The argument that "most kids don't need to go to college" is the same argument that British intellectuals were making at the end of the 19th and early 20th century, except replace "college" with "high school." The main reason that the United States became the dominant superpower of the early-mid 20th century and eclipsed its European peers was that many more kids in the United States had been going to high school for a long time. So "most kids don't need to go to college" seems historically shortsighted.
That being said, I do question whether the not-inconsiderable amount of money we're spending on tertiary education is actually well-spent. For one, it's incredibly unequal - rich public and private universities (which disproportionately cater to the children of the wealthy) soak up far more than their fair share of funding. Universities also spend huge amounts of money on non-academic items - fancy buildings, gyms, sports teams, huge administrative staffs, etc. This spending is partially facilitated by the insanity that is student debt.
I don't think educating fewer people is a good long-term strategy, but I think if we want to educate more people we need to take a long hard look at how tertiary education works in the US.
Edit: for those looking for a citation for attributing the U.S. dominance in the 20th century to education, see Piketty, Capital and Ideology, 517-522. Note that by the dawn of the 20th century German GDP per capita per-job was 60-70% of that of the US; that figure was 80-90% in the UK. I'm not saying two world wars didn't contribute, but the US was already ahead before they began.
> The main reason that the United States became the dominant superpower of the early-mid 20th century and eclipsed its European peers was that many more kids in the United States had been going to high school
This glosses over two World Wars and a massive haul of natural resources and confiscated land.
Yeah, it seems quite a bit easier to become the dominant power when most of your potential competitors have had their cities and industry flattened for half a decade.
See my citation above; the US was well ahead before WWI. And while the economic damage wrought by the wars was not inconsiderable, it simply exacerbated an existing trend.
We have the biggest contiguous piece of farmland in the world the majority of which is relatively close to a navigable river. The USA has had a fundamental geographical advantage stemming from well before WWI.
> massive haul of natural resources and confiscated land
And the pick of scientists and engineers from most of the world (handily snuck some of them in before adding "have you been a member of the government of Nazi Germany?" to immigration forms)
> The main reason that the United States became the dominant superpower of the early-mid 20th century and eclipsed its European peers was that many more kids in the United States had been going to high school for a long time.
The data from the time shows little difference between Canada and the USA in high school attendance. Canada might have even had a slight edge. And now Canada is considered most educated nation on earth, according to the OECD, approaching 70% of the population having a tertiary education, compared to just 40% stateside.
If high school was the significant factor, why has Canada never really become all that significant of a power? Several European powers are more powerful than Canada despite their supposed lack of education. It is questionable if Canada would even be strong as it is if it weren't America's neighbour.
> I think if we want to educate more people we need to take a long hard look at how tertiary education works in the US.
I guess the first question is: What is Canada getting out of it? Certainly the top promise the tertiary education system likes to trumpet – higher incomes – hasn't materialized. Canadians make far less money than their American counterparts in almost all cases, not to mention that incomes have been stagnant as far back as the data goes.
> If high school was the significant factor, why has Canada never really become all that significant of a power?
Because Canada had far, far fewer high school graduates. It just has a smaller population, currently ~1/9th of the United States. There are enormous economies of scale due to populations. As very simple examples, look at the size of the impact - the market for what a business produces, the people affected by what an activist achieves - or compare the money and military that the populations of the US and Canada can afford to invest in international influence. Consider the difference today, from Russia's or Iran's perspectives, between being cut off from the Canadian market and being cut off from the US market.
So what you're saying is that America became a superpower because it had a lot of people who, notably, weren't busy spending their time rebuilding society after a war? That seems like a much more reasonable explanation, honestly.
You said that America became a superpower because it had a lot of people, unlike Canada which had comparatively few people.
To which I added that America was different to the countries in Europe that had large populations as those large populations were busy cleaning up the mess made by several wars that took place during the rise of America.
It stands to reason that if your people are busy cleaning up, they aren't moving you forward. There is only so much time in the day. That's a tremendous advantage America had alongside its large population.
I see; I didn't realize you were talking about European countries. Good points, IMHO.
I would add that much of what was destroyed in Europe was necessary to productive, advanced economic activity - factories and their contents, infrastructure, etc etc. The most valuable human capital (looking at it from a purely economic perspective) - young, able, working age adults - were the soldiers and disproportionately killed. And without functioning economies, they produced much less money to invest in rebuilding and growing.
However, the US population is still ~4x the size of any advanced European economy (Germany has ~80 million).
