[kodis]

I suspect that at least some of this is due to confusing cause with effect: people see that most highly successful people have a collage degree, and wrongly conclude that anyone with a collage degree will be highly successful.

A few of the other problems with this increased drive to send people to collage is that now a collage degree is required -- as the article points out -- as a signal of employability even for jobs where a high school education would suffice; a drive away from trade school, even when a job in the trades pays well and is quite secure; and of course the debt load that comes with collage, even for a degree is in a field with little chance of providing a good return on the cost of the degree.

[simonsarris]

This is what Taleb has said for years. Wealth leads to education. Education does not necessarily, or even commonly, lead to wealth.

If you gain wealth but do not come from an aristocratic or "respected family in society" background, the way to gain prestige is by paying for education for yourself or your children. Buying your kids a degree is the modern day equivalent of buying a venal office in 1500's France or Spain.

(Except Venal offices probably guaranteed a little more ROI in addition to the status!)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venal_office

[f1notformula1]

Agreed with this as well as the GP comment.

Personally I think this also has the unfortunate side-effect of college's turning into de-facto gatekeepers to 'earned' status/success/wealth.

[motohagiography]

I like to summarize a particular coastal elitist view as, "Let them eat college."

[dhimes]

What is a "coastal elitist?" I've never heard that term. Since I live on the coast and have a few liberal friends, I know what a "coastal liberal" is. But "coastal elitist?" The only people I know who fit that bill are finance guys, and only a few at that.

[OtterCoder]

California and New England are so divorced from the concerns and ethos of the 'flyover' states that they may as well be on another planet. You may not think of yourself as elitist, but from the perspective of a Midwesterner, you almost certainly are.

[notfromhere]

It's not the Midwest, it's rural areas everywhere. Coastal elite is just code word for urbanite.

I don't know if people are aware, but the Midwest does have cities and its city dwellers have more in common with city dwellers on either coast than they do with rural areas in their own state.

[OtterCoder]

As an urban Midwesterner, who has also lived on both coasts, you have less in common than you think.

[kgwgk]

That’s what they think :-)

[moorhosj]

“I don’t like to be put in a box and labeled. To prove I’m right, I’ll put a bunch of other people in a box and label them.”

[dnomad]

Yeah those damned coastal elites fighting for universal healthcare and more education and higher minimum wages.

The reality is that the only real "elites" are these fantasists who've bought into this narrative and actually believe they are the "Real Americans (tm)." It's a childish delusion that is only sustainable by an even more delusional pride.

[njarboe]

If you just can't believe that a sane person could be against government enforced "universal healthcare, education, and higher minimum wages" you should expand your horizons a bit. These issues are not so clear cut in the details especially when thinking about long term solutions to problems.

[dhimes]

I agree that the rhetoric is harmful, but they do have a point and the "coasties" need to understand it if they want their political fortunes to change.

[drdeca]

I assume you mean elitists, not elites?

There are certainly people who are elite, in one common sense or another.

[dhimes]

I know, actually, what you are saying. And I can see why you are saying it. But you are wrong.

But I wanted to give motohagiography an opportunity to provide a more specific description of what s/he means. He used a new term and I'd like to understand it.

I don't want to start an acrimonious dispute, but I can clarify what you are right about and what you are wrong about after moto* has had a chance. I moved here- I'm not from here- so I think I actually have a pretty good view of this FWIW.

[OtterCoder]

Within the States, I'm really well traveled. I grew up on the West coast, spent two years on the East coast talking to more people than you've ever met, in more towns than you've ever driven through, and have been living in the Salt Lake valley for about five years. There are profound cultural, even psychological differences in all three regions, that can't be boiled down to red vs blue.

[erd0s]

I liked it much more when elite meant you could hack Gibsons

[adventured]

Some of that depends on how you want to define commonly. White and asian Americans have a near 40% chance of becoming millionaires with a graduate level education.

Without a high school diploma, white Americans have a mere 1.7% chance of becoming a millionaire. A 20+ fold difference.

"What Are Your Odds of Becoming a Millionaire?"

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-millionaire-odds/

"Bloomberg News asked economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis a question: Would it be possible to calculate the odds of being a millionaire for anyone in the U.S., based on age, education and race?"

"According to the sample, a black person’s odds of being a millionaire increase from less than 1 percent if he or she doesn't complete high school to 6.7 percent with a graduate degree. White Americans without a high school diploma start out with slightly better chances—1.7 percent—that rapidly improve with more school: A graduate-level education increases their probability of amassing a net worth greater than $1 million to 37 percent."

