This data is pretty useless without data from other time periods.
And it seems like bashing high education is the cool thing to do nowadays. We use stories of the "I'm $200,000 in debt from my Ivy league B.A. in English and no one wants to hire me!" nature to justify that higher education is becoming irrelevant.
But I think we're all missing several pieces of the puzzle. One piece is that forget that what we're trying to optimize is happiness, and if those 13.4% of waiters are happy, then who cares if they have a BA or MA? OK, maybe we've wasted government money on their education, but can we call it a waste just because they didn't use that BA in English to do Englishy stuff? No. They're probably a more refined person because of those four years.
I do agree that higher education is broken. But higher education is broken in every single freaking country. The French spend less time in college, but they have a higher unemployment rate than us. Kenya's universities are based on entrance exams that encourages memorization and discourages critical thinking and imagination. Asia's universities are based on elite entrance exams where students to spend up to a year studying for.
Yes, higher education is broken. But so is everything else in this world.
OK, maybe we've wasted government money on their education, but can we call it a waste just because they didn't use that BA in English to do Englishy stuff? No. They're probably a more refined person because of those four years.
Are you willing to go up to 40 middle class families and demand that each of them pay $1000 to have a more refined waiter who vaguely remembers some Proust after partying for 4 years?
If not, then we can call it a waste.
Wasting "government money" isn't a tiny drop in some gigantic abstract pool of thousand dollar bills. It's hard earned money taken by force from ordinary Americans. It's not government money, it's your money.
Higher education is not meant to be job training. No one gets an English BA because they think that's the path that will get them the best jobs; they get it because they think it will make them happy. And if the point of higher education isn't job training, it's silly to measure its efficacy based on how well it helps graduates into jobs which wouldn't have otherwise been accessible.
And the benefit to society of a person (who eventually waits tables) getting an education (which wasn't about how to wait tables) doesn't need to be manifested while that person brings you your check. That person has a whole life outside of work where they can benefit from a richer understanding of the world.
As an example, we're a (kinda) democratic society, and a lot of the sanity of our government and policy rests on the judgment of the citizenry. Dealing with political rhetoric, forming opinions about sometimes highly technical public policy issues, and understanding economic policy at a minimum require an ability to critically evaluate rhetoric, some level of scientific literacy, and some numeracy, which are all benefited by a well rounded undergrad program. In some places, the political process requires that people not only be able to follow and evaluate political platforms, but produce arguments on their own (I'm thinking of state primary caucuses in particular). Having an educated populace is important independent of the desire of individuals to be wealthy or professionally successful. Just because we need waiters and parking lot attendants and bar tenders doesn't mean education is wasted on the portion of the population which fills that need.
If your concern is with public funds subsidizing education, I would actually have greater objection to funding educations for people that go on to earn high salaries in jobs that require high levels of education -- those are students who could afford to take loans and pay them back.
That person has a whole life outside of work where they can benefit from a richer understanding of the world.
Why should the 3/4 Americans without a college degree be forced to subsidize the private enjoyment of an individual? Should the government also subsidize my private enjoyment of video games, pornography or martial arts?
As an example, we're a (kinda) democratic society, and a lot of the sanity of our government and policy rests on the judgment of the citizenry.
If that is the case, would you favor denying the vote to people unable to make correct judgements, deal with political rhetoric or form opinions about highly technical issues? It seems that filtering the noise is far cheaper than increasing the signal, in this case.
Regarding your first point: since you already stated you're sometimes in favor of publicly subsidizing things like vaccinations and criminal incarcerations, your opposition to publicly funded education must result from this distinction you draw between public good and "private enjoyment". But I think rather than just assuming a position on college degrees a priori there is a rich and valuable debate to be had about whether higher education should be considered a public good and not merely a private enjoyment.
And your second: this seems to be both a distraction (I don't see how arguing that an educated citizenry is a necessary ingredient of democracy implies that one should necessarily agree with denying participation to those deemed incapable) and somewhat misguided (seeing as we already do deny the right to vote to a certain class of people unable to make correct judgments--we call them felons).
Why should the 3/4 Americans without a college degree be forced to subsidize the private enjoyment of an individual? Should the government also subsidize my private enjoyment of video games, pornography or martial arts?
OK, I think maybe it's worthwhile to distinguish between the issues of (a) whether higher education has a value and function beyond job training and placement and (b) whether higher education is worthy of receiving public funds. My response above was in response to a position I perceived you to be making with respect to (a), and not so much because of my opinions with respect to (b). I think there's a coherent position that could say that higher education has value beyond job placement, but which still held that it didn't deserve public subsidies. That said, I think the $40k of public funding for a neglectful English student turned waiter is an unfair characterization. It's not like we're throwing 40k scholarships after any high school graduate that moves, and most educations are not subsidized to nearly that degree.
If that is the case, would you favor denying the vote to people unable to make correct judgements, deal with political rhetoric or form opinions about highly technical issues? It seems that filtering the noise is far cheaper than increasing the signal, in this case.
That seems messed up, mainly because (a) evaluating people's sophistication with respect to those abilities is tricky and doing it in a politically neutral way is even trickier and (b) I would expect that people who weren't disenfranchised by such a policy wouldn't represent the interests of the people who were disenfranchised.
However, I do think we need more high quality, wide availability of events and materials arranged by non-partisan organizations with the intent of providing the necessary background to follow the issues.
I agree with your sentiment, there is no way that the general population of taxpayers should be subsidizing education for people with the sole rational being "they're happier" or "they have a deeper understanding of the world". That's great for them, but don't spend my money on it.
However this data doesn't really mean much. The table shows how many poeple have thsoe jobs RIGHT NOW. Will they have those jobs forever? Likely not. If you have a phD and spend a year in a crap job looking for something better, I view that as better than just doing nothing.
In fact those numbers are just people with more than a bachelors degree. Some number of them are currently graduate students, I know plenty of graduate students who are bar tenders at the same time. This data doesn't differentiate.
It also doesn't tell you anything about how school was paid for. If you have a phD that someone paid for from a private school, and do nothing for with your life, that doesn't matter to me at all. Only when people start getting subsidized by the taxpayers does it matter.
And hey, if we're going to bitch about the cost of education to the taxpayer, I'd extend it even to phDs with jobs that are paid for by the government (professors doing research at both public and private universities funded by taxpayer grants). A lot of research is freaking useless, and it costs a whole heck of a lot more than the subsidy on loans for students.
...would you favor denying the vote to people unable to make correct judgements, deal with political rhetoric or form opinions about highly technical issues? It seems that filtering the noise is far cheaper than increasing the signal, in this case.
