
The World Might Be Better Off Without College for Everyone - johnny313
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/01/whats-college-good-for/546590/?single_page=true
======
intopieces
Notice that every time someone writes an article about how some people are not
cut out for higher education, it's always other people's kids who should avoid
it.

I'd like to know what Bryan Caplan's (the author) kids are up to these days.
Are they welders? Plumbers? That credential inflation is a topic of this
article really shows the author's hand: _someone keep these people out of
higher ed, they don 't deserve it and they're just making it harder for my
offspring to differentiate themselves in the job market._

~~~
JasonFruit
I've made the same argument as the writer, and I have children. Frankly, I'm
not sure how to advise them when the time comes. It may well be that for some,
I'd suggest a college education, while for others, I might suggest learning a
trade and getting ahead in it while they're young. That is to say, I think
your comment makes a conclusion based on your assumptions about people who
question the universal value of higher education, and you don't have anything
real to back it up.

~~~
jimmaswell
Here's one argument against college education for jobs: you're very likely to
be forced to move far from home to find any work in your field. There just
weren't programming jobs within an hour of me in upper NY so I had to move to
a place in New Jersey that I don't like that much out of necessity. I'm sure
it would've went the same for chemical engineering or whatever else with very
few exceptions, maybe law or medicine. If I'd taken a trade like electrical
work or plumbing I could live anywhere I wanted - everyone has toilets and
wires - but now I'm at the mercy of the programming job market until I can
transition to remote work, so it'll be years until I get to live somewhere to
my preference.

Where do you live? If it's not in or very close to highly dense areas,
encourage trades if you don't want to have to take a plane or drive hours to
visit your grandchildren.

~~~
elguyosupremo
While I get your point it should also be noted that an area can only sustain
so many plumbers and electricians. It's not like there are hundreds of new
plumber jobs opening up every year, especially in a place like Upstate NY with
a shitty economy. They need people to get educated but then come back home and
help improve the home economy.

Of course I say this as someone who moved from Upstate NY to Texas for work.

~~~
IkmoIkmo
True, but there's still a difference. If you graduate with 50k student debt,
say in CS, you're absolutely urged to work in your niche field where you're
compensated for your new expertise and can pay back the loan. That may mean
moving to a particular place with an industry that caters to this niche.

If you did vocational (e.g. apprenticeship) schooling and graduate with little
or no debt, that urgency is far smaller, and it tends to be much less of a
niche.

i.e., there's less debt pressure to pursue work that adequately compensates
for your new knowledge, and there's more places (nearby) as you don't work in
a niche as much.

------
jseliger
Caplan's whole book, _The Case Against Education_ , is excellent, and if it
doesn't convince you, try also _Paying for the Party_ :
[https://jakeseliger.com/2014/04/27/paying-for-the-party-
eliz...](https://jakeseliger.com/2014/04/27/paying-for-the-party-elizabeth-
armstrong-and-laura-hamilton) , which is, too, congruent with my own
experience on the provider side of the education system.

We ought to be moving towards de-stigmatizing and strengthening the vocational
education system: [http://seliger.com/2017/06/16/rare-good-political-news-
boost...](http://seliger.com/2017/06/16/rare-good-political-news-boosting-
apprenticeships) . Not everyone wants to be or is well-suited to being an
abstract-symbol manipulator. I am! But just because someone doesn't have that
disposition, doesn't mean they are less or worse of a person.

~~~
djrobstep
Caplan is absolutely correct to say the much of education system is a waste of
resources, a pointless zero-sum competition that simply re-arranges people on
the socio-economic ladder.

But strangely, Caplan is a libertarian capitalist, an advocate of the very
system that sets up and enforces this a socio-economic ladder in the first
place.

He's also thus an opponent of any kind of welfare system that would make this
competition less intense by making the bottom of the ladder a less miserable
place to be and make the difference between the top and bottom less grotesque.

