Warning: this is a controversial post and therefore may question some deeply held beliefs. If you continue you may not like what you read.
The education industry has successfully internalized the meme that not going to college (buying their product) leads to a life of poverty. A common selling point is a piece of statistics showing the correlation between median income and level of education. For whatever reason education is taking longer and longer while becoming more expensive at rates above the level of inflation. This has spurred counterintuitive studies that question the financial value of going to college versus just getting a job and avoiding incurring sometimes massive student debt. To alleviate this problem (and perhaps help the education industry) the government introduced 529 programs to allow institutions to charge even more for their degrees. All in all this is a great benefit to educational institutions but is it good for you? Is it a good social work?
If the car companies were successful in convincing people that it is impossible to live without a car… hey wait!
This post was actually inspired by Brip blap, he wrote a post called a clear and present danger: humanity. One of his points was that the government should promote educational programs that lead to higher standards (such as engineering) and eliminate degrees that often lead to lower wages (such as English Litt. and ancient Egyptian algebra). And financial aid should be cut off for people who take more than 4 years to complete their degree. The result would be government funded students who would keep the US at the forefront of technological innovation as opposed to the advancement of publishing deconstructionist studies in obscure social science journals(?) I found myself agreeing until he said he was being sarcastic . I think this means we disagree at that point. Hence this post.
The idea raised in the above article in fact it has been encouraged by many European governments. With the low birth rates of rich and “old” people, labor (especially in science and engineering) is a real problem in Europe. With high birth rates in the US, labor is not a big problem. Europe has much to gain from its youth and thus wishes to direct students to building bridges and computers and away from writing another study on suicidal poets of the 18th century. Getting yourself out the door quickly also helps.
I will take this one step further.
I think the idea that a college education leads to a more productive society is wrong. Hard work and creativity lead to productivity. What happens if we send 70% to college instead of 30% with the false assumption that education makes people more productive and skilled that standards are thrown down. In order to continue to get the cream of the crop, education is extended to the smart part (30%). Another 40% get a degree that no longer means much. So we waste 4 years by sending 100% to high school, 70% to college and 30% to teachers instead of sending 70% to a top ranked high school, 30% to a top ranked college and only a few in higher studies.
Your skills help you get your degree and not the other way around.
The problem is higher education does not make people smarter or smarter. Instead do the tasks of
- separating the children of rich parents from the children of poor parents with some money for bright children from poor families and more money for wisdom for less bright children from rich and influential families.
- getting money from students’ parents to fund the university’s sports center, administrative buildings, and professors researching increasingly specialized and often irrelevant subjects. If it weren’t for the grad students who were more accepted to work as TAs instead of their bright ideas, the show would be more expensive unless the professors were to be paid less or the universities were built like barracks instead of expensive imitations of medieval castles. or modern buildings.
- which controls access to the labor market. This is their most important job. When young people are speaking demographically, a higher standard is required. There is a negative feedback loop here. Long-term education helps slow growth as it allows people to spend years attending lectures, playing varsity sports and being fruitless.
Increased education does not lead to increased productivity. Rather, it is productivity growth that results in the country being able to afford to park their children in counterproductive efforts to add more time.
Modern education reads like an intellectual act. There are four reasons why this is so. These are: 1) … 2) … 3) … 4) … In the test: Write four reasons why modern education is a disintegration of the mind. So any person with a well-developed intellect and short-term memory can get a degree.
Unless you need specialized knowledge (researcher, brain surgeon, accountant,…) a college degree is little more than an entry ticket to get your foot in the door of the white-collar workforce.
I predict that a more accurate study correcting this effect should show that The reason for higher salaries is having an office job rather than having a degree. This will eliminate two of the main financial reasons for going to college. It can reduce the college to a place of higher learning and thinking. I think it is naive (I used to be very naive) to expect these qualities among today’s university students.
I stayed for a few years. Maybe 1 in 10 of my students was actually interested in learning something. Others wanted their degrees to go out and get banking jobs under the illusion that people with hard science degrees are smarter than average. Well, maybe, but if so, why do they need a degree to prove it?
What smart students care about is increasing their GPA economically. Economics courses even use this idea as a textbook example. I can’t think of a better example that illustrates the criticism of modern education.
Lots of office work It does not need to understand history, biology, medicine, … see they just need a little ingenuity and an effective short-term memory. It shouldn’t take 4 years to figure out who has what and who doesn’t.
I propose to go back to the polished system of professionals and apprentices. That way people can feel like productive members of society early on and don’t have to go through the Lord of the Flies experience in high school. I think this will work. I’m sure if you gave me a 13 year old kid with an IQ of 135+ and number sense I could teach him to do my job in 3-5 years.. The counter argument is that a 13-year-old won’t know whether he wants to be a carpenter, a dentist, or a research scientist. However, some 22-year-olds don’t know either. In any case, it will not be more difficult for a person to change education than to change career today.
One might argue that this is strictly training (concentration) and not education (to expand the mind passed a bunch of multiple choice tests) as I will only be teaching what is useful. However, I submit that you cannot teach someone who is not interested in a topic (GPA maximizers). I have forgotten most of the things I learned in HS and college as these subjects were of no use to me other than contributing to (and mostly lowering) my GPA. On the other hand, a person who is smart enough and voracious can learn things on his own anytime.
With the advent of the printing press, books are so cheap that one no longer needs to go to lectures to copy notes from the professor (the high price of books was the first objective of lectures and the difficulty of communicating new research was the first reason for seminars – talk about institutional inertia!). It is also possible to get lectures and curriculum from places like a tutoring company, a personal MBA, a self-employed scholar, and many others. Oh, and the library!
Of course this does not solve the “entry ticket” problem. Only a few trades such as programming and certain financial subjects focus on certifications instead of degrees. On the other hand, college degrees are declining to such an extent that employers have begun screening potential hires because they can no longer trust the quality of education – as many admit it should have happened, market forces right? Most likely such companies will issue this assessment. This will lead to a new type of institutions that check whether students have learned anything from other institutions. At this point one can skip education and go for a certificate.
What should you do until then? You can do the tried and true and spend a ton of money (and opportunity cost) on getting a degree or you can be an entrepreneur and try to get your foot in the door another way. As long as you can get your foot in the door, being an autodidact puts you on equal footing with a college grad.
Disclaimer: I have an MS in one field, a PhD in another. I have spent most of my life in the education system. This can lead to the conclusion that I am either a hypocrite or bitter and not very smart.
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First posted 2008-02-17 07:55:29.
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