As to your position that "filtering the noise" is easier than "increasing the signal", I think that you have perhaps...shall we say, not carefully considered the logistics involved? But leave that aside.
The danger with disenfranchising anyone, for any reason, is that of false positives. To paraphrase Blackstone, I would far rather that a hundred idiots were voting than for one wise person to be unfairly disenfranchised.
Fundamentally, society works because most or all of its members believe that they are better off as members of the existing framework than they would be by moving away, rebelling, etc. The last time Americans were bound by laws and taxes concerning which they had no voice, they threw quite a party in this little town up in Massachusetts...I think they served tea?
Higher education is not meant to be job training. No one gets an English BA because they think that's the path that will get them the best jobs; they get it because they think it will make them happy.
It makes me unhappy to be paying into a fund to enable this sort of behavior.
If your concern is with public funds subsidizing education, I would actually have greater objection to funding educations for people that go on to earn high salaries in jobs that require high levels of education -- those are students who could afford to take loans and pay them back.
That's a fair point, and I can't decide if I agree or not. But... I'd much prefer to subsidize education for someone who is going to use the skills they've learned to be productive instead of subsidizing someone going to college to have fun and feel good about themselves.
At least at a government level. I'd love to see private funding -- let people decide (in the philanthropic sense) to give money for that sort of thing. I don't think the government should be paying for 4-years of college "vacation."
It makes me unhappy to be paying into a fund to enable this sort of behavior.
I'm confused by this. Why are you happier to fund someone's education if their goals are better job placement and personal salary than if their goals are to be better, happier people? In either case, you'd be subsidizing someone else's attempt at bettering their own life -- but why is improving their income tax bracket more valuable to you than improving their wellbeing by any other metric that person might choose?
In a hypothetical scenario where you were given the choice of funding Alice's education with the certain knowledge that her degree would get her a high paying job where she'd be miserable, funding Bob's education with the knowledge that his life and relationships would be enriched but he would never earn much, would you really be happier funding Alice's education?
but why is improving their income tax bracket more valuable to you than improving their wellbeing by any other metric that person might choose?
One claim which is often made by advocates of education is that it causes productivity to increase, and that the gains from increased productivity are only partially captured by the educated individual. The remainder of the gains are spread about the general population via trade (i.e., a consumer surplus).
If the educated individual is happier but not more productive, there are no gains from trade or consumer surplus to be enjoyed by everyone. Thus, the standard rationale for public education does not apply to such an individual.
I'm confused by this. Why are you happier to fund someone's education if their goals are better job placement and personal salary than if their goals are to be better, happier people?
Because I'm not paying taxes to make other people happy.
My assumption here (and yes, it's possibly a flawed assumption) is that the person working for better job placement will -- on average -- end up contributing more to society than the person going to school because they like to read about obscure long-dead authors.
I don't believe tax money put toward education should be there to make people happy as a primary goal. It should be put there to encourage people to be productive members of society. Hopefully people find happiness along the way, but that's not my concern here.
In either case, you'd be subsidizing someone else's attempt at bettering their own life -- but why is improving their income tax bracket more valuable to you than improving their wellbeing by any other metric that person might choose?
You're putting words in my mouth here, or perhaps just misunderstanding what I'm saying. Jumping up the income tax bracket ladder is a side-effect of producing better work that ends up being a larger contribution to society.
In a hypothetical scenario where you were given the choice of funding Alice's education with the certain knowledge that her degree would get her a high paying job where she'd be miserable, funding Bob's education with the knowledge that his life and relationships would be enriched but he would never earn much, would you really be happier funding Alice's education?
In that specific case, no. I would be equally unhappy funding either of them. But you can't design this kind of public policy for specific extreme cases; you design it for the common average case.
You are presenting a false dichotomy where on one hand you have happy people who are low wage-earners/low producers, and on the other hand you have unhappy (or less happy) people who are high wager-earners/high producers.
There are people who make a lot of money who are happy, and who are unhappy. There are also people who don't make much money who are happy, and who are unhappy. Education in fields that also end up being economically useful need not be any more or less happiness-inducing than productive dead-ends, on average.
> Are you willing to go up to 40 middle class families and demand that each of them pay $1000 to have a more refined waiter who vaguely remembers some Proust after partying for 4 years?
This is a foolish comment, even beyond your arbitrary splitting up the cost of a degree between 40 "middle class families", or the insinuation that one can actually earn a degree by simply "partying for 4 years."
The value of education goes beyond landing one a job. Simply having well-educated citizens is of value to society -- especially in a representative democracy, where our level of education has a direct impact on how wisely we choose our own leaders. In fact, that education for its own sake is of great value to society is the core assumption behind public education.
Besides which, how exactly would you propose to "fix" the "problem" of well-educated people choosing overqualified jobs? With a state-controlled labor market, dictating what kind of people are allowed to work what kind of jobs?
Any particular way of bringing aggregate costs down to the individual level is arbitrary. I chose a method which illustrates the cost in simple human terms. The fact is, a $10k/year subsidy for college (note: this is roughly the subsidy for Rutgers, which I chose since I attended) is expensive. To give that subsidy to one person, a median worker must work 2500 hours.
As for earning a degree by partying for 4 years, I stand by that claim. College isn't that hard and plenty of idiots pass while learning very little. Believe me, I passed quite a few.
The fix: end subsidies for college. I don't care if you waste your money on a worthless degree, I only care if you waste mine.
The numbers you are coming up with are utterly arbitrary. I could come up with similar numbers via anal extraction and have them be just as relevant to the question at hand. That is not at all.
As for partying for 4 years and passing - Yes, there are some who party for four years, learn nothing and pass college. There are even some who do it on scholarship or government grants. But those are the exception, not the rule.
In my experience the ones who partied like crazy and learned nothing were the ones there on their parent's dime. The ones who were there on government dime rarely left the library, worked their butts off and came away with an excellent education.
It's true, your mileage may vary, but if you ask me it is of great benefit to society that everyone gets the best level of education they can handle as determined by the quality of their mind and determination, not the quality of their parent's bank account.
After all when you're of the age to be applying to college you haven't had the chance to begin being a productive member of society or make any money of your own. The whole point of education is to make people productive members of society. So what determines whether you can pay your own way in college is whether or not your parents were productive members of society -- and no one should be limited by their parents. We'd lose a lot of very bright people that way.
That's what government subsidies are for. They are an investment by all of society in our future. And in the people of our future. Think of it like venture capital investment. Not every investment works out. But if even a few really do succeed, then the investment in all those who don't is worth it. Of course the place where the analogy fails is that unlike with venture capital where only a few will succeed, with college subsidies only a few will fail.
