Maybe the incentives for universities are all wrong. In the early 1900's only 4% of the US went to university. There ended up being a big push to get more people into college with the assumption that it would benefit society. Eventually we ended up with a notion that everyone should go to college and this has been buttressed with government support but what if this idea is wrong? What if the incentives created lots of university departments that were superfluous, producing nothing that was actually benefitting society. This may show up as lots of superfluous/unreproducible papers and journals many not even based on the scientific method. Maybe the incentives focused universities on creating more "education" so they could rake in the cash made readily available through government subsidies targeting those who could not complete STEM degrees. Have we reached a state of elite-overproduction?
This is basically my feeling as well. I would prefer that we (at least in the U.S.) focus on making high school much much better, to the point that fewer people have any need to go to college/university. And then, if we still need to, figure out what to do about University.
(Saying this as someone who never finished college/university, largely because I was trying to pay for it myself and couldn't make it work.)
I read an interview[1] with the general secretary of German trade and he lamented that in Germany for many, many years the consensus was that more and more people had to study. Thias was also because the OECD said so, not just German politicans. He says we don't need so many people who go to university, and I wholeheartedly agree. And this is coming from Germany where the education system is a lot more forgiving than in the US/UK etc. (in that you don't need to study STEM to earn good money, and studies are cheap) But I think in the coming years there will be a lot of rethinking about these things.
There's a difference between outlawing enforcement of segregation by law and enforcing laws requiring people to go to schools they may not want their kids to go to. I think calling the second "finishing" the first is misleading.
However, there is a huge problem in school funding. The fact that school funding is primarily local means that poor neighborhoods get bad schools. That is a huge problem. We definitely should make funding of schools more egalitarian. Eliminating local funding in favor of state funding would do a lot for the public school system I think. But I also think giving parents more choice in schooling would also be a big win.
> However, there is a huge problem in school funding.
School funding is actually not as inegalitarian as you might have been led to believe - federal & state funding usually makes up for the differences in property tax funding, we're often spending more $/kid at these bad schools.
> There's a difference between outlawing enforcement of segregation by law and enforcing laws requiring people to go to schools they may not want their kids to go to. I think calling the second "finishing" the first is misleading.
The distinction you're making is between de jure segregation and de facto segregation, both of which are constitutional violations.
> we're often spending more $/kid at these bad schools.
Source? I'm surprised to hear that.
> The distinction you're making is between de jure segregation and de facto segregation, both of which are constitutional violations.
I disagree. It is not a consitutional violation for black people to live near each other and go to schools with each other. People segregate themselves socially all the time, for better or worse, and it has nothing to do with the constitution. It would be incredibly dubious to suggest that forcing people to integrate socially would be an appropriate government action - especially if done over a long period of time.
In the top spending districts there are two extremely good districts and the rest (esp. Baltimore and hawaii) are generally well known as terrible.
LAUSD spent 18k/pupil, and Chicago spent 16k, both terrible districtd... Don't know what they are not on there
Perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that they cost so much. The common factor between these districts is rampant political corruption (Baltimore spent millions on a plasma-tv-for-hq scandal, la and NYC burn millions on lawsuits for not firing child rapists, etc)...
Eliminating rubber rooms is finally coming to NYC:
I think the solution to this is full federal funding of us public schools. Some people won't like that because they will argue we'd be pushing some federal vision of education. As a graduate of southern education, I argue we should talk about the widespread support for racist laws like Jim Crow instead of just saying slavery was bad and the civil war ended those problems.
The politics around education funding are mudled because governments love to put stipulations around receiving funding, so they can control the recipients. I would agree with those who don't want the federal government to take more control over how education happens. But I could be convinced of federal funding of schools. Of course, both of these things already happen to a (large) degree.
I am very skeptical of that view. Nicer public schools get money in the form of parental fundraising. At my kid's elementary school in a big town on the west coast - not even in California, we raised > 500k every 2 years; poor schools probably didn't have an event where the members of the programmer class dropped a few $k each. This is just the latest way to help your kids.
How do we accomplish that, short of randomizing which school students are assigned to and then dealing with the transportation headache to make it happen? Schools continue to be segregated because of underlying socioeconomic realities; changing that is how we desegregate the schools, I don't know how we could feasibly reverse that causality.
I think randomization plus weighting for geographic distance could work. The issue with busing was never the actual busing, and there are plenty of places (like my hometown) where parents send their kids further out to ensure that they attend a school that is majority their race rather than the local neighborhood school.
I lived in Cambridge, MA, and they have successfully desegregated their schools with a similar approach that kept transportation very low and remained a popular plan with most parents (75% approval income over $100k, ~95% approval income under $75k).
In another place I lived, the top public magnet school was ~95% black. White parents pretty much universally refused to send their kids there, but would send their kids to a different magnet that was further away.
The "underlying socioeconomic realities" are often overstated compared to the unfortunate, but big reason that we don't like to talk about, which is lots of parents (to some extent, understandably) are afraid to send their kids to a school where they would be in the racial minority.
Schools are now as segregated as they were in 1976, which represents a backtracking from the peak in 1988. That represents an erosion of will more than a vastly changed socioeconomic reality.
> there are plenty of places (like my hometown) where parents send their kids further out to ensure that they attend a school that is majority their race rather than the local neighborhood school.
Ah, that is interesting. In my district (and state, AFAIK), school assignment is completely out of the hands of the parents, with some narrow exceptions.
I fully admit to having a narrow view on this, my state is not especially diverse, with more than 75% white and 2% black. So most of our school segregation, if it's fair to call it that, is completely socioeconomic even if the students are largely the same race.
What do we do when choice conflicts? Say, if a black family wants to send their kid to local school in a predominately white neighborhood, and there is a limited capacity?
