Comment by white-flame | Hacker News Reader

Comment by white-flame | Hacker News Reader

I take a more classical view on University: It never should be "job training". It should be about general life enrichment, beyond-industry research, philosophy about the world and its workings, and broadening horizons.

Sure, people who went through that (ie, independently interested in, was recommended in or could afford it, and succeeded) tended to be more capable people. Let's roughly compare it to becoming an Eagle Scout or a Navy Seal in terms of a generally impressive life accomplishment. Shuffling everybody through the same system is useless, wastes everybody's time and money, and devalues the magic paper gotten in the end.

Many skilled professions require training, and specific training institutions are all well and good. But let's not confuse training to become a mechanical engineer or doctor as being equivalent in an employment eligibility sense to more enrichment-oriented university degrees. The latter being required to get a sales/front-desk/entry-level position is a burgeoning and absolutely needless weight on our entire society. Conflating the former with the more heady University worldview is also odd, and eliminates eligibility for those who would be great in their field but are not that compatible with academia.

> It should be about general life enrichment

This is a view that rich people can afford to hold. Poor or middle class people cannot reasonably afford to pay four years of opportunity cost, plus tuition, for "general life enrichment."

The Ireland control serves well here too. Are Irish medical doctors, and indeed all European doctors, less "enriched" than American ones? I'm very skeptical of this idea, but if you could propose some metric that would allow us to evaluate the question, that might be helpful.

This is a view that rich people can afford to hold. Poor or middle class people cannot reasonably afford to pay four years of opportunity cost, plus tuition, for "general life enrichment."

...In countries that don't subsidize higher education to a point where this isn't a problem.

We can debate whether the cost to society is worth it, but just because something is out-of-reach in the status quo doesn't mean it's impossible.

Even in those countries, you are giving up four years of wages. The only reason any ordinary person does that is because they expect to get something out of it beyond mere life enrichment.

Such as enough exposure to both the real world and opportunities for extended reflection thereupon to appreciate the extreme unlikelihood of being able to distinguish between "mere enrichment" and "crucial background knowledge that made the difference between success and failure" 2, 3, or 4 decades out?

The "enrichment" model isn't premised on "job training doesn't matter". It's premised on the realization that it's impossible to know what you don't know but might need to know for a job that you'll have in 2 decades but doesn't exist yet.

Examples abound of Mathematics majors who make tremendous contributions to industries they never studied formally. Many people who never obtain a deep theoretical knowledge of a field do well in life because the usefulness their industry knowledge just happens to outlive them.

If you consider this argument fully, It's hard to defend retirement - or anything else people do without profit motives.

I'm listening to music without any expectation of profit, giving up time I could spend making money. I consider this life enrichment. Actually, besides opportunity costs, I paid literal cash money to be able to do this.

You're not forgoing four years of wages, and taking out an undischargeable house-sized loan to listen to that music though -- that's the point.

That is, the problem isn't that "enrichment is bad", or that everything must have a monetary return, but that "it's not a high enough priority at that point in the typical such person's life to spend that much on it" if it were just an issue of enrichment.

It's like the Burdian's Ass scenario, except the donkey starves while learning the most enlightened way to choose a bale of hay to eat.

Most people do not put higher education in the same category as retirement, they see it as a means to an end.

Retirement is generally taken once you have "enough". I suppose you could argue that college is simply pushing back retirement -- taking some of that self enrichment time early -- but that is not a good analysis. See, when you retire, you already have obtained. When you enter university, you merely hope to.

The music analogy you tried makes no sense to me. You cannot work 24/7. You are not in any reasonable sense forgoing wages you could have earned by listening to music. If you quit your job to listen to music eight hours a day for four years, I would argue that you are either a fool or very wealthy, and I don't think I'd find many to disagree with me.

Social Security. Medicare. Tax breaks for certain types of saving/investing. Tax breaks of property ownership.

The government subsidizes retirement in a plethora of ways.

One problem with this approach is that most people consider "life enrichment" to be courses that are biased towards their own political viewpoint. Conservatives want students to have a basis in the history, literature and philosophy of Western Civilization. Liberals want to teach students to think "critically", i.e. to view Western Civilization through the lens of oppression and racism (and all other ism's).