~~~
ThrustVectoring
You talk about the socio-economic ladder like it's a bad thing in and of
itself. IMO, it's only a bad thing where it sets up an incentive gradient that
encourages bad behavior. The libertarian capitalist view is very aware of how
you're rewarded with socio-economic status when you feed the hungry, invent
cures for diseases, and generally provide wanted goods and services.

~~~
djrobstep
> you're rewarded with socio-economic status when you feed the hungry

LOL

~~~
dang
Could you please not post like this here, regardless of how wrong someone else
is? it just makes the thread even worse.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
djrobstep
Sure. How do you suggest responding to comments too laughable to warrant a
serious response?

~~~
DoreenMichele
A wise old man used to tell me "Silence is the only good reply to stupidity."

------
tyingq
I'm sure it has downsides, but the US military does a fairly decent job of
using their ASVAB[1] tests to see what jobs recruits are qualified for. As an
employer, I'd much rather look at something like that rather than the name of
a school and a GPA.

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armed_Services_Vocational_Ap...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armed_Services_Vocational_Aptitude_Battery)

~~~
burfog
Of course, but legal risks make things weird.

If a company gives a test, and there exists a protected group that does less
well on the test, then discriminatory intent can be presumed. It is certainly
legal to give such a test, but some valid connection to the job requirements
would need to be shown. Proving that in court is probably more trouble than
the test is worth.

Employers don't seem to get in trouble for requiring a degree though, or even
for preferring a degree from a fancy institution, despite the fact that
entering a degree program usually requires a test such as the SAT or ACT.

So that is the workaround for avoiding legal trouble: demand an unnecessary
degree in order to filter by test score without directly demanding a test
score. It's kind of like money laundering, but for test scores. Colleges make
out very well in this deal.

~~~
jessriedel
The constitutional "disparate impact" constraints regarding protected groups
you're referring to don't apply to businesses in Europe, who don't seem to use
cognitive ability tests that much more frequently

[http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2013/07/three_big_facts....](http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2013/07/three_big_facts.html)

------
Hasz
Interesting article (also something of a condensed version of his book, The
Case against Education), and a couple of counterpoints.

Caplan is making several seemingly-logical assumptions that most readers will
miss. I will say that at least some of these assumptions are false, negating
the conclusion.

Caplan assumes that people are largely immutable ("What I’m cynical about is
people."). His touts several studies about both the retention and application
of knowledge that support his point excellently. That being said, these
studies are, at best, empirical estimations of a philosophical issue. The
issue of "real world" ability suffers from being largely impossible to test,
has no real definition, and is fraught with assumptions, none of which make
for rigorous science.

Caplan, as I imagine, is taking college at its full cost when arguing that
less people ought to go. I would like to point out it is fully possible to
provide a college level education for significantly less than is done so now.
I believe point this out makes his pragmatic argument much less strong.

I take issue to this claim in particular "My exams are designed to measure
comprehension, not memorization. Yet in a good class, four test-takers out of
40 demonstrate true economic understanding." If just 10% of students
understand, I would argue the teacher is either grossly ineffective or the
student is grossly underprepared. Teasing out the fault is difficult, but
don't forget, this anecdote is wholly from the teacher. Also, what constitutes
"true economic understanding"?

I don't disagree with Caplan's conclusion personally, but I do disagree with
how he arrives there. Calling students philistines is both an unfair
generalization and a sidelining insult. His assumptions allow him to arrive at
an agreeable point, but that path taken is full of disagreeable compromises.

~~~
wallace_f
>I would like to point out it is fully possible to provide a college level
education for significantly less than is done so now

Yea, exactly. That, and I just wish I could study and compete for degrees in
an open, competitive and lucrative system.

------
ChrisRackauckas
Why teach everyone advanced math and physics? Because you have to start
training for it at a very young age in order to have mathematically and
mentally matured enough to be ready for a modern PhD in your early 20's. The
system is inefficient but has naturally evolved to give everyone a shot,
starting everyone on this path and letting people drop out at different steps
along the way. Our society needs scienstis, lawyers, doctors, and MBAs.
Everyone's parent want their child to be one of these. So everyone is sent
along this path.