It seems like the solution most institutions land on for this kind of thing is just a first come first serve sign up list. Kids who attended the school the previous year, and kids who have siblings currently attending the school, get first priority for open slots. The rest of the slots are first come first serve. This is how my kid's school, a charter school, works.
Sign-up lists self select for parents who are most motivated to get the best school, which has the risk of maintaining roughly positive correlation with the parent's socioeconomic status.
I wouldn't pooh pooh that. It's a tough problem for politicians, teachers, education activists and researchers.
If you set high standards and allowed only those who pass them to advance to the next grade, graduate HS etc. then you'd end up with clear racial disparities.
I don't want to get into a discussion about what's the cause of these disparities and who's fault they are. But, based on available data on e.g. SAT scores, we'd have Asian Americans doing the best, followed by whites, and with blacks at the bottom.
It'd provoke a flurry of media debate and negative attention on everyone involved. These people cannot fix the problem itself, at least not fully and certainly not quickly. But they can change standards to make it look like everyone is doing well. After all if you lower standards enough everyone will meet them.
It's a real problem and these incentives aren't going to change. Any solution will have to acknowledge and address them, not pretend that they don't exist and that incompetent or weak-minded politicians are to blame.
Not passing a kid sets them back 10 years of life (yeah I made up that number but it’s what I’d expect to happen when you end up in a negative feedback loop like this). Education doesn’t have a binary outcome.
Not OP, but would like to say : I don't think science outside of stem is useless, but it is fundamentally different and fundentally less reliable/reproducible.
In terms of reliability and rigor, it seems to go about like : Math -> computer science -> physics/chemistry -> biology -> everything else.
As you continue, you must ignore more independent variables to conduct an experiment. By the time you get to social sciences where you're doing self reported survey studies on your sensation of gender acceptance, you cant really call it science anymore.
Not saying its useless, but ir absolutely should not be treated with the same level of reverence and trust as the harder sciences. People act like the government should be making policy decisions based on psychology thesis papers, or that id you disagree with some purple haired feminism professor, you are a science "denier."
Ultimately this is a function of poor education, and hivemind thinking caused by our inundation with news and various media.
But yeah, my point is STEM (in its colloquial usage) is really all that can be considered science and people tend to mistake any academic paper or public persona for science or a scientist respectively, and that just isn't so.
Article author here. I take your point, but you know there's more to social science than studies of feelings about gender acceptance, right? Here's a randomized controlled trial about how to distribute bednets for malaria: http://www.earthinstitute.columbia.edu/sitefiles/file/bednet.... Getting this right potentially saves thousands of lives. It's a rigorous experiment, so in terms of causality you could argue it's considerably tighter and less theory-dependent than e.g. earth sciences.
There are really two issues here which get conflated. First, social life is complex, people aren't like atoms, and all our explanations are gross simplifications. Second, yes, there's a lot of bullshit social science out there. But there's also some real social science, and it can address important issues.
Something important to understand is that the hard sciences are more rigorous, but that's because they're easier to model than what the social sciences have to deal with. The naming is confusing.
A distinction should be drawn between “this entire field is useless” and “the current discussions in this field are wankery”. IMO, STEMlordery stems from students surmising—correctly or not—that their humanities professor’s publications are wankery and then falsely assuming that the entire field is hokey junk.
Accrediting boards who demand proof that all departments produce relevant scholarly work are also to blame for the situation, as it leads to a proliferation of write-only journals that will publish any word salad that can be convincingly proven to be in dialogue with contemporary scholarship.
I have observed that purported STEMlordery is more of myth than reality, or a caricature created by the media. I have found that on many stem-centric communities that people employed in STEM have great respect for the humanities, such as history, philosophy, or writing. Look at how many non-STEM articles get voted to the top of hacker news, such as articles about literature or philosophy.
Personally I love literature and art, my bedroom is lined with poetry books in several languages, and for that very reason, I dislike much of the modern humanities, with their pious, dreary approach to these beautiful and important things.
> I dislike much of the modern humanities with their pious, dreary approach
As someone who recovered from a mild case of being a STEMlord in college, grandiose claims of unearned self-importance are what turned me off from literature classes. I was always down to take a class in history, philosophy, or music if my schedule had an opening for that semester, but I took the minimum I could get away with in languages & literature.
Part of the problem is that English departments insist they are important because they “teach you how to be fully human”, which induces eye rolls: it’s like how the Quality Inn having the word “quality” in its name is unintentionally ironic. I still don’t know if the Dead Poets Society was meant as a satire of self-important literature classes or as a genuine homage to them.
At least the way it was taught when I was in high school, poetry was either cheesy rhymes or was the literary equivalent of debugging someone else’s code golf. It wasn’t until I discovered the authors Mark Danielewski and Christian Bök that I understood the joy in playing with language for its own sake.
History based English departments might have been more up your alley.
Took a class on Shakespeare centered around recreating the plays as they were meant to be played, and the historical context they were played in. Fascinating stuff, and a lot less susceptible to pure rhetorical analysis nonsense.
Undergraduate underclassmen and high school students are where you find most real live STEM lords. STEM professionals may be ignorant of the humanities, but they are (for the vast majority) no longer condescendingly dismissive enough to be true STEM lords.
I think the problem is that non-STEM classes have been dumbed down to the point where they just aren't on the same level. You see lots of failed science majors in English class, but no failed English majors in differential equations class. But why not? Writing is hard, and if you had to be as good of a writer to be an English major as you do at math to be a math major, lots of people would fail out of that too. But they don't because those classes are easy. I've never actually heard anybody argue that the subject matter isn't worthy.
> You see lots of failed science majors in English class, but no failed English majors in differential equations class.
I always find this funny to read, because that's more or less what happened to me. I was originally very interested in philosophy and the classics, but I just couldn't keep up with the reading and paper assignments. I'm not a bad writer in general, but I'm terrible at writing academic papers. I picked CS/math because I was tired of staring at a blank word document and slowly panicking for a week. with CS/math, I could just sit down and start making progress immediately on a problem set or coding project.