[nosefrog]

That's correlation, not necessarily causation.

[adventured]

No, it's very obvious causation.

The variance is extreme, not subtle, and it shows dramatic improvement for all races. It moves upwards step by step with education attainment. Incomes similarly follow that path. Which is another way of saying, everything aligns. The income you can reach on average without a high school diploma, will radically implode your chances of ever being able to amass millionaire status.

Need to save $50,000 to start a business? Good luck without a high school diploma. You're going to spend your life barely getting by, much less generating a surplus of savings.

Want to become a millionaire via a mixture of 401k, company stock grants, savings, real-estate investment? You have a near zero shot at that without a high school diploma.

[misja111]

That doesn't prove causation. There can be many underlying causes that explain the success of educated people just as well. For instance, as already mentioned, it might be that kids that are smart or work hard tend to finish a higher education. It could also be that kids who are born in wealthier families do both get access to better education and get more opportunities afterwards because of their better network.

That last possibility does a much better job at explaining what the Bloomberg article is about: the different chances of success based on the color of your skin. Black students that graduate still have only 6.7% chance of becoming millionaires comparing to 37% for white people.

[adventured]

You're context dropping at the end. The critical context for the causation in question, is that for all races, education stepping higher coincides to substantial increases in likelihood of wealth attainment.

There are no exceptions that see a backwards regression (ie move up in education and down in wealth likelihood), which further boosts that it is very clear causation. Each step sees the average move considerably higher for all races.

[TheOtherHobbes]

It's correlation. The cause is rationed access to the cultural - never mind the economic - resources needed to get into a graduate program.

Success after the program is an effect - and partly down to luck, as the SA article suggests.

Of course you'll have problems if you don't have a high school diploma. But by the time you've failed to get your diploma, the chances are excellent that your access to resources will have been severely constrained and rationed for your entire life, even if you start off with exceptional talents.

[adventured]

It's cause. What you're referring to is the cause of education deprivation. That education deprivation is the cause of the far lower likelihood of reaching higher wealth status.

A chain of things or events can - typically does - possess multiple causes along the pathing. A cause of a cause, is a legitimate, normal and required logical concept. Practically any outcome or condition you can name has a cause, which has a cause.

Alternatively you'd have to claim that there can only be one cause in an entire chain of events. An absurd notion.

[Retric]

Someone with an IQ of 70 is not going to have a graduate education. In this case education and wealth would both be results not causes.

Similarly, having well off parents drastically increases the chances of getting a graduate degree.

[jpadkins]

> Without a high school diploma,

What is the cause of not completing high school? what about lack of IQ. There is a hidden variable that causes both not passing high school and not being a millionaire.

[huehehue]

I don't think it's as simple as that. Plenty of intelligent people don't finish high school for a number of reasons -- medical issues, problems at home, some simply drop out because they need to start working full-time to afford living.

That's not to say that all of those people would have necessarily gone on to become millionaires, but it's really hard to improve your situation if you don't have that momentum.

[derivt]

Why is American capitalized and asian isn't?

[adventured]

Since you decided to dedicate your first ever HN post to that inquiry, I'll give you my personal reasoning.

Both black and white are very commonly lower-case. For example in the Bloomberg article, they refer several times to "black person's" and "black." I consider it incorrect to upper-case a racial identifier if you're not going to upper-case them all. I alternatively could upper-case Black and White, however I also consider that wrong, and borderline stupid (again, my personal opinion).

If I were referring to a specific national heritage, I would upper-case. Vietnamese American. Nigerian American. German American. And so on.

I also would not upper-case "a Tall American" in description of someone. A person that is an asian American is not necessarily from Asia, asian is their race. A person is not from "black" or "white" either. It's as ridiculous to upper-case asian in this use, as it would be to upper-case Brown Eyed American or Green Eyed American or "the Freckled American."

[meric]

There’s white people in Asia, peach people in Asia, light brown people, dark people, black people in Asia.

But then you wouldn’t call a black Asian a black person, he’d just be South Asian.

Therefore since your use of colours is tied to the location of the person’s ancestors, Asia referring to the continent, oughtn’t it be capitalised?

[stagbeetle]

American is a proper noun in this case. White and asian (or should I rephrase it as "Asian and white?"), are used as descriptive adjectives here, also. If it were rephrased as "Whites and Asians, from America," then it would be capitalized because all three are now proper nouns.

[dragonwriter]

White and Asian are proper adjectives in the sentence, and would normally be capitalized.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proper_adjective

[stagbeetle]

Proper adjectives are for British English only. Even so, I don't see them often nor do I know of any current English grammar texts or thought leaders that recognize proper adjectives.