It's better than the old style where you could only go to school if you were
rich enough. That kind of society couldn't compete with a society that found
the best among millions instead of thousands and thus naturally eroded away.

~~~
palimpsests
The fraction of people out of the total population that will actually want
(need?) a PhD in math, physics, or other related fields doesn't really support
your statement.

Also, I know plenty of parents who don't have specific career goals in mind
for their children, who support their children following their own calling
towards a particular profession.

------
osrec
Purely from an individual financial perspective this also makes sense. Take
the example of the UK: fees are a flat 9k per year. At the end of a 3 year
degree you're at least 30k in debt (usually closer to 50k with living costs).
What chance does a drama graduate from an unheard of university have of paying
that back comfortably?! Has their degree really added to their ability to
earn? Add to that a whopping 6% interest rate on student loans. It's enough to
make a young person depressed. A number of my friends now use less that 5% of
their degree knowledge and have learnt most of their craft on the job. Maybe
we could just skip uni and get straight to learning on the job? It just seems
so much more sensible for a lot of careers (CS included).

~~~
intopieces
Fron a individual financial perspetive, this does not make sense, and the
article says so:

FTA: "Would I advise an academically well-prepared 18-year-old to skip college
because she won’t learn much of value? Absolutely not. Studying irrelevancies
for the next four years will impress future employers and raise her income
potential. If she tried to leap straight into her first white-collar job,
insisting, “I have the right stuff to graduate, I just choose not to,”
employers wouldn’t believe her. To unilaterally curtail your education is to
relegate yourself to a lower-quality pool of workers. For the individual,
college pays."

~~~
osrec
The fact that this is true further emphasises the need to delete this paradigm
from society. Studying irrelevancies for 4 of your most capable and
potentially productive years is a real waste. (My point originally was a
little different - it was that a bunch of people go to uni because "it's the
done thing" while saddling themselves with a mountain of debt for a poorly
chosen degree, often due to pressure from uni marketing, then not getting a
job that can really support them or justify the amount spent on their
education)

~~~
intopieces
>Studying irrelevancies for 4 of your most capable and potentially productive
years is a real waste.

By what measure are 18-22 your most capable and potentially productive years?
The brain doesn't stop maturing until 25-30 [0]. College is a great time for
that to happen: a place and time to make mistakes without severe consequences;
to explore what interests you, fall in love, try drugs, travel abroad, meet
people from outside your comfort zone.

Calling these activities a waste because the person is not contributing to
some economic output indicator is brutally myopic. In the age of AI and rapid
automation of labor, we should be considering more than ever the importance of
putting human minds first.

This is why college should be free. Let people take the courses they want,
drop out, go to a trade school, do whatever. We can afford it.

[0][http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24173194](http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24173194)

~~~
osrec
Except that college/uni is frought with unnecessary stress and anxiety driven
by exams etc. And I'm not saying people should focus on making money from a
young age - quite the opposite actually. We should be free to explore whatever
we choose. I just feel the college/uni education system is a bit of a con and
learning within the confines of that system is expensive and not that
advantageous to most. I too believe uni should be free (it used to be here in
the UK) - and funnily enough, less people chose to go to uni back then despite
it being free! Now that it's super pricey, more people seem to go as more is
spent on marketing degrees to the public and it's "just the done thing" in
society.

Edit: just saw this on the BBC - very relevant to my point:
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-42923529](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-42923529)

------
Chiba-City
It is easier today than ever before to share a basic great books history and
philosophy "story" today. We can include our primate biology, geology, food
history and organizational and strategic narratives from Sun Tzu to Aristotle
to Schelling's game theory to Robert's Rules of order.

If we're going to live to 100, we should should share some tooling for how to
get there better together. Education is not the problem. Constant crop dusting
on filmic conflict fictions and staged sport conflicts is the problem. Living
together in an industrial world secreted behind walls or even continents away
on 1-way broadcast communications is foolhardy.

------
solidsnack9000
It’s beneficial for a broad segment of society to be in conversant in the
liberal arts — particularly history. Not everyone needs or wants a degree, but
it’s hard to have an informed or politically engaged populace without this
kind of education making its way into everyone’s hands.

------
throwawayjava
We need a college education to be _accessible_ to anyone who is qualified.
That's different from universal higher education. Those signals get crossed a
lot.

