The World might be better off without everyone having a degree (The Atlantic)

[valet]

I have been in school for more than 40 years. First preschool, kindergarten, elementary school, junior high, and high school. Then a bachelor’s degree at UC Berkeley, followed by a doctoral program at Princeton. The next step was what you could call my first “real” job—as an economics professor at George Mason University.

Thanks to tenure, I have a dream job for life. Personally, I have no reason to lash out at our system of higher education. Yet a lifetime of experience, plus a quarter century of reading and reflection, has convinced me that it is a big waste of time and money. When politicians vow to send more Americans to college, I can’t help gasping, “Why? You want us to waste even more?”

How, you may ask, can anyone call higher education wasteful in an age when its financial payoff is greater than ever? The earnings premium for college graduates has rocketed to 73 percent—that is, those with a bachelor’s degree earn, on average, 73 percent more than those who have only a high-school diploma, up from about 50 percent in the late 1970s. The key issue, however, isn’t whether college pays, but why. The simple, popular answer is that schools teach students useful job skills. But this dodges puzzling questions.

First and foremost: From kindergarten on, students spend thousands of hours studying subjects irrelevant to the modern labor market. Why do English classes focus on literature and poetry instead of business and technical writing? Why do advanced-math classes bother with proofs almost no student can follow? When will the typical student use history? Trigonometry? Art? Music? Physics? Latin? The class clown who snarks “What does this have to do with real life?” is onto something.

The disconnect between college curricula and the job market has a banal explanation: Educators teach what they know—and most have as little firsthand knowledge of the modern workplace as I do. Yet this merely complicates the puzzle. If schools aim to boost students’ future income by teaching job skills, why do they entrust students’ education to people so detached from the real world? Because, despite the chasm between what students learn and what workers do, academic success is a strong signal of worker productivity.

Suppose your law firm wants a summer associate. A law student with a doctorate in philosophy from Stanford applies. What do you infer? The applicant is probably brilliant, diligent, and willing to tolerate serious boredom. If you’re looking for that kind of worker—and what employer isn’t?—you’ll make an offer, knowing full well that nothing the philosopher learned at Stanford will be relevant to this job.

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.

Lest I be misinterpreted, I emphatically affirm that education confers some marketable skills, namely literacy and numeracy. Nonetheless, I believe that signaling accounts for at least half of college’s financial reward, and probably more.

Most of the salary payoff for college comes from crossing the graduation finish line. Suppose you drop out after a year. You’ll receive a salary bump compared with someone who’s attended no college, but it won’t be anywhere near 25 percent of the salary premium you’d get for a four-year degree. Similarly, the premium for sophomore year is nowhere near 50 percent of the return on a bachelor’s degree, and the premium for junior year is nowhere near 75 percent of that return. Indeed, in the average study, senior year of college brings more than twice the pay increase of freshman, sophomore, and junior years combined. Unless colleges delay job training until the very end, signaling is practically the only explanation. This in turn implies a mountain of wasted resources—time and money that would be better spent preparing students for the jobs they’re likely to do.

The conventional view—that education pays because students learn—assumes that the typical student acquires, and retains, a lot of knowledge. She doesn’t. Teachers often lament summer learning loss: Students know less at the end of summer than they did at the beginning. But summer learning loss is only a special case of the problem of fade-out: Human beings have trouble retaining knowledge they rarely use. Of course, some college graduates use what they’ve learned and thus hold on to it—engineers and other quantitative types, for example, retain a lot of math. But when we measure what the average college graduate recalls years later, the results are discouraging, to say the least.

Excerpt read the rest The World Might Be Better Off Without College for Everyone

 

[hashmander]

time and money that would be better spent preparing students for the jobs they’re likely to do.

that's why i'm a big advocate of trade schools. not everyone is cut out for the bullshyt extra shyt you have to learn in college and college prep is basically the only thing our high schools are doing these days.

 

[Dameon Farrow]

that's why i'm a big advocate of trade schools. not everyone is cut out for the bullshyt extra shyt you have to learn in college and college prep is basically the only thing our high schools are doing these days.

