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Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

These articles never ever bring up the long history of anti-intellectualism in the United States. College may indeed be getting less “worth it” in pure financial terms, but it’s certainly ironic that many people only had a high view of them in the first place because of the supposed financial benefits. Now that those financial benefits are less certain, out comes the anti-intellectualism again.

A more rational society would acknowledge that higher education is a good thing, and therefore try to make it affordable, not try to undermine it entirely.

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It is not just financial, it is a decline in academic standards: https://nypost.com/2026/08/16/us-news/uc-berkeley-math-prof-...

Okay so isn’t the solution then to increase standards, not to undermine the concept of college?

I really don’t get what articles like this one are proposing. Instead of having an institution like Berkeley, we ought to just give students some YouTube videos?

Like I said, it’s very often just anti-intellectualism and culture war nonsense.

There was nothing you couldn't have already learned from a book. Many professors were never even great at teaching and are employed for research.

Attending college as a student was always partly about status and once the standards of an institution drops so does the signal that comes from holding a degree. It is only natural that people will see college as less worthy of an investment.

If someone says they can replicate the college experience by reading books at home, they frankly don’t know what they are talking about.

Yes, being surrounded by smart and motivated people is a huge bonus. But if your classmate doesn't even know fractions, it looks like you won't be getting that either.

Counterpoint to your blanket statement: You do get some life experience, but for me, having a job gave me more experience than doing group projects. And as far as learning things, I often feel that I would have learned more by just goofing around on the computer on my own. In fact, I did.

To be fair, I commuted for two years and didn’t really have the full social experience. But does higher education actually deserve any credit for that aspect, or would it happen naturally with any group of young people?

I don’t think it’s merely being around other young people. There are classes on topics that you will never ever come across in a job context, yet will have a major impact on your personality, mind, etc.

Ah, that makes sense. I didn’t get too much of that in my degree because for me, college was primarily a financial thing. If I was just pursuing the love of knowledge, I would have loved to take philosophy, but it didn’t count toward my electives.

I definitely would have felt differently about college if money was not a concern. I got accepted to CMU but didn’t go because I didn’t want the debt, and at the state college I attended, I didn’t major in what I wanted to do. Looking back, I do feel some regret, but also, if I had chosen differently, I would still be paying for it today. Even if you’re looking for an amazing learning experience, the unbelievable cost forces it to be a primarily financial endeavor, at which point it makes more sense to forgo niceties like philosophy and study it on your own time, or audit classes or something.

For sure, I don’t think less of people that decide it’s not financially worth it. In many cases it’s not.

But I don’t like it when people then rationalize that decision into “it actually sucks anyway,” because IME that’s not true.

In my personal experience, I studied philosophy in college, and have continued reading books off-and-on since.

There really is no book replacement for being in a class of 5-10 philosophy students, arguing about Kant or metaphysics for 3 hours, or in having a professor rip your paper apart and highlight every flaw in an argument. It just won’t happen if you’re self-studying.

That's a decline in academic standards of pre-tertiary education, we're talking about higher education, those things aren't necessarily correlated.

Forget financial benefits: There's just a high risk of ending up in a crippling financial hole. Many schools have tuitions over 60k/yr. Add mandatory campus living costing 20-30k on top.

I have a child graduating high school right now. As a developer in the US, this means no child of mine is getting need based scholarships. So the question becomes whether it really makes sense to go to any of said expensive colleges vs handing the child 200k+ and going to a worse school where he gets merit scholarships worth 6 figures over the course of his stay.

When you put those kinds of prices out there, do not be surprised if people start to think it's all a ripoff.

Let me use a metaphor.

Let’s imagine a Michelin star restaurant that has rave reviews. Everyone loves it. It’s affordable, too, which helps its popularity.

But over time, the restaurant increases its prices. The food remains exactly the same: absolutely delicious. But now the prices are 10x what they were before. And so naturally the discussion becomes: “I’m sure it’s good, but is it worth the cost?”

A rational response to higher education would be similar. Except that’s not how most people, or at least media articles, frame it. Instead of saying “the food is good but it’s not worth the cost,” they just deny that it is delicious in the first place. It’s a very particular kind of short-sightedness that has its roots in the anti-intellectual cultural history of America.

To use your metaphor, I think the more accurate description is that the food has decreased in quality and they increased the cost. The chef is resting on their laurels, maybe focused on other things. Maybe they spent a lot of money on a fancy renovation (dorms and gyms) with no impact to the actual food (education). Maybe they no longer shell out for the best staff and increasingly use lower priced employees (adjunct professors).

This actually happens all the time. It's hard to stay at the top and many Michelin star restaurants still close and go out of business.

I think that’s a small part of it, but it’s not how the critics usually frame it.

It’s almost always criticized because it costs more, doesn’t guarantee a good job, etc. and not because supposed educational standards have fallen. As if the people reading the NYPost were so invested in the quality of education at Berkeley…

I’d even bet that educational standards could be near zero, but as long as the degree guaranteed a high-paying job, those same people wouldn’t care at all about the education.

>These articles never ever bring up the long history of anti-intellectualism in the United States.

Pick any nation and it's the same. Intellectuals as a class catch a bad rap because of how many of them are useful idiots for whatever the oppressive and/or extractive systems in a society are at any one time.

Like crack open any page of the history book. Whether you're reading 1970s exclusionary zoning 1930s eugenics or 1850s "inferior negro" type crap you're reading about something that a large enough to be a problem fraction of educated white collar people saw fit to peddle at everyone else.

It's perfectly understandable that a decent enough to be noticeable subset of everyone else sees this questionable track record and writes off the whole lot.

I think you have a point, but intellectuals as a class also played a role in opposing things like that.

Derek Chauvin was ultimately arrested by other cops.

>A more rational society would acknowledge that higher education is a good thing, and therefore try to make it affordable, not try to undermine it entirely.

This assumes you believe that graduates are indeed gaining skills or beliefs that contribute to the betterment of society. Part of the reaction is a backlash to DEI/Woke and its a true statement that many recent graduates are not in fact contributing to but actively wishing for or working towards the downfall of US Society.

I think that influence is a handful of classes at best. Unless you’re suggesting that every university in the United States has no educational value anymore, and has been replaced with a Fox News caricature?

>Unless you’re suggesting that every university in the United States has no educational value anymore, and has been replaced with a Fox News caricature?

Not at all.

>I think that influence is a handful of classes at best.

I'd say its less about specific courses than the culture and peer pressure to conform to pretty extreme positions.

E.g. its hard to even debate ideas when they are explicitly or implicitly forbidden to even bring up. https://www.fire.org/college-free-speech-rankings

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