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Comment by obstinate | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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