~~~
jseliger
_We need a college education to be accessible to anyone who is qualified_

You should read the article:

 _The labor market doesn’t pay you for the useless subjects you master; it
pays you for the preexisting traits you signal by mastering them. This is not
a fringe idea. Michael Spence, Kenneth Arrow, and Joseph Stiglitz—all Nobel
laureates in economics—made seminal contributions to the theory of educational
signaling. Every college student who does the least work required to get good
grades silently endorses the theory. But signaling plays almost no role in
public discourse or policy making. As a society, we continue to push ever
larger numbers of students into ever higher levels of education. The main
effect is not better jobs or greater skill levels, but a credentialist arms
race._

If college is mostly about signaling, then it's an arms race, and the faster
the herd, the more the individual most race in order to keep up.

Accessibility to _higher education_ is important, but much more of that
education should be vocational in nature. Right now we have a lot of access to
college, but that access has led to ballooning problems with student loans,
along with Girard-style mimetic crises (
[https://jakeseliger.com/2017/06/27/violence-and-the-
sacred-o...](https://jakeseliger.com/2017/06/27/violence-and-the-sacred-on-
campus/) ).

~~~
SapphireSun
If college is part of a signaling arms race, if we conceive of education
purely as a labor market good, why are we asking the laborers to stand down
from that race and not the employers?

~~~
analog31
Indeed, if everybody knows that a college education is empty signaling, then
how is it possibly still effective?

The best and biggest employers should have the best information on the value
of college education (in whole and in terms of its parts, such as humanities
courses). They could expand their potential labor pool and make better or
cheaper hires by adopting different hiring standards. If there's an
information arbitrage going on here, somebody should be able to make money
from it.

In my view the elephant in the room is that maybe a college education is
valuable after all, but we haven't put our finger on the precise reason.

~~~
cinquemb
> _The best and biggest employers should have the best information on the
> value of college education (in whole and in terms of its parts, such as
> humanities courses)._

Depends how one defines "best"; though this is debatable, because one could
say that these are the most beholden to the signaling arms race despite the
data they may have to the contrary (i.e alphabet, amazon, et al).

> _In my view the elephant in the room is that maybe a college education is
> valuable after all, but we haven 't put our finger on the precise reason._

I don't think this is the elephant in the room at all, people routinely say
that some parts of a college education can be valuable for various reasons,
while others (as judged by value by the marketability of the graduates) are
not valuable at all.

In my view, the "best" and biggest employers like it because it signals some
default level of competence (which is growing weaker as the incentives are to
push everyone through to get some kind of degree) as well as relative
malleability and conformance to institutionalized authority (those who opted
out, or didn't go might not conform to the corporate identity or end up making
it expensive for the employer to employ them, compared to their counter parts;
after all, hiring based on objective measurements/metrics without any human
involvement isn't something that happens today). Also these companies are
largely affected by the turnover rates compared to smaller ones, so it's
easier to target colleges graduates as a cohort.

> _If there 's an information arbitrage going on here, somebody should be able
> to make money from it._

I do think some employers take advantage of this environment, though I doubt
it's alphabets, amazons, and apples…

------
mnm1
The article defeats its own arguments with statements like, "In other words,
education enriches individuals much more than it enriches nations." Hard to
argue against education at that point but the article tries anyway. Let's
ignore the fact that that is the point of education. When was it the the
object of education to teach specific job skills? That's a new one to me.
After all, we must be talking about fortune tellers if you can tell which job
skills will be in most demand and pay best two decades from now.

It's sad that people don't want to learn, educate, or improve themselves. It's
a defeatist attitude and sad that we as a society are willing to explore so
little of people's potential. This attitude towards education in the US is, in
many ways, more corrosive to our society than the lack of quality education
itself.

------
cmurf
We're also incentivizing a disparity in credential signalling by making it so
straightforward for 16 year olds to drop out of highschool. I'm not aware of
any industrialized nation that makes this so easy.

------
justizin
This take is so incredibly tired.

What good would life be if we only had technical writers and PR people?

Further, why stop at college? Why not just predetermine who is likely to be
most successful based on their parents, and not school certain kids at all?
This is beyond a slippery slope, and it's _always_ expressed by someone with a
LOT of education, like a fucking professor of economics with a PhD from an Ivy
League school.

My eyes couldn't be rolling harder. I have a successful career in tech of 20+
years, without a degree, and a HUGE amount of what's wrong with the culture of
tech is that we are surrounded and led by folks who haven't studied sociology,
political science, even economics, having HUMONGOUS impact on what those
fields teach.

Far more rarely will you hear people for whom higher education was always out
of reach say that we think it had nothing to offer us. It's a great privilege,
but I _definitely_ think society could benefit from trying to get more
education in the hands of folks who would do something with it, instead of
greedy little fuckshits who think studying art and literature is a waste of
time.

I've been working in tech since I was 16 years old, and I can never get that
time back. There are subjects which I'll never be as able to learn -
particularly higher math - as I was at that age.

I was excited to dive into my career when I was young, but I do not feel it
yielded the best life I could have had.

