Free College Education Is Worse Than Useless | Hacker News Reader

Free College Education Is Worse Than Useless

parrhesia.substack.com

27 pointspaulpauper20 comments

It's really hard to engage with any argument which starts with the false dichotomy that education is either about signalling your traits or giving you skills and knowledge to be a productive worker. It does not even begin to engage with the idea that knowledge and education can have value in and of itself enriching people's lives, building a shared culture, improving social mobiliity, decreasing inequality etc (rather than being a means to an end, in this case being productive).

Given those terms of reference, it's not surprising the author might come to the conclusion that a free college education could be useless. They are ignoring lots of ways in which an education (free or otherwise) could be seen to have value.

>It does not even begin to engage with the idea that knowledge and education can have value in and of itself enriching people's lives, building a shared culture, improving social mobility, decreasing inequality etc

There is a difference between an education, which is what you are describing here and anybody can get for free online, and a college degree which is a part of an outdated industry being propped up by government grants and student loans. The administrative waste in higher education is absurd, and anybody in the industry should be embarrassed by it.

The entire education industry needs to be stripped for parts and rebuilt from the ground up in a way that doesn't bury young adults in debt, or bleed the middle class taxpayers dry.

This is predominantly a problem in the US - in other countries tertiary education is way cheaper per capita and in many countries (predominantly in Europe) it is free. In some countries (eg Norway) it's even free for international students.

In the UK (where I live) things have been sadly moving in the US direction over the last 10 years, with tuition fees and student loans now ubiquitous although university education is still nowhere near as cripplingly expensive as in the US.

It's a little hard to gain signal from university league tables, but US universities make a strong showing, but do not dominate to the extent one might expect given how much more expensive they are than universities in other countries. See the THES computer science rankings for example https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankin...

>or bleed the middle class taxpayers dry.

You may have missed this part. Universities are not free in those countries you speak of, what happens is taxpayers just end up with far less disposable income.

You may have missed the part that the cost per capita is higher in the US for a worse outcome. The US is not a low-tax country in spite of the fact that the government provides fewer services than in Europe.

This is the end result though https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...

This is why people come from all over the world to work and study in the US.

What I was posting was not intended as a general critique of the US - there's a lot that's fantastic about the US. However the way tertiary education works in the US seems broken relative to other places in the world. In particular, saddling swathes of young people with a lifetime of debt service in exchange for an education seems incredibly unfair and the way the debate is framed in the US is around the pros and cons of debt forgiveness rather than a root cause analysis of whether it needs to be so expensive in the first place.

The FA is about the value of education and as I take an Aristotelian view that the value of an education is primarily about the fulfillment of the individual first and foremost and the wider benefits that brings to society secondly and almost not at all about being a productive worker I go back to my point that the article just ignores lots of ways in which education can have value.

Post-secondary schooling is mostly about selection and signaling. Actual contributions to human capital are real, but a small component of the apparent ROI of formal schooling.

So-called "free" college leads people to spend prime years of their life in a tournament game that rewards the winners but is, in aggregate, less productive or even educational than other things they could have spent those years doing.

I don't get why people have to add so many qualifiers to the word free before college. Nobody says "free" K-12 or "free" fire departments because we've socially determined that these are necessary for a society such as ours to operate. I shudder to imagine pitching public libraries to HN in the alternate universe where they weren't created in the 20th century.

Only one industrial country doesn't provide basically free secondary education, and it's not like the US has anything to show for that choice. We still pay more per capita on education than someone in a country with socialized secondary education. With worse outcomes to show for it.

Like all of our policy, the US edu system is optimized for a few big fish (Kaplan, College Board, Scantron, etc) at the expense of students, educators, and taxpayers. Removing the profit motive from education seems wildly uncontroversial everywhere but the US and for what? Unless you have a lot of Kaplan stock I just don't get it

> I don't get why people have to add so many qualifiers to the word free

It's because it's not free. It costs taxpayers money and more importantly, it costs young people prime years of their lives.

