Against Tulip Subsidies

@randomdata -- "trivial" isn't "free". The test I proposed adds an extra hour of in-person interview time per candidate, and also substantially increases the number of viable candidates.

> It may not be racism exactly, but still morally wrong for many reasons. That should be fairly obvious.

Comparing discriminating based upon whether someone did four years of audited work with racism is... a somewhat extreme position, to say the least.

You may not think that college is "real work". You're welcome to your opinion. But I assure you that a university degree at many universities does require a lot of work, and that this work is difficult enough and audited well enough that it warrants consideration in hiring decisions.

A degree is NOT something anyone is born with. It is something many people work very hard to earn.

To put a finer point on it: is it OK to discriminate based upon prior industry experience? Because I consider a degree from a top uni better preparation "work" preparation for many jobs than X years writing web apps.

Is it OK to discriminate against doctors who don't have MDs?

Or am I supposed to give everyone who submits a job application the benefit of an interview, and sink my business in the process?

Personally, I'd say yes to his question - and indeed, this is a question, not an argument; and it's a question that presumes a knee-jerk reaction against Medieval History majors...

Gross world product has been growing along an exponential function for some time, and machines are threatening to allow us to be comfortable even if we don't work as much as we physically can. Maybe giving everyone some years in their youth to enrich their lives would be a good way to organize the economy once it's a viable option. Maybe a lot of people agree with this, and in wealthier nations it's ~just~ now close to being within reach, but it isn't quite there, so what we're feeling would be considered friction in the transition.

I've just searched what are now 58 comments for the phrase "prisoner's dilemma" and got zero hits. WHAT!

Higher Education is now a prisoner's dilemma, and that's really the point of the tulip article, even if he didn't use the phrase. Rational actors will want their children to have a college education and then higher degrees, even though everyone choosing that makes society worse off, not better off. Classic prisoner's dilemma. (Also a "Tragedy of the Commons", I would argue.)

Perhaps the most profound argument against our present system of higher education is that despite his philosophy degree (and I'm guessing at least 70 or 80 other degrees amongst the commentators) neither the author nor anyone else has said the two words "prisoner's dilemma." It's a simple concept, taught in every University, most undergraduates supposedly know what it is, and yet nobody can manage to recognize a gargantuan real world example! (I have yet to see the term PD applied to this subject in other media, either.) Time to scrap them crenellated white towers.

It is not so clear, actually, and the example of the K-12 public schools actaully shows it. Nominally, anyone can go to "the government school", but some are better run than others, and bestow more benefits on the students, and you end up moving the bidding war/arms race right over to "whatever mechanism the school uses to decide who goes there".

In the US, that usually means it spills over onto home prices in the best school districts. So, you get the same sorting of students, the same differential education, but people blow their budgets a different way.

This is not much different from the subsidized result.

(You may object: "But the schools can just sort by merit." Well, a) your previous comment said that it's not so easy to find a test that does so, and b) that's just another mode for the arms race: spending money on ways to game/hack the tests: cf, SAT prep courses.)

The same dynamic has happened for all previous kinds of subsidies to higher education: the amount the government pays for (or provides for free) becomes the new baseline, and people have to spend more money to distinguish themselves the unwashed masses who also go that education. Previously, a high school degree was enough, but now college is. With Sanders's plan (regardless of "free school" vs "pay your tuition"), we may end up at "Sorry, everyone needs a Master's now."

Like the site argues, the result of the subsidies is that everyone has to do the same things they did without it, but you also blow a lot of money unnecessarily.

Let's assume the situation with higher education is a prisoner's dilemma. I, as a player, decide not to go to college (cooperate), while everyone else decides to go to college (defect), resulting in me paying a sucker's payoff since my opportunities are reduced while those of everyone else are expanded. So far so good. Next, I decide to go to college while everyone else also goes to college (defect & defect), I pay a not insubstantial amount of money, as does everyone else. So far so good. But I manage to get a job as a software engineer at Google making $125k/year while several of Everyone-Else-in-the-World only get jobs as clerks at 7-Eleven, making $15k/year. So, the punishment scenario doesn't pan out since I didn't have a sucker's payoff while several others in the world did. That's okay. Let's keep going. Next, I decide not to go to college while everyone else decides not to go to college (cooperate & cooperate). All of a sudden, there are thousands of recently fired professors, instructors, deans, janitors, cooks, etc. on the job market. I can't find a job along with many others of my generation who decided not to go to college. Many of us have a sucker's payoff during the reward scenario.

The situation with education is not a prisoner's dilemma. Q.E.D.

The situation with education is not a tragedy of the commons. There is no central, collective resource that is being exploited by individuals for their own benefit, without regard for the future of the resource. Now, there might be a tragedy of the commons if higher education was universally free and everyone decided to pursue higher education endlessly, with new institutions popping up continuously, which would dry up the treasury and halt the program of universally free higher education. But there is no universally free education.

The situation with education is extremely complex, with a variety of intricacies and unknown unknowns. It can't be distilled into a game or an aphorism.