Against Higher Education

Townhall.com ^ | May 23, 2018 | John Stossel

[Kaslin]

Today, all Americans are told, "Go to college!"

President Obama said, "College graduation has never been more valuable."

But economist Bryan Caplan says that most people shouldn't go.

"How many thousands of hours did you spend in classes studying subjects that you never thought about again?" he asks.

Lots, in my case. At Princeton, I learned to live with strangers, play cards and chase women, but I slept through boring lectures, which were most of them. At least tuition was only $2,000. Now it's almost $50,000.

"People usually just want to talk about the tuition, which is a big deal, but there's also all the years that people spend in school when they could have been doing something else," points out Caplan in my new YouTube video.

"If you just take a look at the faces of students, it's obvious that they're bored," he says. "People are there primarily in order to get a good job."

That sounds like a good reason to go to college. But Caplan, in his new book, "The Case Against Education," argues that there's little connection between what we absorb in college and our ability to do a job.

"It's totally true that when people get fancier degrees their income generally goes up," concedes Caplan, but "the reason why this is happening is not that college pours tons of job skills into you. The reason is ... a diploma is a signaling device."

It tells employers that you were smart enough to get through college.

But when most everyone goes to college, says Caplan, "You just raise the bar. Imagine you're at a concert, and you want to see better. Stand up and of course you'll see better. But if everyone stands up, you just block each other's views."

That's why today, he says, high-end waiters are expected to have college degrees.

"You aren't saying: you, individual, don't go to college," I interjected."You're saying we as a country are suckers to subsidize it."

"Exactly," replied Caplan. "Just because it is lucrative for an individual doesn't mean it's a good idea for a country."

Caplan says if students really want to learn, they can do it without incurring tuition debt.

"If you want to go to Princeton, you don't have to apply," he points out. "Just move to the town and start attending classes."

That's generally true. At most schools you can crash college lectures for free. But almost no one does that.

"In people's bones, they realize that what really counts is that diploma," concludes Caplan.

Because that diploma is now usually subsidized by taxpayers, college costs more. Tuition has risen at triple the rate of inflation.

It's not clear students learn more for their extra tuition, but colleges' facilities sure have gotten fancier. They compete by offering things like luxurious swimming pools and gourmet dining. That probably won't help you get a job.

"If you're doing computer science or electrical engineering, then you probably are actually learning a bunch of useful skills," Caplan says. But students now often major in abstract topics like social justice, diversity studies, multicultural studies.

"But don't the liberal arts expand people's minds?" I asked. Philosophy? Literature? Isn't it all making our brains work better?

"That's the kind of thing you expect teachers to say," answered Caplan. "There's a whole field of people who have actually studied this (and) they generally come away after looking at a lot of evidence saying, 'Wow, actually it's wishful thinking.'"

A study found that a third of people haven't detectably learned anything after four years in college.

Although Caplan thinks college is mostly a scam, he says there's one type of person who definitely benefits -- professors like him.

"I'm a tenured professor," he said. "A tenured professor cannot be fired. ... You got a nice income and there are almost no demands upon your time."

Professor Caplan is only expected to teach for five hours a week.

I told him that sounded like a government-subsidized rip-off.

"Yeah. Well, I'm a whistleblower," replied Caplan.

[DoughtyOne]

I bought a TRS-80 when they first came out.

It had 8K (I believe it was K vs MB) of main memory.

The computer came with a book explaining Basic.

I’d write small programs and save them to audio tape.

You had to load your program each time you turned on the computer.

I learned how to program in basic. I then learned how to program in Mumps, Mis, or today M.

I haven’t dabbled in other languages, but I don’t think it would be that difficult. Once you understand the concepts in programming, it should be pretty straight forward.

You learn the commands and use them to achieve the same results you did in other languages. Of course the other languages would be more robust/complex.

The point is, you don’t necessarily need a teach hanging over your head.

I literally hated sitting in a classroom and listening to a teacher prattle on and on and on and on...

Give me a book and a machine and I’ll learn at my own pace, and frankly a lot faster. It didn’t take me months to learn how to program. It took me days. I believe more complex languages would have taken me weeks, but I wouldn’t have had to spend hour after hour in a classroom bored to death. I wouldn’t have had to spend years getting a degree. I wouldn’t have had to go broke in the process.

[poconopundit]

And you know what? Programming is awful fun!

Don’t know why it is, but writing some code and seeing a result of your thinking seemed cool. Even today is does.

I remember those days with the double floppy disks. Kids today have no idea what that was. Audio tape? Well, that was before my time on PCs.

The other thing I discovered is that computing became more fun when you had a “practical application” for your coding.

I created a PC-based website management system which I regularly use in my journalist/industry analyst work. In creating that, it forced me to learn more about HTML and CSS.

But then, when I got on Free Republic, I had to go back to the older generation of HTML when you had no style sheets. LOL!

