Well, that didn’t make any sense. I meant I have no idea what schools my co-workers went to.
We’re doing God’s work, just like Blankfein.
I don’t know about others but I know I almost never read a post more than two or three brief paragraphs. As far as reaching me is concerned, then, they are a waste of time.
Regarding one of the briefer statements above that I did read, who says markets never fail? They fail all the time. That is why we have poverty and financial crises and all sorts of news. I would also say that the US is every bit as socialist as most countries and a lot more so than some, although I don’t think that is all that terrible.
Your loss, then.
I don’t get people who will follow a thread but won’t read entire posts.
Additional leisure time and excess productive capacity aren’t a bad thing. They’re how we were able to develop worked tools, the wheel, pottery, writing, animal husbandry… The trick is merely ensuring that people who can Invent Things are the ones with the time to do so. It’ll work itself out.
Perhaps we need a new rule that limits posts to 140 characters.
I don’t know about you, but I find that any story with more than 140 characters should really be broken up into two volumes or a trilogy. I can’t keep track of that many people.
I’d concur only in the limited sense that most posts that go on more than about three paragraphs tend to be mind-bogglingly illogical, obsessed or vague. I prize the long-form, sustained discussion here above all else online, but there are those who can communicate effectively and those who just empty their minds into the edit window.
If you say so. I’ve skimmed the endless posts in this thread and most could be a quarter that length without losing much. See above. It’s worse when you get a battle of length, as if throwing arguments by the kiloword makes them more effective. (They’re not. Or rarely at best.)
Get thee behind me, twit.
The problem is that once a signaling system is in place, it becomes extraordinarily difficult to dislodge it. There’s a self-perpetuating element. To deliberately work outside the system is to be punished by it.
You say with complete truth that a hundred years is a long time, but this very thread is about forces that have driven the economy for at least twice that long without changing, and which we have no good reason to believe will change in the near future. Well, education as it now exists doesn’t have the same long previous history, so naturally we have to be less confident, but there are still certain markers of stability written all over it. This status symbol has become important, and that automatically reinforces itself. The people who opt out are announcing to the world their non-conformity. They start with an inherent disadvantage. Average to high-quality students have every reason to continue with the status quo.
That doesn’t mean it’s impossible to change. If the story of those huge antlers is true, sometimes animals like the Irish Elk go the extinction route because the cost becomes too great. But that’s not a universal, not always the case. It’s very possible for a wasteful equilibrium to have long-term stability. How long has the peacock been strutting its stuff?
I agree that there’s a disconnect between employers looking for symbols in order to discriminate, and the desire for everyone to collect the same symbol.
But since I’ve never advocated that everyone should collect the same symbol, your very true point applies to nothing that I’ve said.
What I’ve been saying, repeatedly, is that I don’t see the system changing. Peacock feathers are wasteful, but the damn bird didn’t go extinct. It was evidently a stable equilibrium even before humans started keeping them. I’m not married to this position, but your arguments are just as unconvincing to me as the automation-leads-to-unemployment fears.
I strongly doubt what you say you know. At very least, I’m not going to take your word on it. I’d actually want to see this double-humped distribution that you know is true. Pareto distributions are way more common, and they’re still a nice sliding spectrum. No bifurcation.
I believe you that the tools now exist.
I just don’t think people will use them. I think the status issues will remain more important. This stuff is much more central to the ego than what book to buy.
So I’m just going to challenge you in the same way that I challenge all the people who think automation will lead to massive unemployment. When? When, specifically, will it happen? How do you think the process will proceed? What will be the ultimate effects on the university system in your estimation? Be as specific as possible. You’ve got the best audience in the world for this, if you can make the argument, because this is something that I would seriously enjoy watching. But distinguish yourself from the others in this thread and provide specifics with a timeline.
I’m not asking you lay money down on your predictions. I just need to see a plausible argument, cause and effect, that would dislodge what we have. You start to outline a program, but I don’t need to know about the program. I know what’s possible on that score. I need to see the incentives of average to high-quality students, who would somehow be enticed into this alternate system rather than going with the sure thing they already have. This can’t be the random lightning strike of a successful startup. It has be scalable, a potential for a mass movement of people who successfully circumvent the current gatekeepers to achieve enviable success so dazzlingly fast that college juniors at StateU are sick with themselves that they didn’t take the same route. (And yes, I mean StateU, not an Ivy.)
