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@lain @karen Yeah. Much better having the taxpayers pay for a degree that won't get you a job. (yes yes, the monopsony makes it cheaper)
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@lain @karen True that. I am somewhat in favor of the view that I want to confiscate money to pay for schools because I want to be surrounded by people who went to school.
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@pettter @lain @karen Assuming attending school gets you education. That's the main gripe, whether it gets you a job is mostly a proxy. I admit the proxy is flawed too.
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@pettter @lain @karen But I don't want to make it seem like I agree with the job being irrelevant. If it's to be a sustainable practice, the societal, including productive, benefit needs to justify the resources that go into it.
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@pettter @lain @karen @herrabre Time to drop http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/show/rs-202-bryan-caplan-on-the-case-against-education.html in here.
According to Caplan, the value of higher education, and not only in the US, but also internationally, is 80% signalling, 20% productivity.
Part of how this can be observed is how much individual advantage and how much societal advantage can be shown to result from higher education[0]. That is, individuals compete better in the job market against other individuals when they have better degrees, but nations don't lift themselves as much when the whole population has better degrees. This is an indication that you mostly get selected for because you have shown you can go through school, but that school doesn't actually make you that much more productive.
Another observation is how much the diploma is worth compared to the effort spent. If the diploma assigns a huge monetary value to you, but years of studying without the diploma doesn't, the degree is probably mostly signal. This is of course making the assumption that companies know what the heck they are doing when recruiting, which isn't itself without controversy. But market evolution should give a pretty great advantage to companies that would see through this rather obvious mistake, if it were a mistake.
[0] or I should perhaps say "higher schooling" to resonate with what I said earlier
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@pettter @lain @karen Maybe. But how much? "[Oh, it's all unmeasurable anyway]" is a huge cop out. Why let people work at all? Clearly we are making some judgement on how much education the state can bear to provide.
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@pettter @herrabre @lain @karen If you listen to the episode, you'll find it's not unshakeable. :-)
But yes, it seems reasonable to believe that the market does a decent job evaluating whether a degree is a good heuristic for your job performance. It sucks as a predictor, but not having it sucks even more. Hiring is expensive.
I used to work for connectcubed.com a few years back, and they are trying to find better ways to predict job performance, largely because the higher education proxy, in particular in the US, excludes people from the job market and cements class structures *and* deprives companies of good candidates.
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@bob @pettter @herrabre @karen
> Given the costs, the amount of diversity in universities is very low.
In the US.
> There are very few working class academics now, although that was a thing decades ago.
In the US, for financial reasons.
In Scandinavia, mostly for subcultural reasons. The working class in the 50s valued education. This has changed, and higher education is partly seen as snobbery. But also there are structural reasons -- having educated parents makes it easier for you to navigate school.
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@lain @rysiek @pettter @karen Are you saying exposing people to Japanese studies will increase the number of RWAs? :-)
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@rysiek @pettter @lain @karen
> it increases the quality of living not only for the person educated, but people around them
Apparently the data says "not as much as people would like to believe".
> it makes it dramatically less likely the person will need other kinds of help (since they will more likely find a good job).
Dito. That person benefits, yes. But if you give everyone education the effect isn't all that great.
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@bob @pettter @herrabre @karen Yes, the UK also has high tuition fees, so they're pretty similar.
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@maloki @pettter @herrabre @lain @karen Oh, for sure. It's probably a good proxy measure, but if you start measuring it officially, you get crazy suboptimizations.
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@rysiek @pettter @lain @karen
There is a positive effect. But if it's much smaller than people think, then the ROI calculation is changed. "It's worth it" isn't trivial to say. What could you have done with that money instead? Maybe pushed it into primary schools, maybe that has a greater effect?
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@rysiek @pettter @lain @karen That's more of an argument for military spending draining funds from important stuff. The only reason the US can afford it is because they have the super power to let their grandchildren's grandchildren pay for the party.
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@ayy @pettter @maloki @herrabre @lain @karen You have studied your psychohistory well.
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@clacke @pettter @maloki @HerraBRE @lain @Karen First rule of measuring proxies is don't talk about measuring proxies.
Because people can't game (as easily) what they don't understand ;)
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@rysiek @pettter @lain @karen
Education has desirable side effects, productivity isn't the only value, money circles back, things are hard to measure. But every thing should be looked at. I don't like the "but this thing is much worse" argument.
It would be desirable for the US and the world to split the US into a handful of states and dismantle 90% of its military, but that doesn't affect the societal ROI on state-funded higher education in Scandinavia , the UK or the US.
We disagree, mostly because we put different weights on what we believe about the outcomes, but probably also partly because we put different weights on desirable outcomes. And what the state vs civil society can achieve.
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