> If high school was the significant factor, why has Canada never really become all that significant of a power? Several European powers are more powerful than Canada despite their supposed lack of education
The same reason as why Norway or Switzerland are not great powers despite being rich - population. At the end of WW2 Canada had 12.5mn people, an order of magnitude less than Germany or Japan, let alone the US or the USSR.
Since then Canada's population has tripled, while the German/French/Polish/Italian population has been flat-ish, so now Canada is considered in the same ballpark -- but it is still one tenth of the size of the US, with 1/10th of the potential for military/espionage funding, 1/10 of the market to bootstrap global market leading companies etc.
I don't know much about Canada, but I'd be very interested in looking at census data for primary and secondary education in Canada for the whole of the 19th century. Do you have a source? Remember, the argument goes that the U.S. maintained a large educational gap for over 100 years which allowed it to overcome the productivity leads that the advanced European nations had built up.
I also question whether "making money" is the best way to judge education. Without opening up the philosophical Pandora's Box or determining a correct answer, the US is also far more unequal than Canada, a much worse place to be poor, etc.
The census, but the data starts to become a little sketchy going back as far as you're looking for. Admittedly, I was look at the period around the war, not the 100 years prior.
Canada wasn't great at record keeping in its early history. I expect you won't find anything before the 1910s and even then it is not exactly great. However, in the 1910s it seems both countries only saw around ~10% of the population attending high school, as best as I can tell. More clearly, they both saw around 30% by the 1930s when we start to see much better data.
Let's just assume it was 10% through the entire 19th century. If we attribute America's success in becoming a superpower to that small portion of the population attending high school, that still lends credence to the idea that most don't need to go to high school. Whether or not high school was significant, it is clear that America didn't need most in high school to reach superpower status.
> I also question whether "making money" is the best way to judge education.
I agree, but the industry doesn't. That is the number one feature pushed on students in the marketing. I sincerely doubt Canada or the USA would have such high attainment if people weren't lead to believe that they would make money by doing it. Some attend college because they truly have a love for education, but many more attend simply because they believe they'll be poor in the rest of their life if they don't.
So I did a little digging into the citations, and the most authoritative paper on the subject is J.-W. Lee and H. Lee, Human capital in the long run [1]. While there isn't a time-series for Canada, Fig. 9A shows the U.S. had a significant advantage over Canada in 1870 (in terms of average years of schooling per capita) and both countries had been increasing this number at approximately the same rate. Fig. 10 shows that this advantage remained in 1910. One other note is that the U.S. had a significant slave population until the Civil War (and Black Americans faced significant educational barriers thereafter) which has a significant effect on the U.S. numbers.
Another thing that this analysis doesn't take into account is the base level of GDP per capita per job. One of the reasons the U.S. took a long time to catch up was that Europe was much more productive to begin with. I don't know enough about the Canadian economy of the early-mid 19th century to speculate there.
I think the difference is due to entrepreneurship culture. Human capital is useless if they're not used efficiently. There's a lot more monetary capital flowing into R&D and startups compared to Canada that just invests in real estate (it's literally the largest sector of our GDP).
Do you have evidence that engineers create more economic growth? HN is a bit biased of course, and general reactionary culture is biased against humanities. But generally engineers have a bit of a ceiling on their careers. Management, leadership, and roles in society depend more on what you learn in the humanities.
I went to an elite university on fully paid financial aid.
I don’t think the university made me much wiser than I would had been at a less expensive public school. And I think I could have learned many things on my own based on my abilities at the time.
However, having a degree from an elite university is an effective signal that you made it through the filter of their college admissions process. This is what companies like to see.
Since those admissions were based on SAT and other metrics, the students they select are among the brightest and regardless of the quality of education, they will do well in the world. This reinforces the value of attending an elite university and feeds more competition for the spots. This is similar to a shoe company sponsoring an athlete. The custom shoe might be better than what the athlete had before and maybe they even provide training from world class coaches, but they’re not just sponsoring anyone. You’re not getting that shoe without already proving something.
My earnings have benefitted from the school network and at the price charged the network is probably still a net benefit for me, without accounting for the financial aid.
So overall, it’s a game, but worth playing. There’s likely a better system we could devise to signal intelligence and ability that didn’t rely on diplomas from 4 year schools. However, the network effects of colleges cannot be replaced in the same manner. For that we have to consider whether these effects are disadvantaging others and worth perpetuating.
