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Joined: Feb 2010
Posts: 2,641 Likes: 3
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OP
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Joined: Feb 2010
Posts: 2,641 Likes: 3 |
The World Might Be Better Off Without College for EveryoneStudents don't seem to be getting much out of higher education. by BRYAN CAPLAN The Atlantic December 7, 2017 [...]
Would I advise an academically well-prepared 18-year-old to skip college because she won’t learn much of value? Absolutely not. Studying irrelevancies for the next four years will impress future employers and raise her income potential. If she tried to leap straight into her first white-collar job, insisting, “I have the right stuff to graduate, I just choose not to,” employers wouldn’t believe her. To unilaterally curtail your education is to relegate yourself to a lower-quality pool of workers. For the individual, college pays.
This does not mean, however, that higher education paves the way to general prosperity or social justice. When we look at countries around the world, a year of education appears to raise an individual’s income by 8 to 11 percent. By contrast, increasing education across a country’s population by an average of one year per person raises the national income by only 1 to 3 percent. In other words, education enriches individuals much more than it enriches nations.
How is this possible? Credential inflation: As the average level of education rises, you need more education to convince employers you’re worthy of any specific job. One research team found that from the early 1970s through the mid‑1990s, the average education level within 500 occupational categories rose by 1.2 years. But most of the jobs didn’t change much over that span—there’s no reason, except credential inflation, why people should have needed more education to do them in 1995 than in 1975. What’s more, all American workers’ education rose by 1.5 years in that same span—which is to say that a great majority of the extra education workers received was deployed not to get better jobs, but to get jobs that had recently been held by people with less education.
[...] is a forthcoming book by Caplan. His web site for the book is here.
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Joined: Mar 2013
Posts: 1,453
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Joined: Mar 2013
Posts: 1,453 |
He thinks exactly as I do about this but he has the academic and experiential chops to back it up whereas I have merely watched this whole comedy of errors unfold from the peanut gallery. I also like his presentation of information and may buy the book - I expect it to confirm all my existing biases LOL but he may have some stuff in there that I haven't thought about (probably will). This is also interesting: War on the stupid (linked to in the OP's) highlighted paper While I don't think that having a high IQ makes a person superior to others anymore than I think being tall or having violet coloured irises does, having the ability to put two and two together faster than most will tend to have a beneficial impact on lifetime earnings for sure, IMO.
Last edited by madeinuk; 12/08/17 11:26 AM.
Become what you are
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Joined: Oct 2011
Posts: 2,856
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Joined: Oct 2011
Posts: 2,856 |
I'm not sure why anyone would be surprised that college credentialing has turned into a farcical arms race that confers little genuine benefit to society. That's the inevitable result of competition. As for the "War on Stupid," I'd say that that has been a reciprocal effort ( anti-intellectualism may never have been higher in the US than right now), but the economic impacts of not having higher IQ has nothing to do with IQ warfare and everything to do with class warfare.
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Joined: Nov 2012
Posts: 2,513 Likes: 1
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Joined: Nov 2012
Posts: 2,513 Likes: 1 |
I had the pleasure of hosting a dear friend this last weekend, who was grading undergraduate exams in a STEM field. One particularly egregious answer included a discussion of how climate change can "alter space and time". This is now what passes for adequate quality work at an elite university. *facepalm* (Now, perhaps this student took a cue from a senior statesman in Canada, who previously suggested we need to rethink concepts "as basic as space and time".)
My friend theorized that a shift to a pass/fail grading system in non-major classes was eroding the quality of students' work, and wished she had a list of the status of the student's enrollment (major v. elective), because grading abysmal work is time-consuming.
What is to give light must endure burning.
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Joined: Nov 2012
Posts: 2,513 Likes: 1
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Joined: Nov 2012
Posts: 2,513 Likes: 1 |
I'm not sure why anyone would be surprised that college credentialing has turned into a farcical arms race that confers little genuine benefit to society. That's the inevitable result of competition. It stands to reason that incremental credentialing, over time, has become an arm race of negative or no societal value. We're just now seeing the tipping point, where yesterday's "incremental" is now the norm.
What is to give light must endure burning.
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