It’s a tall challenge, in my eyes. To work outside the current setup conveys non-conformity. The best candidates will be wary of announcing their own tendency to go against the rules, especially when dealing with the very companies they hope to work for. This is a big hurdle when trying to outline a network effect reaching critical mass. The network is less valuable when it’s a small system, and it will stay a small system if average candidates are uninterested. I tell you I’ve run through all sorts of scenarios in my head, and I’ve never been able to tell myself a story that I believe. And this is when I genuinely want to see something, anything happen.
I see you maintain your tendency to be so eager to make a point that you throw as many arguments out as you can without any regard for how they contradict each other.
If supply is fixed with ever growing demand, then they don’t need new facilities to attract more students with all that federal cash. They would just milk their present capacity and save the expense. The very fact that they’re making the whole thing more enticing with all those wonderful toys necessarily means that there’s competition for students. Straight cause and effect there. Injection of money increasing costs? Yes, that is an issue. That one is correct. (It doesn’t negate my own point, but at least it’s right.) And if I’m right and college were tilted a bit more toward status than learning… we should expect more money to increase costs without any real benefit. There’s no place substantive where all that money can go.
I said 20% earlier, but which I meant a fifth of the effort they put in is useful effort. I actually think that’s a reasonably good estimate for the average student.
Oh come now.
There’s a huge difference between evaluating a current employee and evaluating a prospect. You know this, you’ve mentioned it yourself. Someone who has passed the bar has demonstrated knowledge of the law, sure, but they have not at all demonstrated that they’re going to be a good lawyer. When people are first hired, actual effectiveness is what employers want. And it’s still very much an issue within a company when people change positions. Think Peter Principle. Someone who has done a good job at their present position won’t necessarily hack it when they move up the ladder, and that limit to their competency will be a total mystery until it’s too late. There are always unknowns when dealing with evaluating people.
I have spent every post I’ve written on this topic so far saying our current system is a bad thing.
Literally every post.
I called signaling wasteful. I pointed out its ill effects. I said that it would be better if it could be undermined. I just don’t think automation/computerization is going to do jack shit about it, because this is a much deeper issue. I also said, repeatedly, that I would be happy to be wrong about my pessimism but given the weakness of your arguments, there is no reason for me change my position on this.
Status seeking makes education more wasteful, but it won’t be replaced anytime soon. That’s where I stand.
Everybody else is influenced by them, either directly or (much more often) indirectly. If I’m trying to explain why all the dominoes fell, then yes, I’m going to start by pointing my finger firmly at the first one in the row.
It’s not an attempt at total emulation. It’s influence. Community colleges aren’t trying to mimic top universities, but they still feel the tug of the system. There’s nothing inherently good about having the same institution that teaches students be the institution that evaluates students. But how many community colleges separate those functions? They integrate following the general design. Curriculum is also strongly affected. If a new community college opens in your town, and they start enrolling for a macro course, then whose textbook are they most likely to use? It’s not total emulation at that level, it’s just influence, but that influence exists.
For another strong example, very soon the top university in Japan (Toudai, Tokyo University) is likely to shift to fall enrollment. When they do, every single other national university is going to follow suit like dominoes. Other regional universities will follow the national universities they compete most closely with. It’s possible that their local community college equivalents will resist the change, but they might shift, too, and there’s also an outside shot that even primary and secondary school calendars will eventually shift to fall enrollment. This isn’t just my estimation, it’s view of a friend of mine who is a professor at one of the national universities. He is certain his university will shift to match Toudai. He is similarly certain that the regional competition will then follow, too.
Practically nobody in the country wants to do this outside of Toudai, but the influence from the top will be felt.
“Status doesn’t matter, because outside of the place where it matters most, it doesn’t matter.”
If no one gives a shit outside of the first hire, then why is the first hire important? Minimum standards for the first hire sure look like a status hurdle to me. If the meritocracy is so pure, then you should be able to scoop up high school juniors who are bored of the drudgery and looking for some opportunity. The meritocracy takes over, everybody receives their marginal product, rainbows suddenly have one extra color not previously perceived, and it’s all good. That’s meritocracy. They get credits as they need them, not toward a degree but for specific skills. The degree shouldn’t matter in the slightest. Only the skills. If there’s one last class that you need to graduate, but it’s irrelevant to the job, then it can be dropped without cost.
Fantasy. Total fantasy.