[mywittyname]

Because white is the first word in that sentence.

[derivt]

Sorry, I am not a native English speaker, but I think it should be White Asian, do you say white americans?

Also, Google accused in lawsuit of excluding white and Asian men in hiring to boost diversity

https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2018/03/01/google-a...

[leereeves]

> I think it should be White Asian, do you say white americans?

We do say "White Americans", meaning Americans who are "white", which means people whose ancestors were Europeans (including Russia), or from Arabia, Persia, Afghanistan, North Africa, or some (but not all) other Muslim areas.

Then "Asian" includes everyone else whose ancestors were from Asia: China, Japan, India, Vietnam, Korea, Indonesia, etc.

When combined with nationality or geographical location, race is said first, so "White Asian" would mean someone living in Asia whose ancestors were European, most likely, though it's not a phrase I've heard.

[autokad]

I am not great with grammar, however I think its always supposed to be capitalized. that being said, i dont read too much into it in a hn post. Its sort of random for me, depends how tired my fingers are to leave the home keys

[jcranmer]

English grammar generally follows the rule that proper nouns and derivations thereof are capitalized. So the proper way to write it would be white, black, Asian, Hispanic (also Latino/Latina), Native American (or Indian or Amerindian), Pacific Islander, etc. Note the difference between native American and Native American.

[kgwgk]

> Collage (from the French: coller, "to glue";[1] French pronunciation: ​[kɔ.laʒ]) is a technique of an art production, primarily used in the visual arts, where the artwork is made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole.

:-)

[cirgue]

Collage is good, but I hear that if you really want to join the economic elite, you have to get into decoupage.

[jxub]

    Fitting into that decoupage
    Was a torturing massage
    To the pain camouflage
    I gobbled a hefty sausage
    That prospect was still better envisage
    Than college, lectures about collage

[jxub]

Interestingly college comes from the eponymous word in 14th century French [1] and the French term from Latin collegium.

On the other hand, collage comes from coller in Old French and this one from kolla in Ancient Greek.

It's a strange quirk of history that two such simillar words have such different origins.

[1] https://www.etymonline.com/word/college

[2] https://www.etymonline.com/word/collage

[tbassetto]

And to add some confusion, the French word “collège” is roughly the equivalent of middle school…

[jxub]

This rabbit hole goes deep... In Castillian Spanish "colegio" is often used for primary school, but sometimes as a placeholder name for any kind of compulsory education from preschool up to high school (sometimes in the shortened form "cole").

[CPLX]

While in Spanish colegio is the equivalent of high school.

[kgwgk]

It can also be primary school. In Spain, high school is instituto.

And escuela, like ecole in French or school in English, can refer to primary school or higher education institutions.

[chrisweekly]

And in German, "gymnasium" is high school.

(No wonder the Germans do so well in sports!)

/jk

[jxub]

In Poland "gimnazjum" used to be middle school until recently when the 8 year primary school system was restored because of heavy critique.

[raverbashing]

college (n.)

late 14c., "organized association of persons invested with certain powers and rights or engaged in some common duty or pursuit,"

From where expressions like "electoral college" come from

I wonder if there's a linguistic term for having a broad term become a more specific one (in some occasions like this)

Another interesting term is Faculty, which meant "branch of knowledge" then finally became "the group of teachers/professors in an educational institution" https://www.etymonline.com/word/faculty

[thaumasiotes]

> I wonder if there's a linguistic term for having a broad term become a more specific one (in some occasions like this)

Almost certainly there is, but if I ever learned it I can't bring it to mind.

This would be an example of the more general phenomenon "semantic shift", though.

Edit: a quick Google search suggests that this particular shift is known fairly intuitively as "semantic narrowing".

[grkvlt]

Interesting, in the UK (in fact, most of the world except the USA, I think) the term Faculty still means a branch of a university dealing with a particular subject group, like 'Faculty of Arts' or 'Faculty of Science' with departments arranged under the Faculties. It's always odd to me seeing e.g. the teachers at a kids school referred to as 'Faculty' on American TV shows!

[tpurves]

To be fair, studying collage did famously turn out pretty well, and economically too, for some young people like Picasso and Braque :) http://www.ideelart.com/module/csblog/post/159-1-cubist-coll...

[jxub]

It's a typical case of the Red Queen effect [1]. Maybe in some decades a PhD will even be required to get a job as a barista (wait, the future is already here!).

