The World Might Be Better Off Without College for Everyone

[pbrower2a]

More on the topic of education and its value:

Please discuss -- from the Harvard Business Review:

Quote:We often hear employers and business leaders lament the unfortunate gap between what students learn in college and what they are actually expected to know in order to be job-ready. This is particularly alarming in light of the large — and still growing — number of people graduating from university: above 40% in OECD countries, and nearly 50% in America.

Although there is a clear premium on education — recent reports from The Economist suggest that the ROI of a college degree has never been higher for young people — the value added from a college degree decreases as the number of graduates increases. This is why a college degree will boost earnings by over 20% in sub-saharan Africa (where degrees are relatively rare), but only 9% in Scandinavia (where 40% of adults have degrees). At the same time, as university qualifications become more commonplace, recruiters and employers will increasingly demand them, regardless of whether they are actually required for a specific job. So, while tertiary degrees may still lead to higher-paying jobs, the same employers handing out these jobs are hurting themselves — and young people — by limiting their candidate pool to college graduates. In an age of ubiquitous disruption and unpredictable job evolution, it is hard to argue that the knowledge acquisition historically associated with a university degree is still relevant.

There are several data-driven arguments that question the actual, rather than the perceived, value of a college degree. First, meta-analytic reviews have long-established that the correlation between education level and job performance is weak. In fact, the research shows that intelligence scores are a much better indicator of job potential. If we were to pick between a candidate with a college degree and a candidate with a higher intelligence score, we could expect the latter to outperform the former in most jobs, particularly when those jobs require constant thinking and learning. Academic grades are indicative of how much a candidate has studied, but their performance on an intelligence test reflects their actual ability to learn, reason, and think logically.
College degrees are also confounded with social class and play a part in reducing social mobility and augmenting inequality. Many universities do select students on meritocratic grounds, but even merit-based selection is conflated with variables that decrease the diversity of admitted applicants. In many societies, there is a strong degree of assortative mating based on income and class. In the U.S., affluent people are more likely to marry other affluent people, and families with more money can afford to pay for schools, tutors, extracurriculars, and other privileges that increase their child’s likelihood of accessing an elite college education. This, in turn, affects the entire trajectory of that child’s future, including their future career prospects — providing a clear advantage to some and a clear disadvantage to others.

When employers attach value to university qualifications, it’s often because they see them as a reliable indicator of a candidate’s intellectual competence. If that is their focus, why not just use psychological assessments instead, which are much more predictive of future job performance, and less confounded with socioeconomic status and demographic variables?

https://hbr.org/2019/01/does-higher-educ...e-for-jobs

Comment:

1. College is a structured alternative for what non-college kids typically do while of college age: drifting through menial, and servile jobs. If one gets into an apprenticeship program, then that is a good alternative to spending time in  college. This said, I see nothing wrong with someone learning a skilled trade also attending college. College can be an  enriching experience, and I would endorse it for anyone who can reap some benefit from it.

Apprenticeships for skilled trades are not readily available to most youth who may not even recognize the difference between being a craftsman and being a laborer. Apprenticeships are often practically handed down to kids in families whose prime breadwinner does skilled labor.

2. College is not a vocational school. College education, if at a mediocre-to-great school, is far more intellectually rigorous than the training for most clerical work and semi-skilled labor. It is intended to complete a youth to be a more desirable citizen. Of course it isn't for everyone. To be sure one can be an autodidact, but one misses peers in the same quest and gets little direction. Most vocational training is done to make someone adept at doing a low-skilled job, such as operating a cash register, quickly. Very soon after learning to do such a task comes a personal realization that there is more to life than running a cash register -- and the employer who hires one to run a cash register cares not a whit about anything beyond that function on the job (except that one not steal company assets, cut out early and come in late, or insult customers).
 
3. The intellectual rigor makes one more of a thinker on the job even if it is a cut-and-dried personal service. If one is a retail clerk one might be better at finding solutions for a customer.  A waiter? One can better communicate with customers who focuses on something other than the meal. Of course we have more college graduates than we have jobs that legitimately require a college degree.

4. College is a good place for smart people meeting other smart people who have something in common other than being from the same community. This may be the opportunity for someone from Dallas to meat someone from Houston who can be a soulmate -- at the University of Texas at Austin. Boy and girl next door? Sure, if they have the same limited aspirations and the same culture they might have a successful marriage, which solves lots of personal problems. "We both love Peruvian folk music" even if neither is Peruvian is a shared interest even if the two come from very different backgrounds (Finnish-American from the the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and Italian-American from greater Philadelphia).

5. That college boosts one's potential in contrast to a non-college person in Sweden by a smaller share than in sub-Saharan Africa ignores that 9% of ordinary earnings in Sweden are worth far more than ordinary earnings nearly everywhere in sub-Saharan Africa. To fail to recognize such is to ignore that Sweden is a much richer country, the only valid comparisons to Swedish economic conditions in sub-Saharan Africa is to the still-well-off white minority in South Africa... and that Swedish institutions are much more egalitarian than those of most other countries. So Sweden is richer and more egalitarian to begin with -- duh!

6. It is possible to find people with limited formal education who have the sort of intellect characteristic of college students. It is also far more difficult to recognize the cognitive treasure that one has working for one, especially if the work that such a person does offers little opportunity for expressing one's intellectual talent. Most people who are significantly smarter than their co-workers have good cause to hide it. There is no less a closet for intellect in much of America than there was (and really still is) for homosexuality. In most places, a homosexual can hide what he or she is by avoiding discussion of homosexuality or of topics that might suggest homosexuality. It's probably harder to hide intellect when one clearly does not relate to stereotypical topics of prole conversation, like discussions of series television.

Many employers are likely to fire someone far too intellectual in orientation for the job that one does. Face it -- most work is so designed that a moron could do it. So it was with the assembly line, and so it is with fast food.