Me too. Trade schools guarantee a focus on the job at hand and if employers see that certificate it's as good as having experience. A lot of times anyway.

Plus the companies pay for it a lot of the time.

 

[Dameon Farrow]

If we get free college that 70+% of bachelor degrees earning more is toast. I catch negs for saying that but it's true.

Aside from there not being enough jobs to go around as it is, we end up with a ton of new applicants. The employer has someone currently on the job making 25/hr. Living nice but paying down his loans too. Here the new guy comes. Dude is debt free. So he can take a pay cut and live the same life. He takes the job at 18/hr. Hell it's not like he has to pay loans back.

Loan forgiveness will never be in the picture. Everybody is holding out for that but the truth is the government will only push harder on those that owe to help pay for this 'free' program. It will be a compromise and you will not get an economy altering bill like that in place without heavy compromise.

People think I'm being cruel or I'm some 'secret Republican'. All that glitters ain't gold fellas.

Now what we could institute is price caps and audits to see what these schools should really cost. Because some fees I've seen literally sound like something that popped in a guy's head while he was shytting. Just out there shyt.

 

[Robbie3000]

But job skills are not the only benefits of acquiring a higher education. The goal should be to teach people how to think critically and to expose students to liberal arts courses that expand the student's horizons.

I was a business major and I have an MBA, but the courses I took in logic, critical thinking, psychology, history etc have been just as beneficial as the courses that provided marketable job skills.

College should not just be about creating worker drones for the workplace.

I bet the author wouldn't tell his kids not to go to college.

 

[Rarely-Wrong Liggins]

But job skills are not the only benefits of acquiring a higher education. The goal should be to teach people how to think critically and to expose students to liberal arts courses that expand the student's horizons.

And look how well that is working out in Congress and in corporate boardrooms across America.

 

[Robbie3000]

And look how well that is working out in Congress and in corporate boardrooms across America.

I'm not arguing that higher education makes people more moral.

 

[Pressure]

With the rise of automation...

Nevermind. I'll let y'all teach your kids that education is irrelevant.

 

[Pressure]

Every job I've had has trained workers regardless of their experience when they're hired. This is where academics who have spent little or no time in the workforce always miss the mark.

Since a large part of these vocational and trade programs are performing the actual skills, companies could easily solve this problem if there was financial incentive to do so. I imagine a lot of this deals with how transient the workforce can be in these jobs as well as how temperamental the demand for workers are as well.

Now we're back to explaining why it's beneficial to have a broad set of skills.

The average person will change careers 5-7 times during their working life according to career change statistics. With an ever increasing number of different career choices on offer, approximately 30% of the total workforce will now change jobs every 12 months."

 

[Rarely-Wrong Liggins]

I'm not arguing that higher education makes people more moral.

Are their horizons expanded? I guess you could argue so, for better or worse. But people go to college to earn more money and have more opportunity. No one cares about the liberal arts stuff which is why people shyt on those degrees/majors.

 

[Wild self]

Are their horizons expanded? I guess you could argue so, for better or worse. But people go to college to earn more money and have more opportunity. No one cares about the liberal arts stuff which is why people shyt on those degrees/majors.

Even the STEM majors are getting low balled. They have to be another Labor Right revolution in America before we can get a stable middle class again.

 

[kevm3]

It's just simple economics. They're going to keep flooding people to college because college is a business. The more students that go to college, the more money they make. On the other hand, the more people with degrees, the less companies will pay because of oversupply of labor. Degrees were the thing to get during our parents generation because very few have them. Now they are as common as can be and are essentially worthless and those jobs that your parents told you to avoid are the ones now paying well like the trades. Turning everything into essentially a trade school is going to eventually make the salaries in those industries to go down as there is an excess of labor, but then again, those trade schools 'MIGHT' be cheaper than 4 year universities, although the prices will go up as more people start attending.
The key? Avoid crowded/hyped industries unless you are extremely talented.

 

[mbewane]

But job skills are not the only benefits of acquiring a higher education. The goal should be to teach people how to think critically and to expose students to liberal arts courses that expand the student's horizons.