I should hardly have to tell you that’s not how it works in the real world. Completion of the degree is the sign of status, and there are huge rewards to earning that piece of paper, far beyond the marginal benefit of one last class to fulfill the requirements. There is a huge jump between what you can earn after three and a half years of schooling, compared to four. This would simply not be true in a meritocratic system with adequate transmission of information about applicant quality. The fact is that the quality of school is going to influence the first hire. The first hire is going to influence the first salary. And during the application process for the next job, they’re often going to ask about your current salary. Companies tend to ask about previous pay when hiring. (It’s another proxy for quality.) Written job descriptions don’t say nearly enough, but that number helps a bit. You don’t have to ask my ivory-towered ass about this, RickJay will tell you the same thing. Companies ask about previous salary because that number conveys some real information. Imperfect but real.
Maybe your company is different, maybe yours is the meritocratic exception. But I don’t particularly believe it. Obviously there are meritocratic elements in any successful company. It couldn’t be otherwise. But these elements are balanced by status symbols, coalition politics, primitive tribal monkey behavior we hardly notice because it’s so utterly instinctive we think it’s the only way the world can possibly work.
There’s been a decent amount of empirical work done on wages within organizations, and wage parity is a major structural issue, both for firms to attract talent from the outside and also fairness within the company. People care intensely about relative pay levels within an organization because that’s the new important status marker that shows up after the hiring is over. In addition, going down in pay is much more rare than going up. A good college will give a strong boost for the beginning of that new game. I don’t dispute that the college matters much less after the first hire, but that’s just an admission that it does matter to get that foot in the door, and it does matter with how much you get paid when the first round of the career game begins. Some people start the game with a leg up based on the piece of paper they carry. This should not be a surprise.
Then you’re being very silly.
Nobody gives a shit about the Ivies where I came from. Too distant. Total non-entity. Obviously it wouldn’t hurt, but it would be nothing special either. Name dropping would be totally counterproductive, like they were insecure little babies. But status is still an issue. People still judge themselves by their closest peers, so it’s still a thing whether you went to the local college or went to StateU. It’s no mystery that StateU graduates are on average going to land better in-state jobs than kiddies from the smaller regional colleges. If someone went off to a major private school and then came back, they’d be treated well but likely little better than the average state graduate. It would make no special difference, especially long term. That’s the world as you understand it.
But status is like clicking on the first link in Wikipedia articles. If you start at a random article and keep clicking, very quickly you’re going to end up at philosophy. This is true for the vast majority of articles. Philosophy is the high status article.
You don’t give a shit about any of this. There’s no reason for you to. Your article is ten clicks away from philosophy on the Wiki. It’s a non-entity. Doesn’t matter. But you’re simply blind if you think you don’t end up at philosophy after ten clicks. You’re just oblivious. Lots of people don’t care about generic status symbols – lots of articles are ten clicks away from the Lexus, and the Patek Philippe, and the house that’s the largest on the block – but among the people who compulsively click through those links, there is absolutely an established hierarchy. I didn’t pick Ted Cruz’s name on a lark. Obviously he’s an extreme example. Extreme examples seem to really bother you for some reason. Almost all of my examples are extreme, but they have to be extreme to drive the point home because otherwise you ignore them. Then you go the opposite route and start saying that I’m overstating my case. I’m not. I’ve been very careful with my assertions. This kind of stuff matters to people. When he was at Harvard Law, Cruz started a study group that would only admit people who had graduated from Harvard, Yale, or Princeton with good GPAs (he had include the third school, or he would have cut himself out of the running). “Lesser Ivies” weren’t allowed. This story was confirmed independently by at least two students who went to school with him.
Most people aren’t like this, not this extreme. I’m not even sure Ted Cruz is like this anymore. He might have been overcompensating when younger out of heightened sensitivity to his relatively humble origins compared to fellow students. But the monster of insecurity inside him has miniature cousins in nearly everyone else. Most of us care only about the first link. Not only do we not care about clicking through to philosophy, we often make a reverse status symbol about our lack of desire in clicking through, as you did in your last post. By making a big deal about how little we care, we assert our plain-spoken humble prudent non-extravagant virtues. I probably do this even more than you do, in different contexts.
And this is exactly why it’s so silly to claim that we don’t arrive at philosophy/Rolls Royce/Omega/Yale after ten clicks. If that were true, we wouldn’t make such a big deal about how it’s not a big deal.
Actually my gain; think of the time I save.
Jesus, guys. Get a lecture hall.
Nah. We already tried that.
No one’s forcing you to read.
Yeah? Come the Socialist revolution, pal. Come the revolution.
