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Comment by teakettle42 | Hacker News Reader

First, we still need plumbers, painters, and tradesmen of all sorts.

Second, not everyone is equipped to earn a PhD by significantly advancing our knowledge in a useful field. In fact, the majority of people are not.

Third, the demand for degrees — due to the idea that everyone must go to college, and misguided subsidies to make that happen — already far exceeds what colleges are able to supply while still being achievable by the majority of their customer base.

The result has been degree inflation, cost inflation, and a huge number of useless workers with useless degrees unable to pay off their crippling college debt.

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>Second, not everyone is equipped to earn a PhD by significantly advancing our knowledge in a useful field. In fact, the majority of people are not.

And even if equipped (whatever that means exactly) many simply have no interest in doing so. I assume I could have gotten into a PhD program of some sort had I had my heart set on it. (I did get a couple of Masters--and mostly quite enjoyed them.) But had very little interest in getting a PhD--and find the idea retrospectively even less appealing today.

If you broaden the historical context the result has been an advanced economy with computers and high speed communication. It's going to be this kind of anti-intellectual, pseudo-populist rhetoric that ends up killing innovation in the United States.

We're rich enough (for now) to import innovation; we don't need an educated populace. We have a robust military that makes us untouchable geopolitcally.

Do you see how dangerous this kind of bullshit is? Do you see what happens when enough of the people in your country don't value things like degrees and institutions of higher learning? The Athenians fell because of their hubris; not because they valued poetry and art.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pol_Pot

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror

http://hrlibrary.umn.edu/education/thucydides.html

It's not a question of if we value it - we have yet to automate trades, and we still require tradespeople to carry out the day to day work of construction and manufacturing. There's nothing wrong with that, as there are many people who'd rather work with their hands as opposed to sitting in front of a computer.

So long as people have ready access to a trade education if they want it, the wages afforded to various professions should be sufficient to handle the distribution of students into the future - clearly, degrees are still desirable enough to the alternative that trade wages will have to go higher before more people start moving into it.

What a curious line to draw, between "some Catholics think that postsecondary voc-ed might be a good idea" and "anyone with glasses might be an intellectual, best kill them just in case".

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