[kwatsonafter]

This is going to turn our country backwards. We're the richest country in the world. We should be training our citizens to be PhDs and exporting innovation and culture. The standard for "skilled trade" should be world-class skills (Hyperbaric Welding, Robotics, Civil Engineering; ie. "skills an advanced society would export") and not work that can be exported to the developing world. These, "advanced skills" require a level of critical thinking that requires college education. We're beginning to forget that we can't have an advanced society without a well-educated and informed voting populace.

Relevant:

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

[teakettle42]

First, we still need plumbers, painters, and tradesmen of all sorts.

Second, not everyone is equipped to earn a PhD by significantly advancing our knowledge in a useful field. In fact, the majority of people are not.

Third, the demand for degrees — due to the idea that everyone must go to college, and misguided subsidies to make that happen — already far exceeds what colleges are able to supply while still being achievable by the majority of their customer base.

The result has been degree inflation, cost inflation, and a huge number of useless workers with useless degrees unable to pay off their crippling college debt.

[ghaff]

>Second, not everyone is equipped to earn a PhD by significantly advancing our knowledge in a useful field. In fact, the majority of people are not.

And even if equipped (whatever that means exactly) many simply have no interest in doing so. I assume I could have gotten into a PhD program of some sort had I had my heart set on it. (I did get a couple of Masters--and mostly quite enjoyed them.) But had very little interest in getting a PhD--and find the idea retrospectively even less appealing today.

[kwatsonafter]

If you broaden the historical context the result has been an advanced economy with computers and high speed communication. It's going to be this kind of anti-intellectual, pseudo-populist rhetoric that ends up killing innovation in the United States.

We're rich enough (for now) to import innovation; we don't need an educated populace. We have a robust military that makes us untouchable geopolitcally.

Do you see how dangerous this kind of bullshit is? Do you see what happens when enough of the people in your country don't value things like degrees and institutions of higher learning? The Athenians fell because of their hubris; not because they valued poetry and art.

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

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

http://hrlibrary.umn.edu/education/thucydides.html

[Panzer04]

It's not a question of if we value it - we have yet to automate trades, and we still require tradespeople to carry out the day to day work of construction and manufacturing. There's nothing wrong with that, as there are many people who'd rather work with their hands as opposed to sitting in front of a computer.

So long as people have ready access to a trade education if they want it, the wages afforded to various professions should be sufficient to handle the distribution of students into the future - clearly, degrees are still desirable enough to the alternative that trade wages will have to go higher before more people start moving into it.

[linksnapzz]

What a curious line to draw, between "some Catholics think that postsecondary voc-ed might be a good idea" and "anyone with glasses might be an intellectual, best kill them just in case".

[bjornsing]

> This is going to turn our country backwards. We're the richest country in the world. We should be training our citizens to be PhDs and exporting innovation and culture.

I’m Swedish and this is the ideology Sweden is based on. But I’ve come to see it as backwards, even immoral.

There’s a dream on the left side of the political spectrum that everyone is borne a blank slate that society can fill with whatever it wants. By this logic a rich country can fill their blank slates with wonderfully productive and innovative PhDs, because all it takes is economic resources invested in education.

But that’s simply not true. Highly challenging, creative, innovative thinking doesn’t work that way. Take Srinivasa Ramanujan as an example. With no formal education at all he wrote himself into the history books of mathematics. He’s an extreme example. But consider e.g. the distribution of scores on the Putnam: top scores are around 125, and most years the median is zero(!). Those with a zero score do not in general lack education.

I have one brother that has a mild intellectual handicap and one that has a PhD in medicine. The former makes sandwiches for the kids in a local school and works in a stable. The latter makes equipment for medical research. They are both perfectly happy with their stations in life. But taken to the extreme this ideology means that if they were borne in different countries then their positions may very well be switched. Nobody benefits from this. It would make them both miserable, the sandwiches worse and (probably :P) the medical research equipment less useful.

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” In this case I think that means every country on earth is going to have some brilliant innovators, and some skilled craftsmen. They’ll need both to stay rich.

[e63f67dd-065b]

> But consider e.g. the distribution of scores on the Putnam: top scores are around 125, and most years the median is zero(!). Those with a zero score do not in general lack education.

This is a bad example; the Putnam is designed as a competition and scored in a way to distinguish the 90th percentile from the 99th, not the 40th from the 50th. The median = 0 just means that the scoring system throws away everything below the median to better score everything above it.

Skilled craftsmen exist because there are things that require a combination of capital in the form of tools and knowledge in the form of training on a small scale. Think about an electronics repair shop: they will pretty much always exist (and should) because as sophistication increases in electronics, when they break they always result in a unique snowflake of a situation that is basically impossible to automate the repair thereof. Repair also requires spare parts and tools that they buy one time and use many times.

In a dynamic economy both will exist, but it doesn't render the argument that we should want more Nvidias and fewer Subways any less valid.

[bjornsing]

> This is a bad example; the Putnam is designed as a competition and scored in a way to distinguish the 90th percentile from the 99th, not the 40th from the 50th. The median = 0 just means that the scoring system throws away everything below the median to better score everything above it.

Another example of such a competition is the global innovation economy. If you’re in the 50th percentile of GPU companies then you’re not nVidia, and economically speaking you can just go home.

I understand it sounds harsh, and it is. But it’s the truth.

[abakker]

Sure, but college attendance is very high now and wasn’t back when we had a “more informed electorate”. Educational achievement is not a catch all for actually being a thinking and critical person.

Also, not everyone has equal potential, and the people who do have it may not want to use it. Having many trade paths, not just elite ones helps our society to match achievement and desire. We certainly need the full spectrum and should encourage the development of more choice.

[chadash]

I need a plumber. And I don't care what plumbers in Vietnam charge, because I need a plumber here. And if everyone I know made twice as much money, we'd still need plumbers, maybe even more so, and we'd just pay more for them.

[a5seo]

“If I had a million dollars We wouldn't have to eat Kraft dinner But we would eat Kraft dinner Of course we would we'd just eat more”