I see the point of what you're saying though. there's a limit to how rigorous an english class can practically be. the difference between bad and mediocre writing is mostly mechanics. but what's the difference between good and great writing? I doubt the "experts" could even agree, let alone come up with a rubric for grading papers.
There's a lot of non-scientific papers produced from the sciences, they're just heavily laced with jargon, complexity, or intentionally limited scope to make publication viable and hide the shortcuts behind them.
When I was young I believed things outside of the sciences and math were useless. As I've grown older, I realize the tremendous value of the arts, humanities, and other studies. They're just not as obviously functional or as easily quantifiable and much of this work is difficult. These studies help us think as humans and not machines. Yes, they can be gamed by disingenuous and often do get low rewards in society, but they're not inherently useless disciplines. The other studies provide much value to what makes life worth living, IMO.
Literature, art, the human state. I love science, don't get me wrong, but I also enjoy the rest.
I'm suggesting that we may be overinvesting in some parts of academia outside the realm of science and that publishing in a journal may not be the best way to measure how to tune those investments. Sokal's work in 1996 was interesting and "Sokal Squared" seems relevant to the topic. A journal's ability to filter out parody seems like a good test for evaluating the overall quality of investments in a field.
But everyone knows you can only get rich by working in STEM. Have you ever heard of a musician worth millions? Or a writer? Or an actor? Or an athlete? Fashion designer?
You have to look at relative frequency, median wages. A competent coder can made a solid 6 figures.But it requires top .001% of music or athletic ability to make money as a pro. Just being very good at football may be enough to letter but not to join the NFL. Same for writing or acting. World famous actors or writers can make tens of millions of dollars at their craft, but some unknown guy who join #10 at Facebook , Airbnb, or coinbase can easily be worth as much or more.
Just to be clear, you're both kind of right, but I take objection to your overly aggressive stance on this where you rebut and accuse without providing any sort of evidence.
Have you ever heard of one any one of those who anybody gave a shit where they went or if they went to school? (Other than athletes, of course, but for them school is no more than an unpaid apprenticeship forced on them by monopolistic leagues.)
> Eventually we ended up with a notion that everyone should go to college and this has been buttressed with government support but what if this idea is wrong?
The mistake was assuming "going to college" was the goal and not "learning something useful." Too many kids spend years of their life and earnings studying completely useless degrees.
> Maybe the incentives focused universities on creating more "education" so they could rake in the cash made readily available through government subsidies targeting those who could not complete STEM degrees.
Speaking as someone who went pretty heavily into STEM (I have a PhD in math and work as a mathematical physicist) I absolutely hate this view. I have not seen any evidence that on average STEM is harder in a meaningful sense than non-STEM subjects. A huge amount of non-stem stuff is really difficult, if you tried to push me as an undergrad through a philosophy or history or literature degree or whatever I'd probably fail.
Viewing non-stem stubjects as a lesser course for "those who could not complete STEM degrees" is simultaneously idiotic and elitist, which is pretty impressive.
I also completely disagree with the naive assumption that non-vocational degrees are "useless degrees", there is a big difference between something being "useless" and you, personally, not understanding the use.
Congrats on getting a job as a mathematical physicist! Among my cohort (which includes a few maths/physics double degrees) that makes you something of a unicorn.
If you take a moment to revisit my post, you'll notice I never mentioned difficulty. I'm well aware that some non-STEM degrees are incredibly complex and I make no claim to any ability in those areas for myself.
I also never made any value judgement about courses being "greater" or "lesser". That's a subjective call and ymmv.
I absolutely don't discount all non-STEM degrees as being 'useless' and there's plenty of insight and wisdom to be had from people with a deep understanding of history, or comparative culture, or any number of fields.
And yet I still feel it's a grave disservice to tell the average high school student that they should go to university for the sake of it, even if that means specializing in glazing techniques in 14th century French pottery or whatever other navel-gazing pursuit, while your insane U.S. tuition fees are extracted from them.
Well I don't have a permanent job, I'm an adjunct, and not based in the US so maybe I experience a slightly different job market to your cohort.
I was mainly focusing on the line "targeting those who could not complete STEM degrees", which seems to heavily imply that the non-stem options are a lesser choice for those for whom stem is too difficult.
(72k/85k median/mean for STEM in Canada, 56k/69k for non-STEM)
3) Most STEM undergrad programs require students to take roughly half of their credits in non-STEM subjects, which they pass just fine, but non-STEM students are not required to learn about chemistry, electrical circuits, etc.
4) Math and compsci departments split (read: simplify) intro courses like "Statistics" into separate courses for STEM vs non-STEM students, for obvious reasons. I've never seen gender studies simplified for STEM students.
> if you tried to push me as an undergrad through a philosophy or history or literature degree or whatever I'd probably fail.
Ridiculous. I'm calling out your false modesty. If you obviously had enough intelligence and work ethic to get a PhD (any doctorate, but especially math), and then gainfully work as a physicist, you obviously could have passed any other 4-year undergrad program in any field. Undergrad is a low bar to clear.
---
One more note on this topic: when comparing fields/careers like this, I don't find it useful to look at how difficult things are for the top performers. Everything is super competitive at the very top level. Is it harder to be a Fields medalist or a Formula 1 driver? I don't know; there's literally only a handful of genius/superhuman people at that level. But looking at the median level, ask people if they would rather take a math test or a driving test and the results will be predictable.
At least in my university, the failure rate for STEM programs is much higher than non-STEM, despite having a higher entrance average requirement. So that is some evidence for those programs being more difficult.
There is a richness to life that has nothing whatsoever to do with money. To the technocratic mind that would confuse this fact, what is "useful" can only ever be presented in the terms of the economics profession.