Are you saying that you consider the subsidy for your attendance at Rutgers was a waste of taxpayer's money as well? Also, I'm not sure whether you passed out idiot students who attended Rutgers by being smarter/working harder, or that you have given idiots who learned very little a passing grade in the classes you teach.
I don't necessarily disagree with you about ending subsidies, but it seems as if you are trying to have your cake and eat it. Maybe I've misunderstood your position. If they were abolished, would you expect college to get cheaper and academics to tolerate a pay cut, or students to make up the shortfall by borrowing higher sums?
Are you saying that you consider the subsidy for your attendance at Rutgers was a waste of taxpayer's money as well?
It probably was. It's not as clear cut as the case of the waiter, but I don't think my current work creates a benefit for the taxpayer as large as the subsidy I received. When I was still an academic, I created a larger external benefit [1], but it's far from clear that it was positive.
If subsidies were abolished, I expect college would become cheaper and more efficient, most academics would find new employment, and most marginal students would not attend college.
[1] Currently I work as a trader, and most of the benefits I provide are captured by myself and my company. None of my academic research projects have resulted in anything useful yet, though admittedly the jury is still out (people are still exploring some of the lines of inquiry I created).
What about your next job? As long as education is done at the start of one's life, we can't look at its manifested usefulness for "young" people. You can maybe make preliminary tallies at 45-50, at which point I would expect the course of their life is better defined and the contribution of various periods can start being evaluated.
Right, but a country can get well-educated citizens in high-school, and spend promoting lecture and arts. This last benefits all society, not just students and professors.
I think it's important for you to not go trolling.
A middle class family paying a thousand dollars for one complete stranger to go to school is ridiculous sum of money, which is exactly why nobody pays that much money. Please, in the future, use figures which are more closely based in reality.
However, the fact remains that middle class families do pay for part of the tuition of certain people (people who go to public school, and those who get federal loans). It is important to question why from time to time, so I will address your argument, and I will assume a number more realistic (I don't know what a more realistic number would be, and I'm not going to do your work for you).
I think it is very important for middle class families to partially pay for part of student's college tuitions. For one, there is the very likely possibility that one of these students will go on to be a future Proust, and I think it is very important to have the resources available for such a person, even though much of that money will be 'wasted' on people who will go on to be waiters.
Secondly, we live in a mostly democratic society, for better or for worse the opinions of the public can very much shape important political and economic decisions made by our leaders. It is therefore extremely important that the public be educated enough to understand arguments made by our leaders, and to be able to parse evidence presented by experts. Obviously I don't expect the public to understand all of the details of everything, but they need to be able to listen, and to know when they don't know anything at all and shut the fuck up.
We as a society can't move forward without understanding what happened in our past, what we've done right, and what we've done wrong. Right now, high school is very good about telling us certain things, while college is very good helping us understand things. For better or for worse, at some point we have learn how to analyze, and that is something that is not done very well in high school. So, you can either ask your middle class families to pay up to reform high schools, or you can ask middle class families to continue to pay for some individual's college tuitions.
> A middle class family paying a thousand dollars for one complete stranger to go to school is ridiculous sum of money, which is exactly why nobody pays that much money.
> However, the fact remains that middle class families do pay for part of the tuition of certain people (people who go to public school, and those who get federal loans). It is important to question why from time to time, so I will address your argument, and I will assume a number more realistic (I don't know what a more realistic number would be, and I'm not going to do your work for you).
So you clearly don't know what a realistic figure is, which means you obviously have no clue as to what an unrealistic figure is, yet you're highly critical of his ballpark analogy yet you can't even guesstimate to a figure within the city that the ballpark is in!
Perhaps you should ask where the original commenter is from. I grew up in the UK, the government paid for around 800GBP worth of education in night classes I took. I'm not even sure what the price tag on my 2-year certification course was but I'm sure it was a little more than a weekly Psychology and Sociology course.
As I've said before here, what pays my bills is using a hammer. At one point I was coding in HTML and PHP while I was 14 in high school, and I was pushed by every faculty member into going to university (I'm assuming to justify their own existence). I would have loved to go to university, I would have loved to have the opportunity to study psychology or ancient history, or some such... there's books for curiosity.
I use a hammer, and metal shears, and a drill. These are the basic of the basic, the most mundane objects in existence and I see dozens of intelligent, well educated people walk into a job and quit or get fired because they struggle to use them because of shitty education.
I have my woodwork and metalwork teachers to thank for a good education, one that anywhere in the world is guaranteed to pay my bills. Why is our education system set out to target self-actualization when it doesn't even teach us how to achieve our physiological needs.
First and foremost we should be teaching our children how to make money; how to work a job. Second, we should be teaching our children how to spend money; avoiding reliance on credit cards and debt traps. The aim is to improve peoples happiness, but without even teaching the basic steps on the hierarchy, it's a fruitless effort.
If more money out of my pocket would mean better education for the next generation, I'm happy to do it. I would actually love to see a generation of children told "you know it's okay to want to do carpentry, or to become a mechanic". If bashing the frivolity of higher education will get that, then I'll be happy to bash away to get a decent economy and a decent citizenry.
Sure, but you could say that about anything the government spends money on. I happen to believe that the value of the educational system far outweighs the small amount of money wasted on 5,000 waiters. And the bureaucracy of weeding out those 5,000 waiters would far outspend the cost of just paying for their PhDs. Do you suggest that we mandate what jobs anyone who gets a state education gets?
That's exactly the test I would use for anything the government spends money on. It's called a cost/benefit analysis. If our elected officials are not doing that, we should immediately vote them out of office.
Would I demand 100 hours of labor from 25 people to lock a rapist away from them for 2 years? Yes.
Would I demand 100 hours of labor from 25 people to lock a pot smoker away from them for 2 years? No.
2500 hours of labor to kill a few Iraqis? Not liking that so much.
2500 hours of labor to vaccinate 800 babies against MMR? I'm ok with that.
Now, it might not be cost effective to police the educational system for people wasting their education. But that's not the argument elbenshira was making, or what I was arguing against.
The problem with this sort of thing is that the perceived benefit is often quite subjective. It is hard to define and get people to agree on a quantitative measure to use for evaluation
>> It's hard earned money taken by force from ordinary Americans. It's not government money, it's your money.
The money in your hand only has the value it has because we collectively instill a value in it. This is true, isn't it? I mean it really is just numbers and ink on pieces of paper and electrons over a bunch of wires. But if it were just the ink and and numbers and electrons then I could write a few zeros on a piece of fancy paper and become rich overnight.
