| ▲ | proc0 6 hours ago |
| With some exceptions I think higher education should probably go back to being about academia and not necessarily teaching skills for industry. I think companies can now easily invest in their own extended training and grab people out of high school. Just a thought. |
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| ▲ | pasc1878 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| No that will not happen as the company has to pay and it shows in their accounts. Much cheaper not to train anyone and let the state or pupil pay for training. See lack of apprenticeships for a case of this. |
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| ▲ | rglullis 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It is the other way around. Education/Training is only expensive because it is subsidized by the State. | | |
| ▲ | bagacrap 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It is expensive because it confers greatly enhanced earning potential. Students borrow against that future income. Sometimes from the state. It confers enhanced future income largely because of the inherent vetting process that asures future employers this person is able to focus for extended periods of time on intellectual tasks, is able to follow through and function within a bureaucracy. I don't think it's as much about skills, at least it's way overkill for the skills that are actually needed on the job for most jobs. I don't see the rise of LLMs as obviating the "functional cog in the Rube Goldberg machine" training. | | |
| ▲ | OptionOfT an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | It is also expensive because the debt is very hard to get erased through bankruptcy, so private companies are now offering more money to people than is actually needed. So universities see this $ and raise prices. Kinda like how tax breaks on housing initially help people, and then the market adjusts based on the new inflow of $. | |
| ▲ | rglullis 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | This is just another way of saying that people go to school to buy access to the network, not for education itself. |
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| ▲ | KPGv2 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Education/Training is only expensive because it is subsidized by the State.
reply The death of apprenticeships is because you are training your own competition. It worked in the past because you trained your kid for a trade that was arcane and took a couple decades to master, but now you'd be training someone with no loyalty to you in a field that can be speed run in a year or so with YouTube assistance. | |
| ▲ | runarberg 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | You neo-liberals have been wrong about this for 40 years now. You wrought us all with your Reaganomics, and have had the full attention of every government for this entire time (except maybe in Cuba) and the results have been truly disastrous, climate catastrophe and all. If private enterprise was really this efficient, and government was really that inefficient, we should have seen ample evidence for that by now. The fact that we haven’t is proof that the promises of neo-liberalism are all lies. | | |
| ▲ | rglullis 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > If private enterprise was really this efficient, and government was really that inefficient, we should have seen ample evidence for that by now. Food. Consumer goods. Telecommunications services. Transportation. Clothes. All things that have gone down in absolute prices and relative amount of family income to be provided. Education / Housing / Healthcare: all deemed "up to the State" and that takes increasingly more from people at ever diminishing returns. We can have a long and serious conversation about how hard the Government should be involved in regulating these things, and how we could set up systems that ensure that these become universally available and not just for middle/upper class. We can even have a conversation about things that should be controlled by the Government even if it means a high cost to society. But to deny that things managed by the State are more expensive overall is a clear sign of ideological blindness. | | |
| ▲ | tgv 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > But to deny that things managed by the State are more expensive overall is a clear sign of ideological blindness. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50208837 | | |
| ▲ | rglullis 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | The way to solve this is not by giving the monopoly back to the state, but by the state enacting regulations thay allows smaller players to join the grid. | | |
| ▲ | runarberg 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Europe has been doing this for 20 years now. I have yet to see successful results. And realizing each failure of Neo-liberal policy Europe keeps doubling or quadrupling down. I believe they are on their 4th energy package at the moment. I am sure the fate if this 4th attempt will be identical to the other efforts of making capitalism fix the problem, and identical to any other neo-liberal policy. Europe will have more billionaires and peoples energy bills will be higher. As the saying in Europe goes: Neo-liberalism will continue until the economy improves. | | |
| ▲ | rglullis 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Really? Do we have 20 years already since people are allowed to set up a solar panel in their backyard and sell excess capacity to the grid? Do we have 20 years where farmers can grow their own biodiesel to (at least) power their own machinery, or does the state giving them subsidies to let them keep growing vegetables, wine and beef without having to compete in the global market? | | |
| ▲ | runarberg 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | We have had 20 years of energy distribution and infrastructure going from government ownership and into private hands, where different private distributors are allowed to compete for customers on the same grid. These were energy packages 1-2 (if I remember correctly). The results have been higher energy prices for European households. Energy package 3 was supposed to fix this with some additional regulation and standardization. It did not. Energy package 4 is supposed to fix this with more standardization and regulations (including distributed generation; which I am in favor of btw.) however, it will not. The problem is the privatizations of the 2000s, not in the regulations surrounding small scale solar. The problem is neo-liberalism. Get rid of corporations rent-seeking on our infrastructure. Our energy bills will not become lower until then. |
