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A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

theatlantic.com

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Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#181

Post by hackinthebochs »

bradly wrote: post #158
Kinrany wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're explicitly saying that good jobs are zero-sum. Why do you think that? It seems like a non-prediction that having more people with good education will enable new businesses.

Yep, you are correct. Paul Graham writes in Hackers and Painters about how wealth is not zero-sum. You can read more about it in his essay here: http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html

Wealth doesn't map well to what we're talking about here. No economy can support an unbounded number of "high paying" jobs, for example. While wealth has gone up steadily since the world industrialized, a good (i.e. high paying) job is relative to the current standard of living and so wont be monotonic.

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#182

Post by nu_throwaway »

this sort of reads as self re-assurement for his son's path; the author is a Harvard professor and I assume daily interaction in academia all revolves around how great and virtuous higher ed is yet he's bucked the trend.

perhaps if he truly feels that way he could leave academia and cease perpetuating the myth?

imo calling it an "investment" is part of the problem. its a pure sunk cost and not an asset.

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#183

Post by chosenbreed37 »

kleer001 wrote: post #168
Upvoter33 wrote: post #157

Nothing is a guarantee of a good life. A good life requires so many different elements, but mostly comes down to one thing: what you put into it, esp. in regards to improving the lives and welfare of others around you. Do this, and you will find that your own life gets better and better. Be kind, do work to help others, care about people and their lives (and not just your own) and you'll find that life will turn out…

Exactly: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/233578 "The only major personality trait that consistently leads to success is conscientiousness."

I don't think contentiousness is the same thing described in that post. But I agree that it is an excellent trait to have.

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#184

Post by oneplane »

nu_throwaway wrote: post #182

this sort of reads as self re-assurement for his son's path; the author is a Harvard professor and I assume daily interaction in academia all revolves around how great and virtuous higher ed is yet he's bucked the trend. perhaps if he truly feels that way he could leave academia and cease perpetuating the myth? imo calling it an "investment" is part of the problem. its a pure sunk cost and not an asset.

People call it an investment because they think: I put something in it with the goal of getting more out of it in total.

They don't see it as finance terminology and the concept of the word investment in the context of others like 'sunk cost' and 'asset' holds very little specific meaning in that case.

Ironically that is a 'problem' you can 'fix' by putting people in college and teaching them basic accounting.

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#185

Post by randomdata »

hectorr1 wrote: post #4

Most successful people have X. Government: “Let’s give everyone X!” Over time the value of X is diluted, loses its status signaling, and overall quality degrades. Successful people move to Y.

More importantly, correlation does not imply causation.

Just because people born to the right family, who are free of crippling disability and disease, and possess the innate traits that enable one to be successful in the workplace also happen to go to school does not mean that going to school will change the traits you were born with, reverse the disabilities you have, and see you adopted by another family.

Funny that was missed when it is the first thing you learn when you head down the road to attaining a degree.

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#186

Post by hackinthebochs »

throwawaygh wrote: post #176
hackinthebochs wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We give everyone in the U.S. high school education and we don't make the claims you make above. Probably because a high school diploma has been so normalized that it is seen as the baseline. But that underscores the problem. Of course everyone having a high school diploma devalues it. That's part of why its seen as the default. If we make undergraduate education a similar default, it will just devalue that too. Not…

> Good jobs are zero-sum. Without universal high school, the USA would still be a largely illiterate subsistence farming nation with high rates of poverty as defined at the global scale. Even well-paying jobs in the trades require literacy and basic mathematics skills. So, no, good jobs aren't zero-sum.

At one point a factory job would have been considered a good job. In modern times, they're on the low end. What counts as a "good job" is relative to the current standards of living and so you can't naively compare across timescales.

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#187

Post by Spooky23 »

spamizbad wrote: post #121
qzx_pierri wrote: post #96

It is if you major in STEM (and you apply yourself and get internships, etc) - Majoring in "Eastern Gender Studies" will likely waste 4 years of your life.

People always trot out this canard but you should look at how few actual degrees get awarded. cultural gender studies only produces about 15,000 degrees[1] compared to nearly 42,000 for Computer Science [2]. [1] https://datausa.io/profile/cip/cultural-gender-studies [2] https://datausa.io/profile/cip/computer-science The problem here really isn't unmarketable degrees. It's low wage jobs that require college-educated…

Totally agree that liberal arts folks take an unfair beating -- the skills they develop are often more valuable than Computer Science skills, which are mostly unused. Very few of my colleagues have wielded any of the math or other skillsets that are core to Computer Science. Honestly, for 80% of developer or IT jobs, CS is just a hazing ritual to filter the weak.

I used to be the sponsor of an intern program and I'd say based on my experience is that, like anything else, ymmv with programs. One of the schools that I used to get folks from have a very good English, History, Caribbean Studies, and African Studies program, and the students are awesome. Some of the other programs have lower standards or are less mature, (or are landing zones for people who wash out of things) and the students suffer for it.

This happens for all things though. At my alma mater, the Business school was a recruiting funnel for big-5 accountants had a strict GPA requirement. So the frat boys and others would squeak out with an Economics degree. At another school, the Classics department was fossilized and core classes were solely graded on a bunch of multiple choice exams virtually unchanged for 30 years... you can imagine what type of student is attracted to that.

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#189

Post by rbanffy »

Upvoter33 wrote: post #157

Nothing is a guarantee of a good life. A good life requires so many different elements, but mostly comes down to one thing: what you put into it, esp. in regards to improving the lives and welfare of others around you. Do this, and you will find that your own life gets better and better. Be kind, do work to help others, care about people and their lives (and not just your own) and you'll find that life will turn out…

A good ZIP code is a great start.

https://talkpoverty.org/2015/12/17/american-dream-zip-codes-...

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#190

Post by rbanffy »

enkid wrote: post #145
hectorr1 wrote: post #4

Most successful people have X. Government: “Let’s give everyone X!” Over time the value of X is diluted, loses its status signaling, and overall quality degrades. Successful people move to Y.

There are some things that does make everyone more successful. More education is overall better for society, even if it's no longer a guarantee of "success." Some things don't really get diluted but can enrich the lives of anyone they are involved in (if we disassociate the word "success" from a comparative cycle). For example, healthcare, books, digital entertainment, internet connectivity. The comparative advantage…

> More education is overall better for society

And absolutely vital for a healthy democracy.

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