Prometheus 6

The Biggest Gamble of Your Life (Is College Worth it?)

In 2005, young people (ages 18-25) in the US gambled $67 billion. Not in Vegas or online poker rooms, but on a betterment program called college. Their hope is that the monies they are spending will allow them to earn more money over their lifetime. Many are paying for this wager by amassing a mountain of debt that will take years to pay off. Is it a good wager? Conventional wisdom says so, but with $67 billion on the line (and that's debt accumulated in just one year by college attendees) we should have more than conventional wisdom or parental pressures to guide the way to smart economic decisions. REEF’s economic analysis shows that college is a financial mistake for more than half of the American young people today. Shielded from scrutiny in this transaction by an assumption of 'public good' are universities and college lenders who many expect to provide guidance to these young people. While the data hints at ways for some individuals to improve the odds of a positive financial outcome, half the people attending college should hear the frank counter-intuitive advice, "Don't go to college."

There was a time when an education was a social decoration more than anything else. Where being educated meant knowing the things society had deemed sufficient to impress. Because the rate of change seems to have accelerated, training to a specific set of facts seems less important than learning how to reason.

Here come the influence of the weird mood.

The first time I wrote up a job requisition, by manager said I did well, but should require a bachelor's degree. I didn't have one. Still don't. Most of the staff didn't. But unemployment was high, and we used it to cut the number of applicants to a manageable level.

The guy who wrote the linked piece dropped it on that media mailing list (Pho, if it matters). Someone said something about how an autodidact with a broadband connection could do fine without college.

All that discussion is about the arbitrary value of an education within the system (or the subsystem of the system) you inhabit, but says nothing about the value of an education system to the system.

Because THIS system takes a lot of maintainence, by methods that themselves take support. Much of what we are came into being only because we have made knowledge broadly available. It changed the nature of the ground, the agreements by which we interact. You need a lot of people with a lot of non-intuitive knowledge to keep it all running.

And conflating the value of an education within the system, with the need for an education system that freely accessible to all makes for scintilating conversation.