Under such guidelines it is quite "useless" to, say, spend a decade studying Akkadian. But our understanding of the past would be so much poorer without people willing to engage with Assyriology. I'd like to see STEM-maximalists argue that one engineering field or another is somehow more difficult than ANE studies.
Similarly a lot of stuff that falls under the STEM umbrella is completely useless. I have spent months and years of my life working on difficult math problems a bunch of which will probably never have any real-world application.
Well yeah, it's nice to be independently wealthy and spend your life studying whatever takes your fancy, and if you can afford to do so then good on you.
A government can only acquire revenue by siphoning productivity ("nice things").
The organization and its agents bear no consequence for mistakes in the allocation. It has no means to compare value or incentive to do so. The system evolves according to the "iron law of bureaucracy" as a perfect rent-seeking apparatus.
It's nice to imagine everyone having enough, or maybe that everyone is "equal." But you can't save anyone from their choices.
That's not nice. It's prison.
If you know how to optimize human life for a given group of agreeable people, go for it. For the rest of us, no means no.
We have been long past point where just a degree is enough. What the degree is in is also important. And here even some hard-science paths like physics can be limiting.
I vehemently disagree. Education is a value in itself, whatever its impact on the economy or on technology is. People have an innate right to be as educated as they want (and can handle).
Of course, it doesn't follow that they have a right to be considered researchers or publish papers afterwards, and the plethora of bad research may be a real problem. However, it should be noted that academic pseudosciences are not a new phenomenon, and they have sometimes been much more destructive than some of today's examples. Race science, phrenology, medicine in the time of bloodletting and others have been respected academic pursuits created by elites, not the result of anything like over-education.
But does education need to look like universities and colleges? Education used to look (for most people) like apprenticeships, which is more like a tutoring approach without study of anything unnecessary to your trade.
Maybe a better system in modern times would be a combination of mentoring with official recommendations and travel (to broaden horizons).
How would you study history, philosophy, or ethics, then?
Those classes covered things which I have never encountered in my _trade_, but which formatively affected my views on how one should treat others (or treat oneself). I feel like the stereotypical "liberal arts" education, in which one studies things that are not just focused on your trade, has an intrinsic value which is hard to articulate.
“You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library”
Of course not everyone is autodidactic so the path is not for everyone, but it is indeed quite possible to acquire this kind of knowledge/humanity outside of the university structure.
If you are fortunate to go to a top tier university, many of the non-STEM classes will (hopefully) be taught by Professors who are active contributors to their fields, and use their lectures as a "rough draft" of a future book they will publish. Of what value being at the "cutting edge" of literary theory is up for debate, but there are some things that aren't easily available at your local public library.
Also sometimes it's just cool to have the guy who wrote the textbook be your professor.
Interestingly, my neighborhood public library in the Outer Richmond district of San Francisco offers free Great Books-style discussion groups. I never attended a session but always noticed the schedule on the bulletin board. Googling it just now, it's apparently led by members of the Great Books Council of San Francisco (https://www.greatbooksncal.org/).
When my children get old enough I hope to attend with them. I had the great fortune to experience a Great Books program for 2-3 years in high school (a pet project of a teacher who fought tooth and nail to fund that class) and consider it a formative experience.
Yeah to be clear I don’t mean to say a liberal arts education is literally only worth $1.50. I personally place immense value on learning.
Just to point out that much like working at a high level in tech, a degree is actually not a hard pre-requisite to having an understanding of the humanities, ethics, etc.
Also just like STEM, many will absolutely benefit from the structure of a university setting.
I just couldn’t resist the Good Will Hunting quote.
Everyone "can handle" arbitrarily much busywork. Whether the lights are on or anything is happening intellectually is another story. I would like to see every American teenager have that experience, but my experience was that in high school, the very top of the class caught glimmers of it occasionally.
I think when you send "everyone" to college, it's going to be no different for them than high school was for "everyone" (and for the smart kids in their less-special subjects): chug through the tedium with as little of your brain as possible, while away the hours and the months until you get to something you actually care about. That's a reasonable way to warehouse teenagers while their parents are at work, but 18-22 year olds could plausibly be doing something else.
We should be pouring the money we pour into universities into high schools. We should set the bar higher for what we expect of high school students. We should create vocational programs so that kids come out of high school with skills that help to improve society. If you want to improve society, give kids a sense that they can make a difference and be functional members of society.
We should also be pouring money into early childhood development. We should setup community centers for expecting/new mothers. Women can go to these community centers for support, education, and to be with other mothers.
> Have we reached a state of elite-overproduction?
I'm very curious about this line of thought, as it seems to have become very popular in the blogospher over the past year or two.
What are the consequences of "elite overproduction"? I'm curious what the implications of this line of thought are.
Generally, I think more education is better than less - I am wrong to think that?
My personal hypothesis is that this fear of elite overproduction is being generated by existing professionals who are afraid an increasing supply of educated workers reducing their negotiating position/compensation.
I think this elite notion is over-simplified and inaccurate. It suggests that some significant portion of students are at these kind of "walled garden", elite institutions where students become disconnected from the struggles of "real people".
80% of students go to a school where over half of applicants are accepted. Yes, these schools definitely are centers of, frankly, liberal idealism and free-spiritedness. But I think that would be the case in any system where young people are pretty unsupervised and have lots of time to read and study (or party). In my experience though, they aren't factories for elites in the common sense of that word. They're just a reflection of how you need much more training to be competitive in the job market today.
Not OP. My interpretation is that society doesn’t really need as many university degrees as we are producing. Not because of competition but because not all jobs require a college degree, and ideally we should be increasing the pay of those jobs.
It might be better to adopt a model similar to the German or Swiss, in which people follow different tracks depending on their skills and interests, and not everyone goes to college, instead a lot of people go to trades schools. Of course for that to work in the US a huge societal change would need to happen first or alongside.
