Comment by jswelker

The U.S. was already the richest country in the world per capita by 1880–even at the peak of the British Empire. Most of its military achievements during the war—building up the world’s largest Navy and airforce from almost nothing within a couple of years—was a product of the industrial economy that already existed before the war.

America’s preference for common wisdom over book learning is a strength, not a weakness. Formal education filters for risk averse, process and credential-oriented people. And you need some of those people, but you don’t want your society to be like India where you worship credentials and degrees like religion.

The GI bill isn’t a counterpoint. GI’s still had to gain admissions at a time when colleges were far more selective than today: https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2024/01/23/why_college... (undergraduate IQs fell from 119 in 1939 to just 102 in 2022). So you created a filter that was extremely rigorous. It supported college education for people who were both significantly smarter than average, and also had served in the military—the Marcus Aurelius type.

>The US was awarded a unique competitive advantage with WW2, which allowed it to become the world's hegemon.

That advantage was: being the only country that wasn't ravaged by war, and that profited for a while by trading with every faction.

Some of countries were also severly kneecapped by US betrayal of promises, made by allies - to restore pre-war borders, and handover of them to USSR - that means less competition.

That also lead to US dollar becoming world's reserve currency, which may have affected the measured drop afterwards.

There are so many factors involved in that that attributing it to just investment in higher education and GI bill is a gross oversimplification, so is previous post's attribution of the drop afterwards.

> in terms of raw productivity

In terms of dubious financialized metrics of productivity, i.e. debt + fx driven growth. Which is valid indicator, but also the same inflated indicator that suggests 2025 tertiary that cost 200% 1980 tertiary (income/inflation adjusted) is somehow more productive and not parasitic. The entire problem is spreadsheet doing gangbusters is dependenant on increasingly inequitable CoL extraction to prop up GDP flows. US economy would appear much less powerhouse if not for all the disproportionate financiailization/rent extraction from inelastic sectors (rent/education/health etc) aggregated over past 40 years over functionally comparable value goods/services.

Germany is a great example of how you don’t need most of the population enrolled in universities.

> The USA is still THE powerhouse economy of the world.

The US was a powerhouse economy when it could build the world’s largest navy almost overnight. Since the 1980s, the U.S. economy has become highly financialized. It’s disputed how much American economic dominance is real versus on paper today.

> The USA is still THE powerhouse economy of the world.

Things look decidedly different if you exclude the ad companies (Google, Meta, ...) and associated shovel sellers, see the WaPo article about the S&P 493 from a few days ago.

>things are seriously politically messed up

I would argue universities played a big role here. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=social+justice...

The theory of "elite overproduction" suggests that if you train too many aspirants for the same few elite jobs, they will foment instability in order to get the jobs they feel entitled to. That's what happened when we tried to get everyone going to college.

What am I supposed to do with my ethnic studies degree, aside from DEI consulting? Why would I want my DEI consulting to actually solve the underlying problem, if it puts me out of a job? Don't forget, I have a lot of student loans now! This isn't a small issue for me.

The left-extremists say "you need to give me a job in order to make your team more diverse". The right-extremists say "you need to give me a job because the deep state is corrupt, it's time to make america great again". Basically using extremist politics as a trick for getting elite roles.

It was 10% of the US population who went to college before the GI bill, which then doubled to 20% over a decade following the war. Now >50% have post secondary. 70% attempt post-secondary after high school

Before WW2 only about 40% of people completed high school, now it’s at 90%

US had highest per capita GDP in the world in 1913, before Europe's first, and second, self destructions. The US would have been on top in the in 1950s and 1960s no matter what. Just by scale, resources, and economic system.

Community colleges are the best existing institution we have to fill the gap. They are too wedded to the university model though. Credit hours, semesters, discrete courses, administrative overhead, the whole works, minus much of the campus life dressing.

Hell I applaud even boot camps for trying to fill it, for all their faults. At least they tried something slightly different.

Our immigration policies pretty strongly indicate we still need those less educated people doing work, we just don’t want to pay anything resembling reasonable wages for such.

That is absolutely untrue - a large part of the jobs were either outsourced and/or automated to be trivial, but a large part is essentially barely made easier by technology - food service, all the jobs necessary for running and building infrastructure, homes etc. is only changing very slowly due to technology - this is due to the nature of the fields, even if there were rapid advancement in plumbing (there weren't) in the past few decades, most of the buildings are standing and rebuilding them makes little sense - same with water treatment facilities, power plants etc.

In fact I would argue in some ways society is even less capable today - the percentage of people skilled in the trades is much lower, so it would be much harder to rebuild from scratch.

Hard disagree. Most useful skill and knowledge is still learned on the job. The "education" is just a selection process. And not only it is a pretty bad one, it is extremely costly.

People can operate heavy equipment and even fly planes without a fancy sounding degree, so I don't think some stupid office job is so complex that a HS grad can't handle it.

> 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.

I love to point this out to anti-welfare people and make them blue screen. Especially when they're not willing to acknowledge unethical solutions, such as euthanizing the stupid or acknowledging that not having welfare for an unemployable population shits things up for the rest of society.

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

Not to mention rank-and-file American conservatives who see universities as bastions of liberal thought/power, and create threadbare, post-hoc arguments as to why universities have to be dismantled or politically reeducated when partisanship has to be disguised.

> You’re basically arguing that having more uneducated people is better.

Are you arguing that having more people educated in a narrow range of topics is necessarily better? In the USA in the 1950s I would suggest there were more people who knew how to make machine tools or even food.

>You’re basically arguing that having more uneducated people is better.

"I love the poorly educated"

~our current president.

