# In Defense of Lower Education. **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [October 25, 2014, 1:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-defense-of-lower-education/702409 "2014-10-25T01:02:41Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 7\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![robert\_columbia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e79b87/32.png) [@robert\_columbia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/robert_columbia)\ **Post date:** [October 29, 2014, 9:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-defense-of-lower-education/702409/42 "2014-10-29T21:25:18Z")
> [@bump](#): > > … > I suspect that the number of college jobs and skilled trade jobs aren’t anywhere near plentiful enough for everyone who wants one, and there will always be some significant number of people who wash-out of the higher education or trade school route and end up doing something unskilled or semi-skilled. > > Plus, it doesn’t make sense to emphasize college or trade schools if the jobs aren’t there- … And that’s also a good point. We are in a situation now where someone with a college education only has two options for work - a position matching their education, or unskilled minimum wage work. If you have a Bachelor’s degree in Nursing and an RN license but find that there aren’t enough RN jobs and that you’d be grateful for to work as an LPN practical nurse or nursing assistant, you will be instantly labeled as “overqualified” and not hired because obviously you’re going to jump ship as soon as a real RN job comes your way. Hope you like your life flipping burgers. ---
**Author:** ![even\_sven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/dfb087/32.png) [@even\_sven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/even_sven)\ **Post date:** [October 29, 2014, 10:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-defense-of-lower-education/702409/43 "2014-10-29T22:00:00Z")
> [@furt](#): > > One of the major spurs to the explosive growth in college enrollment was the 1960s/70s era move away from (and eventual outlawing) of thing like IQ/aptitude testing for jobs. Employers looking to hire generally smart people started using a college degree as a proxy for intelligence. > > The tide is beginning to turn back, as college has gotten more and more expensive, and more and more people are looking at [alternative learning credentials.](http://higheredtoday.org/2013/10/01/the-emerging-world-of-alternative-credentials/) Would you care to back this up? Assessments are still used in many hiring processes, including by the federal government. ---
**Author:** ![robert\_columbia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e79b87/32.png) [@robert\_columbia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/robert_columbia)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2014, 5:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-defense-of-lower-education/702409/44 "2014-10-30T17:12:09Z")
> [@furt](#): > > One of the major spurs to the explosive growth in college enrollment was the 1960s/70s era move away from (and eventual outlawing) of thing like IQ/aptitude testing for jobs. Employers looking to hire generally smart people started using a college degree as a proxy for intelligence. > > The tide is beginning to turn back, as college has gotten more and more expensive, and more and more people are looking at [alternative learning credentials.](http://higheredtoday.org/2013/10/01/the-emerging-world-of-alternative-credentials/) > [@even\_sven](#): > > Would you care to back this up? Assessments are still used in many hiring processes, including by the federal government. How many positions are there where someone without a degree can jump ahead of a candidate with a degree by passing and/or scoring exceptionally well on an assessment or set of assessments? That was furt’s major point I think. There are plenty of positions nowadays where an exam is part of the hiring process, but there are two differences in what I see today: 1. Exam performance is weighed with degrees, experience, and the ability to say the right thing in the interview and to stand out you have to shine at least decently in all of them. If they want a master’s degree in Important Stuff, one _might_ be able to squeak by with a Graduate Certificate in Slightly Less Important but Closely Related and Analogous Stuff if you do very well on the test and have a lot of experience. But if you haven’t been to college at all, even a stellar performance on the exam doesn’t do much for you but waste your time trying for a job they will never give you. There’s hardly any getting a job by raw ability anymore, which is sort of the point of using exams. 2. Oftentimes, you can’t even take the hiring exam unless you’ve been offered an interview, because the exam is given as part of the interview. So if you don’t have a degree, it’s unlikely they would even offer you an interview, so you don’t really get a chance to say, hey, I got a 99th percentile on this, that means I probably know this job pretty well! ---