> ideally we should be increasing the pay of those jobs.
The pay of which jobs? The ones that require a college degree or not.
> Not because of competition but because not all jobs require a college degree
And are the number and prospects of these jobs increasing or decreasing?
I also find this whole conflation of having a college degree and being an elite silly. The problem seems much less to be that we have too many educated people and seems much more that wealth is concentrated by the small subset of wealthy people who "got here first" and then get the compounding returns.
I agree that this is a problem, and to the extent that we make it too easy for 18 year olds to take out massive amounts of debt, that is bad.
But I feel like many of the people arguing about "elite overproduction" would be opposed to something like making all public schools free or just free community college.
part of "elite overproduction" (or even the crux, as I understand it), is giving more degrees than jobs actually exist for those degrees. from this perspective, it doesn't make any sense to spend more tax dollars on even more degrees that we (allegedly) don't need. a college degree will stop being a "ticket to the middle-class" (as my alma mater described it) somewhere before everyone has one.
that's the economic side of the argument anyway. I partially agree with what you said further up the chain, that education is a value unto itself. but it depends on what kind of education is actually being obtained. imo, a four year program that focuses on one main area and requires a smattering of intro-level courses in others isn't worth that much if you don't end up getting a job related to that area of focus. I guess if the major was interesting to you, that's something, but was it worth four to six years of your life?
> Have we reached a state of elite-overproduction?
I don't see that as a bad thing. Of course they won't be elites when overproduced but its output, when looking at the big picture, will be positive. If you're so with your view why stop at universities then? Why educate the masses at all? Why not have classes of educated and uneducated people?
I think the better question is why exactly are we pouring so many resources into higher education? Most of my classes were taught by lecturers making at best $80 an hour teaching a class of a hundred. The real work is done by the TAs who make at best $15 an hour. Where is the rest of the money going to?
Yes, there are tradeoffs anywhere - which means we should rationally assess what we're putting into education and whether at least some of those resources can be put to better use in other ways.
Too much optimization reminds me of what happens when removing all slack from supply chains: when it fails it takes down the whole system. I'd leave some inefficiencies here and there, we're human after all. Of course, I'm not talking about gross inefficiencies. But are there any? By what measure?
Tax dollars that go to universities for one reason or another are tax dollars that cannot be spent on healthcare - tax dollars that can't be collected from tax exempt institutions (like almost all universities) are tax dollars that can't be spent on maintaining infrastructure. The possibilities are endless. The questions isn't whether or not education is "good", because it obviously is, it's whether the level of resources devoted to it can be spent to better effect elsewhere, which is probably true.
Hm, is it? My guess is that government spending on college probably is probably a net positive investment in terms of revenue for the govt due to downstream growth, likely also lowers the cost to do other things in industry.
There is extensive evidence that further public spending on healthcare does not have a size-able impact on outcomes, unfortunately. [0]
> the level of resources devoted to it can be spent to better effect elsewhere
But why the focus on education? Why not increase, say, inheritance taxation and then use it to fund those additional things? Couldn't we make better use of the resources our society devotes towards making sure that the kids of rich parents are also rich?
This position strikes me as unjustifiably elitist, reminiscent perhaps of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind.
> lots of university departments that were superfluous, producing nothing that was actually benefitting society
Who's to decide precisely what does and doesn't benefit society? More so, how can you decide in advance which line of inquiry will prove fruitful and which won't? Shouldn't you cast a broad net, especially when it comes to academia?
> government subsidies targeting those who could not complete STEM degrees
This, I'm sure, varies greatly between countries. But why do you think there's such a clear hierarchy of academic topics? It's quite dismissive of entire fields to assume that the people who are involved with them are simply STEM drop-outs.
As a side note I would also have to say that lumping together science, engineering and mathematics doesn't make much sense to me - this observation is not targeted at the parent, it's just a general peeve I have.
> Have we reached a state of elite-overproduction?
What would the alternative be? Back to the aristocracy, or to something like the Gilded Age or Belle Epoque?
A podcast I listen to[0] had a throwaway line that’s stuck with me. I’m not sure if it’s actually correct, this isn’t an area I’m an expert in, but it’s interesting nonetheless.
> Colleges are really just real estate speculation businesses that also incidentally give you a degree in dentistry or whatever.
If that’s true, wouldn’t it explain why colleges do things that don’t make sense for education?
I think the type of person who tends to browse HN has a problem with latching on to phrases or ideas that "sound interesting" and then never doing any further research. I think it's where a lot of the rhetoric around 'elite overproduction' comes from.
> Colleges are really just real estate speculation businesses that also incidentally give you a degree in dentistry or whatever.
Why would that incentivize colleges to enroll more students? How does college as real estate speculation business work?
universe is infinite, brains are finite. ergo, brains find compression irresistible, to the point of self-dosing reward juice when a delightful morsel of smartly collapsed reality is encountered.
even our signal processing wiring, with each lopsided neuron merging many inputs into a single output, is biased toward obligate compression.
maybe, but I try to avoid (or at least subordinate) phasing that implies a dualist distinction between the real and the mental. even the 'merest' of mental models is also part of reality, right?
such contextualization does indeed impair portability...
>> even the 'merest' of mental models is also part of reality, right?
That's quite materialistic take - I think the jury is still out on whether mind is inseparable from material reality (even if we treat it only as an emergent phenomena)
(speaking for myself here) s/materialist/monist, in which everything is considered, not material as such, but rather as emergent phenomena of differentials in causality feedback cycles.
The idea that real estate speculation being the baseline goal of universities is funny but doubtful.
Instead, consider that survival is almost always one of the main goals of any larger organization. That happens for a variety of personal, individual reasons: job security, reputation halos, personal networks, etc. But in the end, it translates into organizations taking actions simply to survive. And since one of the best ways to survive is to grow, taking actions to grow.