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| ▲ | djeastm 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I'm a bit confused why you have housing and healthcare "up to the state". Are we talking about the United States or somewhere else? | | |
| ▲ | runarberg 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | I am guessing Germany or Europe more broadly. Germany is in a pretty bad neo-liberal wave right now, and have been getting worse for the past 10-15 years. And given Germany‘s influence in the EU the effects of this neo-liberal wave are felt across Europe, even in non-EU countries like Iceland (which is currently being fined by the EU for not privatizing garbage disposal fast enough). However, if you look at the popular movements on the streets of Europe at the moment, you can see that the people are in fact not happy about this. There are very few political means of getting rid of neo-liberalism (see e.g. Spain for a clear example of what I mean) so people are turning to the streets as the only viable alternative. |
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| ▲ | logicchains 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | >If private enterprise was really this efficient, and government was really that inefficient, we should have seen ample evidence for that by now There's a wealth of clear evidence for this in the economic data in Eastern vs Western Europe, East Germany vs West Germany when Eastern Europe was under Soviet rule. The countries under Soviet rule were significantly poorer and to this day most still haven't caught up with their Western European counterparts. | | |
| ▲ | runarberg 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Eastern Europe underwent shock therapy and are today in many ways more extreme in neo-liberal policies then the western part of the same continent. Western Europe didn’t start neo-liberal policies until after the cold war ended, and it went into full gear around the year 2000. In either case. Is garbage disposal in Europe so much more efficient now that it has all been privatized, compared to the mid-90s? Are trains running cheaper? Is power transmission cheaper now that energy generation, and delivery have been split apart and sold to private investors on the public stock market? No, the answer to all these questions are no. Because efficiencies in a system don‘t care about the ownership model, and neo-liberalism is a religious like creed that operates out of idealism for a world that does not exist. | | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > is garbage disposal in Europe so much more efficient now that it has all been privatized, compared to the mid-90s? Is it? > Are trains running cheaper? They're up about 6% in real terms (or about 0.23% a year) since 2000 [1]. That said, I don't think most European rail is privatized, so this is a strange example. [1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/product/page/PRC_H... deflated with CP00 | | |
| ▲ | runarberg 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Is it? Yes and no. Garbage disposal is more efficient now then it was in the mid-90s, but that has everything to do with the infrastructure and nothing to do with the ownership model. More on that later. The ownership of infrastructure and the operation are split where private operators are allowed to compete with national operators on the same infrastructure. This is true for trains and electricity, and in some cases garbage disposal. Many of the national operators are publicly traded with the national government being the majority shareholder. Some countries in Europe have gone much further in privatizing the rail network then others. The UK being the canonical example of privatization, and Norway being an example of a country privatizing more slowly. If the promises of neo-liberalism were true, we should see the efficiencies gained in the UK compared to Norway. Yet, no such evidence exists. And that is because efficiencies correlate with the quality and the quantity of infrastructure, not the ideological policies that dictate the ownership of the operators. | | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | > efficiencies correlate with the quality and the quantity of infrastructure, not the ideological policies that dictate the ownership of the operators I mostly agree. Infrastructure quality (including institutional quality) dominates. Ideology is usually cover for a lack of evidence. But ownership modes do create different incentive structures. Full private ownership is famously terrible in natural monopolies. It’s a well-known market failure and folks who proselytize fully privatized utilities are stupid or venal. For many other things, however, private ownership works. A good example is package delivery. (Train operation is a weird case. The UK fumbled. Italy did not. On the other end of the spectrum, DB is a trash fire.) |
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| ▲ | rglullis 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Are trains running cheaper? You are picking the textbook example of a natural monopoly as a way to argue against how free markets don't work? |
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| ▲ | logicchains 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Even in China companies are already doing this: https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/china-ai-ta... |
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| ▲ | siva7 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I've heard this argument over decades and to this day it doesn't make any sense to me. You know what happens when you do that ivory tower thing? Those professions die. |
