The secret of education

Warning: This article is anti-conformist and may therefore challenge some deeply held beliefs. If you continue, you may not like what you read.

The education industry has managed to install the meme Students who don’t go to college (by buying their products) are supposedly leading to a life of poverty. A common selling point is a shoddy statistic that demonstrates the correlation between average income and education level. For some reason, education is becoming more time consuming and more expensive at rates well above inflation. This has led to counter-studies questioning the monetary value of going to college versus simply getting a job and avoiding sometimes massive student debt. To alleviate this problem (and perhaps help the education sector), the government introduced 529 plans to allow institutions to charge even more for their degrees. Overall, it’s a good deal for educational institutions, but is it a good deal for you? Is it a good deal for society?

If car manufacturers had only half succeeded in convincing people that it is impossible to live without a car… well, wait!

This post was inspired by Brip Blap, who wrote a post called A Clear and Present Danger: The Humanities. One of his arguments was that the government should encourage educational programs that result in higher salaries (like engineering) and discourage degrees that tend to lead to lower salaries (like English literature and ancient Egyptian algebra). Additionally, financial aid should be reduced for people who take more than 4 years to complete their degree. The result would be that the government would subsidize students who would keep the United States at the forefront of technological innovation rather than at the forefront of publishing deconstructionist studies in incomprehensible sociology journals (?). I found myself agreeing until he said he was being sarcastic. . I guess that means we disagree. Hence this post.

The idea suggested in the above article The idea has been promoted by a number of European governments. With lower birth rates in a wealthy, “older” culture, labor (especially in science and technology) is a real problem in Europe. With higher birth rates in the US, labor is not as big a problem. Europe needs to make the most of its youth, and so wants to direct students toward building bridges and computers rather than writing yet another study on 18th-century suicide poets. It also helps to get them out the door quickly.

I will go even further.

I think the idea that college education leads to a more productive society is wrong.. Hard work and intelligence lead to productivity. What happens when we send 70% of people to college instead of 30%, under the false assumption that education makes people more productive and talented, is that the standards are simply lowered. In order to keep the cream of the crop, we extend education for the smartest part (the 30%). The other 40% get a degree that doesn’t mean much anymore. So we waste 4 years by sending 100% to high school, 70% to college, and 30% to a master’s degree instead of sending 70% to high school with higher standards, 30% to a 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 that Higher education does not make people smarter or smarter. Rather, it fulfills the functions of

• to separate the children of rich parents from those of poor parents by giving a certain monetary allowance to exceptionally bright children from poor families and a large intellectual allowance to less bright children from rich and influential families.
• The university receives money from parents to fund the sports center, the domed buildings, and the professors who do research on increasingly specialized and often irrelevant topics. If it weren’t for the graduate students who are admitted primarily to serve as teaching assistants rather than for their brilliant ideas, the spectacle would be even more expensive, unless professors were paid less or universities were built like barracks rather than expensive imitations of medieval castles or modern architecture.
• regulate entry into the labor market. This is their most important function. The more young people there are, the higher the educational requirement. There is a negative feedback mechanism here. Prolonged education contributes to reduced growth because it allows people to spend several years attending classes, playing college sports, and being generally unproductive.

Increased education does not lead to increased productivity. Rather, it is the increase in productivity that allows the country to afford to let its young people work in essentially unproductive activities for increasingly long periods.

Modern education is like an intellectual parody. There are four reasons for this. Here they are: 1) … 2) … 3) … 4) … In the test: List the four reasons why modern education is an intellectual parody. Thus, anyone with a reasonably well-developed intelligence and a short-term memory can get a degree.

Unless you need very specialized knowledge (researcher, neurosurgeon, accountant, etc.) A college degree is little more than a ticket to get a foot in the door of the white-collar job market.

I predict that a more precise study that corrects for this effect should show that the reason for higher salaries is having a desk job rather than a degree. This would eliminate the two main financial reasons for going to university. It would relegate university to the status of a place of higher learning and reflection. I think it is naive (I was very naive at the time) to expect such qualities from students at modern universities.

I was a technical assistant for a few years. Perhaps one in ten students was actually interested in learning something.. The others simply wanted to get a degree so they could work in banking, imagining that science graduates are smarter than average. Maybe, but if that’s the case, why do they need a degree to prove it?

What smart students care about is maximizing their economic GPA. Even economics studies use this idea as a textbook example. I can’t think of a better example that demonstrates the cynicism of modern education.

Most office jobs do not require knowledge of history, biology, medicine, etc. All that is needed is modest intelligence and an efficient short-term memory.It shouldn’t take four years to figure out who has it and who doesn’t.

I propose going back to a golden system of masters and apprentices. That way, people could feel like productive members of society sooner and wouldn’t have to go through the Lord of the Flies experience in high school. I think it would work. I am convinced that if you give me a 13 year old child with an IQ of 135+ and a sense of numbers, I can teach him how to do my job in 3-5 years.. The counter argument is that a 13-year-old doesn’t know whether he wants to be a carpenter, a dentist or a research scientist. Yet some 22-year-olds don’t know either. In any case, it would be no more difficult for someone to change apprenticeships than it is today to change careers.

It could be argued that this is strictly training (focusing the mind) and not education (broaden the mind (by taking a series of multiple choice tests) because I will only teach what is useful. However, I argue that you cannot educate a person who is fundamentally uninterested in a subject. (GPA maximizers). I have forgotten a lot of the stuff I learned in high school and college because those subjects did nothing for me except contribute to (and mostly lower) my GPA. On the other hand, a sufficiently intelligent and voracious person can learn things on their own at any time.

With the development of printing, books have become so cheap that it is no longer necessary to go to class 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 purpose of seminars—talk about institutional inertia!). Courses and programs can also be obtained from organizations such as educational companies, personal MBAs, self-taught researchers, and many others. Oh, and the library!

Of course, this does not solve the problem of the “entry ticket”. Only a few professions like programming and some financial subjects focus on certifications rather than degrees. On the other hand, college degrees are so diluted that employers have started testing potential employees because they can no longer trust the quality of education – with so many applicants being admitted, it had to happen, market forces, right?! It is possible that these companies will outsource these tests. This will create a new class of institutions that will test whether students have actually learned anything at other institutions. At this point, we could skip the education and just focus on certification.

What to do in the meantime? You can either do the tried and true and spend a ton of money (and opportunity costs) to get a degree, or you can 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 on pretty much equal footing with a college graduate.

Disclaimer: I have a master’s degree in one field, a PhD in another. I have spent most of my life in the education system. This could lead to the conclusion that I am either a hypocrite or bitter and not very intelligent.

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Originally published on 02/17/2008 at 07:55:29.