Jump to content

Is School A Waste of Time and Money?


Vern Edwards

Recommended Posts

See "School Is for Wasting Time and Money," by Prof. Bryan Caplan, George Mason University, in The New York Times, Guest Essay, Sept. 1, 2022:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/01/opinion/us-school-knowledge.html

A taste:

Quote

My work focuses on tests of adult knowledge — what adults retain after graduation. The general pattern is that grown-ups have shockingly little academic knowledge. College graduates know about what you’d expect high school graduates to know; high school graduates know about what you’d expect dropouts to know; dropouts know next to nothing.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I can't access the article (pay wall) but I've long been concerned with the current state of education. I have a child currently in high school The amount of actual learning is shockingly small. FYI, a straight A student.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The BLS data tools show the employment levels of persons aged 16-19 today is almost the same as it was in 1948.  In the meantime, the economy has grown so much since then that I have to surmise the denominator in this equation makes that employment level look extremely small today.

It’s as if the amount of time it takes for one to develop their inner drive to learn how to do a thing has now exceeded 20 years.  A century ago it used to take 10 years - probably because kids or their parents’ lives depended on the kid learning a trade.  I wonder if we could find the next worst thing to dying that would motivate people these days.  How about just taking away their phones and tablets?  I’ll start by applying that in my house, and report back 😉

Link to comment
Share on other sites

23 hours ago, Vern Edwards said:

"School Is for Wasting Time and Money," by Prof. Bryan Caplan

This topic has come up several times over the last few weeks in my realm. I do believe "college" is a waste of time and money, but "education" never is. I make this distinction each time because society has somehow convinced young people to pay $3,500 per class, be told to read a specific book and then discuss it . . . What a waste of time. I don't need a peer group of 20 19-year-olds to discuss what I think about Thomas Sowell's "Basic Economics." I can obtain, read and learn from the same/similar text for nothing. It's called a library. 

Obviously some jobs (architects/nurses) require the piece of paper. Lawyers and Doctors, sorry but you need the 4-years of partying before you can get to learning your preferred skill (if you pass that test). No guarantees. 

Recently published work on the matter - The College Scam: How America's Universities Are Bankrupting and Brainwashing Away the Future of America's Youth: Kirk, Charlie: 9781735503738: Amazon.com: Books

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I wouldn’t be concerned about college promoting subject matter retention.  I barely remember anything I learned in college.  But the benefits are more than just attending classes and subject matter education - socializing and getting along with a wide variety of new people, communicating with strangers, living and working together with others you don’t know exploring new things that might interest you, taking on challenges, exploring new passions, and transitioning from a live at home teenager into an adult.

I still remember my first week as a civilian Army intern.  The Commanding General had a group of us in his office for lunch.  The first thing he said was don’t expect special treatment with a college degree.  All it shows is you set my mind on some goal ( a degree) and successfully achieved it.  That shows drive and motivation.  But as far of future employment, a degree was just one step in the hiring screening process.

Sure we can hire people right out of high school and train them in a job.  But what’s involved with all that?  How are we assured we selected the right people to start with?  Do they exhibit some facet of maturity and motivation.  A degree helps check that box off.

I see lots of new people hired in government and industry to work in our field.  The best ones are curious, want to learn, have decent communication skills, know something about researching and thinking analytically, and have computer skills better than most seasoned workers.  A lot of evidence supports the notion that college got them to that point.  When you get down to it, why do we can how much knowledge they retained from their literature, history, foreign language, calculus, or sociology classes? Sure, that is good if they did.  But what matters to employers is how good are they at their work.  College is one of the best indicators for successful hiring people starting out in our field.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

6 hours ago, Vern Edwards said:

Sorry about the pay wall.

Just my two cents worth: A subscription to the NYT isn’t very expensive, and you don’t have to read the political stuff. The science, travel, book, art, philosophy, culture, and food stories alone are worth it.

Just sayin’.

Or I can go to Harvest Market and pick one up!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Wow, I must have missed a really good time, having gone to an all male (at the time) Military Academy during the height of the Vietnam “Conflict”. My college experience was quite different than that described here. Since all of our daily homework in the Engineering Department was graded, we stayed up until at least midnight, often under the covers (after lights out). . No calculators, mini or personal computers back then. The Electrical Engineering Dept. had the only electric tabletop calculator (cost $5,000) in the entire Engineering Department . It was slide rules and logarithm books for math.

