[jmm]

What gets me about many of these articles is how broad a brush they often use when describing "the education bubble." And so I appreciate that this article at least gestures at different types of grad school, and how student/consumer demand may be decreasing.

But I'd to read more about specific bad "educational investment" decisions, and what makes these decisions bad, as a way of prescribing better pathways for students sizing up their college or grad school options. Specifically, what are the bigger competing opportunities that should entice these "kids" away from educational debt and opportunity cost? Thiel's program can only be a very small part of the re-balancing act, I think.

Point me in the right direction if you've already read it...

[byrneseyeview]

That is part of what makes a bubble a bubble. Individual houses have been good investments for particular reasons; individual e-commerce plays or telecom companies made sense in the mid-90's. But when people start calling up their broker to buy the next Internet IPO, or trying to invest in "housing" as a category--or when parents tell their kids to get "A degree," it naturally selects for the worst version of those.

Here are a couple examples:

* http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view.bg?articleid=...

* http://chronicle.com/article/Many-More-Students-Are/66223/

Thiel's program is more of a signal than anything. I dropped out of college five years ago, and people thought I was crazy. I had lunch a couple months ago with my high school classmates (from a regionally well-regarded prep school), and I'm pretty happy with how my career and prospects stack up.

[jmm]

Thanks. The relationship to the housing bubble is interesting, no doubt. In my mind, no two things have been more connected to class aspirations/freedoms over the last 50 years than home ownership and higher ed. There are class and race issues at play in both cases, which makes new prescriptions pretty tough to make, especially on a political level.

But a problem has been identified here -- too many people are spending too much on money on phantom educational assets. Now the solution -- fewer people should go to college. (Especially expensive low to mid tier schools?) I guess what I was really asking above, is: so what should they do instead? And I'm guessing the answer ain't so pretty, something even more offensive to the idea of the American dream than the analogous housing case, of "sorry, just keep on renting."

[byrneseyeview]

I went to college for a year, and I'm doing just fine without it. That used to be the standard path. There are plenty of well-paying jobs that don't require a degree--many trades pay far better than white-collar jobs, for example, and sales jobs often don't require a degree.

And there's nothing wrong with renting, either. You buy housing as you need it, just like you buy food as you need it--I don't feel ripped off that I eat peaches but don't own an orchard.

[chernevik]

I think the "bubble" argument is that education is overpriced for value delivered. If someone can't pay off their school debt, what's the economic return on the schooling? I can see the objections to such analysis for undergrad, but surely the economic returns on professional education should be reflected in financial returns.

The replacement of "educated" workers by technology suggests similar value problems. If someone is truly replaceable by automation, and can't find other work, were they ever properly educated in the first place? Or were they socialized to a particular work ethic, and trained to follow very complicated instructions? I would expect an educated person to use their analytic abilities and grasp of principles and ability to learn, to find how to use automation, somewhere, to do more work of better quality. If they can't do that, then I question just how well they were educated in the first place.

So the bubble might be reflected not in the price, but in the crummy product delivered at that price.

[billswift]

You bring up a good point. One of my favorite T-shirt sayings is "Go away or I shall replace you with a small shell script". If someone could be replaced with a shell script, or even a major application, they were not well educated in the first place. Despite all the work on AI, computers are still only useful in extremely narrow niches, and absolutely require humans to provide the context necessary for their output to be useful.

[gaius]

I've always thought that t-shirt was pretty offensive. If your manager wore a shirt saying "go away or I'll outsource you to India" what would you think about that? They've both as true as each other...