I'm a liberal, and I got a BA in History from Berkeley. I studied European and American diplomatic history, with an emphasis on war. I mostly took classes on modern European and American history and classical European history. I urge others to take almost exactly the same courses at Berkeley. I currently read mostly American and European history, science, and literature.

One of my non-history courses at Berkeley was focused on Western Civilization and its construction of isms to frame the world in a manner more beneficial to the West. Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism, Taoism - all defined against Christianity, which isn't an ism. Islam has had the political mobility and prowess to break the bonds of the conservative thinkers placing an ism on their lives. Sikhi is trying to do the same. That was probably the most liberally militant course I took at Berkeley.

He somewhat address this in the article. Would as many people pay the substantial cost of college merely for the "life enrichment".

His argument on this point is short enough that it's worth just quoting entire:

> (Yes, it is nice to have college for non-economic reasons too, but let’s be honest – if there were no such institution as college, would you, totally for non-economic reasons, suggest the government pay poor people $100,000 to get a degree in Medieval History? Also, anything not related to job-getting can be done three times as quickly by just reading a book.)

Personally, I'd say yes to his question - and indeed, this is a question, not an argument; and it's a question that presumes a knee-jerk reaction against Medieval History majors...

Gross world product has been growing along an exponential function for some time, and machines are threatening to allow us to be comfortable even if we don't work as much as we physically can. Maybe giving everyone some years in their youth to enrich their lives would be a good way to organize the economy once it's a viable option. Maybe a lot of people agree with this, and in wealthier nations it's ~just~ now close to being within reach, but it isn't quite there, so what we're feeling would be considered friction in the transition.

> Would as many people pay the substantial cost of college merely for the "life enrichment".

"Life enrichment" isn't (just) an ends unto itself. Coming to terms with the magnitude of one's own ignorance is well worth a year or two of sunk opportunity cost. Read through the failed startup post-mortems posted here yesterday.

And there's also real value in the ability to polish a piece of writing (for technical people) or a cursory understanding of the technical work that goes into the product (for business/marketing people).

Edit: In general, conflating students with customers leads to messed up conclusions and backwards priorities.

>"Life enrichment" isn't (just) an ends unto itself. Coming to terms with the magnitude of one's own ignorance is well worth a year or two of sunk opportunity cost. Read through the failed startup post-mortems posted here yesterday.

So then it is possible to learn about your ignorance without college?

Edit: more broadly, I don't think it's wrong to say "college teaches you what you don't know!", but it is misleading. Life teaches you unknown unknowns.

The structure of a university is not uniquely suited for teach you that; its comparative advantage lies in teaching knowledge that you just can't learn in practice because because of the theoretical background needed to piece together the big picture. That's not the same thing as unknown unknowns, and to whatever extent it teaches those is not because it's uniquely optimal to teach them.

Of course. In another thread I called this the Einstein fallacy, and in pervades discussions of higher education in the US.

It's far more likely that you'll know what you don't know (and how to learn it) if you invest two years of time learning enough about other fields to know where you need to consult an expert.

(as an aside, the portion of my post you quoted has nothing to do with what you're saying? I'm willing to bet many of those people both had college degrees and also "wasted" a hell of a lot more VC capital than the cost of a degree. College is not a panacea for unknown unknowns (it's not a panacea for anything), but those are illustrative examples of how not knowing something can cost a tremendous amount of money and opportunity.)

edit re your edit: I don't think the value of depth in a technical area is really up for debate (except for maybe in CS where some people seem to think there's nothing more to software engineering than low-throughput CRUD apps). Even the article concedes that point. The question is whether the rest of college is useful. We'll agree to disagree on studying fields in which you don't have expertise being a good mechanism for learning when you're over your head.

>(as an aside, the portion of my post you quoted has nothing to do with what you're saying

It was a case of people learning unknown unknowns outside of college.

>We'll agree to disagree on studying fields in which you don't have expertise being a good mechanism for learning when you're over your head.

I didn't say that it's a bad mechanism, just that it's not especially better than the kind of learning your pick up in life normally (eg the startups you cited), without blowing $50k in opportunity costs per year.

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