But it was fun trying new things with that. So I guess the human mind enjoys a challenge. Much better use of time than playing cards on-line.

[poconopundit]

Dave, you are blessed with a hardworking and intelligent life partner. Great to read your story. I am also blessed with a wonderful wife who has stayed with me in all my failings and dumb moves in life.

I have not seen any recent FR stories about Nassim Taleb. But if you have not heard it yet, the best YouTube/podcast I have heard with Taleb is this one with Daniel Kahneman.

Check it out. Great insight and also a lot of fun and jokes interspersed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMBclvY_EMA

Cheers

[DoughtyOne]

Still to this day I appreciate the programs I wrote and used at work.

I was accomplishing things nobody else was in the day, because my programs were very very helpful.

In Southern California there was nobody doing what I was in my line of work. Folks were asking how I was doing that. LOL

Yes, it was a real pleasure to watch my programs crunch.

I use spread sheets a lot today.

One of the most enjoyable things I ever programmed was an Excel spreadsheet that would take a date a file and re-organize it it.

By hand it would take about 30-45 minutes to do. I wrote a Macro to handle the whole process once per month. It would accomplish the task in about thirty seconds.

Watching the Macro crunch and reformat the information on the screen was one of the most satisfying things I’ve ever created and then watched.

I’d run the program a number of times just to enjoy it again.

LOL

[poconopundit]

You know, once you get to a certain level of proficiency in Excel or other programming, it’s hard to instruct someone else to do the same thing. But there’s a good reason for that.

This is one of the advantages of your average American new collar worker. Familiarity with the machines you work with leads to great productivity: you are bridging your own knowledge of the particular business with the machine.

The danger is that a big software company comes along and automates processes, but doesn’t fully grasp all the business. And in that case you are dumbing down the business to shave headcount.

That’s when big failures occurs as it did with Lehmann Brothers.

[Grampa Dave]

“Dave, you are blessed with a hardworking and intelligent life partner. Great to read your story. I am also blessed with a wonderful wife who has stayed with me in all my failings and dumb moves in life.”

Amen! We are heading into 57 years of marriage. She is one of the most intelligent people I have ever met. That has been passed on to our adult children and grand kids. She started working a teenager doing all types of jobs to save money to help her parents put her through nursing school.

We both have different mental and physical skill sets and lot of good overlap. That has meant that between the two of we do great problem solving and followup to handle problems or opportunities.

That means when one of us is uncomfortable with something new or someone new in our life. We often listen to the other saying, “I have problems with this or this person!” The end result is we back away from endorsing the issue or person. That has save us a lot of misery, time and money.

You and I are both fortunate to have good women in our life.

Thanks for the heads up re Nassim Taleb. I have a few younger relatives and some our age, where I’m introducing them to the Intellectual Yet Idiot reality. It is amazing when their brains click with the reality of the IYI concept.

Thanks again and have a great weekend.

[Grampa Dave]

“Give me a book and a machine and I’ll learn at my own pace, and frankly a lot faster. It didn’t take me months to learn how to program. It took me days. I believe more complex languages would have taken me weeks, but I wouldn’t have had to spend hour after hour in a classroom bored to death. I wouldn’t have had to spend years getting a degree. I wouldn’t have had to go broke in the process.”

People like you, my siblings and younger relatives past the age of 21 are why the brick and mortar 4-? year college programs/degrees are in trouble and will be gone in about a decade.

[17th Miss Regt]

Yes, perhaps that's true. It may have "always been done this way," and while not ideal, that's the way it is.

Much of this is fallout from the Griggs vs. Duke Power decision. Companies used to be able to sit someone down and give them an aptitude test for the job for which they were applying. If one did well on the test it was evidence that they were qualified for the job. The court decision said that aptitude tests that had a 'disparate impact' on different groups were unconstitutional. So the hiring folks had to try something else to determine who was qualified to do a job. The college diploma was chosen as a substitute indicator of suitability.

[DoughtyOne]

I have observed the dynamic you speak of.

I’ve seen poorly written programs provided to people who had nothing at all, and then pushed on people who had much better programs, simply because so many of those who had nothing at all had jumped on board.

Of course the adoption of the inferior product was proof to some leaders who didn’t have a clue what was going on.

[DoughtyOne]

Once again, I agree with someone. Your right IMO.

I’ve been a big supporter of the idea apprenticeship would be far better at educating workers than college would be.

Even if you have a four or more year degree, what’s the first thing they do when you go to work? Why they train you of course.

Some fields require the additional years of knowledge, but many don’t.

[poconopundit]

Regarding Intellectual Yet Idiot, you may be interested in reading a vanity I wrote during the 2016 campaign entitled:

H. L. Mencken Predicted Donald Trump, the Enlightened Rabble-Rouser

Here's the fun part of this essay written in 1922.

