I’d suggest we need to quit dicking around pretending it’s not so and make it an economic reality. Want basic - and I mean basic, but complete - economic support? Here. Now go away and quit bothering the government and society. You can claim a job any time you want to move up from basic. Or not. Have fun.
[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
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.
[/QUOTE]
We could just go to direct-brain programming. Employers would develop “job chips” that plug into a cortical jack and anyone wearing a particular chip would be an idealized worker for that job. If you get fired for some reason, leave your chip at the door for the next candidate.
Completely eliminates all that educational disconnect and about 90% of the need for education past middle school, but produces nearly 100% universal worker/job match. Perfect solution.
I’d say the peacock can survive a long time.
It can’t keep going up, sure. But it’s just as possible that it will stall out at a certain level, and then stay there.
Awesome. Exactly as you described it. Thank you, I didn’t know that.
I continue to agree that the tail can’t keep getting more extravagant. That doesn’t mean it will go away.
Hmmm.
Thank you for taking the time to make the argument. I don’t really know what to make of it right now. I’m a ruminator. I will have to chew on it. It would be pretty damn awesome if you’re right, and I’m inherently distrustful of anything I think is too awesome. But you make a case, and I will definitely consider it.
I’ll agree with you when it comes to the Ivy League. There are just too many powerful people today who gain advantage from that signal, and too many powerful monied interests who rely on it. That’s not going away any time soon.
I’m more interested in how the kid down the street in Plano Texas signals to a local firm that he’s qualified to do the job.
Maybe… But part of the problem there is that the costs haven’t gone up because of supply increases of professors. If they had, then the problem could be solved by simply cutting the number of professors as demand falls. But the costs of this model have been absorbed largely into new infrastructure and administration, and those are notoriously hard to reduce.
I’ve been thinking more today about what kind of signalling we might see in the future, and it occurs to me that some of it is already taking place in the form of self-signalling through personal achievement. For example, programmers are improving their resumes and increasing their status in their community through participation in large open-source software projects. Writers and musicians are replacing the signals of institutions with direct proof of their quality by addressing their audience directly on Youtube, blogs, etc. A number of now-famous writers built their audiences with blogs, then turned to their blog readers to purchase their first books.
Nate Silver parlayed his own success in baseball forecasting by creating his own blog, and then using the success of that to leap onto the editorial pages of the New York Times.
Artists are doing this too. Tumblr, sites like DeviantArt. Photographers as well. You don’t need a degree in fine art or a diploma from a prestigious school of photography when you can provide hard evidence of your ability directly to the mass market.
There are singers and other performers who have very high status simply on the basis of the numbers of plays their material gets on Youtube. A number of them have turned that into major careers, but for many they’re making a living just off of advertising revenue from being popular on Youtube.
Then there are job sites like Monster.com, which are constantly innovating ways to connect employers to employees, and professional communications tools like Linked-in which are building networks of people who gain status through the associations they make when linking together with other professionals.
Like most market mechanisms, we’re seeing many different ways of achieving these ends being tried at once. Most will fail or have marginal utility, but some will become popular. The competition will learn from them and improve the model. Maybe there won’t be one ‘signaling mechanism’, but a host of them tailored to different job markets and social needs.
I’d already been under the impression that lawyers tended to either get into prestigious law firms or a strip mall storefront practice, but this tends to confirm it.
Better call Saul!
I remember standing in line at a post office and this guy behind me answers his mobile phone with, “Law Office.” I had to wonder.
Virtual offices are becoming pretty common in solo practice. Now that you can be paperless there’s really very little point in having A Building unless there’s more than one of you.
I think it will because the balance of power in the world will shift away from America - and as such will shift away from institutions that are purely American. Also, with new technology, there are new kinds of recruitment happening - for example, recruitment methods for computer programmers now sometimes involve scouring the internet sites visited by hackers and looking at certain key indicators of ability. 14% of google employees have no college degree. Also, with newer and more sophisticated ways of analysing performance, the pomp and circumstance of an Ivy League education may not hold as much weight. But then again, these institutions have held a high degree of importance for a very very long time as far as institutions go.
That’s exactly right. Proxies are only necessary when you don’t have access to the raw data. You don’t need the indirect signalling of a college degree if you have direct evidence of someone’s ability.
Colleges provide a bunch of stuff which MOOC’s would struggle to match:
-
Facetime with professors to help improve your skills.
-
Opportunities to build your network, improve your social skills and work on interesting projects with other students and professors
-
A structure which provides discipline: classes, assignment, exams etc.
-
Physical facilities like labs, high-end equipment etc.
I suspect most colleges will fend off the MOOC threat by doing these things better rather than disappearing.
This may be true at small colleges and in graduate programs, but at my university the undergraduate courses looked like warehouses, and the professors tended to isolate themselves from undergrads through layers of teaching assistants. I think the total ‘face time’ I got with an actual professor in university was less than 10 hours over four years. Mind you, I was in the hard sciences in a big public university - it might be different for other faculties and schools.
Now, the 2-year college I went to first was much different. Our instructors there hung out with us for beers, engaged in bull sessions in the cafeteria, and made themselves available to the students in a number of ways. I learned a lot of the practical skills of engineering from those guys outside of class.
