[catothedev]

Making a DCF analysis for education is going to be extremely murky.

That said, since it was done in spreadsheet, it would be easy for a relatively non-technical person to tweak the numbers to refute the author's argument (sidenote: only in the world of hacker news would people think python is more accessible).

I think the lack of interest in reviewing the spreadsheet reflects how people with education department degrees protect their jobs and win public policy arguments: they prefer to argue that ROI is not a relevant concept for education investment (even if it is at the core of virtually every other type of investment analysis).

[nyokodo]

> ROI is not a relevant concept for education investment

If there is no return or even return sought then it can’t be called an investment. It’s just spending on part-time prison for kids.

[athrowaway3z]

I think you're to harsh with saying it reflect the state of mind of educational departments, and far to lenient with 'extremely murky'.

Sure, its very likely people don't want to engage with something that is saying they are doing inefficient/useless work.

But the author's premise is literately "I've crunched the numbers and people don't care" on a subject that would be my go-to example for an incalculable ROI. You could make an argument for an individual, but that's not what the education department or society at large is doing.

Just for starters, at a national scale over decades, there are no unbiased units to measure with. Next i'd like to agree on how we deal with the correlation between 'Patents that changed society' and 'Patent authors being generally higher educated'.

Maybe you can argue for a decent proxy for these things, or their irrelevance. But since i only have so much time, I'll assume your excel sheet is correct in how it processes the input, and instead argue on what the input should be in the first place.