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen_hypothesis

[Spooky23]

College isn’t the issue, it’s the lack of political will to make the political and social objective sustainable.

An English or art history major has a lot to add to the world, both in terms of enlightenment and analytical ability. The problem is that it isn’t worth the debt load, and the incentive structure for tuition guarantees bad outcomes.

My dad went to City College in NYC for free in the late 60s and received a great education. His dad was a widower with 5 kids who ran a neighborhood bar.

The modern version of my dad would be either in the army by necessity or saddled with massive debt even in a public school.

The societal cost of the current situation is awful — wage slave milennials who will never own a home or have a opportunity to accumulate wealth.

[autokad]

> "wage slave milennials who will never own a home or have a opportunity to accumulate wealth."

not with the way they spend it. i graduated in '02 with 35k dept, couldn't find work till '05. started off at 29k doing tech support. But I didnt travel, I -never- ate out, always tried to keep my spending to almost nothing. two years before i bought my house, i lived in a micro apartment for 400/month to save money. bought a house by 2013.

I dont think I qualify as being a millennial, but I do respect the hardships they faced, as I graduated during the 2001 recession and was smacked with the housing crisis as soon as I was starting to get on my feet. delayed employment and years of low wages have made it almost impossible for me to save enough to retire.

however,

when gainfully employed people say they cant afford a house, they very often mean: "I dont want to adjust my spending, and I dont want to be flexible for where I want to live."

[closeparen]

This has more to do with urbanization/centralization than with spending habits. A handful of firms headquartered in global cities are increasingly eating the world; this is making those cities expensive by increasing the importance of living in one of them.

All the San Francisco complainers could likely find living-wage jobs and houses in what's left of America's small towns and stagnant cities, and choose not to. You're right. But IT jobs only exist in Middle America because the Bay Area and Seattle cloud companies haven't gotten to them yet. If you want to be on the forefront of your industry and on the right side of history, you probably need to do it from a place where homeownership is growing further and further out of reach to mere professionals.

In those cities, the few thousand dollars a year you could save by cutting the restaurant meals and travel don't make a meaningful difference in your ability to amass as $200k down payment or plop down a $1m cash offer (increasingly necessary to win a bid).

[snambi]

Today education is an industry. They influence and market themselves into the government that they are the authority for knowledge. Ultimately most of what I learnt in College is crap and useless. Just got a degree certificate which is useful to provide to governments.

Knowledge has nothing to do with colleges/schools/universities.

[skookumchuck]

> Ultimately most of what I learnt in College is crap and useless

College degree programs have a lot of flexibility in classes you choose to take. If you choose poorly, or look for the easy classes, your education will be worth a lot less.

I.e. college provides you with an opportunity to learn. What you make of that is up to you.

[pascalxus]

No. They force you to learn mostly useless stuff. I can't just decide what I want to learn. Let's say I wanted to do a startup. Besides reading all the Paul Graham articles, the best way to learn how to run your own specific business is to learn by doing. School can only teach you the concepts. No, school in the world will be able to teach you which channel will generate your best customer for "your" business: only an A/B test can teach you that.

Most colleges let you choose 1 semester of real world experience. And the other 95%, is classes that you have to pick from (even if you're creating your own degree). And, in a world where jobs/careers are becoming increasingly specialized, this antiquated form of education is no longer effective for many of us.

The opportunity cost is enormous. At least 6 years of lost wages (500K+). You work for them for 6 years that they don't even pay for (not even minimum wage), and to add insult to injury, you need to pay them for it.

[skookumchuck]

> I can't just decide what I want to learn.

Sure you can. You pick the college, you pick the major.

> only an A/B test can teach you that.

You learn how to do that and how to interpret the results in college. That's what your statistics class is about.

> The opportunity cost is enormous.

My college degree paid off enormously for me. Of course, I picked a major that paid well, and carefully selected the classes to maximize my value in the workplace. I also took accounting classes in college, because running a profitable business requires knowledge of accounting.

(Most startups fail because the owners don't understand notions of profit, cash flow, balance sheets, etc.)

[agumonkey]

I see a few non educational issues with this trend:

- human nature has important points: teenage, young adult, young parents. Pushing education longer means delaying these.

- being a student is not necessarily being an independant adult, very often it delay teenagehood, whereas previous generation had to start earning their life around 16. It creates a meeting point between high desires and responsibilities. Something that doesn't happen nowadays where kids 'may' (only a mild subjective opinion) satisfy desires through culture and fads

- higher education was a bet on the previous structures, where being a grad student meant sure and high payoff. This changed... very often people with degrees are struggling. The education pipeline isn't met by a good demand in a way.

