> Most of the world has severed the two

Yes, and the US system is the envy of the world and is responsible for the overwhelming majority of wealth generated in the US over the past few decades.

I'm not sure how that's an argument against the US Higher Ed system.

Edit: The real issue you seem to be pointing to is the cost of attending universities in the US. There are 2 parts to this. 1 is the costs of running a university, and the other is the cost that is paid by the student.

Most of the rest of the world subsidizes student tuition so students dont pay much out of pocket. The US, OTOH, has been consistently reducing govt support for student tuition. Even worse, it's been pushing students into taking loans that unlike most other loans cannot be discharged during bankruptcy. And even though students aren't required to start paying back those loans until they graduate, they do start collecting interest from day 1, which means a student has picked up a significant burden simply from the interest on the loans they received to pay for their freshman tuition, when they graduate.

These are all issues with the US system of financing education as opposed to the actual liberal arts education system.

The F1 issue is absolutely real. Foreign students have been the secret sauce in keeping prices lower for US students for a long time now. Trump 1 and now Trump 2 presidencies have created financial crises at most universities just by making vague anti immigration gestures without even materially changing student visas. Presidents and provosts routinely make desperate oversea sales pitches to try to gin up the pipeline. I know of one major state university whose entire financial existence depends on visas from a few companies in Hyderabad.

I think widening the aperture outside the USA shows how big societal progress has come out of universities of the type we now recognize, starting with 1800s Germany. Even within the USA, the technological and social progress that percolated on universities had big impacts beyond the people actually enrolled and were essential in providing the basis for the employment of many other Americans.

Finally, it’s worth qualifying the idea of America’s decline. The USA is still THE powerhouse economy of the world. We have huge problems with unequal distribution and things are seriously politically messed up, but in terms of raw productivity, we are doing gangbusters. And solving the political and inequality issues call for a more educated populace, not less.

> The percentage of American adults over age 25 who have a college degree was only 20% as recently as 1990. When America was truly at the top of the world in the 1950s and 1960s, it was under 10%.

Due to automation and the great advance of technology, the floor for most jobs has risen such that the skills/knowledge that a 1950s school dropout had would be insufficient for anything but the most menial jobs today.

Outside of a few sectors like agricultural or physical service labor, our economy just doesn't need less educated people anymore.

That doesn't mean everyone needs a 4 year degree, but to make a sustainable living at least a degree from a trade or service school focused on some advanced technician skill is required, and that must be followed by apprenticeship and licensing. In the end, it requires as much time as University, but might cost less if the education is at a public community college.

> When America was truly at the top of the world in the 1950s and 1960s

You mean when so much of the rest of the world was poorly educated either not very industrialized yet or had their industrial base destroyed by the war? Easy for the US to be "on top" then.

But I much prefer the better educated America that came after that, even if wasn't as "at the top of the world" - though I'm really not sure who else you could be referring to that could be more on top.

Correlation-only is sloppy analysis.

The inheritors and descendants of those that directly created the problem are screaming at the colleges as the problem.

But that’s ass backwards: Create the long-term financial opportunity and the college problem will disappear overnight.

The correlation is because rational actors will follow the only leads available to make money, survive, and raise a family.

Edit: I edited the tone, slightly.

The reason for US economic domination starting in the 50s is the fact that society and infrastructure in the rest of the developed world had been utterly devastated by the second World War. The rate of college education is utterly irrelevant.

are you saying that your kids should not go to college? okay, now do you see why your statistic is meaningless, even if it is true? who answers “yes” to the first question? (hardly anyone).

It’s absolutely an uneasy partnership. But my goodness the benefits of having rubbed shoulders with people studying forensics, entomology, philosophy, pure math, and agriculture were enormous. If I had gone to a school composed exclusively of engineers and other careerists, how much narrower would my world have been? And bringing in ideas from other areas of study has been so powerful in both my life and my career.

I had the impression that liberal arts students were highly profitable for universities, because they had no expensive labs.

Agreed completely on this. I almost wonder if it’d be more palatable to add a grade above A, like a Japanese style “S”.

You'll occasionally see people point out that requiring a college degree has all the same legal problems as requiring a hiring exam does. And those people are correct in terms of the judgments that impose our terrible precedents. They're all just as negative on degree requirements as they are on performance requirements.

But as a matter of empirical reality, our enforcement system declines to prosecute employers who require degrees, because requiring degrees is morally good and requiring exams is morally bad.

The rules about what's allowed don't actually derive from the law. We have laws that forbid everything, accompanied by selective prosecution of only the things that certain people disapprove of.

>The problem is that any hiring test that blacks and whites pass at different rates, is presumed racist. Never mind that the real issue might be that the blacks went to worse schools and received a worse education.

Your first sentence is the result of bigotry against those with "enhanced" melanin content, not the cause.

The cause is laid out in your second sentence.

Resolve the systemic bigotry (not just against those with enhanced melanin content, but against those with the least resources as, at least in the US, most schools are paid for by local property taxes, making the poorest areas the ones with the worst schools) and put us all on a level playing field and we'll be a much fairer society IMNSHO.

As with a lot of things, such as vacation time, Americans seem to prefer to provide certain social goods as employer benefits because that way it seems more like a reward for competitive merit, which one can show off as a status symbol, than like a universal social good.

American health insurance is insurance in name only - picture health insurance models laid on top of your car:

Imagine your car gets totaled. Your insurer says, "Hey, we're going to pay out $25K for your vehicle. So you have a $1,000 deductible, so that's $24,000, and then your copay for a total loss is $2,000, so that brings us down to $22,000. For total losses, your coinsurance as your contribution for your vehicle coverage is 20%, which is $5,000, so here's a check for $17,000. But that's only if you're buying a Hyundai, otherwise the vehicle is out of network and you'll get a check for $8,500 instead."

> If you read the fine print of a health "insurance" plan at a large company, you might discover healthcare costs are directly covered by the employer and the insurance company just administers the plan according to "set rules".

Generally this is done by a TPA (third party administrator). In many ways you can do as you wish, but as insurers have already done the actuarial work, it's generally easier to use a plan and tweak it if desired (like "Give us this plan but pay for 1 massage/week") versus having to figure that out yourself.

Sure, but the doctors/medicine/hospitals/liability are not any cheaper.

So the healthcare isn’t cheap, but the employer is able to gain more control over their employees by tying a piece of their non employee life to the employer creating more friction to prevent people from shopping for jobs with higher pay, and the employee is getting a small tax benefit.

Not sure why the down votes. Severing health insurance from employers would be a huge win. It's just such a massive task that the efforts to address it like Obamacare aren't enough even remotely.