Thread: Wasting money on Education!

Interesting segment on CSPAN today with Peter Morici about this topic. His thesis was that one shouldn't become indebted to the tune of $100,000 in order to obtain a job that on average pays $25,000 per year (i.e. you are bankrupting yourself before you even start working).

"A society only needs a small portion of individuals to be educated in science, medicine, or advanced mathematics. Trying to teach a greater number of people these specialised areas of knowledge will not benefit society." Anders Hoveland

This is a very small part of the problem. It is true that the number of jobs in specialized fields is finite. However, the larger part of the problem is that the following curricula examples do not pay for themselves as per Peter Morici (i.e. political science, journalism, marketing, advertising, business administration, communications). This is the equivalent to going to Hollywood University. For every one celebrity, there are 1,000 waiters.

Originally Posted by dudeman

Interesting segment on CSPAN today with Peter Morici about this topic. His thesis was that one shouldn't become indebted to the tune of $100,000 in order to obtain a job that on average pays $25,000 per year (i.e. you are bankrupting yourself before you even start working).

"A society only needs a small portion of individuals to be educated in science, medicine, or advanced mathematics. Trying to teach a greater number of people these specialised areas of knowledge will not benefit society." Anders Hoveland

This is a very small part of the problem. It is true that the number of jobs in specialized fields is finite. However, the larger part of the problem is that the following curricula examples do not pay for themselves as per Peter Morici (i.e. political science, journalism, marketing, advertising, business administration, communications). This is the equivalent to going to Hollywood University. For every one celebrity, there are 1,000 waiters.

Well I do think that some of those fields do require education, but for most of them, an apprenticeship would work better. For marketing/advertising, it would be far more useful to have the student help do actual campaigns for a client, rather than fake stuff for a teacher. Teachers wouldn't look for the same sorts of things in advertising as the client would. A client is focused on sales -- if the ad in question doesn't actually put dollars in the bank, it's a stupid ad. A lot of them seem that way -- I've seen multi-million dollar ads on TV and couldn't guess what the product or the company was. I'm sure a prof would appreciate the "art" of the ad, but that's not the point of ads -- the point is to make the cusotmer think of your client's product, not to wank off with CGI and art-film camera techniques. I'd rather have the Business Admin actually run a part of a business -- Theory is nice, but it doesn't always work out that way when you have to work with real people and real budgets. Real people have fights over stupid stuff, they get petty. School doesn't teach that. They teach abstract theory. Political science is another one that again would work well as an apprenticeship -- if you want to work in politics, get people elected. Work on the campaign. It's not that hard to get even 10-year olds involved in campaigns. That's real nuts and bolts -- and it gets you closer to people who would hire you. A lot of the fluffy degrees do require some "training" but I think when you're trying to break into a nontech field, it might be better to train by doing rather than pay $100K to sit in a room and listen to a guy with lots of theories that doesn't do the stuff in the field.

I had a family friend who ran for county assessor. We got to sit in the room with the campaign on election night, and I learned quite a bit from listening to the Politicos talk about how it all worked and what they'd done. 3 hours and it's real world, probably know stuff that isn't in polisci.

I certainly believe we need more apprenticeships and internships for our young people, to help transition them into the world of work. But more education, at least of the type currently being taught in universities, is NOT the answer. Our children should be taught useful things, not have to gain ever increasing "qualifications" to compete with everyone else for limited job opportunities. All too often, government policy makers make the mistake of assuming that there will be enough good-paying jobs to go around, if only everyone was educated. To a large extent, the more everyone is educated, the higher the necessary educational qualifications will be raised by employers. I do not see why the state should be paying so much to fund what is essentially a screening process for future employees.

I don't think we disagree, I'm not talking about going to college and then doing internships, I'm talking about simply doing the apprenticeships at a company, working alongside those who are in charge of that work, and then eventually the apprentice becomes a journeyman and works for the company. I think it would produce a better quality of graduate than schooling would.

I studied network admin for a while. Studied, mind, not trained. It was a waste of time and money, and could not hope to create a good graduate. We listened, we took notes, but we weren't fixing problems. We weren't stringing cables, and we designed a paper network that was built from the ground up under ideal conditions. Get the picture -- absolutely NOTHING in the program is aimed at creating a professional, just another diploma holder with a head full of theory. I would think that a preparation for a career fixing something should spend a little time looking at broken systems and thus learning to diagnose and fix those problems.