I think it also change the family structure where parents became grand parents earlier, now you may start stable life after 25 and have kids at 30, whereas before people would have them before that. And IMO this factor is an important source of happiness and motivation for the whole family circle. Delaying means everybody is older and doesn't respond the same way at all.

[closeparen]

>whereas previous generation had to start earning their life around 16

The previous generation had access to vastly more efficient and heavily taxpayer-subsidized public universities, and could pay for them with typical teenage part-time jobs. Universal high school came on the scene in the 1940s. I'm sure there was a generation that had to earn its life starting at age 16, but it was more than a couple of generations ago.

[samsonradu]

Peter Thiel had an interesting analysis on the higher-education issues [1].

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzdiWDw4teo

[forkandwait]

Given the evidence we have, I don't think we can say whether success -> college or college -> success or both or neither.

Just a random anecdote, but I spend 10 years working crappy blue collar jobs after going to pretty good East Coast private dayschools, and while my blue collar compatriots had crappy study skills, they weren't really any smarter or dumber than my fellow students. Guess who did better in the long run...

[gaius]

More generally, it’s a problem with confusing a thing with the symbol of that thing. You can’t make people richer by printing money and just handing it out, tho’ that doesn’t stop governments trying it (quantitative easing being the latest example). No mere coincidence that the same governments think they can educate people by printing and handing out degree certificates.

[AnthonyMouse]

> You can’t make people richer by printing money and just handing it out, tho’ that doesn’t stop governments trying it (quantitative easing being the latest example).

That actually does work pretty well, because it causes people to spend money. If you had none before and the government prints some and gives it to you, now you have some and can spend it. If you had some before and you know the government is going to be printing more, you want to spend it before the inflation reduces its value.

As long as the things people are stimulated to buy are economically productive, it increases real wealth.

The thing you have to be careful with is combining it with policies that cause people to spend the money on unproductive things. See housing bubble.

[UncleEntity]

I used that argument during my counterfeiting trial, didn't go over too well until I started talking about broken windows...

[thaumasiotes]

Counterfeiting is one way of creating money and is generally unpopular.

But making loans is a more mainstream way of accomplishing the same thing, and is in fact often considered to promote growth.

[skookumchuck]

Loans don't make people wealthier. The loans are backed by collateral, and have to be paid back. It is not at all the same thing as counterfeiting.

[opwieurposiu]

We use a fractional reserve banking system. Currently the reserve ratio is 10% for large banks. Therefore when you get a loan, 90% of the money you get from the bank the bank conjured from thin air. Loans are backed by 90% nothing.

[thaumasiotes]

Sure, making loans is not the same thing as counterfeiting.

However, viewed in terms of effect on the money supply, it is the same thing as counterfeiting. They both increase the money supply.

[notfromhere]

Loads generate lots of wealth if they're used effectively, and great at creating problems if used irresponsibly.

[cortesoft]

It is a modern day cargo cult.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult

[TheOtherHobbes]

The whole point of the SA article is that you can make people richer by printing money and handing it out.

It's absolutely clear about this. Printing money and handing it out is the best possible strategy if you want a vibrant, inventive culture.

Conversely rationing access is self-defeating. You get a few individuals with giga-wealth and a lot of friction everywhere else, which throws sand in the wheels of future wealth creation.

[skookumchuck]

No, you can't. There's no free lunch. Printing money makes the person with the new banknotes richer, but everyone else holding banknotes poorer. I.e. it's zero-sum.

> if you want a vibrant, inventive culture

Nonsense.

[DrScump]

  Printing money and handing it out is the best possible strategy if you want a vibrant, inventive culture.

... like present-day Venezuela?

[smt88]

> "No mere coincidence that the same governments think they can educate people by printing and handing out degree certificates."

However much disdain you have for college, it's not even close to the same as printing money. Decent, accredited institutions are still mind-expanding.

I think you're also making a different argument. The argument OP and others are making is that education doesn't create wealth. You seem to be arguing that education doesn't create educated people.

[gaius]

However much disdain you have for college

I’m in the UK where the previous government had an ideological urge to get 50% of school-leavers into university and the only way it could do that was massive dilution. The Russell Group are still quality but the gap between them and the ex-poly degree mills is vast. Attending one of those indeed is not really an education despite the certification.

[derivt]

Why collage and not college? https://www.learnenglish.de/mistakes/collagevscollege.html

[erodr015]

Your argument is based on anecdotal evidence.

Do your research.