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A Generation Hobbled by the Soaring Cost of College

The more tools you have, the more work you can do with less people. Law of diminishing returns says that you will come to a point where the sprialing effect collapses. There aren't enough consumers to support all these jobs you imagine.

Under the current system? Of course not. This is absolutely UNremarkable, because capitalism is based upon prioritizing private profit, and maximizing private profit is not the same thing as making the most efficient use of resources.

There's a basic disconnect going on here with regards to conflicting narratives of needs, wants, resources, and development of economies. It is indeed absolutely true that the system we live under (global capitalism) has a finite limit on how many people can be sustained in jobs calling for degrees (or advanced certifications, etc.). This limit, however, is an artificial obstacle imposed by prioritizing profit over efficient use. I'd add that we're not even close to approaching that artificial limit anyway. There's nothing etched into the fabric of the universe which magically prevents an employer from, say, hiring 20-30 employees with graduate degrees at around 40k a year instead of a handful of obscenely overcompensated executives drawing seven figures. There's plenty of dogma and mythology presenting ideological resistance, but nothing stopping the actual practice.

But the deeper issue here is that jobs as we currently know them are NOT some self-obvious, natural order inherent to economic activity. Once again, even without challenging the larger system, there's no reason we have to resign ourselves to the job roles and duties we're currently accustomed to. Commercial employers already shuffle job duties on a regular basis when employees are away from work for a long time, when companies split or merge, etc. While there are a relative handful of jobs which -- due to the nature of the work done -- for all intents and purposes must remain specialized, MOST of the things people do for work are NOT structured that way. Can a professor manage to also empty their own trash/clean their own office? Of course they can. Get a few dozen professors to do their own cleaning, and the payroll formerly used to pay a full-time campus custodian could instead be used to train that former custodian into some other more flexible and rewarding line of work. Take your pick of work roles, and this concept can likely be applied.

Basically, making higher education genuinely accessible -- in conjunction with rethinking how work duties are articulated and assigned -- means breaking free of the artificially constrained options built-in to presumptions that "the economy doesn't need more educated people." OK...if the CURRENT arrangement can't support more educated people...then let's change the economy.

This dogged commitment to keeping things artificially difficult...because they're already artificially difficult...is an insult to human intelligence and creativity. Clearly people manage to do new things on a regular basis, yet if we took the It's-Just-Got-To-Be-This-Way meme to its logical extension, we are left with no explanation as to how anything new could or would come into operation. After all, if everyone accepted the idea that we have some magically fixed number of feasible work arrangements drawing upon advanced education, then jobs would function more like heirlooms, passed down like family treasures (which indeed they would be, if it were the case that we couldn't do anything to expand the number and quality of work roles available to people).

Back in reality, of course, humans manage to establish work roles for most people, despite our habit of squeezing out more and more babies and expanding the population. Clearly there is some way (or rather, many ways) to establish new, additional gainful work for people, or we'd have long since become a planet of starving paupers.
 
No, that cuts the other way. The advance of technology is eliminating jobs that do NOT require an education. Those are the jobs that are most easily automated. Take landscaping. 50 years ago it required 2-3 times as many people doing that kind of work because they used hand clippers instead of weed whackers and shovels instead of back hoes and reel manual mowers instead of motorized law mowers. Manufacturing jobs are increasingly getting automated. Agriculture is increasingly getting automated. Hand car washes are fading away to mechanical ones. Even restaurants are slowly finding that they need fewer and fewer staff as cooking and dishwashing technologies get better and they can get pre-prepared components from the factory cheaper than they can make them themselves. As technology advances it chews away at the lower end of the job spectrum while creating new opportunities at the top of the spectrum. That's why we steadily need more and more education to keep up.
you use the word automated, when you should be using "mechanized". automation will not displace all unskilled labor...
Yes, we need more education now, but we also need less workers....if you want more education, go to the library, the internet, even educational TV.
The taxpayer will NOT support free education if there isn't a new taxpayer being generated. Better tools, less need for workers, diminishing returns....
 