Now, I Don't Deny that People can Learn Things... The great masses of men can take in certain sorts of knowledge, at least within narrow limits:

• Fully 80 percent of the inhabitants of the United States, within our own time, have absorbed a number of solid facts, before unknown to them — for example, that beer is easy to make in the kitchen, that wood alcohol has various unpleasant physiological effects, and that it is dangerous to crank a Ford.
  
  
• Probably half as many have taken in information of a somewhat wider and more philosophical kind — for example, that the guarantees in the Bill of Rights are merely rhetorical, that saving the world for democracy costs a great deal of money, that feeding a human infant on fried liver will not make it flourish, and every old woman who mumbles as she shuffles along is not a witch.
  
  
• Go back a thousand years, and you will be able to show even greater accretions of knowledge, much of it sound.
  
  
• The average member of the American Legion, though the professors may report him a moron, knows more, I am convinced, than the average legionary of Caesar's Gallic army, and what he knows is better organized.
  
  
• The average American farmer, though he voted for Bryan, is more intelligent than the peasant of Charlemagne's time.
  
  
• Even the average American Congressman, at least in matters that do not concern the business of lawmaking, probably has more useful information in him than the average member of a Tenth Century Witenagemot.

The Progress of Enlightenment Doesn't Reach the Great Masses of People

• Enlightenment is a matter which concerns exclusively a small minority of men. The size of that minority is always grossly overestimated.
  
  
• Because a man is a Ph.D. and licensed to teach Latin grammar it is assumed that he is generally intelligent — that he shares, to some extent at least, in the stupendous miscellaneous knowledge of a Virchow or Huxley. The assumption is often false. He may be, in fact, practically an imbecile, and not infrequently he actually is.
  
  
• I do not here argue, of course, that the intelligence of a man is to be determined by subjected him to an examination like that recently proposed by Thomas A. Edison. Edison himself, indeed, though he could pass his own examination, must be thick-witted at bottom, for when he goes on a holiday he chooses such men as Harding and Henry Ford as his companions.
  
  
• But what I do argue is that no man can be said to share fully in the progress of human knowledge who is ignorant of any of its basic facts — for example, the facts that ghosts do not actually haunt graveyards, that printing money cannot make a nation rich, and that men cannot be made virtuous by law.

The Human Race is actually split into Two Distinct Species...

• The one species is characterized by an incurable thirst for knowledge, and an extraordinary capacity for recognizing and taking in facts and evidences.
  
  
• The other is just as brilliantly marked by a chronic appetite for whatever is most palpably false and a chronic distrust for whatever is palpably true.
  
  
• To the second species being the overwhelming majority of individuals under democracy, including all the favorite politicians, philosophers, theologians, star-gazers, and diviners. These half-wits now run the world.

[Grampa Dave]

Thanks for sharing. I would add another dimension to your first species!

The Human Race is actually split into Two Distinct Species...

The one species is characterized by an incurable thirst for knowledge, and an extraordinary capacity for recognizing and taking in facts and evidences.

This species uses that thirst and energy to constantly evaluate what is right and could stand some minor adjustments.

Also, their BS sensors are on alert 24/7. This enables them to detect and shun the BS sent down from the Intellectual Yet Idiots from DC to their state capitols, to local government BSers.

[Grampa Dave]

The most hated company in America, Walmart, is facing this problem in so called upper education.

What Walmart will be doing might be the beginning of the end of of our Intellectual Yet Idiots produced by our so called elite universities.

Walmart’s New Education Benefit Puts Cap and Gown Within Reach for Associates

- Greg Foran, CEO of Walmart U.S.
Highlights of the program include:

AFFORDABLE:

Under the program, the associate contribution toward a college degree would be just $1 a day. Walmart will subsidize the cost of tuition, books and fees, eliminating the need for student loan debt and addressing one the biggest hurdles that keep people from returning to college.

In addition, associates can jump start their path to completion by earning college credit for paid training at Walmart Academies. Hundreds of thousands of associates have already undergone skills training equivalent to more than $210 million in college credits. This will save associates both time and money in completing their degree.

RELEVANT:
Walmart selected universities with a specialized focus on serving working adult learners and top outcomes for the working adult demographic. In addition, Walmart is collaborating with these universities to tailor curriculum to relevant skills for jobs and advancement across industries for today and in the future.

ACCESSIBLE:
Working with three universities that include both selective and open-access programs, Walmart provides all associates a place to start. The goal is for all associates who apply for admission to be accepted. These universities have a programmatic dedication to high graduation rates for their students.

SUPPORTED:
From day one, associates will receive support from a Guild Education coach on everything from the application and enrollment process to selecting the appropriate degree. This kind of academic counseling has been shown to help students complete their degree.

Excerpted, go to link below for full story!

https://news.walmart.com/2018/05/30/walmarts-new-education-benefit-puts-cap-and-gown-within-reach-for-associates