This is true for everything from charities that take care of the poor and sick to for-profit corporations to government agencies. And, of course, universities.
So why does a university spend a ton of money on renovating their football stadium? Simple, it makes alums happier (more donations), it looks better on televised games (enhanced reputation), etc. It helps the university survive.
It's a perfect example of incentives being wrong. If you're a huge corporation with land, property, and a tradition of relying on bequests and bloated fees, the reward function will optimise for more land, more property, more bequests, and more fees.
The nominal purpose - education - becomes more of a marketing exercise than the primary concern.
> Eventually we ended up with a notion that everyone should go to college and this has been buttressed with government support but what if this idea is wrong?
> What if the incentives created lots of university departments that were superfluous, producing nothing that was actually benefitting society.
I would say that those are two completely independent issues, that just look alike because of policy.
Now, about the actual subject, I'm not sure. The knowledge one gets at higher education brings a lot of possibilities too. It's not all signaling. An educated society is supposed to create wealth by itself, and this seems to happen on practice. I would look elsewhere for the origins of our current economic stagnation.
> Eventually we ended up with a notion that everyone should go to college and this has been buttressed with government support but what if this idea is wrong?
I think the problem with this line of thinking is that since the US is a highly-developed country, we depend on having a well-educated, highly productive workforce in order to maintain our economy. The US is no longer a place where you have large numbers of people working in huge low-tech factories, for example, because the productivity of those factories does not afford the living standards of a highly-developed country. Instead, developed countries perform R & D and need highly-skilled workforces. To the extent we have manufacturing, it tends to be highly-automated advanced processes. Again, automation is enabling high worker productivity here.
It seems like the issue may be misallocation of the education being produced, not too much education in general.
Access to universities was even less based on merit than it is today I think. Also I think that we’re actually hindering progress by trying to limit research to topics that have direct use following out of it.
My understanding of the history (in the United States) is this. College used to be almost exclusively for the rich. Now, while there were always students who went to college as a stepping stone to the further study of medicine, law, or theology, there were plenty of rich kids — "legacies," they were called — who went only because they were from the "right kind" of families, and went only to network with others from the same social circles.
This is where the idea of a "Gentleman's C" comes from. You see, their lives were already pretty well set out. You made connections, graduated, and then went to work for your father or uncle, or your father or uncle's firm; or, married the daughter of a well-to-do family and went to work for your father-in-law.
But there has long been an egalitarian and meritocratic strain in the United States, and after WWII, as a way of saying thank you to those who had saved the world from Hitler, the GI Bill was started. This was a great success.
The GI Bill made it possible for older, generally more mature, and generally more motivated individuals to attend college. Interestingly, the "gentlemen" students, the anecdote goes, used to complain about these people as "DAB's": Damn Average Busters. Those on the GI Bill weren't satisfied with grades of C (whether real or given with a wink).
Now, here I break from the history to my own opinion. The former GI's were a special cohort. To identify them as merely middle and working class people benefiting from college, and from there to imagine that all (or nearly all) middle and working class young people could benefit from college just does not follow.
But, whether or not one follows from the other, it's a wonderful thing for a politician to promise, and just the kind of thing people want to believe. Promising to send the children of your constituents to trade school just doesn't have the same ring to it. So, it became college for everybody.
From here, I can pick up with what you're saying, and add that what you're saying jibes with what Allan Bloom said, way back in 1987, with his Closing of the American Mind. Bloom argued that middle class people are far more practical, economically — not having well-to-do fathers, uncles, and father-in-laws to fall back on; and because of that, colleges had to retool to become far more practical. In other words, many of the new degrees — at least at first — were closer to the aims of trade schools than traditional liberal arts curriculums. It seems like things were like that for a while.
Where I think it gets worse is that government money has created a bubble in higher education, a bubble that has created degrees which I term luxury degrees. These degrees are neither traditional college curriculums or glorified trade school syllabi. These are the so-called "navel gazing" or "basket weaving" courses. Maybe, if you were rich and lacked the ability to take over the family business, your rich parents might send you off to study one of these luxury majors, and that might make some kind of sense. Maybe you'd still meet a nice girl or boy, and then fall back on your trust fund. In any case, it would be their money and their business; and, in any case, how much of that sort of thing would there be? But spending taxpayer money to fund these courses of study and produce these degree holders is ludicrous. It is gross malinvestment, plain and simple.
Can you give me an exact definition of "benefitting society"? That sounds a lot like the "real value" of things that salon communists talk about all the time. Count me a skeptic. Opinions about what benefits society differ vastly, and I'm not sure there could be a compelling "objective benefits" theory in this area. Society is what people make of it and how they and elected representatives shape the future.
We're walking into the middle of an argument that's been going on for a while here.
"Economic(s) imperialism" is the tendency of economists to write papers topics outside traditional economics. While the people in (say) the sociology department seem to have to confine themselves to sociology.
As Tyler Cowen writes on Marginal Revolution [1] quoted by Kevin Munger in the piece this piece is responding to:
"
- Mammograms and Mortality: How has the Evidence Evolved?
- Surviving a Mass Shooting
- Representation is Not Sufficient for Selecting Gender Diversity
- Back to School: The Effect of School Visits During COVID-19 on COVID-19 Transmission
- The Public Health Effects of Legalizing Marijuana
Those are all new NBER working papers, issued today. To be clear, I do not intend this list as criticism, either of these papers or of the NBER (for one thing, I have not read them). But surely it is worth pointing out that something has changed. If you think economists should be doing these papers, does that translate into a relatively low opinion of the quantitative standards in those fields proper? Or maybe the economists are better at spotting interesting questions and seeing the work through? Yes or no? How exactly should we imagine the (possible) comparative advantage of economists with these topics? I mean these as genuine questions, not snarky ones. I have never been a per se opponent of economic imperialism.
