[RasputinsBro]

> In the words of Syndrome "if everyone is super, no one is". If every one has a BS/BA , masters, PHD then in a real sense no one really does.

This is a very small minded view of the world.

If I have a PhD, and everyone else does too, it's like I don't have one? No! I learned many things during my PhD, and that knowledge doesn't disappear because others have more knowledge too.

It seems the only thing you consider is jobs, but even there you're wrong. The job market is not zero sum.

> Yet governments may actually be overestimating the economic benefits of higher education. While universities are places of learning, they are also social sorting mechanisms.

Yes, so? The universities being a social sorting mechanism does not stop them from also being places of learning. This is American anti-intellectualism 101.

[DanAndersen]

Speaking as a PhD student, I think everyone having a PhD would be an extreme net negative on society -- even putting aside questions of opportunity cost or social signaling. PhD study hyper-specializes people, which is important for getting some scientific progress done, but I think it would make it more difficult for people to relate to each other and make valuable broad-minded connections outside of their field.

But I do think that the social signalling aspect is the dominant factor for most people's decision to get higher education. Imagine a world in which it was mandated that degrees were not allowed to be made public, to employers or anyone, and the presence or absence of a formal degree was not allowed to be a deciding factor in employment. Employers would likely find informal proxies to test for skills (either basic competence or specialized knowledge). Would-be students probably wouldn't go to college. And there's nothing wrong with that, because most jobs -- and most people's lives -- don't need the kind of degreed education that colleges are providing.

[_emacsomancer_]

> PhD study hyper-specializes people

I would strongly disagree. A PhD dissertation itself requires a hyper-specialisation (that's the point), but doesn't mean that a person holding a PhD forever writes about the same topic.

[Balgair]

> PhD study hyper-specializes people

I want to dive into that a bit, if it's alright.

If the world is becoming more complex as time marches onward, which I think we all think it is, then we should expect people to specialize and then hyper-specialize with more time. I'm sure most grad students have seen this illustration: http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/

It's an informative idea, that the PhD takes a lot of effort and accounts for not so much. However, it's uninformative in the representation of science being a circle or any other uniform mass. I know I'm nitpicking a quick drawing, but I see this illustration all the time in PhD-land and it makes me a bit frustrated.

The circle misinforms the reader that at large scales, the sum of human knowledge is countable, known to all, and accessible. But even more pernicious is the idea that, in the local area, where that zit on the face of science lies, the field is moving outward/progressing uniformly. That there are no holes, or that if there are, they can be seen and worked towards.

In fact, I'd say that the sum-of-knowledge-circle is more of a fractal, something like the animated Mandelbrot set: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandelbrot_set#/media/File:Ani...

The boundary of science that a PhD pushes outward is a fractal portion of some previous portion. The circumference is always increasing and may do so until infinity, though the surface area is finite (like Euler's horn). Your doctoral work is just making more questions to be asked, though in a smaller and smaller way, like a fractal zoom. As the timestamps count up, the fractals increase in complexity, the questions science creates increase.

But it's not just science, as if 'science' can be locked away from the rest of humanity and just doled out like a communion wafer. Science is human, all of us (eventually) share in it's flowers and thorns. That includes the general populace. They are part of that fractal too. So i think that in fact, yes, given enough time, most folks will be a the level of specialization of today's PhD, because the world and the science will need for them to be there because it will be so advanced and difficult.

[analog31]

PhD study hyper-specializes people...

I'm not sure about that. By way of anecdata, there are several PhDs at my workplace, myself included. The PhDs are the most likely to be doing multi-disciplinary work, and to quickly move into new areas.

At least by tradition, the doctoral education was supposed to be about "learning how to learn," and though the research topic was specialized, you had to pick up a lot of breadth in order to make it work. In my case, though I studied some arcane properties of atoms, in order to conduct my project, I had to learn electronics, programming, and a variety of other things.

Now, another thing about the PhD education is that no two PhDs are alike, which makes it hard to talk about having a PhD as a sort of symbol -- of what? Take two PhDs in nearly the same area, and they will have remarkably different sets of knowledge and approaches to problems. A PhD project is a series of disasters, not a smooth trajectory towards mastery of a narrow field.

And as you move up the academic ladder, you are given more freedom to forge your own education, including an education that makes you more employable, or less so. Perhaps how you get yourself through your PhD amplifies the small things that make you unique as a person and problem solver.

(Note that there's some hidden advice here. If the degree itself won't make you desirable, you have to make yourself desirable by what you add to your abilities).

[ouid]

>PhD study hyper-specializes people.

Hyper-specialization benefits from, if not outright requires, a broad foundation.

[nopinsight]

I believe a proper PhD education should allow one to dig into any subjects given enough time and examine them in great depth. It would help greatly in spotting misdirections and fallacies even in published research. Most of the PhDs I know are quite open to be convinced by sound reasoning even though they might disagree at first, and that is a great boon to societal decision making.

The issues of costs, ROI, and capabilities/interests do make it difficult to push everyone toward getting a PhD though.

[lalaland1125]

> Most of the PhDs I know are quite open to be convinced by sound reasoning even though they might disagree at first, and that is a great boon to societal decision making.

Correlation is not causation. A potentially more likely explanation is that people more open to changing their mind are more likely to be willing and able to get a PhD.

[forapurpose]

> The job market is not zero sum.

To expand on that, the more educated your neighbor is, the more productive and capable they are, and the better off you are. Do you want poor, unskilled, uneducated customers, vendors, employees, neighbors, and fellow citizens? Or skilled, prosperous, educated ones? Do we want to return to the Middle Ages?

