just
don't have a price or a monetary reward. Capitalism is a fun game that we play
that works in some areas and doesn't in others; it's not the meaning of life.

Should I read Shakespeare in my free time or work on a side project? Should I
paint or look out of the window at the wildlife or should I move further from
work and spend that time commuting?

Capitalism makes sense for producing widgets at low cost. For apportioning
scarce luxury objects. Etc. But we don't win by trying to make everything
profitable. We just make everything more competitive, more stressful, less...
human.

~~~
bmelton
> Capitalism makes sense for producing widgets at low cost. For apportioning
> scarce luxury objects. Etc. But we don't win by trying to make everything
> profitable. We just make everything more competitive, more stressful,
> less... human.

But Capitalism also allows people a great degree more freedom to do the things
they want. Are there constraints? Sure. Is it perfect? Clearly not. But there
are many who justify themselves by the works they produce. I don't ordinarily
think of myself as that, but when I was an electrician, I used to construct
things, build things.

I still get a sense of pride whenever I'm home and can look at the light poles
that I jackhammered the foundations from, directed the concrete pouring of,
wired to main, erected with a crane and bolted into place. There's an odd
sense of pride that I have every time I see them. That's something I did. And
yeah, it's pretty trivial, but I get value from it.

In a capitalist system, not only can I prioritize how much I choose to work,
but I also have the luxury of choosing what I do, where I can contribute the
most value. I can't say that I've studied it very much, but compared to
assigned work for whatever the normal amount of pay is, I very much prefer the
freedom of working more for more money, or working less for less money, in a
field of my choosing.

I can then allocate that money to the items I prioritize most dearly to me. I
never have as new a phone as my peers seem to, but in their stead, I have some
very nice guitars that I gain great enjoyment from.

I'm not yet convinced that there a non-capitalist system exists that affords
me such choices. Without incentivizing at least some people to go out and get
work done, it seems unlikely to me that there is wealth enough to sustain our
collective frivolities. And sure, looking out the window doesn't cost a whole
lot, but guitars do, and so do canvases and paints.

~~~
SapphireSun
Hmm, I don't think anyone seriously believes that a system where you can't
choose your job would be superior to capitalism (after all, it wouldn't be
very free). I think a more serious competitor is one where the underpinnings
of capitalism remain in place, but some form of wealth distribution prevents
all the gains from accumulating at the top (our current and probably dire
within a few decades situation).

For example, after world war two, the top tax rate was 90% and the world
didn't end. This decimated the concentrations of wealth at the upper reaches
of society and excessive luxury spending plummeted (for instance, once basic
needs are satisfied, rich people start trading around excessively expensive
pieces of art or excessively large houses). It, amongst other policies, also
broke the intergenerational passage of wealth. However, it didn't remove the
temptation to still create wealth. Think of it like playing a game on hard
mode, you only get 1/10th the points a n00b gets, but you can still increase
your relative position compared to others (which is what I assume rich people
really care about when it comes to personal finances).

I'm not advocating a particular course of action, but it seems the current
course is unsustainable and similar things have been done successfully before.
The political rhetoric is out of control these days though.

Also, for what it's worth, guitars and canvases don't really cost that much.
;)

EDIT: Thinking about this, what if we explicitly posed tax rates as
validations of people's success and allowed them to get "achievements" past a
certain point? Then playing the game at a harder difficulty would be a badge
of prestige. This sounds a little crazy here, but in, e.g. the netherlands has
entirely public tax returns and it's been debated and enacted here at various
times:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/business/yourtaxes/14discl...](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/business/yourtaxes/14disclose.html)

~~~
bmelton
> For example, after world war two, the top tax rate was 90% and the world
> didn't end.

No, but it also wasn't nearly as easy then to emigrate to another country.
Considering that the rich can file a few forms and gain citizenship in a tax-
friendlier haven, and that is all that is required to recoup some 50% of their
earnings, it seems unlikely that wealth would continue to be concentrated in
America. Though expatriation numbers are relatively low overall, the _rate_ of
expatriation is currently at record highs. So long as there are countries not
charging 90% tax rates, it seems unlikely that tax revenues would climb
significantly, especially considering that the effective tax revenues stays
relatively constant, it seems unlikely to change all that much.

As far as all that goes, if you're not talking about supplanting capitalism,
then it seems like we can agree that capitalism isn't actually Satan
incarnate. If the "fix" for Capitalism is more of what we have (since we do
already have redistribution, in spades), then we aren't talking about changing
the game at all, but perhaps just some of the rules.

As for the unsustainability of the current course, what, in particular,
indicates that the current course is doing so horribly? We had a giant bust,
and a slowly recovering recession, but that doesn't necessarily put capitalism
as the culprit. I look at Twitter, and I see #resistcapitalism trending, and
it seems everybody's trying to blame capitalism for police brutality. Maybe
I'm just missing the bigger picture, but I can't figure out how the two are
linked, even just a little bit.

~~~
SapphireSun
For what it's worth, I agree, I think capitalism + some rule tweaks is fine.
The culprit is really the beauty of capitalism: accelerating returns on
investment. If you get to the head of the race you tend to start to accrue
more and more wealth. The problem is that it's sucking the pond dry as there
is a relatively stable money supply and much of it is circulating in the
stratosphere (often as corporate stock buybacks). Hence the need for rule
tweaks to enhance recirculation.

This is a cool video I saw a while back that shows the current issue:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM)

I also agree that movement between countries is a modern problem that probably
invalidates the old solution (unless multiple countries coordinate -
unlikely). So, we have a problem that wealth will continue to concentrate
absent controls on the distribution.

The US has a lot of political problems right now, and the major commonality is
that people at the bottom get the shaft every time. I think it's too much to
try to solve every problem facing civilization in one conversation though, so
I'll stick to distributions. ;)

For what it's worth, believe me, I'm not a hippie. I want to start a company
and get rich one day like all of you. I just think it's important to pay
attention to the steady state of the system we are participating in.

------
acconrad
I just find it a hard pill to swallow when they claim that college for the
masses is a good thing when all of the research they're pointing out comes
from people at Harvard, Princeton and MIT. Feels very much like an Ivory Tower
view on things.