Our system for a lot of majors is so completely backward that I think formal education in many areas tends to retard the student's ability to succeed in his future career. They're excersizes in note-taking and circle filling, not in doing the day to day tasks of the job. How many books are lit majors writing? How many political science majors spend the majority of their time working on a campaign? How many journalism majors are writing for a real (for profit, non-university) newspaper? Compare that to the numbers of chemistry students practicing identifying unknown chemicals and synthesizing chemicals from precursors, or the nursing students practicing putting in IVs and changing dressings, or the occupational assistants practicing walking patients through a therapy.

University is fine for extremely academic type jobs, but they make crappy graduates who don't have a clue about the real world.

Education is a screening process because it's the only process in place. If there was a real apprentice system, the screening an training would by simultanious -- if a kid is failing the company's training in the first 6 months, both know better than to continue. That means less debt for the kid, and less wasted time for the company.

I thought this article would be interesting:

South Korea faces problem of "over-education"

South Korea has some of the world’s most over-educated bakers. In one class in Seoul teaching muffin and scone-making, there are graduates in Russian, fine art and animation. For South Korean parents, the world’s highest spenders on their children’s education, something is going horribly wrong.

“I wanted to ease the burden on my parents by earning just a little something and finding a job that could give me something more dependable than temporary work,” said one 29-year-old trainee baker. Since graduating in art she could only find part-time work as a waitress. Like so many young people asked about finding work in a socially competitive society where unemployment is a stigma, she was too embarrassed to give her name.

South Koreans often attribute their economic success to a passion for education. But the country of 48m has overdone it, with 407 colleges and universities churning out an over-abundance of graduates.

Over-education has become a crippling financial drain on Asia’s fourth biggest economy. South Korean families mire themselves in debt and burn more than 3 per cent of gross domestic product on night schools and crammers dedicated exclusively to passing formulaic university entrance examinations.

After all that effort, Koreans joke they have simply created Itaebaek, meaning “mostly unemployed 20-somethings”.

“Reckless university enrolment has aggravated both the private education burden and youth unemployment. It’s a huge loss, not just for households but the whole country,” said Lee Myung-bak, the president, who is trying to combat 82 per cent enrolment in tertiary education by strengthening vocational schools.

While unemployment among the over 30s averages between 3 and 4 per cent, it runs at 10 per cent among the under 30s. These headline figures disguise the number of graduates in dead-end temporary jobs. Some 34 per cent of unemployed men and 43 per cent of jobless women have attended college or university.

The plethora of graduates also causes shortfalls in the manual labour sector, triggering a wave of low-skilled immigrant workers – mainly from China, Mongolia and south-east Asia – who now constitute more than 1 per cent of the population.

“The grave problem in Korea is that families fundamentally believe that education will be a way to climb the ladder. So even poor families spurn anything in manual labour and pay huge amounts for education, taking on big loans,” said Kim Young-gyoung, president of the youth community union, a group dedicated to helping young people integrate into the workplace.

The government has put unemployment high on its list of priorities but flagship public works programmes are of no interest to educated youngsters. In late 2008, the government announced river damming and dredging projects intended to create 230,000 jobs by 2012. With 8 per cent of the work done, the schemes have only created 5,000 jobs.

“Most of the members of the youth union think the money being put into the river projects would be better invested expanding opportunities at small and medium-sized companies,” Ms Kim said.

South Korea’s economy is still dominated by massive conglomerates called chaebol which have intensely competitive graduate recruitment with high drop-out rates. Beneath that, middle-sized companies are far less adept at integrating university leavers.

Graduates are hitting problems while overall prognoses for South Korean employment are healthy. Tim Condon, Asia economist at ING, predicts Korea will create 15,000 to 20,000 jobs each month. Barclays Capital agreed the job outlook was bright but cautioned unemployment among the under 30s was a weakness that could undermine the “quality of growth”.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development last year identified major flaws in South Korea’s vocational education. In 1995, half of Koreans attended vocational high schools but the number has now dropped to about a quarter. Those at vocational schools receive a very academic education from teachers with little knowledge of the workplace, the OECD says.

The OECD also called on industry to play a more constructive role in vocational qualifications, saying students were often used for repetitive drudgery by local companies rather than being taught useful skills.

To combat these weaknesses in the system, South Korea has launched “Meister schools” hoping to train master craftsmen in the German model. Under a pilot scheme, there are 21 such schools, increasing to 50 by 2012.

