His point about the declining value of business school in particular is nominally sound, but he pinpoints the wrong source of the problem.<p>The problem with business school is that it's started seeing itself in competition with law school, and accordingly, it's started focusing on younger and younger candidates. Average ages of first-year MBA students have been getting younger, especially at the top-tier programs like HBS and Stanford.<p>This is, quite frankly, defeating the original purpose of business school: to be a finishing school, and not a preparatory school. Back in the day, you got an MBA because you had learned a thing or two in your work experience, and would like to reflect on it through the prism of various frameworks, theories, and leaders. But it was critical that you <i>had</i> an empirical knowledge base to work with, or else the lessons were vague and meaningless. The topics demanded practical knowledge of the general subject.<p>Today, b-school is trying to position itself as an entry vehicle into the working world. You graduate, you go to b-school, you learn some mumbo-jumbo about how this whole working world -- which you've never experienced -- is supposed to work. And then you get sent off into that world, ready to be an entitled prick and piss off everyone around you who has actually experienced the real thing. People who will laugh at your frameworks and your theories, because they've heard them from the last 20,000 MBAs who came before you.<p>B-school can still be relevant in today's business world, and in the business world of the future. But it needs to decide what it wants to be. And, whatever that is, it should be something more than simply an alternative to law school for 22-to-25-year-olds.
I'm glad these articles are being written and taken seriously. We definitely need to end the heresy of questioning the value of higher education. Students need to understand that debt is the opposite of freedom, and student loans are (as the article pointed out) much harder to escape than almost any other kind of debt.<p>That said, I'd like to see someone take on education in a stronger form. This particular article mocks an english teacher (another one asks who would spend $250,000 to read chaucer). Alrighty, agreed, not worth spending $250,000 to read Chaucer.<p>How about engineering at a highly regarded state supported institution? How about Computer Science at the University of Washington or Illinois? Or even at a private university? How about going pre-med (though Medicine is clearly somewhat positional, rejecting many applicants than would be capable of completing the program), or to law school (probably even more positional than medicine in determining the value of your degree).<p>Please understand, I'm not saying the answer is an obvious "yes" or "no" in any of these cases. If you're a good enough programmer to pass data structures at college that teaches the class for real, it could very well make sense to drop out and do YC or take that 100K startup from Thiel. But we do need to start distinguishing between different types of education: different majors, institutions, motivations.<p>Definitely time to move past asking whether it's worth spending $250k to study Chaucer. There's much more interesting material here.
What gets me about many of these articles is how broad a brush they often use when describing "the education bubble." And so I appreciate that this article at least gestures at different types of grad school, and how student/consumer demand may be decreasing.<p>But I'd to read more about specific bad "educational investment" decisions, and what makes these decisions bad, as a way of prescribing better pathways for students sizing up their college or grad school options. Specifically, what are the bigger competing opportunities that should entice these "kids" away from educational debt and opportunity cost? Thiel's program can only be a very small part of the re-balancing act, I think.<p>Point me in the right direction if you've already read it...
Education is not an unstable bubble. Looking at the low and high end of the market there does seem to be an education bubble despite plenty of vary good state schools with reasonable tuition.<p>What people seem to miss is unlike the housing or gold bubble tuition costs don't really feed off each other. The high end is really just a luxury in another form and nothing is stopping Breitling from selling 300,000$ watches any time soon. And the low end is a direct government subsidy (like corn farming) which will continue as long as the government feels the need to waste money.<p>PS: As long as demand is unlimited and wages elastic Technology can't really destroy jobs in the long term even as it disrupts industry after industry. Still, people will always look for the best workers, so even if a degree might not mean an increase in pay the unemployment rate for people with a BS is 1/2 that of those without one for a reason.
I think the author is confusing the members that currently make up the set of high-end jobs with the set itself.<p>In 1995 I was writing HTML templating engines and session management code. An HR person might have called me a "templating and session engineer." <i>By that definition</i> the role I was filling is now obsolete: standardized technologies have been developed that mean I will never find work as a templating and session engineer again. I am not crying about that development.<p>The coming obsolescence of particular high-end jobs opens an opportunity for new high-end jobs. The world has fewer Unix admins per Unix server than it did fifteen years ago, and the world is better off for that. (Apropos the recent "Linux admin shortage looms" non-story recent posted here.)<p>The author is perpetuating the same fallacious argument that wheelwrights were at the dawn of the age of automobiles.
It doesn't reduce the demand for high-end jobs, it might reduce the demand for the currently large variety of high-end jobs. I always thought that the development of science and technology pretty much meant that eventually everything trends towards pure symbol manipulation within a computerized environment, aka programming. Today we're programming ERP systems; tomorrow, automated asteroid belt ore extractors and 3d printers. Even then, I'm sure you'll have an even more bewildering variety of highly specialized technicians than you have today.
If only there were a way to short middling private schools. The hedgies shorting the for-profit schools are well documented. But you have to think that the lower- to middle-tier non-profit private schools--the ones that charge tuitions not unlike those of the Ivies--will be the first into the fire. Perhaps Goldman can create a Middling Private School Index (the MPX) and sell CDSs against it? The question: who can play the role of sucker on the long side? I know! Taxpayers!
The best evidence for an education bubble can be found at Starbucks. The amount of people who have advanced degrees and work at Starbucks is simply astounding.