But then there is the printing presses, which are guarded and the vaults that are guarded and the software systems that are guarded and the counterfeiting laws none of which you created. So "your money" (see? I can do quotes too) is really society's money. Moreover we collectively agree that the government allocates a portion of all of our earnings and recognize that this happens nowadays in a mainly un-coerced fashion. Sorry it inconveniences you. Maybe we can argue about waste without bringing your pet ideology into it.
I'm not bringing ideology into it. I'm focusing on the human cost of spending money, that's all.
So lets put it another way, since you want to get into arguments over the value of green pieces of paper. $40k worth of subsidies for education are about 2500 hours of labor from a median laborer. Are you willing to force 25 median Americans to work 100 hours each, just so that their waiter can party for 4 years and maybe quote Beowulf?
The output of those 2500 hours of labor are what makes the green pieces of paper worth something.
But then there is the printing presses, which are guarded and the vaults that are guarded and the software systems that are guarded and the counterfeiting laws none of which you created.
I have, however, paid far more than my fair share for this service, which probably amounts to only a few dollars per person per year. It's also dishonest for you to bring public goods into this. We are discussing redistribution of wealth in the form of private goods, not public goods (such as anti-counterfeiting, police and fire protection).
Now, you might argue there are public benefits to education (e.g., a well educated labor force is more productive). But that is irrelevant for this discussion - we are discussing workers who are choosing not to make a productive use of our investment in them.
Ok, twice now, you've boiled the benefit of higher education which doesn't result in placement at jobs requiring higher education as partying for 4 years, and a weak lingering familiarity with literature. I don't think that's fair. No one here is arguing for higher education for apathetic, disengaged students, or for low standards in higher education.
Also, this is twice that you've pulled out this 40k figure. Is that from some other article? I didn't think most degrees are subsidized that heavily, or that most college students have access to funding at that level, although if you have sources you'd like to cite, I'd be interested to see them.
[W]e are discussing workers who are choosing not to make a productive use of our investment in them.
Three points:
(a) it's not always obvious whether a person's education is being put to productive use. Taking a job which directly requires that education is only one way a person might put their education to productive use.
(b) among people who aren't putting their education to productive use, are these really all about choice? All of the friends I have that graduated in the past couple years who haven't ended up in jobs which specifically required their education haven't chosen to not make productive use of their education. The job market for a lot of areas is tough right now, and a new graduate attempting to put his or her education to good use has to compete with more experienced applicants even for low level positions.
(c) even if they haven't found jobs where they can put their education to good use yet, doesn't mean they won't when the job market changes.
I think a lot of the people you'd like to paint as being deliberately bad investments are actually victims of poor economic circumstance.
I agree with every statement you have made highly, except for one small but significant nitpick.
Many of those people are not choosing not to make productive use of it, but failing to find a good way to do it. I have an acquantaince with an MA in English literature who was unable to find any job related to it, my own wife failed to find any reasonable job with a BA in History and is pursuing her MA so she can teach at the community college, hopefully.
You could say that they deliberately chose degrees that are hard to market and I would agree, but once they had those degrees neither of them chose not to use it deliberately. Also, I know that is anecodatal, but I strongly suspect a fair number of those PHDed waiters failed to find employment in their field rather than chose not to.
Are you willing to force 25 median Americans to work 100 hours each, just so that their waiter can party for 4 years and maybe quote Beowulf?
No, but I'm willing ask they put in that amount of work to subsidize college students based on the probability that they'll later make a net contribution to society, including the laborers - if that probability is high enough. You are counting the costs while avoiding any calculation of the benefits, as if you knew with certainty which students entering college would never progress beyond being waiters afterwards.
I might as well say we should stop funding all training of doctors, because every year some of them lose their license to practice medicine, or that we cease funding mathematical research because some of recipients perpetuate logical fallacies on the internet.
No, but I'm willing ask they put in that amount of work to subsidize college students...
So they are permitted to say no?
... based on the probability that they'll later make a net contribution to society, including the laborers - if that probability is high enough.
Try to pay attention. I was responding to a comment by elbenshira questioning whether it was a waste even if the education goes unused. I was asserting that it was a waste in that case.
Try to pay attention (...) I was asserting that it was a waste in that case.
You were asserting that the wasted subsidy could be equated with the efforts of 25 laborers working 100 hours each. By that logic, 25 other laborers working the same amount might end up subsidizing the education of a student who becomes a great industrialist. Should they break out the champagne?
Tax payments go into a pool, and a proportion of the amount spent on educational subsidies will be wasted. What matters is the overall rate of return.
I'm confused - if I vote against subsidizing other people's consumption, I'm not obligated to do so?
Or perhaps you are confused and believe that 2 people (aka, a majority) threatening 1 person with violence is not force.
By that logic, 25 other laborers working the same amount might end up subsidizing the education of a student who becomes a great industrialist.
And in that case, it might be worthwhile, depending on whether the public benefits of the great industrialist outweigh the public costs. Assuming education is what enabled this person to become a great industrialist, then it probably is worthwhile.
Again, let me repeat: elbenshira questioned whether it was a waste even in cases where there is no public benefit, only a private benefit. That's what I was responding to.
Well, you're not always guaranteed to get what you want; a loss for your preferred candidate or ballot issue doesn't equate to threats of violence, in my view.
The form of the money is completely irrelevant. What's relevant is that resources are being allocated to one sector of the economy that does less to raise the standard of living than other sectors would likely be able to do with those same resources. Therefore the government, in this instance, is preventing the standard of living from increasing as much as it would have otherwise, which happens to hurt real people.
Ensuring that the resources they take from the private sector are used better than they otherwise would have been should be one of the primary concerns any government has when it decides to meddle in an economy because the consequences can negatively impact a lot of people.
That's correct, but incredibly irrelevant. Yes, money is only "money" because we as a society decide it is. But we as a society (in theory) also decide what our government should spend money on. It is our money, no matter how you look at it. The government does take some of it from us as the price of having a civilized society, but we still get to (collectively) decide what that money is used for. And if we don't like paying for a 4-year college education for someone who is going to end up being a parking attendant, we have the right to try to find a way to fix that.
Maybe we'll fail, but we have the right to try to change things.
>Are you willing to go up to 40 middle class families and demand that each of them pay $1000 to have a more refined waiter who vaguely remembers some Proust after partying for 4 years?
Yes, I am. Education is a diversified investment. While you will get a few negative returns (e.g. your waiters with English BAs), you will also get a handful of exceptional returns (e.g. Sergey Brin). As long as the overall ROI is positive, public education is a good thing.
I think it might only be a waste if you can come up with a way to predict who is going to be the person with a BA in English that doesn't use it. If you can't predict it, then it means that those who do use it are more expensive than sticker price (their cost would be "total costs to get people BA's in English"/"total number of people that actually use it").
