Peter Thiel Is Wrong About Higher Education (It’s Worse Than A Bubble)

> they only look like a bubble because we’ve learned to treat education as a market-driven commodity rather than a social good

how can you not treat it as a market-driven commodity when a 4 year college degree can cost $120K ?

I was thinking about this today. I remember I used to think 'well, if you do a degree, at least you'll be an expert in something, even if you can't find a good job with it.' When I think of it now, the notion is almost laughable.

University students don't become experts in anything. For a non-technical subject, the knowledge gained isn't really going to beat a normal member of the public with an interest in the subject. English literature students, for example, just leave with some long essays under their belts, they don't graduate as well-read authorities on different epochs of literature. For technical subjects, I suspect most the skills learnt are forgotten afterwards.

It's just too easy for people to coast by, or cheat. The astonishingly low pass marks in some courses have the added effect that the bright students don't need to really get on top of their game to get a good grade. So most people who graduate are far from experts on what they were learning about. As in, if a member of the public needed any of those skills/knowledge to do their job, they could acquire them privately without much difficulty.

The vast majority of graduates do not leave college having intensively studied anything as rigorous as physics or mathematics. Most leave college with a degree that they didn't work very hard to earn.

College offers the opportunity to do what you did and work your ass off, but most have no such desire.

Expanding on grandalf's thought, I suspect that the alternative--that is, opting out of school to pursue a career or other business opportunity--can come off as overly selfish or capitalistic. Education is still often considered to have some sort of intrinsic value (though, of course, this is changing as students are increasingly viewing college for its instrumental value toward finding jobs); jumping straight into a career, on the other hand, is often associated (perhaps unfairly) with generating money, which has only instrumental value.

This might be an unfair representation; there is, of course, intrinsic value to many people in pursuing a career that they're passionate about, and it's becoming increasingly the case that college is seen as having instrumental value. In the minds of many, though, college is still seen as more inherently valuable, and the arguments against going to college are just making us more and more capitalistic, at the expense of culture, education, and whatnot.

Without acceptance criteria -- some neutrally-given test that yields a yes or no -- you can't really measure the function of something. Education has been notorious for refusing to create or abide by acceptance criteria.

So it becomes a brand-name game. You pay for the brand, you spend some time getting indoctrinated (most likely to how important this particular brand is) and you get your piece of paper.

Somebody said once that the purpose of education is to create new habits. So, for instance, if you are an English speaker and develop a habit of reading a good Russian novel once a year, that might be an excellent habit to have. Or if you develop a habit of reading a dozen computer books a year, or perhaps you develop a habit of cross-checking politically-slanted stories you agree with. And so on.

Lots of great habits that you can form. Some subset of these constitute what we call "critical thinking," which everybody seems to think is important. There are a bunch of entrepreneurial habits that I'd love to make sure folks had. If you want a job after college, developing great people, marketing, and networking habits would be awesome.

But I don't think anybody wants to seriously start talking about what habits college graduates should mostly exhibit. To do that would cause controversy. Colleges are very much dependent on public dollars (at least in the states) and I don't think they are ready for the political firestorm that would occur once you start actually trying to define the thing that we're all paying for.

It's not a bubble, except for the part about more and more money goes for less and less return. The problem is that there is no "thing" that is being returned. There's no bad guys here, but it's much more like a con: you pay increasing amounts of money for this intangible thing where there's no real way to determine if what you got was what you wanted. You don't really know if it's worth what you spent, because the seller is purposely keeping you in the dark about the value, continuing to assure you that this type of purchase at these rates is absolutely necessary. In fact, as time goes on they get more and more insistent that this thing is absolutely necessary -- at any price.

That kind of building up of expectations, then jacking the price, then delivery of something that could roughly be considered what was needed but isn't enough, repeat-and-rinse, is much more indicative of a con (Disclaimer: I don't mean to imply intent here, and I also don't mean to imply outright fraud. Just trying to find the best metaphor. I also realize that I am making a large generalization, and all generalizations are false. Caveat Emptor.)