Warning: This is a post that goes against popular opinion and may call into question some deeply held beliefs. If you continue reading, you may not like what you read.
The education industry has successfully installed the meme. Not going to college (buying their stuff) leads to poor living. One popular selling point is a piece of poor statistics showing the correlation between average income and education level. For some reason, education is taking longer and longer while getting more expensive at rates well above inflation. This has fueled counter-studies that question the monetary value of going to college compared to just getting a job and avoiding sometimes massive student debt. To alleviate this problem (and perhaps help the education industry), the government introduced 529 plans to allow institutions to charge more for their degrees. Overall, this is a great deal for educational institutions, but is it a good deal for you? And is it a good deal for society?
If only car companies had been half as successful at convincing people that it’s impossible to live without a car… wait!
This post was actually inspired by Prep BlabHe wrote a post titled A Clear and Present Danger: The HumanitiesOne of the points he made was that the government should encourage educational programs that lead to higher salaries (such as engineering) and discourage degrees that lead to lower salaries (such as English literature and ancient Egyptian algebra). Financial aid should also be cut for people who take more than 4 years to complete their degrees. The result would be government subsidies for students, which would keep the United States at the forefront of technological innovation, rather than at the forefront of deconstructionist studies in obscure sociology journals. I found myself agreeing until he said he was being sarcastic. I guess that means we disagree then, hence this post.
The idea suggested in the article above This has already been promoted by a number of European governments. With declining birth rates in a wealthy and “older” culture, the workforce (especially in science and engineering) is a real problem in Europe. With high birth rates in the United States, the workforce is not a serious problem. Europe needs to get the most out of its young people, so it wants to direct students toward building bridges and computers and away from writing another study about suicidal 18th-century poets. Getting them out the door quickly helps, too.
I will take this a step further.
I think the idea that a university education leads to a more productive society is a misconception.Hard work and intelligence lead to productivity. But what happens when we send 70% of students to college instead of 30% on the false assumption that education makes people more productive and talented is that standards simply drop. To keep getting the best students, education is extended to the smartest 30%. The other 40% get a degree that no longer means much. So we waste four years sending 100% to high school, 70% to college, and 30% to master’s instead of sending 70% to high school with higher standards, 30% to college with higher standards, and only a few to graduate school.
Your talents helped you get your degree, not the other way around.
The problem is Higher education does not make people smarter or more intelligent.Rather, it serves functions.
- Separating the children of wealthy parents from the children of poor parents through some financial allowances allocated to very intelligent children from poor families and many intellectual allowances allocated to less intelligent children from rich and influential families.
- The program requires money from students’ parents to fund the university’s athletic center, the domed buildings, and professors who conduct research in specialized and often unrelated fields. Without graduate students, who are often hired as teaching assistants rather than for their bright ideas, the program would be much more expensive unless professor salaries were cut or campuses were built like barracks rather than expensive imitations of medieval castles or modern architecture.
- Education regulates entry into the labor market. This is their most important function. The younger the demographic, the greater the need for higher education. There is a negative feedback mechanism here. Longer education helps to reduce growth because it allows people to spend many years attending lectures, playing college sports, and generally being unproductive.
Increased education does not lead to increased productivity. Rather, it is increased productivity that enables the state to bear the costs of leaving its young people in essentially unproductive activities for increasing periods of time.
Modern education seems like an intellectual farce. There are four reasons why this is so. They are: 1) … 2) … 3) … 4) … In the test: State the four reasons why modern education is an intellectual farce. Thus, anyone with a reasonably developed intelligence and short-term memory can obtain a degree.
Unless you need very specialized knowledge (researcher, neurosurgeon, accountant, …) A college degree is nothing more than a ticket to the white-collar job market..
I expect that a more careful study to correct for this effect should show that The reason wages are higher is because you have an office job, not a college degree.This would eliminate the two main financial reasons for going to university. It would turn the university into a place of higher learning and thinking. I think it is naive (I was very naive in the past) to expect such qualities among students in modern universities.
I have worked as a teaching assistant for several years. Maybe 1 in 10 of my students were actually interested in learning something.The rest just wanted their degrees so they could go out and get banking jobs under the illusion that people with degrees are smarter than average. Well, maybe they are, but if they are, why do they need a degree to prove it?
What smart students care about is maximizing their GPA economically. Even studies in economics use this idea as a reference point. I can’t think of a better example of the irony of modern education.
Most office jobs It does not require an understanding of history, biology, medicine, … it is All you need is a modest amount of intelligence and an effective short-term memory.It shouldn’t take four years to figure out who has it and who doesn’t.
I suggest going back to the prestigious teacher-apprentice system. That way people can feel like productive members of society much earlier and not have to go through the Lord of the Flies experience in high school. I think that might work. I am absolutely convinced that if you gave me a 13 year old with an IQ of 135+ and a sense of numbers, I could teach him how to do my job in 3-5 years.The counterargument 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 won’t be much harder for someone to change vocational training than it is to change professions today.
Some may claim that this is rigorous training (mind concentration) and not education (expand the mind (Pass a set of multiple choice tests) where I will only teach exactly what is useful. However, I think you can’t educate someone who isn’t fundamentally interested in a subject. (GPA boosters). I forgot a lot of the stuff I learned in high school and college because those subjects were useless to me other than contributing to (and lowering) my GPA. On the other hand, a smart, voracious person can learn things on their own at any time.
With the development of printing presses, books became so cheap that one no longer had to go to lectures to copy the professor’s notes (the high price of books was the original purpose of lectures and the difficulty of communicating new research was the original reason for seminars – talk about institutional inertia!). It is also possible to obtain lectures and syllabi from places like Teaching Company, Personal MBA, Self-taught researcherand many others. Oh, and the library!
Of course this does not solve the “entry ticket” problem.Only a few professions, such as programming and some finance subjects, focus on certificates rather than degrees. On the other hand, college degrees have become so diluted that employers have started testing potential employees because they can no longer trust the quality of the education – with many admitting that it had to happen, right? Perhaps such companies will outsource this testing. This will lead to a new breed of institutions that test whether students have actually learned anything at other institutions. At that point, one could skip the education and just go for the certificate.
What do you do until then? Either do what’s tried and true and spend a lot of money (and opportunity cost) to get a college degree or be an entrepreneur and try to get your foot in the door some other way. As long as you can get your foot in the door, being self-taught puts you practically on the same footing as a college graduate.
Disclaimer: I have a Masters in one field, and a PhD in another. I have spent most of my life in the education system. This may lead to the conclusion that I am either a hypocrite or that I am bitter and not very intelligent.
Copyright © 2007-2023 earlyretirementextreme.com
This material is intended for personal, non-commercial use only.
Use of this material on other websites constitutes copyright infringement. If you see this notice anywhere other than your news reader, this makes the page you are viewing infringing copyright. Some sites use random word substitution algorithms to hide the origin. You can find the original, unspoiled version of this post at earlyretirementextreme.com. (Digital footprint: 47d7050e5790442c7fa8cab55461e9ce)
Originally published on 2008-02-17 07:55:29.
Source link
