In a World Shaped by College Dropouts, Education is the Next Bubble

The post does quote one popular statistics aphorism, "correlation is not causation", but is sorely in need of another of them, "the plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'". There are interesting arguments for or against college, but a list of a handful of successful college dropouts is not one of the better arguments.

While I agree that education is going to change fundamentally over the course of our lives, this article represents both a misunderstanding of the housing bubble and the likely path of education in our country.<p>Our community can be somewhat insular and we forget the incredible value that higher education provides to the job market at large, and as unemployment rates rise, the disparity grows and makes education more valuable, not less.<p>I had hoped this would be an article about the practice of selling bad student debt (debt from dropouts unlikely to pay it back) as a way to get around new regulations. Instead it listed the same, tired list of famous people who dropped out of college. We all know their names and most of us also know that the vast majority of successful entrepreneurs have at least their bachelors degrees, and that a huge percent also have masters or phds.

Argh, more bait from refer.ly founders. The refer.ly modus operandi seems to be:<p>a) write evergreen content that HN users are likely to upvote or read (HN catnip) based on current HN trends<p>b) fill content with paid referral links<p>c) post catnip to HN

Or maybe these "dropouts" were so smart and business apt that the educational system was holding them back.<p><a href="http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html</a><p>I have the luck of having IQ in the low 150s, I have barely had the need to to ever study. I can make up all the formulas, proof and laws needed for math, physics,chemistry on the fly. And these guys - they have way more raw brainpower than me, and some of them dumb luck. I suppose the Bill Gates was even more bored back in the time without lolcats to waste his time on.<p>So unless you can read 500 pages of detailed excel spec, understand and follow the IDispatch and COM while keeping the whole of the previous versions of excel quirks in your head in a few hours - don't drop out.<p>Of course the question why college is so expensive, while in the rest of the world is affordable is another thing.

Just want to point out that all of your examples are white men.<p>Higher education is still a great way for those who don't already have every door open to them to advance in the world.

But employers use diplomas as a signal[0]. The increases in the number of college graduates only further necessitates that smart people require one for signaling their productivity.<p>[0] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics)" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics)</a> Search for "sheepskin"

What if someone, like, wants to become a doctor, needs to learn pre-medical subjects? Self-study is better?

Ok, in a nutshell: There were useful things for me to learn in college. But, for me, it was <i>incredibly</i> inefficient.<p>In part, due to my own shortcomings. But... as part of a college career and education, I would expect some significant guidance. And, in addition to everything else, that was rather completely lacking, in my own experience.<p>To use the TL;DR meme: College is the new high school.<p>(Only, our society can't support four more years of high school. And so the system is now rapidly breaking down.)

As an aside, is it correct that John Carmack is a billionaire?

Selling most academic learning in a physical space makes about as much sense as selling information printed on paper.

Why does it have to be a bubble, if there is new learning involved at minimal cost? I feel it will just lead to a great disparity in learning amongst those who have access to the internet and those who do not. Not to mention those who are self-motivated and those who are not.

Without degrees there would be no employees to work at the dropout's companies.

I'm so sorry. I know its totally off topic, but I just can't read those first three words in anything other than Don LaFontaine voice.

In a world shaped by social media sites, blogspamming yesterday's HN topics is the next bubble.

The college tuition phenomenon is an example of a very <i>weird</i> bubble. Of the hundreds of well-studied economic bubbles, there isn't one quite like it. I'm fairly comfortable saying that it's impossible to predict when it will go down. It could happen next year, or not until 50 have passed.<p>We know that education <i>itself</i> is of multi-trillion-dollar importance. It's the difference between stagnation and growth and, for a society, progress and failure. How people think influences what they do. By and large, most people are underprepared for the problems and complexities of the future. People talk about the Singularity and Strong AI but, if you've actually read some corporate source code, you become a bit more pessimistic. 95% of paid professional programmers can't even write shitty business apps well.<p>So that's Weird Thing #1 about this bubble. It involves something that actually is very important-- not gold or tulip bulbs or stock in silly companies.<p>Of course, you don't need to spend $160,000 on an elite college to get a decent education. That gets to the <i>real</i> reason people are paying so much.<p>We also know that social connections matter for personal position. It's a zero-sum game and it's shitty that we have to play it, but if you don't get the "who you know" game in order, then you can't make use of what you know, and you become yet another bitter, smart underachiever. That's even more miserable than being a regular, ignorant person.<p>That's Weird Thing #2 about this education bubble: it pertains to a social need that many people feel intensely and experience bitterly. <i>If</i> those Ivy League colleges are delivering on connections, they're probably worth $160,000. Which is why they get away with charging that much. They could probably triple it, were it not for the image problems of drawing attention to the socioeconomic issues. (They wouldn't actually make themselves unaffordable at $120k per year, because they'd be offering a lot more financial aid except to the very rich. However, putting the full-price level at that point <i>would</i> draw negative secondary attention.)<p>The tuition bubble is about the social connections. Do not be deluded on this. Education is a secondary concern in all that, especially when we're talking about private pre-schools where the quality is ancillary: it's about the "feeder" effect. How did degenerate connection-seeking get conflated with education? We have a weird superego in our society that says that the best way to spend ages 18-22 is to live in a way mirroring how the upper class wants to perceive itself, as opposed to how it actually is (see Xoxohth for that, because while most of its posters are not upper-class themselves, they have U.S. upper class attitudes <i>down</i>). College, for most Americans, is this period of making connections that involves courses because of that ghost of a superego that says we're supposed to find those things important, especially if we want to run the world. (The <i>actual</i> people who run the world are uneducated, ignorant garbage, but I'll step over that issue for now.)<p>MBA programs are more brazen about this. It's a regular thing for an MBA professor to reschedule exams to accommodate student travel and social events. Top MBAs are the only educational program (to my knowledge) where professors are virtually required to accommodate students' social calendars.<p>So why is tuition high? Education <i>is</i> important to society, even at those ridiculous price levels. However, the price is mostly paid by the individual (well, parents) and that is because of the connections.<p>I don't think anyone can predict how this will play out. Escalating economic inequality increases the importance of social connections, which means that more money is going to get sucked away in the search for them. Expensive, reputable colleges are (a) the most socially acceptable way to turn money into connections for young people, and (b) a socially acceptable way to transfer wealth across generations. That isn't going to fade out just because we've found better ways of disseminating information on the Internet.<p>Don't get me wrong: online education is going to be quite powerful, and we're going to see some awesome progress in the next decade or two, but this extremely profitable (for some institutions) pattern of social-connection seeking is not going to disappear just yet.