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Originally Posted by callipygian
NC political rant. Mods can delete if this is inappropriate but in reality it's not really political (I just said that so nobody can accuse me of misrepresenting this).
I'm mildly shocked and very disappointed at the latest polls showing a dramatic rise in the number of conservatives that think college is bad for America.
Fundamentally, the world is changing. Integral to the future is the ability to control machines and computers. We won't have cars anymore - we will have computers with wheels. We won't have houses anymore - we will have computers with doors and beds.
It's neither a Democratic nor Republican nor liberal nor conservative thing. It's simply the way things are going to work. We will no longer dig coal out of the ground - we will design and operate and repair robots to dig coal. And if we don't need coal we will design and operate and repair robots to dig out Lanthanides, because our robot overlords demand Lanthanides of our robot servants.
Even poker has not been untouched by this revolution. Think of all the self-taught pros who scoff at Young Internet Punks - those people are at a severe competitive disadvantage. And while you don't need a college degree to run Equilab, you're still dependent on the college-educated mathematicians and computer programmers that wrote it.
A lot of people in leadership positions today pride themselves on pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. Many of them remember the days when they worked their way up from mail clerk to CEO.
Those days are gone.
At my former company, an executive questioned why we didn't have interns like past him - ambitious and smart but uneducated. I pointed out to him that we didn't need to because now we had a pretty vast pool of people who were ambitious, smart, AND educated.
Why does all this matter?
Parents' attitudes about college NOW will make a huge difference LATER in their kids' lives. No matter what you think the cause is of college tuitions skyrocketing (and I'm with conservatives on this issue, federal subsidies are driving up prices faster than the free market would have), the reality is that tuitions will increase faster than inflation and the tuition to income ratio is already higher than what a part time job can bear. That is, in the past you could pay for 40 hours/week of school with a 20 hours/week job; now you can barely pay for 20 h/wk of school with a 40 h/wk job. Parents are going to have to save for and pay for their childrens' college tuitions.
Now, I can almost predict what the arguments are. "We're totally fine with college, but collegeS are bastions of liberalism." And that's true - college is disproportionately liberal, probably because young people are liberal. And while that's not ideal, what's the alternative, putting your kids at an economic disadvantage for the rest of their lives because you don't approve of friends they haven't even met yet?
If this trend persists, here's what's going to happen: we're going to end up with a permanent underclass. People who don't go to college feel increasingly bitter about it and condemn their kids to not even have the option.
Want a success story? Look at Pittsburgh of "I was elected president of Pittsburgh not Paris" fame. Decimated manufacturing economy? Check. Abandoned by multinational conglomerates? Check. Dying? Nope - thanks to colleges. Driven by the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and Carnegie Mellon, it's attracted Google into old manufacturing plants. And the recipe was pretty simple: fund and support good schools, convince smart graduates it's a good place to live, and watch an economy of the future grow.
I actually find this to be great and wished that it continued. Really, the only reasons to attend college are:
1) the facilities and environment would prove beneficial to your studies (you aren't learning chemical engineering, petroleum engineering, physics, etc, properly from your desk at home)
2) you truly want a liberal arts education
3) your name is Thaddeus James Watson IV and it doesn't matter how much time you waste because dad will hand you the hedge fund when you're 35 anyway.
There's a lot of unfortunate statistics the defenders of college don't like to talk about. For one, a BLS study from 2013 stated that just 23% of jobs require a bachelors degree. Well, according to Pew research in 2016, 40% of the 25-29 year old work force has a bachelors degree or higher. So by that metric, a bachelors degree is already a very expensive job hunting license.
Also, say what you want about IQ and cognitive ability, but it is, according to Jordan Peterson, the best measure for intelligence based performance. You take a kid with an IQ of 100 and stuff him through a college program, and maybe he finished. But since he's only intellectually average, he didn't study STEM, or Accounting, or Nursing, or the fields that lead to steady employment and good wages. He probably majored in something lower level, where pay is worse and jobs are tough to come by. How is that more advantageous than pointing him to a welding program at age 16 and having him fill one of the many positions that companies are desperate to hire for, but can't?
You mention opportunities and how these days, not having a degree shuts doors more than having one opens them. I fully, 100% agree with that; as I mentioned before, there's a funnel where your studies don't guarantee you a career, but you better believe your lack of studies will guarantee that some careers are off limits. However, that's just pure economics; these jobs won't go away just because the proportion of people with a certain arbitrary educational checkmark declines. Marty Nemko once made the A+ point on 20/20 where he mentioned that you could take the pool of college bound kids and lock them in a room for 4 years, and they'll come out and make more money. While some fields do rely on crystallized intelligence (medical fields, for example), most top modern jobs rely on fluid intelligence. You could probably take a class of 4th Grader standardized tests and predict who will be most likely to succeed at those jobs in 20 years, and you'll probably be shockingly accurate.
And you also mention the automated economy, self driving cars and the like. Once again, as a guy who is currently working in software, I see this every day. But frankly, software is hard. If you take a generic person and stuff them in a college computer science program, they will probably fail. Not to mention I have worked with many college dropouts, who have all been highly skilled software engineers. This alludes to things I said before, where fluid intelligence, work ethic and interests are a way better predictor of success in a field like software engineering than a degree.
W/R/T income disparity, well, that's growing, and given my best guess via workforce knowledge and labor Econ research, it's going to keep growing. Notice I'm not saying underclass, though. This is because in the age of technology, we see an absurdly small amount of people create an absurdly high amount of value. WhatsApp, for example, is a 50 man shop per Wikipedia and sold a few years back for $19.3 billion. That's like 60% more per head than James Harden's contract. So why is that? Well, the big reason is efficiency; with this technology, companies are able to push product to hundreds of millions of people with a very small workforce. And labor is expensive, so when you can produce a ton with not a lot of human labor, you have a recipe for huge value. So as companies move further to robots, they'll see cost reductions that can be passed down to consumers in order to gain a competitive advantage over their less modern rivals.
So what does that all potentially mean? Means things will begin to get dirt cheap. Which means that you won't need as much income to cut it. Now, we've seen repetitive jobs and low level white collar jobs disappear due to the robots, but there's plenty of industries out there whose performance is reliant on strong economies. What this means is that while the low level law job is now gone, what exists is the snowboard instructor job in Lake Tahoe that pays the bills. We've already experienced this trend, as the amount of effort required to survive has continued to progressively go down, and it's possible that people could one day make a living attempting to not laugh at the rich, fat engineers who are trying to learn how to surf.
But for less pie in the sky type optimistic theorizing about the future of the global economy, it is undoubtably not a good idea for all kids who go to college now to do so. One area I will agree with you is that it would be a terrible trend for families to keep their 4.0 GPA, 1500 SAT type kid from college due to a values misalignment, especially since the current hyper-leftist climate on many college campuses is unsustainable (as Mizzou is showing us). But America, and the world, has gone so far into the tank for college over the last 50 years, that we have long been due for a correction in that. So I think you have to mind the people whose first generation college grad kids are still living at home at 30 with student debt greater than their mortgage balance questioning whether or not college is all that great.