But that's after the point at which anything can be done educationally. My point wasn't helpful and friendly, illiterate people aren't any less helpful or friendly than literates.
And it seems like bashing high education is the cool thing to do nowadays.
It seems to be particularly common around here. Perhaps because most of the people around here have degrees in CS, which is something relatively easy to self-teach. If you hang around on a forum with a bunch of mathematicians or molecular biologists I doubt you'd be hearing the same "blah blah, university is useless" memes.
By mathematicians, do you mean the tiny fraction of people with math PhD's employed as math profs, quants or "the machine learning guy"?
Or do you include the much larger set of mathematicians who couldn't find a job as mathematicians, and now work as high school math teachers, community college adjuncts or business analysts?
I'm a member of the former set. Most of the people I went to school with are members of the latter. School was fun, but no one is under the illusion it was a good career move.
Are you saying mathematics teachers shouldn't require a degree in math in teach high school mathematics? That a student who have recently graduated is qualified enough to teach the year below him? That a business analyst would do a better job without a major in statistics? Community college adjuncts who teach math don't need anything beyond high school math classes? If not then I think you were beside the point.
University is definitely useful for at least some subset of the population.
You don't need a PhD or even an MS in math to teach high school/CC math. The business analyst, for the most part, doesn't need to know math beyond means and standard deviations. Note: I'm interpreting "mathematician" to mean "math Ph.D." or "person who does/did research in math", which is typically the way the term is used.
Most people with a math degree don't use even a small fraction of their training. I do, but I'm in the minority. (Also worth noting that most of what I use I didn't learn in school.)
We started with 11. One left in the first year. 3 more failed to graduate after 4-7 years. 5 people got postdocs. Of the 5 with postdocs, 2 left the country (one involuntarily), I left academia to work in the private sector, and one I haven't kept in touch with. So at most, 2 are on the tenure track in the US [1].
This was Rutgers - at Princeton, the ratio would be a bit better, at NJIT it would be worse. Don't even ask about podunk state.
It's a shitty career path. Unless you are fantastically good, don't waste your time.
[1] My adviser told me I could have been on the tenure track if I wanted to. Since I didn't put it to the test by applying for such jobs, I won't claim it as true.
No degree will guarantee you a job. Professional degrees (law, engn, accounting, medicine etc) will come close, if you want to work in a profession.
Every other course will just give you a better chance of getting a job, and help you perform better once you get there. A math grad can solve all kinds of problems that other people will just shrug their shoulders at. That's always useful.
Academia in general is a dangerous career path though. Too many people on the ground floor (i.e. every undergrad who can't think of a better thing than grad school), too much glamor keeping them there, very bureaucratic organizations, and a complete mismatch between work (research) and funding (students).
Physics is probably worse. In math, you are either in the game or eliminated. In physics, you can eliminated but still doing grunt work for low pay in someone's lab.
I'm surprised you use Mathematics as an example of a field that's hard to self teach. I actually think Mathematics is one of the easiest fields to self-teach in - you really only need books / video lectures, some paper and pencils, and your brain. It's even less demanding than programming in that sense!
There are also several famous self-taught Mathematicians.
Programming is easy to self-teach because you can immediately verify whether you've got it right -- compile and run, see if it works.
Mathematics is harder to verify, though easier than (say) physics because you can test yourself by proving theorems. However, your proofs might be wrong because you're under some misconception. And, as the other response said, it requires an incredible amount of discipline.
Ramanujan was probably the last great self-taught mathematician, and I'm sure most would say he could have been a helluva lot greater if only he'd been sent off to Oxford at sixteen instead of twenty-seven.
The fundamental things being taught to math majors are how to distinguish between valid and invalid reasoning, and how to produce arguments (proofs) that contain only valid reasoning.
For better or worse, the way these skills are taught is to pick a couple of subjects (like analysis, algebra, or number theory) and demand that students produce dozens of proofs, which are then mercilessly picked apart by professors and grad students. That negative reinforcement is combined with lectures that (should) consist entirely of good examples of mathematical reasoning, at that's an Education.
(The fact that students may also pick up a few facts about analysis or algebra is just a bonus, it's not the main point.)
You can certainly get the good examples from books and video lectures, but not the experience of having your arguments criticized by experts. This part is crucial -- it's just as easy to miss the flaws in your own proofs, especially your early attempts, as it is to miss the flaws in your own programs. (Worse, it's perfectly possible to reach a conclusion that's correct through an invalid argument. You're wrong, but you'll never be able to find evidence against your conclusion.) Feedback from experts is essential.
You also need lots and lots of self-discipline. Of course, that is true for serious study in any field, but unlike many fields no one would call a mathematician someone who wasn't serious about it.
"Which is ye surest character of a true Mathematical Genius, learned these of his own inclination & by his owne industry without a teacher."
— Isaac Newton
In many respects, math has a totally unfair advantage over every other subject you could possibly study in college because it can be learned almost without needing any other people. Well, living people that is, as you do need the books of long deceased thinkers. (I'd say this also applies to philosophy, and hardly anything else). You just need to be willing to spend enormous amounts of time alone in contemplation reading.
The sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.
— Blaise Pascal
There's also a very limited social component layer such as you would find in medicine, law, politics, economics, et al. To become a doctor, or any kind of "professional", sure, it requires a massive social apparatus on top of a high degree of actual learning. You have to have connections, know the right people, say the right and popular things to them, be supported and credentialed by the leadership and their agenda, and basically imposture one's self into mimicking whatever behaviors and traits are specific to and dominant in whatever professional field you're studying. Eventually your identity morphs into this set of learned behaviors, and it's almost entirely built upon your position in some type of social hierarchy.
Not so with math. You either know some theorem and the proof, or you don't. How much you know and how advanced you are is entirely dependent upon what you have worked through on your own. What new stuff you can create only comes from what old stuff you already know. None of this has anything to do with interacting with people. Sure, you can benefit by talking to other mathematicians, attending lectures, conferences, teaching others, etc, but at the end of the day, at some point, you still have to sit down and learn the material by yourself. And if you don't do that, it doesn't matter how much of a social butterfly you are—you can't be a mathematician.
No man is an island, but I imagine a Robinson Crusoe type figure would have no such problems becoming a mathematician on a desert island, given enough math books(and some kind of Internet connection).
Well, it was a lot easier to be self-taught in Newton's day... there wasn't that much to learn! You could read Euclid and you're be mostly done. Newton alone probably made learning mathematics at least three times harder during his career.
Anyway, if you're trying to make me regret choosing mathematics as one of my examples, y'all have won. I see no molecular biologists have popped up to advocate for self-taught molecular biology.