Maybe, but again I think this depends on the school. Between foreign students and people traveling from across the country to go to my school, the ability to network was pretty limited. I did make some life-long friends, though. And I don’t underestimate the social aspect - it’s important. But it’s not important enough to bankrupt yourself over.
This is the biggest one. The dropout rate for MOOC classes is still very high. I think any alternative education system is going to have to figure out how to provide that structure and motivation.
Given a high enough participation rate in MOOCs, I can see the market adapting to this in the same way that home schooling has created new ways for those kids to socialize and gain access to facilities. I could see commercial ‘student lab’ facilities opening to provide access to necessary equipment. Perhaps the best online organizations will partner with companies that have a network of physical presence. Hell, back before it became another phone store, I could see a company like Radio Shack expanding into providing electronic lab facilities. I believe its parent company, Tandy Leather, did something like that with crafts.
Thinking about that more, this model already exists. There’s a chain of sewing machine stores in my province that provides sewing classes and the store I was in had a ‘lab’ with what looked like a classroom with 15 or so sewing machines set up in it. The ‘Michaels’ art stores also have classrooms and offer courses in everything from painting to pottery. In the mall nearest me there is a high-school prep company that maintains some labs for the science courses.
I could easily see an online art program partnering with a chain like that to provide hands-on instruction to supplement online work. For that matter, DeVry technical institute was started by Bell and Howell as a way to train workers for its own company. I could see corporate partnerships with companies that need tech talent like HP, GE, Siemens, Microsoft, etc.
Maybe. I think it’s likely that they open up their own MOOC campuses and use their existing facilities as a competitive advantage over other startups. But the big problem there is I’m not sure their financial model can compete. I was looking at an online course from a traditional university, and they were trying to charge their standard tuition, near as I could tell. I could take the same course from another provider for $200, but the university wanted something like $3,000. That’s not going to fly, but their cost structure is such that they might not be able to charge much less without poaching from their regular tuition, and they can’t afford that.
People keep complaining that unemployment is around 6%-7%. I can’t believe that someone is actually willing to pay 93% of the morons out there to do something.
And yet Stanford, MIT, Berkley and Carnegie Melon are some of the top schools Google recruits out of.
This is exactly right. Tech workers tend to over-estimate the value of their technical services. One of my tech guys was arguing with me about how critical they are compared to the “suits” in management. If that is the case, why do all the suits like me (account and project managers) live and work in Manhattan making six figures while the critical tech workers all live in developing countries making pennies on the dollar? The reason is that for centuries, the trend has been to replace complex, high-end technical skills with automation that can be operated by a low-end technician. Think of replacing a highly trained machinist with a machine that can be operated by a high school dropout (or a computer algorithm). But you can never automate or outsource the people who come up with the ideas, interact with customers or provide leadership.
I always ask myself this. For all their education and intelligence, Silicon Valley tech giants aside, why are most American tech workers working in crappy open-plan work spaces with cheapo Ikea desks and exposed pipes or in the bowels of giant corporate offices while lawyers, finance guys, management types and other white collar professions seem to work in nice offices with real office furniture?
I did some research and it turns out that Judge Dredd is a comic book and not a dissertation by some economics professor.
Because capitalism is a fundamentally corrupt and oppressive mode of socioeconomic organization that gives exaggerated rewards for vice and socially-destructive behavior.
And what makes you think most lawyers, finance guys, and managers sit amongst nice office furniture? I’ve worked with ordinary finance guys and managers and quite a lot of them are sitting at shitty IKEA desks. My lawyer’s office is nothing special.
Must of this has to do with culture; it’s why I know many independent IT consultants who wear Ralph Lauren drive BMWs but struggle to make payments, while the most successful consultant I know drives a Mazda 5, never wears a suit and has a bank account that would make Scrooge McDuck jealous; the fancy desk is somethign many lawyers think they need. A guy who owns a fancy desk might think he needs it for “appearances,” while some companies realize that IKEA desks are, frankly, just as likely to hold your laptop up as an expensive one.
That’s paradise compared to factory jobs 100 years ago.
Because most tech workers aren’t as superficial as most finance guys? Or, maybe they’re superficial in other ways.
ETA: I’m one of those tech workers (or was). You’d never guess my net worth from the vehicle I drive, the shoes I wear, or the watch that is not on my wrist.
In times of low unemployment, such as the 2-3% we experienced a few years back and most service jobs were filled with utterly uncaring drones so stupid they couldn’t find the cash register, I was known to mutter that what this country needed was a 6% unemployment rate and a code duello.
A rate bouncing along just under 6% seems to mean that everyone who actually wants and qualifies for a job has one, while the useless dregs are home on their couches and employers don’t have to scrape the barrel to fill the lowest tier - or sometimes not-so-lowest tier.
Exactly. The way the human body is a fundamentally ill-designed machine that needs endless continual maintenance, is prone to frequent malfunction, has parts that wear out and fail long before others and promotes vice and socially-destructive behavior.
That must be why people have, for hundreds of years, fled non-capitalist countries to go to capitalist ones and not the other way round.
People keep thinking they have a better system, and whenever it’s tried, it doesn’t work. I’m sure your imaginary system is wonderful, too, on paper.
What is this idea based on? AFAIK the Scandanavian countries have some the highest standards of living in the world and they are heavily socialist. A large part of the reason people choose to go to one country over another is which country will let them in at all, not the one with the best standard of living or most desirable.