I was a business major and I have an MBA, but the courses I took in logic, critical thinking, psychology, history etc have been just as beneficial as the courses that provided marketable job skills.

College should not just be about creating worker drones for the workplace.

I bet the author wouldn't tell his kids not to go to college.

That's exactly what education was before capitalism turned it into a training camp for future employees.

 

[Jimi Swagger]

The conventional view—that education pays because students learn—assumes that the typical student acquires, and retains, a lot of knowledge. She doesn’t. Teachers often lament summer learning loss: Students know less at the end of summer than they did at the beginning. But summer learning loss is only a special case of the problem of fade-out: Human beings have trouble retaining knowledge they rarely use. Of course, some college graduates use what they’ve learned and thus hold on to it—engineers and other quantitative types, for example, retain a lot of math. But when we measure what the average college graduate recalls years later, the results are discouraging, to say the least.

Excerpt read the rest The World Might Be Better Off Without College for Everyone

This dovetails into article I am reading concerning how a focusing on examinations may not be the most effective form of education based on recent research:

Do you regard yourself as an intellectual? Are you a keen seeker of specific facts, anxious to plug those rare knowledge gaps that surface at work events and dinner parties?

If so, I respectfully suggest that you deserve a C for learning. A study out this week reveals that the personality trait of openness, which reflects the ability to live in the moment, is more crucial to learning than intellectual curiosity, which describes a penchant for academic knowledge, abstract ideas and intellectual pursuits.

The research, published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, implies that the current teach-and-test mode of schooling is not terribly good at turning out proficient learners. Rather than encouraging children to memorise facts and sit a string of exams, we would be better off encouraging them to be enthusiastic explorers of whatever environments they find themselves in, whether a classroom or a convenience store. That way, learning becomes a natural feature of everyday life rather than a purposeful activity geared to a particular outcome.

Many academics subscribe to the “investment theory” of adult intelligence, first proposed in the 1940s by psychologist Raymond Cattell. He theorised two components to intelligence: first, cognitive ability; second, the propensity to “invest” that ability, or exploit it. That second component is where personality comes in. You might be naturally smart, but if you are also lazy then success may elude you.

The more academically inclined have traditionally been thought to be good learners. Dr Sophie von Stumm, a developmental psychologist at the London School of Economics, set out to scrutinise the extent to which personality fits into this picture. She recruited about 650 people to variously undergo four tests of differing academic rigour: the easiest required volunteers to peruse a website on Croatian lakes, while the most demanding was a long multiple-choice test on a dense 2,000-word academic text. The volunteers were also given separate tests to gauge their openness to experience, one of the so-called big five personality traits, and to measure their intellectual curiosity.

The paper’s conclusion was unexpected and provocative: intellectual curiosity didn’t have a bearing on how well volunteers performed on the tests but openness to experience did. The correlation was largely independent of cognitive ability.

As Dr von Stumm explains: “Being open to information means you absorb all of it without any judgment that it will be helpful.” In other words, people who are “open” are always taking in information — and consequently always learning. She hopes that children’s education policy moves away from narrow testing regimes and towards the encouragement of open exploration.

To become better learners, then, we should become more receptive to the world, eagerly embracing everything on offer. Unfortunately, personality traits remain rather stable over time. One does not change from a wallflower to a cultural wanderer overnight.

But while traits don’t really budge, emotional states do. One notable attribute of people who score highly on measures of openness is their imagination and their capacity to engage emotionally with their environment.

This is, perhaps, the secret formula when it comes to learning: success is about making students feel for a subject. A fabulous teacher puts you, emotionally, in the moment. She can make you care, if only for 50 minutes, about verb endings in Latin; or about the awe-inspiring fact that photosynthesis uses light to produce glucose.

Whether or not you regard yourself as an intellectual, this research conveys a powerful message: when you are open to the world, you engage. And when you engage, you learn.​

 

[Mook]

I can't take this article serious. I stopped reading St first "real" job

This fakkit ass nikka teaching economics and didn't do shyt in the field but his PhD work