Under the current system? Of course not. This is absolutely UNremarkable, because capitalism is based upon prioritizing private profit, and maximizing private profit is not the same thing as making the most efficient use of resources.

There's a basic disconnect going on here with regards to conflicting narratives of needs, wants, resources, and development of economies. It is indeed absolutely true that the system we live under (global capitalism) has a finite limit on how many people can be sustained in jobs calling for degrees (or advanced certifications, etc.). This limit, however, is an artificial obstacle imposed by prioritizing profit over efficient use. I'd add that we're not even close to approaching that artificial limit anyway. There's nothing etched into the fabric of the universe which magically prevents an employer from, say, hiring 20-30 employees with graduate degrees at around 40k a year instead of a handful of obscenely overcompensated executives drawing seven figures. There's plenty of dogma and mythology presenting ideological resistance, but nothing stopping the actual practice.

But the deeper issue here is that jobs as we currently know them are NOT some self-obvious, natural order inherent to economic activity. Once again, even without challenging the larger system, there's no reason we have to resign ourselves to the job roles and duties we're currently accustomed to. Commercial employers already shuffle job duties on a regular basis when employees are away from work for a long time, when companies split or merge, etc. While there are a relative handful of jobs which -- due to the nature of the work done -- for all intents and purposes must remain specialized, MOST of the things people do for work are NOT structured that way. Can a professor manage to also empty their own trash/clean their own office? Of course they can. Get a few dozen professors to do their own cleaning, and the payroll formerly used to pay a full-time campus custodian could instead be used to train that former custodian into some other more flexible and rewarding line of work. Take your pick of work roles, and this concept can likely be applied.

Basically, making higher education genuinely accessible -- in conjunction with rethinking how work duties are articulated and assigned -- means breaking free of the artificially constrained options built-in to presumptions that "the economy doesn't need more educated people." OK...if the CURRENT arrangement can't support more educated people...then let's change the economy.

This dogged commitment to keeping things artificially difficult...because they're already artificially difficult...is an insult to human intelligence and creativity. Clearly people manage to do new things on a regular basis, yet if we took the It's-Just-Got-To-Be-This-Way meme to its logical extension, we are left with no explanation as to how anything new could or would come into operation. After all, if everyone accepted the idea that we have some magically fixed number of feasible work arrangements drawing upon advanced education, then jobs would function more like heirlooms, passed down like family treasures (which indeed they would be, if it were the case that we couldn't do anything to expand the number and quality of work roles available to people).

Back in reality, of course, humans manage to establish work roles for most people, despite our habit of squeezing out more and more babies and expanding the population. Clearly there is some way (or rather, many ways) to establish new, additional gainful work for people, or we'd have long since become a planet of starving paupers.

Birth control.....especially where the starving paupers live...sounds cruel, but not as cruel as letting them be born only to starve to death...
 
You also refute the demand for lower-echelon workers with higher skills. Treat the superior minds like we now treat superior athletes, from childhood on, and you will get the people who make things user friendly. With a computer diagnostic, even the auto repairmen don't have to be very skilled. The more geniuses we pay for their grades, the more they eventually invent things that anyone can quickly learn to use.
yeah, useful things like video games.....we already have too many people wasting their intellect and time on stupid gadgets...altho I think the intellect isn't really there for most of them, that leaves time. If these time wasters had jobs, they wouldn't be wandering around like zombies staring at a little screen and twiddling their thumbs on a keyboard..

gotta give you credit for persistence, tho....
just don't hold your breath til the nation goes another trillion in debt turning the mindless masses into educated people capable of real thought.
That is the last thing politicians want.
 
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but how much education ??
Last year the USA graduated about 120,000 engineers, and if we double that number the wages of those engineers will go down. We only need so many....
Clearly we have way too many lawyers and politicians....do we need more of those?
As a technician, I watched my profession change such that we need fewer and fewer techs, since electonics is cheaper to replace than repair, not to mention that the reliability is so much better now and long before our gadgets need repair, they are obsolete anyway.
It is a waste of resources to train or retrain people into dying professions, something else that we seem to do a lot...