And the Air Force Academy used the “Whole Man” Concept. We jokingly called it the “Manhole Concept”. The Core Courses (outside our Majors)  included the spectrum of basic engineering, math, common law, language, Econ, computer science, English, History, philosophy, leadership, Honor and Ethics and other Liberal Arts, Military and (four year) P.E./Athletics training. Heavy course load. I had more than twice as many semester hours of qualifying courses for the DAWIA KO contracting warrant/requirements.

I was impressed with the knowledge and capabilities of my engineering peers throughout my Air Force and later careers. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

20 hours ago, formerfed said:

But the benefits are more than just attending classes and subject matter education - socializing and getting along with a wide variety of new people, communicating with strangers, living and working together with others you don’t know exploring new things that might interest you, taking on challenges, exploring new passions, and transitioning from a live at home teenager into an adult.

I find several of the things you described above available outside of a college campus and at a cheaper rate (Average College Tuition by State - OnToCollege). Let me provide a story (100% not a real/😜). 

"I really enjoy my one-a-week lunches. I go alone, sit at the bar, have a beer and work on my laptop at a location three blocks from a university campus of roughly 45K students. About 1.5 years ago, I meant a young women. She worked there and attended the university. As I always do, I asked what she was studying. She replied and I had to ask what that course of study was. She explained and I said, "oh, well that's nice." It stuck in my mind for a few days so I did some digging. The highest paying job I could find, on one of the popular job-search sites, was in San Francisco and yearly salary capped at $75K a year. 

I ran into this young lady a couple of weeks ago. I asked how school was going. She replied that she had graduated last Spring and, even though it took her six years, she had finally completed workload and received her diploma. At this educational institution, six years would roughly translate into $120K, not accounting for books and rent.

Since graduating, she has been working as one of four managers of my favorite little hole-in-wall location. From what I can tell, knowing the owner and many others that work there, she is doing very well.

All that to say, she could have the job she has now, been doing it since 19 or 20, without a piece of paper which probably cost more than I owe on my house at 33 years young. 

Your final line about college turning teens into adults' is almost laughable in 80% of cases. I think it does the opposite. It keeps them from going into the workforce, learning responsibility, learning to accept and heed criticism and accel. 

20 hours ago, formerfed said:

Sure we can hire people right out of high school and train them in a job.

100% what I would do. 

20 hours ago, formerfed said:

But what’s involved with all that?

Training with a capable CS/CO.

20 hours ago, formerfed said:

 How are we assured we selected the right people to start with?  Do they exhibit some facet of maturity and motivation.

Their work product will speak for itself. If after nine months, they are asking the same stupid question over and over, fire them. 

20 hours ago, formerfed said:

A degree helps check that box off.

Not in most cases. Link to degrees offered 2022 at PSU - Penn State Majors - Undergraduate Admissions (psu.edu). Don't think a degree in "Golf Management" makes someone a lock to enter our beloved career field. 

I'll shut up now. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

If we ever want the 1102 workforce to be considered a professional occupation, a degree for entry is needed.  That’s even if it’s just considered a gatekeeper or price for entry.  Name one professional occupation that doesn’t require a degree?

I was in this field a long time and well before a degree was required.   Many people were good.  Others weren’t.  But the long term composition results are better with a degree requirement than without.   

Link to comment
Share on other sites

52 minutes ago, formerfed said:

If we ever want the 1102 workforce to be considered a professional occupation, a degree for entry is needed.

A degree is indeed required for all federal "professional" occupations.  This a factual statement, by statute addressing standards for scientific, technical, or professional, positions (5 U.S.C. 3308).  OPM, however, decided in 1983 that the 1102 series is not a professional series, and that decision still stands in its published Position Classification Standard.  See the "Series Definition" issue no. (3) raised in it here, on pages 130-132.

DOD opts to further restrict this OPM standard and require a "baccalaureate degree (for 1102s and military equivalent positions) from an accredited educational institution authorized to grant baccalaureate degrees" in its recently published USD(A&S) memorandum, Subject: "Contracting Officer Warranting Program", dated August 29, 2022 - available on the WIFCON front page still.  The question of the day is, "why?"  Is this a disagreement with the OPM decision on some specific grounds?  Or is it on the grounds that all other employers seem to be doing it?  If it is the latter, in my view that is ignorant of the current state of things on campuses.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, formerfed said:

If we ever want the 1102 workforce to be considered a professional occupation, a degree for entry is needed.