I've read that the last Universal mathematicians we've had were Chebyshev and Poincare, who could claim to know "all of math", and who were active in research in nearly every sub-field. It's been over 50 years since their time, and much like the fabled Renaissance Man, that frontier is now closed.
Perhaps because most of the people around here have degrees in CS, which is something relatively easy to self-teach.
Except that it isn't. The problem is that computer programming is easy to self-teach (indeed, that's pretty much the only way it can be taught) and many people confuse computer programming with computer science.
Also MBA degrees are bashed periodically; but I don't think engineering and medical school degrees are.
Edit: and for the Humanities and MBA, the reasons I usually see for bashing are more like "not worth spending the time to learn" than "easy to self-teach".
"One piece is that forget that what we're trying to optimize is happiness, and if those 13.4% of waiters are happy, then who cares if they have a BA or MA?"
Sorry to nitpick, but this is important. Never mind whether a degree really brings more happiness - who said we're trying to optimize happiness anyway? It's certainly not what most societies try and optimize, at least not on the societal level.
Just as a simple example, sending kids to join the army is not in the best interests of the kids' happiness, nor in the best interests of the parents' happiness; yet every society chooses to do so (never mind your personal stance on the military, societies are obviously optimizing for self-preservation over the happiness of individuals.)
Consider as a counterpoint Aristotle's Politics, Vii.2: "It is evident that the form of government is best in which every man, whoever he is, can act best and live happily."
I think it's a fallacy to automatically hone in on liberal arts degrees. When I worked for several manufacturing companies, I always came across people with engineering and other technical degrees that were working on the production floor as assembly workers. These were entry level jobs paying $6-10/hr.
They often had one or more or the following attributes:
- They were 45+ years old.
- They were more introverted, less likely to network.
- They had technical degrees from outside the US.
- Their careers had taken them into management or PM roles.
So these are just a few career considerations if you don't want to be pushing a mop when you're 55.
I'd be fine with people going to college to be happy if it wasn't based on tax dollars forcibly collected from me. It's time to end public funding for higher education and let people pay their own way.
I am sure someone will comment and say, "But you benefit from people going to college." And of course I do just as each of us benefit from all kinds of network effects. Volitional trade is the way to settle those scores, not stealing someone's money because you claim to have helped them.
Higher education isnt necessarily broken - it just serves a different purpose than you might think.
The signalling theory suggests that gaining a higher education isnt meant to equip you with a specific set of skills. Instead higher education simply works as a filter to distinguish between efficient and less efficient persons. An efficient person is able to get a college degree, which in terms signals to potential employers that this student is very productive.
This is especially true, if you consider how little application most of the things you learned actually have in the real world.
This is horribly confusing "current job" with "lifetime earnings".
I took 2 months off last year to go skiing in Colorado with some of my friends who were ski bums. One in particular was about 26, was a web developer with a CS degree, and had been a ski bum for 3 years.
During that time he had been a janitor/house cleaner. Was that using his degree? Obvously not. Did it pay the bills and allow him to ski every single day while working in the late afternoon/evening? It sure did.
This year he moved back and is going to graduate school and consulting on the side (why he cleaned toilets instead of consulting the whole time still escapes me). He is back on his "real" career after taking that time to do what he wanted to do with his life.
Ha true. There were some perks of it, since he worked for the mountain he got a free season pass which was about $500, and when your monthly expenses are barely $500 that is signficant.
I used to know a guy just like this. He had a PhD in physics, but was a bartender for a couple years while he did his own thing. Now he's part of some research group.
"I have long been a proponent of Charles Murray’s thesis that an increasing number of people attending college do not have the cognitive abilities or other attributes usually necessary for success at higher levels of learning"
I'm not sure how that follows from the data. I'd be more likely to conclude that the job market doesn't support the levels of college graduates being produced.
Or that people don't get graduate degrees with the intent of maximizing their earnings potential.
I've often heard it said that the fundamental problem with economics is that it assumes people are rational and have good information. I'd say it goes deeper than that: it assumes that money is the rational thing for a person to maximize. In reality, money is something that bears some maximization, but it's hardly the primary consideration.
Economics doesn't assume everyone wants to maximize money. It assumes everyone wants to maximize utility, and then uses money as a (poor) proxy for utility. It's a subtle, important difference.
People want to maximize utility, we'll use money as a proxy, people want to maximize money. I suppose there are economic schools of thought that use other proxies for utility, but you seem to be agreeing with me insofar as the primary stand-in for utility is money, and it is a poor one.
No, that was my exact point. In general, economics treats money and utility as distinct. I should've been clearer: money only proxies for utility in behavioral experiments.
Labor supply theory, for example, assumes people maximize utility by choosing a combination of work and leisure. It doesn't assume people work as much as possible (or, maximize their money).
This is one of the more heinous quotes in the entire article.
First, it seems to write off any sense of plasticity in cognition and learning.
Second, these people clearly were successful in that they earned a degree, so ojbyrne is right in that this statement and the data have no correlation; say what you will about the quality of an education in some institutions, but I can assure you that plenty of people in food service and janitorial occupations dropped out of college (if they were fortunate enough to have the opportunity available).
Finally, it underscores the article's implication that a lack of success invalidates the reason for having tried at all. As other commenters pointed out, a college degree can be a vehicle for personal fulfillment, salary maximization, etc. (There was a link on HN very recently about the 100-year-old man going for his PhD... is his effort not worthwhile?) Call me crazy, but I believe people who attain a degree are enriched in some way, and if they fall short of their original goal it's still better to have tried.
I work for an education-related startup, and I'm quick to acknowledge that problems abound in higher education... but this article really raised my hackles.
Look at the dropout rates. In undergrad, nationally, and historically, 50+% do not complete the 4 years to obtain a bachelors degree. Of those who go on to grad school, again, 50%+ withdraw without completing their Phd/Masters.
If we as a society are contributing money and other collective resources to make higher education possible, yet more than half of the young people dropout, then it's pretty clear that most of them do not have the "abilities" to succeed at higher ed. However, it is far more likely that higher-ed itself is structured completely wrong. If the system fails most people, then most people are not failures, but rather it is the system itself that is the failure.
Granted it is highly debatable what "abilities" refer to, and what "success" entails. Both are mostly arbitrary markers which will be wildly different for everybody.
I tend to view things from a different perspective—I'm a cheerleader for the notion of the classical Liberal Arts education, and learning for the sake of becoming a Better Fucking Human Being, not for the purposes of some phony job in a phony society performing whatever phony crap those in power have commanded.
By disengaging education from mere financial concerns, my biggest problem with all of this is not that we have thousands of massively underemployed people, but that we have the social expectation that the most educated deserve to be the big shots, manage everything, do little real work, and collect most of the profit just for showing up. Sorry, in this society, you only get those entitlements by luck of birth, inheritance or marriage. Just going to fucking college and earning a piece of paper does not automatically grant it to you.
