Fun with WAR

Someone agrees with me about higher education! and that someone is DFA!

The apocalypse is surely at hand!

any absolute level of expertise. Its value is as a signal that separates one group from another. If all students achieved the level of expertise or if none did, then it has no worth.

Too many people getting degrees is a problem regardless of whether all those people have achieved any particular level of education.

A lot of people who go to college don’t really belong in college. It’s not that they’re dumb, but they have specific skills and talents that make them more suited for something else (this is why I think “professional sports” should be a major in college, so the “student-athletes” don’t have to take BS geology classes. They can instead get an education in what they’re good at.).

If we focused more on finding out what someone is good at then teaching them how to do that, there’d be fewer people wasting years in college when they could spend maybe a year on an inexpensive specialized school/training program.

prisoner’s dilemma is to stop thinking like an economist and think in terms of a code of honor. Cultures that do the latter consistently fare better at the prisoner’s dilemma, and this fact is only paradoxical if you think like an economist.

As for the college problem, I think a good start would be to cut out the subsidies. The education industry is heavily subsidized, based on the notion that education is one of the best things a society can have and it is therefore worthy of public funding. This notion is correct, but the problem is that the subsidy doesn’t actually buy more of the stuff. Like most subsidies it only causes a temporary instability in the local market, and once the market adjusts you have no more actual education than you had before but the price has gone up to match the subsidy, the market signal is lost in the noise, and if you’re the poor fuck who actually wanted an education even without the bribe you just got priced out of it.

Like most subsidies that are least effective in achieving their supposed goals and most effective in keeping themselves alive, the education subsidy is disguised. It comes mostly in the form of loan guarantees. If I go to a bank for a business loan, they’ll want to know what my business plan is: if it looks like it’s going to create enough money to pay them back, they’ll offer the loan; if it doesn’t they won’t. Without loan guarantees, the same thing would happen for student loans. If I want something practical that’s going to get me a job, I can get a loan; if I want to study Byzantine history, the bank will say, “That’s very nice for you, but we don’t care to finance it.” This is not only good for the banks, but it’s an excellent market signal to colleges and students for how to target their education at whatever is most economically useful, which is, after all, the basis of the subsidy’s original inspiration that education is one of the best things a society can have and therefore a public interest. The banks will make it their business to be aware of what is most likely to pay them back and will communicate it to the student. So if some 20-year-old went to law school with the idea that it’s a good way to get rich, as opposed to a genuine interest in law, the bank would have set him straight and told him he’s looking at 15-year-old data and if he gets on the train now, all he gets is a chance to buy high and ride it down in the inevitable decline.

But I don’t see any end to student loan guarantees until the bubble bursts and it creates another gigantic bailout, and possibly even then. No politician can come out against education funding because then he looks like he’s against education (even though he’s really not). If you’re just a buffoon like me, you can embrace it and loudly proclaim you’re opposed to education (even you’re really not) just to make the point, but it’s no way to get elected.

… Uh, sorry for the soapbox speech, and apologies if I got too political. Please help cover my ass here, guys, and refrain from injecting anything partisan.

have plenty of signals they’re using. The problem — which perhaps really isn’t a problem; certainly not from the employer’s viewpoint — is that the students don’t know what they are, so they’re chasing after yesterday’s targets.

Some employers do pay attention to blogs, and probably not in the way people think they do. (That is, crazy weird stuff may well be more useful than something that looks like a resume.)

The majority of skills most favored in today’s economy are “female” skills, which is why today’s economy is already female-dominated, even though the lagging culture hasn’t yet accepted and adjusted to this, except cryptically.

But I’ve already given one soapbox today, so I’ll stop now.

as i found out when my college thesis was the only one un-published because it was considered a political hot potato