[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...