Peter Thiel on Over-Educated Workers in the U.S. Economy

Peter Thiel, one of the co-founders of Paypal, has some interesting thoughts to share on the economy and education.

here's a transcript of part of the speech he gave at the Intelligence Squared U.S. Foundation

"And the law school context I'm familar with. There's about 50,000 people a year who graduate from law school in the U.S. There only are 30,000 legal jobs available in the U.S., and I would argue we have maybe too many lawyers as is, but we're producing way more for a society that already has too many. The median wage for lawyers is 62,000, which isn't that great considering that you've taken on a quarter million in law school debt typically.
Pre-med. There are only about 9 percent of the people who study pre-med have slots available to them in medical school. The other 91% are wasting their time. And somebody should have told them that their freshman or sophomore year. And not waited to their senior year, or post-college, to figure that stuff out.
If you broaden the ambit more generally, there's something like 17 million people in the labor force who have college degrees and are basically doing unskilled work. Or sort of the - you'll find narrow and extreme statistics, like 6100 people in the U.S. who have PhDs and are doing janitorial work."​

video here:
Mazino (@mazinosarchive), Peter Thiel - "Whos gunna tell him? >=)

you can also find the video on YouTube
Too Many Kids Go To College, IntelligenceSquared Debates, Oct 28, 2011, 11:30 into the video

With globalization, many of the manufacturing jobs that HS grads used to be able to get are gone forever, and employers are looking for the kinds of cognitive skills we associate with college graduates.

"Throughout the '90s I had a belief that education was absolutely paramount, we should only hire people who went to the best schools, and we discriminated on this basis very aggressively in hiring at PayPal, and I thought this was the most important thing in our society."

We are experiencing something of a bubble in education. (...) It is characterized by two things: 1) runaway costs, and 2) an incredible psycho-social dynamic where you cannot question it. This is the one thing people still really believe in our society.

"We need to figure out, how do we create more jobs, how do we create more good-paying jobs, we don't have enough of either in our society. While education is linked to them, it's not this absolute thing. What we want to question is that education is an absolute good, or an absolute necessity."
​

Peter Thiel of PayPal, Facebook, Palantir, Founder's Fund - My Thoughts on Various Topics - Confluence (atlassian.net), Nathan Wailes

 

An educated population is a good thing.

 

Educated in what, exactly? For what reason, exactly?
Those are important questions.

 

Unless the majority of your educated have useless degrees. Then you have a problem.

 

We can never have enough people with degrees in English literature.

 

The better educated a population is the less of a leap there is to new research because the base level of information is just that bit higher.

 

"Never let your schooling interfere with your education." -- Mark Twain

The problem in the USA today is that schools do not educate young people, but rather indoctrinate them in objectively false woke bull$#!+. The only reliable exception is the STEM fields, and even they are under attack by leftist woke SJWs: math and physics are claimed to be racist and sexist because so few women and blacks pursue doctoral degrees in them compared to white and Asian males.

 

I'm sure Feminist Dance Theory will help with that. And lets not forget Gender Studies, and Social Work!

 

ah, so nothing useful to add then.

 

Exactly my point about those degrees.

Nothing useful to add.

 

But the point of the opening post was, even for degrees that are considered useful, there may still be too many of them in the economy, and more of it might not be providing an additional overall benefit to society.

 

Example?

Thoughtful and informed voters are an overall benefit to society.

 

Theil acting like a law degree is only useful for practicing lawyers would be like saying that knowing how to code is only useful for programmers.

 

It used to be the case that college taught people a broad foundation of knowledge and the ability to think critically. When I was an undergraduate, every student had to take English (4 semesters, one semester was writing, another was Western literature), state & national & world history, economics, 4 semesters of physical education/health, 2 semesters of math, 2 semesters of chemistry, 1 semester of physics, plus some number of semesters hours (16?) of elective classes outside the major field (I was in engineering so those 16 could not be in engineering).

To get into college I had to take 2 years of a foreign language in high school.

Now college is a trade school, or an indoctrination center. There is no broad education and no critical thinking.

 

Perhaps more of that should be done in high school, rather than waiting until college.
It's obvious that most modern progressive schools don't offer much at all emphasis on civics. So while you are right, I think that is in large part a red herring, because it's obvious making students into educated voters is not a priority for most schools.

(And furthermore, keep in mind only about 40% of adults will get a college degree, so what about the other 60% of voters?)

True, but almost no one would get a law degree if they were not considering entering a career to practice as a lawyer.
Your point is not completely incorrect, and does have a little bit of validity, but I believe as applied to this argument it is a red herring and a very weak overall argument.

It's like saying that knowing how to weave baskets is beneficial to people.

 

There's no relationship between education and "thoughtful and informed" voters, though. Universities are full of young ideologues .. believing as they do almost solely on emotional grounds.

An uneducated rube could easily poor more thought and information into his vote.

 

In this country, if you wish to be a law librarian, you need to have an LLB (Bachelor level law degree.)

 

In YOUR opinion.

 

You are confusing education with schooling. And in most cases, they are well down that path before they ever get to university, having been indoctrinated in woke bull$#!+ since primary school.

Oh, really? In the 2016 election, the only demographic that favored Trump was whites with no more than high school education. As Trump was by far the least qualified and least suitable person ever elected to high office in the USA, that should tell you something.

 

Sorry, still a weak argument. What percentage of these people who get law degrees and do not end up establishing a career as a lawyer become a law librarian? I'll guess it's a tiny fraction less than one percent.

 

Certainly.

Or anything academic, really. But they love indoctrinating kids in woke bull$#!+ -- and running very well-funded athletics and performing arts programs, of course.

Indeed, quite the opposite:

"I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion." -- Thomas Jefferson

Too many people go to college and university when they don't have the brains, character, or maturity to benefit from it. But the young people who do have those things should not have to undertake decades of debt peonage to get an education.

 

I'm not sure that is the case.

I know a few people with law degrees who never had any intention of practicing law.

 

In reality. Attend any big city university and ask around. Or check the stats, if you prefer. Many kids get sucked into ideology via education. This doesn't mean they're thinking more or better, it just means they're exposed to the ideology more. When you consider that no ideology comes from rational thought (they're always the product of emotion or culture), it's easy to grasp the reality.

 

It's quite common, actually. Law is a useful degree in the broader corporate world.

 

That's nice.

However, in bigger picture there is nothing at all to suggest that choosing to vote a particular way indicates a more considered approach to voting.

Look at San Francisco. Some here would claim that those who voted in that basket case of a city, put more considered thought into their choice. The evidence tells us they did nothing of the sort. Those who OPPOSED the ideology which lead to such a disaster, evidently did all the thinking.