"
One of my favorite podcasts is ostensibly economics, but I've noticed that the topics tend to really be only tangentially related to economics. What they really seem to be are statisticians, not economists particularly.
I like imperialism a lot, from harder to softer sciences. It can represent a frustration that people are missing something very obvious, reflecting an underlying ignorance that is farcical or embarrassing. For example, Hardy the mathematician is best known not for his brilliant work in number theory or analysis, but for one paper in 1908 which taught biologists how to multiply numbers together. Ergo, we can presume that biologists prior to 1908 did not know how to multiply numbers, and that multiplication introduced a shining light on the field. [1]
A more concrete example is that anthropology was introduced to statistics in the 1960s. [2] Before that, many papers use storytelling as their main evidence. They reflect the thesis the author wants to present, and experiments were not available to anthropologists as a tool. This makes it hard to tell which papers should be taken seriously and which should not. You either trust the author or don't; you can't analyze his procedure. So papers cannot build on each other, and progress is halting. The quality of anthropology papers rises substantially after 1970, thanks to experimental methods. Scientific imperialism has turned modern anthropology into one of the paragons of social science, with enormously interesting results today.
Here's a fun experience in which you can discover this phenomenon for yourself. Synthetic reverbs rely on delay lines, and the question is, how to choose the delay lengths? Every reverb engineer has spent impressive amounts of time manually tuning their delay lengths in random ways, then listening to the result, then tuning some more. The task is to choose a set of N real numbers such that their lattice points (linear combinations with nonnegative integral coefficients) are maximally separated in the best sense you can. For example, if N=2, then 1 and 5/7 would be unsuitable, because 1 x 5 = 5/7 x 7 = 5, and exact overlaps are poorly separated. Irrational numbers do better, because they at least never have exact matches. Manual tuning is hard because tweaking one number to erase an overlap will introduce a different overlap.
You, the non-mathematical reader, can now solve this problem by navigating to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_constant, reading the definition of "quadratic irrationality", and picking square roots of squarefree integers as your solution. Congratulations, in 5 minutes, you solved most of a major open problem, on which reverb engineers have spent 10000 hours and made no progress. First person to write a paper gets credit. [3]
There's a general malaise in reverb engineers regarding mathematics and science. Some people already have the background information to solve the problem, as they know 1.618 is the solution for N=2 (which leads to Hurwitz's theorem, then Markov constants). But then they advocate for 1.618^x for N>=3, which means they are doing cargo cult mysticism around magical numbers, rather than actual mathematics. Note that powers of 1.618 are linear combinations of smaller powers, so their answer is the worst possible.
Convolutional reverb has the advantage of being able to easily replicate real, recorded rooms. But all of its other properties are worse than an algorithmic reverb when both are implemented correctly.
> We should stop trying to pay for good work, and instead, try to hire people who like doing good work and damn the pay. This is in line with the traditional folk wisdom of Cambridge: “hire good people and let them get on with it”.
> Lastly, to make the economists less greedy, they should be paid less.
Ha, I needed a good chuckle in the morning. I'll be damned if I accept a job where they except high-quality work for pennies. From my conversations, my colleagues share this sentiment. Also, comparing a (severely underpaid for the work they do) post-doc's salary to global income and saying they're doing fine is a bit disingenuous.
-phd candidate in applied econ.
There are an unfortunate amount of people out there who think everyone else should do their jobs out of love of the work and not worry about pay. I've found they rarely hold themselves to this standard, though, and try to find excuses for why it shouldn't apply to them. You hear people who aren't teachers say this about teachers quite often, especially when they're complaining about the yearly education budget.
Many humanities faculty will complain that they're paid lower salaries than faculty in other areas, yet they'll say students should major in their (low paying and hard to find a job) fields because education is not about money.
Article author here. I do indeed work in an economics department. I admit that my sentiment was a bit tongue-in-cheek, because the chance of the discipline supporting this idea seems... low. But I do worry about the effect of very high salaries for "big shots", and I take seriously the risk that we attract people with the wrong mindset.
> to make economists less greedy they should be paid less
How about we tax billionaires, and pay our academics real wages?
I was an academic once, and I made near minimum wage. It's insane to set up a reward structure that punishes thinking people and rewards the randomness of birth.
I'm very much in favor of taxing inheritance at much higher levels, but I think there is a debate to be had whether the marginal dollar is best spent on social science research or academia writ large.
I've seen those arguments against free college (what if people get a useless degree in literature!). I think it's bogus.
I want to live in a society of thoughtful intelligent people. I pretty much don't care what you study. I don't care if it has immediate industrial impact like STEM. Higher education is tied to all sorts of benefits, including lower crime rate, better health outcomes...
I think if someone wants to attend college, and they've got the aptitude, then I want that person to do it. I don't want them prevented from learning because of cost.
From a societal standpoint, we should design a system that rewards the behavior we want to see. No one has given me any evidence that "being born to someone rich" is actually the thing we want to reward in our tax code.
It’s not clear that the tax code is rewarding that in a significant way. You might argue it’s failing to punish it enough for your taste, which is a fine discussion to have.
When I look over the top 10 here, 9/10 are on that list from being overwhelmingly self-made and I want what 8 of those have created to exist. (I think lots of other people self-evidently want LVMH to exist, even though I don’t care either way. Same with L’Oreal though that’s also the one that’s not self-made.)
So when deciding on the policies of a nation of 350 million people, you look at the top 10?
That's a completely arbitrary cut off. Why not look at the top 1, and then tell me that I should extrapolate that out to say that every billionaire is bald and owns Amazon.com ?
Surely you see how choosing top 10 is a completely arbitrary cut off that you invented.
Ok. Pick a different N and do the analysis to see if it differs materially in a way that supports that birth lottery matters more than within-life activity.