**Author:** ![robert\_columbia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e79b87/32.png) [@robert\_columbia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/robert_columbia)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2014, 5:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-defense-of-lower-education/702409/45 "2014-10-30T17:21:49Z")
> [@even\_sven](#): > > Would you care to back this up? Assessments are still used in many hiring processes, including by the federal government. Also, some “assessments” are not really assessments in the traditional sense. I was looking at applying for a software developer job a while back that was advertised as being one for which management planned to use a skills assessment. When I looked deeper, however, I found out that the “assessment” was a questionnaire that looked sort of like this: Exam. Warning: Falsification of any item on this exam may subject the candidate to disqualification. 1. How many years of experience do you have in Java? a) None b) Less than two years c) Between two years and five years d) More than five years 1. What is your highest educational credential? a) None b) High school diploma or equivalency c) Associate’s degree d) Bachelor’s degree e) Master’s or doctorate degree 1. Have you worked at least six months on a team that utilized Six Sigma methods? a) Yes b) No 1. How many years of experience do you have writing, debugging, and testing database queries for Oracle databases? a) None b) Less than two years c) Between two years and five years d) More than five years 1. Do you have a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer credential? a) Yes b) No That’s not a knowledge, skills, or abilities assessment in any meaningful way. ---
**Author:** ![Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e8c25b/32.png) [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Really_Not_All_That_Bright)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2014, 5:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-defense-of-lower-education/702409/46 "2014-10-30T17:32:09Z")
> [@furt](#): > > Why the special scorn for for-profit schools? Would you feel differently about the University of Phoenix if instead of profits, they spent huge money on giving senior employees a lighter workload, fancier buildings, million-dollar sports programs, while continuing to spend as little as possible on basic undergraduate education? Because I just described 90% of the “non-profit” colleges. But we have (some) _control_ over how state universities spend their budgets. We don’t exercise it, of course, but if enough people get pissed off about the phenomenon you describe (and it seems like there is some emerging awareness of this issue) we could. You have no control at all over what private colleges do, except in the loose sense that the Department of Education makes them comply with some guidelines. > [@](#): > > Apologies: I said “negative,” but meant “worse than the returns on putting the same amount of money in the market and four years of wages with a HS diploma.” i.e. a poor investment, in that if a private college Sociology major ROI is only ~20% ROI, you’re better off investing the money you would have borrowed, and earning $100k during those four years. Where, exactly, does a high school graduate get an unsecured $100,000 loan at 4.7% for something other than education? ---
**Author:** ![robert\_columbia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e79b87/32.png) [@robert\_columbia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/robert_columbia)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2014, 10:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-defense-of-lower-education/702409/47 "2014-10-30T22:39:16Z")
> [@furt](#): > > … > 2) Why the special scorn for for-profit schools?.. > [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](#): > > But we have (some) _control_ over how state universities spend their budgets. We don’t exercise it, of course, but if enough people get pissed off about the phenomenon you describe (and it seems like there is some emerging awareness of this issue) we could. You have no control at all over what private colleges do, except in the loose sense that the Department of Education makes them comply with some guidelines… But many private schools are non-profit, such as Harvard, MIT, and Notre Dame. They are not for-profit schools, but they are not state schools either. Both non-profit and for-profit private schools are regulated by the general regulatory laws in place in the jurisdictions in which they operate as well as the applicable accreditation agencies. For-profit schools like DeVry and the University of Phoenix are accredited. You could make an argument that their accreditation status should be reviewed, or that the accreditation agencies should increase surveillance and/or enforcement priorities, but that’s not the same thing as saying that there’s nothing that can be done to raise their standards. ---
**Author:** ![foolsguinea](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/foolsguinea/32/14751_2.png) [@foolsguinea](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/foolsguinea)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2014, 12:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-defense-of-lower-education/702409/48 "2014-11-03T00:26:23Z")
> [@cornopean](#): > > but you see…herein lies the problem. education subsidies may make you feel good. They make me feel good too. But the question is…do they really help further the cause of education or do they hinder it? lots of things that make us feel good, don’t actually do any good. > > If we think of this issue like an economist (synonym for “common sense”) then we know that when you subsidize things, the price is sure to rise. This is obvious b/c if the govt is paying for it, then the schools can raise prices far faster than normal market conditions would allow. and that is exactly what we see happening. Yikes. Save me from “common sense” economics, then. The question is how those subsidies work. If we’re lending money to students (raising demand) instead of building more capacity (raising supply) then prices will go up. But if subsidies were geared toward increasing supply and not raising ultimate cost to the student, then prices would go down. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-defense-of-lower-education/702409.md?page=2)