How much education is the wrong question. What direction is a much better one. There isn't a huge need for PhD's in Latin, but there is for computer programmers and engineers. There is a need for more health care professionals. Those are the courses of study that need to be paid for collectively.
 
How much education is the wrong question. What direction is a much better one. There isn't a huge need for PhD's in Latin, but there is for computer programmers and engineers. There is a need for more health care professionals. Those are the courses of study that need to be paid for collectively.

problem is, when there is a shortage, we over train until we have an excess....knowing which direction is good, just don't overdo it.
where are these experts in trending when we need them?
 
There needs to be some Government regulation on how much Colleges can charge (read that salary caps for administrators and professors).
 
problem is, when there is a shortage, we over train until we have an excess....knowing which direction is good, just don't overdo it.
where are these experts in trending when we need them?

The experts in trending are a lot like the experts in forecasting the weather. They're pretty good in the short term, not good at all in the long term. What is a good bet is that it's not going to be below zero in Phoenix in July and that there isn't going to be a sudden need for advanced degrees in classic literature. Sometimes, the experts are going to be wrong, as when they decided that there would be a huge need for new teachers in California when the baby boomers started to retire. It sounded like a good bet, but didn't take in to account the economic crash.

Nothing is certain, but it is possible to calculate the odds, at least to a degree.
 
There needs to be some Government regulation on how much Colleges can charge (read that salary caps for administrators and professors).

I shop a lot at university surplus outlets.....the waste is incredible. We pay professors and university leaders too much money to waste even more money....
 
you use the word automated, when you should be using "mechanized". automation will not displace all unskilled labor...

It probably will never replace all unskilled labor, but those jobs are going to get fewer and farer between. People who are capable of doing more- which is the overwhelming majority of people- need to be preparing themselves to do more. Somebody who fails to prepare themselves for the jobs of the next 30 years is going to be a drain on society and somebody who does prepare themselves for those jobs is going to be a boost to society.

Yes, we need more education now, but we also need less workers...

If that were the case, why don't we have far fewer jobs today than we did 50 years ago? 50 years ago most women didn't work. We have far, far, more jobs today despite the massive leaps forward in technology and automation. It is because as we automate old jobs we come up with new things to do for a living. We focus on optimizing our ability to wield information, we invent new products that people like, we work on extending our lifespans, etc. 50 years ago there were more assembly line manufacturing jobs. Those got automated and now we have people who would have been working in a factory programming computers. In another 50 years computer programming will largely be automated and we will have those people working in some field that doesn't exist today. And 50 years after that, those jobs will start to dry up and they'll be working in some field that the people 50 years from today have never dreamed of. This is how life works. And each time we take that jump forward the new job requires more education than the last job.

The taxpayer will NOT support free education if there isn't a new taxpayer being generated. Better tools, less need for workers, diminishing returns....

No, it isn't another taxpayer, it is converting a lower income taxpayer into a higher income taxpayer. Like I posted out before, the median person makes an additional $833k in their lifetime if they go to college. That's way more than enough taxes to cover the cost of college.
 
The experts in trending are a lot like the experts in forecasting the weather. They're pretty good in the short term, not good at all in the long term. What is a good bet is that it's not going to be below zero in Phoenix in July and that there isn't going to be a sudden need for advanced degrees in classic literature. Sometimes, the experts are going to be wrong, as when they decided that there would be a huge need for new teachers in California when the baby boomers started to retire. It sounded like a good bet, but didn't take in to account the economic crash.

Nothing is certain, but it is possible to calculate the odds, at least to a degree.

Until he passed away last year, I had a retired economics professor living next door. He said that this current recession is way different that previous ones, and will take a lot longer to crawl out of...
 
Until he passed away last year, I had a retired economics professor living next door. He said that this current recession is way different that previous ones, and will take a lot longer to crawl out of...

So far, he is proving correct.
 
I shop a lot at university surplus outlets.....the waste is incredible. We pay professors and university leaders too much money to waste even more money....

College president defends salary

Posted: Mar 24, 2011 1:42 PM PDT Updated: Mar 24, 2011 3:30 PM PDT

LEE COUNTY: The president of Edison State College is in a meeting defending his paycheck and decisions made by his administration. The emergency meeting was in response to several complaints by Edison State staff. They question why its president is making so much money and how an executive's salary jumped by nearly $100,000 in less than a year.