No, it would not have beat the cost in my case. I did know others who got academic full scholarships to state schools but little financial aid to private colleges.
This does not play to the anti-college sentiment on this site. But there is good evidence that secondary and university education is a large part of a nation's ability to support a strong economy.
The questioning of the value of university education also coincides with an ageing cohort of men with university educations they got when men dominated university attendance being replaced by women who now dominate university graduating classes. Hmmm.
Really? It's exactly how I think of education in China.
Indeed, this is the case for most of the developing world, the only difference being that their Tier 1 cities are much larger and the education quality better (based on my experience interviewing people, students from top (Tsinghua, other C9) universities in China are basically equivalent with the Ivies + Stanford + MIT)
> based on my experience interviewing people, students from top (Tsinghua, other C9) universities in China are basically equivalent with the Ivies + Stanford + MIT
Your experience may be further confounded by the fact that you are only interviewing people who emigrated out of China. I am not an expert in this, but from some of my friends' experience of going to college in South Asia, I have seen that only the top students would be able to make it "out of there."
This spurred some research. Everyone knows he got rejected from art school. But prior to that he basically failed out of high school too. He attended two of them.
Question is - is college education in current form really useful? I feel we get more practical education from the internet than from the structured courses in traditional college education.
The "current form" is changing. I'm hearing more and more schools who integrate their curriculum with real-world projects, and who encourage travel and international study to expose the students to wider perspectives. I've seen some programs that almost make me envious of current students, and feel like my own education from 30 years ago was fairly lame in comparison.
I think college is getting better and more valuable with time, at least in some programs. I doubt the programs that are not evolving will fare as well in the future. But the costs are the true problem. If the evolution of higher education continues and becomes available to all, we could really have something.
Perhaps what you find on the Internet is not nearly the same quality as what you find at college, and much it is misinformation, having a negative impact - you are better off not reading it. You could always try to learn from books you found at the library, and those were much higher quality on average than what you find on the Internet! Personally, it's hard to imagine a worse idea that 'learning' from 'the Internet'.
But if we throw out the values of truth and knowledge, then the Internet is filled with stuff!
> practical education
College isn't supposed to be practical, only to transform your understanding of the world and your thinking skills. Go to a vocational school for practical information.
You seem to know it all but here I am with 20 years of fruitful employment with all of my learning , that is needed to do my job , learnt from the internet. Thank you Wikipedia and hyperlinks. So yes I have a strong opinion that traditional college education is obsolete now.
But not as education. It’s just an expensive stamp of approval one must receive to work with certain institutions. You pay the institutions for the stamp, fill out worksheets for children and write papers for no one for 4 years and then bravo! You did it!
You didn’t do anything!
Now it’s time to learn the actual job. But this process is time-tested. The only fault is the parents lying to the kids attending that they’ll learn something. They won’t. But they’ll start understanding how to show up (without their parents waking them up) and do tasks (without their parents making them) which is really what college is these days.
Yeah and they were right. We keep inflating the time children spend in school but don't proportionately scale the content. People are taking Calculus the second year they're in college now. People are graduating high school practically illiterate and innumerate.
This isn't a call to educate fewer people. It's to educate more efficiently which, when done right, will reach more people.
I'm not convinced that most kids need High School either.
For smart kids, High School is basically just
a grade-grubbing competition to determine
who gets to go to the best college.
This mostly gets in the way of actual learning.
I think bright students would learn much more if, after 9th grade,
they went directly to university,
with admission determined by lottery.
For all other students,
High School is basically just prison.
They already know how to read, write, and do arithmetic.
They know that the earth goes around the sun
and that America invented freedom and fought in half a dozen wars.
They know everything that they're ever
going to remember learning in school
or that they'll use afterward.
But, for some reason, they're forced to spend years
doing stoichiometry and reading old books
that they're never going to appreciate.
A liberal arts education is valuable,
even if it's not directly applicable to daily life,
because it can elevate the spirit.
But can you elevate the spirit by force?
I think not.
I'm in my 50's, my parents are in their 80's. Neither of my parents received any O levels (studied by 14-15 year-olds). I just don't think it was considered important. My dad did an apprenticeship after leaving school, though.
When my turn came, it was standard to do O levels. I had a chance to look at a chemistry book and an electronics book, aimed at O level students. And, like you say, pupils who have had a secondary education know that the earth goes around the sun, matter is made from atoms, and will even have learned some calculus.
