3035

This is a HUGE piece of the puzzle.

We have damaged the entire education system severely by transforming it into a certification process for a ridiculous portion of the job market, and making high school accountable for putting a very high percentage of students into this certification conveyor belt.

So

  • We encourage bitterness on the part of students who do not mix well with academic learning.
  • Which creates a political backlash against education.
  • We discourage training students in vocations that would benefit both them and society, maintaining the ever-oppressive character of high schools
  • We intensify competition for college seats, driving up costs.
  • We insure that lots of people not only end up deeply in debt, but that a whole lot of those people come to realize that the education they bought lacks any intrinsic worth. (It just produced a piece of paper necessary to go and learn on the job somewhere.)
  • The education-as-certification scam comes to entirely replace education-as-knowledge-and-understanding-of-the-world… which suits conservative political goals very well,
3036

There is also corroborating factors from outside the education front. Namely

  • The decline of labor rights, unionization, and quality jobs for non college degrees

  • Transitioning traditionally non college jobs to degree mandatory ones

  • The general assault on worker protections and rights weakening the bargaining power of the working class, therefore suppressing wages

All leads to an environment where the previous existence of well paying stable jobs for high school grads that all previous generations had is now vanished. When the only option for people to have a non minimum wage is to go to college? More people have to go to college.

So the options basically are:
be economically fucked for the rest of your life earning below subsistence wages doing menial jobs that rapidly are vanishing due to automation leading to a life of permanent economic instability

Be economically turbo fucked for the short and medium term with crippling student debt in the hopes that long term you make enough to be able to start a life by 40 that your parents started when they were 23. But always be one recession or job loss from being completely ruined, as those loans dominate your every economic decision through your 20’s and 30’s or beyond. If you complete your degree you’ll probably be better off, but no guarantee. And if you don’t finish, well, the only thing you’ll have to pass on to your kids (if you ever managed to have any because you can’t actually afford them) will be a pile of debt.

3037

I think there’s also just the need for workers in many industries to have technological knowhow. Nursing used to be a 2-year degree. And you can still do it with a 2-year degree, but good nursing jobs increasingly require a BSN. Teachers at public schools generally need a Master’s degree to advance. And much of this isn’t because of degree creep but because those fields are more technical than they used to be and require the extra training. I think a more vocationally focused post-secondary apparatus would be beneficial, but some of what’s happening is the growing pains of a technological civilization.

I also just can’t help but wonder why people are paying so much for college when there are cheaper options. My gf just completed her MSN via a correspondence course for a total cost of about $4000. And potential employers give zero fucks where her degree is from. Private and elite public universities are offering some nebulous idea of status that really only matters at the very tippy top of economic social culture. I think high school kids are coming from a very very status-heavy environment, and are misled into thinking it matters a bunch where they go to college. Certainly the quality of their educational experience will be different, but I submit a marginal improvement in the support for on-campus clubs and a better sports teams are not worth paying 10x as much.

I think this is a bit halcyon. This might be true for the Silent Generation, but that’s probably it. Go back any further and standard of living gets murky enough that it’s tough to make comparisons. Was it better to live with your family in a one-room house, working sunup to sundown 7 days a week on the farm? Boomers needed college almost as much as we do, but could afford it (and a house.)

Also, I work at a plasma physics research facility. At least half of the 150 or so people who work here are in jobs that don’t require a college degree: welders, technicians, machinists, electricians, assemblers, planners, drafters, etc. I suspect that there are actually more trades jobs now than there ever have been, and many trades workers are getting near retirement. (Average age of an electrician, for instance, is over 50.) Skilled tradesworkers don’t make as much as, say engineers, but they also don’t have college debt, and their jobs are more portable.

I also wouldn’t discount the military as a way to get a leg up. I’m not saying everything is glorious for non-college grads, but you’re also not consigned to being a barista or clerk at a department store for life. If you have some aptitude and a vocational plan, you can do ok.

3038

This one is more impressionistic, but there’s enough of a narrative out there that I want to say it: I’ve interviewed most of the Democrats running for president and I find Warren warmer and more natural than almost any of them. That’s true in person, but it’s also true on the stump.

This bit got cut from the transcript, but if you listen to our full podcast, you’ll hear her discussing her insistence that the lights are always turned up in the auditoriums so she can see the faces of her audience and actually interact with them. “It’s actually a very close and intimate interaction, even with a thousand people or a couple of thousand,” she says. “It’s the eye to eye, face to face.” This isn’t just talk: Warren engages much more naturally with the crowd than most politicians do. The idea that she comes off as cold or uncharismatic on the stump — she was going viral with speeches when that was barely a thing — crumbles upon watching or meeting her.

3039
3040

I’m open to the idea that it is a more technological world, and that in some fields that drives the need for e.g. more technical skills, but I’m really struggling to understand how public primary education has been impacted by that to such a degree that most or all primary school teachers should need an MA to advance. What is different about teaching language, math, science, social studies, government, etc as a result of them being ‘more technical’? It can’t be that computers are involved, because the pool of potential new teachers are basically raised computer-literate for free, by their home environment,

3041

And

3042

I actually don’t think this is a given. But it’s definitely true that younger teachers are more willing to use technology in the classroom than older teachers. I’m not convinced that classrooms need better technology than books, chalk, and chalkboards, but that’s a different conversation. But that’s not the driver of teacher education: it’s educational methods, child psychology, behavioral science, and a primary school curriculum that has steadily gotten more comprehensive and detailed over the last couple of decades.