Dr. Kenneth Walker has a base salary of $322,400. He also earns $18,000 for housing, $25,000 for college development and $79,955 for retirement/annuity. His total salary is $445,355.

In September 2010, Dr. James Browder, the Senior VP of Operations, was making $160,000 base salary plus $7,200 for a car. His total salary was $167,200.

In February 2011 his base salary increased to $208,000. He also receives $1,000 for a car, $12,000 for housing, $10,000 for college development and $20,000 for retirement. His total salary is now $251,000.

Edison State College has fewer than 20,000 students.

College president defends salary - NBC-2.com WBBH News for Fort Myers, Cape Coral & Naples, Florida

And that's a small college.
 
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I'd like to add one more thing about college education.

I think that we need to change the way we look at education and intelligence. It's fairly easy to game the system. I learned around 8th or 9th grade that all I was doing was memorizing facts and spewing them out on paper. Since then, I've never had to work too hard at school and have gotten good grades (A's and B's) overall. It isn't hard to get good grades at all, yet we have people running around assuming they are 'smart' because they got an A on a test. That really doesn't mean much as, like I said, most of school is just memorization. Thus, I think that we should actually have classes (and there are a few already) where one is tested via applied knowledge, essentially taking what you have learned in class and applying it to real-world situations. Some courses need to be revamped entirely such as History classes (at least on the high school level) where everything is reduced to people and dates. I think that we need to change how we teach also because it doesn't seem that people even remember most of what was taught to them in school, it just goes in one ear and out the other.
 
I'd like to add one more thing about college education.

I think that we need to change the way we look at education and intelligence. It's fairly easy to game the system. I learned around 8th or 9th grade that all I was doing was memorizing facts and spewing them out on paper. Since then, I've never had to work too hard at school and have gotten good grades (A's and B's) overall. It isn't hard to get good grades at all, yet we have people running around assuming they are 'smart' because they got an A on a test. That really doesn't mean much as, like I said, most of school is just memorization. Thus, I think that we should actually have classes (and there are a few already) where one is tested via applied knowledge, essentially taking what you have learned in class and applying it to real-world situations. Some courses need to be revamped entirely such as History classes (at least on the high school level) where everything is reduced to people and dates. I think that we need to change how we teach also because it doesn't seem that people even remember most of what was taught to them in school, it just goes in one ear and out the other.

Well it all depends what school you're in. The higher up you go both in terms of the tier the school is in and in terms of how advanced it is, the more independent thought and the less memorization is involved. For example, I'm in law school at the moment and it is all applied. 100%. Every test they just give you a legal situation and you need to reason out all the different possible issues involved. Memorization has nothing to do with it at all. They're all open book tests. College is somewhere in between high school and law school in that regard, but the better the college, the more independent thought will be expected of you. Nobody sails through college at a top school just memorizing things.

It sounds like you're maybe in high school? If so, college definitely requires more of you, and if you're doing well in high school as it sounds like you are, but you don't find it challenging enough, I would strongly urge you to do your absolute best in school and to prepare for months for the SAT because if you do those things you will definitely be able to get into a college that will give you a lot more of a run for your money. It's way more fun and will benefit you a whole lot more.
 
I am perfectly willing to pay for grades, I do so with my grandchildren, but only thru high school. I won't do this for others....
and NO, I will not adopt you.
There are some no talent brown nosed blue bloods out there, but not enough to worry about.
Biggest problem is the no ambition young who have no desire to develop their talents unless they get a paycheck up front for it. Ever lend BIG money to a friend or relative? Try it, it will be a learning experience.
Americans don't realize how much they benefit from the few people who deserved to be educated, and how much they are harmed by the people who never should have been accepted for college and also cheated out of available talent by not making college acceptable to the many people who would have benefited other Americans by submitting to this ungrateful and insulting self-sacrifice. Besides, I am suggesting that the few High IQs who should be the only ones awarded a college education will have to pay a 5% surcharge when their income exceeds $50,000 and pay until they retire. So those who benefited most will pay back more than they received and some will never pay back anything at all.

