Comment by tsally | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tsally | Hacker News Reader

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Bs. I do quite fine with high school.

Personal anecdotes aren't valid pieces of evidence...

The biggest advantage those growing up in today's environment have going for them is that everyone else their age is lazy. You can do far better today with the same work ethic of the previous generation.

... and neither are broad generalizations. In fact, the college admission process directly contradicts your misguided conceptions [1]. (Whether young people are working hard towards the right goal is another debate, but they are working hard.)

You're going to have to do much better if you want to argue that an extensively researched and reported global trend (degree inflation) doesn't exist [2,3,4,5]. Enough of this hurr-durr-pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps-because-that's-what-I-did bullshit. People who point out the issues with education are hard working people who have valid concerns. They aren't "whining".

[1] http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/31/a-few-more-col...

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/12/education/12masters.html

[3] http://www.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/worklife/05/27/cb.degree.not....

[4] http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/world_agenda/art...

[5] http://www.insidehighered.com/views/sloane/sloane20

Actually anecdotes are evidence. They don't prove correlation or causation in themselves but they are evidence. Also none of your "extensively researched" evidence proves causation. At best you can point to correlation. What I'm saying is that hard work and intelligent choices have far more of an effect on your life than "a degree". Unfortunately those types of things aren't easily compilable. Universities are selling a solution to a self created and self perpetuating problem. When everyone has a masters the answer will be to get a phd and when everyone has a phd a new degree with be made. In 100 years you can expect baskin robins university with 31 degrees. I don't doubt that education is valuable but you can get it much cheaper than by going to university.

Would you be skeptical of "research" from the cigarette manufacturers that said tobacco is good for you and that tailor mades are the best way to get it? Color me unconvinced that more schooling is the answer.

It could well be that a degree is the best way to spend a half million dollars but I don't think it is.

You're doing something horribly wrong if you're spending half a million dollars on a degree. Even if you include opportunity cost, it's nowhere near that high on average. I'm not really sure what purpose that type of exaggeration serves.

Of course I agree with platitudes like "hard work and intelligent choices have far more of an effect on your life than a degree", but if you're going to frame the problem in that broad of a sense why should we even discuss it?

> Personal anecdotes aren't valid pieces of evidence...

Several of my coworkers do not have 4-year degrees and make well over $100k/year.

Several my coworkers have graduate degrees from prestigious universities and are on the brink of being fired (some of them have been already).

A degree is not much more than a fresh start, a foot in the door, and some residual credibility.

I really don't find these anecdotes convincing. There's been a fair bit of research showing that the college wage premia is large and positive. Now, there are lots of arguments to be had about the mechanism by which that premia arises and to what extent it is fair, but its existence is not in question.

A degree is not much more than a fresh start, a foot in the door, and some residual credibility.

That's true in some fields. But in some fields, you simply cannot succeed without a college degree. If you want to be a civil engineer designing bridges, you need a college degree. If you want to be a physician or even a registered nurse or physician's assistant, then you need a degree. Period.

> There's been a fair bit of research showing that the college wage premia is large and positive. Now, there are lots of arguments to be had about the mechanism by which that premia arises and to what extent it is fair, but its existence is not in question.

Not many people are arguing it doesn't exist. People (or at least I) am giving evidence that college is not the only way to obtain this "premia," and that there is a cost, beyond which if college exceeds that cost, college is no longer favorable over its alternatives. Of course this is highly dependent on the university attended and the degree received and also depends on the individual involved. To blindly say, "college is always better" ignores all this evidence and turns off our minds to alternatives.

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