Entitlement is really what this article is about, but the author can't just come out and say it, because that would piss off his audience even more than his Bell-Curve innuendo. (Don't even get me started on why some of the most entitled people are incapable of acknowledging it, and pretend otherwise). Many academics are outraged that their so-called highest achievements don't guarantee a high status role in society outside of academia. But the truth is that the value of education and learning is insignificant if you're measuring it by economic metrics. And society at large worships wealth and fame. Just because you have an encyclopedic knowledge of Proust doesn't mean you deserve jack shit from society. Even though there is no way in hell anyone could read Proust and not be enriched and transformed as a person in incalculable ways.
This whole article and debate is really an Apples-versus-Oranges false dichotomy, and I'm not sure why I got suckered into writing this long reply. :P
tldr;
Being really smart and highly educated should have little to no correlation to your social & financial status in society.
Seriously, is there a central index of janitors somewhere listing their highest level of educational achievement from which a precise number like 5057 can be read out? Did they interview twenty janitors, find one who claimed to have a PhD, and extrapolate? Did they derive the number completely ex anum? Because I'm finding it difficult to believe.
The short answer is, yes, they extrapolate from a sample. 72,000 households from 754 sample areas. Crude calculations here, but some quick linear analysis says they found 1 janitor with a PhD, JD, MBA, or another professional degree.
I haven't read the methodology for how the bureau of labor statistics gets its data, but I'd be very surprised if it were significantly flawed. The federal government is generally extremely competent at collecting social sciences data like this. I'd actually say that it's one of the few things the government does really well.
The big thing you need to watch out for is the media and other government agencies spinning it. For example I always see MSM articles saying that 41% of Americans have tried weed, despite the fact that it's closer to 85% of Americans under age 55.[1] (And above that we don't have as good data.)
This article, and many (not all) of the comments here, are really missing an important point: that if you don't view a bachelor's degree as vocational training, but rather as the education proper to any free person---i.e. the liberal arts ideal---then you would expect a lot of people with at least bachelor's degrees working in fields that don't, on surface, "require" them.
The idea of college (=university) students having a specialisation (a "major" area of study) is not by any means a new one, but the idea that this tightly corresponds to one's career and serves as a sort of vocational training program, that's pretty new. Schooling of that nature used to be found primarily in apprenticeships and vocational schools.
The problem many people have here is that college is heavily subsidized, and those subsidies pretty much require us to get something for our money. I would be very surprised if the government's policy was "we will lend up to $200K to people with no assets and no prospects, which they can use to purchase art." And yet when those people borrow similar sums of money to purchase, say, a BA and MA in art history, it's fine.
That's a bad policy. If the university system didn't exist, and you tried to pitch the current version to Congress, you'd be ridiculed.
Can you clarify the 'heavily subsidized' part? I don't know a whole lot about this area, but I was under the impression that relatively speaking, the US higher education system was significantly less subsidized than in many comparably developed countries. And anecdotally, I'm sure we all know students and families that struggle with tuition costs. Are the subsidies you're talking about Pell grants? or tax breaks for funding education? People in this conversation make is sound like getting a full ride from public funds is the norm, but that seems really off.
Public Universities (which usually have names like "University of Florida" or "Idaho State University" are heavily subsidized by direct money from (primarily) state governments. Many "private" universities also get significant direct money from government. In addition, there are federally (and state) funded scholarship programs that give money for school directly to students, and student loans have their interest paid while the student is in school by the federal government.
I don't know how it compares to other countries, but there is a lot of government subsidization.
There's a ton of jobs that society deems as bad that are in fact not bad at all. "Garbage men" in certain cities, for example, make quite a nice living.
I just think that sometimes we see "Janitor" and think that it's automatically bad. Too often, we don't even scratch the surface or know the whole story.
And (honestly not joking), Good Will Hunting is a great movie.
The dig at parking attendants is off the mark, I think Parking attendant is a great job (if you angle it right and get a quiet parking lot, say, long term by the airport).
You are free to read to your hearts content, and get paid to do so.
I was an overnight security guard for 3 years at a Christian college. Honestly, it was the easiest job I've ever had because there was never any crime, the students were serious about school and very studious, and it was a dry campus. It was easy for me to get overtime, which made the pay tolerable.
The first thing I did was make a reading list. I re-read most of the Western Canon and a lot of other non-fiction books I wanted to read. The school also had a computer lab with Macs and even a few Linux boxen, and during the winter when I was snowed in I spent many nights learning PHP, Python, and MySQL. It ended up being one of the most productive learning periods of my life.
> I just think that sometimes we see "Janitor" and think that it's automatically bad.
Some people, sometimes, probably. Me, most of the time, no. Currently I'd be rather happy if I were a janitor. Easy going job, lot's of time to think about neat stuff, no major stress and stable income. Or at least that's how I think it would be, reality might differ.
As someone who switched from the "low educated" level to the "higher" one (and I did that myself, not from Uni. or anything else, but just reading on the web and opening my mind), I do value a lot Higher Education.
It improves quality. Wouldn't it be better if a waiter in Tunisia speaks English well to improve the tourists experience.
The problem is that there is no university for waiters. It seems stupid, but just think twice of it. If you provide them higher language education (how they speak to customers, answer their questions) and formal practice (how they should put the food, ask for payments...). This won't take 3 year, may be only one, but would probably rise their salaries.
And so, the waiter, carpenter, bartender... salary increase. This follow up with a high purchase power, more sales, better companies, higher salaries for Engineers, doctors...
May be I'm wrong? I'm open for discussion about that.
Professional degrees are degrees that are designed to prepare you for a specific profession. Those professions typically involve government regulation, with said regulation commonly requiring the degree in question. It's often used to indicate M.D. and J.D. degrees, although it also includes a slew of others, e.g., nursing, accounting, education.
I'm aware of what they are (and in fact have one myself), but my point was that they're distinct from Ph.D.'s (so the title is misleading), and they can span across a broad spectrum of fields.
Sorry about the misunderstanding. At a guess, I'd say they mostly just mean J.D. and M.D. degrees. Those are the ones most commonly lumped in with Ph.D.s, probably due to the amount of time you need to spend getting them.
I think the number 107,000 is the number of janitors and cleaners with degrees, not total janitors and cleaners. Note the author says "Over 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degree" - 317,000 is in the same column as the 107,000.
A parking lot attendant or janitor does not require even a high school education. So does that mean we should stop investing in high school education too?
There are always exceptional people outside the normal parameters.