Are we not, under U.S.C, already defined as professionals (5 USC 7103: Definitions; application (house.gov))(a)(15)? Are we not paid well as professionals are? There is no requirement for a degree. Only one for so many hours of business credits (24 I think), unless you want to become a supervisor, then any degree will work. If someone has a degree in the Chinese language or Asia Studies, does that make them more capable leaders? Is the alone factor that a person, from the age 18 through 22, managed to live in a dorm, completed three/four classes each semester and made it through six one-hour-long lectors per week for four years is now more capable? 

I am not saying that going to college or requiring a degree for certain professions is bad. I prefer my doctor to have some pretty extensive training. I feel the same for the pilot flying the plane I am on, but he doesn't have to go to Harvard for four years to obtain that skill. 

Industry is picking up on the disconnect - Companies eliminate college degree requirement to draw needed workers (cnbc.com)

"A growing number of companies, including many in tech, are dropping the requirement for a bachelor’s degree for many middle-skill and even higher-skill roles, according to a recent study from Harvard Business Review and Emsi Burning Glass, a leading labor market data company. More than 51 million jobs posted between 2017 and 2020 were analyzed for the study.

This reverses the so-called “degree inflation” trend that picked up steam after the Great Recession where many employers began adding degree requirements to job descriptions that hadn’t previously needed them — even though the actual jobs hadn’t changed.

In place of four-year-degree requirements, many companies are instead focusing on skills-based hiring to widen the talent pool."

1 hour ago, formerfed said:

Many people were good.  Others weren’t.

That hasn't changed. Degree or not. I trained one person with a BA, MBA and JD. This individual was sharp, but not to the point that I can definitively say that the kid that works behind the counter at my gym couldn't do the same thing, minus three papers hanging on the wall. 

1 hour ago, here_2_help said:

Worth two minutes of your time, in my opinion.

What he is saying is true, but doesn't apply to all situations. Those who go and plan to obtain a skill do well. I am not going to cite a list of those fields because we know what they are. But what about the kids who pay the same price as the engineers, but receive a degree in Jewish Studies, Medieval Studies or Race and Ethic Studies (there in the PSU list I posted). I am not saying those things are bad. I love history. I am saying that if we framing those degrees as a must have to get on the road to being wealthy, we are lying to our youth. 

No one commented my "completely false/didn't happen" story above. Do we ignore those in that situation? I ask because I meet and speak with a lot of current students. It will be a majority of them when they are done. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I apologize for the length of what follows.

The requirement for educational credentials as a prerequisite to employment is a kind of credentialism. See "The Social Sources of Educational Credentialism: Status Cultures, Labor Markets, and Organizations," Sociology of Education (2001):

Quote

Educational credentialing theory and research have cast serious doubts on central assumptions in individualistic human capital theories and capitalist control-based Marxian structuralist theories of education. Eschewing notions that schools are merely meritocratic institutions that sort individuals and certify their objective technical skills (their productive capacities) or tools of a capitalist elite, credentialing theorists argue that educational certification is a historical legitimation of advantages that empower degree holders in occupational and organizational recruitment. Credential requirements for jobs are less concerned with concrete work skills than with demanding that recruits hold similar, school-taught cultural dispositions to incumbents of positions. These similarities reduce a variety of organizational recruitment uncertainties. Occupational monopolies are upheld by popular beliefs that mask cultural domination under ideologies of individual merit and technical competence.

Credentialism has sometimes been considered a form of improper employment discrimination. It has been the subject of litigation under the Civil Rights Act. See the Supreme Court's decision in Griggs, et al, v. Duke Power Company, 401 U.S. 849 (1971), in which the issue was the requirement for a high school diploma. The Court unanimously decided that the requirement was improperly discriminatory, saying: "Diplomas and tests are useful servants, but Congress has mandated the commonsense proposition that they are not to become masters of reality."

See White and Francis, "Title VII and the Masters of Reality: Eliminating Credentialism in the American Labor Market," Georgetown Law Journal (July 1976), and "Diplomas Degrees, and Discrimination," The Hastings Law Journal (May 1975).

