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Comment by jitix | Hacker News Reader

To move to a more automated manufacturing industry and to expand the service industry the US needs more educated people. You can't do hi-tech manufacturing with high school graduates.

I think US needs to fix it's education system first to make sure that all deserving people get a chance to go to college without incurring debt. It can easily be done considering the money the government spends on defense and other (I'd call useless) agencies like NSA, DEA, etc.

One of the first steps could be to pay college tuition for students matching certain criteria (I'm not sure what the criteria could be - maybe GPA - but I'm certain that some elibility criteria can be defined).

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Why draw lines at all in deciding who is deserving? In my country anyone can study anything without going into debt. The only requirements are prior degrees. It leaves young people free to choose their path in life. We spend 6.6% of our gdp to have that system. The US spends 5.6% of gdp on its system. That's close enough that the US education system should be offering better choices and outcomes to students. Why isn't it?

I agree. Thats why I said "to start with". Universal free education should be a right in this day and age. However if the Congress is to pass such a bill they most probably won't make it all free on day one. They (and the population) need to ease into it, so reimbursing tuition fee as a "scholarship" could be a good starting point.

Costs-benefits analysis. If I allocate $100 for 100 students in higher education, I can spend only $1 on each. If 25 show far more promise in the productivity they can contribute that $4 spent on each will achieve a greater overall output of productivity, it's in society's interest to invest $4 each in those 25 students over investing $1 each in 100. Since those 25 are getting $4 of investment, they should also expect to pay back to society enough to justify the higher investment in them.

What makes you think it isn't?

What's the delta in lifetime earnings for high school education vs 4 year college in your country? Or how many doctorates per capita? Or some other metric for outcomes that you prefer?

You could do hi-tech manufacturing with high school graduates if they actually studied a high-tech curriculum or had the opportunity to apprentice for 2-3 years.

College is not (and should not be) required for everyone who wants a decent middle class job.

That would probably require a major reform of the K-12 system, and also a cultural shift where people actually become interested in tech curriculum. And to do that STEM subjects need to be given importance at a very early stage.

It might take longer than it needs to, but I see this happening eventually. As low-skill jobs are automated away and cab/truck drivers are replaced by self-driving vehicles, many people won't really have a choice but to become interested in tech curriculum.

Furthermore, I think that cultural shift is already happening. Computers aren't just for geeks and professionals anymore. The average user might not be thinking about how Snapchat's geofencing works when they take a selfie, but that can't be more than a few steps away.

Germany has been mentioned a lot here. Education is another place where the country is "ahead". Occupational schools and apprenticeships are a common higher education route. My understanding is that only people slotted for college get an abstract curriculum similar to what Americans would call "high school".

Many regions in Germany accomplish this through heavy uses of Tracking[1] which, regardless of your stance on it, is a political non-starter in the US.

One place I visited (it varies heavily with region), the students were sorted towards Gymnasium (college prep) or Realschule (ends at 10th grade with a sight towards job, apprenticeship, or further vocational training) around 3rd grade. Good luck implementing that in the US.

Even that though assumes that there are people needed in hi-tech manufacturing, and I'd say that assumption comes against a brick wall of automation. Sure, the lower-requirement manufacturing jobs went first but the more specialized and more precise ones are going away too. The jobs that are temporarily safe from robots are rapidly becoming a minority, and jobs that are completely safe from robots are an endangered species.

I always find it interesting that in these sorts of articles, the absence of growth is the problem, as though manufacturing output (or the output of any industry really) can just keep growing and keep growing ad infinitum. Once we can make a box of tissues for every living person on the planet, the tissue industry must stop growing, because why would we make any more? Every given industry has a saturation point where output must level off, lest we drown our population in a sea of products they don't need, regardless of affordability.

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