“We can show that even if people do not go to university, they can still be successful in the job market,” said Kim Chong-yeon, an employment expert at the education ministry.

High-spending parents have yet to be convinced.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b5bb3868-3...#axzz1xNoEMpUW

Here is another related article:
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/fc853...#axzz1xNoEMpUW

Originally Posted by Anders Hoveland

The government is wasting a huge ammount of money on mis-educating our young people. About 1 trillion dollars are spent by the government in the USA on education each year.

The educators just want more and more money. Whatever is in their own interest. They are, in a way, like parasites.

Some of them try to make the argument that educating everyone will make everyone earn more money. This is an example of the fallacy of composition- what is true for an individual is not necessarily true of a larger group of individuals. Education is not the solution to lifting people out of poverty.

Only useful education helps create more wealth.

It seems that most forms of education is modern society are not useful, only competitive demonstrations of competency. In this sense then, education does not help create more wealth, but rather, in a way, is a waste of time and resources.

While on the scale of an individual, education leads to a higher personal income, this is not necessarily the case in society. Education often only leads to higher income because the employer would rather give the good paying jobs to those that have more education. So if other people obtain higher educational credentials, it will just mean lower incomes for the people that do not have such credentials.

The phenomena of economic disincentives caused by non-practical over-education in a society is called credentialism.

A society only needs a small portion of individuals to be educated in science, medicine, or advanced mathematics. Trying to teach a greater number of people these specialised areas of knowledge will not benefit society.


There are much more productive uses for all that money and labor.

Education provides students with a well rounded view of the world, there is no about that and is extremely important to ensuring that despite current climate the country is staying competitive in the global economy. The level of education can be disputed as to its benefits, but devaluing education is actually taking a step back in time. You just have to look at countries that don't have appropriate education systems and the reflection of their economies. Education is extremely important and will evolve, just as it has throughout history. Qualificational requirement demands will enhance through this process. Demographics, demands and industry changes will require a different focus, but at the end of the day - Education must remain a valued process of society.

Education is a waste of huge money in the USA. It pays adults to do stuff, that can be done for free. It pays for a Public school police force for the public school subculture of criminals children and adults. It pays for buildings, and transportation system, and administrators and their assistants, Money also buys the vacations and conventions for educators so they can talk and discuss, it pays for union dues so the unions can increase their membership for mor and more tax money, it pays for books and classroom chairs. Money also buys the junk food and vegetables like Pizza, and sugar. Tax money pays for all this and the overtime for special ed meetings, as well as all the retirement benifits for the three fold of former educators who now get payed twice of what they made when they worked. The tax money also pays for the workers comp of educators who slip and fall. The tax moeny also pays for the 3 to 4 months vacaton for educators. And the tax money also pays for the criminal educators while on administrative leave while the toss the case into the "pending" file. And tax money also buys the bad teachers free time to sit back and read the paper while they are in remedial training.

But no money goes to any kid.

Originally Posted by truthvigilante

Education ... is extremely important to ensuring that despite current climate the country is staying competitive in the global economy.

There we go again. What exactly does "staying competitive in the global economy" mean? Were we not all doing good before we had to compete in the "global economy"? Why is using education to compete an inherently good thing? Why does the government have a role to train workers? What ever happened to the employer providing on-the-job training? Perhaps there is a problem if the jobs available are simply not paying enough to make the cost of training worthwhile. These are important questions one must address before one can make such claims.

Originally Posted by truthvigilante

Qualificational requirement demands will enhance through this process.

Perhaps these demands are only increasing because the government is subsidising it. When jobs that previously did not require qualifications now do, we can see there is obviously something wrong.

Originally Posted by Anders Hoveland

The government is wasting a huge ammount of money on mis-educating our young people. About 1 trillion dollars are spent by the government in the USA on education each year.

LMAO!





Algernon, please don't strangle that little girl.

The USA wastes huge money on a public school welfare system for adults who do not have the ability to work real hours in real word environment.

Public school welfare allows these complacent safety net for people who are insecure and have no real consept of how the real workd functions and competes against eachother. These welfare systems breed pedophiles and other social outcasts who only did good in school and have not learned to assimilate into real society. The cost to you USA taxpayers is more than the federal debt when you combine all the State's education debt.

The high cost and dummbing down of the USA via pbulic school's wellfare system is a thereat to national security.

We in the USA only hope other nations will adopt this modality of education to bring down their country.