Americans have this "every man for himself" fantasy, as if geniuses studied something like casino gambling (as in the movie "21") and their brains benefited no one else. Only if that selfish reward of education were true do people have a right to be jealous of the people with talent. But they should be jealous of modern college graduates, because if they are not paid to go to college, they aren't worth anything. Indentured-servitude graduates have run the economy for 50 years and have run it into the ground. We need a new method of achieving economic leadership. Getting a good job by going four years without a job has caused our decline, but the ones enabled by that are not held accountable. People are misled into thinking that more of the same incompetent conformists is the solution. These ambitious imbeciles and greedy workoholics are only out for themselves.
 
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I'd like to add one more thing about college education.

I think that we need to change the way we look at education and intelligence. It's fairly easy to game the system. I learned around 8th or 9th grade that all I was doing was memorizing facts and spewing them out on paper. Since then, I've never had to work too hard at school and have gotten good grades (A's and B's) overall. It isn't hard to get good grades at all, yet we have people running around assuming they are 'smart' because they got an A on a test. That really doesn't mean much as, like I said, most of school is just memorization. Thus, I think that we should actually have classes (and there are a few already) where one is tested via applied knowledge, essentially taking what you have learned in class and applying it to real-world situations. Some courses need to be revamped entirely such as History classes (at least on the high school level) where everything is reduced to people and dates. I think that we need to change how we teach also because it doesn't seem that people even remember most of what was taught to them in school, it just goes in one ear and out the other.

You make a good point. There is little value in simply having an encyclopedic knowledge of facts and figures unless you can apply them to real world situations and come up with logical conclusions. That has always been true, but is even more true now that we have a world of facts and figures at our fingertips via the internet.
 
Birth control.....especially where the starving paupers live...sounds cruel, but not as cruel as letting them be born only to starve to death...

You appear to have missed the point: we do not in fact live in a situation of a fixed number of jobs for all time, and the world population of humans is going up and up. The number of people in gainful employment has also steadily risen, which proves that one way or another we've clearly found ways to support more jobs (both with and without requirements of higher levels of formal education).
 
Well it all depends what school you're in. The higher up you go both in terms of the tier the school is in and in terms of how advanced it is, the more independent thought and the less memorization is involved. For example, I'm in law school at the moment and it is all applied. 100%. Every test they just give you a legal situation and you need to reason out all the different possible issues involved. Memorization has nothing to do with it at all. They're all open book tests. College is somewhere in between high school and law school in that regard, but the better the college, the more independent thought will be expected of you. Nobody sails through college at a top school just memorizing things.

It sounds like you're maybe in high school? If so, college definitely requires more of you, and if you're doing well in high school as it sounds like you are, but you don't find it challenging enough, I would strongly urge you to do your absolute best in school and to prepare for months for the SAT because if you do those things you will definitely be able to get into a college that will give you a lot more of a run for your money. It's way more fun and will benefit you a whole lot more.

Actually, I'm in college right now.
 
It probably will never replace all unskilled labor, but those jobs are going to get fewer and farer between. People who are capable of doing more- which is the overwhelming majority of people- need to be preparing themselves to do more. Somebody who fails to prepare themselves for the jobs of the next 30 years is going to be a drain on society and somebody who does prepare themselves for those jobs is going to be a boost to society.


If that were the case, why don't we have far fewer jobs today than we did 50 years ago? 50 years ago most women didn't work. We have far, far, more jobs today despite the massive leaps forward in technology and automation. It is because as we automate old jobs we come up with new things to do for a living. We focus on optimizing our ability to wield information, we invent new products that people like, we work on extending our lifespans, etc. 50 years ago there were more assembly line manufacturing jobs. Those got automated and now we have people who would have been working in a factory programming computers. In another 50 years computer programming will largely be automated and we will have those people working in some field that doesn't exist today. And 50 years after that, those jobs will start to dry up and they'll be working in some field that the people 50 years from today have never dreamed of. This is how life works. And each time we take that jump forward the new job requires more education than the last job.