College is a great choice for some people, but there are many others who it doesn't serve well. There's a tremendous cost in everyone having a default assumption that they need to delay whatever else they'd do with their lives to get a credential they don't really want, can't really use but feel immense social pressure to pursue. It's not as bad as the situation in Europe or Japan, but far too many Americans go to college. Increasingly, China appears headed down the same path.

Mass post-secondary schooling is also sub-optimal from a supply and demand perspective. Every year the market is flooded with millions of youths who graduated with the same small number of common degrees. As a result, the economic reward for those skills falls.

> Only one industrial country doesn't provide basically free secondary education, and it's not like the US has anything to show for that choice.

Secondary education is "free" (not really, but subsidized) in the US, to a further degree than most industrialized countries. Doing this for the secondary level is much more reasonable than for college, but there are still some serious issues around how the system is essentially designed for Prussian factory workers from a previous century.

For the first half of my career, I was a school teacher (not in the US) and this topic is near and dear to my heart. Improvement on this axis is possibly one of the lowest hanging fruits that can lead to increased flourishing of human prosperity and happiness.

> Removing the profit motive from education seems wildly uncontroversial everywhere but the US and for what?

Profit as a motive in education is huge in China, Singapore, Vietnam, Japan and most countries I've lived in. I'm not sure where you live, but it's definitely not representative of the world as a whole.

1. Doesn't "improving social mobiliity, decreasing inequality" fall under "value in and of itself"? In other words, the way by which education does those things is by giving the attendees "skills and knowledge to be a productive worker".

2. While I'm sure it's possible to argue that "enriching people's lives, building a shared culture" is one benefit of education, that's not the primary reason for it. The primary reason why post-secondary education is funded is for the productivity benefits. While the government also funds organizations/activities aimed at "enriching people's lives, building a shared culture" (eg. community centers?), I have a hard time believing that the electorate is willing to subsidize "enriching people's lives, building a shared culture" to the tune of thousands per student per year.

> hard time believing that the electorate is willing to subsidize "enriching people's lives, building a shared culture" to the tune of thousands per student per year.

Beyond a high school diploma, that is? Not like that prepares you for very much these days, and mechanical/trade education is treated as second-class.

So German universities are worthless? How awkward. Somebody please call Benjamin List and tell him that his degree is worthless.

Yeah every paragraph is a new invitation to refute unreasonable assertions, I concluded that there is no value in this post and I'm exiting this discussion.

This article makes me think of an idea I heard years ago. That being make the cost of tuition zero for all students, and then take 20% of their income for the 5 years after they graduate. The thought process here is that no matter what we do, people are people and will seek degrees in what they are interested in. So, if we take that 20% from everyone it will average out so that the people going to work at Google and receiving > $100,000 out of the gate help to offset those that major in a less lucrative field.

I could have sworn that there was something like this being tested somewhere in Michigan, but I can't fully remember.

So, income tax?

With free public education, paid for via income tax?

In a way yeah, but only for those that utilize the tuition assistance, and a cap on how long it applies for.

Here's my nutty cuckoo idea: Free admission. Free book rental. No lab fees. No student activity fees. BUT: Only admit the top 20% of applicants. Minimum 12 hours per semester. Maximum 16. Every class is curved, 20% A, 20% B, etc. At the end of of each year, freshman, sophomore, etc, the lowest 20% by GPA are dropped. Competition makes us stronger, no? FWIW, I taught community college for over a decade and share my share of people pass that I wouldn't hire to write "Hello World" in ANY language. But they ticked the boxes, got to pass, and got the credit to graduate.

I think the author is mixing up College (i.e. a trade school) and University (i.e. an institution of higher education). For some reason both of them are synonimous (as well as school?) in US english.

In the U.S. the two are typically used to reference the same thing (whereas "school" has a more general meaning); there's nothing wrong with this usage, and I think it's kind of weird to point out the distinction if you understand the meaning.

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