
College has been oversold (2011) - jseliger
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/11/college-has-been-oversold.html
======
rayiner
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.

~~~
tptacek
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?

~~~
jasode
_> 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_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_H._Clark#Early_life_and_education)

~~~
tptacek
You're missing my point. I'm saying, if you want to universalize college
education to equalize opportunity between children raised in low-income
families and children raised in high-income families --- a coherent cause, and
one I happen to support --- you need to fix the systemic problems that keep
low-income students from attending college, or free tuition will simply be
another giveaway the government gives to people who don't need the help.

I'm not arguing against college (I think there are arguments against college
as an opportunity equalizer, but I'm not making them). I'm arguing against
_free tuition for everyone_ as a vector for getting more low-income people
into college.

If you want more low-income people to attend college, fix childcare first, so
high-school age students aren't sacrificing class rank to take care of younger
siblings and graduating high school into circumstances that demand they
immediately find a wage.

Or, if you're dead set on applying pressure at college itself: means-test the
benefit, so at least you're not giving billions of dollars away to families
making six-figure incomes while families making less than $40,000 are sending
their 17-18 year olds to 5 years of sporadic dead-end service industry
employment. Because: "college is too expensive" is not the only reason that
happens. There are plenty of extremely inexpensive community colleges that are
vast improvements over 9 months working at the Sprint Cell Phone Store. But
that's where low-income teenagers often end up.

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

~~~
Noseshine
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](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).

~~~
jknoepfler
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.

~~~
WildUtah
TO be more specific, a US college psychology major neither trains nor
qualifies one for any job whatsoever in the psychiatric care field. Neither is
such a major helpful in gaining admission to a trade school where one can
learn to be qualified for such a profession.

Psychology is simply the default major for many students that have no specific
interest in studies.

------
alexmat
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.

~~~
WildUtah
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.

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

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

~~~
munin
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.

------
beachstartup
it sure has.

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

~~~
jschwartzi
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.

------
zizzles
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.

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

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

~~~
justinator
Well, I certainly wouldn't be brave enough to speak for a large, mostly
anonymous group of users.

