[moonchrome]

>Who says people are expected to have degrees before they can do anything of value?

Professional guilds - legal bars, medical boards, engineering, academia - you're pretty much excluded from all those fields lacking a formal degree accepted by the mentioned institutions, even tough you can have the required skills and even experience (as a skilled immigrant for eg., you can even have a degree from a non-accredited/foreign education institution). The monopolistic nature of this system is nicely illustrated by the "diploma mills" that allow people to get hired for the job requiring a diploma without completing the education program, perform their jobs successfully for considerable amount of time and then when/if discovered "cheating" get fired - without actually failing to do their job at any point, just because they don't have the degree. Granted this is logical from the employers point of view as the legal liability is huge but that's the result of the system.

>I think it's ironic that the OP used a computer and the internet to publish his propagandist rant; an action that would've been impossible without all the academic research into computing and networking systems in the last few decades. I'd argue that the economic fallout of that research alone has more than paid back whatever money the US government has invested in universities.

I'd argue that you don't consider the opportunity cost and the crowding out of R&D investment in that assertion and implied that without public funding the academic work wouldn't be done. Here's a different view of that argument : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_PVI6V6o-4 , also he has a book on topic.

[microarchitect]

Professional guilds - legal bars, medical boards, engineering, geology, academia - you're pretty much excluded from all those fields lacking a formal degree accepted by the mentioned institutions, even tough you can have the experience (or even a degree from a non-accredited/foreign education institution).

I think you're being generous to the author here. He said "people are expected to have degrees before they can do anything of value" which is different from your claim that you can't do some things of value that without a degree.

In any case, none of this is an indictment of the university itself. While I agree that it's possible that some of these professions might be better served with looser guidelines, I don't see how the author's idea of cutting university funding will improve this situation.

I'd argue that you don't consider the opportunity cost and the crowding out of R&D investment in that assertion.

I'm not sure what you mean by "crowding out of R&D investment". If you're suggesting that the federal grant money would've been better spent on private entities doing research, isn't that what NSF and co. are already doing when they fund, say, professors at the likes of Princeton and Harvard?

I'm not disagreeing with this statement of yours, but I hope you realize that you're arguing a much weaker and better articulated position than the OP. If the OP is suggesting that we re-examine how federal grant money is allocated, I would consider that a defensible position. But he's clearly not saying that and has chosen instead to launch a broadside against the university institution and seems to have no evidence backing up his assertions.

[moonchrome]

>If you're suggesting that the federal grant money would've been better spent on private entities doing research, isn't that what NSF and co. are already doing when they fund, say, professors at the likes of Princeton and Harvard?

Sorry it should have been private R&D investment. I'm saying that there is evidence that suggests that public grants to R&D crowd out private investment, that public R&D doesn't correlate with GDP growth, that private R&D does and that grants are inferior to market approaches such as tax breaks for R&D. I think that video I linked overstates the strength of the evidence and it's conclusiveness but it's still a valid point and goes against the accepted view. Also the argument that the Internet is here only because of public R&D is very hard to make because at every instance I've looked at where public R&D gets credited (eg. CERN) there is similar work done separately in the private sector (eg. Xerox PARC). I'm not saying that the evidence is definitive, that all public science funding doesn't generate GDP growth, that GDP growth is a good metric of the value created by public R&D or that public funding is inferior to private, those are all empirical questions (or even unanswerable/subjective) and can't be generalized. I'm just saying that the position you seem to take - without public funding it wouldn't get done - isn't true both historically (eg. check out Nobel prizes from IBM and Bell labs in pure research) and you can make a theoretical argument why that is the case.

As for the authors post, yeah it's a rant but I get where he's coming from.

[microarchitect]

Fair enough, this is a viewpoint I can agree with. I don't think this is what the OP had in mind, though. Or if he did, he didn't do a good job of articulating it.

[yummyfajitas]

...I don't see how the author's idea of cutting university funding will improve this situation.

If you reduce subsidies for wasteful signalling, people will do less of it. Employers will then find signal based discrimination more difficult and expensive, and will reduce their dependence on it.

[microarchitect]

The assumption here is that education has a significant component which is "wasteful signalling". If this is true, and that's a pretty big if, what you say follows. If the assumption is not true, reducing funding would result in a poorly educated populace which could spell economic disaster.

My point is: (1) this is not an issue we can decide without looking at the data and (2) making a claim one way or another without carefully looking at the data is not justified.

[yummyfajitas]

Here is a blog post discussing data. After graduation, the sheepskin effect is about 50% of the value of a degree. (Over time, as a worker builds up a track record, this goes down.)

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2a012/01/the_present_val...

Unless you believe human capital jumps massively between 116 credits and 120 credits, this is strong evidence in favor of the signalling model.

Another big chunk of the measured returns to education are merely ability bias.

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/01/correcting_for.h...