See also, U.S. Dept. of Health Education and Welfare, Work in America, Report PB-214 779, Dec. 1972 (available via Google Books):

Quote

For some years, Americans have assumed that increasingly higher levels of education are crucial to an individual's chances for " getting ahead"--e.g., finding and keeping a good job , making more money, obtaining the respect of others. National policies—such as the G.I. Bill of Rights , and the National Defense Education Act (which emphasized scientific and technical skills )—have all been incentives to advanced educational attainment. Similarly, the expansion of professional and white-collar occupations has created a demand for workers with higher levels of education. But this interest in "attainment" has been focused on the credentials of education—high school diploma, baccalaureate, and graduate degrees—rather than on the learning. The plethora of economic articles that have appeared in recent decades, demonstrating the economic value of ever-higher education, undoubtedly abetted this emphasis on credentials. Moreover , credentialism spread well beyond the white-collar sector; high school diplomas became a prerequisite for most apprenticeships, and even for entry level, semi-skilled jobs.

The college degree employment prerequisite increased the demand for college admission. The increase in demand led to an increase in cost—I paid about $350 per quarter to attend UCLA. The tuition is much, much higher now.) It also led to lower standards for admission and to lower standards for graduation.

What explains (and justifies) educational credentialism? See David Labaree's powerful preface to Brown, Degrees of Control: A Sociology of Educational Expansion and Occupational Credentialism (1995), in which he said:

Quote

 

Traditional explanations do not hold up very well when examined closely. Structural-functionalist theory argues that an expanding economy created a powerful demand for advanced technical skills (human capital), which only a rapid expansion of higher education could fill. But Brown notes that during this expansion most students pursued programs not in vocational-technical areas but in liberal arts, meaning that the forms of knowledge they were acquiring were rather remote from the economically productive skills supposedly demanded by employers. Social reproduction theory sees the university as a mechanism that emerged to protect the privilege of the upper-middle class behind a wall of cultural capital, during a time (with the decline of proprietorship) when it became increasingly difficult for economic capital alone to provide such protection. But, while this theory points to a central outcome of college expansion, it fails to explain the historical contingencies and agencies that actually produced this outcome. In fact, both of these theories are essentially functionalist in approach, portraying higher education as arising automatically to fill a social need within the economy, in the first case, and within the class system, in the second.

However, credentialing theory, as developed most extensively by Randall Collins (1979), helps explain the socially reproductive effect of expanding higher education without denying agency. It conceives of higher education diplomas as a kind of cultural currency that becomes attractive to status groups seeking an advantage in the competition for social positions, and therefore it sees the expansion of higher education as a response to consumer demand rather than functional necessity. Upper classes tend to benefit disproportionately from this educational development, not because of an institutional correspondence principle that preordains such an outcome, but because they are socially and culturally better equipped to gain access to and succeed within the educational market.

 

Please do not misunderstand me. I am not arguing against going to college. I am saying that social-political-economic policies and practices in our country are not always grounded in critical thinking. And thus, $1.75 trillion in student debt remains to be paid off for half-baked "degrees," and most of the debtors will never recover in wages.

Neither of my sons attended college. They both are partners is successful and growing businesses (wine and imported specialty foods). They each live more prosperously than most college attendees and graduates, and neither must pay off any student loans. They were making money while many of their peers were taking classes they will not remember in five years. In the meantime, people with expensive bachelor's degrees and graduate degrees in law and business are working (some unhappily) as 1102s. You don't need a degree to be successful, although possession of a degree will help you get a job.

In my experience, many if not most of the college graduates I have met cannot identify the grammatical subject and the predicate noun of the following sentence from FAR:

Quote

When a prime contractor includes defective subcontract data in arriving at the price but later awards the subcontract to a lower priced subcontractor (or does not subcontract for the work), any adjustment in the prime contract price due to defective subcontract data is limited to the difference (plus applicable indirect cost and profit markups) between the subcontract price used for pricing the prime contract, and either the actual subcontract price or the actual cost to the contractor, if not subcontracted, provided the data on which the actual subcontract price is based are not themselves defective.

Little that I learned in my classes at UCLA has been of use in my career. But learning how to read and analyze difficult texts, how to think critically, and how to write a half-way decent English sentence has been of immense benefit, and I learned those things from three teachers who took me under their wing and from books and articles that I found on my own. I learned about subject and predicate and sentence diagramming in 6th or 7th grade.

The best class that I took at UCLA was in the history of 19th Century German philosophy. If you can understand even a part of Hegel's The Phenomenology of Mind (aka The Phenomenology of Spirit), you can understand almost anything, even the FAR. That class was so hard it made me cry, thinking I was too stupid to be in college. Maybe I was.