Seriously, I’m just suggesting there’s a law of diminishing returns in trying to take turns writing an entire socioeconomics paper with a dozen quotes in each post. I’ve read most of the thread and the arguments are wearing thin… applying a dozen coats does not make them thicker.
But never mind me.
Back to the OP, for those who think that danger is looming when do you expect the problem to manifest itself? fisha believes a revolution is upcoming; when? Agnostic Pagan believes that a crisis of unemployment is coming; when?
I would say “never.” (With the qualification that events that could spark some form of a “workers’ revolt” or “employment revolt” could strike without warning but are unlikely.)
We are in the same kind of volatile time as the late 1930s, the late 1950s, the early 1970s, 2001-2, and now 2008 or so to present. Earlier incidences (1890s-1920) spawned the rise of Communism and Socialist in Europe and the US; both largely faded away outside of Russia, where the conditions are entrenched. The later eras were not sustained or fertile enough for major political and socioeconomic upheaval - the 30s were an aftershock of earlier movements, supported by the dominance of the movement in the Soviet Union.
While we have a large body of displaced and disaffected workers because of the economic upheavals of the last five years, the pressures are rapidly dissipating. It’s nowhere near “revolution” conditions except among those with too much time to jaw about it in [del]taverns[/del] [del]soup lines[/del] [del]coffeehouses[/del] online discussions.
Nuthin’ new here.
One work of dystopian fiction which anticipated this problem is the 2000 AD/Judge Dredd comics. In the Megacities intelligent robots do almost all real work, so over 90% of the population are totally dependent on the state. The only exceptions are the Judges themselves, a handful of tech scientists, and a mostly parasitic class of marketeers competing for welfare creds.
Interesting. I didn’t know enough about the Dreddiverse to realize that.
It is an entirely possible future, certain things about Judges aside. (A largely supported population with few actual workers and managers.)
How’s your proletariat these days, anyway? 
Most of the people who have ever lived **would perceive that to already be the case **in a modern, industrialized country. To a farmer or herder in (name any period prior to three hundred years ago or so) most jobs people do today would strike them as being preposterously silly, easy, and superfluous to any reasonable human need. The idea people could call management consulting, quality systems auditing, or almost anything to do with financial services “work” would be met with amazement. When on top of this there exist a sufficient number of safety nets that a person can get the necessities of life even if they can’t work, they’d think we hardly work at all.
What will almost certainly happen in the future is that as we need fewer of some jobs, we will simply invent new jobs. In the film “Her” the main character’s job is writing personal letters for people who aren’t good at writing personal letters, a job that probably exists today but is pretty unusual, and which 50 years ago would have struck most people as absurdly stupid and wasteful. Fifty years from now that might well be a common service, affordable because automation makes it so cheap and easy to have other things.
But what it means is that the signalling model is breaking down. Something will rise up to replace it. We don’t know what that is, and the market will decide, but something’s going to fill that vacuum, wouldn’t you agree?
Do you agree that there’s a bubble in education? Something that can’t continue…won’t. The middle class is being priced out of higher education, and the ‘solution’ so far has been to make more student loans available - which makes the problem worse but kicks the damage from it down the road a few years. That can’t continue either. At some point, the current system is facing a restructuring.
Bimodal Lawyers: How extreme competition breeds extreme inequality
In particular, look at this graph.
Oh, status will remain important. I agree with you on that. I just don’t think it’s going to be determined by whether or not you went to Harvard.
Okay, I’ll give it a shot. Amateur Barbarian, this might get long, so this would be a good time to check out.
First of all, I’ll preface this by saying that I have really no idea what the real future of education will look like, and neither does anyone else. But we can talk about the problems of the current system, and what market forces are doing to it, and we can see a glimmering of where the market is going.
A couple of damning trends:
Student loan debt is growing at a rapid pace - it has grown 20% from the end of 2011 to May 2013, and is now about 1.2 trillion dollars. That makes it the largest form of consumer debt, and the growth rate is clearly unsustainable. cite. That’s actually a conservative estimate because it doesn’t include things like families mortgaging houses to pay for college education.
In the meantime, the cost of a college education has increased much faster than either GDP growth or inflation. Since 1985, the overall consumer price index has risen 115% while the college education inflation rate has risen nearly 500%. During that time, family income has increased by 147%. Cite
This would all be okay if the value of a college degree was increasing by a similar amount. But it isn’t. Or rather, students are not choosing the college educations that have the highest value. The incentive model of deferred pain of payment through student loan guarantees, coupled with social pressure to go to college and colleges responding by turning their campuses into college fun time is resulting in more people than ever going to college, but no more of them are equipped or qualified for the hard sciences than they were before.