But the higher the level of education in any social group the better off the entire group will be in the long term, whatever the individual variations.
I think there is a net positive effect on society of more people having decent educations and committing to learn past the compulsory levels, even if these skills aren't put to good use in a direct way with a job.
What would be their solution, you can't retroactively decide that certain people shouldn't have attended college when down the track they either can't or decide not to take up a job in their field.
This argument is circular, at least with respect to the Ph.Ds. The primary field of employment for those with Ph.Ds is higher education. The deal is they are paid by universities to teach students and do research. When there is less funding for the university and less students to teach, there is also less funding for research. And less money to hire Professors.
The fact that so many with Ph.Ds are underemployed is symptomatic of a lack of funding for these institutions. Using that data to claim that it reveals that these institutions are over funded reveals a lack of understanding of the field in question.
Furthermore, the rest of the posted argument takes the data out of context. The context is one of the worst economic downturns of the last hundred years. With the highest unemployment and underemployment rates we've seen in a long time.
Of course there are tons of people with college degrees working shit jobs. We knew that already.
Finally, those who the author calls "higher education apologists" want higher education to be a general thing not simply because it leads to more productive citizens, but rather because of the value society as a whole receives when the standard of education is higher. Especially with respect to our citizen's duties toward our Democratic society.
"In a republican nation whose citizens are to be led by reason and persuasion and not by force, the art of reasoning becomes of first importance." --Thomas Jefferson
> my feeling that diminishing returns have set in to investments in higher education
That's seeing people only as a black box slave-like "workforce", giving them "education" as well as food to sustain your busyness
> Now it is true that college has a consumption as well as investment function. People often enjoy going to classes [...]
It has many other functions too, for the human beeings beiing "educated". If done well, it can even give them critical thought process, and knowledge about certain topics of their environement. In eastern europe countries, the aboundance of educated people in a beauraucratic regime which did not propose so much interesting life openings contributed to its fall.
> [...] increasingly costly and unproductive forms of special pleading by a sector that abhors transparency and performance measures.
Just like the banking sector, the pharmaceutical sector, etc... Performance is a word people often use meaning fittness to a metrics relevant to their particular interests.
> Higher education is on the brink of big change, like it or not.
Which only means the balance of powers is changing. Care to ellaborate about why and how ? Otherwise it is just saying : specialized labour is less needed by US industry, so less people have to be trained. Ok, agreed (or not), so let's give them education instead.
Higher education is useless without the job market to sustain it. Most people don't spend 50k+ on a college degree to be better "educated". They do so in anticipation of improving their lives, not making them worse. I have a BS in Mathematics and Chemistry and neither of those degrees has improved my life, only limited my jobs to those that require someone to have a degree and of those, the pay is less than most waiters/waitresses make. The more you push for everyone to attend higher education and the less jobs are created, then you have a debt ridden "educated" soceity that can't afford to pay for their student loans. Which then the government has to do something about, which means all the tax payers have to pay for. So now we're all smart and poor. Sounds like a bad plan to me.
The problem is that for a lot of the jobs listed as "underemployment" the nash equilibrium is that a significant percentage of these jobs will always have bachelors degrees. If you can get a receptionist with a bachelors degree, would you hire one that is right out of high-school?
Yes, becuase the person with the bachelors degree is obviously going to leave at the first oppurtunity and be unhappy about their salary and responsiblity the entire time. Filling a position costs money so best to do it less often.
what if their bachelors is in fine art? My assistant has one of those, and I'm a lot less worried about her leaving than my support guy who has no degree but quite a lot of *NIX experience.
My point is that a degree does not necessarily impart more upwards mobility than other kinds of less formal training.
The well-known but thoroughly ignored issue in this article: college has become all-but-a-necessity to get a decent job in the US because having only a high school diploma doesn't even guarantee to an employer that one has basic literacy or math skills.
It would be more useful to know how many people with a bachelor's degree are under-employed against their will. A computer science graduate working as a janitor because he can't find a job is a problem. If after his course work he decides he wants to be a janitor, that's a different story.
What their majors were, and what college they were from would also be informative as other replies noted.
Me too. I know a lot of people with degrees in Law, Linguistics, Literature (in their respective languages) and so on who moved to the US and now have regular jobs because their degrees lose any meaning when changing the country.
You go to college to have options later, not to pursue a career, you know little about at the age of 18, due to some misguided sense of loyalty to the taxpayer.
Doesn't that 5,057 include "other professional degrees"? Further, are these only from accredited schools? Both could greatly reduce the effect of this particular statistic. That said, it is always disheartening to be reminded of the poor folks who likely shelled out tons of money only to find there were no jobs on the other end.
This analysis would be much more useful if (a) lifetime earnings were factored in as a data point, and (b) schools were reported separately (a PhD from MIT is a lot different from one from University of Phoenix, but the referenced study seems to treat them as equal).
Another aspect we have to consider is title inflation. It's no problem nowadays to buy a BA, MA or even doctoral degrees - it dont know how and if those fake degrees have been counted in the statistics.
Are these all graduates of US colleges? I can't find confirmation either way, but it's worth keeping in mind that college degrees from many countries are not comparable to US.
I'd love to see this broken down by major, GPA, toughness-of-curriculum and prestige-of-university. Assuming the claim isn't extrapolated from a single janitor.
Makes sense. Electrician is a skilled job which requires a lot of training. It's not the kind of thing you just fall into as a temporary stopgap when you can't get real work with your B.A. in Medieval Basket-weaving.
We have a well-established apprenticeship system for electricians and other skilled trades here in the States. Not all formal learning happens in colleges.
In college I knew a ton of people who would take jobs as parking lot attendants because it gave them a simple, non-taxing job with plenty of spare time allowing them to study while working.
Even those these were all undergrads, I can easily imagine lots of grad students would do the same.
And it seems like bashing high education is the cool thing to do nowadays. We use stories of the "I'm $200,000 in debt from my Ivy league B.A. in English and no one wants to hire me!" nature to justify that higher education is becoming irrelevant.
But I think we're all missing several pieces of the puzzle. One piece is that forget that what we're trying to optimize is happiness, and if those 13.4% of waiters are happy, then who cares if they have a BA or MA? OK, maybe we've wasted government money on their education, but can we call it a waste just because they didn't use that BA in English to do Englishy stuff? No. They're probably a more refined person because of those four years.
I do agree that higher education is broken. But higher education is broken in every single freaking country. The French spend less time in college, but they have a higher unemployment rate than us. Kenya's universities are based on entrance exams that encourages memorization and discourages critical thinking and imagination. Asia's universities are based on elite entrance exams where students to spend up to a year studying for.
Yes, higher education is broken. But so is everything else in this world.