That's actually a pretty good deal. The secondary education does, or at least /should/, give people a good general level of education. This leaves us with the question of what we think the purpose of tertiary education is. At least some of that answer seems to boil down to nothing more than "well, that's how we do things around here."
My own answer is that I see tertiary education as providing two routes: an academic route, and a vocational route. The academic route has more kudos, but there is a great deal of practical benefit from the vocational route. I, myself, were always more academically inclined. The world only needs so many academics, or people with extensive training like physicians, architects or researchers.
I would prefer to see more on-the-job training, like you see with electricians, and even lawyers and accountants.
The real problem, as I see it, is too many people, not enough jobs. I have no solution to that problem, nor do I think that governments can concoct solutions that will necessarily make things better rather than worse. All I'm saying is that if the balance of supply and demand were to shift, employers would be less fussy about the academic qualifications of the job candidates, and the job candidates wouldn't be in an arms race to pile on more and more certificates.
> So "most kids don't need to go to college" seems historically shortsighted.
High school was proven important (if we just take that part of your argument as a given), so therefor college must be? By that reasoning, I don't see what makes the highschool cutoff "shortsighted" and the college cutoff correct. Why not four more years for a postgraduate degree?
> The main reason that the United States became the dominant superpower...
Favorable demographics, abundant natural resources, a relatively safe geographic position between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, culture, and two World Wars were surely greater factors than how many people went to high school.
Maybe, but there is HOW it is being spent. The first 2 years of my university education could have easily, and frankly much better, taken place on something like Khan Academy. And high school would have made an even larger difference. I'm pretty sure at least half the time spent at high school worked against me rather than for me.
I'm not advocating for switching schools 100% to such platforms, I see the problems, but I do believe that perhaps half on those platforms would be an easy and large win over traditional education.
> The main reason that the United States became the dominant superpower of the early-mid 20th century and eclipsed its European peers was that many more kids in the United States had been going to high school for a long time.
Citation definitely needed on that one, as I think most casual observers would assume that being destroyed by the most catastrophic war the world ever saw ... twice ... would have more to do with it than some long forgotten fashion amongst British intellectuals.
Employers want an underclass that they can exploit, and degree holders expect more than subsistence wages and dead-end jobs, creating a problem for companies that want cheap labor.
> I don't think educating fewer people is a good long-term strategy, but I think if we want to educate more people we need to take a long hard look at how tertiary education works in the US.
As part of doing that, we should take a long hard look at primary and secondary education too. U.S. public school K-12 is a disaster, and modern educational trends are only making the picture worse and more unequal rather than less.
> The main reason that the United States became the dominant superpower of the early-mid 20th century and eclipsed its European peers was that many more kids in the United States had been going to high school for a long time.
It definitely depends on how you are determining the dominate superpower, GDP is certainly important but it’s not determinative.
If there were a single factor determining a single dominate superpower I think throughout history it is more closely related to the World’s Reserve Currency, and the US Dollar didn’t succeed the British Pound as the Reserve Currency. Though not official until Bretton Woods Agreement in 1944 with 44 nations, it is generally understood this was a concession made in a backroom deal to get the US to enter the War in 1941 while Hitler was actively bombing London.
There are a lot of people that believe, I’ll call them speculators but maybe fair to call them conspiracy theorists, that the economic impact of Covid is leading to a change in the Reserve Currency because the IMF called for "A New Bretton Woods Moment". I’m not sure that will happen, but if it does, I’m certain what that would mean is a passing of the torch of the dominate superpower.
Plenty of countries (Germany, France, Japan, etc.) are only slightly poorer than the US per capita, but have much smaller land area/population and therefore smaller GDP. Size matters!
That being said, I do question whether the not-inconsiderable amount of money we're spending on tertiary education is actually well-spent. For one, it's incredibly unequal - rich public and private universities (which disproportionately cater to the children of the wealthy) soak up far more than their fair share of funding. Universities also spend huge amounts of money on non-academic items - fancy buildings, gyms, sports teams, huge administrative staffs, etc. This spending is partially facilitated by the insanity that is student debt.
I don't think educating fewer people is a good long-term strategy, but I think if we want to educate more people we need to take a long hard look at how tertiary education works in the US.
Edit: for those looking for a citation for attributing the U.S. dominance in the 20th century to education, see Piketty, Capital and Ideology, 517-522. Note that by the dawn of the 20th century German GDP per capita per-job was 60-70% of that of the US; that figure was 80-90% in the UK. I'm not saying two world wars didn't contribute, but the US was already ahead before they began.