Comment by palata
10 months ago
> I'm there for the degree. If I wanted to learn and engage with material, I could save $60,000
I would argue that if it costs $60,000, both your education system and the recruitment in those companies that require this degree are broken. It's not the case in all countries though.
Not that it is your fault, just stating the obvious.
It is broken. For every coveted job there are thousands of applicants. Employers will accept any signal that reliably predicts a modicum of intelligence, conscientiousness, and agreeability. University degrees cover all three.
But that's just the job market. The other elephants in the room are inflation and the housing market. People who don't have top-notch jobs (that require degrees) can't afford to buy a house. They can hardly afford rent. Cities don't want to build more housing because that will undermine the equity growth of homeowners.
We are a society of ladder-pullers.
I don't disagree, but often we complain about people pulling up ladders and when faced with the same decision we follow suit. Ultimately we can't change this behavior if no one is willing to defect from "conventional wisdom"
We can't fix the problem by making better choices as individuals, and exhorting people to do so saps energy and distracts. The system interprets integrity as damage and routes around it.
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>The other elephants in the room are inflation and the housing market.
I'm not even sure if people are aware of inflation/housing as a completely solvable issue by the govt. I guess it's because people most people are clueless on how it is to be solved.
>We are a society of ladder-pullers.
It's by design, to serve the rulers. It's an assembly line of slaves who are given some freedoms and are put through various stages of school, university, work and retirement. When most people retire they are left with little to nothing.
My tuition was $35k a year 25 years ago. Just checked, and now it is $60k a year. Before room and board.
Broken? Saddling individuals with a quarter million in debt when they are just starting life is absolutely broken. That they must indenture to be a modern professional (and buy hope for at least a middle class landing) is broken.
The notion that everything must return a (generally, near-term) accounting profit is on its face stupid.
$35k/yr for tuition in 2000 was still an extremely expensive college. The school I went to in that decade was ~$10k/yr in tuition+fees and was the most expensive state school in my state at the time.
Even today, that university is considered expensive for the state at ~$8,200/semester.
$35k in 2000 is $65k now so that's actually decreased in real terms.
Sure, the system is broken but what's the alternative? Employers have a surplus of applicants for entry-level technical positions. They need to filter the applicant pool down to those with some level of competence and discipline. Possession of a college degree is a reasonably accurate proxy for those attributes: lots of false negatives but good enough from the employer's perspective.
Ideally maybe employers ought to rely on more targeted selection mechanisms. But this would be extremely expensive (and potentially legally risky due to equal opportunity laws) so most don't bother.
> Sure, the system is broken but what's the alternative?
As I said, the only country I know where it is like that is the US.
Are you saying the US is the only country that has an excess of applicants for entry-level positions? Or the only one for which credentialism is the solution to this problem? If the second, how does the place you're from solve it?
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>Sure, the system is broken but what's the alternative?
For a true solution, the entire taxation and monetary system will have to overhauled. It's of course not going to happen.
Transactions outside of the govt monetary system is effectively illegal or taxed so people are forced to participate by applying for jobs for their livelihood.
> I would argue that if it costs $60,000, both your education system and the recruitment in those companies that require this degree are broken.
Meh, academic degrees don't come for free, someone has to pay for universities, staff and other expenses. In the US it's everyone for themselves by student loans that can't be discharged in bankruptcies, in Europe it's the tax payers.
The problem is, the ones profiting from the gatekeeping (aka employers) aren't the ones paying for it in either system. If employers had to pay, say, 10.000$ for each job listing that requires an academic degree without an actual valid reason, guess how fast that incentive would lead to employers not requiring academic degrees for paper-pusher bullshit jobs.
In a sense, it still comes down to supply and demand — if applicants, upon graduating, all requested to be reimbursed for, say, 25% of their tuition up front and to the university they graduated from, we'd end up with reduced salaries compared to just distributing those 25% to the new employee over a number a years.
But how do you get all students to agree with this in principle when someone is in more rush to start earning an income than others?
However, employers would then look to only hire from universities that do good teaching, so maybe it's a win-win?
So like a payroll tax specific to jobs that require higher education?
No, only for jobs that claim to require higher education but do not. Basically, an "abuse tax" to reimburse the government (or the students) for having to spend money on something clearly not needed.
There is also nobody cares about low prices but you can brag about how exclusive you are with high prices. One univertity near me automatically gives everyone a 40% scholarship - which is to say they have inflated their sticker price.