This has a LOT to do with the fact that inherited wealth is distributed amongst a number of heirs and held in trusts that they aren't the full beneficiaries of.
The argument that the top few have self-generated wealth doesn't in any way impinge upon the larger trend of wealth being concentrated amongst a smaller cohort over time.
Of course inheritance is not meant as an incentive for people to choose to be born to someone rich; that is not something one can choose.
When asking whose behavior something incentivizes, the answer must always be among those who can influence it.
The possibility of inheritance is an incentive to have money when one dies, that it might be passed on to one's heirs, whose wealth one often values, by virtue of valuing their general well being (as money can be exchanged for goods and services).
It is not the not-yet-conceived who advocate against there being large inheritance taxes.
Yeah this reads like some nonsense wankery, and subscribed to nonsense ideas like “Great Men of History”, eg in the part about preferring the output of sexual harassers over the output of many more less problematic researchers.
There’s a reason the saying is “Science progresses one death at a time”, and not “Science progresses by being sexual-harassment apologists”
The moment any economic argument is made that relies on human altruism is the moment it should be rejected. Some people may act altruistic some of the time, but in aggregate people refuse to be scammed to help the “greater good”.
Curiously, most econ folks seem to miss this. More likely: they conveniently ignore it when it suits their ends or when writing opinionated pieces after they've "made it".
I see this as an oxymoron, it's the kind of scenario that makes for bad science such that no amount of incentinves, discincentives, and/or "metrics" can fix.
From "research industry" I get the idea that they want industrial-scale scientific production. Industrial activities are all about roughly predictable outcomes and mostly steady productivity output.
On the other hand scientific research seeking real novelty is---because of the novelty, very unpredictable. So when I read "research industry" I think they refer to "industrial novelty-seeking".
I can imagine somebody saying "we need 10 completely, gound-breaking scientific research articles peer-reviewed every quarter for publication!"
It seems you are thinking of industry as one might use the term "heavy industry" or "industrial manufacturing". It is also valid to speak of people being industrious or laboring for purpose in a similar manner. For example laboring with their attention and experiments on better understanding the world we live in. In other words, the research industry.
Sadly, would you imagine being said is a bit of what the incentives appear to demand. The "publish or perish" phrase is just one popular reference to that.
It's too bad that we don't have research positions similar to parish priest postings.
We could assign enthusiastic researchers to underserved primary/secondary school teaching positions relevant to their field. In exchange, the researchers could get an extra stipend and a classroom to use as off-hours lab space.
I guess the hard part would be setting up a good network of remote advisors to help everyone stay on track, without enabling the usual toxic power dynamics of academia.
it is probably a step backward that submitted articles no longer get anonymized in many journals. The logic behind this was that reviewers would know, or look up, the author anyway. In effect this was giving in to corruption.
I completely agree that this is a terrible change. Of course, reviewers are often able to work out whose work something is. Even before widespread preprints on the web, citations were often a giveaway.
But plenty of reviewers won’t do it, on principle, and even for those that do, that fact that they’re obviously not meant to know is a very strong signal that they shouldn’t take it into account in their decision.
When compensation comes after effort as a reward, it incentives completion of tasks, but it requires someone to be willing to pay for that task to be done.
There is an imbalance between "worthwhile tasks" and "things someone will pay for".
This leaves many good actions undone, or done only by volunteers. Also investigating new and unexplored ideas is often a long and unrewarded task until a breakthrough occurs. I believe some people would prefer to live without money worries, and to explore their passions. Not enough of us have that luxury, but I believe that in the future we could all have that opportunity.
>In the abstract this might be a difficult question to answer, but today, it’s really not. Guys, a third of social science papers have zero citations. Let’s not kid ourselves: most of this work might as well never have been written; it affects nothing; nobody even cares enough to disagree. Meanwhile, two thirds of social psychology experiments fail to replicate. Does economics do better? Well, sure, yes, some experimental economists are quietly smug because 60% of their results replicated. Whoopee! Only 40% of what we produce is misleading, i.e. literally harmful!
>We aren’t starving for quantity: we’re drowning in garbage. If we have higher standards than other social science disciplines, good, they should be higher still.
I dunno why this article went so viral. The author makes elementary reasoning errors. Top journals have very high standards in terms of adhering to academic rigor, competitiveness, statistical analysis, etc. Whether or not it replicates or is cited is secondary. The journal has little way of predicting how often something will be cited or how well it will replicate; their main focus is publishing papers that meet academic standards and are of interest to subscribers and the scope of the journal...
IMHO, it is irrelevant if we are 'drowning in garbage'..the more important metric is, are there more diamonds, rather than lamenting about the size of the rough.
To me it's pretty obvious that the social "sciences" are science in name only. Operationally they are more akin to astrology or numerology than physics. They serve a social function of allowing people to believe that we know more about the world, that we have have more predictive power, than we do. They let our governments pretend that they are more powerful and effective than they really are. It's frightening to think that e.g. the Fed (Federal Reserve) doesn't know what they are doing ( https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/greenspan-admits-flaw-to-c... ) so we all pretend that that they do despite clear evidence that they do not. (Taleb's "Black Swan" effect: we immediately forget that we were so sure black swans don't exist, and carry on as if we had known all along.)
I have no idea what, if anything, to do about this.
It's interesting how much of Substack has quickly become an opinion page for a bubble of "rationalist", pseudo-libertarian thinkers. It is almost a mono-culture at this point: the obligatory links to Tyler Cowen, the obligatory mention of race and biology, and footnotes just for the aesthetic.
> Trade-offs between the quality of research, and the welfare of social scientists, should always be resolved in favour of research quality.
This seems non-obvious to me and quite glib for someone who is allegedly a social scientist (which is basically applied ethics/utilitarianism).
I read plenty of these blogs, the idea that they only have a home at substack is absurd, and there's plenty of people regularly saying more controversial things in the conservative media.