So the bulk of the increase in college is going to programs like communications, psychology, journalism and fine arts. In the meantime, we’re graduating about the same number of computing science majors as we did in the 1980’s, despite growing demand.
Here’s a Canadian study showing the rising cost of education is increasingly coupled with declining education premium: Degrees of Success: The Payoff to Higher Education in Canada. I believe the same trends are roughly the same in the U.S.
There is a really damning set of charts on page 4 of that report. One of them ranks degree majors by income, and another shows the growth rate in the various majors. The worst degrees in terms of income are Psychology and the Humanities. In Canada, almost 50% of college grads with those majors are earning below median incomes.
And yet, what are the faculties experiencing the largest growth? Commerce, the Humanities, and Psychology. In the meantime, the faculties that have the highest wage premium - Math, Computer Science, and the physical sciences, are experiencing negative growth.
There is a fundamental disconnect there - the result of the perverse incentives of the current model.
So there’s the problem: College costs are skyrocketing while the value of a college degree is declining. The gap is being made up by student loans and other borrowing, which is also skyrocketing. The incentives baked into the current model are actually incentivizing students to see degrees that are least in demand and causing a decline in students going into degree programs most in need.
These trends simply can’t continue. Something has to break somewhere. Do you agree?
We’re already seeing the first troubling signs of the bubble popping - colleges playing shenanigans with job placement statistics, rising student loan default rates, higher youth unemployment, and most importantly for this argument, the beginning of a shift to alternative education sources - primarily online.
So that’s the problem statement. How about a solution? Is the traditional college model being supplanted?
Growth in online learning becoming biggest threat to traditional colleges and universities
2013 outlook for growth in online education
This makes total sense to me. Think about how antiquated the current model is when it comes to providing high quality education to the masses. Sure, it’s great to have an in-person lecture from a world-class professor like you might get at Harvard. But the quality of in-class lectures from a state U or other smaller facility varies wildly. And what a waste of resources to have the world’s best professor only able to reach a few hundred students per year at most.
What does it do to the signalling model when a student who goes to State U learns from mediocrities, while an online student is learning from a Richard Feynman or a Paul Samuelson? A MOOC model (massive online courses) can expose the mass of students to the greatest minds. Furthermore, the economies of scale can simultaneously dramatically lower the cost of education while providing higher salaries to the best professors, attracting more of our best people to education.
The other huge advantage of this model is that it can be measured, which is needed to drive improvement. Even at Harvard you can wind up taking classes from lousy teachers. The overall degree masks the relative quality of the individual courses within in, which makes it harder to spot improvements. In the MOOC model, the class size is such that you can develop some pretty good metrics, and by breaking down institutional walls it becomes easier to identify the best courses and sift out the worst.
So that’s my basic prediction: The current model is breaking down, while at the same time the advantages of moving online are overwhelming, even if they aren’t being realized today.
My other ideas stem from this: If people move online and can pick and choose coursework across institutions, the old signalling model has to be replaced by a new signalling model that is more granular and targeted. Rather than my status being signalled by a degree from Harvard, it might be signalled by my educational rating of 93.7, that being determined by a combination of the grades I got, the difficulty of the courses I took, or the fact that I took the courses that lead to the most hiring by the best firms. Or perhaps there will be multiple signals - someone looking for an engineer might choose a different subset of courses from my matrix as someone looking for a manager, and the new system would allow that kind of deep dive into my qualifications.
Or perhaps there will be some completely different model for signalling that replaces the old one. Perhaps we’ll develop competitions (“Winner of the Siemens Engineering thinker award in 2018!”), or some other currently unknown mechanism.
So I obviously can’t predict the exact form a new educational system will take, but the broad outlines are that it moves online, that education becomes more granular and less tied to specific institutions and degree programs, and that the resulting change in signalling will probably bring employers and other vested interests into the process.
As for the incentives driving this: A big one is the growing disconnect between what current colleges are teaching and what the market needs. We currently have a huge number of unemployed college graduates, while at the same time a number of industries are facing crises due to their inability to find qualified applicants for the jobs. There’s just too much of a disconnect between the incentives students are facing and the real needs of the job market.
As more and more people seek non-traditional education because of rising costs and poor outcomes in the traditional system, employers are going to be forced to look at them. And that in turn will drive the need to develop new ways to signal educational achievement.