No, it isn't another taxpayer, it is converting a lower income taxpayer into a higher income taxpayer. Like I posted out before, the median person makes an additional $833k in their lifetime if they go to college. That's way more than enough taxes to cover the cost of college.
we have, or HAD, more jobs due to a positive birth rate and the marginal propensity to consume....

Marginal propensity to consume - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The "floor" of our economy is based on essentials, needs, things we must have....
When times are good, we get too optimistic and spend on things we don't need, which boosts the economy and creates jobs.
But that never lasts forever.....
 
first identify the geniuses, and educate them....there aren't very many of them, actually. So we agree to a point.
Computer diagnostics of autos has made mechanics lazy, if the computer doesn't tell them what is wrong, they replace parts til it works again. You still need to look at the potential failures that the computers don't monitor. A car that is completely monitored will cost a lot more money than you think....
Think of identifying and educating the geniuses as you would about identifying and training superior athletes. The point you miss is that you have to offer the recruits something far more than what the mentally talented are offered now. So only with athletes do we think of the talented as people who need immediate material incentives.

My other point is that if we paid people for their grades, we would get the quality of people who would invent diagnostic computers that would monitor everything and also, they could use their talent to lower costs. Not only user-friendly, but worker-friendly and cost-accountant friendly.
 
Think of identifying and educating the geniuses as you would about identifying and training superior athletes. The point you miss is that you have to offer the recruits something far more than what the mentally talented are offered now. So only with athletes do we think of the talented as people who need immediate material incentives. My other point is that if we paid people for their grades, we would get the quality of people who would invent diagnostic computers that would monitor everything and also, they could use their talent to lower costs. Not only user-friendly, but worker-friendly and cost-accountant friendly.

if what you are saying was possible, it would have already been done....I spent many years in the installation, calibration and repair of instrumentation, and most of that was to monitor the many parameters of nuclear power plants. It is easily overdone and never cheap. It is essential at the power plant, not essential on a car that might be on the road 10 years (average age of cars on the road).
athletes have nothing to do with this, they are just the result of stupid people paying to watch millionairs play.
the part of your post that I bolded is telling.
Those who need immediate gratification are seldom the ones who end up with college degrees.
well, maybe not, if you feed a dolphin enough fish, it can be taught new tricks, and I suppose that can work with people.
do you like fish?:2razz:
 
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I just fundamentally disagree with that idea. You are assuming that there are a fixed number of jobs that require educated workers. That doesn't seem to be the case at all. An educated workforce is a massive resource. Probably the biggest and most central economic resource there is. The bigger and the more educated it gets, the more the market will continue to find ways to profit off that resource. It's not like if you have two islands one with 10 inventors and one with 100 inventors, they'll both invent the same things and 90 of the inventors will be sitting idle on the second island. The second island will invent 10 times as many things. Actually, it appears that because of synchronicities between their work, the second island will invent more like 20 times as many things. Same with everything. If we have a bunch more computer programmers we will come up with more clever ways to use computers and the internet to create new fields. It propels itself forward. Educated people create their own niches to work in. That's why today we have several times as many jobs that require college degrees as we did 30 years ago, and we will have several times more in another 30 years. We aren't all that far from the point where say 80% of jobs will require at least that much education. Certainly we'll cross that line in the lifetimes of people who are in high school today.

It's simple supply and demand. As much as you may or may not admit it, workers are a commodity. Educated workers even more so. When a commodity exceeds demand, the price drops. :shrug:
 
There needs to be some Government regulation on how much Colleges can charge (read that salary caps for administrators and professors).

No there doesn't. That's called price fixing and it doesn't work, long term. However, I do support the idea of "public" universities. But I think the entry requirements should be high AND need dependent.
 
Until he passed away last year, I had a retired economics professor living next door. He said that this current recession is way different that previous ones, and will take a lot longer to crawl out of...
Because college education, in the indentured-servitude way it has been structured, puts inferior people in superior positions. A similar dysfunction of letting Communist Party politicians run the economy took 70 years to collapse, so it won't be long before this "Educationism" gets discredited.
 
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