I just spent a week in Montana with my oldest friend, a woman I met in a Russian language class at UCLA. She made Phi Beta Kappa. We discussed all this, and she said she can hardly remember a thing she learned at UCLA, including Russian. But that was 52 years ago. Neither of us blame the school. It had great libraries. We blame ourselves for not spending more time in them.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 9/8/2022 at 7:42 AM, Vern Edwards said:

Sorry about the pay wall.

Everyone, try this link for the article: https://everything-voluntary.com/school-is-for-wasting-time-and-money

When I left school, I joined the Jaycees.  There I met and quickly befriended a guy, who was less than five years into the financial services industry.  He had attended a prep school and then an elite university.  We spoke often over the next ten years before I aged out of the organization.  One of his sayings was, "if you do nothing, one thing is for certain, nothing will happen [i.e., you will merely continue to be acted upon by the circumstances of life]."  Another observation he relayed was how few "well educated" young people from top colleges were succeeding in his industry.  His explanation was that being an "A" student was sometimes indicative of nothing more than one's ability to follow instructions and regurgitate information.  However, it says little about one's capacity to think independently and assess real world situations.  This is not to say that learning how to follow instructions and meet deadlines are not critical to success.  They absolutely are.  But to achieve greater success, there must be more.

I remember my first day of high school English class.  The instructor stood before us and admitted, I really cannot teach any of you to write well.  He went on to say, if you want to be an excellent writer you should make a lifelong commitment to reading.  Read everything you can get your hands on.  Start by reading what you enjoy, to develop your comprehension and speed, then branch out from there.  Most people do not regularly read books and serious articles.  When I say most people, I am referring to those within my sphere, meaning specialists, attorneys and organizational leaders.  This is why statements of work do not make sense.  This is why the highest paid people have others writing for them.  But it's not just that people in today's professional workforce cannot write.  They cannot read, or will not take the time.  So much so that DOD is teaching its most highly graded employees to ask their questions in the first sentence of their correspondences and to limit emails to no more than a few sentences.  It seems that reading to the end of a paragraph or two has become too much for the modern workforce.  But, you might take exception, we are all so busy.  What is it we are so busy doing?  What is it that is distracting us?  We hear the term "high level" all the time.  What does this term really mean?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 9/7/2022 at 11:47 AM, Vern Edwards said:

[Quoting Professor Caplan] College graduates know about what you’d expect high school graduates to know; high school graduates know about what you’d expect dropouts to know; dropouts know next to nothing.

This may be because the current state of things on campus per a book by Jean M. Twenge, whom has studied state-sponsored surveys of high schoolers for decades, is that the maturity levels of this latest generation (which first entered college in 2013) follow this same regressing trend.  An 18-year-old mind is as developed as a 15-year-old one previously was these days, she says.  See iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy - and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood (Atria Books, 2017).

Notable authors have cited Twenge's work and come to the conclusion these technically adult minds should consider a service year, work, or military service before college, to grow up first.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It seems that writing clear, grammatically correct regulations is a lost skill in DoD. I'm referring to the recent tantalum restriction mandated by the 2020 NDAA. Despite commenters asking for clarification of sentences that made no sense, DoD stood its ground and said there was no need to clarify. If I have time I'll start a new thread to avoid cluttering up this one. I'll just say that while the NDAA itself was not a model of clarity, DoD completely mucked it up.

Was the new rule written, reviewed, and approved by people with college degrees? Likely. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

52 minutes ago, Voyager said:

Notable authors have cited Twenge's work and come to the conclusion these technically adult minds should consider a service year, work, or military service before college, to grow up first.

Not military service. Please. We have already weakened our military by making it some kind of laboratory for social experiments. The military's purpose is not to help young people grow up.

Wartime military service in the combat arms (infantry, armor, artillery) is a life of hardship and suffering. (Read Hell In A Very Small Place: The Siege of Dien Bien Phu, esp. Chapter 3, Sorties.) We should want only those who are prepared for that. Maybe eager for it. Brutal training. No conscripts.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 month later...

As a manager, one of my greatest epiphanies was how the prestige of their degree had zero to do with performance, attitude, or ability of an individual in the workplace.  Some of the smartest, most well-read, articulate people I've ever worked with went to Community College, and one guy, no college (former AF enlisted tech sergeant who liked to read and learn. He was Apple employee #150 or something like that).  The common thread of course was that they didn't have the financial resources to attend college, so they adapted and overcame obstacles to obtaining a formal higher education.  THAT'S a skill that transfers 100% to the workplace.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...