3043

So how do you explain the data that @an_Theman posted that showed the dramatic increase in private non-profits schools tuition. . The tuition in private schools went from $15.2K in 1987 in $34.7 in 2017 The $19K increase in tuition is more than twice as much as the rise tuition from $3.2 to $10,0K in public university.

If your theory is correct that state support for public universities is the main culprit, we should have seen the tuition gap shrink between public and private, instead it widened.

3044

Are we still having a discussion about the 2020 candidates in here? I keep getting confused.

3045

I think it’s a factor, I just don’t think it’s the whole story. And I think private non-profits understood that they could charge whatever they wanted, in a way that public schools couldn’t . A growing wealth class resulting from the Reagan Revolution produces more than enough kids to fill their classrooms, and price is largely no object.

Tuitions rose by a greater factor at public than private schools, right?

3046

It’s that latter part I’m questioning. How has the curriculum gotten much more detailed, and what role does the skills of the teacher following the curriculum have in defining the curriculum, and what part of the MA program is necessary to deliver those skills? Why not have a better BA program, if in fact something different is needed?

I’m no expert, but the prevailing narrative about education is that curricula have become more simplified, not more complex. E.g. the dumbing down / elimination of much of the humanities, the reduced requirements for STEM for graduation, etc.

3047

I wonder how much the weird incentives we’ve built into the system affect this. With teacher pay not keeping up with inflation in many parts of the country, and without merit pay based on performance, one of the only ways for teachers in many states to increase their income is to add credentials. I know in CA, adding a Masters can increase teacher salary even if there is no change at all in job duties or performance. In that circumstance, combined with rising housing costs and so forth, you can see a huge incentive for teachers to add credentials even if not fully relevant to the job.

3048

Yes, I think it’s a huge factor, and one that only follows the same track as other careers / industries. We’re no more than one or two generations from an age when anyone with ability and luck could be a software developer; but now no one will hire anyone for that job unless they’ve got at least a 4-year degree, and something like 10% of the open jobs remain permanently unfilled.

3049

I actually think you’re right that teachers are probably over-credentialed and that a more focused BA could be enough for most. But as a parent of kids in primary school, the curriculum is definitely “better”, i.e. more detailed, comprehensive, and broad with more focus on different learning styles, more collaborative efforts, more project-based work, than it was when I went to school. That could be because I live in CA, which has some of the best curriculum standards in the country.

EDIT: I just wanted to qualify this a little bit. I’m an engineer with an MS, and I’m probably over-credentialed too. Even one year of work experience is about 10x more useful for my job than all the classes I took for my advanced degree.

3050

It is pretty interesting chicken-egg problem, did the market fail because of government intervention, or were they failing before hand and government intervention fail to fix them.
In addition to the mortgage interest subsidy, Fannie Mae has artificially spike demand for housing. Ironically, Fannie designed to avoid the housing problems of the great depression led to housing crisis during the great recession. For homeowners, on every major indicator, number of foreclosure, average percentage decrease in home value, delinquent mortgages etc. the great recession was worse than the great depression. Not to mention Freddie and Fannie having to be bailed out by taxpayers to the tune of several hundred billion dollars.

Similarly, distortion to health care market started with the WWII wage freeze which resulted in Kaiser shipyards offering free medical care and lead to the weird US system where health care is tied to employment.

Finally, as some of the earlier studies show their is strong evidence that huge increase in federal subsidize loans was largely responsible for the major increase in the cost of college education.

3051

So, the platform of people like wahoo is to remove the tax exemption for health care (resulting in a fairly substantial tax increase on most Americans), remove the tax exemption for home mortgages (a fairly large tax increase on many Americans), stop providing government student loan guarantees, and then trust in the mighty market to provide all these things at prices most Americans can afford?

There’s a part of me that wishes the GOP would in fact fully go with that type of platform b/c we could beat them 90 to 10 in every election and then actually start fixing shit.

You know, I could get into the weeds disputing wahoo’s take on all this but fuck it. If it’s not self evident to a reader, based on the big picture, I can’t be arsed to educate every dumbass.

Market imperfection. It’s a thing. The market is a great tool but also an imperfect tool Government intervention in the market is not the only way the market can produce poor results. To get good results from the market, just as with any tool, it must be used for the right jobs and used with the proper judgement and skill.

Turing a blind eye to the various areas of the economy where the market has inefficiencies and imperfections is one of the many ways the GOP is responsible for the current F’ed up state of long term opportunity and stability in the US, for the majority of citizens.

3052

Yup, one of my best friends was married to two CA teachers (the first one passed away about 12 years ago). Both spent a lot of time getting their masters, solely for the pay increase. The first finished her master in her mid 40s after having been teaching for 20 years. She was teaching home economics, and seriously doubt she learned anything relevant in her courses. His current wife started of as cafeteria, diligently worked finish her bachelor and teaching credentials , so she didn’t start teaching until her mid 50s, she finished the master last year, and retired this year. But having a master makes huge difference in her retirement pay.

I have another friend who after getting laid of as Silicon Valley engineer, decide to become a teacher at 58. I don’t think he really needs the money, but I won’t be surprised for him to follow in their path, to make sure his retirement pay gets juiced, especially because he likes school.

3053

A few of us are attempting to, but an Internet Argument has broken out.

3054

Elizabeth Warren started it! 😝

I’m very pleased to see her climbing in the polls.