[DanAndersen]

Education is not a one-dimensional scale of more/less educated. I'd want customers, vendors, employees, neighbors, and citizens who are sufficiently educated in whatever specifics are useful for their lives to be meaningful and happy. If we as a society can stop thinking that getting a B.S. is the only sign of smarts and high status, and recognize that things like trade schools or specialized job training are better for vast portions of the populations than imprisoning oneself in debt, then I think we'd be better off.

>Do we want to return to the Middle Ages?

I'll take the universal literacy of modernity, but there's actually a lot to learn from apprentice-based systems in previous centuries.

[elefanten]

But there are other, more ephemeral things that you want people to at least have been introduced to and grappled with a bit. Arguably a lot of the unrest in democracies right now has to do with people not being very critical thinkers. You don't have to have an undergraduate degree, but having some well of knowledge in history, politics and economics to draw upon is pretty important to understanding and interpreting civic life around you.

So there has to be some middle ground between "everyone must get a bachelor's!!" and "start shop class at 15, you'll be fine"

[geodel]

How come then there is so much unrest in universities nowadays? And univ students seems to be on forefront in making feelings based arguments instead critical thinking based arguments.

[elefanten]

The short answer to both of your observations is that they're misperceptions.

1. Universities have long been tied to visible activism -- the fact that we're at the high point of a wave now isn't particularly meaningful. There is no systemically disruptive "unrest" in universities -- classes go on, degrees are being earned.

2. The feelings thing seems like your perception. Yes, more visible and provocative and simply unusual speech occurs at universities. By gross volume, there may be more feelings-based reasoning that you perceive in universities. But compared to the cultural mainstream, critical thinking is much more visible and prevalent at universities -- it is, in fact, required a lot of them time.

[sjg007]

I don't think anyone expects a BS to be high status. It's one path. I know plenty of successful people in the trades. One thing with the trades though is that it can be hard on your body so you have to move to management/ownership as you age. But yes, education is too expensive. I think of student loans as a direct tax on education paid to universities to offset their direct loss in state funds. What I feel is immoral is that the interest is captured by private corporations when the loans are guaranteed by the Feds.

[forapurpose]

> I know plenty of successful people in the trades.

Good for them, but it's an anecdote. People with bachelors degrees make 70% more, per the article.

[Symmetry]

The question is to what extent the things people learn in school actually make more skilled in ways that allow them to create prosperity. Obviously many things learned in school are quickly forgotten and never used. But also obviously many of us make a living with the things we learned.

[lucas_membrane]

>> return to the Middle Ages <<

Why not? At lease Charlemagne could almost read and promoted education.

[kermittd]

Does the holy script of a degree confer these qualities?

[Caveman_Coder]

No, plus the question is a kind of false dichotomy...they present it as either you're college educated and productive/capable/smart or you aren't...it turns out you can be very productive/capable/skilled/smart without ever having gone to college.

[elefanten]

What are you reading? Can you link one comment that presented it that way?

Specifically, ggp that you're referring to was expanding on reasons why education is good beyond it's connection to the job market.

[Caveman_Coder]

> "Do you want poor, unskilled, uneducated customers, vendors, employees, neighbors, and fellow citizens? Or skilled, prosperous, educated ones?"

[elefanten]

Exactly. Neither that comment nor its parent said degrees are necessary for education. Both were defending the value of education that extends beyond it's signal to the job market.

The only extent to which people are conflating degrees and education is the empirically obvious observation that most people don't get much actionable education beyond their time in degree programs, individual counterexamples notwithstanding.

[kermittd]

I think your view is small minded. One it's possible that you learned nothing during your PHD or more accurately you learned what paths not to go down.

Your knowledge doesn't disappear sure but your opportunities particularly the ability to put that knowledge to use does.

Not zero sum? It's been completely zero sum for he past forty years. Average incomes are stagnating, the cost of essential goods is rising. Furthermore the developing world's propsperity has increased but at what cost? The cost of much of the middle classes' prosperity in the developed world.

You are actually the anti-intellectual. You would tie the gaining and practice of knowledge to exclusionary institutions.

[elefanten]

If everyone put in the hours learning something that go into the average PhD, the population would be much more skilled in general. No it's not the only way to gain skill but what you're ignoring is that the overwhelming majority of people stop learning economically valuable skills in their teens. Even just continuing to do some of that throughout your 20's would be a big difference. Academic route isnt the only one to learn but empirically it's a good one because it involves making your life and schedule revolve around it -- something most people need in order to pull it off.

I've never heard anyone claim that "schools are the only way to learn" or that "you must have a degree to be skilled" -- I always hear it framed as "school's a great environment for learning" and "degrees are a useful heuristic for skill"

The good observations of the school-skeptics are not helped along by the ridiculous distortions and exaggerations.

[sjg007]

Huh? It's only zero sum in the sense that corporations and the top 1% are taking the gains. Technological progress has increase productivity in real terms and brought about new advances for what we can actually do. There also have been plenty of biotech and other engineering companies born out of the "glut" of PhDs.

Learning what not to do helps you discover what you should do and technology increase our resolution to discover scientific principles and put them to use. A PhD is an expert in research. Yes you can learn this on your own outside of academia but why? You have to put the time in anyway, may as well get the degree.

An undergraduate education prepares you for the job market whether that be graduate work, corporate work or something other activity. It may be bad at teaching automative repair, construction, plumbing, earth work, electrical work etc... but that's OK. There are other paths for that and those are not bad jobs. Even computer programming at some levels can be seen as a trade skill (wire X to Y), debug operating system. It can also be seen as a professional skill (hence the focus on algorithms/complexity etc... that we see in interviews).

At big research institutions in the sciences you get to see the future and you get to work on it or invent it. That's a nice place to be sometimes.