A minor nit. "Should not" is on a path from "don't have to" and "can chose not to"

When the fintech boom in the 80s and 90s kicked off, quants aside, many had zero tertiary education. The benefit of a university then became access to social circles, and a bit of spreadsheets. I have friends who worked in this sector, and the associated industries wiring it up and nobody cared about your degree if you weren't dining with merchant bankers.

I think the WH is proving at best education is marginal value to hucksters.

> 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

The benefits of the U.S. university system aren’t generated by average people taking a debt-financed 4 year vacation. They are generated by the same subset of people who would still be attending university even in a scaled down system that sent far fewer people to college.

Envy of the world due to network effects and inertia, not due to any inherent superiority of our model. There are some good parts of our model, don't get me wrong, but they do not explain the status of the US system at all.

From European perspective US system is a joke. All built on even bigger joke of high school. Which fails to teach students what they need in general education. And thus you get some weird "general" education irrelevancy being part of degree. Not to even mention how Master's level is not the standard most aim towards.

> Yes, and the US system is the envy of the world

Where in the world have you polled?? because this is categorically opposite to my experience discussing the US college system

The education system to be envied by the rest of the world is Norway's model.

>Most of the rest of the world subsidizes student tuition so students dont pay much out of pocket.

And they also severely restrict who can attend university. Of course this is a non-starter in the current US political environment.

> 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

Citation needed on both counts

> 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.

Can you elaborate on this a bit? It's very easy to read uncharitably without further elaboration and reads pretty delusional as is.

The US made a big shift from public financing via grants to public financing via loans. During the same period there was a ton of information/propaganda disseminated about how much more lifetime income college grads made vs high school grads. The companies making these loans are doing very well.

If I believed in conspiracy theories I might think this was all planned.

Vague isn't the word I would use to describe Trump's anti immigration gestures.

> have created financial crises at most universities

Those multi-billion dollar endowments are fine man, don't worry about them, they're not running out.

> Trump 1 and now Trump 2 presidencies have created financial crises at most universities

Worst financial crisis at any university was probably caused by himself at his own scam Trump University, long before he become president.

> Do all colleges require engineering students to take liberal arts?

15 credit hours of liberal arts education isn't why college in the US is so expensive, and if one pays attention, they might even learn something from it.

If nothing else, you'll learn how to read and write.

Liberal arts is a huge grab bag of courses with varying rigor, quality, appeal and difficulty.

One of the best courses I had in college was a metalworking course during which I learned to weld.

But like many (engineering) students, for most of the liberal arts credit, I went with stuff where I could get the best possible grade with the least possible work.

That's not for societal reasons, that's for practical reasons. People want to be able to get around.

By contrast, many people don't want to be forced to take classes unrelated to their desired area of study.

What do you suggest people were trying to buy, instead of cars?

You went from "median" job/employer to "best" employee in high value/pay/education roles. These best employee's don't want to work in the "median college-degree-required job", they likely have done some significant post-grad studies and have also likely been saddled with more debt thus requiring their high paying career outcome just to avoid collapse of their personal finances.

I think the median 4 year college graduate going after the "median college-degree-required job", did not care much about their studies at all. They slogged through it hung over from the night before. College was a social experience and gave them a sports team to root for on Saturday. It let them extend their childhood and eschew responsibilities for a few more years.

We have this weird cultural thing in the US where we put super high expectations on education systems but we actually don't value education. We value the social clout and whatnot. Public schools are a prime example, parents are the problem. Make your kids do homework! Take away the video games/phone/tablet/wifi/whatever. It translates to college as, do just what is necessary to get a degree. Often the bare minimum, etc. Cheating runs rampant and so on. It manifests itself in so many ways. Just a core part of youth right now is much more interested in being an influencer, popular, a good athlete, no sorry good athletes are a dime a dozen - you need to be an elite athlete, etc. Being a bookworm or just studious simply isn't seen as cool, it has no social reward, quite the opposite in fact.

This might not apply to many students at ivy and top schools, but I'd argue it's certainly the median for the nation's college students the past few decades maybe longer. I think colleges allow it to happen. They don't grade as harshly as they used to, they have dumbed down the courses, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if the "median undergrad" education was more on par with the "median high school" education from a few decades ago.

Then sell it to doctors, lawyers, and engineers. Those fields aren't really the issue.

It depends highly on logistics like class size. Many programs brag about small class sizes, which are great for students but anathema to university bean counters. These programs often try to subsidize the small program specific courses with huge gen ed courses, making the whole student body effectively subsidize these underperforming programs. Real nasty fights occur over which courses to include in the gen ed program because every department wants a piece of that pie to prop up their poor numbers. And this dynamic is definitely much worse in humanities.

Edit: also instructor composition, meaning the proportion of instructors in a program who are senior/tenured vs new vs adjuncts. Class size and instructor salary are nearly the whole equation.

"if you can't prove something, then it isn't true" is an obvious logical fallacy.

American high schools are already doing a form of this, with certain classes earning more than a 4.0 score in GPA calculations. 5.0 is quite common now, with 6.0 and even 7.0 scores on individual classes being possible.

Many games already have an S-tier in class/stats/builds, whatever the criteria is. Would be funny if higher ed ripped that off. Life mimicking art and all that.

That already exists, it's called an A+.

There's that Jerry Yang quote:

Middle class is a state of mind

IMO Middle Class = PMC (Professional Managerial Class) in Marxist terms. They are the members of the working class (they have to work or they will starve, go homeless, etc) but are highly compensated because they are essential to functioning of the system and have rare skills. Engineers, Lawyers, Doctors, Managers, Accountants, etc.

We're talking about academia, not hobbies. Academics expect to get paid in both money and social status.

As do churches and community theaters, by the way. They tend to expect donations. If nobody ever donated money they'd shut down.