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Vive-ut-Vivas comments on Open Thread June 2010, Part 3 - Less Wrong
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I'm not sure if it meets the Ponzi scheme model, but the problem is this: lots of students are going deeper into debt to get an education that has less and less positive impact on their earning power. So the labor force will be saturated with people having useless skills (given lack of demand, government-driven or otherwise, for people with a standard academic education) and being deep in undischargeable debt.
The inertia of the conventional wisdom ("you've gotta go to college!") is further making the new generation slow to adapt to the reality, not to mention another example of Goodhart's Law.
On top of that, to the extent that people do pick up on this, the sciences will continue to be starved of the people who can bring about advances -- this past generation they were lured away to produce deceptive financial instruments that hid dangerous risk, and which (governments claim) put the global financial system at the brink of collapse.
My take? The system of go-to-college/get-a-job needs to collapse and be replaced, for the most part, by apprenticeships (or "internships" as we fine gentry call them) at a younger age, which will give people significantly more financial security and enhance the economy's productivity. But this will be bad news for academics.
And as for the future of science? The system is broken. Peer review has become pal review, and most working scientists lack serious understanding of rationality and the ability to appropriately analyze their data or know what heavy-duty algorithmic techniques to bring in.
So the slack will have to be picked up by people "outside the system". Yes, they'll be starved for funds and rely on rich people and donations to non-profits, but they'll mostly make up for it by their ability to get much more insight out of much less data: knowing what data-mining techniques to use, spotting parallels across different fields, avoiding the biases that infect academia, and generally automating the kind of inference currently believed to require a human expert to perform.
In short: this, too, shall pass -- the only question is how long we'll have to suffer until the transition is complete.
Sorry, [/rant].
I wish I could vote this comment up a hundred times. This insane push toward college without much thought about the quality of the education is extremely harmful. People are more focused on slips of paper that signal status versus the actual ability to do things. Not only that, but people are spending tens of thousands of dollars for degrees that are, let's be honest, mostly worthless. Liberal arts and humanities majors are told that their skill set lies in the ability to "think critically"; this is a necessary but not sufficient skill for success in the modern world. (Aside from the fact that their ability to actually "think critically" is dubious in the first place.) In reality, the entire point is networking, but there has to be a more efficient way of doing this that isn't crippling an entire generation with personal debt.
I would settle for just 10 times if it were in the form of a post. ;)
Evidently the ability to think critically is instilled after the propaganda is spread.
Wow, now that is what I would call fraud. It's something the students should be able to detect right off the bat, given the lack of liberal arts success stories they can point to. It's like they just think, "I like history, so I'll study that", with no consideration of how they'll earn a living in four years (or seven). That can't last.
And I wish I could vote that up a hundred times. I wouldn't mind as much if colleges were more open about "hey, the whole point of being here is networking", but I guess that's something no one can talk about in polite company.
Tell my parents this one.
On the other hand, is 'success' an existentialist concept (in that you have to define it yourself)? I would think it'd be near impossible to come to a consensus as to what is necessary and sufficient for success.
Sure, it's vague. The point is that, for any plausible, conventional definition of success you might be able to come up with, a typical liberal arts degree is definitely insufficient and probably unnecessary to meet that definition's criteria.