~~~
dvt
> My eyes couldn't be rolling harder. I have a successful career in tech of
> 20+ years, without a degree, and a HUGE amount of what's wrong with the
> culture of tech is that we are surrounded and led by folks who haven't
> studied sociology, political science, even economics, having HUMONGOUS
> impact on what those fields teach.

Couldn't agree with this more. I'm relatively young, but I'm trying to get out
of tech (and especially engineering) because of the lack of a stimulating
cultural environment. The kind of conversations I like having, the kind of
women I'd like to meet, and the kind of company I like to keep just don't
exist in tech. Talking about video games was cool in my early 20s, but I've
had 30+ coworkers that literally _only_ talked about video games and the most
recent tech stack. Yuck.

Coming from having studied philosophy (at an elite school) and where most of
my old classmates are lawyers now, it's kind of a bummer. As an aside, startup
people/founders/investors tend to be much more eclectic, but tech, at the
ground level, is an intellectual wasteland.

~~~
uxp100
> Coming from having studied philosophy (at an elite school) and where most of
> my old classmates are lawyers now, it's kind of a bummer. As an aside,
> startup people/founders/investors tend to be much more eclectic, but tech,
> at the ground level, is an intellectual wasteland.

Now my eyes are rolling. It must be contagious. I'm sure the famously
fascinating and well loved folks known as Lawyers will be better to work with.

~~~
torstenvl
I know you were just trying to get in some cheap laughs by putting other
people down, but being a lawyer has made my life much more fascinating.

It's hard to imagine another profession that has as good a balance between
intellectual depth (law is very much a technical skill) and intellectual
breadth (a natural result of having to become conversant in whatever domain
forms the context of the current dispute). Because of my job, I've learned so
much about fields as diverse as Vitamin D testing and DNA identification to
Sikh religious apparel to Hellfire missile post-launch abort procedures.

So, I mean, you are of course entitled to laugh at the cliché of lawyers being
boring suits. But the simple reality is that it's a deeply enriching field.

~~~
uxp100
Read that quote. Philosophy at an elite school, all my former classmates are
lawyers, intellectual wasteland. The cheap laughs already happened.

------
znpy
Classic American: "I can't make money on it, it's useless".

Having an education (at least a high school diploma) is supposed to make you a
civil and functioning citizen of your country, with enough knowledge to
understand (albeit at a basic level) why things are the way they are.

~~~
dang
National swipes are not allowed on HN, regardless of which nation. Please
don't do it here.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