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| ▲ | davnicwil 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I don't understand where the premise comes from that higher education is doing this, or even has it as a goal. To the extent it is I agree it should obviously be replaced by on the job training, because that will be much much better. But to me this is what's happening now anyway, de facto. Even you do, say, a computer science degree which is one of the more obviously industry aligned fields you're still not really learning how to build software products or even useful software at all really except in the most mechanical sense. You're learning a bunch of variously useful theory (in the sense that it could all be useful in principle but you won't know exactly for what and at what time until you're out building things in the world) and no company is ever going to be incentivised to introduce you this in a proper environment conducive to intellectual exploration separate from 'the job', because frankly you'll be long long gone by the time any of it pays off often decades hence. |
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| ▲ | NewJazz 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Cs students I've talked to work on real software projects as part of their coursework. It is definitely not all theory. | | |
| ▲ | davnicwil 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | The software projects you work on as coursework just give you the shallowest possible mechanical introduction on how to put together working code, and their point is almost always to demostrate some underlying theory like networking or distributed systems or graphics or whatever has been understood. It's not to pretend to produce anything viable in a commercial sense or please any imagined customer or market. Even the ones that are ostensibly under software engineering courses where you might even work in a group, it's about as far away from working on a real software project in a company with (or without) customers and capital on the line etc as can be imagined. Probably even open source would be a closer approximation / better practice at this. And all of this is a good thing and is the point. It's a sandbox, for you to play around, mess up, 'waste time' and learn. No company is going to really give you this sandbox in the same way, nor should they. They're paying you, you're not paying them. |
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| ▲ | parineum 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > I don't understand where the premise comes from that higher education is doing this, or even has it as a goal. They aren't the ones saying it. Parents, government officials and high school guidance counselors are telling everyone they need college to get a good job. Colleges don't have to say anything thing about it but they raise their tuition abd accept the grant money while expanding their campuses to accommodate the rise in demand. That's exactly how a business would react to a growing market with rising demand and an influx of government money. People pass through colleges on their way to getting a job and colleges oblige. What op thinks colleges should be doing is accepting people who they think, with education, could contribute to the college's research fields. Think about the college tracks that lead to PhDs where the student stays with the university for some or all of their career. That's what OP is suggesting colleges become (or revert to, if that's what they ever were). |
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| ▲ | 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
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| ▲ | theoreticalmal 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Maybe AI will be yet another disincentivized for higher education. When I was considering law school a decade ago, the overwhelming advices from existing attorneys was “unless you’re in the top 10% of the top 10% of universities, you’re wasting your time getting a law degree”. Seems very similar to university today (at least in the USA) |
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| ▲ | whimsicalism 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| it is too challenging today to capture the value of training your early employees, labor markets too liquid |
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| ▲ | 10111001 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > With some exceptions I think higher education should probably go back to being about academia and not necessarily teaching skills for industry. I think companies can now easily invest in their own extended training and grab people out of high school. Just a thought. They'll probably just shut it all down. With AI, what's the ROI on educating the masses? Paying specialist academics to know things? Just leave them dumb and let save the rich some tax money. Dumb people are easier to control anyway. On research: If some tech bro can't do the research in an afternoon with an agent, it's not worth doing at all, let alone worth paying a PhD for a tenured lifetime job to do. |
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| ▲ | rayiner 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > With AI, what's the ROI on educating the masses? Paying specialist academics to know things? Just leave them dumb and let save the rich some tax money. Dumb people are easier to control anyway The generation of Americans that went to the moon had only 5-8% of people go to college. Whether someone is smart or dumb has little to do with formal higher education. | | |
| ▲ | hnfong 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Ironically those on a government payroll are much easier to manipulate and control. Education is not subsidized only because it's a public good. |
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| ▲ | proc0 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The idea is AI is cheap enough and worth it for a company to invest in younger talent that will learn the specifics of the industry much faster. It doesn't have to be all or nothing, maybe university is reduced by 2 years or something. | |
| ▲ | ballmerpoint 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > If some tech bro can't do the research in an afternoon with an agent, it's not worth doing at all, let alone worth paying a PhD for a tenured lifetime job to do. The OpenAI math dump showed that it’s not worth paying hundreds of PhD-years if a tech bro can do it with an agent. | | |
| ▲ | senderista 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | The value of math does not consist in providing yes/no answers to conjectures. |
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